Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

Genres: Coming of Age; Sagas; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Sixteen-year-old Martha Calhoun runs away from her home in Katydid, Illinois after a misunderstood incident with the nine-year-old boy she was babysitting.  She discovers a great deal about herself while on the road with a boy she does not even like.

Release date: January 2, 2013

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 304

Sample

ONE
 
One thing about Bunny, she’s got beautiful blond hair. It’s the first thing about her you’d notice. Actually, she’s got lots of great features—soft, clear skin, blue eyes, long, muscled legs. She’s the most beautiful woman in Katydid, Illinois. But she was always proudest of her hair. She used to talk to me about it, showing it off. (Bunny is my mother. I call her Bunny because that’s all I ever heard anyone call her. My father, Jeremiah P. Calhoun, ran away before I was born.)
 
When I was about six, Bunny went through a phase where she was upset because her hair was turning darker. It was still very blond, and she helped it along with a little peroxide—Sweden in a bottle, as she used to say—but it was no longer pure blond corn silk, the way it was when she was young. I guess the change had started after my brother, Tom, was born, when Bunny was eighteen. She understood that life goes on and that she had to grow older, but still she was sorry, and she always wished that Grandmother had thought to snip off a lock of her hair years ago, just so there’d be some souvenir of how things had once been. Then Bunny got it in her head that I should never suffer like that. My hair is plain brown. At best, just after it’s been washed, it has a kind of reddish sheen. But Bunny was concerned that, like her, I’d lose something and then be sorry, so she clipped off a bit of my hair and put it in an envelope. That way, she said, I’d have something to save and show my own daughters, if I ever had any. But later she started worrying that we’d lose the envelope or forget where she’d put it. So she clipped some more hair, and then again and again and again. Over the course of a year or so, she kept taking samples and hiding them away. After a while, there were locks of my hair everywhere. I’d be looking over a bookshelf or rummaging through a drawer and suddenly come across an envelope with my name on it and a soft chunk of my hair inside. It always gave me an eerie feeling, as if I’d grown very old or gone far away.
 
That was around 1946, about ten years ago, just after the war. I’ve been thinking a lot about those times recently. Bunny’s little house on Sycamore Street, where we’d lived since I was two, is closed up now. All our things are locked inside. I keep imagining that some time, years from now, someone will go in and discover everything—our clothes, the furniture, Tom’s baseball-card collection, my locks of hair—and try to piece together our lives from the evidence. They’ll never get it right, of course, but it’s fun to think of the romance, the mystery they’ll attach to us—“Another lock of hair! What can it mean?”—particularly given the way things really were, and the way they turned out.
 
This is my explanation of all that. My testimony, my confession, whatever you want to call it—the story I probably should have told before and didn’t. My name is Martha Calhoun, and I’m sixteen. I turned sixteen three months ago. Looking back, I think that may have been part of the trouble. I turned sixteen—Sweet Sixteen—and I expected something to happen. To celebrate, Bunny took me to dinner at Walker’s Chinese, outside of town. We got dressed up—me in a sweater and skirt, Bunny in a black sheath and heels. While we were sitting there, two men we didn’t know—businessmen passing through town, probably—noticed us and sent over drinks. It seemed so romantic, Bunny and me being courted. Of course, I was too young to have a drink. Bunny finished both of them and then shooed the men away. But still, it seemed as if I’d passed a point, that things were starting to happen.
 
The next day, though, I woke up, and everything was the same. Bunny’s house was still tiny and messy. My best friend was still Mary Sue Zimmerman, though she really only qualified through endurance—we’d known each other since we were both five. Katydid was the same little town, full of farmers and ex-farmers, living from one county fair to the next. And, of course, I still had the same brown hair, the same angular face, the same towering body.
 
