They had to cut across the back half of the Gilbertsen property and through a field of lupine. Up close the lupine was far from the unbroken sheet of purple it appeared at a distance. Still it was intense enough. Irini fell silent, neither saying anything nor hearing anything that was said. She watched her feet making each purple step. When she reached the grasses again, it was as if a spell had been broken.
Initially Henry had opposed the idea of practices. He argued that practicing added an additional muddy variable. The results would be so much cleaner if the Sweethearts could win just through eating Sweetwheats. Walter had to take him upstairs to the ham radio room for a long talk.
After practice, the Sweethearts crossed the other edge of the Gilbertsens’ on their way to the Törngrens’ steam bath. Margo Törngren was herself a walking advertisement for the benefits of steam. Margo had white-gold hair and pale skin. She looked as delicate as a china figurine, but from kindergarten to graduation she had never missed a day of school. Irini couldn’t remember that she had ever had a cold.
Her hair was extraordinary; she was the Rapunzel in Irini’s father’s fairy-tale Magrit. But her personality was a bit at odds with the extravagant hair. No princess had ever been more practical or diligent or disciplined. Her only sin was tardiness. Her friends had learned to tack on the extra half hour to any plans that included her.
The sauna was set some distance from the Törngren house and downstream from Margaret Mill. There was an old grindstone in the dressing room with the seat and pedals of a bicycle, so it provided an opportunity for exercise, as well as the healthful benefits of steam. This was not an opportunity any of the girls took advantage of. The word “aerobics” had, thankfully, not yet been invented.
While the room heated the girls undressed. They had been stripping together since they were six years old, but instead of becoming more comfortable with it, they had become less so. The past years had seen more towels and less eye contact. If they had lived among the Greeks, this might have been an occasion for boasting. “I am as beautiful as the sea nymphs,” they might have said to each other, dropping their towels, just before all hell broke loose. Helen took off her brassiere. “Incoming,” she said. Her breasts fell to her waist. Irini looked down at her own legs and saw that they needed a shave.
After a long day in the Kitchen and a long evening on the field, Irini’s arm was aching. She couldn’t wait to get some heat on it, although she hated the feel of hot air in her lungs or her nose. She pinned up her hair. “Remember how I could put my hair up without pins before I cut it last time?” said Tracy. “It was that thick.” She was that close to having her hair turned into snakes.
Fortunately for Magrit, none of the girls, not even Tracy, really felt that they were beautiful. Partly this was because there were no men around, except for a few fathers, to tell them so. “Remember when there were boys in Magrit?” Cindy May asked plaintively.
“Scott Moodey and Wilbur Floyd,” Irini reminded her.
“The others. Do you remember when we couldn’t come to the sauna without them spying on us every step of the way?”
“As if they were spying on you,” Tracy said. “In a pig’s eye! When the boys left, you were as skinny as a rail and as freckled as a frog. You were the biggest droon.”
My mother said that the Sweethearts never fought. Nine girls, most of whom worked together all day, and my mother couldn’t remember that a cross or gossipy or hurtful word was ever spoken, except for the tiniest of quarrels, the smallest of disagreements, only enough dissension to keep things interesting. Of course she was aided in this happy memory by the fact that the Tarkens and the Mays didn’t speak to each other at all.
I don’t find this picture of excessive harmony and sisterhood to be plausible, and so I’m ignoring it. It’s only fair to point this out.
But even my mother would concede that the May girls, being sisters, had a tendency to pick at one another. “This didn’t mean they weren’t close,” my mother said. “Criticize one of them yourself and watch how fast they became the three musketeers.”
Margo poured water from the bucket onto the coals. The room began to sizzle and Irini could smell the wet birch overlaying the smell of the wet bodies added to the smell of the damp wood. Arlys and Margo would last the longest. While the rest of them covered their faces with wet washrags in order to survive, Arlys and Margo would whip themselves with birch branches to make it even hotter.
The only explanation for their endurance was genetic. Irini’s people had never discovered recreational steam. We’ve never been a people celebrated for our cleanliness. Irini would take the lowest bench and still she would be the first to leave.
