The Girls

Summer Hammond

Wilmington, North Carolina – 2016

Pulling up to the new place, I don’t want to get out of the moving truck, a startling phenomenon. My husband and I are adventurous rovers, having moved multiple times. But the air here in Wilmington is thick with mysterious sadness, so palpable I can feel it on my skin. Who can I tell this to? Who will believe me? My husband will say I’m being mystical, that you can’t feel sadness from a place. Perhaps this is true. My hormones have lately been all over the place, something I’ve attributed to the stress of public school teaching. Skipped periods, spiked anxiety.  Likely this dark vibe is somehow connected. Being here is a feat you never dreamed, I remind myself, an attempt to sustain my excitement and joy.

At forty years old, a high school teacher in Texas, I was accepted into a graduate-level creative writing program here on the Atlantic coast. I had grown up Jehovah’s Witness, a religion that condemns higher education. After leaving the faith, achieving a bachelor’s in my thirties from an online school was triumph enough. Acceptance into an MFA was an electric shock, so dazzling I hadn’t bothered to scope out the town beforehand, or conduct too much research, before saying yes. 

And here is the consequence. The townhome that I’ve rented, sight unseen, gluts me with dread. It isn’t just the bare, blank façade, the darkly mulched garden space devoid of a single flower, it’s something more, terrible and heavy, drowning my excitement in concrete.

I watch as my husband climbs out, walks up to and unlocks the new place. The lights pop on, his shadow from inside, cast tall and flickering, ominous across the lawn. I grip my seatbelt, do not budge. When he returns, I say, “We have to go back.” Back means a three-day trek of 1400 miles to Austin, the city we’ve traded for this one.

My husband responds, “You have to come see this tree.” He doesn’t inquire into the reason for my resistance, just gets right down to the business of winning me over. Along with books and bugs, he knows I have never been able to resist trees.

And this tree is beyond compare. My husband and I stand side by side in the night, looking up, and up, and up. She is approximately two hundred feet tall, wrapped in vines, with the moon perched jauntily at her top, like a hat. She is like a figure that shows up in a fairy tale, a guardian or godmother, at a crucial point of dire need. In her grandeur, she summons memories of the women who raised me, their personalities so large they branched out over my childhood, and now, my memory.

This tree is one of the girls.

Iowa, 1978

Sundays are meeting day in the rented space at the top of the old Farm Bureau building in downtown DeWitt. At the Elder’s command, our congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses stands, aluminum fold-out chairs creaking and squeaking, to sing a hymn about the resurrection promise. I am two years old and already knock on doors, warning people that Armageddon is at hand.

Mondays are shopping day. My mother and grandmother and my mother’s best friend, Jan, meet up—Two Blondes and a Redhead, my mother has christened their fun-loving trio. “Make that three blondes,” she amends, and lays her hand, so gently on my toddler wisps of hair. I shiver, born each time she sees me.

When the electric doors slide open and we step across the threshold into NorthPark Mall, I think we are entering Heaven—immersed in a polished entryway, bedazzled with light.

I’m strapped into a navy blue stroller. My beloved companion, a stuffed bumblebee named Buzzy, is tucked into my hand. I hug him to me as the stroller begins its rolling journey along tiles, shiny and palatial. Clack-clack-clack the wheels sing, the sweetest lullaby, the women’s voices above me, their chatter and laughter, comforting as a tree’s canopy.

Mist drifts from a fountain, sparkling in the sun, a cooling spritz upon skin. Are the angels here? Lifted from the stroller, my body angled toward water, I reach to pat the wavering blue, breathe the sting of chlorine and bracing tang of pennies, dimes, and quarters, shimmering like mirages at the bottom. I slap the water and droplets fly like tiny crystals into my eyes.

Returned to the stroller’s cozy cocoon, buckled in, Buzzy given to my searching hand. Lifted once more, at an escalator, oh! Those resplendent silver steps rolling up and up to God’s throne, Buzzy firm in my hands—until he’s not.

