Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “How long will it take?”

  “About three hours. It isn’t that far away. We can come back all the time, Rhoda. You can come back to see your play.”

  “I don’t care about the goddamn play. Don’t talk about the play. Let’s get going. What else do we have to do?”

  Then they were in the car and headed out of town. They drove down the main street, then turned onto Decatur and drove past the store where Anne Layne was working still, selling clothes to people off of racks, a frown on her face, caught forever in a world she could not imagine leaving for good reasons or bad ones, past the drugstore where Philip Holloman would sit every Saturday of his life on the same stool until it closed the year he was thirty-nine and he had to find a new place to hang out in on Saturdays. Past the icehouse and the filling station and the drive-in and past the brick fence of Bob Rosen’s grandmother’s house, where his gray Plymouth would come to rest. Past the site of the new consolidated school and the park where Rhoda had necked with Bob Rosen when he was still going steady with Anne Layne and past the sign that said City Limits, Harrisburg, Illinois, Population 12,480. Come Back Soon. You’re Welcome.

  It grew dark swiftly as it was the middle of December. December the fourteenth. At least it’s not my lucky number, Rhoda thought, and fell asleep, her hand touching the edge of her mother’s soft green wool skirt, the smell of her mother’s expensive perfume all around them in the car. The sound of the wheels on the asphalt road. When she woke they were pulling onto the wide steel bridge that separates Illinois from Kentucky. Rhoda sat up in the seat. It was the Ohio River, dark and vast below her, and the sky was dark and vast above with only a few stars and they were really leaving.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “I don’t believe he’d do this to me.” Then she began to weep. She wept terrible uncontrollable tears all across the bridge, weeping into her hands, and her mother wept with her but she kept her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road. “There was nothing I could do about it, darling,” she said. “I told him over and over but he wouldn’t listen. He doesn’t care about anything in the world but himself. I don’t know what else I could have done. I’m so sorry. I know how you feel. I know what you are going through.”

  “No, you don’t,” Rhoda said, turning her rage against her mother. “You don’t know. You could have stopped him. You don’t know. You lived in the same house every day of your life. Your house is still there. Your mother is still there in that same house. You went to one school. You had the same friends. I don’t care about this goddamn Franklin, Kentucky. I hope it burns to the ground. I won’t like it. I hate it. I already hate it. Oh, my God. I hate its guts.” Her mother took one hand from the wheel and touched her arm.

  “Good will come of it, Rhoda. Good comes of everything.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” she said. “It does not. That’s a lie. Half the stuff you tell me is a lie. You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know a goddamn thing. STOP THIS GODDAMN CAR. I HAVE TO GO TO THE BATHROOM. STOP IT, MOTHER. I MEAN, STOP IT RIGHT THIS MINUTE. THE MINUTE YOU GET OFF THIS BRIDGE.”

  Ariane stopped the car and Rhoda strode off across a field and urinated behind a tree. The warm urine poured out upon the ground and steam rose from it and that solaced her in some strange way and she pulled up her pants and walked back across the stubble and got into the car.

  “It better be a big house,” she said. “It had better be the biggest house in that goddamn town.”

  Music

  Rhoda was fourteen years old the summer her father dragged her off to Clay County, Kentucky, to make her stop smoking and acting like a movie star. She was fourteen years old, a holy and terrible age, and her desire for beauty and romance drove her all day long and pursued her if she slept.

  “Te amo,” she whispered to herself in Latin class. “Te amo, Bob Rosen,” sending the heat of her passions across the classroom and out through the window and across two states to a hospital room in Saint Louis, where a college boy lay recovering from a series of operations Rhoda had decided would be fatal.

  “And you as well must die, beloved dust,” she quoted to herself. “Oh, sleep forever in your Latmian cave, Mortal Endymion, darling of the moon,” she whispered, and sometimes it was Bob Rosen’s lanky body stretched out in the cave beside his saxophone that she envisioned and sometimes it was her own lush, apricot-colored skin growing cold against the rocks in the moonlight.

