HOUSEBOUND
A N O V E L
B Y E L I Z A B E T H G E N T R Y
&NOW Books
Lake Forest
For Rebecca
FOREWORD
Housebound is a multidimensional novel that moves through rooms, fields, towns, and woods as through a nightmare. The language is sensual and estranging at once. Each sentence belongs to a mind reader who intimately knows the book’s many children—and former children—living and dying inside of the book. The everyday world is a real world. The everyday world might be a ghost. The deranged and delicate lyric of Housebound is pieced together by grammar. And if a novel is a diorama, this one is taped with very old tape, brittle and breaking—barely containing the beautiful scene. This is a terrible feat of the imagination and of a stylist’s wanton, bold hand.
Reading Housebound, one feels trapped, searching for a way out of the danger. There is no way out, except by reading the book, of course. “You all read too much,” the children are told early on in Housebound. This line damns us all and it’s a bold statement to have early in a novel. You have to read too much to read Housebound—that is its beauty and terror.
Indeed, the language swirls—breathy and careful—like a child you love whispering too close to your ear. It is too much but you love it. It doesn’t feel very good but you love it. The hot words hang there, and in part you love them because what they do is name everything in the world, like a child who has just learned the signs: grass spiders, glass bottles, terrible dogs, blackberry bushes, babies, piles of shoes. And as almost every child eventually learns, humans have power. People are liars. Red houses, new babies—always there. Not the danger. Yet also not quite . . . not very . . . real. How then to explain the power of things in this novel? When it is humans who so abuse power?
It cannot be explained.
In this world, nothing is right and not even the narrator will behave as a narrator should. The narrator’s unruly. The gaze goes everywhere it wants to—it has a sinister and dirty direction. It stares at a girl, mostly Maggie, and moves up and down her body and up and down the paths of the town. The narration does not have desire, per se; the narrator works hard and is toiling and intense on behalf of the children—mostly of Maggie. The narrator worries about pain. Also about cupcake wrappers; everything in this novel is worrisome.
The worry is concrete; boundaries are being defined. Waking and dreaming, childhood and adulthood, daughter and mother, baby and woman, woods and town, home and house, city and country, human and dog: the binaries of a fairy tale crisscross through the novel. Constellate. And then we hesitate, because disenchantment’s at work; the binaries are all muddled up—mother to husband, baby to cat, azalea to bedroom, liver to food?
The derangement is physical. The children take care of each other, but they’re nearly adults—their bodies grow hair, leak fluids, have wants. Isolated, they look for safe haven in nature (flowers and water)—they walk through open doors leading to air.
The anxiety is palpable. An aesthetic completeness presides, offering little consolation but very much beauty. The unease is quite lovely; for as in a fairy tale, common sense does not operate as ought to—almost but not quite, and the not-quite is just-so. To utilize fairy-tale techniques (and there are dozens, including paradox, riddle, displacement, symmetry, lack—all wonderfully explicated by scholar Max Luthi and at work in my evolving theory of “the fairy way of reading”) is to change the meaning of meaning. There is no natural law at work in the language though it follows the letter of the law quite nicely, thank you.
This strangeness produces what feels like an awakening state—one experiences it in writers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben, Emily Dickinson, Cesar Aira. And one thinks of Kathryn Davis, Katherine Mansfield, John Updike, Joy Williams: their profoundly balanced imbalance. Writers of avant garde fairy tales read too much and too well into the world.
In this heaven or hell, which is so remarkably life-like, so book-like, so ontologically screwed, there are “no more anecdotes, poetry recitations, ghost stories, contrived games, or late-night disclosures before the wood stove.” Crime scene, children’s book, family romance? Housebound is a horror—also a dream.
But oh! So many surging demands on dear Maggie, this story’s main girl. She’s the girl in a fairy tale—the girl trapped inside of a book. As I was once upon a time too, turning its pages.
Housebound had me spellbound.
