WILLFUL
by Aimee LaBrie
Donna is difficult. She has been that way from the beginning. She cries and cries and cries. The mother had hoped Donna would be a relief from the boy energy in the house: Joseph, Richard and David, but when she holds the baby, Donna thrums and thrashes, her hands in fists, her face red, brow tight. She sobs until she goes hoarse. No fever, clean diaper. This goes on and on. She can only be quieted if you hold her. All the way into her toddler years and through the next pregnancy with Joanne, the mother lugs Donna around on her hip while taking laundry off the line, mixing pancake mix, chopping vegetables, setting the table, ironing. The second the mother sets her down, Donna wails as if stuck by a diaper pin. They don’t have extra money for a specialist and anyway, you can see she is healthy. Bright eyes, clear ears and nose, good bowel movements. It is something inside that upsets her, as if she has swallowed a hornets nest.
By the time Joanne is born, the mother's arms are hard muscles. She worries the new baby will be too much for her. Joseph and Richard are what they call Irish twins, and two children in diapers is hard, but she shouldn't have worried, because Donna takes to Joanne like she is her doll. Donna still clings to the mother’s dress or apron, but she wants to help. She wants to dress the baby and feed the baby and when the baby fusses or cries, she holds the baby, and it is so funny to see Donna in the rocking chair, her legs sticking out with Joanne a bundle in her lap.
Joanne is a good baby, perhaps because she is never without someone touching her. Where Donna buzzes with energy, Joanne is like a lavender satchel, calm, easy. She is only fussy when she needs a diaper changed, and that almost never happens because Donna learns right away how to remove the cloth, clean Joanne, and puff her with Johnson and Johnson baby powder.
Donna has been made to give up the crib for baby Joanne. Maybe the mother has allowed Donna to stay in the crib for too long, since she is almost three. But she doesn't like it. She prefers the safety of small spaces. You can see it in her face, the calculation.
The first night, she throws herself out of bed with a thump and a wail. Five times she does this, and five times, she wakes up the baby. The mother is so tired, and Glenn is snoring, and the boys will be up early, and tomorrow is Sunday dinner with Mary and Ray, so that's five children to get ready for church plus pot roast and vegetables that need peeling and a pie crust to be made. Does the mother come into the bedroom the fifth time, at half past three, and pick Donna up hard by the armpits and throw her onto the bed? Hard enough that Donna is startled out of crying? And does the mother lean down and say, in what she knows is a scary adult voice, "If you fall out of the bed one more time, the devil will snatch you by the heels and pull you under." Yes, she does.
And she leaves Donna in the dark and does not come back until morning.
Donna turns four, five, and six. She still cries too much, but she will stop if the mother lets her sleep with one of the mother’s nightgowns sprayed with the Chantilly Lace Glenn buys her from Hastings every year for Christmas.
No punishment deters, at least not for long. She swats back if the mother spanks her, sasses, and refuses to wear her new Mary Janes because they squish her toes.
Saturdays are the worst because all the children are home from school and the mother has to send them outside to get anything done. Donna keeps coming into the house to tell on her brothers. Joseph’s teasing Joanne. David said a bad word. Richard's hurting a tree, until the mother threatens, “If you tattle one more time, I am going to wash your mouth out with soap.”
Half an hour later, Donna returns. She says, “Mom.” Very serious, like this is a war mission. “Mom, David and Richard broke a light bulb in the basement.” Donna sticks a bar of Ivory soap into her mouth and bursts into tears, while also gagging.
That is Donna. A willful, willful child.
At seven, Donna falls off the monkey bars at school. She is not supposed to be on the monkey bars wearing a skirt. The teacher, Miss Brogan, is scared because after Donna fell, she lay on the ground, unconscious, wet her pants, knocking her head against the dirt.
They take her to Doniphan to the main hospital and there are tests and they want to do a brain scan, but the mother can’t think about it because she’s not sure her sister Mary can keep Joanne past 7 PM, and the boys will be home needing dinner, and there’s Glenn next to her in his work overalls, rustling in the hard waiting room chair, wanting to get back to irrigation.
