The Longings of Wayward Girls: A Novel - Softcover

Karen Brown is the author of Little Sinners and Other Stories, which was named a Best Book of 2012 by Publishers Weekly, and Pins and Needles: Stories, which was the recipient of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her work has been featured in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, and Good Housekeeping. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of South Florida.

The Longings of Wayward Girls May 5, 1979

SADIE WASN’T A BAD GIRL. When she was little she played church, flattening soft bread into disks, singing the hymns from stolen paper missals: Our Fathers chained in prisons dark, were still in heart and conscience free, how sweet would be their children’s fate, if they like them, could die for Thee. She set up carnivals and lemonade stands, collected pennies for UNICEF on Halloween. She bought a tree to be planted in her name in a forest purged by fire. She included everyone in her neighborhood games, even the irritating younger siblings, even the girl, Sally Frobel, who was clearly a boy, and the boy, Larry Schuster, who was clearly schizophrenic. They were cast in roles like the frog in her production of The Frog Prince or the dead boy in her Haunted Woods. She understood, perfectly, what was expected of her—and still, when it came to Francie Bingham, none of this applied. She was feral, unequivocally vicious, like a girl raised by the mountain lions that occasionally slunk out of the wilderness of Massacoe State Forest, between the swing sets and the lawn furniture, into the tended backyards of her neighborhood.

It was May when it all started, and the seventeen-year cicada nymphs (genus Magicicada) emerged from the soil to shed their skins on window screens, in shrubs and trees, and unfold their new wings. The air was still sharp and the forsythia waved its long arms of bright flowers. The bluets opened on the pasture hillsides like white carpets. The apple blossoms dropped petals onto the dark ground like snow. Sadie Watkins was twelve, nearly thirteen, and she and her friend Betty Donahue had begun stealing their mothers’ Salems and Virginia Slims, hiding them in clever places in their bedrooms. Sadie had taken off one brass finial and slipped the cigarettes into her curtain rod. At prearranged times they’d retrieve them to smoke in the woods, but one day they put on the clothes from Sadie’s basement first: her mother’s pleated plaid boarding school skirt, a cocktail dress. They put on her old winter coats, alligator pumps, and black patent-leather sling-backs. They went out walking in the woods behind Sadie’s house, pretending they were someone else. They were too old for dress-up—this was their last fling. They put on the clothes and assumed other personalities with accents.

“Blimey, this is a steep path, I say.”

“Where are we headed? Isn’t that the clearing, darling?”

Two years before, when Sadie had been ten, she’d devised the game of Old-Fashioned-Days House. They’d studied Connecticut history in school that spring, and she’d created a diorama in a shoe box—a scene from the Pequot War that dramatized the Pequot abduction of two girl colonists in a miniature canoe she made out of white birch bark. Her teacher’s mention of the girls’ kidnapping had been the one vivid thing among the names, dates, and details of the lesson, and Sadie knew it had to do with the shadow of Laura Loomis, who had been a year older than Sadie when she disappeared, a girl who resembled her so closely everyone thought they were sisters. In school, Sadie often imagined the empty seat in the sixth-grade classroom that would have been Laura’s. At home, she scrutinized the photo of their Brownie troop lined up on the school blacktop, she and Laura posing at either end like copies of each other—never destined to be friends. For her diorama she’d drawn the girls on the white cardboard that slipped out of her father’s new shirts, their faces etched with terror as they glanced back to their cabin on the shore, their blond hair blowing long and loose behind them. Her teacher had raised her eyebrows at the scene but couldn’t deny her the grade of E for “Excellent” she taped onto the back.

Sadie had been intrigued by the strife of the colonists—cooking over an open fire, fetching water, growing corn in rocky soil, the threat of animals and untrustworthy Pequots and Narragansetts. She admired the women for accomplishing their daily tasks in long skirts. If they were going to play Old-Fashioned-Days House, she told Betty, they had to dress the part. Sadie’s mother, who had grown up a poor girl with a single mother in New York City, often returned there now to shop lavishly and had the best cast-off clothes—Chanel, Halston, Diane von Furstenberg, evening gowns in satin and chiffon, strapless, layered with tulle, brocaded and beaded, dresses they slipped on over their flowered panties. The gowns dragged the ground, and they had to diaper-pin them around the waist to get them to fit. They held the skirts in their hands and became Colonial women picking their way across Sadie’s muddy backyard.

