Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I bought a dress,” Rhoda said. “You want to see it?”

  Ten minutes later Rhoda came down the stairs from her room wearing the dress. Cynthia was right behind her holding a pearl necklace they had found in Ariane’s jewelry box.

  “What do you think?” Rhoda asked and began to turn and turn in front of her grandmother. “Isn’t it gorgeous? Aren’t you crazy about it?”

  “What are you thinking of?” Her grandmother stood up and began to wave her hands in the air. “Take that off immediately. Where did that come from? Rhoda, Rhoda, Rhoda, you are the craziest child I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “You don’t like it?” Rhoda was stunned. There was no end to the insanity of grown people, especially her mother’s people from the Delta.

  “Oh, my,” Cynthia said, and laid the pearls down carefully on a chair. “Maybe I’d better go home.”

  At four that afternoon Nell drove Rhoda back to the Fashion M’Lady and followed her into the store and they gave back the dress and retrieved the nine dollars and fifty cents. “I tried to tell her it wasn’t suitable,” the saleslady lamely defended herself.

  “The very idea,” Nell said. “The very idea that you would let her try it on, much less pay for it and bring it home.”

  “She wanted it. She had the money. Her friend was with her. The judge’s youngest daughter, well, I heard she wasn’t all they wanted her to be.”

  “Just refund the money, please,” Nell insisted. “And in the future try to use some judgment.”

  They drove back home in silence. Nell’s short legs barely reached the pedals of the old Chevrolet Dudley had left for her to drive. Her stockings, which had been rolled up above her knees and held in place with garters, were now halfway down her legs. Her petticoat was down at least an inch and a half beneath her hem. Her hands gripped the wheel. She drove down Main Street to the house and up into the side yard and parked the car.

  “It is Saturday afternoon,” she said, when she turned off the key. “Don’t let anything else happen, Rhoda. Go in the house and find yourself something to do until supper.”

  Rhoda got out of the car without a word and walked up to the back door. A praying mantis was hanging on the screen. She picked him up and stuck him to her skirt and carried him inside to add to her collection. She stopped in the kitchen and got a jelly glass and transferred him to that and then covered the jelly glass with a piece of wax paper and took a rubber band out of a drawer and put it around the top. Then she took an ice pick and made a little circle of holes to let the air in.

  Dudley was in the living room with Ingersol. “Because of you I had to take care of the baby,” he said. “Because of you I didn’t get to go to Mike Reilly’s and play basketball.”

  “Tough luck,” Rhoda called out and walked on past him and up the stairs. She considered falling down the stairs and pretending to break her leg but she decided it wasn’t worth it. She had better things to do. She had to finish Below the Salt by Thomas Costain and she needed to work on the telephone she was making out of a shoebox.

  She went into her room and locked the door. She got the cardboard telephone out from underneath her bed and also a loaf of bread and a jar of mayonnaise. She spread some mayonnaise on a piece of bread and added another piece for a top. She sat the praying mantis on a bookshelf and tapped the jar to make sure it was still alive. Then she lay down on top of her dark red silk eiderdown comforter and opened the book that was on her pillow. She took a big bite of her mayonnaise sandwich. She began to read.

  A sudden draft almost extinguished the candle held by the countess. Tostig moved a screen which stood against the wall and propped it up around her, so she would have no further trouble.

  “What is Richard doing in Wales?”

  “He is there with his lady wife.”

  “His wife!” exclaimed the countess, her voice rising with surprise. “Richard is married? Why did I not know of this? And who is the bride?”

  “He is married”—Tostig seemed reluctant to give voice to such dangerous information—“he is married to the Princess Eleanor of Brittany.”

  “This is utter nonsense! You can’t know what you’re saying, Tostig. The princess is a state prisoner. She is held in one of the king’s castles. I believe it is Corfe, although I have never been able to get any information from my husband. He may not know himself.”

  “She escaped from Corfe Castle several weeks ago, my lady.”

