“We’re going to the beach with Mrs. Forrester,” I said.
“Ain’t that dandy,” he said.
Mary Ella looked around to be sure no one was watching, then jumped out of the back of the truck carrying the basket she always had on her arm. She reached up for the bike Devil was handing down to her, but Eli told him to leave it. “I’ll carry it home for you,” he said to Mary Ella.
Mary Ella got in the backseat of Mrs. Forrester’s car, and Eli took off.
“What do you mean about the beach?” Mary Ella asked.
“I have a free day,” Mrs. Forrester said, “so I stopped by to see if you girls and William would like to take a little trip to the beach.” I was so glad she didn’t say anything about Mary Ella being in the truck with the boys. Mrs. Werkman would have preached a whole sermon.
“We can swim?” Mary Ella asked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Forrester said.
“But it ain’t like the pond,” I told Mary Ella. “You’ve seen pictures of them big waves in the ocean.” I thought of the pictures in Henry Allen’s California book, the ones with them boys on the boards, but I knew the Atlantic Ocean didn’t have no waves like that. “We have to keep a good eye on Baby William.” I wanted Mrs. Forrester to know I heard her. I wanted her to like me; it was dumb how much. I didn’t usually care that much about being liked, except by one handsome boy I hardly ever got to see these days.
“Hopefully, it will be calm today,” Mrs. Forrester said. She kept looking in her mirror at Mary Ella.
“What did you get for Nonnie?” I asked her.
“Oatmeal cookies.”
“She’s gonna collapse and die on us,” I said.
“Maybe Nurse Ann needs to talk to her some more about what to eat,” Mrs. Forrester said.
“She knows what,” I said. “She just gets real hungry and can’t stop herself.”
“It must be very hard for her,” Mrs. Forrester said, and I thought that was real kind of her. More kind than I would be, and Nonnie was my own flesh and blood.
We got back to the house and Mrs. Forrester told us to pee and get a fresh diaper on Baby William. Then she went in the johnny herself and then we put on the clothes Nonnie got out for us. I’d outgrowed mine already. I had to stop eating Nonnie’s biscuits. I didn’t have nothing to wear to swim in, so Nonnie gave me one of her old housedresses. It would have to do. She said we could take a few cookies with us, but Mrs. Forrester said she had sandwiches in a cooler and a big thermos full of lemonade, so we was set.
The drive took a long time. No wonder we never got to the beach before! It took forever and Baby William cried half the way there, then finally calmed down and fell asleep on Mary Ella’s lap in the backseat. Mrs. Forrester asked us lots of questions, which seemed like her favorite thing to do. What subject did I like best in school? I said history. Then she asked Mary Ella what subject did she like back when she was in school and Mary Ella said, “Nothing.” If we could live anywhere, where would we like to live? That was her next question. For me, that was easy. California, of course. Mary Ella had a harder time answering. She didn’t like questions. She didn’t like nobody seeing inside herself. Not even me, her own sister. When she didn’t answer, Mrs. Forrester just asked it again. “Where would you most like to live, Mary Ella?” she asked. “If you could live anywhere in the whole wide world?”
“California,” she said.
“What?” I said. “You ain’t never said nothing about California before. You just said that because I did. She don’t even know where California is,” I said to Mrs. Forrester.
“Do you really want to live in California, Mary Ella?” Mrs. Forrester asked, looking in her mirror. I knowed what she was seeing. My sister, her hair blowing all around her head from the open window, looking at the countryside, thinking how to answer.
“No,” she finally said. “I just want to live away. Far away. Baby William and me.”
“Far away … some place in particular?” Mrs. Forrester asked.
“Any place. Long as it’s far away.”
“Who else would live there?” Mrs. Forrester asked, and I knew even before the last word was out of her mouth that she’d pushed Mary Ella one question too far. Sure enough, my sister shut up and didn’t speak another word for the rest of the drive.
