Chapter Five #3
“It said, ‘Please take good care of this little baby named Margaret, who I love very much but can’t take care of,’ ” Lydia said, hoping that was the way she’d worded it the last time Margaret had asked. She’d lost track of the note over the years.
Lightning in the distance. Five Mississippis, then thunder. The storm was moving away.
“Why couldn’t she take care of me? Was she really poor? Or really busy?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know anything about her?”
“I know she had to be kind and loving to write a note like that.”
Kind and loving didn’t square with leaving a person in a basket, and they both knew it. Margaret made a Star. She made a Moth. Lightning flashed, and she zigzagged her fingers through the yarn, trying to finish before the accompanying thunder. “Fishing spear,” she said, holding up her hands.
They heard the distant, rolling boom.
—
Sometimes, she imagined her mother as very young and having patches on her clothes and coal smudges on her face. Sometimes, she was a beautiful woman of no age at all, with a purse on one arm, a baby on the other, and things to do.
She never gave a thought to who her father was.
None of the other girls talked about their birth parents, she noticed.
Maybe they didn’t know any more about them than she knew about hers.
They also didn’t talk much about any of the homes they’d lived in before Open Arms, those who’d been previously fostered, unless it was to mention a game they used to play or a friend they used to have.
One girl, tall and blond, talked about her next parents.
They were in the yard, ten of them, folding sheets and towels and blouses and skirts and underwear, slowly denuding the clotheslines.
The blond girl standing beside Margaret said to her folding partner—and to the rest of them within earshot—that her next parents were going to have servants to take care of the washing and folding, and all she was going to have to do, besides go to school, was ride horses.
“How do you know?” Margaret asked.
“Because they’re going to be rich and own a horse stable.”
“But how do you know that, for sure?” Margaret didn’t mean it as a challenge; she thought the blond girl had heard something in advance about where she was going to be sent, and she was genuinely curious. The other girls were too.
It turned out the blond girl didn’t know anything about where she was going.
She’d just been wishful thinking out loud.
She went quiet instead of answering Margaret’s question, and Margaret was sorry she’d asked, because it made her feel like one of those girls at school who asked, Why didn’t your parents want you?
How come no one’s adopted you? What’s wrong with you?
—
In the summer of 1931, at three a.m., Lydia was awakened by something much bigger than a thunderstorm.
The wind smacked against the windows, the lightning was constant, the thunder sounded like the fists of giants pounding on the roof.
She was on her way to the girls when an especially loud bang made the lights go out.
The wind got louder and changed into a high-pitched screech, and the floor shook beneath her feet.
She put her hand against one of the walls to try to stop it all—
And it stopped: the rumbling, the screeching, even the lightning. Through the mesh windows—two of which were cracked, she noticed—the sky had somehow taken on a yellowish hue.
She ran down the hall to the dormitory wing.
Why was no one crying? Where were the girls?
Their rooms were empty, one after another.
Her heart beat hard and fast in her chest. It hurt, beating that way.
But the girls were all in the last room, it turned out, the supply closet she’d converted into a private room for Margaret when she’d turned thirteen.
Margaret had either corralled them or they’d run to her; she’d lit a lantern with matches she wasn’t supposed to have and was consoling them and counting heads at the same time.
A tornado, they found out the next day. People down the block had seen it jump right over the orphanage and touch on the milliner’s next door. The orphanage’s clotheslines were snapped, fallen, some of the T-posts carried away, and there were hats all over the yard. Hats!
—
Lydia gave Margaret different kinds of books to read as she got older.
Little Women. Anne of Green Gables. All the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.
She pulled Great Expectations off the shelf, and that took forever because they read it aloud to each other in little increments, but Margaret loved it.
A dirty, stinkin’ kid no one wants who gets a benefactor and falls in love—what could be better than that?
Lydia also gave her more and more to do, believing that tasks and responsibilities helped pass the time and made a person feel useful.
After her friend Wendell made them new posts for their clotheslines, she put Margaret in charge of the folding brigade, and Margaret took right to it.
She also started helping with the general cleaning and straightening Open Arms required on a daily basis.
(It was a treat, Lydia discovered, just having someone pick up all the handkerchiefs, buttons, and barrettes twenty-four girls could shed in a day.) At fourteen, Margaret was helping out with the filing, and it became one of her official duties to keep an eye on the new arrivals—most of them between the ages of four and eight—and to make sure they behaved themselves and were treated well by the others.
At fifteen, she was running errands alone in town.
Lydia began slipping her a quarter on Saturdays—she called it mad money—and sending her off to have fun.
Margaret had no idea what her options were.
“Get ice cream with some of your school friends,” Lydia suggested, because she didn’t know that, at the end of the day, you either went to your house or to your orphanage, and that was that.
There were girls who said hi to Margaret in school and ignored her in town when she was running errands.
She went to the pictures instead. Her favorites had dancing in them.
Footlight Parade. Flying Down to Rio. The men were all narrow and dashing and rubbery; the women were funny and sophisticated and able to travel at a moment’s notice, because they always had a steamer trunk packed and ready to go.
If there wasn’t a dance picture showing, it was usually a cops-and-robbers picture, and there were two types of women in those, as far as Margaret could tell: the ones with class, and the ones without.
The ones with class worked as bank tellers and secretaries, went on dates, and fell in love with handsome men who were in the act of either committing or solving a crime.
The ones without class were disheveled-looking, dated cop-killers, and grabbed the steering wheel at the worst possible moment.
Every opening title lifted her from her seat and invited her on a little trip.
Every THE END brought her back to Doyle, and Open Arms.
—
Lydia’s friend Wendell had an ear that looked like it was trying to tuck itself into his head.
It turned out he used to be a professional boxer, which surprised Margaret because he didn’t look like someone who could punch people for a living.
But what was even more surprising was that he was sweet on Lydia—and she was sweet on him!
They had a standing weekly date that just happened to overlap Margaret’s movie time.
On her seventeenth birthday—and Lydia’s fifty-second—Lydia surprised her with blueberry pancakes for breakfast and a new dress she’d just finished making for her: bright yellow with white piping.
When Margaret finished eating, Lydia told her to put on the dress and her good shoes and meet her out front.
Wendell’s tan Ford Roadster was parked on the street.
Top down, white interior gleaming. He stood next to it in a jacket with a carnation sticking out of the lapel, and he pretended to be a professional chauffeur as he helped Margaret into the rumble seat, then held the passenger’s door open for Lydia—who, Margaret noticed, had put on lipstick and her fancy shawl.
“What about the girls?” Margaret asked.
“Jeanette and Doreen have come in for the day,” Lydia said.
“Where are we going?” Margaret asked, thrilled just to be in an automobile.
“I’m awaiting orders,” Wendell said.
“Out to the old mud puddle and twice around the turnip,” Lydia said, and Margaret knew they were at least getting out of town.
They drove fifty miles away, to Columbus.
It was her first city, the first tall buildings she’d ever laid eyes on, the first time she’d seen that many people, everywhere she looked, moving around like the feeder fish in the tank at the pet store.
Wendell parked on Rich Street and put coins in the parking meter, and the three of them walked through the throng, past buildings that made her dizzy to look up at.
They rode the streetcar up and down Cleveland Avenue.
They ate in a fancy coffee shop with printed menus, and she ordered an éclair just because she’d never eaten something that had an accent mark.
She smiled more than she ever had in her life that day; her face hurt from it.
Wendell pulled two tiny candles out of his blazer pocket, stuck one in her éclair and the other in Lydia’s cucumber sandwich, and lit them both with his Ronson.
—