Chapter Five #2
The boarding house was down the street from Open Arms. For a year, she’d watched from the window as the girls were walked to and from school, and to and from the park, always accompanied by this woman or that. The girls looked to be a handful. Lydia needed a job.
Her mother, she felt certain, would want her to remarry and have a family.
Her sister would beg her not to take the job at the orphanage because it would keep her in Doyle.
But both of them knew what she’d been through, and neither of them said a word against the decisions she went on to make in her life.
—
Back into the local school Margaret went. (They were understanding about the precarious geography of the girls at Open Arms.) She did well—in part because she did nothing but pay attention and made no close friends; orphans and non-orphans didn’t interact.
When she was sent off to her fourth foster home, at the age of nine, it was 1927 and Lydia had grown fondest of her out of all the girls she’d ever taken care of.
Margaret was, after all, a special case: the only baby ever deposited in the basket (which Lydia no longer kept in the front window after she found a stray cat sitting in it).
She was also the only girl Lydia had ever allowed herself to nickname—because nicknames led to attachment, and attachment made everything harder.
Firefly. She teared up helping Margaret pack her few things into a little suitcase—even as she told her she was going to an exciting new place with lots of fun adventures.
She then asked the social worker to make sure that the home Margaret was going to was clean and that the foster parents were good, caring people.
She expected reports now and then, she said, knowing she wouldn’t get them because that wasn’t how things worked.
The new foster home was on the Pennsylvania border.
The new parents, Selby was their last name, seemed okay to Margaret at first. But there was another girl in the house, a foster from a different orphanage who was fifteen and had been living with the Selbys for a year by the time Margaret arrived.
Her name was Thelma, and she had no interest in pretending to be Margaret’s sister or even her friend.
“Don’t you ever blink?” was the first thing Thelma said to Margaret, the day she arrived.
Margaret said yes and proved it by blinking, but Thelma didn’t think that was funny. Nor did she seem impressed when she asked Margaret what she liked to do and Margaret said, “I like to dance.”
Thelma had on a loose light-blue cotton dress that came to her knees. She sat on the floor of the bedroom they shared, pulled that dress down and tucked every part of her body into it until just her head was showing. “Let’s see.”
Lydia had given herself dancing lessons for her thirtieth birthday.
At first, she’d danced with Truly, the dressmaker’s dummy, to make Margaret laugh.
Then she’d taught Margaret some steps. Shown her how to jitterbug and taught her how to do Charleston knee swaps.
Margaret did a few knee swaps for Thelma.
Thelma rolled her eyes. “That won’t get you anywhere. The warden and his wife are all giggles now, but wait till you’ve been here a while. He’ll get bossy, and she’ll start walking around like somebody shot her dog.”
“Mrs. Selby said we could make cupcakes.”
“She lies.”
Thelma did sloppy Charleston knee swaps and crossed her eyes and said, “Am I doing it right?” Every few days, she reminded Margaret that they were orphans. And not just orphans, but “dirty, stinkin’ orphans. Just because we’re here doesn’t mean we’re not.”
“You’re mean!” Margaret yelled at her, crying. Just once.
“It’s the only way to survive,” Thelma said, rocking on her bed and drawing herself into her dress.
True to Thelma’s word, one morning whatever kindness had been in Mrs. Selby’s face was gone, her cheeks went slack, and her eyes went vacant. She worked in a laundromat and brought home handfuls of loose soap flakes in her pockets that she put into a big coffee tin.
Mr. Selby wore his kindness like a hat; it was either on, or off.
He had a little red storm in the white part of one eye.
He worked on cars in a nearby garage and came home early sometimes in the afternoon dressed in his smudgy coveralls, just as the girls were returning from school.
When that happened, he sent Margaret out into the yard to play, though there was nothing to do out there, and he spent time with Thelma, helping her with her homework.
Then he went back to his job. Thelma never told Margaret what homework he helped her with.
The only decoration the Selbys put up for the one Christmas Margaret spent with them was a sprig of mistletoe between the dining room and living room, and while she never saw anyone kiss under it, it hung from the lintel for months, like a bat.
