They stayed late at the table, later than Emily could ever remember. Usually they were up and away by seven o’clock for the mandatory hour of TV togetherness that Jenny had instituted. But on this night it was near nine before Jenny rose, interrupting another gale of laughter at one of Lulu’s downtown dialogues, as she came to call them.
“Lulu, dear, this crowd could and would sit here and monopolize you all night, but I know how early you and Emily get up, and we must not keep you any longer,” she said, smiling.
Lulu clapped a hand over her mouth.
“You know, the one thing I hate most about Southern women is how they run on, and here I am doing it,” she said. “I am so embarrassed. I guess it’s because you’re all such good listeners, and nobody in my crowd pays any attention to me. They just say, ‘Oh, well, that’s just Lulu.’ So I appreciate your indulgence and I promise not to hold you captive ever again.”
“We’re willing captives,” Jenny said. “We’ll do it again anytime you want to. We’ve all learned more about old Charleston in two hours than we have in all our lives. Next time we’ll just start earlier.”
“Oh,” Lulu said ruefully. “I hope there is a next time.”
A chorus of Parmenter voices assured her there would be.
“I hope we can make it a regular affair,” Walter said, beaming at her. And then, turning to Emily, “You listen to Lulu. You can learn all you need to know about the kind of life I want for you from her. You can learn to be a lady.”
Emily felt her cheeks heat. Anger flared up again. Anger at her father, anger at Lulu.
“I’m not a lady,” she said, not looking at anyone. “I’m a river-swamp kid with dirty shoes.”
“You’ve got the makings of something better than a lady,” Lulu said seriously to Emily. “You’ve got the makings of a terrific woman. That’s something I just know. But you’re right about one thing. You sure have got dirty shoes. So have I, for that matter. Would you do me the honor of walking me home in your dirty shoes? I’d like to see what you think of my nest, as my mother insists on calling it.”
The anger faded. Liking stood trembling off at the edge of Emily’s consciousness, waiting to creep in.
“Sure,” she said nonchalantly. “Can Elvis come?”
He was nowhere to be found. But when they had walked through the warm, mothy darkness to the pool of dim light that illumined the entrance to the barn’s staircase, Elvis was waiting for them, thumping his tail and grinning.
“What are you doing here?” Emily asked him, not at all pleased to see him back at the fringe of Lulu’s domain.
“He knows where you are all the time,” Lulu said. “I’ve noticed that. I’ll see him get up and start off in one direction or another, and in a minute, there you are. It’s uncanny. Have you been casting spells on dogs, Emily?”
“He’s always just kind of done that,” Emily said, scratching Elvis’s ears. “It’s like he’s sort of my brother or something.”
“Good brother to have,” Lulu said. “Elvis makes three; you’re lucky. I’m an only child. I think I would have loved having a brother.”
“I had four, counting Elvis. And you would have loved having Buddy. And he’d like you, too,” she thought, to her surprise.
But she said nothing. She wasn’t ready to share Buddy with Lulu Foxworth.
They groped their way up the old staircase. It needed a much stronger light, Emily noticed. For some reason, the knowledge shamed her. Lulu could not have been used to such negligence. She would tell Jenny; Jenny would see to it.
At the top of the staircase Lulu unlocked the newly glossy door and pushed it open.
“Ta-daaa!” she said.
Emily walked into the apartment and stood still, at first unable to process it. Under this strange new vision of fluttering white and shining bare wood and small flares of color and rioting green, she kept seeing the old apartment, weeping cobwebs over its decaying bones.
“Wow!” Emily said inadequately.
Lulu smiled at her. “Wow is right. At least it’s better now that I’ve sort of edited my mother’s version of it. Come on in.”
They moved into the big room that served as a bed–sitting room. Behind them Elvis whined, but did not come in until Emily said, “Oh, come on in. You’ve already…”
She did not finish. She did not want Lulu to know that she had seen Elvis here earlier in the day, a willing receptacle for her unknowable anguish.
Elvis came in and lay down on the small white rug beside the bed and laid his head on his crossed paws. Home, his position said.