By that time their parents’ mandate that they stay out of the woods was heedlessly ignored, even though the tragedy of the Loomis girl—who’d lived on a street that did not connect to theirs—was fresh and the questions surrounding her fate still unanswered. The woods had always been a place of imaginative games, the source of legends passed down from their grandparents, who as children might have encountered the old Leatherman, a kindly beggar fed by townspeople who lived his entire life outdoors. The girls wandered the woods behind Sadie’s house in the long dresses, mindless of any threat. They hiked up to the old Latimer cemetery to place flowers on the children’s graves, adopting the names on the stones for themselves: Prudence, Electa, Rebekah, Abigail. They used paths the boys had begun to tame and trample riding their bikes, pulling wagons loaded with stolen plywood intended for forts. When fall arrived and it grew cold, they used Sadie’s basement as their house. Sadie had the little kids bring in large stones, and they stacked them against the wall into the semblance of a fireplace. They had tarnished sterling candelabra, and they stole candles from Sadie’s dining room buffet, matches from the kitchen drawer. They learned to knit, and they sat beside the pretend fire in their dresses, their needles clicking, the pipes rushing water overhead. They’d play out the story of Snow White and Rose Red. From upstairs would come the smell of a roast in the oven.

The last time they’d played the game had been that winter when Sadie was ten, on a gray day threatening more snow, the old snow still on the ground. The game had begun to lose its allure, and the participants had dwindled to Sadie; her best friend, Betty; and that day, Francie Bingham, who’d come to Sadie’s front door to drop off her mother’s Avon brochures. In a rare move Sadie’s mother called Sadie up from the basement and told her to let Francie play. When Sadie widened her eyes and protested, her mother reminded her of how little she asked of her, of her comfortable house, her multitude of friends.

“Some children aren’t as lucky,” her mother said. She wore a nearly floor-length red dress, a gold necklace. Her hair was long and blond, and once Sadie had overheard her teachers talking about her at school.

They’d been in the cafeteria last year during the chaos of a rain-day pickup, and Sadie had missed her bus. Her mother had driven up to school to get her, had walked into the cafeteria and been spotted by the two teachers—one of them Sadie’s teacher, Mrs. Susskey, reviled by the students, and the other her young intern.

“Oh, she’s like Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago,” the intern said.

Mrs. Susskey glanced over to where Sadie’s mother was making her way through the crowd of children, heading in their direction. Neither teacher knew she was there for Sadie.

“More like Sharon Tate in Valley of the Dolls,” the older one said, her voice filled with resentment.

By the time Sadie’s mother had reached them and taken Sadie by the hand the older woman’s face had reddened and become blotchy with her mistake. “You didn’t tell us this was your mother, Sadie,” she said, her voice falsely sweetened, and for the rest of that year, even though Sadie couldn’t really interpret the woman’s comment, she’d lived in fear of her retaliation.

Standing in the dining room, with Francie Bingham waiting, hopeful, in the foyer, Sadie worried her mother would launch into the lesson of her own childhood—her forced attendance at St. John Villa Academy, a Catholic boarding school for girls, with its stern nuns and cold tile dormitory walls. But instead her mother glared at her and told her she would lose her television privilege if Francie wasn’t included. So, Francie, two years Sadie’s junior, was allowed to be the younger sister, a role that required she remove her glasses and attend to Sadie and Betty like a maid. They’d been knitting, but Sadie had grown tired of it. “Let’s pretend our husbands are out hunting.”

Betty always followed Sadie’s lead. “Oh, I do hope they stick to the paths, Electa,” she said.

Francie Bingham eyed them both. She wore a Halston gown—black sleeveless crepe bodice, chiffon skirt decorated with a spray of pale-colored leaves. Her chest was freckled, and she shivered and tugged her shawl in tighter. Earlier, she had argued and won the dress from Sadie, who’d chosen it first and given in when Francie said she would just go home.

“They know the woods well enough, I daresay,” Sadie said.

Their needles clicked. The basement was dim. The candles flickered.

“You should set the table, sister,” Betty told Francie.

“We don’t yet know what they’ll be bringing,” Francie said.

“Methinks they will bring something,” Sadie said. “Unless they are lost!”

Sadie dropped her knitting—a square of green wool that would never amount to anything—took the candelabra, and stood in front of the sliding glass doors that opened out onto the backyard. It was dusk, and the shadows thickened in the trees. The ground was white, pitted with footprints from the day before when they’d gone sledding and come in the sliding basement door to take off their boots. Brambles dotted with hard, bright berries edged the woods, their barklike stems gray and tangled. “We should go look for them, Rebekah,” Sadie said.

Francie gasped. “Out? Into the wilderness?”

Betty jumped up. “I’ll get our wraps.”