  The countess stamped a foot in disbelief and exasperation. “You can’t mean what you are saying! This is unbelievable. You stand there and tell me with a straight face these extraordinary things. . . .”

  Rhoda grabbed the mayonnaise and added a layer to the crust of the bread. An almond-shaped piece of mayonnaise fell on the page. Rhoda wiped it off with her finger and went on reading. England was better than Arabia. In England a countess could wear all the blue satin she needed, she could stamp her feet while properly attired, she could get to be a queen while she was still young enough to know how to act, she could be heard.

  Rhoda finished off the sandwich and dove back in.

  Downstairs, Nell had finally managed to get Ariane and Dudley on the phone. “I can’t handle her,” she was saying. “She went downtown this afternoon and bought a cocktail dress in a store. I want you to tell her to stop running off all over town. And she never eats anything. She hasn’t eaten a bite I’ve fixed her since you left.”

  “Let her starve,” Dudley said. “Lock her in her room with bread and water.”

  “We’ll come on home tomorrow.” Ariane took the phone away from him and spoke sweetly into the receiver. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  “The princess must have lost her head completely!” exclaimed the countess. “Although she was a state prisoner, she remained high on the list of succession. By running away and marrying a commoner, she has forfeited all chance of high preferment.”

  “She has lost her liking for heights, my lady. The cell in which she was confined was very high. It was at the top of a forty-foot shaft in the castle wall. She was kept there for seven years! She prefers now to live on a less exalted level, even though it means being the wife of a poor knight. My lady, they are very much in love with each other.”

  Rhoda had left the bed now and was lying on the floor underneath it. It was a high four-poster bed and the space beneath it was just the right size for a twelve-year-old girl, her eiderdown comforter, her provisions, and her book. She sang the book to herself as she read it, here in her life, in the vast confines of the only world there is.

  The Expansion of the Universe

  It was Saturday afternoon in Harrisburg, Illinois. Rhoda was lying on the bed with catalogs all around her, pretending to be ordering things. It was fall outside the window, Rhoda’s favorite time of year. “The fall is so poignant,” she was fond of saying. This fall was more poignant than ever because Rhoda had started menstruating on the thirteenth of September. Thirteen, her lucky number. Rhoda had been dying to start menstruating. Everyone she knew had started. Shirley Hancock and Dixie Lee Carouthers and Naomi and everyone who was anyone in the ninth grade had started. It was beginning to look like Rhoda would be the last person in Southern Illinois to menstruate. Now, finally, right in the middle of a Friday night double feature at the picture show, she had started. She had stuffed some toilet paper into her pants and hurried back down the aisle and pulled Letitia and Naomi back to the restroom with her. They huddled together, very excited. Rhoda’s arms were on her friends’ shoulders. “I started,” she said. “It’s on my pants. Oh, God, I thought I never would.”

  “You’ve got to have a belt,” Letitia said. “I’m going home and get you a belt. You stay right here.”

  “She doesn’t need a belt,” Naomi said. “All she needs is to pin one to her pants. Where’s a quarter?” Someone produced a quarter and they stuck it in the machine and the Kotex came sliding out and Rhoda pinned it inside her pants and they went back into the theater to tell ev
eryone else. A Date with Judy, starring Elizabeth Taylor, was playing. Rhoda snuggled down in her accustomed seat, six rows from the front on the left-hand aisle. It was too good to be true. It was wonderful.

  It was almost a week later when her mother discovered what had happened. Rhoda tossed the information over her shoulder on her way out the door. “I fell off the roof last week,” she said. “Did I tell you that?”

  “You did what? What are you talking about?”

  “I started menstruating. I got my period. You know, fell off the roof.”

  “Oh, my God,” Ariane said. “What are you talking about, Rhoda? Where were you? What did you do about it? WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?”

  “I knew what to do. I was at the picture show. Naomi gave me some Kotex.”

  “Rhoda. Don’t leave. Wait a minute, you have to talk to me about this. Where are you going?” Rhoda’s mother dropped the scarf she was knitting and stood beside the chair.