“Walter is spending a lot of time coaching Helen,” Cindy observed. She had taken the seat beside Irini. Her freckled shoulders showed above a modestly draped towel.
“Do I care what Walter Collins does?” Irini asked. She and Walter had quarreled about the batting order. He was batting Helen leadoff and nothing Irini said could dissuade him. Cindy was a decent contact batter, although, batting one-handed, she was bound to lack power. She swung the bat like a tennis racquet, and she always hit between short and third. But she was fast and had a good chance of getting to first, while the runner moving from first to second, particularly if she was a slow runner like Helen, was an easy out. Cindy should hit when there was no one else on base, or better yet, when there was a runner on third, but this couldn’t really be planned.
Besides, Irini didn’t want Helen embarrassed. If the men saw Helen’s breasts as freakish or funny or fascinating or whatever it was that men saw when they looked at large breasts, Irini didn’t want Helen to have to deal with it.
“If we play smart, we can win,” Walter had said to her, as if that were the point of playing baseball. He was being insensitive and Irini could not imagine the circumstances that would induce her to speak to him again.
Margo turned to Helen. “Helen, you need to level out your swing.”
“Walter says I don’t need to hit the ball.”
“But it would be so great if you did. A nice, easy, level swing. Less height, more distance.”
“Could we not talk baseball for a change?” said Helen.
“I was talking physics.”
“You’ve got to run faster, too,” said Irini. “Cindy’s going to be coming right behind you and you’re slowing her down. Just try, Helen. You don’t look as if you’re trying.”
“Imagine my gratitude for the advice, because it exists only in your imagination. I don’t know why I’m playing at all. I’m going to be terrible.”
“You’re going to be fine,” Claire said. Her light hair was dark with sweat. Two red circles burned in her cheeks. “You’ll be great. Won’t she, girls?”
“Mrs. Ada has gone to bat for us,” Cindy told them. The short hairs around Cindy’s face were curling in the steam. She brushed her bangs back with her full hand. They were so wet they stayed there, stuck straight up like the brim of a hat. Irini felt her own hair, sagging limply against her scalp. “Apparently Mr. Henry wanted us to play in skirts, but Mrs. Ada told him not to be ridiculous.”
“We’ll be sliding into base,” said Arlys. “Our legs would be a mass of scrapes and scars. What can he have been thinking?”
“He’s still mad at us,” said Irini. “Over that Salem thing.” Given their suspicions of Fanny and the presence of the two younger May girls, this was a delicate subject. But it was one they all wanted to discuss. The other girls waited for a sign from Tracy or Cindy, something that gave them permission.
Tracy gave Irini a look instead. It was the opposite of permission. “We can look just as cute in slacks,” said Tracy. “Are you going to wear a girdle?”
No one else had thought about it. It was an engrossing subject with much to be said on both sides. They discussed it for several minutes.
Irini wiped her face with the corner of her towel. She had to partially disrobe to do so. She tucked the corner away again.
Drops of sweat ran from her neck to the top of the towel and gathered in a little puddle there. She tried to ignore this, to concentrate on how good her aching arm now felt. The delicate skin inside her nostrils had begun to burn. The smell of dried wood became painful. She tried breathing through her mouth, which quickly scorched her throat.
Cindy was breathing shallowly, too. “Mrs. Ada’s also upset about the fish sticks.”
“Little Miss Know-It-All,” said Tracy.
“Little Miss Know-Nothing,” said Cindy back. It was a fact that Cindy frequently knew things she had no way of knowing. It was the two older sisters. And being the town’s telephone operator. “Sometimes I hear things,” she had once conceded. “Just in that moment when I’m hanging up.”
“Mrs. Ada doesn’t see why he can’t take it just the one step farther, and make the fish sticks without using any fish. She doesn’t want any fish hurt.”
“What next?” said Arlys. Her own tastes in fish ran to nasty, pickled things with their heads and their webby little tails intact and one eye staring up at you.
“Next is India. She’s gotten the tickets. She’s really going.”
