The Longings of Wayward Girls (25 page)

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she knew it with a matter-of-factness that surprised her even then. There was no clutch of panic, no rush to open the garage door. she didn’t stumble back from the sight. she turned and shut the door. she went to the kitchen phone and called her father at his office. He was out, his secretary said. “Can I take a message?” sadie said to tell him that her mother was in the garage in the car, and she hung up. since Francie’s disappearance she’d been waiting, apprehensive, for the punishment she deserved—for betty to confess and implicate her, for Francie’s body to be found—and yet she never expected her mother’s suicide to be the outcome of her fear. That day, something at her core seized up into a hard, impermeable knot that she now sees has never loosened, that as time passed she must have grown used to.
Mrs. sidelman came to the back porch door moments later. she was there, knocking, demanding to be let in. “sadie watkins,” she said, her teacher’s voice firm. “open the door.”
but sadie did not do it. she went up to her bedroom and sat on her bed until she heard voices downstairs, the rush and stumble of strangers’ footsteps. And then betty’s mother came up the stairs and entered her room. she sat beside sadie on the bed, cautiously, as if sadie were a wild animal that might bolt. sadie could feel her trying to control her sobs, and she looked over at her, dry eyed, knowing that she, too, should be crying. but she only felt relief. Charlene put her arm around sadie’s shoulder, and then helped her pack a small bag of clothes and walked her across the street to her house just as the ambulance, turning into sadie’s driveway, bumped up the curb.
sadie remembers the expressions of the people around her, first at the Donahues’, and then later at the funeral—their tear-stained faces, the women’s smeared mascara, the men’s red-rimmed eyes, their awkward embraces. she recalls being held by strangers, inhaling their various complicated smells. For a long time after there were those looks—soft, sad smiles. none like the one Mrs. sidelman gave her through the garage window, the one she gives her now.
“I went out to rake leaves,” she says. “I heard the car running, but it was like background noise, and I didn’t give it much notice until I realized what it was. I wish to this day that I had gotten there first, that I might have spared you that.”
sadie remembers the leaves blowing about the driveway, the swirls of them, their beautiful flattened shapes on the walkway. Mrs. sidelman reaches out and takes sadie’s hand in her own.
“your mother loved you very much,” she says. “I remember one easter she had you in the most adorable matching dress and spring coat. you had a straw hat and a little purse and white gloves. she brought you over so you could show me before you left for church. she always told me how proud she was of you.”
Mrs. sidelman went on to describe her mother’s praise— stories of sadie’s good grades, the poems sadie wrote her for her birthday, her confidence that sadie would one day find a greatness all her own.
“oh, she had such high expectations of you,” she says.
sadie feels she is hearing about some other child, some other life. Then she remembers the card in the suitcase, and realizes that at one time she had high expectations for her mother, too—and her mother wanted to remember that. Mrs. sidelman pours more coffee. Her spoon hits the side of the china cup. A seagull squawks from the jetty. Her smile is calm, her silence a space waiting to be filled. sadie wishes she could take it all back. she thinks about ray asleep in the cottage nursery, about his plan for them to run away together that doesn’t seem like a plan at all anymore, just a series of beds and sex. she feels the first cold edges of shock at what she’s done, and her urge is to shock Mrs. sidelman in turn, to startle her so she’s not so alone.
“I’ve been sleeping with ray,” sadie says. she doesn’t say “having an affair” or name ray as her “lover,” words that sound adult and old-fashioned, that might be ascribed to her mother. “we met, secretly, twice. And then we planned to meet last night, and somehow—I don’t know—we drove off together.”
she wants the woman to stop smiling. she is furious with herself, with ray and his foolhardy life, with her mother, who left her with an emptiness she has no idea how to fill, much less name. why she wants to lash out at bea sidelman is as inexplicable as anything she has done in the last twenty-four hours, the last twenty-four years.
“I’ve left them,” she says then. “My children, my husband.”
saying the words makes them real, the finality leaden.
Mrs. sidelman watches sadie, her eyes fixed, and sadie keeps talking, telling her more. she talks about lily, the little girl she lost, how she went into labor, how it was only three weeks early and they were safely checked into the hospital.