  “I’m going to cheerleader practice. I’m late.”

  “Rhoda, you have to have a belt. You have to use the right things. I want to take you to Doctor Usry. You can’t just start menstruating.”

  “We’re going to get some Tampax. Donna Marie and Letitia and I. We’re going to learn to wear it.” Then she was gone, as Rhoda was always going, leaving her mother standing in a doorway or the middle of a room with her jaw clenched and her nails digging into her palms and everything she had believed all her life in question.

  Now it was October and Rhoda was lying on the bed among the catalogs watching the October sun outside the window and getting bored with Saturday afternoon. She decided to get dressed and go downtown to see if Philip Holloman was sitting on his stool at the drugstore. Philip Holloman was a friend of Bob Rosen’s and Rhoda was madly in love with Bob Rosen, who was nineteen years old and off at school in Champaign-Urbana.

  Bob Rosen was the smartest person Rhoda had ever known. He played saxophone and laughed at everything and taught her how to dress and about jazz and took her riding in his car and gave her passionate kisses whenever his girlfriend was mad at him. She was mad at him a lot. Her name was Anne and she worked in a dress shop downtown and she was always frowning. Every time Rhoda had ever seen her she was frowning. Because of this Rhoda was certain that sooner or later Bob Rosen would break up with her and get his pin back. In the meantime she would be standing by, she would be his friend or his protégée or anything he wanted her to be. She would memorize the books and records he told her to buy. She would wear the clothes he told her to wear and write for The Purple Clarion and be a cheerleader and march with the band and do everything he directed her to do. So he would love her. Love me, love me, love me, she chanted to the dark bushes, alone in the yard at night, sending him messages through the stars. Love me, love me, love me, love me.

  Rhoda walked down Rollston Street toward the town, concentrating on making Bob Rosen love her. She walked past the ivy-colored walls of the Clayton Place, past the new Oldsmobile Stephanie Hinton got to drive to school, past the hospital and the bakery and the filling station. The Sweet Shop stood on its corner with its pink-and-white gingerbread trim. I could stop off and get a lemon phosphate before I go to the drugstore, Rhoda thought. Or one of those things that Dudley likes with ice cream in the lemonade. There was something strange about the Sweet Shop. Something spooky and unhealthy. Rhoda was more comfortable with the drugstore, where the vices were mixed in with Band-Aids and hot water bottles and magazines and aspirins.

  Leta Ainsley was in the Sweet Shop. Leaning up against a counter with her big foreign-looking face turned toward the door. She had been in Japan before she came to Harrisburg. She had strange ideas and hair that grew around her lips. She was the Junior editor of The Purple Clarion where Rhoda was making her start as a reporter. She had let Rhoda wear her coat and her horn-rimmed glasses when the photographer came to take a picture of The Purple Clarion staff for the yearbook.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Leta said, drawing Rhoda over to a table by the window. “You wouldn’t believe what happened to me. I’ve got to talk to someone.”

  “What happened?” Rhoda moved in close, getting a whiff of Leta’s Tabu.

  “I’ve been, ahh, in a man’s apartment.” Leta paused and looked around. She bent near. The hairs above her lip stood out like bristles. Rhoda couldn’t take her eyes off them. Leta was so amazing. She wasn’t even clean. Rhoda raised her eyes from Leta’s lips; Leta’s black eyes peered at her through the horn-rims. “I’ve been dryfucking,” she said very slowly. “That’s what you call it.”

  “Doing what?” Rhoda said. A shiver went over her body. It was the most startling thing she had ever heard. People in Harrisburg, Illinois, were too polite to talk about something as terrible and powerful as sex. They said “doing it” or “making babies,” but, except when men were alone without women, no one said the real words out loud.

  “Dryfucking,” Leta said. “You do it with your clothes on.”

  “Oh, my God,” Rhoda said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “It feels so wonderful,” Leta said, “I might go crazy thinking about it. He’s going to call me up tomorrow. He’s coming to band practice on Tuesday night and see us march. I’ll show him to you.”