“No, it’s not,” Emily thought to him.
He thumped his tail again. I know.
Only one lamp was lit in the big room, on a low table beside the pretty little painted bed. The French one, Emily thought, remembering what Lulu’s mother had said on the day she had first seen the room. It’s like a kid’s drawing of flowers and vines. I’ve seen better than that at Wal-Mart. I could do that.
The narrow bed had an iron canopy, and clouds of what looked to be mosquito netting puddled on the polished cypress floor. A plain white cotton bedspread covered it, and there was only one pillow, also white. At the foot was folded a quilt, so faded with age that you could hardly make out its pattern of tiny blue flowers. Beside it, on the floor, a sumptuous drift of white fleece served as a rug, sheepskin perhaps, Emily thought. She had never seen a sheepskin rug. Sheep and warmth were not Lowcountry prerequisites. The rug was the only thing in the room that spoke of privilege. Even with only a narrow circle of light from the lamp, you could see that the room was as plain as a nun’s cell.
And yet…it was not. It drew you in like quicksand, promising peace and rest and dreamless sleep. A bank of tall green plants forested the wall behind the bed, and with the netting, nights here must be like sleeping in a toothless jungle. Old embroidered pillows were piled on a low sofa, which was covered with what looked to be another age-bleached quilt. The deep, small-paned windows, open now, were uncurtained, letting in moonlight or sunlight or stormlight or whatever flooded the marshes. There were a few plants in rough terra cotta pots on the windowsills, herbs, Emily thought. Aunt Jenny had similar ones in her garden. A plain wooden bookshelf covered the wall opposite the bed, crammed untidily with books. Emily’s chest tightened. Buddy had had one in his room that might have been this one’s twin. There was a little radio, a small cassette player, and a battered laptop on one of the shelves. These, plus a deep armchair and ottoman under the window, partly covered by a length of batik the colors of desert sand and adobe walls, were the only other significant furnishings in the room. Emily wondered where the raj procession of furnishings had gone.
On the last unadorned wall a large painting burned like a wildfire, turning the nun’s cell into something else entirely, something sensuous and half-hidden and throbbing with primal life. In it a jaguar unlike any that had ever padded the earth prowled through a fever dream of tropical foliage. Blood-red pyramids were silhouetted against an empty, murderous blue sky, and over them old, terrible birds wheeled and dove. A squat brown man held up a stone vessel to the sky, a vessel dripping red. Emily felt a surge of fear and heat and a fierce joy start deep in her stomach and spread out all over her. Overwhelming. Terrifying. Sweet. She turned to look at Lulu, almost expecting to see, instead of the thin golden blade of a girl she knew, a dark, half-naked priestess, chanting. The painting was totally unlike the trembling girl who had come to them, or this stark Mediterranean-washed room. And yet again…it was right. Emily thought of Lulu’s whisper she had only half heard on that first day that the Foxworths came. “Penitential.” If that was so, then here was the altar at which the penitent would kneel.
“Richard Hagerty,” Lulu smiled at her. “A Charleston painter I’ve loved since I was a little girl. He’s a doctor, too. I guess, if you hit people like this, you need to be able to heal them, too. Do you like it?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like anything else. You wouldn’t eve
r want flowers or ancestors after you saw it, would you?”
Lulu laughed.
“No, you wouldn’t. It outrages a lot of people. My mother absolutely hates it. She says it’s pagan. Of course, that’s the whole idea. Come in and I’ll make us some iced tea and then I promise I’ll let you go.”
Emily came into the room and sat down tentatively on the sofa. Elvis leaped up to settle beside her. Lulu went into the kitchen to make the tea, and Emily and Elvis sat listening to the night sounds of the summer Lowcountry: the dissonant song of the katydids off in the live oaks, the stealthy scramblings of some small creature in the cordgrass on the marsh, the yip of a restless puppy in the kennels, the all-swallowing silence. There was no moon, but the stars burned hot and huge and near. The sky seemed lower than it usually did; it seemed to lean down to look into the windows of Lulu Foxworth’s room. Emily almost squirmed under the weight of it. She did not know if she could live in this room. Even while it soothed you, it asked everything of you.
