Maxine leaned into Rose and slid right into an old favorite—a day at the beach. Maxine had grown up so close to the sea that she’d been able to smell it on a windy morning, and although she’d never been, this didn’t stop her from imagining the waves and the sun and a lingering afternoon that included a picnic. Maxine often dreamed of picnics. Eating on a pretty blanket while the sun warmed your shoulders and birds chirped all around… her mother laughing at her brothers playing in the water, and her father napping on the sand. Rose was there, of course, as was Alice.
Alice was always there.
Alice woke ten minutes before the whistle blew. She always did. Everything at the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, where she had spent the last seven years of her life, was on a schedule, including Alice.
A whistle began the day at five thirty in the morning, and the girls were herded into their first session of “excusing,” the word used for the sometimes thirty minutes of sitting together on the long row of toilets that all students were made to do periodically during the day. Next came dressing in the clothing room. Then a walk on the circular paths just a short distance from the dormitory, where the weak light of dawn seemed to greet them begrudgingly.
Breakfast succeeded the circles—boiled beef, oatmeal, and milk.
Classroom time, which consisted of any number of activities, none of which had anything to do with a pencil or paper.
Lunch. Always soup and bread and more milk.
Manual Training, which for Alice meant time spent in front of the gears, wheels, and handles of the mangle machines, pressing the water out of bedsheet after bedsheet until dinner, a combination of breakfast and lunch served at three.
Then back they went, for another regulated walk, this time to the beat of a drum. They marched the circular paths until four… the hour that brought Alice to her favorite place, the window in the day room.
Today had been like all the others, and Alice had done what she did every day—she’d lived it. Her reward was to find herself on the hard benches of the day room, where they had an hour to sit while waiting for their group’s turn in the toilet room to excuse their bladders and bowels, followed by their turn in the clothing room to change their clothes for bed.
Alice’s brother had dropped her off at the school on a long-ago summer afternoon. It had been a hot day, but she’d forgotten about the heat while traveling in the automobile. Her first auto ride. He’d borrowed it, and then taken her for candy on Tremont Street. Another first. She’d never tasted anything that came out of a wrapper. After, they’d taken the long eleven-mile drive out into the country, leaving behind the dense streets of the South End, where two of her brothers worked as Pullman porters and the third as a lineman for the railroad, and where she had lived with the eldest of her brothers, and his now-pregnant wife, since the death of her father.
Her brother hadn’t explained what they were doing or where they were going, and Alice hadn’t asked. Her life had been a series of things she’d had to do—leave school, clean for the neighbors, take care of the children of her brothers—and knowing ahead of time what those things were didn’t change anything.
Though Alice didn’t ask where they were going, she had a pretty good idea why. A few days earlier, she’d been walking down Columbus Avenue with her brother’s wife when a white woman had caught sight of her clubfoot and clicked her tongue, a pretty common reaction to Alice living her life. But then the woman had noticed the large belly of Alice’s brother’s wife and said, “Pray to the Lord this next one don’t come out tainted.” And Alice had seen the fear in the young, pregnant woman’s eyes.
Less than a week later, Alice and her brother were rolling through the entrance gate and up the curving driveway of the institution, slowly, as if the borrowed automobile itself felt unsure of this decision.
Every so often over the years, something would flash in Alice’s mind and she’d see the school again as she had that first day—the massive brick buildings presiding over great expanses of lawn. Alice had never seen so much mowed grass in all her life. It had made her shy. Her brother had taken her hand as they’d climbed the steps, and for the first time that day she understood the seriousness of her situation. He’d never held her hand before; though she’d been limping on a twisted foot all her life, Alice had never needed help walking. It was only later that she realized he’d held it for another reason, because it would be the last time she’d ever see him. Within an hour, Alice would be swept into the moving river of routine that was the institution.
She now sat in the very room and in the very spot where she’d been placed that first day—following a short stop in the small office with her brother and a nurse—next to the front doors of the dormitory, where he’d told her that this was for the best.
Alice now stared out across the darkening lawn and listened to Maxine and Rose chatter, the sweet sound of their voices smoothing out the long day that had coiled up inside her. She was always amazed at how much the two had to say to each other, especially since the pair spent most of the day together. Maxine was her sister’s caretaker, and the school matched their classroom and manual-labor schedules, at least until Maxine turned fifteen, which would take place next year… for both Alice and Maxine.
At fifteen, school ended at the institution and adult life began. Alice and Maxine would be moved from the girls’ dormitory to the women’s dormitory. They’d still be called girls, though. All women inmates at the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded—or the Walter E. Fernald State School, as it had now come to be called after the death of the old superintendent—were referred to as girls, whether you were fourteen or forty. No matter the name of the institution, it was a lifetime placement, and no one—no matter the diagnosis—ever left.
Although, it wasn’t only age that had the potential to separate the sisters, but the machine of the institution itself. The groupings within the girls’ dormitory were now firmly set within the system of the institution. And once set, the machine of the place rattled on, never changing. But if you were scheduled to move into the women’s dormitory, who knew what the machine would do? Perhaps it would separate the sisters by diagnoses? Rose had been born a Mongoloid and diagnosed an imbecile. Maxine and Alice had been diagnosed morons. For all Alice knew, morons, imbeciles, idiots, Mongoloids, cripples, epileptics, and so on could be placed into different women’s dormitories or cottages across the huge expanse of the institution’s grounds. The chances of the machine keeping the sisters together were slim, and slimmer still for keeping Alice and Maxine together. Maxine never spoke about the coming move, or their inevitable separation, but it was all Alice ever thought about.
“Police wagon,” Maxine said suddenly.
Alice had been staring out the window but had seen nothing other than the coming darkness. Now she saw the truck with its two dimly shining headlamps making its way toward the girls’ dormitory, the same route her brother had driven long ago. It wasn’t an uncommon sight, this truck. It had actually grown much more common in the past few years.
“Bet you a nickel this girl is a moron,” Maxine said.
“You don’t have a nickel.” Rose laughed. Rose laughed a lot. As long as she was with Maxine, anyway. “Do you have a nickel, Alice?”