Buzzy falling, not flying, fast he goes, down below. My piercing wail! A search party of women, hunting behind the jewelry racks, the makeup counter, sliding out trash bins, peering into every conceivable nook—and no Buzzy found.

The ice-cream sandwich from G&C, coated in carob, my lonely hands, the consoling coldness—and sweeter than anything, the sense—that I belong.

The girls will never lose me.

Wilmington, North Carolina – 2016

On the brink of my first day in grad school, I’m packing my new Target backpack, one with an herb and wildflower print. With the glee of a kid, in spite of the fact I’ve had two periods this month, and a painful mountain of a zit, I neatly arrange my multicolored binders, the purple for my novel writing class, the silver for nature poetry. Lastly, I tuck into the inside pocket my prized find: a zippered pencil bag decorated with katydids, cicadas, and emerald green beetles.

I am hopeful, even excited, but—the dread remains. Every time I step outside, I’m met with it. The sadness that hangs in the air like something burnt that will never clear.

I try describing what I feel to a cohort over coffee. She has traveled even further than me, all the way from Oakland, California. She suggests that perhaps I’m sensitive to energies. “After all,” she says, “Wilmington was plagued by pirates, bloodshed, yellow fever.” She swirls her straw, then peers at me. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

I look inward. Do I?

I don’t tell her that for the first twenty-seven years of my life, I believed that Armageddon was right around the bend. After Jehovah and His angels cleansed the earth of evil, a New Earth would rise. First, the earth would mend, grow back into its original Paradise. Then, a jubilant resurrection of the dead, in their exact same physical bodies. There was no such thing, the religion taught, as an immortal soul. That was a pagan lie.

“Ghosts?” I take a sip of coffee. “No. I don’t think so.”

Iowa, 1988

I grow older and the stroller is folded, one last time, shoved into a corner of the garage, where spiders sew lace around what was.

At twelve, my great passion is collecting bugs in a giant insect carrier, shaped like an iconic Iowa barn and painted the exact same shade of red. It’s the summer before my period starts and for a little while longer, I’m still a rascal, still carefree, in a way I never will be again, once the monthly hormonal frenzy takes over.

I take my bug barn everywhere, including my weekly Bible studies with Jan. We are reading together from a hardbound book titled with gold letters that exclaim You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth!

Side by side at her kitchen table, my bug barn between us, where katydids intermittently burst into chattering song, we read, and dream about our future life, together on the New Earth.

“Resurrection announcements, instead of obituaries,” Jan says.

“Back-to-Life parties, instead of funerals,” I add.

“Won’t it be wonderful, Summer? Think of it.”

I do think, and then, unexpectedly, grow troubled. “How will Jehovah remember what everyone looked like?”

Jan pours more lemonade into our tumblers. “Jehovah’s memory is perfect.”

“What about Grandma Millee? Will Jehovah remember that her hair is bleached blonde? Will He remember that she can’t be seen without her makeup on?”

Jan smiles. “If Grandma Millee dies before Armageddon, her body will be pieced together like a precious puzzle.”

I bite back the crucial question—but how will she be dressed?

Mondays are still shopping day. We cross the I-80 bridge over the Mississippi into Illinois, Three Blondes and a Redhead, to historic downtown Geneseo and the women’s boutiques Four Seasons, Merry-Go-Round, and Leading Lady.

The hand mannequins in the windows of Four Seasons, just hands, quite large, splayed fingers, sometimes wearing gold rings, rivet my gaze like the katydids munching leaves in my bug barn. Sweeping into the store, the air cold, strongly scented of perfume and new clothes, the shriek of hangers a familiar song as the women shop.

Jan pulls out blouse after blouse, her apple-cheeked face turning stern, like the schoolteacher she was before becoming Jehovah’s Witness. She checks the neckline, length, forehead puckered, wearing a frown. Is it modest? That is her main concern. She’s acquired the most Bible studies of anyone at Kingdom Hall. She worries she might “stumble” someone out of The Truth with her cleavage. She holds the blouse to her chest, swivels to a full-length mirror. “What do you think, Summer? Will it cover?” Her giggle is more like a schoolgirl than a schoolteacher.

