DAYBREAK by Cary Holladay
I.
When I was thirteen, my mother’s Aunt Essie died and left my mother her house in central Pennsylvania. My father had been granted a year’s sabbatical from the college in Georgia where he taught chemistry. He suggested we move into Essie’s house, live there until his sabbatical was over, and sell it. My mother, who worked part- time in the office at our church, agreed. The minister hired an interim secretary with the understanding that my mother would get her job back when we returned. There was a small college in Essie’s town, and my father hoped to use the chemistry laboratory to work on the project that had won him the sabbatical. He found a visiting instructor and his wife to rent our Georgia home for the academic year. If Essie’s house happened to sell before their lease was up, we could live temporarily with my father’s parents in Savannah, or my mother’s in Philadelphia.
My parents and I made the long drive and arrived in Pennsylvania’s June brilliance. The shadows of a mountain- country afternoon were already falling. Essie’s house sat on the town’s main street. It was big and fancy, with columns and pediments, and well- maintained, with several blue spruce in the yard. Like a queen crowded by supplicants, the sizeable lot was surrounded by more modest properties. Houses at the far end of the block had tarpaper roofs. I was in a castle phase of my reading, and moats and sieges were daily fare. As an only child, a daughter, I easily projected myself into these stories.
Essie was a widow, and childless. Not only her house but also its contents had been left to my mother. Everything was my mother’s – sideboards, dishes, linens, piano, everything from the trunks in the attic to the coal scuttles in the basement. It was the 1970s, but none of Essie’s clocks were electric. They were all ticking and chiming.
“Somebody’s kept them wound,” my mother said.
“It’s a different time up here than downstairs,” my father called from the second floor, and they laughed. A new boyishness had taken hold of him.
“I miss her,” my mother said, but her face was glowing, and I realized that grief could produce that glow.
My mother had grown up in Philadelphia, several hours to the east. Her uncle, Don Coleman, had married Essie Kratzer, a native of central Pennsylvania. I had never met Essie, but I knew her by her cards and letters, and her silvery voice on the phone when she called to wish us Merry Christmas or to share some bit of family news. She had died of a heart attack at seventy- eight, “and a neighbor found her. She didn’t suffer,” my mother said. The furniture included Eastlake beds and dressers, and an oak dining table that made my mother tear up, remembering meals she had shared with Essie and her husband, my mother’s late uncle Don.
The neighborhood occupied a high ridge that sloped down to the Susquehanna River. The houses opposite Essie’s looked like they could tumble backwards and be swept away. The main street, which ran right in front of Essie’s lawn, was part of a state highway. Cars and trucks blared and roared, but during the quiet stretches when there was no traffic, I imagined I could hear the Susquehanna River flowing by at the bottom of the ridge.
“It used to be a quiet country road,” my mother said. “After Don died, Essie needed money. She sold most of her land, and then people built these other houses. That one was always here, and it used to be beautiful.” She pointed to a shambling Victorian next door, which seemed to be empty. “A nice couple lived there, and Essie took me to visit, and they served us hot chocolate.”
She remembered the last time she had seen Essie: “Three years ago.” Essie was driving to Florida to visit friends. I was in school, and my father was at work. “She called and asked if she could stop by. I fixed sandwiches, and she stayed about an hour. I asked, wasn’t she afraid to drive so far by herself? But she wasn’t.”
And when was the last time my mother had visited Essie? She calculated: before I was born, when Essie’s husband Don was still alive.
“But I wrote to her,” she said.
And even though there’d been no other obvious heirs, since Essie and Don had had no children, and there were no other nieces or nephews, still my mother was elated to be chosen, as if she were a daughter.
“She was lovely,” she said, which I understood to mean worthy of our love.
“But why didn’t I ever get to meet her?” Only rarely did I ask my mother a why question, yet weren’t those the most important?
“Well, it’s a long way up here. Time just went by. You never think it’ll be the last time you see somebody. And . . .” She hesitated. “Sometimes, if people are just kin by marriage, they don’t even keep in touch.”
Essie had some money in the bank. We didn’t know how much, although my mother remembered that Essie had inherited from a wellto- do brother, “but that was after Don died and she’d already sold the land.” According to Essie’s will, her money and the proceeds from the sale of her car, a Cadillac in the garage, were to be split between her church and a scholarship fund for the descendants of Moravian immigrants. I wondered what Moravian meant.
Essie had served as a Red Cross nurse in World War One. She had survived bombings on the Western Front, and she had come home and married Don. A wedding photo on a table showed her dewy, heart- shaped face. She wasn’t pretty in the way my mother was, but her face exuded kindness. Her veil frothed around her shoulders. Modern brides were getting married on beaches, barefoot and bareheaded, wearing miniskirts or bathing suits, and living with the man before the wedding, awful, my parents agreed, which only served to heighten my admiration of the free spirits saying I do on the sand. But Essie was my new heroine. I asked questions, and my mother answered gravely and thoughtfully.
“Why didn’t they have children?”
“They wanted to. They just couldn’t.”
I found a leather Red Cross bag with a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff inside. “Did she keep on being a nurse after the war?”
“Yes, she worked for a doctor. He smoked cigars, and the smoke hung in the air. When he died, the office closed. That meant the nearest doctor was miles away. People kept calling her, and she’d do whatever she could. She delivered babies.”
A black telephone sat on Essie’s bedside table, decades older than the one we had at home. My mother called her parents and my father’s parents and gave them the number. Occasionally they checked on us, but otherwise, the phone didn’t ring. The news of Essie’s death had apparently reached all who needed to know. I imagined latenight, urgent pleas from sick people, and Essie’s resolve as she steered the Cadillac into darkness and storms. I picked up the receiver and listened to the steady dial tone, exactly as Essie had heard it. I vowed to become a nurse, to be brave in times of peril.
“If it seems countrified around here now, it was more so back then,” my mother said, with an involuntary shrug of one shoulder that always caught at my heart, because it meant she was happy. The more she talked, the more she remembered. Uncle Don was a pilot, with private clients. He had flown a local man to a hospital in Pittsburgh for treatment, with Essie in attendance as a private nurse, “and when the man was well, they flew him back.”
Late one afternoon, a few days after we’d arrived, the doorbell rang. A noisy, blustery man barged in, leading two women, hardly waiting for my parents to invite them inside.
“I am Marvin Witmer,” the man said to my father.
His name was already familiar to me. He was a lawyer and the executor of the estate, and he was the person who had called my mother to let her know that Essie had died, and when the funeral would take place, and the fact that she had inherited the house. She had insisted on coming up for the funeral by herself, because my father was finishing his semester and I was still in school. I’ll be fine, she said. Maybe she wanted to grieve privately, but I felt the true reason was that she wanted to have an adventure on her own. She had flown to Harrisburg, which was the closest commercial airport, and from there, she rode fifty miles north on a Greyhound bus and rented a room at the town’s one inn. She seemed to be the only guest, and was told by the proprietor that it was about to close its doors, given the scarcity of the traveling salesmen who had once made it profitable. At the funeral, Mr. Witmer gave her a key to Essie’s house and asked that she not remove anything until certain documents were in order. And she might want to allow time for the house to be cleaned before she went in. Not that there was any, you know, mess from how she died, he said. Of course, she said.
“I’ll handle everything,” Mr. Witmer was saying now. When my parents were ready to put the house on the market – “and don’t wait too long, it can take a while” – he would sell it for them. “I buy and sell real estate in three states. Just did a sweetheart of a deal in Cape May, New Jersey. Ever been there? Vacation spot of the world.”
He was old and gruff, his eyes flashing with new lenses that had replaced his cataracts. He told us about the operation. He’d had to lie very still, and while recovering, he was not supposed to look down. His rough blue- black hair was probably dyed, I realized, or maybe it was a wig. One of the women was his wife, Myrtle. The other, “Cousin Flo,” resembled a vexed elderly kitten. Mrs. Witmer – Myrtle – gave me a trembly smile that was all bottom teeth. She and Flo were Essie’s friends, I understood, and members of her church. They dabbed their eyes with their handkerchiefs and declined my mother’s offer to be seated.
