Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Rhoda

  A Life in Stories

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1995 by Ellen Gilchrist

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpts from “Begin the Beguine,” words and music by Cole Porter. Copyright © 1935 by Warner Bros. Inc. (Renewed). “The Desert Song” words by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II, music by Sigmund Romberg. Copyright © 1926 by Warner Bros. Inc. (Renewed). “Embraceable You,” words by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin. Copyright © 1930 WB Music Corp. (Renewed). By permission of Warner Bros. Publications Inc.

  Excerpt from “Me and Bobby McGee” by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster. Copyright © 1969 Combine Music Corporation. By permission of SBK Blackwood Music Inc.

  “Pictures in the Smoke” and an excerpt from “Inventory” from The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker, introduction by Brendan Gill. Copyright © 1926, renewed 1954 by Dorothy Parker. By permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition October 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-63576-346-1

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Revenge

  2. Nineteen Forty-one

  3. The Tree Fort

  4. The Time Capsule

  5. 1944

  6. Victory Over Japan

  7. Perils of the Nile

  8. Blue Satin

  9. The Expansion of the Universe

  10. Music

  11. Some Blue Hills at Sundown

  12. Excerpts From Net of Jewels

  13. Adoration

  14. 1957, a Romance

  15. Love of My Life

  16. Drunk Every Day

  17. Joyce

  18. Going to Join the Poets

  19. A Statue of Aphrodite

  20. Mexico

  21. Paris

  22. A Wedding in Jackson

  23. The Uninsured

  Also by Ellen Gilchrist

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  Introduction

  I invented Rhoda Manning on a beautiful fall day in New Orleans. That morning I set out to write a story with a description at the beginning. I was new to fiction writing at the time and if I read something I liked I would immediately try to write something similar. I think that I had just been shown a description of a tree in a book by John Steinbeck. The description ended with the words “it was everything a tree should be.” That took my breath away and made me want to describe something that fully, with that finality. A vision came to me of the pasture beside my grandmother’s house. In good years it would be a pasture. In bad years it would be pressed into service as a cotton field. I saw the pasture in all its beauty and my cousins and my brother in the center of it building a broad jump pit. The famous Broad Jump Pit to which I was going to be denied access. The Broad Jump Pit was famous in my family long before I wrote about it.

  As I began to describe the pit I realized I was seeing it from the perspective of the roof of the chicken house, an octagonal-shaped structure that was one of my favorite hideouts on the plantation. “Think how it looked from my lonely exile atop the chicken house,” I wrote. That was the first time I wrote in Rhoda Manning’s voice and as soon as I typed the line I knew the little girl as I know myself. By noon I had finished a draft of the story, which is called “Revenge,” and which is the second or third completed short story I ever wrote in my life. I had the story and I had the central character but she did not yet have a name. She was almost Shelby, from “Summer, an Elegy,” but not quite. I had darkened the persona in Shelby, to accommodate the death that shadows that story.

  There are no shadows in Rhoda. Rhoda is passion, energy, light. If germs get inside her, her blood boils up and devours them. If she loses a pearl ring, it’s proof there is no God. If it’s necessary to drop an atomic bomb to save Western Civilization, she’s ready. I had the character by the end of that morning’s work but I did not have a name.

  I went out to run in Audubon Park. The most self-assured woman in New Orleans was running her four miles. This was a woman who had declared, at the height of the running craze, that it was obsessive to run more than four miles a day. I began to run along beside her. “I wrote a funny story this morning,” I said. “May I name a little, fictional girl for you?”

  “What’s she like?” the real Rhoda asked.

  “She’s powerful and she wins.”

  “All right. Go ahead. You may.”

  Now, fifteen years later, I have written many stories about Rhoda. Some of them are blatantly autobiographical and some are made up. Many are true to the real essence of the Rhoda I created on that fall morning. Others miss the mark. If I was in a bad mood or out of sorts with myself, I would savage Rhoda. Of course I only know all this in retrospect. Or think I know it. No writer truly understands the relationship between reality and storytelling. No real storyteller gives a damn about it except in retrospect or in those rare generous moments when they think what they know can be explained.

  The one thing I do know is that something wonderful happens to me when I am writing about Rhoda, especially Rhoda as a child. Because she is a mirror of myself I am able to participate in the story as I write it. I radiate with her curiosity and intelligence, her divine cynicism. I am eight and ten and twelve years old. Those memory banks are evoked most powerfully when I am writing about the child Rhoda alone with one of her obsessions. She is pinning butterflies to cardboard for one of her scientific experiments, let us say. I smell her hands, know her horror and fascination. Science demands sacrifice. Rhoda and I will pay the price. We write the names below the specimens. The cold wind of karma blows over us. We shake it off. We go on with our work.