* * *
Mary Ella turned out to be afraid of the ocean. I understood. When we got out of the car and climbed over the little sandy hills, I felt dizzy myself. When you see a picture of the ocean, it’s cut off at the edges. You know it goes on and on to the right and on and on to the left, but you never really know how it feels to see that until you actually do see it. Mary Ella climbed over the sandy hill and couldn’t take another step. She just stood there, Baby William in her arms, yellow hair blowing all around.
“It’s too big,” she said.
Mrs. Forrester laughed, but just a little. Not like she was making fun of Mary Ella. “It’s a shock at first, isn’t it?” she said. “You’ll get used to it quickly. Baby William is used to it already. He wants to get down and play.” Baby William was squirming in Mary Ella’s arms. Mrs. Forrester took him from her and set him on the sand. He started doing his wobbly run toward the water. “Don’t go in yet!” Mrs. Forrester called after him. “Wait for us.”
I laughed. Let her see how easy it was to keep an eye on that boy.
There was other people on the beach, but not too many. I could hear music from transistor radios and wished I brung mine. Mary Ella and me rubbed suntan oil on each other’s arms and backs and we set out the two blankets Mrs. Forrester had and the cooler and thermos and towels and took off our shoes and then we walked into the water. The waves seemed big to me but Mrs. Forrester said they were tiny. Mary Ella stayed up near the beach, the water just splashing around her legs, but me and Mrs. Forrester held Baby William’s hands and swung him through the waves. I never saw that boy smile and laugh so much. I wished we lived right next to the ocean. When I said that, Mrs. Forrester said you could ruin a thing by wishing for something else. She asked me if I understood what she meant, but I thought she was talking gibberish. So she said, “If you’re having fun at the beach, like we are, but you spend all your time here wishing you could be here all the time, you’re wasting the time you’re here.” She asked me if I understood that, and I said yes but I still thought she was talking some other language.
When we came out of the water, Mrs. Forrester went back to her car to get a big umbrella and she put it up over us. The truth is, Mary Ella and me are pretty brown from working on the farm all summer, but Mrs. Forrester is sickly pale and she put a lot of the suntan oil on her skin. I tried to keep Baby William under the umbrella as much as I could because when his skin gets brown, people think he’s colored. Little colored-looking boy with a blond mama? Didn’t look so good.
After we ate, Mary Ella and Baby William went to sleep on the blanket, but Mrs. Forrester and me sat watching the waves.
“I could watch the ocean forever and ever,” I said. “Don’t think I’d ever get tired of it.”
“I agree,” Mrs. Forrester said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to have a house right on the water?”
“Like a floating house?”
“No, no. A house up on the dunes. Where you’d be on safe ground—at least until a hurricane came—but you’d have this view every single day.”
I tried to remember what she’d said to me about wishing for something and how that wasted the time you had now, but I couldn’t think exactly how she said it, so I just thought it to myself.
“Is the Pacific Ocean just like this?” I asked.
“You’re very interested in California,” she said.
“I seen pictures. You ever been there?”
She shook her head. “It does sound beautiful,” she said.
I wanted to tell her about Henry Allen so bad. I never got to tell nobody about him. We sat there quiet for a few minutes, me almost shaking while I got up the courage. “You asked me if I had a boy
friend,” I said. “I do. I got one.”
She just looked out at the waves and I didn’t think she heard me, but then she said, “Tell me about him.”
The way it took her a few seconds to answer made me change my mind about telling her. “Please don’t tell,” I said. It was stupid I said anything. She’d tell Nonnie and Nonnie would kill me. “Promise you won’t tell nobody?” I asked.
“Yes, I promise,” she said. “How do you know this boy?”
“I just do,” I said. “Me and him talk about living in California someday. We both want to be teachers.”
“So … to be a teacher you have to stay in school.”
“I know that.” Did she think I was dumb?
“What I mean is, you need to be very careful about not getting pregnant so you don’t get kicked out of school.”