“Good for her,” said Helen. She stretched out on the wooden bench with her eyes closed. Her breasts slid to the sides of her body. “Why should the men be the only ones to see the big world?”
“It’s not as if they saw the big world at its best,” Irini pointed out. Her forehead dripped. She wiped her hand across it. “Helen, it’s not fair the way you always make it sound as if they were off on a cruise.”
“It’s not as if they came back,” Margo said.
“Except for Walter,” said Claire.
Irini couldn’t breathe at all now, but it was the worst possible moment to leave the sauna. It would open her to suspicions. She wiped her face and neck with her hands, wiped her hands on the front of her towel in a hopeless effort to be dry. Her tongue was so parched it was beginning to swell. “Has it ever occurred to you that we’re literally cooking ourselves in here? We’re being voluntarily parboiled.”
“ ‘Steaming, not boiling, that’s the ticket,’ ” said Margo. “More water, please, Arlys. I haven’t broken a sweat yet.”
Meanwhile, in India…
Gandhi prepares for Independence.
16
That spring Henry had a sudden hankering to band some birds. Spring does this to some people. It makes them think of migrations. Everyone in Magrit seemed to be restless that year.
He hired Norma Baldish to string the back of Collins House with nets and bought notebooks and new red pens. He was studying migratory patterns, he told the girls in the Kitchen. He imitated for them the call of the shy yellow rail by tapping his fingernails on the counter. He was good at bird calls and had once done an entire school assembly filled with them. His secret wish was to band the rare and lovely Kirtland’s warbler on its way home from the Yucatan. That would be something the Audubon Society would notice.
During the war, what with rationing and all, Maggie had been forced to consider all birds as potential food sources. She didn’t want to. But crow, for example, Maggie had found to be no greasier than duck. She recommended it in a recipe book called Four and Twenty Black Birds.
Those were dark times. In general, Henry had a fondness for birds, who were, after all, great cereal eaters. There was a bird feeder just outside the Kitchen window, which the girls kept full of Sweet-wheats. The birds fed there in the winter. In the spring they ignored it.
Bugs! Seeds! Saps and honeys! There was a red-headed woodpecker nesting loudly in the Doyles’ yard. The waxwings trilled among the leaves. Up by Upper Magrit was a large white tree they called Chickadee Pine. Hundreds of the black-headed birds lived there and had for as long as Irini could remember. It was a sort of flying city above the drowned one.
The woods between Brief Street and Collins House were full of robins and wrens and swallows and martins and vireos and tanagers. They swooped and sang and threaded their way above Irini. She was walking over to Collins House to see the nets.
Norma told her father who told her that they were worth seeing. Ada had advised on the placement, so it had a sort of artistic integrity. If Ada had thought of it as art, she might have gone on to bigger projects. She might have strung the nets into a twenty-four-foot fence surrounding Magrit. She might have wrapped the mill in cellophane. She was concentrating on world peace instead of personal achievement, and so, as often happens in such cases, she missed the main chance.
So far the only thing Henry had caught was one of the larger dogs. “Imagine if these nets were meant for us,” Ada said gaily to Irini. “I’d arrive in India banded and logged.”
Ada was stopping first in New York to buy a travel wardrobe. What one would wear to see Mr. Gandhi was a ticklish question. Modesty was the key, but poverty might be the look. Hopefully someone on Fifth Avenue would know.
She seemed happier than Irini had seen her in a long time. “You win some games while I’m gone,” she said. “Win some for Mr. Gandhi. Tell everyone you’re playing for nonviolence.”
The nets, with their fine threads, lay a delicate curtain of gauze over the vista of hills and trees behind Collins House. They had a surprisingly natural look, more of a shadow than a substance, in the scene. They rippled gently.
Ada left for India by way of New York, on the four o’clock, and Claire Kinser moved into Collins House to do for Henry while Ada was away. Claire was released from work in the Kitchen for the duration. Henry forgot about the fish-stick project, which eventually went belly up. But Claire still made it to practice. Walter drove her over every afternoon.