When they return home, the mother takes Donna to the room she shares with Joanne and baby Thomas and tells her to stay still. The mother warms a washcloth in the oven and brings it up with a fizzy glass of ginger ale. She is about to leave, but Donna says, “Can you please hold my hand?”
The boys are at the dining room table doing homework and Joanne is being minded by Joseph, so the mother sits on the floor next to the bed. Donna holds her hand, playing with the mother’s wedding ring, and plucking at her fingernails. Donna tells her how much she likes Miss Brogan, and what song they are singing in music (“Frere Jacques”), and wonders out loud if they could someday have a horse and did it seem that her mother would live longer than her father, and how did God decide these things, and on and on, and this makes the mother sleepy (she doesn’t know yet that Timothy, the next child, is an inkling inside of her), and the mother realizes that she hasn't spent any time with Donna alone, the two of them, since before Joanne was born.
On Christmas, the blue willow plates are laid on the dining room table. Each child gets a scoop of hard candy from Tyson's Grocery, a navel orange, a MacIntosh apple, and walnuts. The toys go under the tree, unwrapped. Too many kids to wrap each gift.
One year, Donna gets exactly what she wants, a doll that could walk. She names her Bernadette after her favorite saint and carries her around tucked under her arm. She paints her eyelids with the mother's blue eye shadow and put nail polish on her plastic toes. Bernadette is more than the budget allows but it is the only thing she had asked for, ever, When Glenn sees the credit card bill, he says, “Well, she should get something once in a while.” She loves him most days.
The days are divided by chores. Three meals a day, Glenn’s lunch for the field by six in morning, Folgers coffee brewing all day long in the percolator. Vacuum, dust, pick up, dishes, knock the mud off Glenn’s shoes, grocery shopping. Dirty laundry the mother washes on Saturday mornings with the radio on and then hangs out on the clothesline, the wooden clothes pins fastened to the hem of her skirt or pockets. Throughout the year, she makes most of the children’s clothes, straight pins in her mouth, the Singer machine whirring along, the smell of oil in the air. Donna helps the mother cut out the Butterwick patterns on the dining room table and she and Joanne uses the thin papery scraps to make dress patterns for their paper dolls. The paper dolls are cut out from the cardboard shoe boxes or the cardboard that Glenn’s shirts came in. Donna makes them with curly ringlets like Little Lulu and adds two round circles in their cheeks for dimples.
Donna is eight, nine, ten, and eleven, and the mother barely notices. Those are the years when Glenn's drinking is bad. One afternoon, he falls off the combine and breaks his collarbone, and another year the drought shrivels up half their acreage. The Butler boy, David’s best friend, drowns in the pond, and three of their dogs are lost to pick-up trucks on the road or shot by neighbors for killing chickens. The mother loses a sister to ovarian cancer and her mother to dementia.
Donna has a seizure again and goes to school with two black eyes from hitting her head on the ground while the mother scrambled to grab a picture from the living room couch. They take her back to the doctor, who puts her on phenobarbital. The phenobarbital makes her drowsy. One morning, the mother finds the pills stashed in a pair of folded up church socks. When she asks Donna about it, she says she doesn’t know how they got there.
The mother threatens but is too tired to argue.
Then Glenn starts to go to AA meetings in the church basement and that is okay; that is better. He still drinks beer on the weekends, Budweiser in the red and white can while watching the Cornhuskers on their new black and white TV.
Then one year, Tom has some trouble in school; he is shy, always blushing, easy to tease, sensitive, and Joseph tumbles the Ford into a ditch, so in those years, Donna is a mark on the wall in the dining room where they measure each child’s growth with a different color pencil at the beginning of each school year—lines that go up up and up the wall. Donna’s color is green.
What does the mother remember? Donna is a chatty talker at dinner. She breaks her eye glasses on purpose because she wants new ones. She likes to get catch lightning bugs in Mason jars, while the boys smash the bugs and paint their faces with the glow. She does well in school, brings home reports the mother doesn’t have time to read, like the one on Girl of the Limberlost, a book they both love, but they all love books. If the mother has done one thing right, it is going every month to the public library in Doniphan and letting the children check out as many books as they want.