“We met at the funeral, Martha,” Mrs. Witmer said.
“Yes, I remember you,” my mother said. The women waited, as if wanting more. She was Essie’s niece, after all.
“E.J. and I were friends for fifty years,” said Flo.
My mother looked surprised. “E.J.?”
“Esther Josephine. Everybody called her E.J.”
“Uncle Don called her Essie. She was Essie in the family.”
Flo and Myrtle exchanged glances. Mr. Witmer gave my mother some papers. She sat down at the sofa and signed them. Mr. Witmer held out his hand, and she gave them back.
“What are Moravians?” I asked. My parents and the visitors looked up, startled. Since we’d arrived, I’d felt new and bold, a teenager, not a shy, mumbling child anymore.
“I am Moravian,” said Mrs. Witmer, and showed her bottom teeth. “It means German Protestants.”
“And Flo’s a southern Baptist,” said Mr. Witmer, “or was, a long time ago.”
The elderly kitten gave a watery frown. I sensed I was supposed to feel some regional kinship.
“Now, then.” Mr. Witmer took a folded paper from his pocket. “The will has a codicil.”
“A what?” my mother said.
Codicil – I pictured a crocodile.
“An extra part.” He unfolded the paper and handed it to her. “E.J. wanted Myrtle and Flo to have a few things.”
“Oh,” my mother said. “All right.”
“Why wasn’t this made clear earlier?” my father said. He was reading the typed sheet of paper over my mother’s shoulder. “Why wasn’t this with the main will?”
“A codicil can be a separate document,” Mr. Witmer said. “Surely you don’t mind a lady leaving things to her special friends?”
“Well,” my mother said, “of course not.”
“I have a key,” Mr. Witmer said to my father. “I could have come in any time, but I waited until you were here, so you’d know everything’s above board.”
Mrs. Witmer went to the fireplace and lifted a handsome clock from the mantel. Flo snatched a covered sugar bowl from the coffee table. It was something I admired and suddenly wanted for myself, blue glass filigreed with silver and topped with a silver bird. Moving fast, each woman started a pile of goods by the front door. For Mrs. Witmer, an engraved soup ladle, a carved wooden bear, a hurricane lamp; for Flo, a china Easter egg, a silver letter opener, and a mirror with an inlaid frame. Each woman rolled up an Oriental rug into a tight cylinder. Flo seized a picture from the wall, a moody seascape I liked. Struggling under its weight, she looked over her shoulder at my father as if expecting his help. Mr. Witmer was making trips to the car.
“Now wait a minute,” my father said, but they paid no attention.
Flo got the painting down and staggered to the door. Then she and Myrtle went to the pantry and emerged with paper bags that Essie had saved from the grocery store. I thought of the rhyme about St. Ives: kits, cats, sacks, and wives. They made a beeline to Essie’s desk and removed a stack of slim books, which they placed in a bag. They went upstairs, and I followed at a cautious distance. They opened Essie’s closet and flipped through the clothes. Myrtle flung a fur wrap around her shoulders; Flo selected a blouse and a sweater. They rummaged in the dresser drawers. From the doorway, I watched them sort through a jewelry box, tucking rings, brooches, and necklaces into their pockets. My mother and I had examined the jewelry briefly and reverently; handling it had felt intrusive even though it had been left to her.
“Stop,” my father called from the stair landing. “Stop right now and come down.”
Something flashed in Myrtle’s palm – a wristwatch – and it went into her purse. I stepped aside so she and Flo could pass through the doorway. Their dresses swished as they descended the carpeted steps, brushing by my father.
“Goodbye, Martha,” they said to my mother, who was sitting, dazed, on the sofa, and they let themselves out. The piles by the door were gone. Mr. Witmer was out in the car. It was already running. The women’s voices caroled faintly, and the doors slammed. I watched through the windows as the car turned out of the driveway and sped down the street.
My mother erupted in tears. What had happened? Where was that thing, the codicil? She and my father searched. She’d been holding it. A list, yes, but she was so flustered, she said, she couldn’t keep track of whether they were taking what was on it, or more.
“I must have given it back to him.”
“Thieves,” my father said. “You can demand a copy.”
“I don’t want any more dealings with him.”
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“No, don’t stir him up. It said clock, and bird sugar bowl, and some other things, but it did seem like they were getting more.”
“We need to find out how much Essie had in the bank. He’s liable to steal every penny.”
“That was an oil painting. They took the best things, the treasures. Oriental rugs!” She looked to my father with the beginnings of accusation in her eyes.
“There’s still plenty here,” he said.
The wristwatch in Myrtle’s hand: I had been through the dresser drawers, had found and examined it, and was bedazzled by the brilliant stones. If my mother didn’t know it existed, would it be better if she didn’t know it was gone? I agonized, but I told.
She flinched. “Uncle Don gave her a diamond watch. That must have been it.”
“They robbed us before our very eyes,” my father said. “I’m calling the police.”
“That would only make it worse. They’re her friends. Maybe the list was real. And like he said, he’s the executor, he could have come in any time.”
“That eye operation,” my father said. “He had to wait for his eyes to heal. That delayed him. Otherwise, they’d have been in here before you ever set foot.”
“But he could have given the key to his wife and that Flo, and they could have come over before we got here.”
“Maybe they can’t drive,” my father said. “They didn’t look like they could.”
He said those quirky things sometimes. I started to say, How can you tell whether or not a person can drive?
“He had to drive the getaway car,” he said.
The doorbell rang. He answered, and there stood a woman with a casserole dish wrapped in a towel. She reached out and placed it in his arms.
“Chicken bot boi,” she said. “I’m Iva Reigl. I live . . .” and pointed down the street. “I have a key, and I want to give it back.”
My father put the key in his pocket. My mother got up from the sofa with tears still on her cheeks.
“Martha,” Iva said and hugged her, “welcome back.”
“The house is clean, and the clocks are wound,” my mother said. “Did you do all that?”
“I was glad to. Call me if you need anything,” and she was gone so fast, my mother barely had time to thank her.
My father took the towel- wrapped dish into the kitchen.
“Chicken bot boy?” I said. It sounded Chinese.
“Bot boi is Pennsylvania Dutch for pot pie,” my mother said.
We had it for supper. I pointed out that it was noodles and broth, not pie, and there was not much chicken.
“I know,” my mother said contritely, as if the food had feelings. It was bland and starchy, but we agreed that Iva Reigl was nice. “Essie’d have done better to leave things to her,” my mother said.
“Is there anybody who doesn’t have a key to this house?” my father said.
My mother put her fork down. “I want to go home.”
“We can’t,” I said, appalled.
My parents looked at each other. All she had to do was say it again, and he would eject our Georgia tenants.
“I know,” she said, and after a moment, “I never heard anybody call her E.J. until today. Maybe they did at the funeral, and I was too upset to notice.”
“Was it Iva Reigl who found her?” I said, and she nodded. A heart attack, she had said. She didn’t suffer. She burst into tears.
My father stood up and placed a hand on her shoulder. “There, now, it’s all right.”
* * *
My father visited the local college to see about using the chemistry lab and came home elated. The lab was closed for the summer, but beginning in the fall, the chairman would allow him three mornings a week, from 5:00 until 8:30 a.m.
“Is that all?” my mother said.
“I can’t get in the way of their classes.”
“What are you going to do with the rest of your time?”
He would read and plan and make calculations. “And I’ll fix up the house.”
* * *
Uncle Don was not only a pilot, he had also established the first airport in the area, and it had made him rich enough to buy the big house and the Eastlake furniture and the diamond watch and the Cadillac. Like all the members of my mother’s family, he was a Philadelphian, but Essie, the daughter of a grocer, had grown up in this very town.
“Let’s go see the airport,” my mother said one day. My father drove us out into the countryside, following her directions, which she spoke in a hesitant chant, as if retrieving information from deep in her memory. We reached an area of flat, level land. There was a weedy, overgrown landing strip in a field, and an abandoned one- story building, partly open like a garage. Vines snaked through the windows.