It is such an honor to introduce Elizabeth Gentry’s first novel to you.
These walls enclose a world. Here is continuity spinning a web from room to room, from year to year. It is safe in this house. Here grows something energetic, concentrated, tough, serene; with its own laws and habits; something alarming, oppressive, not altogether to be trusted: nefarious perhaps. Here grows a curious plant with strong roots knotted all together: an unique specimen.
Chapter One
Leaving home felt like tunneling out of a snow that had kept everyone housebound so long they had run out of things to talk about. There were no more anecdotes, poetry recitations, ghost stories, contrived games, or late-night disclosures before the wood stove. Rather than building their knowledge of one another in successive cycles of irritation and love, memorizing each new layer as they aged and grew, the eleven members of the family had simply succumbed, once and for all, to a silence that turned them into strangers. They forgot the pressing revelations. They forgot that short surprised laugh. They forgot, too, the ring of the telephone against the wall, connecting them to people they might no longer recognize. With the radio dusty and their records scratched and worn, they perched on the ends of straight-backed chairs reading as if with peripheral vision engaged, shoulders tensed against an encroachment of space unlikely to occur. They felt suspended, always waiting for someone else to make the first move—to take a turn with the bath, to return with fresh wood, to put the pot on to boil, to summon to supper, and most of all, to grow up and to leave.
When Maggie decided to leave, the honeysuckle vines were just beginning to smother the herb garden far below her open bedroom window. Awaking in early dawn to the sound of a cough, she guessed that Douglas, the fourteen-year-old, lay without sleeping, his twin bed pushed against the wall alongside two bunks and a cradle. Presently their mother and father would pass through the nursery from their adjoining room on the far side, apparently unable to imagine that their children wanted anything more than to linger on in the great heart and heat of the room for six, the passageway to each parental entrance and exit. And why not? The oldest boys in the side rooms downstairs weren’t ready to leave. The eighteen-year-old whom the children often referred to as the theologian could continue indefinitely in his independent study of philosophy and religion, since their mother ceased her instruction when each of them turned fifteen. The sixteen-year-old athlete could run half-way to the city nearly thirty miles to the west and across the railroad tracks in town straight up the ridge into mountain ravines to the east. What could such skills bring? Her brothers were delaying, preparing for nothing.
But Maggie’s skill, child rearing, had been honed long ago, with the last baby now four years old. Sliding from beneath the coverlet and reaching for the lamp switch, she understood that the time had come for someone else to use this room: at nineteen, she had occupied the only private bedroom off the second-floor landing for nearly a decade. If she did not leave, perhaps no one would.
From the nightstand drawer, Maggie pulled an old favorite children’s book and a new favorite novel and set them on the bed. On top of the books she placed a pocket knife with scissors, a spool of white thread stuck through with a thin needle, and an unopened pack of Teaberry gum given her by a town boy for changing the diaper of his baby sister, a small bit of contraband in a house where sweets were outlawed by their parents. Bending to reach beneath her bed, she felt for a round leather box that she had discovered on the top shelf of her closet years ago. When Maggie asked to be allowed to keep the box, her mother could not remember where they had acquired such an item—perhaps it had been in the house when they arrived, she said. Yet upon first taking the worn black handle, Maggie had imagined a raucous, gray-headed woman who drank beer and smoked cigarettes as was done in some books and perhaps on some forgotten television show, watched at someone else’s house long ago. Though Maggie did not remember ever having met this low-breasted woman, she thought of her as a forgotten grandmother, one who had no trust for men or women and who steered away from babies whenever possible. Since no one spoke of relatives, the family might as well have come into being all on its own, without ancestry or extended relations, its identity gleaned from these small, oddly-shaped rooms, the steep staircase, the deep ashy swirling within the woodstove, and the thin paneling of the half-finished basement. Still, like a disgruntled fairy godmother, the imaginary grandmother had briefly appeared in the living room when, at age eleven, Maggie had been told to wait with her laboring mother until the midwife came. “I tore mine out with a coat hanger,” she said with a chuckle, then faded away.