Donna has two new dresses one year from Sears in Omaha and her first pair of shoes with heels, but mostly, she is in the background, Joanne in her shadow, like the mother’s own younger sister Carleen had been shy. You could see Carleen in Joanne’s face, and in Donna’s face, the mother sees herself.
Some Saturdays, they go to the drive-in movie theater because they don’t charge by the number of people, just by the vehicle itself and they can fit seven kids in the back of the pick-up and she and Glenn in the front seat with the speaker hanging off the car door; the truck backed into the parking spot and the kids lying out on a few of her grandmother’s old hand sewn quilts. Those nights, Glenn makes popcorn on the stove and puts it in the big white basin (where all the babies have been bathed at one time), adds Morton salt and plenty of melted butter and if she thinks of it in time, she brings Hershey's chocolate bars to hand around. Those are the times she doesn't mind being a mother and a wife, when the kids are all safe and in one place watching a Western with John Wayne, even though Donna cries when the horses get shot during a gunfight (and then Joanne cries with her) and both have to be reassured that the horses are not hurt in real life.
On those nights, the mother remembers why she loves Glenn, the shy boy from her elementary school, now a quiet man, but never hardly ever a mean one, and for this grace, she knows she is more fortunate than most women.
Then Donna is twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and she rears up again, skipping school, smoking L&M menthols she steals from Glenn or the mother, turning her skirt up at the waist so the hem rises past her kneecaps, and riding around in cars with older boys. She goes to confession with Father O’Donnell sometimes twice a week, but that seems like just another way to get attention.
One weekend night she comes home smelling like alcohol.
This is a night the mother has been waiting for another child, Joseph or Richard who are out of high school but still living at home. In comes Donna, listing to one side. The mother pretends to be upset, pretends that she has been waiting for her. She is mad, but the truth is that she didn't even know Donna was missing. She thought she was up in her room with Joanne the whole time.
Donna walks in, sends her shoes sailing into the air, and flops on the floor by the mother. She says, “I'm fine, mom,” and puts her head on the mother's lap like when she was little. But she is not little, she is nearly grown. She has a pretty face, maybe a little too sharp. They had taken her to Doniphan for braces, spending a good amount of money, and what did Donna do when she got home? Pulled them off with pliers she stole from the barn.
Remembering this, the mother snaps, “Get off of me now. I need to check in with the Obermeier boys.”
Donna startles back like she has been slapped. Always too sensitive. She pulls herself up and disappears up the stairs, holding tight to the banister as if she might fall.
She's sixteen, seventeen, running around with town boys, the hard-drinking ones whose dads are gone, not the quiet, hard working farm boys. Now the mother knows when Donna comes home late because she does stay up to wait for her, to check if she is wearing a bra, if her hair is matted in the back. The mother cannot tell her that she has found the Trojan condoms in between Donna's mattress sheet and pad when she was changing the beds, because maybe Donna is hiding them for one of the boys, but that's not likely.
They don't have those conversations. The first time she was with a man was Glenn. She was surprised by how much it hurt and then by how often he wanted to be with her and how sticky it felt and how it was pleasurable in a distant way, like a dinner bell ringing down the road. How could she talk to Donna about that?
“You be careful,” she says when they are driving in the car to get their hair done, a weekly task to get the bouffant style that goes unwashed for a week.
Donna is applying lipstick in the rearview mirror of the Buick. “Yes, mother dear,” she says, kissing a napkin, leaving a perfect outline of her lips.
There are people at church, Doris and Kitty Nelson, telling her that Donna has been seen with Junior Most, a man six years older than her, driving in his car with her arm out of the window.
Junior Most is the son of the pharmacist. The mother knows Junior’s father Leonard Most from her own high school–he was handsome, vain, charming. She had a little crush on him when they were in geometry class together, but he didn't notice.
She wants to slap Donna. Instead, she tells her to wash the pots in the kitchen. When Donna balks that the soap makes her hands itchy, the mother says, “He just wants to get between your legs.” Donna takes a step back, her hand flying to her crooked teeth. But the mother can’t stop. “He's engaged. He and the Obermeier’s girl. You should be ashamed.”