My mother spins the earring rack, a carousel of glittering color. She loves Two Sisters jewelry, the pearled and gemmed flowers, a garden she can wear. She holds the earrings up, bends to look in the little mirror. Nearby, other women pause. With her platinum hair, flawless skin, and red lipstick, my mother is likened to Marilyn Monroe. She possesses a starlet’s outsized beauty, here in cornfield-thick flyover country. Women watch her closely, to see what draws her, and whatever she puts back, with one last admiring glance, they scramble to pick up themselves. My mother sashays off, feigning unawareness.

Grandma Millee examines buttons. As a young woman, she’d worked as an inspector in a garment factory. She pulls at each showy silver button on a razzle-dazzle leopard-print blouse, testing, determining. She hunts for loose threads, face serious as a scholar. The results of each test manifest in whether the blouse is slammed back on the rack or draped over the side of her cart. Most of the clothing she gathers and tries on she stuns in but can’t afford. However, for her, buying comprises only a fraction of the meaning and fun.

The dressing rooms are a party.

Jan tries on one of her long pioneer dresses, and my mother catcalls. “Sexy as a Mennonite, Jan!” Jan twirls, swivels her hips in that blue gingham, or denim, or weird linen that mimics denim, or some floral sailor monstrosity. My mother and Grandma Millee snort-laugh. “Gonna burn the place down, Jan, unleashing all that hot.”

A riot of laughter, Jan stumbling around, wiping her eyes, red hair a frenzy. The other women peek out from behind dressing room doors, flummoxed and worried.

But before too long, the other ladies, and the sales clerks, have joined in. They bring offerings. Loud safari shirts featuring lions and palm leaves, skirts with peekaboo slits, silky royal-blue blouses to emphasize Jan’s hair and eyes—which, after dutifully checking the buttons, Grandma Millee unbuttons, one, two, three. “Ack!” Jan shrieks, throwing a hand over her freckled bosom. Her face, my mother says, is as red as her hair. The women laugh and laugh.

In the corner, on the dressing room sofa, sits a tree-climbing bug girl, in cutoff shorts and a tee, two tattered Band-aids hanging by a thread from either knee, burning up with questions that, now released, won’t quit.

Won’t Resurrection Day be crowded? Will everyone gather at cemeteries? Will coffins be dug up? How will Jehovah resurrect cremated bodies? What about bodies that were never found? Bodies at the bottom of the sea? How, how—will we find each other?

What I need to know is that my mother will be there with her favorite red lipstick, that Jan will arrive with her exact same giggle, that my hand will still be able to find my Grandma’s, our fingers twining, the tender bite of her flamboyant, sparkling rings—all resurrected with equal precision.

Wilmington, North Carolina – 2017

Perimenopause.

The hormonal hurricane I hoped would ease has a name, one I’ve never heard.

This is one of the many new things I’ve learned as a middle-aged grad student afflicted with middle-school-girl breakouts, along with hot flashes, palpitations, and panic so severe, I sometimes think I’m dying in the middle of class.

The stunning diagnosis is confirmation—I’m aging—and while many women grapple with this time period, feeling the relentless, ruthless surge of body changes as a betrayal, I’m told by the therapist I sought soon after moving here that, for one with my faith background, the transition into menopause might initiate a form of complicated grief.

It is spring, and I’m digging in the field that flanks our townhouse, preparing to start a garden, whether the HOA likes it or not. Between hot flashes that tear through my body like a wildfire, I’m dreaming of tangles of morning glories and, in the summer, sweet corn, the husks whispering against each other, a Midwest music that will bring me home again and perhaps lift some of the gloom that persists here, a dense perfume.