“I could see,” she says, “if it had been back in the days when women had babies in houses without heat and running water, without modern medicine, with just herbs and roots to treat complications.” she remembers the graves in the old cemetery, the markers for the infants with the inscription
Born and died,
followed by a single date. As a child, sadie hadn’t understood how this might be possible, much less imagined a time it might happen to her.
she tells her how the labor was normal. “she looked perfectly fine,” sadie says. “I couldn’t quite believe it. sometimes I still don’t. sometimes I think she is somewhere else, living a life with other parents. stolen from me.”
Like Francie,
sadie thinks. she won’t confess about the letters. Despite ray’s accusation that she is complicit, she isn’t sure how much the letters contributed to Francie’s ultimate disappearance. In the light of what she’s learned—about ray, about her mother—the letters are only a part. sadie has eaten one of the triangles of toast, and then another, and now discovers she has eaten them all. she sits back. Mrs. sidelman has remained silent all of this time. The sun heats up the sand. The tide has shifted and the water laps at the jetty, fills the pockets between the stones with a hollow slap.
“I don’t know what to do now,” sadie says.
on her fingers are the buttered crumbs, and the taste of the toasted bread still fills her mouth. she feels desperate, depleted. Mrs. sidelman’s eyes watch her with the kind of sorrow that cannot be ignored.
“Can I be honest with you?” Mrs. sidelman says. “I feel I owe you that much.”
sadie nods, curious. Mrs. sidelman tells her that when her mother had first moved to the neighborhood they became friends.
“we would have coffee,” Mrs. sidelman says. “like you and I are doing now.”
over coffee, Clare revealed her dreams of an acting career, and also personal things about her husband—how he insisted on having sex on Friday nights, and no other night would do. How he made strange faces when he climaxed. she told her about her feelings for other men. It would be one she met at a party or someone she saw at Drug City, who held the door for her and whose cologne she could not forget. Mrs. sidelman, bea, encouraged Clare to join the community theater, tried to discourage her from obsessing about the men.
“I told her to buy the cologne for her husband,” bea says. “I said, ‘Close your eyes when you make love.’ well, she didn’t want my advice.”
bea tells sadie that her mother came to her one afternoon, brimming with news.
“she was pregnant,” she says. “I worried, of course, about who the father of the baby was, but I didn’t let on. she was happy, and that was all that mattered.”
sadie can’t imagine her mother pregnant, but this is another woman bea’s describing, someone sadie didn’t know. “she lost the baby,” sadie says, finally understanding.
bea nods solemnly. “And the one after that. And then another.”
sadie remembers the wary happiness, the crushing sadness of her own lost pregnancies.
bea says she called sadie’s mother and her father would tell her she couldn’t come to the phone. bea baked a lemon pound cake and left it at the house, and she found it later in the day on her own front porch. sadie’s mother made it clear she wanted nothing to do with her, for whatever reason. “This was long before I wrote the reviews,” bea said. “At the time, I didn’t know why, but maybe she felt she’d shared too much.” she finally accepted this and stopped trying to contact her. “I heard later that she’d taken an overdose of pills.”
bea sips her coffee. she looks up at sadie over the rim of her cup, her eyes softened.
“but I couldn’t sit by and allow what was happening with that Filley boy,” bea says. “I saw him that summer before I left for the shore—slipping into your basement. At first, God forgive me, I thought you were letting him in. but one morning your mother came out with him—and they embraced. I was standing on my porch, and your mother saw me watching.”
bea looks to sadie, waiting, her mouth tight.
“blame me for her suicide, if you want. but don’t think you’re destined to become her.”
sadie wonders how many people claim responsibility for her mother’s death. Hasn’t she thought back through it all herself—over and over again? How her mother had pressed a new shirt for sadie and made her a lunch to take to school. How she was dressed and standing by the door as sadie left to catch the bus—the white silk blouse, the herringbone skirt. she tried to kiss sadie good-bye, but sadie felt awkward in her arms and pulled away. Her mother called to her as the bus chugged up the hill, but the other kids were there, and sadie only glanced back and didn’t hear what her mother said. was it an important message? some instruction that sadie neglected to follow? she imagines her mother putting on her coat, mixing the drink they found with her in the car, cutting the lime they found on the counter, gathering her cigarettes. what journey did her mother take, watching the woods waving beyond the garage window?