  Rhoda was fourteen years old that spring and her true love had been cruelly taken from her and she had started smoking because there was nothing left to do now but be a writer.

  She was fourteen years old and she would sit on the porch at night looking down the hill that led through the small town of Franklin, Kentucky, and think about the stars, wondering where heaven could be in all that vastness, feeling betrayed by her mother’s pale Episcopalianism and the fate that had brought her to this small town right in the middle of her sophomore year in high school. She would sit on the porch stuffing chocolate chip cookies into her mouth, drinking endless homemade chocolate milkshakes, smoking endless Lucky Strike cigarettes, watching her mother’s transplanted roses move steadily across the trellis, taking Bob Rosen’s thin letters in and out of their envelopes, holding them against her face, then going up to the new bedroom, to the soft, blue sheets, stuffed with cookies and ice cream and cigarettes and rage.

  “Is that you, Rhoda?” her father would call out as she passed his bedroom. “Is that you, sweetie? Come tell us goodnight.” And she would go into their bedroom and lean over and kiss him.

  “You just ought to smell yourself,” he would say, sitting up, pushing her away. “You just ought to smell those nasty cigarettes.” And as soon as she went into her room he would go downstairs and empty all the ashtrays to make sure the house wouldn’t burn down while he was sleeping.

  “I’ve got to make her stop that goddamn smoking,” he would say, climbing back into the bed. “I’m goddamned if I’m going to put up with that.”

  “I’d like to know how you’re going to stop it,” Rhoda’s mother said. “I’d like to see anyone make Rhoda do anything she doesn’t want to do. Not to mention that you’re hardly ever here.”

  “Goddammit, Ariane, don’t start that this time of night.” And he rolled over on his side of the bed and began to plot his campaign against Rhoda’s cigarettes.

  Dudley Manning wasn’t afraid of Rhoda, even if she was as stubborn as a goat. Dudley Manning wasn’t afraid of anything. He had gotten up at dawn every day for years and believed in himself and followed his luck wherever it led him, dragging his sweet Southern wife and his children behind him, and now, in his fortieth year, he was about to become a millionaire.

  He was about to become a millionaire and he was in love with a beautiful woman who was not his wife and it was the strangest spring he had ever known. When he added up the figures in his account books he was filled with awe at his own achievements, amazed at what he had made of himself, and to make up for it he talked a lot about luck and pretended to be humble but deep down inside he believed there was nothing he couldn’t do, even love two women at once, even make Rhoda stop smoking.

  Both Dudley and Rhoda were early risers. If he was in town he would be waiting in the kitchen when she came down to breakfast, dressed in his khakis, his pens in his pocket, his glasses on his nose, sitting at the table going over his papers, his head full of the clean new ideas of morning.

  “How many more days of school do you have?” he said to her one morning, watching her light the first of her cigarettes without saying anything about it.

  “Just this week,” she said. “Just until Friday. I’m making A’s, Daddy. This is the easiest school I’ve ever been to.”

  “Well, don’t be smart-alecky about it, Rhoda,” he said. “If you’ve got a good mind it’s only because God gave it to you.”

  “God didn’t give me anything,” she said. “Because there isn’t any God.”

  “Well, let’s don’t g
et into an argument about that this morning,” Dudley said. “As soon as you finish school I want you to drive up to the mines with me for a few days.”

  “For how long?” she said.

  “We won’t be gone long,” he said. “I just want to take you to the mines to look things over.”

  Rhoda french-inhaled, blowing the smoke out into the sunlight coming through the kitchen windows, imagining herself on a tour of her father’s mines, the workers with their caps in their hands smiling at her as she walked politely among them. Rhoda liked that idea. She dropped two saccharin tablets into her coffee and sat down at the table, enjoying her fantasy.

  “Is that what you’re having for breakfast?” he said.

  “I’m on a diet,” Rhoda said. “I’m on a black coffee diet.”

  He looked down at his poached eggs, cutting into the yellow with his knife. I can wait, he said to himself. As God is my witness I can wait until Sunday.

