She could hear the neighbors’ voices in the other half of the house during the days, the many Breedloves as they came and went, hearing the children’s voices, even the parents arguing. She could smell their meals cooking, and hear their lives going on right here under the same roof as hers, and that made her feel all the worse. She could feel her body changing, the baby growing inside of her, and it had her mind in a turmoil. She was no longer the girl she had been, yet she was not sure who she was supposed to be. Life in the village was so different—and it was boring, so unendingly boring.
She wrote long letters to her mother and to her brother, Stan, and received long letters in return. Her mother’s writings were falsely cheerful, prattling on about people she knew, gossiping about neighbors, and showing a genuine excitement over the grandchild that Martha Whitley had to know she would likely never see. Stan’s letters were much more honest, and his honesty tore right through Elise’s heart—her name could no longer be spoken in her father’s house. Her room had been dismantled, her things either burned or given away to the colored families who lived at the edge of town. The people she had grown up with had been told that her father had thrown her out, that she was an ungrateful daughter who was at last getting what she rightly deserved. No mention was to be made of her, or of the “damned half-breed” she had married, and, when her mother at last told her father that she was pregnant, he said that he hoped that neither she nor her baby survived the birth.
She was dead to him, and he wanted every part of her dead as well, and, as Elise went through the days, she began to feel that a part of her really was dying, the part of her that had been Elise Whitley, the part that had been young and carefree and so excited just to be a young woman of the twenties. She could remember being that girl; she could remember being excited over new dresses and shades of lipstick, of wanting to be bold and daring and a bit shocking—but she wasn’t that girl anymore, and she knew she never would be again. She was Janson’s wife, and, though her entire world had changed because of him, she still wanted nothing else so much as to be his wife—she just wanted time with him, and something to do with the hours when they were apart. She just wanted to know who she was now, and to figure out her place in this new world. She had always had friends in Endicott County, people very much like herself, and she realized that she had defined who she was through those friends—but she had no friends here except for Janson himself.
She began to attend the Baptist church in the village, going alone, for Janson usually slept on Sunday mornings. She quickly became part of the choir, and was delighted when people made a fuss over her and told her how well she sang, until she realized she was valued primarily for her ability to drown out one of the other choir members, Helene Price, who sang loudly and usually quite off key, and who seemed to think that she could run the choir and the church and many of the other church members. Elise decided that she detested Helene, and it did not take long to realize that at least one other of the choir members felt much the same.
“Thinks she’s somethin’, don’t she?” she heard someone say as she was putting on her coat after choir practice on a Wednesday evening late that February. She turned to find Dorrie Keith just behind her, the heavy-set woman taking up her own coat from where it had lain across the back of a pew. Dorrie was the only person Elise had met who was outspoken enough to tell Helene Price when she was flat or in the wrong key.
Elise followed her gaze, and found Helene standing near the front of the church talking to the preacher, Reverend Satterwhite.
“Thinks she’s so high-and-mighty,” Dorrie was saying, bringing Elise’s eyes back to her. “I remember when she was just Helen, growin’ up at the edge of town. Her family was about th’ poorest I know of, ’cause my mama used t’ feed them young’ns more than their own folks ever fed them—then she married Bert Price, and him th’ boss of th’ supply room, and she was suddenly Helene, all high and mighty, but she ain’t nothin’ but Helen, no matter what she thinks of herself.”
Elise found that she liked Dorrie Keith as heartily as she detested Helene, and was surprised when she learned the two were distant cousins.
“She just about lived at our house growin’ up,” Dorrie told Elise one day, “though t’ hear her talk now you’d ’a thought we were her poor relations—tried t’ give me a old wore-out dress of hers not too long ago, as if I’d have some old rag she’d wore—”
Dorrie lived with her husband, Clarence, and their four sons only a few streets away from Elise and Janson in the mill village, and Elise began walking to church on Sunday mornings and afternoons and Wednesday evenings by way of Dorrie’s house.
It was nice to finally have a friend in the mill village, even if that friend was old enough to be Elise’s own mother, nice to have another woman to talk to about being pregnant, and about what having a baby would be like.
Elise sat in Dorrie’s kitchen late on a Thursday afternoon in March. Janson had left for his shift in the card room at the mill and would not be home until early the next morning, and Elise had been looking for company when she had walked the few streets to Dorrie’s house. Dorrie had just gotten in from the shift she worked in the spinning room, and was beginning supper for her family, but she had been uncharacteristically silent almost from the moment she had met Elise at the door. Dorrie was peeling potatoes for supper, her eyes going to the door repeatedly, until Elise at last asked her what was wrong.
“They sent for Clarence just as soon as we got in from our shift, told him t’ bring Wheeler James t’ th’ mill office,” Dorrie said, meeting Elise’s eyes from where she sat just opposite Elise at the old table then looking away again. “Men—” she said, the word coming out almost as if it were a curse. She peeled viciously at a potato, taking away chunks of white with the peelings, “they think we got nothin’ t’ say when they go t’ talk somethin’ important. Women’re there t’ birth ’em, an’ bury ’em, an’ in between we get t’ clean their bottoms an’ bandage their heads an’ put ’em t’ bed if they’ve had a drunk—they sent for Wheeler James an’ for Clarence with no mention ’a me, as if I ain’t been in th’ mill every bit as long as Clarence, as if I ain’t Wheeler James’s mama, as if I ain’t got nothin’ t’ say, or even th’ right t’ know—”
“Why would they want to see Wheeler James at the mill office?” Elise asked. Wheeler James was Dorrie’s oldest son, only a couple of months younger than Elise herself, very tall and thin, with a quiet manner that did little to show the brilliant mind that Elise had found behind his brown eyes and shy smile. He seemed to know something about almost any subject she could bring up, and could do mathematics in his head that she could never hope to do with pencil and paper and unlimited time.
“Mr. Eason offered him a night shift in th’ twister room at th’ mill, soon as school’s out this year,” Dorrie said, an odd tone in her voice.
“A night shift—for the summer?”
“No, permanent.” Dorrie’s eyes moved back toward the door, and Elise realized she was waiting for her husband and son to return from the mill office.
“But, there’s no way he can work all night and go to school the next day.”
“I know that.”
“But, he shouldn’t quit school; there’s so much he could do with his life. He—”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Dorrie asked, anger coming to her brown eyes and into her voice as she turned to look at Elise once again. “Don’t you think I know how smart he is? Don’t you think I know that he’s got in him t’ be anythin’ he wants t’ be—I’ve knowed it since he was talkin’ in complete sentences at two, and readin’ books when he was only four. I’ve watched him grow up, thinkin’ every day, dreamin’ every day, about him finishin’ school, not just the village school here, but goin’ on beyond it, maybe even college—”
“Then, why—” But Elise’s words were cut