checked on the girl one more time, and she was still asleep. I pulled the afghan gently up over her and turned off the light again. I found her pile of wet clothes on the bathroom floor and put them in the dryer. The wet fabric slapped around the inside of the machine, thumping rhythmically as I locked her inside the apartment and bounded down the stairs. I would figure out what to do after I got home. Maybe by then the girl would be having second thoughts and would call her father. She was probably still in shock about the accident. A good rest was probably all she needed. Some dinner. Some nice warm, dry clothes.
The Folding Machine
I n the summer of 1958, my father set out to invent a machine that would automatically fold freshly laundered clothes. Most of his inventions were aimed at making my mother’s life easier. She was an accidental housewife, a college graduate and once-aspiring musician whose life took a turn for the ordinary, as many extraordinary women’s lives did, when she fell in love. My father’s efforts at easing the burden of laundering and dishwashing and floor scrubbing were like small apologies for something understood but unspoken between them.
My mother, Helen Wilder, met Charlie Montgomery at Middlebury College, where Charlie, my father, was studying engineering, and she, music. They married not long after they graduated and, despite more grandiose plans, moved to Two Rivers when my grandmother died, leaving them the house that my father had grown up in. Convinced that they might be able to save some money before moving on, my mother agreed to spend the first few years of their married life in Two Rivers. My father accepted a job at the Two Rivers Paper Company, and my mother taught piano. But when she became pregnant with me, she must have known that her tenure in Two Rivers would last more than a few years. And before she knew it, I figure, she had probably resigned herself to bake sales instead of classical performances—to the quotidian life of a New England housewife instead of the glamour of a concert pianist’s.
The truth was, though I adored my mother, I was also embarrassed by her. She wasn’t like anybody else’s mother. Not my best friend, Ray’s, not Betsy’s either. She was fluent in French ( Parisian French, she emphasized, not the bastardized French of Two Rivers’s French Canadian population), and she had even been to France as a foreign exchange student while in college. She was constantly using French vocabulary when English, in her opinion, would not suffice. This, like much about my mother, was upsetting to the regular people in Two Rivers. First of all, she hadn’t taken my father’s name when she got married, convincing many people that they weren’t married at all but simply living in sin. She didn’t cook and she didn’t know how to sew. She wrote angry letters to the editor of the local paper and she refused to wear skirts. And, perhaps worst of all, instead of reading Redbook or Ladies’ Home Journal , she had the Rexall order one issue of The New York Times every week. This would have been fine, except that she insisted on picking it up each Sunday morning when everyone else was just getting out of church and stopping at the drugstore for their Sunday sundries. Thanks to The New York Times , everyone in Two Rivers knew that Helen Wilder did not believe in God.
Betsy’s mother, on the other hand, had learned everything she knew from magazines: glorious glossy magazines that were spread out in full-colored fans on every end table in the house. She made cupcakes that looked like witches at Halloween and robin’s nests at Easter. Mrs. Parker believed wholeheartedly in God and went to church every Sunday in dresses she made herself from crinkly patterns that smelled like dust. Later, Betsy would let me hold the fragile parchment only after I’d washed my hands.
The summer that we were twelve, I fell in love twice. First with Betsy Parker, and then with her mother.
For a whole week after I’d spoken to Betsy outside her father’s barbershop, I’d been trying to come up with an excuse to go see her again. I didn’t need a haircut, or else I would have just returned to the barbershop. My father considered himself a competent lay barber and methodically cut my hair on the last day of every month (outside so as to avoid getting any hair on the floors, which already generated near tumbleweed-sized dust balls). Finally, after much rumination, I concocted a story about needing to borrow sugar.
It was a typical Saturday; my mother was curled up on the overstuffed chair in our living room lost inside a book, and my father was in the basement working on his folding machine. It had to have been eighty degrees outside, but my parents were inside people. Especially in the summer. My mother abhorred the sun, and my father preferred his basement workshop to the outdoors. As soon as I was allowed to operate the lawn mower, I took it upon myself to tend to the overgrown and unruly chaos that was our yard, but then, when I was only twelve and not allowed to touch anything with a motor, I made my way through the shin-high grass to the sidewalk and across the street to the Parkers’ tidy plot.
When Mrs. Parker opened the door, she could have been Elizabeth Taylor. Her hair was jet black, even darker than Betsy’s, and she was wearing a slinky sort of dress, looking more like she was at a cocktail party than simply puttering around that giant house. My ears were hot.
“I live across the street,” I said, gesturing vaguely behind me.
Mrs. Parker looked at me, her eyes the stunned eyes of a doe.
“Do you have some sugar?” I asked, relieved to have remembered my excuse.
She smiled then. “Sure, honey. How much do you need?”
I had no idea how much sugar one might need if one truly needed sugar. I was also suddenly aware that I had no way of getting the sugar home. “This much?” I suggested, making a bowl with my hands, seemingly solving both the quantity and container problem.
“About a cup? Sure thing, come on in.”
The inside of Betsy Parker’s house was as tidy as the outside. Fresh flowers stood erect in thin glass vases, catching light from any number of the windows. The floors were completely covered in carpeting. I’d never seen, or felt, anything like it before.
I followed her down a long hallway to the kitchen, where she motioned for me to sit at the clean white dinette set. Mrs. Parker opened up a tin marked “Sugar” in fancy red script and pulled out a scoop. She poured the sugar into a teacup and handed it to me.
“Here you go, exactly one level cup. What’s your momma making?”
I hoped my ears weren’t as red as they felt.
“Doughnuts,” I answered, saying the first sweet thing that popped into my head.
Mrs. Parker’s forehead wrinkled a little, and I was pretty certain I’d been figured out. “Can you be a sweetheart and get the recipe from her? You can bring it over when you return the teacup.” Mrs. Parker smiled. “I can’t find a decent doughnut recipe anywhere.”
I nodded, and was backing down the hall, balancing the teacup by its delicate handle when I remembered why I had really come.
“Oh,” I said. “Is Betsy home?”
“Sure, honey. She’s in her room. Would you like me to go get her?”
I thought about it for a minute, even pictured Betsy Parker in her room, maybe lying on her stomach on her bed, thumbing through a magazine, but the idea of actually talking to her suddenly seemed ludicrous.
“Nah,” I said. “Just tell her I stopped by.”
Mrs. Parker raised one perfect black eyebrow and then winked at me. “Sure thing, sugar.”
The next time I went back, I pretended my mother was making beef stew. I pulled a dusty cookbook down