  Rhoda poured herself another cup of coffee and went upstairs to write Bob Rosen before she left for school.

  Dear Bob [the letter began],

  School is almost over. I made straight A’s, of course, as per your instructions. This school is so easy it’s crazy.

  They read one of my newspaper columns on the radio in Nashville. Everyone in Franklin goes around saying my mother writes my columns. Can you believe that? Allison Hotchkiss, that’s my editor, say she’s going to write an editorial about it saying I really write them.

  I turned my bedroom into an office and took out the tacky dressing table mother made me and got a desk and put my typewriter on it and made striped drapes, green and black and white. I think you would approve.

  Sunday Daddy is taking me to Manchester, Kentucky, to look over the coal mines. He’s going to let me drive. He lets me drive all the time. I live for your letters.

  Te amo,

  Rhoda

  She put the letter in a pale blue envelope, sealed it, dripped some Toujours Moi lavishly onto it in several places and threw herself down on her bed.

  She pressed her face deep down into her comforter pretending it was Bob Rosen’s smooth cool skin. “Oh, Bob, Bob,” she whispered to the comforter. “Oh, honey, don’t die, don’t die, please don’t die.” She could feel the tears coming. She reached out and caressed the seam of the comforter, pretending it was the scar on Bob Rosen’s neck.

  The last night she had been with him he had just come home from an operation for a mysterious tumor that he didn’t want to talk about. It would be better soon, was all he would say about it. Before long he would be as good as new.

  They had driven out of town and parked the old Pontiac underneath a tree beside a pasture. It was September and Rhoda had lain in his arms smelling the clean smell of his new sweater, touching the fresh red scars on his neck, looking out the window to memorize every detail of the scene, the black tree, the September pasture, the white horse leaning against the fence, the palms of his hands, the taste of their cigarettes, the night breeze, the exact temperature of the air, saying to herself over and over, I must remember everything. This will have to last me forever and ever and ever.

  “I want you to do it to me,” she said. “Whatever it is they do.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I couldn’t do that now. It’s too much trouble to make love to a virgin.” He was laughing. “Besides, it’s hard to do it in a car.”

  “But I’m leaving,” she said. “I might not ever see you again.”

  “Not tonight,” he said. “I still don’t feel very good, Rhoda.”

  “What if I come back and visit,” she said. “Will you do it then? When you feel better.”

  “If you still want me to I will,” he said. “If you come back to visit and we both want to, I will.”

  “Do you promise?” she said, hugging him fiercely.

  “I promise,” he said. “On my honor I promise to do it when you come to visit.”

  But Rhoda was not allowed to go to Saint Louis to visit. Either her mother guessed her intentions or else she seized the opportunity to do what she had been wanting to do all along and stop her daughter from seeing a boy with a Jewish last name.

  There were weeks of pleadings and threats. It all ended one Sunday night when Mrs. Manning lost her temper and made the statement that Jews were little peddlers who went through the Delta selling needles and pins.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rhoda screamed. “He’s not a peddler, and I love him and I’m going to love him until I die.” Rhoda pulled her arms away from her mother’s hands.

  “I’m going up there this weekend to see him,” she screamed. “Daddy promised me I could and you’re not going to stop me and if you try to stop me I’ll kill you and I’ll run away and I’ll never come back.”

  “You are not going to Saint Louis and that’s the end of this conversation and if you don’t calm down I’ll call a doctor and have you locked up. I think you’re crazy, Rhoda. I really do.”

  “I’m not crazy,” Rhoda screamed. “You’re the one that’s crazy.”

  “You and your father think you’re so smart,” her mother said. She was shaking but she held her ground, moving around behind a Queen Anne chair. “Well, I don’t care how smart you are, you’re not going to get on a train and go off to Saint Louis, Missouri, to see a man when you’re only fourteen years old, and that, Miss Rhoda K. Manning, is that.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” Rhoda said. “I really am. I’m going to kill you,” and she thought for a moment that she would kill her, but then she noticed her grandmother’s Limoges hot chocolate pot sitting on top of the piano holding a spray of yellow jasmine, and she walked over to the piano and picked it up and threw it all the way across the room and smashed it into a wall beside a framed print of The Blue Boy.