“The hangar,” my mother said. “There used to be a real nice café in it.”
We got out of the car and looked around. My father sneezed: among the weeds were wildflowers, and he was allergic to the pollen. He went out on the airstrip and looked up at the sky as if for incoming planes. Since the visit from the Witmers and Flo, my parents had lost some of the shiny excitement of those first few days in Pennsylvania.
“The airport was just for private planes,” my mother said.
I wouldn’t have thought there would be enough business to support an airport, because how many private planes could there possibly have been in that part of the country back then? Uncle Don’s clients were very well- to-do, my mother said.
“There was a rich widow named Mrs. Becker who had him on retainer,” she said. “I met her. Very glamorous, and he’d fly her all over the place.”
Eventually Uncle Don had sold the airfield to the county, but the local officials decided to build a new airport in another place, so this one had simply rusted away. Trees had grown up in the landing strip.
A movement caught my eye, a gray cat gliding into a hole in the wall. I rubbed the dust from a windowpane and discovered a restaurant – a grill, a Formica- topped counter with round stools in front of it, and four small square tables, the chairs knocked askew. It was easy to imagine the clink of spoons and cups, the smell of hamburgers and coffee, and passengers and pilots enjoying a meal all the more because of the excitement of traveling.
“People used to come out here just to eat,” my mother said. “They served Pennsylvania Dutch meals.”
“Maybe that’s why it closed,” my father said.
“Essie and Don were so dashing,” my mother said.
In a photo album at Essie’s house, there were pictures of Uncle Don in aviator’s goggles and helmet. To walk on ground where he had walked made him as real to me as my own hand. I decided I loved the hangar. I loved the green mountains surrounding the airfield, the mountains that were sparsely peopled, yet were home to the very rich who had flown with him. I felt a surge of affection. Uncle Don seemed like a guardian for my parents and me, even though he was gone. Somehow, Essie had bequeathed him, too. And there was much to wonder about. Who was the last person to have eaten here? Why had the tables and chairs been discarded? How was it that Essie and Don collected so many nice things, only to leave them behind, everywhere they went? Did the cat have kittens?
I remembered my secret. From the piles of goods that Myrtle and Flo had placed by the door, I had taken one of the books they’d plucked from Essie’s desk. I’d have been delighted with an empty ledger. But it was a jackpot – a diary, Essie’s diary from 1951. I hadn’t read it, just hidden it in my suitcase, which smelled musty and piney, like our Georgia attic.
My parents puttered around the airfield. I sensed some wondering in them, as if they were considering how it would be if either stayed on in Pennsylvania without the other. It wasn’t that I thought they would divorce. It was just that I felt their own separateness, perceived a certain way they felt apart from each other, in a place where we knew we wouldn’t be for very long. I was aware of them as individuals who might change, especially my mother, who as a surprise heiress had been lifted up, as if she were in a fairy tale. She was forty, my father forty- two. In their mood of abstraction, they resembled each other, absorbed in their newfound preoccupations. I had never noticed before how fine their profiles were, my father’s jutting brow, my mother’s delicate cheekbones.
“Listen.” She tilted her face to the sky. Her hearing was the keenest in the family. When my science teacher described the structure of the ear, it was my mother’s I pictured, the miniature hammer and anvil and stirrup.
I detected a lazy growl. “A biplane,” my father said.
The sound grew louder, slow and sputtering, as if the plane were being pulled along by invisible wheels. When it appeared, it was low and golden- red, and it passed close enough that we could see the spaces between the sets of parallel wings.
“It’s Uncle Don!” my mother said and laughed.
We waved. It was impossible to see the pilot, but he might have seen us. For a dazzling instant I wondered if Uncle Don were alive after all. The plane trundled across the sky and vanished, and the silence was complete, the kind of silence that the gray cat would hear as it hunted mice in the coffee shop. The plane existed between invisible parentheses marks, on either side of which was stretched- out stillness. Why did I feel satisfied and melancholy all at once, almost self- pitying, when a plane did the only thing it could do, which was approach and fly over and disappear? It made a beginning and a middle and an end to a story I couldn’t figure out but in which I was always left behind.
I vowed to be a pilot. A nurse and a pilot, too. My father sneezed.
“Let’s go,” my mother said. She had picked a handful of chicory and daisies and Queen Anne’s lace, but she tossed them aside before we got in the car.
* * *
Daybreak, a Maxfield Parrish painting, or rather, a print in a gilt frame, hung in the upstairs hallway. A winsome faun, hands on knees, bent over a girl asleep on a stone parapet dappled with dawn light. Behind them, jagged mountains cut into a violently blue sky. I wanted to be the slumberous girl in the white gown. I couldn’t tell if the beaming faun were male or female. Its adoration, the otherworldly peaks, and the electric shades of blue enthralled me. Any moment, the girl would wake up, and the faun would vanish when she opened her eyes.
“Are you all right?” my mother said. “You’ve been looking at that for the longest time.”
“I’m fine.” Embarrassed: could she tell I was in love with it?
“They didn’t take that. I guess it’s not valuable enough.”
The Witmers and Flo were never far from her thoughts or mine, hard as I tried to banish them. At night, I heard my parents arguing.
“I don’t want our time here to be defined by what they did,” my father said. “Please stop talking about them.”
“The nerve. I still can’t get over it.”
I knew her well enough to know she never would. She and my father were waiting for the deed to the house. Summer was going by, and no deed had arrived.
“He’s just sitting on it.” Now it was my father who was agitated.
“Go to his office and ask for it. Maybe the secretary forgot to mail it.”
Marvin Witmer, Esq., Att’y at Law, said a smudged plate- glass window in the tiny downtown district. Usually, the office appeared to be empty, but occasionally Mr. Witmer was there, hunched at a desk. He had no secretary. The blue- black hair, the aggression: I hurried past. Downtown was six blocks from Essie’s house, and I often walked to a ten- cent store for candy, aware that Essie had trod the same sidewalk. The shopkeepers knew who my family was. It made me proud, being kin to Essie Coleman. The doctor’s office where she’d worked had been located above the ten- cent store. My mother had pointed out the high, dusty windows. The space didn’t seem to be occupied. I pictured a long- ago doctor, smoking cigars in the empty rooms.
“Does that man still believe he’s going to be our agent?” my mother said. “What if he won’t turn the deed loose? What if he’s signing the house over to himself?”
“He can’t. You have a copy of the will. Have the taxes been paid for this year?”
“He said something about taxes at the funeral, but it was too much to take in.”
“As the executor, he’s supposed to see that they’re paid. You can ask at the county records office.”
Silence – she hated it when he suggested she do something.
“I’ll do it,” he said. He did, and yes, the taxes had been paid.
* * *
In my dreams, Myrtle and Flo turned books upside down and shook them, and money fell out. Working in tandem, they stripped entire rooms.
My mother declared we would make a written inventory of “what’s left,” she said. She and I took turns calling out the names and descriptions of items in each room and writing them down on a yellow legal pad. As we worked, I felt the beneficent spirit of Esther Josephine Kratzer Coleman hovering nearby, like the Daybreak faun, and sometimes I sensed a cheekier side of her that was E.J. The lists my mother and I created were long, and we had to be careful not to miss something or count it more than once.
She checked the bottom of a china figurine, a child surrounded by birds. “Chicken Girl, by Hummel,” she said, and I added it.
“What would have happened if he’d looked down?”
She didn’t have to ask who I meant. “Cataracts have to be peeled off, and the doctor puts new lenses in. I guess they have to grow into your eyes. Maybe if you bend over too soon, they could fall out.” It turned my stomach. I put my pencil down.
“We’ve done enough for now,” she said. “Go play.”
But I hadn’t found anybody to play with. There was a teenaged boy, newly arrived in the neighborhood, who tuned his electric guitar in the evening. Deafening, shuddering twangs reached deep into my body and made me feel sick, the way thoughts of Mr. Witmer’s eye operation did.
“It’s Iva Reigl’s grandson, named Greg,” my mother said. “She told me he’s visiting.”
