Read The Longings of Wayward Girls for Free Online

letters were short, each filling only one page. sadie could make out phrases that told how much the man missed bea, longed for her, and imagined the smell of her perfume. He mentioned that time at the club, cherry blossoms, and a rooftop . He wrote about songs: Remember “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”? sadie imagined these were all clear signs of love—bea and bud. she put the letters away for another day.
    October 16, 2002
     
    S
    adie realizes that unlike her previous miscarriages the loss of this baby, carried nearly to term, cannot be a private grief she nurses over a glass of wine. she can’t hide her loss from the neighborhood women she’s spotted leaving for school drop-offs, who cast sorrowful glances toward her house and who send her the same covered dishes and casseroles in sympathy that they would have prepared had she been busy with a new baby. At the hospital the grief counselor, a young woman in a narrow skirt and heels, visited her with pamphlets. sadie sat on the bed in her maternity clothes, her feet in thick socks, her full breasts leaving her feeling inexplicably empty.
    “would you like someone to take down the baby things before you go home?” the counselor asked.
sadie was affronted and assured her she would do that herself. but once she was home she found she preferred to leave the baby’s room intact: crib, changing table, songbird mobile, the small blanket monogramed with an “l.” Lily . now she winds the mobile, stares into the crib. she would be two months old, and cooing, she thinks, and catches herself sliding into some dark place.
she decides she must make sure she is too busy to remember the things that make her unhappy, but she has no real skills, no education, and the idea of returning to lord & Taylor, a job she quit to start a family, is out of the ques
    29
    tion. Instead she remembers the years after her first miscarriage, before sylvia was born, when she volunteered with the wintonbury Historical society. she calls up the director and agrees to meet a woman named Harriet at the same Congregational church where Max attends preschool. That morning she dresses in a skirt and blouse, an outfit she last wore before her pregnancy, to sylvia’s school Christmas pageant. sadie is tall and has always been curvaceous, but the skirt, she discovers with a swooning feeling, is too tight. The blouse gapes at its pearl buttons. she leaves the skirt’s clasp undone, the blouse untucked to cover it. she wants to laugh at herself, dressing up like her mother, who wore beautiful clothes every day—wool skirts, pressed white blouses, gold earrings, and lipstick. she always knew her mother was different, but now she realizes that difference was a certain glamour—a movie-star quality. she glances beyond the bedroom window to the trees waving their bright leaves, and it occurs to her, with a jolt, that the anniversary of her mother’s death has come and gone without her usual mental ritual of acknowledgment.
    Downstairs, Craig is in his shirtsleeves, his tie loose, his face smoothly shaven and pink, as if he’s come from a bracing walk. The children, who sit at the kitchen table with their bowls of cereal, cease their chatter and cast confused glances up at sadie in her outfit, waiting for an explanation. sadie feels, suddenly, as if she is wearing a costume.
    “why aren’t you wearing comfy clothes?” sylvia asks. sadie’s clothing has lately consisted of cotton sweatpants and T-shirts, jeans and pullover sweaters.
    “I’m going to work,” she says.
    Craig opens the refrigerator and turns to look at her. He nods, so careful, lately, that sadie suspects he has read all of the grief counselor’s pamphlets. “okay,” he says. “okay.”
    “I’m going to be a part-time historian.”
    Max smiles because she is smiling. she feels her face tight with the effort to be cheery.
“How will I get home from school?” sylvia asks.
Max’s smile fades. “And me?” he says. sadie sees his