Does Donna care? No, she keeps seeing him, and is spotted drinking beer with him at a bar in Hastings, wearing a strapless dress. What can they do? Girls are sent away when they get pregnant out of wedlock. They are driven at night to a charity home in Kansas City where they have the baby and return alone (the mother has never told anyone, and will certainly not tell Donna that she was pregnant with Joseph when she and Glenn got married at St. Anne’s).
The crops are good that year, and Glenn calls Mary and Ray to ask for extra money to pay for a year at the Assumption Academy, an all-girls school run by the Benedictine nuns in Norfolk, a good hundred miles away. It is not as expensive as they thought, and with some tightening, they can manage her final year.
They sit with Donna at the dining room table. She has just had a shower and her wet hair runs into the collar of her shirt. Her arms are crossed. She says, “I didn't do anything.”
Joanne, fifteen, in Donna's clothes, taken out a bit because she is huskier, stands in the shadows, listening, tugging at her hair with nervousness.
Glenn says, “You're going. It's settled. We already paid the term.”
She rubs at her nose with the heel of her hand. “You can’t make me.” She throws a hairbrush and then looks at her father. He is a gentle man, but the children don't want to disappoint him, especially not the girls. The boys see him more when they are old enough to help in the field, but if Donna gets only a sliver of the mother’s time, she gets even less from Glenn.
Now, he warns, “You are not too old,” and Donna must know what he means. He has taken a strap to the boys, when they go too far and shoot a pheasant out of season or wreck their bikes messing around.
Donna crumples. “Okay, okay, I'll go, but please let me come back. I want to come back.” She wrings her hands in a way that is comically exaggerated, like an orphan in the Sunday comics.
The day before they send her away, the mother helps her pack. Donna will take Carleen’s trunk from when Carleen lived in Switzerland and met the blind man who became her husband. The mother has bought Donna new underwear, two new bras, given her the best slip she has, a rosary and her Chantilly perfume. The mother says, “You're going to like it just fine.”
Donna is not speaking to her. Her mouth is a straight line like it has been sewn shut. She moves between the dresser and the bed where the trunk is open, taking clothes out and putting them back in again.
The next day, Donna takes her black pocketbook to the car where Glenn is waiting. They will drive her in the Buick, not the pick-up. They want her to make a good impression at the new school.
She is seventeen now, not a little girl, and she's trying to have a hard look on her face like she doesn't care, but when she turns to the mother, her face is pale like she’s going to be sick. The mother knows she is looking for reassurance.
Inside the house, a pot for hard boiled eggs is boiling on the stove, sheets need putting out on the line, and there are two more little ones doing God knows what in the basement.
The mother tells Donna to stop looking like she swallowed a lemon. She means for it to sound like a joke, but it comes out wrong. The mother steps away from the car. “Bye now.” She opens up the screen door and goes inside. The car door slams shut and the gravel spits as Glenn spins out of the driveway and onto the road.
Does the mother cry? No, she doesn't. She doesn’t. She simply doesn’t have time.
And of course, Donna comes back for Christmas and makes jokes about the snotty girls in her dorm and the nuns bobbing around like bowling pins. Someone has cut her hair too short. It’s strange to see that much of her neck. The mother has to remind herself, Do not say anything, when all she can see is what’s wrong. Her skirt seems too small and her lipstick is a cheap orange color. Donna acts nervous in a preening way, turning her head often as if showing off her bare neck. She brags to the younger kids about how easy it is to sneak away from campus to go downtown. She looks sideways at her mother. “Only kidding, mother. I am a good girl.”
Joanne laughs and then blushes. She is dating a shy boy who sings in the church choir. Donna teases her about letting him unbutton her bra and Joann looks as if she would like to die. The mother knows Joanne still dresses each morning in the dark of her room, no lights on, afraid to see her own reflection in the mirror.
The mother has made Donna a new plaid skirt she wanted last winter. Making it has required several late nights, trying to line up the colors so it will match. The mother gives it to her on Christmas Eve so she can wear it to mass. They are alone in Donna’s and Joanne’s bedroom. The mother feels odd around her daughter, as if they have just been introduced.
Donna rips at the shiny silver paper the mother so carefully wrapped. She opens the box. She pulls out the skirt and shakes it. She says, “Isn’t that something? It barely looks homemade.” She won’t look the mother in the eye. Her hug is quick and then she is gone down the stairs.