Morning and evening, Greg walked Iva’s dog, a roly- poly little creature with an uneven gait. Greg loped down the sidewalk, his head canted back, his hooded eyes barely open behind tiny gold- framed glasses, his yellow hair frizzed to his shoulders. There was a diner beside the ten- cent store, and often he left the dog outside and went in. A waitress brought him a thick white mug that presumably contained coffee. With refills, he made it last an hour. The dog waited obediently but greeted everyone who came near, leaping onto their knees, its leash tangling around their ankles. If I encountered Greg on the narrow sidewalk, he didn’t speak but slowly lifted his hand in the peace sign. I tried to develop a crush but couldn’t. Wasn’t love supposed to feel like Daybreak?
The ten- cent store had wooden floors, buzzing overhead lights, and a world of appealing wares. On Saturdays, Amish women and girls came to town and trooped through, laughing and speaking a strange, droll language to each other. I had never seen shoppers enjoy themselves so wholly. They pawed through the bins and racks of goods. They wore long, plain dresses in solid colors and tiny goldrimmed glasses similar to Greg Reigl’s. The older women were heavy enough to create a symphony of creaks on the floors. They all had beautiful rosy skin, and they pulled their hair back in severe buns that were covered with nylon net.
I lingered at the displays of Maybelline, stationery, and 45 rpm records. One day, two women emerged into my aisle, and I recognized Myrtle and Flo. They held permanent wave kits and bottles of shampoo. They stopped short, and we regarded each other. We were three cats, with the fur rising on our scruffs.
“Well,” said Myrtle. “Hello, Ginny.”
“How is your mother?” asked Flo. She gave her watery smile that was also a frown.
“She’s fine.” I could have moved on, but something was rousing inside me. I was angry. It felt oddly powerful to be angry with adults. It was up to me to go to bat for Essie. “What kind of friend,” I said, and the words caught in my throat, “steals their friend’s diaries?”
They gasped and drew back, and too late, I realized that Essie might have asked them to secure her private papers. Myrtle’s face flooded with red. She looked old and florid and ill, her bottom lip hanging so her worn teeth showed. I saw how much I had upset her by meddling in matters I couldn’t understand, the lives of middleaged women. I was afraid Myrtle would cry.
Yet Flo was steely- eyed. “What gives you the right, child?” she said, and I heard the echo of a Southern accent. “What gives you the right?”
I lifted my hand and held up two fingers – the peace sign – and fled.
“Who did you see?” my mother asked when I got home, something she always did.
“Nobody.”
“Didn’t Greg go by? Didn’t you see him?”
“I don’t know. Leave me alone.”
To my surprise, she didn’t rebuke me, but guilt became my everpresent companion, a slippery dark sensation in my throat. Guilt for how I’d acted to Myrtle and Flo. Guilt for snapping at my mother. I prayed my parents wouldn’t hear about what I had done in the tencent store. For days, whenever the phone rang – always, mercifully, it was one of my grandparents – I felt I would throw up.
Myrtle and Flo had gaped at the peace sign. Did they think it was an obscene gesture? I imagined how they might have spent the rest of the day, mixing the chemical solutions and rolling up each other’s hair with the tissue papers and the plastic clips that came in a permanent wave kit. Whose house would they choose for their endeavor, Myrtle’s or Flo’s? Myrtle’s, I decided, because Flo, living alone and likely fastidious, would refuse to be stuck with cleanup; it would fall to Myrtle to pull the snags of loose hair out of the sink. While they waited for their hair to set, with the acrid smells in their noses and a kitchen timer ticking the minutes away, they would grapple with the hurt I had inflicted, a hurt that made me writhe as the images played on in my mind. Crowned with curlers, they might march through Myrtle’s house to examine the items of Essie’s she now possessed, but their pleasure in those things would be gone, and there was still the neutralizer and the rinse to be done, and the drying and more waiting, until the whole process grew tedious and their tempers frayed. Myrtle might even fear that Flo would hit her. Myrtle was stronger. She had lifted the heavy mantel clock as if it were Styrofoam, whereas Flo had struggled with the painting, but I sensed Flo was capable of violence. Another minute in the store, and she might have slapped me. By the time they yanked the plastic rollers out of their hair and compared the results – and Flo’s would turn out better, I felt sure her hair took a curl easily – they would turn on each other with pitched ferocity, whether or not they were innocent, whether or not I had spoken the truth. It was E.J. they were fighting about, who had E.J. loved more? Who had been the better friend to her? The timer would go off, brrringgg, and one would give in, it would be Flo, she had to, because Myrtle’s husband was a lawyer and they could have cut Flo out of the deal, even though the codicil was her idea, I was sure it was. The craftiness of her watery smirk outstripped even that of the bewigged, sore- eyed man. But I knew the limits of a home perm: the curls didn’t last.
* * *
My father decided to get estimates for an oil burner to replace the old furnace that ran on coal. It would be expensive, but it would improve the value of the house and make for a quicker sale. Time and again, different workmen arrived to examine the furnace. My father opened the basement door, a damp, sooty smell rose up, and the men went tramping down the wooden steps in their heavy boots.
My father pored over their bids and studied catalogs of heating equipment. He showed me the old furnace. Beneath a bare, flaring lightbulb, it was enormous, a rusty metal box with pipes and flues attached, down in a pit. The pit’s walls were concrete, but the floor was earth.
“What’ll happen to it?” I said.
“It’s too heavy to move. It’ll just stay here.”
A heap of coal glittered beside it, taller than my father in the cavernous basement. The coal, too, would stay. Bituminous or anthracite? We took a few lumps outside and examined them in the pearly light.
“Anthracite,” he said, which was the harder, better kind, and which was mined a mere twenty- five miles to the east, in a town named Shamokin. Shamokin made me think of smoke. In fact, coal mines could catch on fire, my father said. An underground fire had been burning for years in a place called Centralia, fifteen miles east of Shamokin. The fire had started in 1962, the year I was born. Flames kept coming up through the ground, and the air filled with gases, to the point that Centralia was too dangerous to live in and had to be abandoned, a ghost town. The fire could burn for hundreds of years, fed by the massive supply of coal, and nobody could put it out.
“Could that happen here?” I asked.
“The closest mines around here are mostly iron and lead.”
“Can we go see Centralia?”
He shook his head. The lumps of coal in our hands smeared and blackened our fingers.
“Don’t ever work in a mine,” he said. “Their lungs get like this.”
* * *
“Would you like to see Essie’s church?” my mother said after supper one evening.
“Y’all go,” my father said. He was comparing furnace estimates.
It was eight o’clock, but the sun was still high. As my mother and I walked downtown, men and women greeted us from porches or front yards, where they sat in plastic chairs, cans of beer in their hands and babies on their laps.
“Hi,” my mother and I called back.
Downtown was deserted, the diner with a Closed sign on the door.
“They could stay open and serve ice cream,” she said. “People would like that.”
The Moravian church was located on a side street, a dark brick building squeezed between a hardware store and a shoe repair shop. Bats swirled around the steeple.
“They said at the funeral it’s never locked,” she said and pushed it open.
Inside, the church was bigger than I’d expected, with white plaster walls, rows of pews, and a musty, sacred scent that made me think of old lace. Our Georgia church was Presbyterian, sleek and modern. It smelled of the sugar cookies that were served in the fellowship hall.
“Essie brought me two or three times,” she said. “Moravians go way back. They were Protestants before anybody else thought of it. The Lutheran church got started later. Most Pennsylvania Dutch people are Lutherans.” Flanking the altar was a set of wooden risers, “for the chorus; Essie sang in the chorus,” and a platform, “for the instrument players. They use a lot of brass.”
I imagined the parade- like shine of trumpets, and Essie standing proudly among the singers, inhaling deeply, knowing by heart the words to the hymns.
My mother placed her hands on my shoulders and turned me toward a stained- glass window. “Look.”
Brilliant evening rays fired the intricate, jewel- colored panes. A white lamb knelt in the center, surrounded by garlands and doves.
“The Lamb of God,” she said, “an important symbol for them.”