Lulu came out with iced tea on a tole tray.
“So what’s the verdict?” she said. “Do you approve of my lair?”
“Yes. It’s really unusual,” Emily said politely. In point of fact, she had no idea if she liked the room or not, just that she would see it in her mind’s eye forever.
There was a small silence as they drank their tea, and then Emily said, “Where’s all that stuff your folks brought out here? It looked like enough to furnish a whole house.”
“Most of it’s downstairs in that space your father said he might make into a living room. I told my mother that I didn’t want it, but she hears what she wants to hear, and that’s that. So I just moved most of it down there. I’ll get somebody to move it out when your dad needs the space.”
“You moved all that stuff by yourself?”
“Yes. I’m a lot stronger than I look right now, Emily. I was on the varsity field hockey team at school my first two years there.”
Debutantes could play rowdy sweaty contact sports, too. Emily snapped the knowledge into the grid of Lulu lore she was accumulating.
“I don’t think your mother’s going to like it very much,” she said.
“I know damned well she isn’t. But this is my place, not hers. It’s the first one I’ve ever had that suited me, and not the vapory lady of some eighteenth-century manor.”
“Wouldn’t your mother have bought you new furniture if you wanted it?” Emily said. In her world, if you disliked what you had, you bought new—if you could afford it. That the Sweetwater Plantation house was sparsely furnished with peeling old things only meant that the Parmenters couldn’t afford new. She had never questioned the veracity of that.
“Well, downtown you don’t buy your furniture,” Lulu said, grinning. “You have your furniture.”
They drank tea again in silence, and then Lulu said, “Listen, Emily, I know you saw Elvis in here with me this afternoon. I just plain went and got him. I was hurting very badly, and I needed something to hold onto. The puppies aren’t people enough yet, and I couldn’t impose on you all. But Elvis just feels so…permanent.”
“I know,” Emily said. The absurdity of speaking of her dog as if he were a human being was not lost on her, but it did not seem to matter here.
“But I shouldn’t have done it,” Lulu said. “I hurt you, and I really didn’t mean that. I want you to know that he’s your dog to the core. He whined and looked at the door when you came up. He didn’t leave me, but he wanted to. When I finally was…better again, he was out the door like a shot, back to you.”
Emily scratched Elvis’s ears, and he shifted position, but did not wake.
“Are you really sick?” she asked Lulu. She had never spoken to anyone as intimately as she was doing now, except Buddy, of course. This was something else to ponder when she was alone.
“In a way, yes, I am,” Lulu said. Her face was in shadow, and she did not look at Emily.
“Then why aren’t you at home with your folks? I don’t think we can take care of you right if you’re really, truly sick.”
“Only you all can,” Lulu said. “You all and the dogs and this room and this place. It’s not like sick sick, with fever and germs. My folks would only make it worse. They wouldn’t mean to, but they would. As I said, my mother hears only what she wants to hear. If I tried to tell her what was really wrong with me, she’d just say I was tired and needed a little rest. It’s what she did say, as a matter of fact. So I knew I’d have to get myself well, and when I came here and saw the dogs, I knew that if I could just get here, I could maybe heal myself. And I think perhaps I can. Elvis was a big help today. You all were, tonight.”
Emily said nothing. Huge questions hung in the air between them, but she could not bring herself to ask them. This was painful and frightening; adult territory. I am not ready to know this stuff, she thought resentfully. I’m not old enough.
As if she had read Emily’s thoughts, Lulu sighed and scrubbed her face with her hands and straightened up on the sofa.
“This is not fair to you, and I’m not going to do it. Whatever is ailing me is my problem; I don’t want any of you to feel like you have to do something about me. I promise I’m not nuts, or dangerous, or anything. I’m not going to come howling up your stairs with a butcher knife—”
The image was so awful that Emily winced and Lulu laughed and brushed the tangled red hair off her face.