I take a break to gaze at the tree, towering above. A warm gust, and her many leaves glitter like rings in the sunlight. She is a steady presence, watching over me. We didn’t move to Wilmington, I like to tell my husband. We moved to the tree.

“Hello!”

I look up, startled to see my neighbor, hanging onto the fence that divides us. He waves. “I heard you digging over here and thought I should warn you.” He scratches the back of his head, looks away. “I wouldn’t dig too deep.”

Instantly, I’m chilled. “Why is that?”

“Well, hate to say it, but your condo was built on top of an old cemetery, and rumor has it, the graves were not properly disinterred.”

Enclave Townhomes, I discover, have thus earned a local nickname.

Enclave on the Graves.

Iowa, 1992

At Bishop’s Buffet, a staple on shopping day, we wait in line, then from the stack pluck our brown trays, freshly washed, water droplets clinging like little tears. We smack our trays down on the two silver bars, like a rail line, sliding all the way down to desserts, with all the fun stops in between—salads, breads, entrees, sides, desserts, drinks. Grandma is the engine chugging ahead, mom and Jan the cars, and me at the end, their little caboose—even though I am now sixteen, proudly wearing my mother’s favorite red lipstick.

The food at Bishop’s, made from scratch, each selection: lettuce wedge salad with dressing and blue cheese crumbles, molded gelatins showcasing jeweled fruits, frosted orange rolls, little bowls of fried okra, plates piled with prime rib, red snapper, ham—“Want more gravy on that?” the attendants ask.

The line attendants wear Bishop’s brown and white uniforms, impeccable, Grandma notes, solid buttons, neatly pressed, and the chefs adorned in big, tall toques, carving long slabs of steaming roast beef for the juicy French dip housed in its crusty roll.

“What are we getting, girls?” “The roast beef sure looks good today!” “What’s on special?” “Which pie are we getting, girls?” “Why don’t we all get something different and share?”

We carry our trays to a table, cozy, intimate, near the fireplace, the lighting golden to create the dream, and I sit cross-legged in the heavy leather chair, squeezing my slice of lemon into my tall cup of icy cold tea.

“What did you get, Sum?” “Oooh, does that ever look good!” Grandma’s fork, stealthy, reaching for a sample. “Look at her enjoying that Reuben!” “She’s practically swimming in the corn!”

Their running commentary, an adoration.

Grandma Millee carefully, like an artist, peels the fried skin off her chicken. She is “being good,” since her doctor told her she needs to lay off the foods she loves most. So off to the side, by her green beans and mashed potatoes, she constructs a fried golden fort. Throughout lunch, Grandma eats chicken with her fork, then fast, with her fingers, snags a piece of forbidden skin from the pile. By the end of lunch, only a couple crunchy skins remain.

My mother switches on the candle that is really a light, signaling the attendant. Francine hurries over in her uniform, her thick-soled shoes, her pantyhose swishing, an older woman with spiky orange hair and matching lipstick, who greets us every time across years with: “The girls!” as she refills coffee cups, held aloft, the open mouths of baby birds.

My mother says that when I was an infant, the attendant spilled hot coffee on my bald head. My screams were fit to tear the roof off. When she tells this story, they all remember, and gaze at me with the same love and pain they must have felt then. I don’t reveal that this story, the way they look at me, makes me proud. A baptism, by coffee fire, into the inner sanctum.

The girls dive deep into tall, luxurious slices of banana cream, French coconut, and Bishop’s famous chocolate ambrosia silk pie, slathered in creamy whip, garnished with thick, luxurious chocolate shavings, peeled by a potato peeler from a decadent chocolate bar.

They are all on diets, except on shopping day. They eat, and sigh about their weight. My mother leans back in her chair, smacks her belly like a punishment.

“Don’t I know it,” Jan chimes in with a harsh grip on her thighs.

“Just you wait, girls,” Grandma Millee tsks. “You haven’t even started The Change. You’ll gain fifty pounds overnight, and never be able to lose, no matter what you do.” She swings her arms, pinches the loose skin underneath swaying like hammocks. Clucks with scorn, distaste.