Dust motes sifted through the sunlight. Staring, I felt the lamb’s holy innocence.
“I timed it just right,” my mother said, sounding pleased. “The window is high enough that the hardware store doesn’t block the light. Want to see the cemetery?”
She led me to a side door. It too was unlocked, and we stepped directly into a grassy plot which was crowded with gravestones, all flat. The gnarled roots of a big maple tree had caused several to rise and crack.
“Help me find hers,” my mother said. “It may not have been put in yet.”
The sky grew darker as we strained to read the chiseled names. Cicadas sang in the maple tree, and I felt sharp sorrow about my Georgia friends, who didn’t stay on the phone very long when I called, and didn’t answer my letters. They were caught up with each other’s lives, and I was in the odd space of being away. I kept looking, up and down the rows of stones.
“Here it is,” I said. Esther Kratzer Coleman 1897– 1975. “Where’s your Uncle Don?”
“He’s buried at the Philadelphia church that he and my mother grew up in.”
“Didn’t he and Essie want to be together?”
“They must have decided this would be all right.”
On the way home, it was dark. The porches we passed were empty. TVs shimmered in living rooms.
“I was pregnant with you when I went to his funeral,” she said.
* * *
She heard about a swimming pool at a community center about ten miles away. Sometimes we went, always on a Saturday. Toddlers squabbled in the shallow end, teenagers sprang off the diving board, and adults swam decorous laps in the middle. The community center itself was a raw new building that still smelled of wet concrete, but its hilltop setting befitted a chateau, with a panoramic view of the mountains. My parents spread out towels and shared a newspaper while I slid into the water, feeling ugly in my childish nylon suit and rubber bathing cap. There didn’t seem to be anyone my age. I gave in to the luxury of brimming eyes. Essie would have been my friend, loyal and steadfast. On the grass, my mother turned the pages of the newspaper, yawning behind her round sunglasses. My father heaved a sigh so heavy I saw it from the far end of the pool. He was impatient for the college lab to open. Fall semester was still weeks away.
I shivered. The air was hot, but the water was cold, as if it couldn’t warm up from nighttime, never mind the generous, sweeping rays of the sun. I had never been so near the sun as on that mountaintop. The days were beguiling, with a coppery heat in late afternoon, but the nights were chilly even in July. Then it was August. And the summer passed.
* * *
Just after Labor Day, I started the eighth grade at an enormous brick school that served grades seven through twelve in a tri- county region. Whereas the town was small, the student population, gathered from scores of villages and farms, numbered nearly a thousand. I was accustomed to being taught by one teacher, but here, students changed classrooms. Confused and overwhelmed, I kept losing things and leaving books behind. Everybody in the eighth grade, it seemed, already had a best friend. Even if they appeared to be opposites – a tall skinny girl, say, and her round, short pal – they were as right together as a pair of Popsicle sticks. It would be hard to break into those fierce pairs. Now and then I glimpsed the blithe slump of Greg Reigl, whose visit to his grandmother had stretched out indefinitely.
“His parents are getting a divorce and think this is best for now,” my mother said, Iva Reigl having confided in her.
I befriended a seventh- grade boy in my art class, Bill Sharp. He liked tapioca, so whenever it was on the lunch menu, I gave him mine. A skilled caricaturist, Sharpie possessed a cruel acumen. His sketches emphasized the worst features of our classmates and teachers. Although he was younger and might have been expected to look up to me, I was afraid he would soon tire of my company.
You need more to do became a theme in my parents’ nightly conversations – my mother’s message to my father, despite his three mornings a week in the college lab.
“Ask if you can have more time.”
“They’re doing me a favor,” he said. “I don’t want to become a nuisance.”
For years, he’d eaten his midday meal at the cafeteria of his Georgia university, even in the summer, because he spent so much time in his lab. Now, even with the borrowed facilities, he was home by mid- morning.
“Sandwiches are fine,” he said. “Lunch doesn’t have to be a big meal.”
“Sandwiches are work, too.”
“We could go out. There’s the downtown diner.”
“That gets expensive.”
“I can cook,” he said.
I would come home from school to the smell of burned toast or the metallic odor of canned stew. The matter of lunch was only a symptom of the fact that she felt that he was underfoot. He was taking care of the mail and the bills that were being forwarded from our Georgia house, and making minor repairs, but he was constantly asking her to bring him a hammer or a screwdriver, she told me, or interrupting while she sorted through Essie’s things.
“I can’t get anything done,” she said.
“But . . .” I said. They had always been such good companions.
“I miss the office,” she said, the church office a thousand miles away, where the interim secretary now occupied my mother’s chair, took messages, and typed up the bulletin.
The furnace replacement was scheduled, then postponed, because the workman they had chosen had fallen down somebody else’s basement steps and broken his foot. His wife called to say he was laid up, “but he still wants the job,” she said. “Please don’t hire anybody else.”
My parents debated what to do. They hadn’t given the man a down payment. They hadn’t signed a contract. They didn’t want to go through winter with the old coal burner.
“But we shook hands,” my father said.
* * *
In October, a family moved into the Victorian house next door. The new people, the Dorffs, were loud but became stubbornly mute when we greeted them. The children’s faces reminded me of electrical sockets, blank and startled and alert. They raced away in a whooping pack that made me feel mocked.
My mother baked brownies and took them over. She wanted me to go, but I wouldn’t; already I was scared of the Dorffs. The brownies were grabbed at the door, she reported, without thanks. The pan was not returned.
There were adults who existed chiefly as hollering from within the dilapidated dwelling. Sometimes, a man or a woman would storm out to the yard and take off in their ancient gray Plymouth, amid a spray of dirt and gravel. The ragtag siblings brimmed with distrust. They were shouts and bruised silences, disorder and disorganization, emitting a sour smell that made me think of ringworm, pinworms, and beatings, though I had no experience with them. Shawna, the oldest girl, taunted me when I was alone in my yard. She was running to fat, with big breasts and a big behind in sloppy culottes. Unlike her siblings, she had dark eyes and a hawk nose, and I wondered if she might have a different father. There was an older brother my mother referred to as Boy. Boy Dorff. Colorless, nameless, furtive, one more male in a brutal tribe. The children were too numerous to count – blurred, squalling mouths, encrusted, ungovernable, doomed. Like a knocked- over ant colony, they overran their house and swarmed the lopsided porch. Squinting toddlers staggered through puddles of motor oil. By November, it was always cold, but the children opened the second- story windows and sat on the sills with their legs dangling. My father said he felt sorry for the landlord, whoever he was.
The Dorffs awakened such bad feeling in me that I could hardly contain it, a bile I was afraid I would taste forever. Somehow, they were my burden, a raw, complicated challenge, with their blisters and sores, their thin T-shirts a defiance of the wintry afternoons when they played in their yard. Bundled into a warm coat and miserably self- conscious, I ignored them as I slid into the car for my mother to take me shopping.
“Jailbait,” my mother said as Shawna hurtled in front of our car to retrieve a ball in the street. She squatted, flashing her white thighs. She was helplessly, haplessly growing into womanhood, fourteen but in the eighth grade, a year behind where she should have been, smelly and shunned. She couldn’t possibly have heard my mother, but the expression she flung at us made me think battledore. From my reading, I knew it meant a game, like badminton, but to me, it meant Shawna’s face. I whispered the word in private, and it felt like a declaration of war.
There in the street, Shawna locked eyes with me, and I quaked She raised the ball and wound up her arm, and for a second I thought she was going to throw it through the windshield. She took her time, making my mother wait. Finally she turned away and tossed the ball to Boy. He caught it, and my mother paused until Shawna gained the crumbly sidewalk. As we drove on, I looked back to see Boy holding the ball high as younger ones leaped for it.
More than once, my father suggested, “Invite them over to play,” and I said, “No.”
“You’re stupid,” Shawna hissed through the privet hedge when I took out the trash after supper. She’d lurked, hunkered down, waiting.
“I’m smarter than you,” I shot back, “and you’re the ugliest person I’ve ever seen.”