“To put it in a nutshell, so you won’t be scared of me, I just got myself too deep into things I couldn’t do anything about,” Lulu said. “I’ve never really felt like I belonged in the Charleston my family has lived in back to Adam, although it’s so beautiful and seductive that it just takes your breath away sometimes. But I did the walk-through so well that nobody realized that, not even me, sometimes. And then I went off to Randolph Macon, but that was Mother’s choice, too, and from the first it didn’t fit. I’d wanted to go to Bennington, in Vermont; they let you pretty much choose your own structure, I’d heard. But of course my mother almost had a hissy-fit. It was just easier to go on to Randolph Macon. And there’s a lot about it I loved, and still do, but it was like Charleston; it didn’t fit me naturally. So I got myself into every activity I could find so I didn’t have to think about it, and got so strung out and tired and felt so trapped in it all, that I couldn’t seem to see one day ahead. And then, there was the famous debutante season looming out there, and…one day I just started crying and couldn’t stop. My mother came and got me and took me to a discreet shrink the day after I got home, and he said basically that I had gotten myself into a no-win situation so I could avoid facing up to my life, instead of trying to take charge of it. God, I couldn’t have changed a light bulb at that point, much less my life. He was just one more person who didn’t listen to me.”
“So what did you do?” Emily said, fascinated. Debutantes didn’t always want to be that. Another chip of knowledge for the grid.
“I told him to go fuck himself, and went home and locked myself in my room, and wouldn’t come out. That’s when my parents finally saw that I wasn’t just ‘tired,’ but they couldn’t find anything else to call it, so they told everybody in town they’d been told I needed absolute quiet and rest, and that I’d come roaring back for the winter season, full of piss and vinegar. When she saw that the dogs got through to me when nothing else did, Mother had the idea about my boarding here for the summer. It solved everything. She told people that I’d gone to spend the summer with a nice plantation family and learn about their prize Boykins, a new passion of mine, and was happy as a dead pig in the sunshine. I just let her do it. I didn’t care what she told them, as long as I could get here. I knew I’d die back home. And I knew that here, maybe I could learn to live.”
She fell silent, and Emily simply looked at her. This was more than any adult in her life had ever offered her. More intimate, more complex. More demanding. She didn’t know how she should respond. Everything Lulu said rang true, but somehow Emily thought there
had to be more. Lulu’s face when she had come upon her that afternoon had looked…shattered. Despairing. Terrified. That face did not seem to Emily to belong to someone saving herself. She thought of a reproduction of a painting Buddy had once showed her, in an art book. It was called The Scream, by some Scandinavian artist, and it had utterly terrified Emily. What if, one day, she herself would come to feel that way? She knew that it would kill her.
Lulu had looked like that.
“Well, I hope you get better soon,” she said faintly and inanely, and Lulu laughed again and gave her a small hug around the shoulders.
“I will. Don’t give all this babbling another thought. This is the best place I could possibly be right now, and you and Elvis are a big part of it. All of you are. It’s going to work out fine. But maybe, if I get to feeling really low again, I could borrow Elvis for a few hours or a night?”
Suddenly Emily felt calm, centered, powerful—the recipient of mysteries, the granter of boons.
“Sure,” she said. “Just let me know. Only sometimes I need him too, and we’d have to work out a schedule. In case you hadn’t noticed, my father is just about killing me.”
Lulu nodded. “They will do it, won’t they? Your dad seems nice, though. Steady. Just so steady….”
“He’s steady all right,” Emily snapped. Walter Parmenter was to be accorded no acclaim. “There’s only one way, and that’s his way, and he doesn’t any more hear what I say than your parents do. There are two things that matter more to him than anything or anybody, and that’s the dogs and his great ambition. More than anything in the world he wants to be a part of this fancy plantation society of y’all’s, and he thinks the dogs are going to get him there. He’s over the moon that you’re here this summer; he thinks it means that he’s gotten in.”
“God, why does he want that?” Lulu said fervently. “This is so much realer—”
“He wants to make me a debutante, too,” Emily rushed on. She was in full spate now. “Can you imagine anything worse?”
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