These consisted of Sadie’s mother’s old coats, smelling of mothballs—camel’s hair, tweed, herringbone. They slid the door and the cold air hit their faces, filled with the scent of fires stoked with newspaper and kindling. Spires of smoke marked the sky. Sadie took the candelabra, and she and Betty stepped across the frozen yard, their dresses and coats dragging. Francie remained by the basement doors. Sadie turned to look at her.

“Why aren’t you coming, sister?”

Francie’s face was pinched. Her resolve to follow the parents’ rule made Sadie and Betty all the more aware of it. “We can’t,” she said.

“Our husbands may need our help!” Betty said.

Sadie knew that either prospect—going into the woods or staying in the dank basement alone—was terrifying to Francie, her hesitation a ploy to prevent them from going, and she turned to continue across the yard.

“Never mind her,” Sadie said. “She can stay behind and tend the fire.”

At this, Francie quickly relented, and the three girls headed into the woods, the main path leading up, the smaller paths heading off into an overgrowth of young saplings, and birch, and hemlocks shagged and heavy with snow. Their breath came out in clouds. They wore the pumps in patent leather, snakeskin, and pink satin, the toes stuffed with tissue. The incline proved difficult to manage. The candles flickered and went out. From this vantage spot the lights in the Hamlet Hill houses glowed yellow—desk lamps in bedrooms upstairs where kids did homework, sconces in carpeted stairwells, chandeliers in dining rooms, brass Stiffel lamps in living rooms and dens where fathers read the remaining bits of the Sunday paper and watched football on television, bathroom lights flicking on and then off after some child examined her pimple in the mirror, garage lights where mothers sought a screwdriver to fix a loose high chair. The houses were spacious, made with cedar shingles and painted clapboards and bricks, surrounded by landscaped beds of juniper and rhododendron. Their yards met each other in rolling hills and dips, occasionally marked by lines of shrubs or pine or forsythia. The kitchen windows were steamed up from cooking. The girls could see Mrs. Battinson opening cabinets, taking down plates. They saw the Schuster boys watching television on the couch. Sadie’s house was dark save the one dim bulb over the stove.

“I think I see our husbands,” Betty said.

“That is them, isn’t it?” Francie said. She cupped her hand to her mouth and called out into the woods. “Halloooo!”

Sadie stifled a laugh and glanced at Betty. It wasn’t proper to break character. “Oh, be silent and still,” she chastised. “What if it’s a bear!”

Francie squinted without her glasses. “Is something coming?”

Sadie looked out into the woods, through the brambles, past the big hemlock. There was someone there, a shape, waiting, not moving forward. “It’s a stump,” she said. “Part of an old tree, likely that one hit by lightning a few summers nigh.” She kept her eyes on the shape. It wasn’t a bear. She felt something tense in her, a quickening she would feel only a few times later: when she lost control of the car she was driving at seventeen; when she felt the sharp stab, then the dull slip of her first miscarriage at twenty-six.

The tree stump moved then. It took a step and a branch snapped. The girls huddled together, a bundle of fabric. The shape—not a tree, not a bear—seemed to be moving in their direction. Sadie, clear headed, clever, whispered, “Methinks we should head back.” Betty’s hand tightened on hers. Sadie stared, transfixed, at the moving shape. It lumbered, not in a bear way, but in a tall-man way. She thought, Pequot, but didn’t dare say it. She felt the specter of Laura Loomis urging her to run. Betty tugged her down the path. “Move, move, move,” she said. Francie saw the two of them moving away from her, and she turned to follow them and tripped. The man in the woods wore a camouflage jacket, a brown, broad-brimmed hat.

“Why doesn’t he call to us?” Francie said, her voice bright with alarm. “Why is he walking this way?”

They could hear his footsteps now in the frozen snow, the crack of branches in his path.

Sadie felt the fear rise. She was the first to kick off her pumps and run, and Betty and Francie followed, all of them running, the silent man somewhere behind them. They reached Sadie’s backyard and the sliding glass door, crying now, panicked. They got inside and locked the door and continued on up the basement stairs, and then up the stairs to the second story, where they flung themselves onto Sadie’s bed, Francie repeating, “I told you, I told you.” Her mother came to the door and knocked.

“Girls,” she said. “What’s going on?”

Sadie glared at Francie, who seemed on the verge of telling. “Nothing,” she said. “We’re just playing.”

“We’re sorry, Mrs. Watkins,” Betty said. Her face was smeared with tears, but now she was laughing, giggling. Sadie’s mother made an exasperated sound on the other side of the door.

“Be good,” she said. They heard the ice in her glass and then her footsteps retreating down the carpeted hall.

The hems of the dresses were torn, snagged with brambles, filled with snow that melted onto Sadie’s bedroom floor. Their feet were raw and red and Sadie gave them pairs of the woolen socks ...