  So is Rhoda me? I don’t know. She starts off being me and she ends up being my creation. Unlike me she can have varying numbers of brothers of varying ages. She can live in different places at different ages and, of course, she could have any man she wanted if she really wanted one. She has never had a sister but she has always wanted an identical twin and perhaps I will give her one. She was identical twins in the womb, let us say, and one was resorbed by the mother’s body because of a lack of calcium in the diet. Rhoda goes back in a time machine and changes her mother’s diet and the twins are born in perfect health. Twin Rhoda is born first, and then twin Treena Aurora, who will stick by her older sister every day of her life and be her trusted lieutenant. When it is time to study biochemistry and become Nobel laureates in science, they will share the prize.

  In the meantime, we will have to be satisfied with the Rhoda I have created, in all her cosmic loneliness and hope. Here she is then, all her guises under one cover. She would probably like to think of herself being read about on an airplane above the deserts of the west, or alone in a bedroom with a plate of cookies within reach, or to some poor old lady on a sickbed, on a fall day underneath a crimson tree, or a golden one or an orange one.

  Ellen Gilchrist

  February 20, 1995

  Revenge

  It was the summer of the Broad Jump Pit.

  The Broad Jump Pit, how shall I describe it! It was a bright orange rectangle in the middle of a green pasture. It was three feet deep, filled with river sand and sawdus
t. A real cinder track led up to it, ending where tall poles for pole-vaulting rose forever in the still Delta air.

  I am looking through the old binoculars. I am watching Bunky coming at a run down the cinder path, pausing expertly at the jump-off line, then rising into the air, heels stretched far out in front of him, landing in the sawdust. Before the dust has settled Saint John comes running with the tape, calling out measurements in his high, excitable voice.

  Next comes my thirteen-year-old brother, Dudley, coming at a brisk jog down the track, the pole-vaulting pole held lightly in his delicate hands, then vaulting, high into the sky. His skinny tanned legs make a last, desperate surge, and he is clear and over.

  Think how it looked from my lonely exile atop the chicken house. I was ten years old, the only girl in a house full of cousins. There were six of us, shipped to the Delta for the summer, dumped on my grandmother right in the middle of a world war.

  They built this wonder in answer to a V-Mail letter from my father in Europe. The war was going well, my father wrote, within a year the Allies would triumph over the forces of evil, the world would be at peace, and the Olympic torch would again be brought down from its mountain and carried to Zurich or Amsterdam or London or Mexico City, wherever free men lived and worshiped sports. My father had been a participant in an Olympic event when he was young.

  Therefore, the letter continued, Dudley and Bunky and Philip and Saint John and Oliver were to begin training. The United States would need athletes now, not soldiers.

  They were to train for broad jumping and pole-vaulting and discus throwing, for fifty-, one-hundred-, and four-hundred-yard dashes, for high and low hurdles. The letter included instructions for building the pit, for making pole-vaulting poles out of cane, and for converting ordinary sawhorses into hurdles. It ended with a page of tips for proper eating and admonished Dudley to take good care of me as I was my father’s own dear sweet little girl.

  The letter came one afternoon. Early the next morning they began construction. Around noon I wandered out to the pasture to see how they were coming along. I picked up a shovel.

  “Put that down, Rhoda,” Dudley said. “Don’t bother us now. We’re working.”

  “I know it,” I said. “I’m going to help.”

  “No, you’re not,” Bunky said. “This is the Broad Jump Pit. We’re starting our training.”

  “I’m going to do it too,” I said. “I’m going to be in training.”

  “Get out of here now,” Dudley said. “This is only for boys, Rhoda. This isn’t a game.”

  “I’m going to dig it if I want to,” I said, picking up a shovelful of dirt and throwing it on Philip. On second thought I picked up another shovelful and threw it on Bunky.

  “Get out of here, Ratface,” Philip yelled at me. “You German spy.” He was referring to the initials on my Girl Scout uniform.

  “You goddamn niggers,” I yelled. “You niggers. I’m digging this if I want to and you can’t stop me, you nasty niggers, you Japs, you Jews.” I was throwing dirt on everyone now. Dudley grabbed the shovel and wrestled me to the ground. He held my arms down in the coarse grass and peered into my face.

  “Rhoda, you’re not having anything to do with this Broad Jump Pit. And if you set foot inside this pasture or come around here and touch anything we will break your legs and drown you in the bayou with a crowbar around your neck.” He was twisting my leg until it creaked at the joints. “Do you get it, Rhoda? Do you understand me?”

  “Let me up,” I was screaming, my rage threatening to split open my skull. “Let me up, you goddamn nigger, you Jap, you spy. I’m telling Grannie and you’re going to get the worst whipping of your life. And you better quit digging this hole for the horses to fall in. Let me up, let me up. Let me go.”

  “You’ve been ruining everything we’ve thought up all summer,” Dudley said, “and you’re not setting foot inside this pasture.”

  In the end they dragged me back to the house, and I ran screaming into the kitchen where Grannie and Calvin, the black man who did the cooking, tried to comfort me, feeding me pound cake and offering to let me help with the mayonnaise.

  “You be a sweet girl, Rhoda,” my grandmother said, “and this afternoon we’ll go over to Eisenglas Plantation to play with Miss Ann Wentzel.”