Though Maggie understood that today she would at best only accompany her father into the city to inquire about a position, she packed her clothes into the box along with the other things in case she did not return. Then she changed into a dress and pulled on a green cardigan against the spring chill. From across the hall Douglas heard the bureau drawers slide open and for no particular reason—unless because the noise was the same noise he heard every morning—became despondent: if no one left, then it was as if they all existed solely as indirect witnesses to their parents’ copulation, a kind of relentless insular system in which all circled a secret central drama that only revealed itself with each new creation. Even the smallest of rustlings from the other side of the bedroom wall, noises that could have simply been the parting of his parents’ bedclothes, had lately caused Douglas to awake in disgust, shamefully longing for solitude to still the early morning tides of ache. He did not consider that perhaps this four-year lapse in childbearing was final, and that whatever happened from here spun them out and away from the source, which somewhere deep had glowed warm and bright, but was now cooling, withdrawing, curling in to simply sustain itself. The unseen beginnings of change were beyond his experience or intuition, and so he had no reason to believe that there would be anything but a new cradle slid into the room in which he slept with the twelve-year-old whose baby fat was gathering at her chest, the eleven-year-old who kicked the mattress while she slept, the ten-year-old who pressed his cheek to the window each morning to stare at the gravel driveway below, the eight-year-old who bounced a ball against doors to pass the time, and the four-year-old who for attention still tried to slip into self-conscious baby talk until everyone stiffened and looked away, embarrassed for him.
And so it was that Douglas, along with all of the other children, felt some strange new contraction in the heart when the family had settled onto the benches of the long wooden table for breakfast, where Maggie made her announcement.
“There haven’t been any babies here for quite some time,” she said, her voice deep and almost hollow. She nodded toward Bertie, the four-year-old, sitting on the middle sister’s lap to get closer to his hot cereal. Bertie looked up from beneath blond hair as if he had been caught growing up and was responsible for no longer charming them. “I don’t want any babies of my own,” she continued, “so it’s time for me to find some work to do.”
Some time had passed since two complete sentences had been spoken over breakfast that did not pertain to some practical task—an instruction or bid for help. The children shifted on the benches, unable to believe they were witnessing a declaration of intent that even their parents’ refusal could not erase: Maggie had not asked for permission nor had she made the announcement in private. She made it in front of all of them deliberately, suggesting that they, too, might seek out something else.
But their father did not resist. Maggie half-expected her parents to make some other suggestion, to promote an idea of their own. Perhaps in taking the initiative she would trigger memory of the dreams they had once harbored for their children when they decided to educate them beyond the limited capacity of the rural public schools. Instead, her father looked just past her, through the kitchen and toward the back door, the broken red veins visible in his cheeks and nose, one wisp of hair lying across the top of his head. “There are always babies in the city,” he said. “And some people I know.” He speared egg with his fork, signaling that they might all resume eating.
Their mother never looked up. She took the littlest from his sister’s lap and put him on her own, tucking her long brown hair behind one ear as she did so. “He’s spilling,” she said, the unsolicited explanation the only sign that she resented this disruption. In that one phrase, they all knew that in Maggie’s absence, their mother would redouble her efforts at caring for Bertie, who was furthest from leaving her, a safe investment. Bertie suddenly felt restless and cramped, as if he were growing bigger in his mother’s lap, and her thighs no longer cushioned him.
Knowing her father would want to leave promptly in order to reach the government finance office in time for Monday morning work, Maggie left the table after quickly finishing her breakfast. She did not wait, as on every day, for the others to finish. She took a last bite of potato and without a word placed her fork across her plate and mounted the steep stairs to her bedroom. This seamless motion was like a soaring in her mind and in the minds of her siblings—fork to plate, heel to floor, toe to first wooden stair, the lift and swing of her denim dress over her boots. She would not be asked to resume her seat at the table, they knew, not now or ever. They turned from the sight of her retreating hemline back to their half-empty plates.