“What’s The Change?” I ask, eager to know.

A glance goes round the table. Jan lays her hand on my arm, squeezes. “Something you won’t have to worry about. The New Earth will be here before then.”

“That’s right,” my mother says, “you won’t have to grow old, get sick, or die, like us.”

Sitting cross-legged in Bishop’s heavy leather chair, I am stricken, can’t breathe, can’t eat. I gaze round the circle, two blondes and a redhead—the loves of my life!

In the grip of this fear that they’ll leave me here, I ask the silliest question. “What about malls? Our favorite stores? Bishop’s? Will Jehovah resurrect those? In the New Earth, will we still have shopping day?”

Jan hoots. “Of course! Except all the clothes will be modest, we can always afford them—”

“And they’ll always fit!” Grandma Millee raises a piece of fried chicken skin in the air before popping it in her mouth.

Wilmington, North Carolina, 2017

St. Thomas’ Catholic Cemetery in Wilmington was officially consecrated on November 2, 1879, during the Festival of All Souls.

There were at least 130 interments, and my research shows construction of our condominium complex was fought, halted, then restarted and relentlessly pursued, despite the outcry. Enclave Townhomes now cover those four sacred acres.

Enclave on the Graves.

I look up their obituaries and am stunned to find so many infants, toddlers, and teens who died of dysentery, typhoid, and consumption. Young mothers, too, cancer and quick, pernicious fevers.

I walk to fetch the mail and hear them, the clip-clopping of horse and carriage, small coffin within, the mourners that accompany, some on foot, weeping their way down Market Street, turning onto the well-trod cemetery path, coming toward me like a vision as I stand here, twisting the key in the mailbox.

I let them in. And their sadness summons mine.

Rebelling against the HOA, in favor of the dead, I plant a garden rich with wildflowers on the graves that once were, thick tears dripping at a steady rate. I recall the illustrations in You Can Live Forever in Paradise On Earth! The jewel tones as children ran to embrace a mother, a grandmother, a friend—rising with relief and exaltation, always well-dressed, from their grave.

When you leave a religion everyone considers a cult, you are congratulated for your honest questioning, the courage it requires to confront the lies and walk away.

No one tells you how long you will spend reckoning with the loss of your most beautiful stories, your most cherished hopes.

The girls are gone now.

I’m here without them, on land that’s a mourning ground, where I daily face the truth that the dead will not rise, and our hands, reaching through time, will not ever find each other again.

I am famished for hints of them—red lipstick on crumpled napkins and the edges of coffee cups, the sparkling spin of an earring rack, dressing room laughs and the way her rings clack-clacked against the plastic bar of the shopping cart, a beloved music I get to hear from now on only in my head.

I pause my writing here, where I sit in this garden graveyard, and like that first night, I gaze up, up, up, deep into her ivy-drenched branches.

I’ve given her a name. Great Grandma.

She was here when this was St. Thomas. A witness to the funerals, the burials, each fresh pain. She is here now, to witness me, enduring The Change, this endless flux, aging without them and seeking them always, a drifting ghost, up and down escalators, in and out of dressing rooms, flicking on the candle that’s really a light, calling out lost, for the rest of my life—girls!

Rooted here, on this old earth, Great Grandma takes care of me, the same way she did the others.

She lets us cry, and long for each other, silent, kind, without answers.

Summer Hammond grew up in rural Iowa, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. After parting ways with the faith, she went on to achieve a BA in Literature, teach ninth grade reading in Austin, Texas, and later, earn her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her writing appears in Sonora Review, StoryQuarterly, Moon City Review, and Tahoma Review, among others. She won the 2023 New Letters Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction. Supported by the Wilmington Arts Council, Summer is currently at work on a memoir in Granta’s Memoir Writing Workshop. Instagram: @summerdhammond Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/summer.d.hammond