  “Good,” Rhoda said. “I can’t wait to see him.”

  “What you do,” Leta went on, taking a cigarette out of its package without lifting her elbows from the table. “Is get on a bed and do it. You need a bed.” Rhoda leaned down on the table until her head was almost touching Leta’s hands. The word was racing around her head. The word was unbelievable. The word would drive her mad.

  “I have to go up to the drugstore and look for Philip Holloman,” she said. “You want to come with me?”

  “Not now,” Leta said. “I have to think.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” Rhoda said. “I’ll turn in my gossip column stuff before class. I’ve almost got it finished. It’s really funny. I pretended Carl Davis was Gene Kelly and was dancing in Shirley Hancock’s yard.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Leta sat back. Unfurled herself into the chair. “That sounds great.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  “Sure. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Rhoda proceeded on down the street, past the movie theater and the cleaners and the store where Bob Rosen’s unsmiling girlfriend sold clothes to people. Rhoda considered going in and trying on things, but she didn’t feel like doing it now. She was too haunted by the conversation with Leta. It was the wildest word there could be in the world. Rhoda wanted to do it. Right that very minute. With anyone. Anyone on the street. Anyone in a store. Anyone at all. She went into the drugstore but no one was there that she knew, just a couple of old men at the counter having Alka-Seltzers. She bought a package of Nabs and walked toward the park eating them, thinking about Leta and band practice and men that took you to apartments and did that to you. The excitement of the word was wearing off. It was beginning to sound like something only poor people would do. It sounded worse and worse the more it pounded in her head. It sounded bad. It made her want to take a bath.

  She went home and went up to her room and took off her clothes and stood in front of the full-length mirror inspecting her vagina. She lifted one foot and put it on the doorknob to get a better look. It was terrible to look at. It was too much to bear. She picked up her clothes and threw them under the bed and went into the bathroom and got into the tub. She ran the hot water all the way up to the drain. She lay back listening to the sucking noises of the drain. Dryfucking. She sank down deeper into the water. She ran her hand across her stomach, found her navel, explored its folds with her fingers, going deeper and deeper, spiraling down. It was where she had been hooked on to her mother. Imagine having a baby hooked on to you. Swimming around inside you. It was the worst thing that could happen. She would never marry. She would never have one swimming in her. Never, never, never as long as she lived. No, she would go to Paradise Island and live with Queen Hipp
olyta. She would walk among the Amazons in her golden girdle. She would give her glass plane away and never return to civilization.

  “Rhoda, what are you doing in there?” It was her real mother, the one in Illinois. She was standing in the doorway wearing a suit she’d been making all week. Dubonnet rayon with shoulder pads and a peplum, the height of style. “You’re going to shrink.”

  “No I’m not. What was it like to have me inside of you? How did it feel?”

  “It didn’t feel like anything. I’ve told you that.”

  “But it was awful when I came, wasn’t it?”

  “You came too fast. You tore me up coming out. Like everything else you’ve ever done.” Ariane drew herself up on her heels. “You never could wait for anything.”

  “I’m not going to do it,” Rhoda said. “You couldn’t pay me to have a baby.”

  “Well, maybe no one will want you to. Now get out, Rhoda. Your father’s bringing company home. I want you dressed for dinner.”

  “How far in does a navel go?”

  “I don’t know. Now get out, honey. You can’t stay in the tub all day.”

  Rhoda got out of the tub and wrapped herself in a towel and padded back to her room.

  “Hello, Shorty,” Dudley said. He was standing in the doorway of his room with a sultry look on his face. His hands were hooked in the pockets of his pants. He filled the doorframe. “Where you been all day?”

  “None of your business,” she said. “Get out of my way.”

  “I’m not in your way. We’re going to move again, did you know that?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s buying some mines. If he gets them we have to move to Kentucky. I was at the office today. I saw the maps. He’s going to make about a million dollars.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You wait and see.”

  “Shut up. He wouldn’t make us move in the middle of high school.”