She laughed. “Guess who’d say you’re wrong?”
“Who?” and for an instant, we were just two girls talking.
“E.J.” She jerked her chin toward Essie’s house. “She got me born. My middle name’s Esther, for her. Whenever she saw me, she’d say, There’s that beautiful little girl I brung into the world.” This smote me into silence.
“Sharpie makes fun of you,” she said. “He drew your picture and let people spit on it,” and she sped away.
The next morning, our trash cans had been knocked over, the contents scattered. The early riser of the family, I righted them and cleaned up, my heart beating hard. I started making up excuses not to go out after supper, saying it was too cold, so my father took out the trash. I was afraid Shawna would insult him too. He’d have reprimanded her just for startling him. Maybe that was what she wanted. Provacateur, I learned from a book I was studying for a spelling bee. I had won the contest in the junior high and was scheduled to compete in a regional bee in Harrisburg, the state capital. Shawna was a battledore, a provocateur, and in the opinion of the boys at school, a skank, which did not appear in the speller.
My mother kept trying. She gathered my outgrown clothes, washed and folded them, and knocked on the Dorffs’ door. Again, the offering was grabbed, this time by an adult. The next morning, my sweaters and slacks and dresses had been tossed over the hedge into our yard, slashed and stained with mud or worse. There were no Dorffs to be seen, but I felt they were watching as my father picked up the things and placed them in the garbage can.
“Never again,” my mother said.
On weekends, the Dorffs burned the babies’ used diapers in a rusty barrel. My family felt hectored by the smoky stench, my mother wondered aloud if we should call the police, and my father said, No, they were just pitiful, was all.
Sabotage. Persecution. The spelling book, a paperback with a picture of the national Capitol on its cover, became my guide to understanding and vanquishing Shawna Dorff. Saboteur and persecutor applied to her, never to me. I felt the tide of her hatred even when I was sheltered by the thick walls of Essie’s house. I tried to dream myself out of the reach of Shawna and her legion. If I won in Harrisburg, I would get to go to the National Bee in Washington, D.C. A long- ago boy from my school, named Stan Foster, had done just that. He hadn’t won, but his trophy shone in a glass case outside the principal’s office. I imagined him coming back, a handsome grownup, to sing my praises.
Codicil was in the spelling book, leaping out like a snake.
Shawna had hexed me. There were hex signs on barns out in the countryside, colorful circles with geometric designs. I understood that once they’d been regarded as evil, but now they were quaint decorations. Folk art, my mother said. Still, when my family went out for a drive and stopped to buy fresh eggs from an Amish farmer, I tried not to look at the signs. My mother engaged the taciturn farmer in conversation. She praised the eggs. Often, there were double yolks, and the whites whipped to a high froth when she made meringue.
The night before the spelling bee, she fixed steak and mashed potatoes, with chocolate cake for dessert, but I was too nervous to eat more than a few bites. We would leave for Harrisburg early in the morning. When the supper dishes were done and my parents were watching TV in the den, I slipped outside.
In my coat, standing by the hedge, I shivered. There was no moon, but the stars were out. Owls chanted in the oak tree that grew by the garage: Who will cook, who will cook? Suddenly Shawna was there. I didn’t see her, but felt her presence on the other side of the hedge.
“Skank,” I said, and my breath made steam.
“Provacateur. Saboteur,” I said.
“Battledore,” I said.
She loomed up from behind the privet, tall as a bear, her eyes gray jelly. “Your stupid spelling bee’s tomorrow,” and her breath, like mine, made a frosty plume.
“Hey, we’re cartoons,” I said, because our breath- clouds were like the word- bubbles in comic strips.
Louder and faster the owls sang, Who will cook, who will cook?
Shawna gave a short bark, and that too made a cloud. For an instant, the world rearranged itself. Was our enmity melting, or turning into air? Sublimating, like dry ice in science class?
She burst through a gap in the hedge and lunged. “You’re going to lose!”
I ran, and she chased me across my yard. I reached my house and slammed the door behind me. The smell of popcorn came from the kitchen; a laugh track sounded from the den. I fled to my room without taking off my coat. The next day, my parents drove me to Harrisburg, where I competed against students from other schools and was knocked out in the second round. Now, in adulthood, sometimes I tell myself that Shawna and I were friends. You hear about that type of bonding, when kids are hateful but don’t really mean it.
* * *
“He came and got the Cadillac,” my mother said one day when I got home from school. Her face had the level look she wore when talking about troublesome grownups. “He and your father had a fight. But he finally handed over the deed.”
My stomach clenched. “Did they hit each other?”
“No,” but the grimness didn’t leave her face.
My father hammered a post into the front yard and nailed up a For Sale By Owner sign. Twice a day, Greg Reigl allowed his grandmother’s dog to run to the post and lift its leg. At night, my parents debated the timing of the sale. We should wait till spring to put it on the market, so Ginny can finish out the school year, my mother said. My father didn’t want to wait. A sale might take months. One thing they agreed on. They wouldn’t have to fool with Mr. Witmer anymore. They called a locksmith and had the locks changed.
Snow fell, and the temperature sank to fifteen degrees. Sounds carried clearly through the cold still air. When a train went by, the deep harmonica of its song reverberated through the windowpane, its pauses sibilant and wheezy, and I thought of Essie pressing her stethoscope against a person’s chest, knowing when there was still time and when it was too late.
The furnace repairman showed up, still wearing a cast. His wife had driven him in their pickup truck. She waited while he spoke to my father. The oil burner and the parts had arrived, he said. He could install them the next day.
My father looked doubtful. “Why not wait till you’re feeling better?”
“I’m good. I’m good to work.”
The following afternoon, the man hopped down our basement stairs, slowly, gripping the railing. Two boys, his sons, strained to carry the burner down the steps in the murky light. With my father’s help, they maneuvered it into place. The man labored for hours, sending the boys back and forth to fetch tools from the truck. At my mother’s insistence, his wife came inside, but she wouldn’t take off her coat or have anything to eat or drink. At last the man called my father to come down. I went, too. The house was already warm. The new furnace hummed softly. The man crouched beside it with his foot in its cast stuck out in front of him.
“It’ll last you a hundred years,” he said.
I smelled his sweat and chewing tobacco and something else, like pus or blood. His sons raised him by the elbows and helped him up the stairs.
“Oh, my God,” his wife said. On the way to the truck, he fainted in the snow.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” my father said, but the woman wouldn’t let him. The boys put the man in the truck, and they drove away.
* * *
At Christmas, I won Sharpie back with a professional drawing set, a lucky find at the ten- cent store. The box was dusty, but the extra- dark graphite pencils were fresh and untouched.
“Hey, thanks.” He started sitting with me at lunch again.
And I made a new friend, a girl named Dorie Walsh who lived on the river. I started visiting her in their ramshackle cabin, which was wonderful, never mind the mildewy smell and the drafts, and anyway, we spent most of our time outside. The water stretched broad and wide, with hilly woods on the other side, and the currents moved fast. The river flooded in the spring, Dorie said, and once her family had spent a night on the roof. She showed me the high-water mark on the side of the house. They kept a rowboat in the yard.
Dorie and her brothers fished directly from the marshy riverbank, rolled their catch in cornmeal, built a fire, and fried it in a skillet. They shared it with me. Delicious, and we ate without a grownup in sight. It was a mild winter day, the January thaw, the science teacher had explained, and we were warm enough in our jean jackets.
“Where are your parents?” I asked.
“They’re divorced,” Dorie said. Their father had moved to Pittsburgh. They lived with their mother, who worked variable shifts at a cabinet factory. She had remarried, but the man had recently left. “I hate him,” Dorie said. “I hope he never comes back,” wrinkling her nose and looking away, and I got a bad, funny feeling.
“You know who’s weird?” said her older brother, Lewie. “That neighbor of yours, Ginny, the guy who thinks he’s John Lennon. What’s his name, Dore?”
“Greg Reigl.” As Dore, readily supplying information, she seemed like a gun moll, a term my mother found occasion to use. “He tried to kiss me.”
