Peggy Adams grew up in Ohio in the 1950’s. Very happily retired from Ithaca College, she believes in writing what she knows. Buckeye Girls, selected as a semi-finalist entry in the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, is her first novel. Peggy is looking for an agent to represent her work.
About Buckeye Girls:
Poodle skirts, cootie catchers, and saddle shoes, I Like Ike and I Love Lucy—for Buckeye girls Arden and Sealy Taylor, the fifties were all those and more. Dad was a war hero, but in 1953, he’s a drunk who puts the Thanksgiving leftovers on the front seat and drives into a house. With three kids and a fourth to come, their mother gets sadder by the day.
Sealy is thirteen. Reckless and gullible, she fiercely stands up to her bully of a father. Thrilled to learn “all about sex,” from Pal, a summer visitor, Sealy falls hard for her, and then for Ronnie, an eighth-grade Ricky Nelson look-alike. But nothing goes right, and Sealy hoards her babysitting cash so the girls can run away to Arkansas.
Arden is eight. Her warm heart, unquenchable curiosity, and enthusiasm keep her bouncing along. With a mind bigger than the sky, Arden believes in Santa Claus, but doesn’t buy anything the nuns tell her about god—she is sure god is like electricity, but with more goodness. She is cheery company for Sealy when the sisters finally get on the Greyhound Sceni-cruiser heading south.
Excerpt from Buckeye Girls:
My sister Sealy told me that Catholics get ashes on their foreheads to remind them that they will be dead and turn into ashes, and that’s why it’s called Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Well, who forgets they’re going to die? I don’t. But I do not like to think about being in a coffin, remember that terrible song, “ The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,” I have to wash it out my mind. I sing “Mairsie dotes and dozy dotes and liddle lamsee divey,” that’s so cute when you get it, so I sing it over and over until the other song gets out. Isn’t it amazing that you can sing in your head and no one ever knows? After Holy Mass at St. Gabriel’s-in-the-basement, Father Dartlan stood up behind the rail and we went up and knelt there and he put ashes on his thumb and drew a cross on our foreheads. “Remember, man, dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return,” he said. I am not a man, of course, so it was a little wrong, Sealy said that really means men, women and children, well, why not say so? The Catholic Church doesn’t let women do much, remember about the altar girls, there can’t be any. I liked getting the ashes though. At school you could tell who was Catholic, not Mrs. Minnay, but Miss McGraw had them and so did our principal Mr. Eisenoble. Faithy and I used our pencils to put more on at lunchtime because they were wearing off. Use the side of your pencil, it goes on better. Pencils smell so good and woody.
Sealy is mad at god or afraid or sorry, I don’t know exactly, but she still thinks she made god take our baby brother back and give our mother that missed carriage. I keep telling her god doesn’t think like that, god’s mind is a lot bigger and has a lot more room in it. If god has any thoughts, they are like ribbons—floating ribbons. If you walked into god’s mind it would be like walking right off the edge of the Grand Canyon, and you wouldn’t fall down, you would go through sort of a door and instead of a person’s mind that’s more like an attic but with those card catalogue drawers where you put all your ideas or even songs like “Mairsie dotes,” or commercials from TV instead, god’s mind would open like the sky, and you could walk into it, not falling or being afraid. Like a beautiful sky, but lighter, more yellow and pink. You could just step out. If god had thoughts you could see them every once in a while. Maybe they would look like those signs that airplanes pull behind them, with “I love Irma,” or “I like Ike” on them. Or if it’s night in god’s mind, very very dark blue, big stars, you could see ideas lit up like on the Goodyear Blimp. We see that more than a lot of people because of Akron being in Ohio. The blimp goes up from Akron, my father said the hangar is as big as seven football fields, imagine—I have only been to Akron in the car, it smells terrible because of all the rubber burning. They make all the tires and inner tubes in Akron. The blimp says things like “Buy Tires.” I would like it to fly over my neighborhood on my birthday and flash “Happy Birthday, Arden” to me, but I don’t think so! Probably Sealy has the idea that god thinks about her birthday, but I believe god is quieter than thinking, very relaxed, but with a lot of energy. So Sealy can stop worrying that she made god think about taking back our baby brother. She needs to just stop. I am very sad but I think our baby brother will try again to get born, maybe if my father doesn’t drink all the time. Our house would get quieter and the baby would not hear yelling. My father might get tired of drinking and go back to that club, that AA, he went twice, but he said it didn’t work on him, he said he felt like a goddamn fool and everyone there was looking at him, and who are they, a bunch of drunks. Sealy says probably all his friends go there, and then after the meetings they go and drink beer. Maybe it does work for some people, though.
My mother is a little better, she made mushroom soup and crackers and Swiss cheese and fruit cocktail for dinner. My father didn’t like it, he said, “What kind of dinner is that?” But I did, what was wrong with it? My mother says she doesn’t want to eat anything; she just smokes her cigarettes. Last night Sealy tried cooking oatmeal. Not so good. But we ate school lunch in the cafeteria all week, chicken and biscuits, stuffed peppers, hot dogs and beans, Sealy knows where to find money in the cupboards. She found us milk money, and I am supposed to get white, but I got chocolate, that is 30 cents a week. Milk comes, the eighth grade boys bring it, at ten o’clock on the dot, you can hear them rattling the little bottles in a metal crate. I would like to have one of those little bottles, but Mrs. Minnay says they have to go back to the dairy, so they can sterilize them and use them again, that is a good idea. We are going to the dairy, Isaly’s, in two weeks, mostly to see cottage cheese, I think, but I hope we get to see how they sterilize our milk bottles.
I was thinking about the song about the little lambs. We used to go see the new lambs every spring up in Middle Branch. The story is the first year my aunt Jean taught music it was at Middle Branch School, and it was still a one room school house, she points it out. Outhouses, they had outhouses! It was 1935 when she started, and she had to use the outhouse like everybody, can you imagine—but they had two, one for boys, one for girls. It is beautiful out there, the farms and the Middle Branch river —we would stop the car by a field of sheep and lambs, and what they do is jump up in the air, you never know when—Jean said they jump for sheer joy. Because they are born. Sheer joy. Black ones, brown ones, my best are the white ones with black faces. Ewes, rams and lambs—baby goats are called kids, I learned that, I love to know the names, the right names of things. Jean says, when she’s not quite ready,
“ I’ll be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” That means very quickly! She probably got that from out in Middle Branch.