There were arguments late at night, as loud as cars. She and Thelma buried their heads under their pillows to try to drown them out.
Once, at the table, Margaret accidentally knocked a bowl of cereal milk onto the floor.
Thelma laughed and said, “Don’t cry over spilt milk!
” and it was so unusual to see a smile on her face that Margaret laughed too—until Mrs. Selby slapped Margaret so hard that little flecks of silver swam in the air for a minute.
Thelma hollered, “Stop it!” at Mrs. Selby and knocked her hand against Mrs. Selby’s arm.
Mrs. Selby chased her with a wooden spoon into the back of the house.
Thelma ran away not long after that and was brought back in a police car.
A few days later, a man and woman from the state came and collected her and her few things.
Margaret never found out where Thelma went.
She didn’t want to ask the Selbys, and they didn’t seem to want to tell her.
It didn’t matter, because within days the same two people from the state came and collected her, and took her back to Open Arms.
—
She’d been gone for more than a year. Lydia, who knew nothing of Thelma, only that the state had wanted to pull Margaret out of the Selbys’ home because of a “contentious arrangement,” was both heartbroken and overjoyed to see her.
She did her best to tamp down both of those reactions and noticed that this time, Margaret didn’t look wary of the orphanage.
The Selbys left their mistletoe up. That was the one detail the girl had to share with Lydia about her year in their house.
As time passed, that year began to feel like a long, fitful dream they had endured together.
Lydia put Margaret back in school again—this time in the fourth grade.
Margaret had been in and out of so many different classrooms that she’d fallen behind some, but her reading skills were fine; she’d read all the way through The Corner House Girls series while she lived with the Selbys (the books had been left behind by some previous girl).
Lydia found her one day looking at the illustrated copy of the Rubaiyat she kept on her coffee table.
“He was the Astronomer Poet of Persia,” Lydia said, nodding to show that Margaret should be impressed.
Margaret looked bored. There were plenty of other things to read, though.
Books of all sorts found their way into donation boxes and ended up on the shelves that lined one of Lydia’s peach-colored living room walls.
Setting the Astronomer Poet aside, she introduced Margaret to Heidi, and Black Beauty, and Emily of New Moon.
—
At eleven, Margaret began to tend to the younger girls, look out for them in little ways. She walked around with a hairbrush and brushed the backs of their heads while they ate breakfast. She lined them up when it was time for an outing, tugged their stocking caps down on their heads.
You never have to leave again, Lydia wanted to tell her.
Margaret couldn’t help noticing that the girls who got adopted (as opposed to fostered) were all little, five or under.
The youngest was in and out in a month. Your chances diminished as you got older, it seemed.
Ten was old enough to understand that her situation wasn’t a simple one.
She wanted to have a house and a yard and parents, but not if they were like the Selbys, and how many Selbys were out there?
Twice she was called into Lydia’s office to meet couples looking to adopt, and both times she could easily picture them turning mean, or strange.
She tried to be polite, though, and watched them take their business elsewhere.
She asked Lydia if she was still an orphan.
They were unpacking a food donation, stacking cans of vegetables and boxes of flour and rice in the pantry.
“That’s what it says on paper,” Lydia said.
“What paper?”
“Everyone has a paper. That’s what yours says.”
Did it say Orphan, Margaret wondered, or Dirty, Stinkin’ Orphan?
—
One evening, late, during a thunderstorm, Margaret did what she hadn’t done since before the Selbys: she left her room, came into Lydia’s apartment, and crawled into bed with her.
Lydia was reading. She set her book aside, picked up her knitting from the nightstand, and as they watched the lightning flash beyond the window panes and counted the seconds till the thunder, they tied yarn into loops and made Jacob’s Ladders and Witches’ Brooms.
Somehow—along with the questions that were asked repeatedly over the years—there were things that hadn’t come up before. Margaret asked if Lydia had parents.
“I do. Well, one. My mother. My father died when I was little.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“I have a sister. My brother died in France, in the war.”
“What did my note say?”
“Oh, Firefly, I told you.”
“Tell me again.”