The mother folds up the box and the wrapping paper carefully, saving it for another time, another child.
Donna is nineteen. She meets a man on a double date with her wildest friend Nao, the girl she roomed with at the Assumption Academy. The man is twenty-five years older. Not Catholic. They meet him one time at a Denny’s in Hastings, and the mother does not like the way he keeps his hand wrapped around Donna’s arm as if he’s saying, Mine.
He takes her as far away as he can—all the way to Florida.
They do not visit. He does not allow Donna to make long distance phone calls, so the mother calls instead. Often, the phone just rings and rings and rings.
When the mother looks back later, those years bleed together; ten years in total being pregnant and tired and worried. Only a few moments stay clear in her mind. Glenn with the small number two pencil he kept in the front pocket of his overalls along with a notebook from the gas station to write down the weather. At one Christmas dinner, her sister Mary saying, This meal is so good, I can't wait for it to end so I can have a cigarette. The two girls, Donna and Joanne, heads bent over a JC Penney catalog, picking out the furniture they would have when they were married, and Donna saying about a canopy bed, “I love this so much, I would kill my own mother for it.”
No time for thought most days, just getting them to school and then driving back home, chores, meals, baths— always a baby or two underfoot. The afternoons were ironing Sunday shirts and handkerchiefs in front of the TV watching As the World Turns and The Guiding Light, a cigarette burning in the glass ashtray at the end of the ironing board, unwinding smoke to the ceiling. The smell of Tide and wet diapers and fresh cut hay from the field, Glenn’s Old Spice aftershave, an angel food cake baking in the oven. It seems very far away, like a dream.
The mother returns again and again to one story about her first girl.
When she was about four years old, Donna disappeared. Children died in such awful ways then. Mary’s first baby burned from hot water in the kitchen sink when Mary went to check the mail. The Obermeier’s boy fell into the grain elevator. The cousin of Glenn’s whose toddler wandered into the corn stalks while the combines were shearing the crops.
The boys were all at school, Joanne was down for a nap, and the mother was trying to follow a recipe for mince pie in the Betty Crocker cookbook she borrowed from Mary. The blender was meant to save a step of chopping, but it was almost too much noise and fanfare. She pushed the stop button and in the quiet, the black retriever, Duke barked a warning, probably at the geese honking across the sky. The quietness that followed gave her goosebumps. That's a rabbit running across your grave, her mother used to say.
When she couldn’t find Donna at first, the mother was annoyed. Then furious. Then anxious. For several minutes, the mother felt the panic closing her throat, the tightness of the seams of her dress under her arms, sweat rolling down her back. She searched under beds, in cupboards, in the crawl space beneath the barn where the feral cats gathered.
Calling her name: Donna, Donna.
Nowhere. Gone.
Finally, the mother checked in the coat closet where they hid Christmas presents. The wooden door was old and often got stuck. Donna was lying on the floor, her head on Glenn’s winter jacket. Her eyes were closed, and the mother couldn’t at first tell if she were alive or dead.
The mother grabbed her up. She put her hand on Donna’s chest to make sure she was breathing. Donna opened her eyes, blinked. There were red marks on her little hands. The mother searched for a cut, imagining a nail in the wall or a carpet tack that had come loose.
Then she saw a red marker under the coat, like the ones Glenn used to measure out boards in the basement. The mother held Donna too tight, anger and relief washing over her in waves.
On the wooden door, Donna had drawn a ladder. The red lines of the steps went up, up, up the wall, getting smaller and smaller. She seemed to believe that if she made a ladder, she could climb out. When that didn’t work, what must she have thought? The mother tried to imagine. Her daughter, the difficult one. Maybe she thought, Someone will find me. Someone will notice that I’m gone.
Aimee LaBrie is the author of two award-winning short story collections. Her most recent book, Rage & Other Cages—winner of the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize—was released by Leapfrog Press in June 2024. Her first collection, Wonderful Girl, received the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. LaBrie’s stories have appeared in Swamp Pink, StoryQuarterly, Pleiades, Zoetrope, Iron Horse Literary Review, and numerous other journals. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times.