Free The World Below by Sue Miller Page A

already a spinster.
    At other times, though, she began to seem more a child than she had in her childhood, to go backward. There was, after all, no one there anymore to remind her that she was a young lady now, that there were certain decent ways to behave. Mothers in town and other older women commented on this, that it was a shame, a disgrace, really, the way she still raced Freddie and Ada across the town green after church, shrieking and carrying on. The way she jounced when she walked, you had to look away, you truly did. The way she’d been seen in a tree in the Marches’ front yard and you could look right up her dress and she didn’t seem to have the least idea.
    She played wild games in the house with Ada and Freddie too, their own three-person versions of Hide and Seek or Sardines or Kick the Can that went on long after the younger children should have been in bed. One night, Mrs. Mitchell, hearing what she described to anyone interested as “blood-curdling screams” coming from the Rices’ well after nine, went over to see what was happening, whether she could help. A silence fell in the house when she banged the knocker, and after a long minute or two, Georgia—panting, flushed with excitement and damp with perspiration—opened the door a crack. No, she said. No, nothing was wrong. She was terribly sorry if Ada or Fred had been a bother; she’d speak to them right away. And then, much too quickly, she shut the door again, hard, right in Mrs. Mitchell’s face.
    The wildest play, though, was aimed at their father, at diverting him, at lifting his burden of grief. During the week they planned their surprises: their theatrical productions, their scavenger hunts, their patriotic tableaux or concerts, their minstrel shows, their living room parades, once with their cat, Napoleon, dressed as a baby pushed in a carriage at the head. Friday nights were frantic, sometimes, with gaiety. And when their father laughed, when he gave himself over again to his family’s life, to the possibility of finding some pleasure there even without Fanny, Georgia felt complete, she felt rewarded: she, she had made this possible, through her efforts. Surely this would be enough forever.
    It was all, anyway, she was aware of wanting.
    And so, after she graduated from high school, she did not, as she had planned earlier, go to the university along with Bill March—or even to normal school, as many of her friends were doing. She stayed home, she undertook more of the household chores, more of the cooking, and they were able to get by with having Mrs. Beston come only twice a week.
    It was just as her grandmother had said it would be: her girlhood was done.
    •     •     •
    But as illness had trapped her in this particular box of happiness, so illness rescued her, too. For several months in the third winter after her mother’s death, Georgia had a cold, with a cough that never seemed to ease. Finally her father insisted she go to the doctor, and, as he would be out of town the day of the appointment, he arranged with a friend to drive her into Pittsfield. The doctor was their family doctor, the same man who’d cared for her mother. He knew Georgia well, of course, though he hadn’t seen her in three years. He welcomed her in; he invited her to sit down. His office smelled sharply of soap and disinfectant, and of something else, too, something more pleasant. Wintergreen, perhaps.
    In the time since she’d last seen him, Dr. Holbrooke seemed to have changed somehow. Changed completely, he would have said. He’d been to war in France. As a doctor, to be sure, but that, perhaps, made it worse. What Georgia thought, as she sat down in the wooden chair opposite him and looked at him across his desk, was that he’d become old in the meantime, but somehow without altering much physically. She looked carefully: surely there must be something she could attribute it to. It’s true there was a bit of gray where there