* * * *
The new order—that Maggie would no longer join them at table—was in place that very evening, when she and her father returned home from the city, having found her a position in a daycare center that would begin in three days. Edwin, the eight-year-old throwing his battered orange ball against the barn door when they arrived home, was so surprised at the slamming of two car doors instead of one that he missed his ball and had to chase it across the grass. Maggie never once looked in his direction. She appeared disoriented, as if she had run through the woods believing that she was being chased by a wolf, only to be stopped by someone who told her there had never been a wolf. Grasping the ball between his fingertips again, Edwin felt shamed somehow, caught doing something routine when she had ventured out to something new.
After a moment he followed her to the kitchen, where she slumped alone on the stool drinking a glass of milk, the heels of her low boots slung over the bottom rail, her knees splayed beneath her skirt. When the screen door closed behind him, Maggie looked up from beneath heavy dark bangs with a small smile.
“I saw a toy shop full of balls in the city today,” she whispered, as if she were afraid their mother would hear. He fingered the dusty basketball in his hands without speaking, such an exchange having never been demanded of him before. “There were other toys, too, but mostly balls. All different sizes and colors.” She looked away, remembering. His knowledge of the rest of the world, like hers, came from library books and from what the town kids said, at least before today, and so with her he now imagined not only the toy store, but a bookstore run by two young women who lived together in an apartment above the shop; an antique store owned by an old man who scowled when someone’s entrance tripped the doorbell; a fabric store, boring except for one bolt in the window—deep blue with gold edging that folded stiff and crisp. Perhaps as she gazed into her milk glass his sister was deciding that book knowledge was enough. But as Edwin passed Maggie without a word to disappear into the living room, he thought that reading offered merely a glimpse—not nearly enough at all.
She would miss him when she left, Maggie thought, watching her little brother retreat. She might even miss the rest of them, a somber mass with little concern for her coupled with profound expectations that pulled and tugged. This morning she and her father had spent the half-hour drive into the city in silence. She watched as the familiar streets and houses dropped away after the first curvy mile, followed by the grocer and farmers’ market and library and the other places in town where the family walked. Just beyond the railroad tracks they passed the courthouse, then the public health department, then an old gas station. There the mountains fell away and the car reached the flat stretch of highway that their father would have them believe he endured every morning and evening for their sake.
When the five or six tall buildings of the city sparkled against the sky long before she expected them to, Maggie was embarrassed to realize that their father did not just retreat from their consciousness every day when he left, the way that characters did when the children set down their books for a break. Minutes later, watching the people move within the shadows created by buildings, she believed she’d guessed her father’s secret: he deliberately kept this place to himself, speaking of it only as a sinister and dirty destination at the end of a long and arduous journey. Certainly many of the windows were boarded up, and a mass of forlorn figures hovered at the entrance to a large public library. Still, she had also seen a bookstore with pale blue curtains, a greening park with a fountain, a stone statue of a hunched bear, and a man selling flowers on the corner. She did not know why her father would wish to mislead them about the city, except to hoard the power that came from moving easily among strangers, an ability she could sense in him even as he pulled the brown station wagon into the parking garage. As for her, she shrank back from the unfamiliar faces.
Her father left her in the bakery near the offices where he worked so that he could make inquiries discreetly, without parading her around like an orphan or a prostitute he said, the only thing he had said yet. He bought her a coffee, making it acceptable for her to spend the morning in the shop, and since she had never had any and he had set it down so formally before her on the small table, without offering either cream or sugar, she could not tell whether he was welcoming her to his world or telling her she’d be sorry she’d come. Only a little while later, when the coffee caused her to feel a slow rising panic and a need to move about that she could not indulge, did she decide that it was the latter.