Mrs. sidelman gives her a long look. “It’s not about judgment. It’s about how you choose.”
sadie realizes that she’s been involved in a long pursuit and sees now that having recognized it, she cannot go on any longer. Her mother is still gone, and she is still floundering, unsure. she remembers the Mary Vial Holyoke diary, the entries that chart the death of Mary’s daughter, Polly, the women all coming to sit and
watch
—the word conjuring up figures by a bedside, their presence a balm, bearing witness. sadie shunned the women trying to
watch
her, hid herself away with her sorrow rather than share it and move on. she never considered that her mother did the same. Pretending it had never happened, seeking her own method of escape.
“I should leave,” she says. she stands up, suddenly, and knocks her china cup onto the stone patio, where it shatters, a sound that is both delicate and deafening. sadie looks down at it in despair.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, and stoops to pick up the shards.
Mrs. sidelman waves her hand at sadie’s apology. “It’s an old cup,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.” but sadie bends down and gathers the little floral-patterned pieces, her eyes stinging with tears. when she stands Mrs. sidelman is standing as well, and they look at each other—sadie with the china pieces gathered in her hand, bea sidelman with her hands clenched like a warrior.
“you’re going home,” bea says in that way she has of making an order out of a question.
sadie is afraid to imagine it, to allow herself to entertain the idea. “I could go wake up ray and ask him to take me back,” she suggests.
“I’ll drive you,” bea says. she takes the china pieces from sadie’s hand and disappears inside the cottage. she emerges in a caftanlike cover-up, jingling a set of car keys.
“I don’t want to bother you,” sadie says.
“nonsense,” bea says.
They climb into her long Grand Marquis, the sand from their feet falling onto the floor mats. sadie settles back into the leather upholstery, already hot from the sun, but she cannot relax. They pass Pietro and emma’s, ray’s truck still there in the sandy lot in front.
“what if it’s too late?” sadie says. she doesn’t say anything about Craig refusing to take her back, the children with questions she cannot answer.
bea reaches over and pats her hand. “never too late,” she says. “you’ll tell him you ran into an old friend of your mother’s, and I invited you to my house. we had too much sherry, and you fell asleep.”
“The children will hate me,” she says. “They won’t ever trust me again.”
“They’ll forget,” bea says. “It won’t matter in light of everything else.”
sadie understands what she means, the way that memories come like postcards pinned to a board, standing in for years of a life. And even though she isn’t entirely convinced she can return, that Craig will accept bea sidelman’s outlandish story, she lets herself imagine the smell of her children— Max like sweat and earth, sylvia cleaner and sweeter, like her bonne bell perfume, like her Johnson’s baby shampoo. she imagines the swell of Craig’s chest beneath his work shirt, his brusque, familiar way of saying good-bye in the mornings. she thinks about the casserole recipe that Maura gave her two days before—Indian inspired, with raisins and almonds—and imagines what it will taste like. ray’s truck disappears in the rearview mirror. They turn onto shore road and head toward the highway, and bea turns on the radio to a station playing old forties and fifties hits that she begins to sing along, softly, to “baubles, bangles, and beads.” sadie knows she cannot ask bea about her hidden love letters, but she remembers the longing in them, bud’s desire to make a life with her, the lost opportunity. bea made her choice, and yet she kept the letters all those years. sadie doesn’t think she could keep ray’s letters, not when she sees them as devices to lure her into having sex, letters written to a dead woman, a character she tried to play. “Clare,” he said, his voice low and tremulous, a fleeting sound that might, as time passes, be yet another thing she tells herself she only imagined.
bea signals and changes lanes. The radio is lost beneath the rush of morning traffic composed of commuters heading into Hartford, vacationers anticipating the holiday weekend. The cars merge and speed past them, and she worries about letting bea, an eighty-year-old woman, drive on the interstate highway, about a tractor-trailer nudging them off into the metal guardrail. The traffic slows and jams and then inches along, the heat rising off the car bumpers. sadie tries to remain calm, but she is filled with a sudden urgency. now that she’s decided to return she is faced with the exasperating possibility of being prevented from doing so.