  “I don’t want to play with Miss Ann Wentzel,” I screamed. “I hate Miss Ann Wentzel. She’s fat and she calls me a Yankee. She said my socks were ugly.”

  “Why, Rhoda,” my grandmother said. “I’m surprised at you. Miss Ann Wentzel is your own sweet friend. Her momma was your momma’s roommate at All Saint’s. How can you talk like that?”

  “She’s a nigger,” I screamed. “She’s a goddamned nigger German spy.”

  “Now it’s coming. Here comes the temper,” Calvin said, rolling his eyes back in their sockets to make me madder. I threw my second fit of the morning, beating my fists into a door frame. My grandmother seized me in soft arms. She led me to a bedroom where I sobbed myself to sleep in a sea of down pillows.

  The construction went on for several weeks. As soon as they finished breakfast every morning they started out for the pasture. Wood had to be burned to make cinders, sawdust brought from the sawmill, sand hauled up from the riverbank by wheelbarrow.

  When the pit was finished the savage training began. From my several vantage points I watched them. Up and down, up and down they ran, dove, flew, sprinted. Drenched with sweat they wrestled each other to the ground in bitter feuds over distances and times and fractions of inches.

  Dudley was their self-appointed leader. He drove them like a demon. They began each morning by running around the edge of the pasture several times, then practicing their hurdles and dashes, then on to discus throwing and calisthenics. Then on to the Broad Jump Pit with its endless challenges.

  They even pressed the old mare into service. Saint John was from New Orleans and knew the British ambassador and was thinking of being a polo player. Up and down the pasture he drove the poor old creature, leaning far out of the saddle, swatting a basketball with my grandaddy’s cane.

  I spied on them from the swing that went out over the bayou, and from the roof of the chicken house, and sometimes from the pasture fence itself, calling out insults or attempts to make them jealous.

  “Guess what,” I would yell, “I’m going to town to the Chinaman’s store.” “Guess what, I’m getting to go to the beauty parlor.” “Doctor Biggs says you’re adopted.”

  They ignored me. At meals they sat together at one end of the table, making jokes about my temper and my red hair, opening their mouths so I could see their half-chewed food, burping loudly in my direction.

  At night they pulled their cots together on the sleeping porch, plotting against me while I slept beneath my grandmother’s window, listening to the soft assurance of her snoring.

  I began to pray the Japs would win the war, would come marching into Issaquena County and take them prisoners, starving and torturing them, sticking bamboo splinters under their fingernails. I saw myself in the Japanese colonel’s office, turning them in, writing their names down, myself being treated like an honored guest, drinking tea from tiny blue cups like the ones the Chinaman had in his store.

  They would be outside, tied up with wire. There would be Dudley, begging for mercy. What good to him now his loyal gang, his photographic memory, his trick magnet dogs, his perfect pitch, his camp shorts, his Baby Brownie camera.

  I prayed they would get polio, would be consigned forever to iron lungs. I put myself to sleep at night imagining their labored breathing, their five little wheelchairs lined up by the store as I drove by in my father’s Packard, my arm around the jacket of his blue uniform, on my way to Hollywood for my screen test.

  Meanwhile, I practiced dancing. My grandmother had a black housekeeper named Baby Doll who was a wonderful dancer. In the mornings I followed her around while she dusted, begging for dancing lessons. She was a big woman, as tall as a man, and gave off a dark rich sm
ell, an unforgettable incense, a combination of Evening in Paris and the sweet perfume of the cabins.

  Baby Doll wore bright skirts and on her blouses a pin that said REMEMBER, then a real pearl, then HARBOR. She was engaged to a sailor and was going to California to be rich as soon as the war was over.

  I would put a stack of heavy, scratched records on the record player, and Baby Doll and I would dance through the parlors to the music of Glenn Miller or Guy Lombardo or Tommy Dorsey.

  Sometimes I stood on a stool in front of the fireplace and made up lyrics while Baby Doll acted them out, moving lightly across the old dark rugs, turning and swooping and shaking and gliding.

  Outside the summer sun beat down on the Delta, beating down a million volts a minute, feeding the soybeans and cotton and clover, sucking Steele’s Bayou up into the clouds, beating down on the road and the store, on the pecans and elms and magnolias, on the men at work in the fields, on the athletes at work in the pasture.

  Inside Baby Doll and I would be dancing. Or Guy Lombardo would be playing “Begin the Beguine” and I would be belting out lyrics.

  “Oh, let them begin . . . we don’t care,

  America all . . . ways does its share,

  We’ll be there with plenty of ammo,

  Allies . . . don’t ever despair . . .”

  Baby Doll thought I was a genius. If I was having an especially creative morning she would go running out to the kitchen and bring anyone she could find to hear me.

  “Oh, let them begin any warrr . . .” I would be singing, tapping one foot against the fireplace tiles, waving my arms around like a conductor.

  “Uncle Sam will fight

  for the underrr . . . doggg.

  Never fear, Allies, never fear.”

  A new record would drop. Baby Doll would swoop me into her fragrant arms, and we would break into an improvisation on Tommy Dorsey’s “Boogie-Woogie.”