Draining the last of the milk as she had the coffee, Maggie recalled that tonight was her night to prepare dinner for the rest of them. She slid off the stool and placed the empty glass in the bottom of the sink, where she hesitated over her mother’s low murmur, reading quietly to Bertie in the living room as if he were ill. Outside a jump rope snapped, and from the other side of the pantry wall, Warren coughed. Her family was not caught up in their routine activities, oblivious to her return. Instead they were lingering over them in hopes that she would step in to prepare the meal, as if this morning’s conversation had never occurred. If she did this for a number of days, they might decide that she had changed her mind about leaving, as it was in some ways inconvenient and troubling for them, and eventually allow her to return to table. Tonight their father would announce that Maggie was leaving for work at the end of the week, yet the rest of the family would wait to see whether she would really go, as her failure to do so would explain something about themselves and something about what the world had to offer. What they could assume or hope for. What they hoped for now was calm and a good meal; she was a better cook than her mother or brothers.
Maggie opened the refrigerator to seek out ingredients for a recipe or the rare available snack in a household that ate only regulated meals. When she did so, she heard faint laughter through the screen door. Her sisters were somewhere beyond the meadow. They were not waiting on her to make dinner at all—they had likely forgotten her. Maggie recognized a faint hint of Agnes’ authoritative storytelling voice, the lilt and inflection summoning her from the kitchen. Taking three long carrots and a bruised apple from the bottom drawer of the refrigerator, she let the screen door fall closed behind her: she would not be humbled by service to a family that wanted to let her know they had already forgotten her at the same time that they willed her back in her place.
At the edge of the yard, Maggie stuffed the food in the pockets of her dress and left through the gate, a standalone iron archway that her mother had years ago positioned in what was now a gap between the hedges. When she first placed the ornament in the yard, back when she still had some desire to shape and adorn their surroundings, the bushes had not yet been planted: the archway stood on its own, granting entrance or exit to nowhere that couldn’t be reached simply by stepping over the grass, as if their mother had wanted to rip a hole in space that would allow entrance to another world. Then the fast-growing bushes were planted, and the vines slowly crept up both the archway and the bushes, ivy twisting around the iron bars. Douglas, who had begun to demonstrate an interest in yard work over the past year, would eventually clear the vines and trim the hedges. Last fall he had also cut a path through the overgrown meadow sloping down into the woods, just past the raised bed where their mother had once kept a vegetable garden. Though this path would not last much longer in the warm weather, Maggie used it now to walk through the knee-high grasses.
At the tree line, she came upon her sisters, sitting side-by-side on the horizontal leg of a grapevine with their skirts tucked beneath them, chatting and eating mulberries from their stained palms. They grew quiet as she approached. The eleven-year-old stared wide-eyed from beneath the sharp center part of her long gold hair, but Agnes sniffed and looked away.
“We had a sister like you once,” Agnes said with a scowl, green eyes darting back to Maggie and then away again. Maggie was startled by the boldness of the rebuke.
“Is she a ghost?” Ellen whispered in her sister’s ear.
“Are you a ghost?” Agnes asked, smoothing the brown ponytail that rested across her shoulder. “Ellen would like to know.”
Maggie hesitated. She did not know what she could say to them of her leaving. She had not comforted the girls in some time, and only then when they had cried over a stubbed toe or a bee sting. Neither girl was now crying, and neither would ask about her trip to the city today, or about what was to come, so she could not think of how to bring it up. “Where did you get the mulberries?” Maggie said.
“Ghosts don’t eat,” Ellen said, blue eyes gazing directly at Maggie. Then she pointed to the tree a few feet away, branches low enough to reach.