“You lie,” said Lewie, laughing, chewing his fried trout.
“Did you let him?” asked the younger boy, Bret, who was quiet but had a deadly reputation. Sharpie would go silent around him and didn’t dare sketch any of the Walshes.
“Ain’t telling,” Dorie said.
“Nobody else gives the peace sign,” said Lewie. “It’s like out, man.” Dorie said, “Shh,” and pointed to a little animal by the edge of the river. “A muskrat,” she whispered, with a smile. “We see all kinds of things here.”
Let me stay here forever, I thought, and it was like I was praying with my eyes open and sitting very still to watch the muskrat as it slipped through the brush and into the water.
“What else do you see?” I asked.
“Bears, foxes, beavers,” said Lewie.
“Dead bodies,” said Bret.
“Eagles,” said Lewie. “They live on the island,” a scrap of land offshore. “We swim out there in the summer. There’s deer, too. They can swim. They’re good swimmers.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Dead bodies?”
The boys looked at each other. Lewie started whistling. He picked up a handful of dried grass and scrubbed out the skillet.
“Don’t worry, Dore,” Bret said. “Sometimes bad people just float away.” He gestured to the rippling water. It flowed all the way to the Chesapeake Bay, my father had said.
I was careful not to tell my mother very much about the Walshes. “Are they any better than the Dorffs?” she said, but didn’t stop me from visiting. It was a fast walk down to the river, three steep blocks down a plunging street. It was the secrets that drew me to the Walshes. They were curled around their secrets like animals protecting their bellies. I felt a strange tenderness for them, even for their mother, a bleary- eyed young woman I saw only once, when I visited on a Saturday morning. Hey there, kiddo, she said and disappeared into the back of the cabin without asking who I was. Dorie said, She was on night shift, now she’ll sleep. And she said, She was fifteen when she had Lewie.
On a class field trip to the Hershey chocolate factory, Dorie and I shared a seat on the bus. She rolled down the window, took off her bra, and waved it at truck drivers. By springtime, she was hanging out with an older boy and skipping school. Lewie and Bret got in trouble for robbing a bait store. I stopped going to the river, but I still loved them; I was a faun leaning over them while they slept.
* * *
In April, my mother received a letter from the minister at our Georgia church. The interim secretary was having difficulties, he said. She had a new baby, and her husband had left her. Yes, husband, and soon to be ex: last summer, he explained, she had married rashly, due to being in the family way, and now she had an infant and was all alone. She was allowed to bring the baby to the office. She is now full- time, the minister wrote, in the position you vacated. I trust you will understand that it could not be held for you indefinitely.
My mother tossed the letter on the mail table. She gave me a dollar and asked me to go downtown and pick out a baby card. “Try to find one that’s not pink or blue, since he doesn’t say if it’s a boy or a girl.”
* * *
Overnight, the Dorffs were gone. They left doors swinging on hinges, a broken TV in the yard, and deep gouges in the dirt where their Plymouth had been parked.
“I woke up about three o’clock and thought I heard something,” my mother said, “but who’d leave in the middle of the night?”
“They’d probably quit paying rent,” my father said.
At school, I sought out Sharpie. I’d barely said Dorff before he crowed with delight. It turned out that his mother knew the man who owned the house.
“Oh, it was great. The landlord told them if they didn’t get out, he’d come over with a bulldozer and knock the whole place down, with them in it.”
“Where’d they go?” My throat felt tight.
“Sunbury,” which was a bigger, rougher town only a few miles away, but in a different school district. “I bet they’re living out of their car.” He pointed with his spoon to the tapioca on my tray, and I let him take it.
* * *
The “For Sale” sign attracted few prospects, mostly casual visitors who admitted they’d always wanted to see the house.
“That’s too much,” they said of the price.
“Make an offer,” my father said, but none of them did.
Agents from three counties left their cards in the door. Mr. Witmer left his, and my mother threw it away.
“It’ll sell this summer,” my father said.
“That eyesore next door isn’t helping,” my mother said.
My last day of eighth grade was in early June. Classes at the local college were already over, and my father’s lab privileges ended. My parents reduced their asking price. To their relief, the Georgia tenants wanted to stay until the middle of August.
Essie’s clocks ticked on. It was my job to wind them, and I enjoyed using the tiny keys and smelling their secretive scents of oil and felt. I turned fourteen, and we embarked on another summer at the hilltop swimming pool. On the Fourth of July, a cool, starry night, we lugged lawn chairs up the slope to watch a fireworks display. The parking lot below was crammed with cars, their headlights catching on bumpers and on the scissoring legs of more people coming up the hill, so many that eventually they were turned away from the pool area and had to watch from the path. The fireworks thrilled me, and it was thrilling to say, “Ohh,” with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other people and breathe the sharp wafts of gunpowder. The after- image of Roman candles stayed in my brain for hours, glittering and fading.
Still the house didn’t sell, and Greg Reigl glided by with his grandmother’s dog and flashed the peace sign. The scenario my parents had feared seemed to be approaching. By the end of the second week of August, our Georgia tenants had moved out, classes at my father’s university were about to start, and nobody was even coming to look.
“Ginny and I can stay till it sells,” my mother said to my father. “Or she could go back with you, and I’ll hold down this fort. It can’t be that much longer till we get an offer.”
My father’s jaw dropped. I remembered her solo trip to Essie’s funeral, and I sensed she wanted the second scenario. But what would that mean? Women were striking out on their own and doing fine. Was she aching to live alone, to be free from the confines of domestic life? What else might she do, given this drive for independence? She could get a job at the cabinet factory like Dorie Walsh’s mother, or find another church office, or stay at home in Essie’s big house and think her thoughts, but in any case, she’d be released from cooking and cleaning for my father and me, and she wouldn’t need us, though I would never doubt that she loved us. She seemed like a new person, self- sufficient, like Essie must have been. Part of me wanted this new way of life, a busting-up of our old routines, but I was afraid that if she stayed in Pennsylvania by herself, she wouldn’t ever come back to my father and me.
“I don’t want to do that, Martha,” my father said, and he sounded deeply hurt. “We’ll all stick together. We’ll go next week.”
“But who’ll take care of the house? And what about all these things?”
“Essie’s gone. You’ve done right by her. You can’t do anything more by staying here.”
“It’s too risky to leave this place empty.”
“We’ll hire a real estate agent.” And a moving company, he said, so we could take the furniture we wanted. We’d have a yard sale for the rest. We could ask Iva Reigl to look in now and then.
“Greg can mow the lawn,” I said, though having said it, couldn’t picture it. Iva cut her grass with a push mower; she would probably end up doing ours.
“Good idea,” my father said.
My mother looked searchingly around the living room. She picked up Essie’s wedding picture and held it against her hip.
“I want to visit Mom and Dad on our way back,” she said.
Philadelphia was not on the route, but my father didn’t hesitate.
“Okay.”
That night, I read Essie’s diary. For the first half of January 1951, she had made regular entries. Ed Heimbach pneumonia, took him to hospital. 2 feet snow. Jean Weber had twins. William Stahl d. old age, 97. Lunch w/ Myrtle and Flo. Don flew Mrs. B to Hilton Head. In mid- January, she wrote, I found out. Blank pages until February 14: Diamond watch. Blank until summer. Forgive? It’s so hard. Blank, blank, blank.
Mrs. Becker, a rich widow, my mother had said, very glamorous.
Even as Essie confided to her journal, or when she was too anguished to write, Don and Mrs. Becker might have been high above the Earth, with the propellers buzzing and passion firing their hearts, savoring the torment of having to wait until they landed. Don’t touch me, or we’ll die.
My mother knocked on the door and handed me the framed print of Daybreak.
“This should be yours,” she said.
II.
Twenty years later, when I was a nurse in a Midwestern town, a story erupted in the local news. A child had reported a smell coming from a car in the parking lot of a playground. That led to the discovery of a body, a woman’s remains stuffed into the trunk. She’d been strangled. The driver was tracked down and arrested, but he wasn’t talking. There’d been no phone or license or jewelry with the body, but police found a carwash receipt under the front seat of the car, and drops of blood on the floor, which was otherwise clean. With the help of the carwash attendant, the police and the press put the story together. The car, occupied by a driver and a female passenger, had entered the automatic wash, where ropes of rainbow suds spurted out, and giant roller- brushes whooshed across the hood, the roof, and the fenders. The noise and the water obscured what may have been happening inside the car.
