The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown

Author:Karen Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press

August 29, 2003

RAY DROVE FOR AN HOUR and stopped at a motel near the Connecticut shore, a shingled building built low to the ground, surrounded by a salt marsh. The motel was Ray’s idea, and Sadie wonders, lying in bed, what other women he has brought here. They have just had sex, yet her body still aches for him. This is the meaning of the word “cleave,” she thinks: a bond forged through violence. He props his head up in the semidarkness, his face inches from her mouth.

“Sadie, Sadie,” he says. “Your hair is dirty.”

“I didn’t have time to wash it.”

She is sickened by what she has done—betrayed her children, her husband with his happiness and pressed shirts, his careful concern.

Ray drops his head to her breast. He sighs. His hands slide along her body, find a place to settle. He has yet to explain the duffel bag, left in the truck. There was never a plan in place for this, and it didn’t even occur to her to pack a bag. They drove mostly in silence—Ray deep in thought, his brow furrowed, and Sadie too afraid to hear the answers to her questions: What are you running away from? Do I even figure in your plan, or did I stumble in at the wrong time? She closes her eyes. If I had come an hour later, she wants to ask, would you have even been there? The motel sheet is starched and cheap. She doesn’t know how she will go back, so she refuses to imagine that yet. This, like her escape from her neighborhood earlier, gives her an odd sense of relief. Outside the summer storm has followed them with its heavy skies and thunder.

“I love this,” she tells him.

He makes a sound of agreement, a kind of grunt. She isn’t sure he understands that she means the weather, that she’s leery about admitting she loves the sex. Him.

“I used to run outside in thunderstorms with an umbrella,” she says.

“You had those cutoff jean shorts. Skinny legs.” His voice is deep and thick, satiated.

“The tar road would have that smell.”

She tries not to imagine what is happening without her, but the images surface like those in the View-Master she had as a child—the 3-D scenes falling into place at the click of the button, whole little worlds opening up, ones you could stare into for a long time, so filled with detail you might never see everything. Ray falls asleep. She gets up and puts on her damp skirt and blouse, a decisive action, but now that she stands at the screen door of the motel, she is paralyzed. She watches the rain puddle in the sand and ground shells of the parking lot. If she breathes in deeply she can smell the briny scent of the tidal marsh. It is nearing dinnertime. Other women will have come down the path, and she imagines Max and Sylvia swallowed up in the confusion of their children, all of them vying for an ice cream cup, the women settling into chairs around the kitchen table.

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