“EMOTIONALLY DISTURBED,” THE SOCIAL worker murmured, writing in her book.
“Unstable,” Uncle Ralph said, and Toby thought of wild horses, un-stabled, their manes flying in the wind. But she knew her mother was crazy, had gone crazy, no matter what anyone called it. And that she was in a state hospital, where all the patients were like that, and where there were bars on the windows.
Summoned by neighbors, Toby and Anne’s grandmother had come to their apartment, her battered brown valise banging up the stairs at her side. And when the old woman stood in the doorway, breathless from climbing, enraged at this final duty for a dead son, Anne burst into tears. “What’s the matter with her?” the grandmother asked.
Later, in their bedroom, the sisters whispered together, conspiring in the dark. “I want Mommy,” Anne said, but Toby knew she wanted their old mommy, that known person they could trust, not the one who moaned and raved and woke them before morning to tell them terrible stories from her imagination. Not the mother who had crouched in the bathroom the night before and would not speak at all.
“Me too,” Toby said. She was twice as old as Anne, but that didn’t seem to matter now.
Their grandmother snored in their mother’s bed.
“And I’m not going to live with her,” Anne said. “She’s mad all the time, and she smells.”
Anne meant anger, not madness, and Toby felt the same way, although she hadn’t noticed a bad smell.
Before she went to sleep, their grandmother had emptied her suitcase onto the bed, dumping everything at once, the straps and strings of her undergarments snaking like live things. She opened drawers and closets, slamming them shut on the evidence of her daughter-in-law’s sickness. “Look at this mess!” she cried. “I told him and I told him.”
Dirty laundry lay in collapsed piles in the bedroom. The refrigerator was filled with inedibles: furred fruit and milk that was clotted and ivory-yellow.
Their mother liked to invent exotic dishes, main courses with bananas or peanuts in them. But she had hardly cooked anything lately, and for a few days had eaten almost nothing herself. The girls emptied cereal boxes and boxes of cookies whenever they were hungry. Once Toby tried to cook eggs, but she forgot about them until the water boiled out and the eggs exploded against the walls. Their mother had laughed and laughed as if it were truly funny, while Toby wiped the walls with a damp sponge. There were still bits of dried yolk and shell on the tiles.
For supper that night, their grandmother had slathered peanut butter on borrowed bread and placed the sandwiches on paper napkins in front of the sisters. She wasn’t going to take on dirty dishes, too.
Peanut butter, without jelly to ease it down, was difficult to swallow at any time, and impossible to get past the thickness of sorrow in their throats. Anne choked and whimpered.
When the grandmother went out of the room, Toby grabbed the sandwiches and threw them into the oven. “Shhh,” she said. “Don’t tell.” And for once Anne cooperated.
“We won’t have to live with her,” Toby said later in the bedroom, but she wasn’t sure and her voice quavered. They might have to do all sorts of things they didn’t want to. Without their mother there, she felt unprotected and uncertain. But she wasn’t going to give in to those feelings. She hadn’t even cried once since everything happened. Her mother was like that, used to be like that, and Toby wanted to be the same way—strong and able to bear trouble without complaining. Everyone said she looked like her mother, too, with her heavy dark hair and deep-blue eyes.
“We won’t go,” Toby said in a louder and harder voice, as much to herself as to Anne. She thought of stories she’d read about children who had run away from home. Then she thought of Anne’s favorite, Hansel and Gretel, and how they were lost in the woods and tried so desperately to find their way back again. Growing sleepy at last, she imagined a long, white path of bread crumbs that would lead her and Anne back safely, far back in memory, to a time when they had been happy.
She was right about their grandmother, at least. The next day there was a conference. Their mother’s Uncle Ralph came from Riverdale, and Miss Vernon, a social worker from the agency the doctor had called, arrived a few minutes later. She looked at the children with such open sympathy that Toby found it uncomfortable to meet her gaze. Sympathy was somehow as painful as their grandmother’s rage.
But Anne sat on the social worker’s roomy lap, apparently eager for the consolation of an embrace. She sucked her thumb, that baby habit revived whenever she was unhappy.
“Now!” Miss Vernon said, like someone calling a meeting to order. “Let’s see what arrangements we can make for these young ladies until we’ve weathered our crisis.”
“Well, I can’t take care of them with these legs,” the grandmother announced, as if she possibly had another pair at home more suitable for the job. They all looked down at her short, thick legs in their elastic stockings, and nobody said anything. “I warned him twelve years ago about this,” she added, and Toby knew she was referring to their father.
Uncle Ralph cleared his throat and mumbled something about water under the bridge, and then: “My wife and I aren’t prepared for additional responsibility at this time. Our own children...Business commitments...” His voice faded and he looked miserable, smaller somehow than he had seemed a moment ago.
Miss Vernon hugged Anne, determinedly cheerful. “Well! Some of Mrs. Goodwin’s friends have offered financial aid, but none of them is in a position to assume custody of both girls. Given the circumstances, we didn’t want to separate them. And it’s always best, we think, if the family can absorb the children in cases like this. But, if not, we’ll have to make other plans.”
With some difficulty, she convinced the grandmother to stay a few more days, until a foster home could be found. “Otherwise,” Miss Vernon explained, “the girls will have to be placed in a county shelter.”
Toby had never heard of a shelter for children before, just one for animals, for homeless cats and dogs.
Anne shifted in Miss Vernon’s arms. “I want Mommy,” she said, so plaintively that Toby felt as if she had said the words herself.
“Of course you do,” the social worker said, and their Uncle Ralph jingled the change and keys in his pocket, anxious to be away. “And you’ll have her, as soon as she’s well again.”
At this, the grandmother snorted, drawing fury from the social worker’s eyes, although her mouth still smiled.
“C-r-a-z-y,” the grandmother spelled. “And you don’t get better from that.”
Toby could see Anne trying to shape the word phonetically, the way she had learned in school, but the c-r sound was too much for her. Toby shuddered. What if their grandmother was right? But wasn’t there medicine to make you better when this happened, the way there was for sore throats and stomach aches? She knew there were all kinds of wonder drugs, but was there something like penicillin that could change her mother back to the way she had been? She thought of Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre, a book her mother had read aloud to her because she liked it so much she wanted to hear it again herself. Mrs. Rochester, wild-eyed and clawing, a crazy woman kept in the attic like some terrible, untamable beast. Would Toby’s mother have to be locked in a dark room somewhere forever? She remembered that awful night with such clarity her chest ached. Their mother lying naked in the bathroom, curled up, even her fists tight, the way Anne had slept as a baby, and making those harsh, anguished sounds that weren’t words, without a stop. They had spoken to her and touched her, and finally Toby shouted as if her mother were only deeply asleep or suddenly deaf. Anne screamed and begged, “Don’t do that, Mommy. I’m scared!” And then she repeated, “Mommy Mommy Mommy”—a needle caught in the groove of a broken record.
Neighbors came in their bathrobes, looking frightened themselves, and one of them called the police and an ambulance. Little children stared at Anne and Toby from doorways and through the banister rails as they went downstairs behind the stretcher. There was a small crowd in the street and their faces seemed to glow with excitement in the turning red light of the ambulance.
Now Toby felt a wail like the siren’s beginning deep in her throat and she forced it back with an effort that was physical, and said, “What’s going to happen to us?”