The Carwash Murder, the headlines called it, even though the police wouldn’t say, and maybe didn’t know, if that was where the woman had lost her life. There was a forensic sketch: did anyone recognize the victim? The more I looked, the more she resembled my memories of Shawna Dorff. A hawk nose, dark eyes, and – in the artist’s imagination, or in mine – the keen, searching expression of someone who had been deceived and had learned to live with it. This woman was in her fifties, and eventually she was identified by family members. Still, it was Shawna’s face I kept picturing, mashed against a window, her screams drowned out while the big fans whirred and old leaves flew out from beneath the windshield wipers.
I was thirty- four, and my father had just died. My mother was still living in Atlanta. We talked every night, and afterward, I couldn’t sleep. Old griefs came back. I remembered the furnace repairman who had collapsed in the snow. He had died a week later. When his obituary came out in the paper, my father, who had already paid the bill, wrote out another check. Too much? he asked my mother, and she said, She’ll need it. Deep snows had blanketed Essie’s house, and the owls ruled over the glistening, enchanting nights, asking the question that was never settled. Who will cook?
I grieved for Greg Reigl, who had been beaten within an inch of his life. A few weeks after my family had left Pennsylvania, Greg was set upon by Dorie Walsh’s brothers – those river rats, Iva wept to my mother, on a long- distance call. Lewie and Bret Walsh dragged him into an alley, tore his hair from his scalp, and smashed his glasses into his face. He almost lost an eye, and his brain was injured. They went to jail for it. When he got out of the hospital, he left town and said he was never coming back, and Iva said she didn’t blame him. Her dog was with him when he was attacked, and it leaped high enough to bite Bret Walsh in the neck and probably saved Greg’s life, but it died soon after; the leap was too much for it.
Too much. And the house, Essie’s house didn’t sell. My parents were asking too much, even though they dropped the price and dropped it again. The moving van was there in the driveway and our suitcases were in the car when Mr. Witmer showed up again and said, Well, are you folks ready to list it with me? My mother stood in the doorway and said, Over my dead body, and he cursed and spun on his heel, and my father laughed, but my mother cried, and they proceeded according to my father’s plan. We went back to Georgia together. They listed the house with another agent who finally sold it for about half what we should’ve gotten, my father said, and in fact the buyer was a client of Mr. Witmer’s, so he got a split commission. Aw, shucks, my father said, and laughed in a way that meant he was laughing at himself, too. By then it was February, and I was in the ninth grade in a new high school in Atlanta.
My mother never again spoke of living apart, nor did she look for another job. She did keep in touch with Iva Reigl. They wrote letters back and forth, and from Iva she found out that Mr. Witmer had left Myrtle and run off with Flo to Cape May, New Jersey. Deserted and forsaken, Myrtle forged ahead. She rented the space above the ten- cent store that used to be the doctor’s office where Essie had worked. She opened a beauty parlor and hired Shawna Dorff and Dorie Walsh to work after school and on Saturdays, and full time once they graduated. It was the best gathering spot in town, Iva said. They didn’t have formal training, but they learned fast, they were beauty geniuses. They backcombed hair into the helmet styles that stayed in fashion so long, but they also offered suggestions for something new. Let’s go a little shorter, with layers. Or let it grow, and we’ll perm it next time. You’ll look like a million bucks. They made chitchat, swept the floor, took smoke breaks in the alley. When you’re under the dryer, they bring you coffee and magazines, Iva wrote, and you feel you’re in the lap of luxury. Shawna and Dorie turned nineteen, twenty, twenty- one, and then Shawna left for nursing school, and Dorie joined the Air Force. She felt bad about what her brothers did, she said so a million times, Iva wrote. She brought candy and puzzles to Greg when he was in the hospital. But I liked Shawna better and I gave her $100 for nursing school. She dropped out after one term, but I am glad I gave her the money. I don’t know where she is now. E.J. was her idol.
My mother let me read the letters. For years they corresponded. My friend Iva, she called her, and said it was almost like writing to Essie, to have the letters come with the familiar postmark. When Iva died, at age ninety, my parents went to her funeral and saw Greg again and met his wife, because he was married by then and he did come back that once, and my mother said she could still see the silvery scars on his face. He had never recovered his full vision. She said she wished she’d been kinder to him when he was a teenager, a lonely boy walking that little dog. She should have reached out. He was your friend, wasn’t he? He grew into a fine man, she said. He’d have made you a nice husband.
And during the winter of the carwash murder, which was a year after Iva’s death and six months after my father’s, my heart started racing, and I felt nauseated and panicky. Maybe the picture of a woman who resembled Shawna had started this, but the real cause had nothing to do with Shawna. It was something else. I made a call to the police in Pennsylvania, and then I called my mother.
“Of course,” she said, when I said I wanted to visit.
We sat on an Eastlake sofa that had belonged to Essie, and drank tea from Essie’s cups and saucers.
“That was our great adventure, your father’s and mine,” my mother said, of our time in Essie’s house. Her cheekbones were still delicate, her eyes points of light. “I’m glad we went back for Iva’s funeral.”
When I was younger, she had seemed tall. Now she was still elegant, but she had started buying petite- sized clothes.
She gave me a level look. “You’re unstrung. Now tell me why.”
And the thing that had haunted me came out of my mouth, a thing that had seemed dreamlike when I was thirteen. At the time, the remarks two boys had made on a riverbank had struck me as softly as petals.
“I think the Walsh brothers killed their stepfather. They pretty much said so. He’d been bad to Dorie. They killed him and put him in the river.”
She gasped. “But you used to go visit them. You wouldn’t have, if you’d thought that.” Her eyes flared at me while she considered.
“Wouldn’t a body have been found? Wouldn’t somebody have reported he was missing, and there’d have been a search?”
“All I know is what they said. They made him go away, they said. Float away.”
She sat very quietly. “Did you think they were making it up? Boasting?”
“I think they were telling the truth. I thought so then, and I think so now.”
I saw in her face that she believed me. “But you didn’t say anything,” she said. “Why not? Were you afraid of them?”
“No. I loved being with them, by the river.”
“How could you know a thing like that, and not tell me? Your father and I would have done something. You wouldn’t have had to keep it a secret.”
“They’d solved a bad situation for Dorie. It didn’t really feel like a secret.”
“You knew they might have murdered a man, and you didn’t say anything. I can’t fathom that.”
“Last week I called the police. I told them everything I remember.”
“But what about Greg? If you’d spoken up twenty years ago, he might have been spared.”
“I know, and I can’t change it.” I reached for her hand, but she pulled away. I wanted her to say, You were just a child. “And when you saw him at Iva’s funeral, and told me, ever since then, I can’t stop thinking about it.”
She sipped her tea, her eyes on mine, her figure tense and compact.
“It’s making me sick,” I said.
She placed her cup and saucer on the coffee table. Gently she took my cup from my hands and set that down, too. Then she drew back her arm and slapped me across the face.
“Oh!” My cheek stung, and I put up my hand and felt the heat with my fingers. We stared at each other, and her eyes filled up.
A clock chimed, one of Essie’s. I waited for it to stop, and then I reached out, and she let me hold her. Her face fit into my neck, and her tears slipped down my collar, and mine fell into her hair. Her shoulders felt narrow in my arms. I didn’t ever want to let her go.
“Mama, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I am, too.” She stroked my hair. “Lamb of God,” she said.
Cary Holladay has published two novels and six collections of short stories, including The Quick- Change Artist (Swallow Press, 2006), Horse People (LSU Press, 2013), and Brides in the Sky (Swallow Press, 2019). Her story “Merry- Go- Sorry,” based on the case of the West Memphis Three, was published in Alaska Quarterly Review and won an O. Henry Prize.