“We already talked about this, ma’am.” I tried to sound as polite as I could but I wasn’t going to tell her about personal things. It was bad enough with Nurse Ann.
“I just worry, that’s all.”
“He has a book on California and we spend hours looking at the pictures. That’s all we do.”
She smiled at me. Her nose was pink and she looked real pretty. “He sounds like a nice boy,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, he is.”
“When do you get to see him?”
“Oh, hardly never now school’s out.” I’d let her think I knew him at school.
“It’s very hard to be a teacher and have a family at the same time,” she said. “Have you thought about that?”
“My favorite teacher, Mrs. Rex, done it. She got two children and she’s a teacher.”
“Do you want children, Ivy?”
“Don’t everybody?” I asked. Sometimes she asked the stupidest questions.
“Well, no,” she said. “Every girl in the world doesn’t want to have children. Some of them only have them because they feel society says they should.”
“What does that mean? Society says?”
“Other people. Other people judge you if you don’t have children. As if there’s something wrong with you. But for some women, it can be the right choice because they want to do other things with their lives.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, have a career—that means a job—that doesn’t mix well with raising a family. That sort of thing. So no, every woman doesn’t want to have children.”
“That’s not me,” I said. “I can’t imagine having no children. That’s crazy. That’s what life’s about.” Then I thought maybe she was one of them ladies who didn’t want children and I just made her feel bad, because she went quiet again.
“Do you want to have children?” I asked.
She nodded, but real slowly. “Someday,” she said. “Not yet.”
* * *
We walked back to the car, and we was hot and the dunes steep. I didn’t feel so good and Mrs. Forrester said maybe I had too much sun. I was out of breath by the time we got to the car and really, really tired. Everyone was quiet and when I got into my seat I thought Mrs. Forrester had tears in her eyes. She turned her face away from me real quick.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She shook her head and smiled at me but it was one of them weak smiles, not a real smile at all. “Nothing,” she said. “It was just a good day.” She looked over her shoulder at Mary Ella and Baby William, already almost asleep.
“Why don’t you nap while I drive home?” she said. She reached over and put her palm on my forehead like she was checking me for a fever. She was acting strange, but I liked that she touched me. Her hand felt real soft. “Would you like some lemonade before we start driving?” she asked.
“I don’t need nothing,” I said.
She started the car and pulled into the street and I closed my eyes and before I knew it, I was asleep, dreaming of all that water.
23
Jane
“Welcome back!” I smiled as I walked into my office … well, the office that had been mine alone for the past month while Charlotte recovered from her fall. Now Charlotte sat at her desk, with her leg, still in a cast, propped up on a stool and her crutches leaning against the wall. She still had that polished, clear-skinned look I’d come to associate with her, though there was a tightness around her mouth that made me think she was in pain. “How are you feeling?” I set my briefcase on the floor near my desk. “And how on earth did you get up the stairs?”
“It took me about twenty minutes with lots of help from Fred and Gayle,” she said. “But I couldn’t stay home another day. I was going stir-crazy.”
“I bet.” I sat down at my desk. “You look wonderful.”
She brushed aside the compliment with a small groan. “I still relive that fall every time I close my eyes,” she said.
“It was terrible. I’m so glad you’re doing all right.”
“Obviously, I won’t be working in the field for a while,” she said. “Fred will stick around another month until I’m at full strength. And actually”—she looked at her watch—“he’ll be here any minute. We need to talk to you.”
Her tone told me they didn’t have good news for me, and I immediately thought of my clients. Had something happened to one of them?
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Fred walked into the room at that moment. He stood just inside the doorway and pointed at me. “You,” he said, “are a loose cannon.”
“Me?” I said. “I don’t understand.”
Fred sat down in the only unoccupied chair in the room, a straight-backed chair against the wall by the door. “I got a call from Ann Laing this morning,” he said. “She was out to check on the Hart family and learned you took them to the beach yesterday.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Jane.” Charlotte’s voice registered disappointment and disbelief. “You can’t go carting your clients around willy-nilly at off-hours,” she said. “It’s against regulations.”