  “I hate you,” Rhoda said. “I wish you were dead.” And while her mother stared in disbelief at the wreck of the sainted hot chocolate pot, Rhoda walked out of the house and got in the car and drove off down the steep driveway. I hate her guts, she said to herself. I hope she cries herself to death.

  She shifted into second gear and drove off toward her father’s office, quoting to herself from Edna Millay. “Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane, I shall be dead or I shall be with you.”

  But in the end Rhoda didn’t die. Neither did she kill her mother. Neither did she go to Saint Louis to give her virginity to her reluctant lover.

  The Sunday of the trip Rhoda woke at dawn feeling very excited and changed clothes four or five times trying to decide how she wanted to look for her inspection of the mines.

  Rhoda had never even seen a picture of a strip mine. In her imagination she and her father would be riding an elevator down into the heart of a mountain where obsequious masked miners were lined up to shake her hand. Later that evening the captain of the football team would be coming over to the hotel to meet her and take her somewhere for a drive.

  She pulled on a pair of pink pedal pushers and a long navy blue sweat shirt, threw every single thing she could possibly imagine wearing into a large suitcase, and started down the stairs to where her father was calling for her to hurry up.

  Her mother followed her out of the house holding a buttered biscuit on a linen napkin. “Please eat something before you leave,” she said. “There isn’t a decent restaurant after you leave Bowling Green.”

  “I told you I don’t want anything to eat,” Rhoda said. “I’m on a diet.” She stared at the biscuit as though it were a coral snake.

  “One biscuit isn’t going to hurt you,” her mother said. “I made you a lunch, chicken and carrot sticks and apples.”

  “I don’t want it,” Rhoda said “Don’t put any food in this car, Mother.”

  “Just because you never eat doesn’t mean your father won’t get hungry. You don’t have to eat any of it unless you want to.” Their eyes met. Then they sighed and looked away.

  Her father appeared at the door and climbed in behind the wheel of the
secondhand Cadillac.

  “Let’s go, Sweet Sister,” he said, cruising down the driveway, turning onto the road leading to Bowling Green and due east into the hill country. Usually this was his favorite moment of the week, starting the long drive into the rich Kentucky hills where his energy and intelligence had created the long black rows of figures in the account books, figures that meant Rhoda would never know what it was to be really afraid or uncertain or powerless.

  “How long will it take?” Rhoda asked.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Just look out the window and enjoy the ride. This is beautiful country we’re driving through.”

  “I can’t right now,” Rhoda said. “I want to read the new book Allison gave me. It’s a book of poems.”

  She settled down into the seat and opened the book.

  Oh, gallant was the first love, and glittering and fine;

  The second love was water, in a clear blue cup;

  The third love was his, and the fourth was mine.

  And after that, I always get them all mixed up.

  Oh, God, this is good, she thought. She sat up straighter, wanting to kiss the book. Oh, God, this is really good. She turned the book over to look at the picture of the author. It was a photograph of a small bright face in full profile staring off into the mysterious brightly lit world of a poet’s life.

  Dorothy Parker, she read. What a wonderful name. Maybe I’ll change my name to Dorothy, Dorothy Louise Manning. Dot Manning. Dottie, Dottie Leigh, Dot.

  Rhoda pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes out of her purse, tamped it on the dashboard, opened it, extracted a cigarette and lit it with a gold Ronson fighter. She inhaled deeply and went back to the book.

  Her father gripped the wheel, trying to concentrate on the beauty of the morning, the green fields, the small, neat farmhouses, the red barns, the cattle and horses. He moved his eyes from all that order to his fourteen-year-old daughter slumped beside him with her nose buried in a book, her plump fingers languishing in the air, holding a cigarette. He slowed down, pulled the car onto the side of the road and killed the motor.