Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

worked so long and so hard on this doll’s house and it’s so very special—of course you know Bill won’t be interested, with all his cars and fire engines—but do you think you’re grown up enough now and generous enough to share it with Bridget? I’ll bet you are. Think! Wouldn’t it be nice for her to be able to play with it, too?”

I thought. That question, Mother’s simple question on Christmas morning, 1944, about the doll’s house that George Stearns built was to me the most complex question anyone had ever asked. I thought for a whole minute while my heart stopped and my eyes blinked and my face flushed with fury. It was a trick question, two-sided, flipping back and forth, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, the trick of a supreme magician who could—with cunning legerdemain under a silk handkerchief—transform a few seconds of tranquility into an eternity of chaos. The truth: no, I did not, under any circumstance whatsoever, wish to share the doll’s house with Bridget (unless, uncoerced, the next day, or week, or year, I felt like changing my mind and giving it to her outright). Or the truth: yes, of course I wanted to share the doll’s house with Bridget, because not only would that please Mother and demonstrate how generous and grown up I really was but because I knew that I loved Bridget very deeply and identified with her yearning as she tentatively touched the miniature grandfather’s clock in the miniature hallway. (Get your nasty little fingers out of there, I wanted to scream, until I give you permission.) Bridget was blissfully oblivious of my pain, my conflict. I had not, before that question, ever been conscious of hating her or of loving her so absolutely. I never felt, or had the ability to be unaware of feeling, the same way about my sister again. And I could never bring myself to play with the doll’s house. Eventually it had to be given away.

Then it was spring. The time had come to leave, even though nobody seemed to know exactly why. We were moving not to a house just around the corner but to a farm in a distant place called Connecticut. For years Father had maintained that California was, deservedly, about to be bombed into the Pacific Ocean by the Japs, but now the war was almost over, and in any case Father didn’t pretend to be naturally inclined toward a rural existence. Mother, on the other hand, was enthralled with the idea of country life, and enthralled the three of us with her descriptions of it. We did know, in a subtle way, that she hoped to wean Father away from the agency business, the bulk of which remained, for him, in California, and that she wanted to decontaminate the atmosphere in which we were being brought up. It was phony, she claimed, all phony—Hollywood, New York, movies, the theatre. She wanted to retire and never work again, to become a real wife and mother. We had no idea at all what that meant, and neither, apparently, did Father, who swore that he didn’t believe a word of it.

“Goodbye,” Mother wrote in our scrapbooks above a series of Johnny Swope’s lovingly detailed photographs of the house and grounds. “Goodbye to the red barn—To 12928 Evanston Street—To the scarecrow [a symbol of our Victory garden, that quarter acre of lawn plowed under and laid out in rows of vegetables, where Bridget, Bill, and I were diligently picking green caterpillars off the tomato vines at a penny apiece when V-E Day was announced on the radio]—Goodbye to the stable where Sonny [my pony] lived—To the tree on the terrace and our statue [a primitive stone sculpture of three small children gathered in their mother’s arms]—To the birdhouse—The weather vane on Elsa and Otto’s house—And the angel! [a recumbent wooden figure in white relief against the sky, blowing a trumpet to the winds that spun him around and around on top of The Barn]—Goodbye.” The last picture was of the driveway, where, somewhere in the gravel, my first tooth still lay—and where, at the far end, between the pepper trees curving over them, the front gates were drawn across the entrance, tightly shut.

We came to Brookfield, Connecticut, in 1945 with the last spring lilacs. From the moment of our arrival, the three of us ran wild. There was nothing to stop us, really—at least nothing like the previous physical boundaries or disciplines. We developed a new awareness of time; it, not Mother or Emily, seemed to discipline and define everything, even the space around us, the pastures and meadows and woods, which changed perceptibly from hour to hour, from morning to evening, from season to season. We also found that we could change like the seasons, as could our attitudes about each other, even Mother’s about Father. And we acquired the unforgettable knowledge that violence and danger lay everywhere, under any surface, around any corner, even in the most deceptively beautiful and serene places.

The farm itself was named Stone Ledges. It was a ninety-five-acre estate and lay on a natural shelf in the hillside fields that rolled down to it, continued beyond as gently sloping pastureland, and leveled out way below in mysterious woods and stagnant marshes. Most of the land was situated on one side of a little country lane, Long Meadow Hill Road, and bordered its length with low stone walls. On the other side, also belonging to the property, was a lush meadow of corn and alfalfa, grown as fodder for the livestock, and, in the far corner, a fragrant patch of waist-high clover, which, on hot summer days, was our secret refuge. The field, enclosed by split fences, sloped up to a dark pine forest; at any point along the crest of the hill, one could look down and catch glimpses of the white clapboard farmhouse through towering maple trees, hundreds of years old, whose massive trunks and spreading foliage