Fred looked at her. “Does she have the manual?” he asked.
“I gave her one,” Charlotte said, talking about me as if I weren’t sitting right there. She looked at me. “Didn’t you read it? Your manual?”
“Yes, of course I did, but I—”
“These people are not your best friends,” Fred said. “You had no authority to take them on a road trip with you.”
“I didn’t realize I was doing something wrong.” I’d remembered what David, the psychologist at the country club, had said about seeing Ivy in a different environment. “I thought it would be helpful to see Ivy someplace unfamiliar to her,” I said. “I’m so convinced that she’s brighter than her test shows and thought—”
“You’re treading on very thin ice,” Charlotte said.
“You’ve been at this job how long?” Fred asked.
“Five weeks,” I said.
“And you know better than Charlotte and the testing psychologist and the nurse who’ve been working with this girl—and others like her—for decades?”
I thought of what I’d learned on the beach trip. It had been valuable, but perhaps only to reinforce Charlotte and Ann’s case. I now knew Ivy had a boyfriend, so there was greater potential for her to have sex. But I also knew how much she wanted a family. I knew she had what the books I’d read called “native intelligence”—common sense—and I was sure her IQ was higher than 80, though perhaps not by much. But the thing I’d learned that had truly shaken—and depressed—me, had happened in the last few minutes of our time on the beach. As we climbed over the dune to go back to the car, Ivy suddenly stopped walking. When I looked at her, she was staring into space, blinking a mile a minute. Her eyes rolled up and I knew what I was seeing even before Mary Ella said, matter-of-factly, “It’s a fit. It’ll be over in no time.”
It was over in no time and Ivy picked up walking right where she left off, unaware of what had just happened, but for me, everything had changed. She was still epileptic. She hadn’t outgrown it, as I’d hoped.
That family she wanted? It would be much harder to come by now. By the time we reached my car, my eyes had stung with tears. I’d already planned to talk to Ann about the weight Ivy was putting on. She needed some guidance to know what she should eat and what she shouldn’t. After that seizure, though, I knew I had something much more serious to talk to Ann about, and I also knew what Ann would say.
If Ivy were my neighbor, though, no one would think of sterilizing her. That was the thing. The petition was because she was poor. Poor and on welfare and unable to speak for herself.
“Ivy wants children,” I said. “If she doesn’t get pregnant now and gets good medical care for her epilepsy and good care once she’s married and pregnant, she could have a chance at the family,” I said.
“That’s a hell of a lot of ifs,” Fred said.
“Unrealistic ifs,” Charlotte added. “I was shocked this morning when Paula told me you haven’t turned the petition in yet,” she said. “She said you’re getting cold feet about the Eugenics Program. I thought we’d talked about that and you understood the benefits.”
“I—”
“How far along are you with the petition?” Fred asked.
“It’s almost finished,” I said.
“Then finish it and turn it in,” Charlotte said.
Barbara appeared at my office door. “There’s a call for you, Jane,” she said. “A Davison Gardiner? He said it’s urgent.”
I turned away from Charlotte and Fred, glad to escape their angry eyes. I picked up the phone. “Mr. Gardiner?” I said. “This is Jane Forrester.”
“Hey, Mrs. Forrester,” he said. “I’m afraid we got a situation here.”
24
Ivy
I was looping at the Christmas barn, trying to watch Henry Allen at the same time. He was driving the mule in front of the sled out in the field, and I couldn’t wait till the sled was full and he’d bring us the leaves. Then he’d be close enough for me to touch. Or at least to get a good look at. We was so careful about not looking at each other when people was around—which was always—and we never talked in front of nobody. It’d been almost three weeks since the last time we was together and I missed him so bad I felt crazy. How we was ever going to work things out, I didn’t know. Once school started in September, though, I’d get to see him more. Nobody could keep us apart at school.