Maggie turned, remembering. She hadn’t picked from the mulberry tree since her mother gave birth to Edwin, shortly before the big snow that buried everything in the woods for days. Not long after, Maggie had gotten her first period, becoming an unwilling participant in a cycle she could not control that was linked to the space torn from between her mother’s legs, as if the universe was not one whole piece but could be altered to suddenly offer more, the way the archway, once placed, suggested an entrance that had not otherwise existed. On asking about the health of the mother and baby, the neighbors in town referred to the birthing as natural, as it had been done at home, though to Maggie there could not have been anything less natural. Her mother had complained that the baby would not take her nipple, which also seemed unnatural. Why not let it die if it had so few instincts? The last time Maggie entered the woods, as her mother tried to nurse inside, everything turned grotesque: the vines that consumed all other vegetation, the bright yellow lichen on a log, the yellow jacket eating a dead wasp, the white unripe berries of the mulberry tree like insect larvae. Worse, when she returned to the house, she could find no rest: centipedes surfaced on the wood floors by the dozens to be captured by the spider webs flourishing in every corner. Mice scratched in the walls. And once she sprinkled dried dill onto the fried eggs she was making for her family only to notice that the thin green slivers moved against the whites, the herb infested with some kind of worm. She had longed for winter so everything would freeze and die.
In spite of this aversion to the natural world, Maggie, too, had been pulled into slavery to potential procreation at twelve, when without warning she endured two days with a relentless hunger while clear fluid dripped persistently from between her legs. Two weeks later she experienced rage and deep sadness, an excruciating intolerance to noise, spasms of pain in her back, and the week-long monitoring of the useless blood draining from her body. This routine, she found, would occur at regular intervals, again and again, causing a notable percentage of her time to be occupied by forces she could not see, the symptoms of which she was always turning toward just as soon as she thought she had turned away. Her mother showed her how to fold and then wash the rags, which they used in place of the napkins the grocer sold in order to keep expenses down. She did not offer words of celebration or consolation. “Just another form of diaper,” her mother said, and went back to her newest child.
From then on, Maggie began having nightmares in which she was genuinely at a loss as to how she had become pregnant. In waking life she understood all too well how babies came to be, but in the dreams, she was always vaguely suspicious that some sibling or parent caused the problem by pressing particularly close with unspoken thoughts and ingrained habits—a distinct form of chewing or a suppressed belch.
Now Maggie saw that the mulberries were not quite ripe. She tore one from its stem, popped it into her mouth, then spit out the sour pulp a moment later. She tried once more before coming back to the grapevine, where her sisters were licking their fingers as if they had feasted on a bushel.
“What story were you telling earlier?” Maggie asked, hoping to make conversation.
Agnes frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Earlier, from the house, I heard you telling a story. What was it about?”
“I don’t know,” she said flippantly.
“Of course you do,” Ellen said to Agnes. Then to Maggie, “She was retelling the story that she’s been reading aloud to us in bed at night. About a boy who lives in a cave.”
Agnes rolled her eyes. “Oh, that story.”
“Except that in the told version,” Ellen said. “It’s about us. That way we get to hear a story about ourselves.”
“That sounds nice,” Maggie said, and indeed she thought it was.
“You could do it, too,” Ellen said, giving a little kick. The grapevine shook. “You could tell us one now, about ourselves.” Ellen leaned hopefully toward Maggie. “A real one.”
“You shouldn’t ask her that, Ellen,” Agnes hissed.
“We’re in the woods,” Ellen said, “And so it’s not against the rules.”
“It’s not against the rules in any case,” Maggie said, though since no story rose readily to her lips, she wondered if her sisters had a better grasp of how things worked than she did. Surely she had at one time told them stories? She thought for a moment, as Ellen stared hopefully and Agnes twisted the cloth tie of her dress around one finger. Maggie could recall the smell of the wild mint they used to chew, the heat radiating from the hair she braided in the sunny backyard, the hiccups erupting from Ellen’s small body, the sour expression on Agnes’ face when she ate cabbage. Maggie could feel again her movements in caring for them, stooping and lifting, wiping and changing, carrying and chasing. All of these motions imbedded the girls in her memory. But they had asked for a story—a linked chain of events that indicated something about who they were or what they could become—not a catalogue of the senses. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again.
