There had been other times when Momma had kept her in the closet for as long as a day at a stretch – when she stole that forty-nine-cent finger ring from Shuber's Five and Ten, the time she had found that picture of Flash Bobby Pickett under Carrie's pillow – and Carrie had once fainted from the lack of food and the smell of her own waste. And she had never, never spoken back as she had done today. Today she had even said the Eff Word. Yet Momma had let her out almost as soon as she broke.
There. The dress was done. She removed her feet from the treadle and held it up to look at it. It was long. And ugly. She hated it.
She knew why Momma had let her out.
'Momma, may I go to bed?'
'Yes.' Momma did not look up from her doily.
She folded the dress over her arm. She looked down at the sewing machine. All at once the treadle depressed itself. The needle began to dip up and down, catching the light in steely flashes. The bobbin whirred and jerked. The sidewheel spun.
Momma's head jerked up, her eyes wide. The looped matrix at the edge of her doily, wonderfully intricate yet at the same time as precise and even, suddenly fell in disarray.
'Only clearing the thread,' Carrie said softly.
'Go to bed,' Momma said curtly, and the fear was back in her eyes.
'Yes,
(she was afraid i'd knock the closet door right off its hinges)
Momma,'
(and i think i could i think i could yes i think i could)
From The Shadow Exploded (p. 58):
Margaret White was born and raised in Motton, a small town which borders Chamberlain and sends its tuition students to Chamberlain's junior and senior high schools. Her parents were fairly well-to-do; they owned a prosperous night spot just outside the Motton town limits called The Jolly Roadhouse. Margaret's father, John Brigham, was killed in a barroom shooting incident in the summer of 1959.
Margaret Brigham, who was then almost thirty, began attending fundamentalist prayer meetings. Her mother had become involved with a new man (Harold Alison, whom she later married) and they both wanted Margaret out of the house – she believed her mother, Judith, and Harold Alison were living in sin and made her views known frequently. Judith Brigham expected her daughter to remain a spinster the rest of her life. In the more pungent phraseology of her soon-to-be stepfather, 'Margaret had a face like the ass end of a gasoline truck and a body to match.' He also referred to her as 'a little prayin' Jesus.'
Margaret refused to leave until 1960, when she met Ralph White at a revival meeting. In September of that year she left the Brigham residence in Motton and moved to a small flat in Chamberlain Centre.
The courtship of Margaret Brigham, and Ralph White terminated in marriage on March 23, 1962. On April 3, 1962, Margaret White was admitted briefly to Westover Doctors Hospital.
'Nope, she wouldn't tell us what was wrong,' Harold Alison said. 'The one time we went to see her she told us we were living in adultery even though we were hitched, and we were going to hell. She said God had put an invisible mark on our foreheads, but she could see it. Acted crazy as a bat in a henhouse, she did. Her mom tried to be nice, tried to find out what the matter with her was. She got hysterical and started to rave about an angel with a sword who would walk through the parking lots of roadhouses and cut down the wicked. We left.'
Judith Alison, however, had at least an idea of what might have been wrong with her daughter; she thought that Margaret had gone through a miscarriage. If so, the baby was conceived out of wedlock. Confirmation of this would shed an interesting light on the character of Carrie's mother.
In a long and rather hysterical letter to her mother dated August 19, 1962, Margaret said that she and Ralph were living sinlessly, without 'the Curse of Intercourse'. She urged Harold and Judith Alison to close their 'abode of wickedness' and do likewise. 'It is,' Margaret declares near the end of her letter, 'the only [sic] way you & That Man can avoid the Rain of Blood yet to come. Ralph & I, like Mary & Joseph, will neither know or polute [sic] each others flesh. If there is issue, let it be Divine.'
Of course, the calendar tells us that Carrie was conceived later that same year …
The girls dressed quietly for their Monday morning Period One gym class, with no horseplay or little screaming catcalls, and none of them were very surprised when Miss Desjardin slammed open the locker-room and walked in. Her silver whistle dangling between her small breasts, and if her shorts were the ones she had been wearing on Friday, no trace of Carrie's bloody handprint remained.
The girls continued to dress sullenly, not looking at her.
'Aren't you the bunch to send out for graduation,' Miss Desjardin said softly. 'When is it? A month? And the spring Ball even less than that. Most of you have your dates and gowns already, I bet. Sue, you'll be going with Tommy Ross. Helen, Roy Evarts. Chris, I imagine you can take your pick. Who's the lucky guy?'.
'Billy Nolan,' Chris Hargensen said sullenly.
'Well, isn't he the lucky one?' Desjardin remarked. 'What are you going to give him for a party favour, Chris, a bloody Kotex? Or how about some used toilet paper? I understand these things seem to be your sack these days.'
Chris went red. 'I'm leaving. I don't have to listen to that.'
Desjardin had not been able to get the image of Carrie out of her mind all weekend, Carrie screaming, blubbering, a wet napkin plastered squarely in the middle of her pubic hair – and her own sick, angry reaction.
And now, as Chris tried to storm out past her, she reached out and slammed her against a row of dented, olive-coloured lockers beside the inner door. Chris's eyes widened with shocked disbelief. Then a kind of insane rage filled her face.
'You can't hit us!' she screamed. 'You'll get canned for this! See if you don't, you bitch!'
The other girls winced and sucked breath and stared at the floor. It was getting out of hand. Sue noticed out of the corner of her eye that Fern and Donna Thibodeau were holding hands.
'I don't really care, Hargensen,' Desjardin said. 'If you or any of your girls – think I'm wearing my teacher hat right now, you're making a bad mistake. I just want you all to know that you did a shitty thing on Friday. A really shitty thing.'
Chris Hargensen was sneering at the floor. The rest of the girls were looking miserably at anything but their gym instructor. Sue found herself looking into the shower stall – the scene of the crime – and jerked her glance elsewhere. None of them had ever heard a teacher call anything shitty before.
'Did any of you stop to think that Carrie White has feelings? Do any of you ever stop to think? Sue? Fern? Helen? Jessica? Any of you? You think she's ugly. Well, you're all ugly. I saw it on Friday morning.'
Chris Hargensen was mumbling about her father being a lawyer.
'Shut up!' Desjardin yelled in her face. Chris recoiled so suddenly that her head struck the lockers behind her. She began to whine and rub her head.
'One more remark out of you,' Desjardin said softly, 'and I'll throw you across the room. Want to find out if I'm telling the truth?'
Chris, who had apparently decided she was dealing with a mad-woman, said nothing.
Desjardin put her hands on her hips. 'The office has decided on punishment for you girls. Not my punishment, I'm sorry to say. My idea was three days' suspension and refusal of your prom tickets.'
Several girls looked at each other and muttered unhappily.
'That would have hit you where you live,' Desjardin continued, 'Unfortunately, Ewen is staffed completely by men in its administration wing. I don't believe they have any real conception of how utterly nasty what you did was. So. One week's detention.'