Even when Howard was living at home, Grace tried to go out on the town. She’d wait until Friday night and then pick a fight with him so he’d run off, get too drunk to come back until morning. Sometimes, she got more than she bargained for. He’d rage at her, shake and hit her. She’d yell, “Howard! Oh, Howard!” He liked this. He liked her scared. And she knew it, too: she could amplify the sound of her own fear for his pleasure, her yells operatic and trembling, until finally his hands got more gentle. These were the nights he stayed home.
But most Fridays, Howard was out finding trouble or getting punished for it, and Grace didn’t have to pick a fight. She would curl her hair and put on her best dress, enlisting Glenice’s help. And her ex-husband, Ray, would appear in his teal Thunderbird, tailfins cutting the dust of the road, to take her out dancing and more. She didn’t always come home on Saturday. Or Sunday, or Monday. She didn’t always go out with Ray—sometimes there were others. Grace favored the Top Hat, a long, low dance hall in the woods at the base of a steep mountain. A dark place, for open secrets.
Whenever Grace didn’t come home on Monday, Glenice, still only about twelve years old, had to miss school to take care of the five younger kids. Her older siblings had all moved out by then. Sometimes there wasn’t any food in the house, but she knew that her mother had chocolate bars and new stockings hidden away, that she denied herself nothing. When Crystal and Gwen were just toddlers, mobile but too little to understand very much, the river was a problem, always cold and clear and running swiftly behind the field, as though waiting to take a younger one under. Glenice worried about it constantly. But she couldn’t watch them every minute. There were Wayne and Webster, and then there was Tootsie and, even younger, Gwen and Crystal, but those two stayed together, could watch themselves, a little. Glenice got distracted; there was so much to do. And they disappeared so quickly.
One afternoon she was in the house, making sandwiches out of the little she could find, and suddenly it was too quiet. Suddenly she knew: the river.
She ran through the field, the sharp edges of deer grass pulling at her pant legs, long, dark blond hair streaming out behind her. She ran faster than ever, because she knew. The river, oh God.
She found Gwen facedown in the water, arms splayed out, alone. Gwen was about four, kept forgetting she couldn’t swim. Loved the water. When Glenice turned her sister over, she was blue in the face. They were alone on a strip of sandy beach, no parents to help. Glenice was overcome with rage. The rage carried her running back through the field, carried her as she carried the inert weight of the wet child, her sister.
She got to the dusty road and, miraculously, improbably, there was a car. There was a car, and an adult, and help, and Gwen survived.
This wasn’t the first time Glenice had pulled her little sister from the water, but it was the worst. For years to come, she would suddenly notice Gwen gone from the room, panic and call out for her. Gwen would sometimes hide on purpose, and the other kids would laugh—not at Glenice, really, but at fate. Luckily, Crystal was too little to wander that far, and once she was, she was a stronger swimmer, and tougher, less prone to mishaps. She was the baby of the family, but everyone knew she could take care of herself.
Eventually Glenice stopped helping her mother get ready to go out. The tender ritual, perhaps their only one, of helping Grace curl her hair and button up her dress, disappeared in Glenice’s anger. “You need to stay here and take care of all these kids!” she’d yell, still just a kid herself. At the age of fourteen, she left for good, slapping her mother’s face on the way out. She felt guilty for years—not about the slap but about leaving her brothers and sisters there. But she knew that if she didn’t leave, she would miss too much school and eventually fail out, and then she wouldn’t be able to help anybody, not really.
Gracie wasn’t malicious; there were just a lot of things that she couldn’t handle. One day, she was home with the kids when Gloria tripped on the stairs, landing on an exposed nail that ripped her thigh open. The other kids tended to the wound; Gracie was too scared. She locked herself in the bedroom and wouldn’t come out.
* * *
It’s unclear exactly when Grace decided to leave Howard, or even whether she was the one who did the leaving. But at some point, when my mother was four or five, the two divorced. Soon after, Grace married Ray—of the teal Thunderbird and the first child—for the second time. He had left the Navy with a decent pension and was able to move the family to a modern, three-bedroom house in the town of Bridgton, about an hour’s drive south of Milton. It was a real town, with a post office and a police station and a stoplight town center.
Grace must have exerted a truly powerful, undeniable pull on Ray, because he hated children, and five of hers were still living at home. Ray demanded quiet in the house at all hours; even a whispered conversation in another room could send him into a fit. He was especially intolerant when he was drinking, which was often. The kids—Tootsie, Gwen, and Crystal, and Wayne and Webster—couldn’t really play, couldn’t have friends over. Glenice and Gloria picked them up for weekend visits whenever they could, driving them back north to the towns they’d escaped to from Milton, either to Glenice’s house in Rumford or to Gloria’s in Dixfield, a few towns downriver. They even tried to take Gwen and Crystal for good, but Grace wouldn’t let them.
Ray wouldn’t let the kids take showers; they could only take baths, and he allowed them just a shallow measure of water. He didn’t want to waste it on them, he said. They weren’t allowed to eat at the table; Grace cooked elaborate dinners for Ray alone and sent her children to their rooms with bowls of cereal.
Sometimes Ray hit Grace, but he generally didn’t strike the children. Instead he growled at them from around corners, cursed at them and told them they were worthless. “I can’t stand to look at you,” he’d say to a braided, freckled, six-year-old girl. He ordered Grace around and she took it. She did whatever she could to make her children be quiet, to keep them from bothering him in any way. Grace was more passive with Ray than she had been with Howard, possibly because Ray was a little less extreme; there was less opportunity for open brawling. Ray also provided more material benefits. He agreed to tolerate the children—just barely—and she agreed to do what she could to shut them up. He got access to this woman who so compelled him, and she got a nice house to live in. The deal mostly worked for them. It just didn’t work for anybody else.