“I told you she couldn’t do it,” Agnes said.
“But she’s the only one who would be willing,” Ellen said, biting her bottom lip.
“I’ll have to think a little,” Maggie said lamely. If she told them they often smelled like the ginger they helped her to peel in the kitchen, they would be disappointed.
“Won’t you be eating with us tonight?” Agnes said, free to taunt now that Maggie had failed them.
“She’ll be eating in the woods, silly,” Ellen said, appearing to have recovered from the tears that threatened just a moment before. She pointed to Maggie’s bulging pockets. “When the house doesn’t want you, the woods won’t complain.”
“But Maggie hates the woods,” Agnes said, scrutinizing her older sister, “so she must be on her way to the fat lady’s house.”
“Where?” Maggie asked.
“You know, the fat lady neighbor.” Agnes waited for recognition from her sister, and when none came, sighed and pointed toward the cane break beyond the fence. “Don’t you know? Little Sis and I used to go there. She would give us cupcakes. They tasted good and were decorated nicely.”
“We’ve not been back in a while,” Ellen said, wistfully.
“We didn’t always like going,” Agnes reminded Ellen.
Ellen nodded, then said to Maggie, “She’ll laugh on your knees, which is sometimes quite funny, but also a little uncomfortable. Her breath is hot and her teeth are sharp.”
Agnes’ pale brow knit tight. “And she keeps a prowling man. We didn’t like him.”
“What’s worse,” Ellen said, “sometimes she sits on you. It’s quite scary to be sat upon by a fat lady.”
Indeed, Maggie could suddenly envision a round woman who had every type of metal frosting tip to decorate the tops of her cakes, though she did not seem in memory like a real woman, but like someone from a book she had read as a child—perhaps her sisters had been reading the same book. She recollected then that her role in relation to her sisters was maternal, authoritarian. “You all read too much,” she chided. She did not actually believe it was possible to read too much, but she did not know what to say to them unless she was asking a question, giving an instruction, or delivering a reprimand. She might not even have entertained the notion of excessive reading at all if the town children as well as the librarian herself had not said something to this effect on more than one occasion. “Besides,” she said, “we’re not supposed to leave our property. You know that father doesn’t like us to trespass.”
In response, her sisters stared at her blankly, as if she had just said something in an unknown language. Then they both laughed.
“Well, it’s better to eat out here, really,” Ellen said, hopping off the vine. It swung back then came forward with a jarring motion. “The table won’t let you speak.”
“Hey now!” Agnes protested the rough dismount, grabbing hold of the vine to keep her balance.
“She broke the rule this morning, and spoke over breakfast,” Ellen said to Agnes, as if she’d been misunderstood.
“There’s no rule, honey pot. You’ve made it up.”
“Of course there’s a rule.” Ellen turned back to Maggie. “Big Sis and I have been thinking of breaking it for some time. We haven’t because we didn’t know what might happen to us.”
Agnes slid from the vine daintily. “Now we know,” she said.
“Yes, now we know—if you speak in a certain way, saying certain things, you can’t come back.”
“That punishment wouldn’t apply in all cases,” Agnes said. “You’re exaggerating.”
“I might have said to Sis, ‘I see your breast buds!’” The youngest reached out and pinched her sister’s small breast, who screamed, then burst into giggles.
“They’re mine!” she said in triumph. “Get your own.” They grabbed hands and took off running up the path through the meadow, as if, Maggie thought, they were being chased by a wolf. They looked over their shoulders to see whether she would follow, or perhaps to see whether she would simply drift away, like a good ghost. Maggie, shivering with the coming dusk, turned to look into the woods behind her. In the dim gray light, the rotting hackberry trees sagged with the weight of the grape vines, and the gaping tunnels of grass spiders shimmered beneath the choke of privet.