Over the next few days, while Bunny was at work, I spent hours in the bathroom, studying myself in the mirror. I remembered that Bunny had once said that she could look at other kids and tell exactly how they were going to turn out. With me, she wasn’t sure. “You defy me,” she had said. “I see too much. You’ve got too many possibilities.” Staring at myself in the mirror, hour after hour, I used to wonder what she saw. All I am is tall. I’ve always been one of the tallest in any group. Even as a child, I was an expert on the tops of boys’ heads, a connoisseur of the incredible swirls of hair, sometimes double-barreled, that form just behind the crown, of the sweeping waves that push forward from the back. By ten, I was taller than Bunny, and even with Tom, who was a year older. At fourteen, I passed him and towered half a head above most of the boys my age. I finally realized what was happening and willed myself to stop growing, but by then I was almost five eleven, and it was already too late. To compensate, I developed a permanent slouch, almost a hunchback. That helped a little, and, over time, some of the boys started to catch up; a few even passed me. (Today, Tom and I are exactly even again.) But nothing ever erased my feeling that I was from a different race, one that was fundamentally a mistake. Leafing once through a social studies book, I came to a photograph and stopped. There I was: A totem pole carved by a tribe of Pacific Coast Indians, a thin, knobby log topped by an enormous, beaky bird’s head.
 
It didn’t help any being Tom’s sister. Everybody knew about him, or if they didn’t, he made sure they found out. He was always in trouble. Even when we were little and the best of friends, his face would light up at the prospect of doing something naughty. We’d be playing happily enough, and suddenly he’d get an idea—let’s hide the neighbor boy’s bicycle, let’s put a scoop of Jell-O in Bunny’s coat pocket—and he wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d done it. I used to argue with him, but he always had some reason why it was really all right—he was just playing a joke, or only getting even. Then, as he got older, you couldn’t argue with him at all.
 
Given my feelings of awkwardness and Tom’s reputation, the solution was to stay quiet and out of sight, and by the time I started high school, I’d become almost a recluse. I’d venture out to school and to the usual school events, but I drifted farther and farther from the world of my classmates. Mostly, I just stayed home and waited, looking forward to the time when Bunny would get back from work or from her date, wherever she was.
 
I don’t know why I thought that being sixteen would change anything. Perhaps I was carried away by boredom. Once school had let out for the summer, I didn’t have much to do. Occasionally, I’d sub for Bunny or one of the other waitresses out at the Katydid Country Club. That probably sounds like a more glamorous place than it is. They call it a country club, but there aren’t any tennis courts or swimming pools. In fact, the golf course only has twelve holes—to make a complete game, you have to play the first six over again. But there’s a restaurant at the club where Bunny had worked as long as I could remember. Actually, the food wasn’t bad. The cook was an Indian man called Gunga Din—that wasn’t his real name, of course, just something people gave him from the movie. He claimed he was once personal chef to a rajah, and he was full of stories about riding elephants and tracking Bengal tigers. How he ended up in Katydid has never been clear to me. He lived in back of the country club, above the equipment barn in a room he shared with Shorty, the greenskeeper. They made a very odd pair. Shorty’s deaf and he can hardly talk, and Gunga was always going on about his glory days in India. Bunny once told me never to go back to their place.
 
Anyway, the real trouble for me actually started a couple of years ago out at the country club, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Business was slow that night, and Bunny had brought me along to keep her company. One of her tables was occupied by the Benedicts, a family I’d seen around for years. Mr. Benedict was an airline pilot and often out of town, but Mrs. Benedict was a country-club regular, a young, very dark, very stylish woman, a slacks lady, as Bunny put it. The three Benedict children had come along, and the family was having a pleasant dinner, perhaps happy to have the father around. After a while, I noticed that Bunny was getting depressed. This was right at a time when Tom was at his worst, and it weighed on her, seeing another family so carefree. Finally, she couldn’t restrain herself. “Don’t you have any trouble with these children?” she asked Mrs. Benedict. “I mean, don’t they give you any problems?” Bunny was preoccupied and looking for reassurance or she never would have said anything, but Mrs. Benedict isn’t the type to coddle people. “Children can only return the love they get,” she said. Of course, that made Bunny feel worse. I tried to comfort her, but I couldn’t. Just two days before, Tom had shot out all the windows on the back porch with his BB gun.