Two days before their first game, Irini made an appointment to have her hair cut. Mrs. Tarken ran Magrit’s beauty shop out of the Tarken home and right next door. In the summer the hair dryers sat on the back porch, where the ladies could read their magazines and look out over the Tarken roses. Mrs. Tarken had a trellis of pale pink Maybelle Stearnes. In the winter the ladies went into the parlor, a small dark room with fuzzy wallpaper and the permanent smell of permanent waves, plus hairspray and tomcat.
This was 1947, when people thought it sufficient to wash their hair once a week. Dandruff was Mrs. Tarken’s personal bailiwick and in 1947 it was a large and serious territory.
On her good days, Mrs. Tarken sported a kind of style that was rare in Magrit. Sexy. She wore more makeup, tighter clothes, slimmer skirts, fancier hairstyles than the rest of the mothers. Her lipstick came off on her food whenever she ate. It was a cheap look and the ladies disapproved of it whenever they weren’t attempting to duplicate it. But they had nothing but concern for Mrs. Tarken herself.
Mrs. Tarken had always been frail and moody. The loss of her son Jimmy had amplified her moods. They were darker, deeper, and less rational. Twice now since the telegram, she had been found wandering in her bathrobe and furred, high-heeled slippers on Main Street, with no very plausible explanation. Twenty years later she would have been on Valium; fifty years later, Prozac; and maybe then you wouldn’t have had to call ahead and carefully gauge her mood before making an appointment. You sympathized, naturally. It broke your heart, but it didn’t follow that you were willing to have her despair express itself in some unfortunate way on your head.
Even before the war, there’d been a risk. Once, without asking, Mrs. Tarken had cut and curled Irini’s hair à la the Depression era Shirley Temple. The next day at school Scott Moodey bleated at her all recess long. Even her father had said she looked like a dandelion gone to seed, although he contrived to make it sound a compliment. “Wild and wishful hair,” he said. “Mrs. Tarken has outdone herself.”
“Hair is flat on the sides and the top this year,” Mrs. Tarken told Irini over the phone. “And waved in the back.” Actually this was the style last year, but close enough for Magrit. “I hope you’re not going to want that dreadful do where all the hair is combed to the same side. I can’t see that on you, Irini. It requires absolutely symmetrical features.”
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“Just the usual,” said Irini. “Just me, looking like me, but trimmed.”
Most of the Sweethearts were having their hair done sometime during the week. The Mays had given each other home permanents. Sissy Tarken was a Rembrandt of French braids and ribbons. Helen had cut three inches from the back and gone for bangs well above the eyebrows, like Judy Garland’s.
Even Margo was forsaking her usual plaits. She was sitting under the dryer when Irini arrived, while Mrs. Tarken gazed at her lustfully. For as long as Irini could remember, Mrs. Tarken had wanted to cut Margo’s hair. “It could be so smart,” she said. But Margo’s mother had always said no until Margo was old enough to begin saying no for herself.
Something new had been added to the usual chemical and cat smells. Irini could just make out the odor of cooked meat. Margo raised the hair dryer and leaned forward. “Hello, Irini,” she said. “Mrs. Tarken? Is your dinner burning or is that my hair?”
Mrs. Tarken went to the kitchen to check the water level in the pot roast. Margo motioned for Irini to come over. The hair dryer stormed and crackled above Margo’s head. Her face was pink, and her voice was quiet. “Can you reach my purse, Irini? I left it by the mirror. There’s a letter inside. Take it and read it when no one is watching. Don’t let anyone see you.”
They could hear the tack, tack, tack of Mrs. Tarken’s heels coming in their direction. Irini put the letter in her pocket. Later, when she was under the dryer and Margo was being combed out, Irini opened a Ladies’ Home Journal to the Drene Shampoo ad in the middle. For evenings out, the Drene girl was combed into two side loops and a top curl.
The face on the opposite page was that of Babe Ruth. “Medical science offers proof positive. No other leading cigarette is safer to smoke than Raleighs,” Ruth said, and let’s be fair, he was probably right.