Chapter Two
Climbing the stairs, Quinn squeezed quietly by his father, who looked past him as he often did, his mind on other matters. But Quinn wasn’t fooled. Whatever there was down that road their father traveled, it was more than he let on and at the same time wasn’t much at all.
From the window on the landing, Quinn spotted Maggie in the backyard, just as his two sisters had told him he would. She was sitting on a grapevine at the far end of the meadow, staring across the fence toward the cane brake with her face in profile. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, swollen from crying. He hadn’t expected her to return today, but he did not believe she could be a ghost, as his sisters had teased. She was more likely to be an angel, gently cupping the back of his head with one hand if he were in her way and she needed to move past. His mother had long ago retreated into some place of her own that did not invite others, but his oldest sister had not ignored him when Edwin and Bertie came along.
When Maggie remained seated, Quinn understood that she’d been sent to stand at the edge of the woods as punishment, as he had been some years ago after pinching Edwin very hard on the arm. That day, his father had required him to keep his back to the forest and stare at the house, where all of the windows stared blankly back at him. He stood there sweating from the August heat and from fear, unable to hear whether someone or something was approaching from behind because of the insects swarming in the trees. He expected Ellen or Agnes to comfort him by appearing at the landing window, but when this did not occur he realized they were all going about their usual activities, disregarding him, forgetting him as if something had already snatched him into the forest never to return. No one really believed him when he said that tramps from the train tracks sometimes came through the woods and down to the trickle of creek, but he had found their empty, strong-smelling bottles, a knife, and once, an old woolen blanket.
Which was why he put his hand against the glass now, signaling support to Maggie in spite of his worry that there might be repercussions for aligning himself with her. In a book he had read recently, wild dogs were said to sometimes collect other neighborhood dogs left free to roam by their owners, and when they did this, the kindest of pets became part of an aggressive gang, following the leader who would choose some weaker prey to kill for no reason except that weakness inspired scorn and loathing. If Quinn were ever in a pack of terrible dogs, he knew that even though he would not want to participate in violence, he would still remain part of the group, not so much because he was afraid of becoming the victim, but because leaving would cause so much pain that he wondered how anyone ever managed it.
When his runner brother summoned them all to supper, Quinn hesitated, knowing that he would now need to leave Maggie in the growing dark. In his delay, he saw her slide off the grapevine and begin walking in the direction of the creek, as if giving him permission to leave. He was afraid for her, abandoning her punishment, out in the dusk with the tramps. He was also afraid of how the table might seem without her, which is what he assumed everyone else was afraid of, since they were eating later than usual. But when he arrived at the bottom of the stairs a moment later, he remembered that tonight was Maggie’s night to cook for them. Since she had not done so, Phillip had come in early from jumping rope to cut up radishes and cheese and yesterday’s bread and pull the last of the meat from Sunday’s cooked chickens, a cold supper that closely resembled lunch.
Because the long benches allowed the family to spread out, Maggie’s place was neither empty nor occupied. As the eldest now, Warren simply slid farther down to compensate. He was now positioned not quite directly across from his father, his thick shoulders slumped forward with this responsibility. Taking his place at the other end of the table beside Agnes, Quinn could see that Warren was working problems out in his head and would not concern himself over Maggie’s absence. The slightest tremor in Phillip’s thin fingers, however, suggested that he felt put upon by Maggie’s failure to feed them. This tremor, captured in a deliberate effort to pull apart the stale bread, assumed the others would share and indulge his sense of inconvenience. Quinn, too, began to feel the injustice in the cold gel around the base of his chicken leg.
They all understood that this small hint of resentment that Phillip had been allowed to express was what led their father to turn to Douglas across the table and say, “You’ll want to go ahead and move into the open room.”
Douglas nodded, the freckles on his cheeks fading into a pink flush.
Then to Phillip, their father said, “And if you’ll put the cradle in the basement. Bertie’s more than old enough to sleep in a bed now.”