Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Then Bob Rosen, or maybe it was Johnny Hazard, or maybe this unfriendly pilot, stood there on that city street, looking up at the sky, holding the book against his chest, crying and brokenhearted because Rhoda was lost to him forever, this famous author, who could have been his, lost to him forever.

  Thirty years later Rhoda woke up in a hotel room in New York City. There was a letter lying on the floor where she had thrown it when she went to bed. She picked it up and read it again. Take my name off that book, the letter said. Imagine a girl with your advantages writing a book like that. Your mother is so ashamed of you.

  Goddamn you, Rhoda thought. Goddamn you to hell. She climbed back into the bed and pulled the pillows over her head. She lay there for a while feeling sorry for herself. Then she got up and walked across the room and pulled a legal pad out of a briefcase and started writing.

  Dear Father,

  You take my name off those checks you send those television preachers and those goddamn right-wing politicians. That name has come to me from a hundred generations of men and women . . . also, in the future let my mother speak for herself about my work.

  Love,

  Rhoda

  P.S. The slate was put there by the second law of thermodynamics. Some folks call it gravity. Other folks call it God.

  I guess it was the second law, she thought. It was the second law or the third law or something like that. She leaned back in the chair, looking at the ceiling. Maybe I’d better find out before I mail it.

  Some Blue Hills at Sundown

  It was the last time Rhoda would ever see Bob Rosen in her life. Perhaps she knew that the whole time she was driving to meet him, the long drive through the November fields, down the long narrow state of Kentucky, driving due west, then across the Ohio River and up into the flat-topped hills of Southern Illinois.

  If it had been any other time in her life or any other boyfriend she would have been stopping every fifty miles to look at herself in the mirror or spray her wrists with perfume or smooth the wrinkles from her skirt. As it was she drove steadily up into the hills with the lengthening shadows all around her. She didn’t glance at her watch, didn’t worry about the time. He would be there when she got there, waiting at the old corrugated building where he worked on his car, the radio playing, his cat sitting on a shelf by the Tune Oil, watching. Nothing would have changed. Only she was two months older and he was two months older and there had been another operation. When he got home from the hospital he had called her and said, “Come on if you can. I’ll be here the rest of the semester. Come if you want to. Just let me know.” So she had told her mother and father that if they didn’t let her go she would kill herself and they believed her, so caught up in their terrible triangle and half-broken marriage and tears and lies and sadness that they couldn’t fight with her that year. Her mother tried to stop it.

  “Don’t give her a car to go up there and see that college boy,” her mother said. “Don’t you dare do that, Dudley. I will leave you if you do.”

  So her father had loaned her the new Cadillac, six thousand dollars’ worth of brand-new car, a fortune of a car in nineteen fifty-three, and she had driven up to Southern Illinois to see Bob Rosen and tell him that she loved him. No, just to see him and look at his face. No, to watch him work on his car. No, to smell the kind soft whiteness of his cheeks. To see him before he died. Untold madness of the dark hour. “Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane, I shall be dead or I shall be with you.”

  He was waiting for her. Not working on the car. Not even inside the building. Standing outside on the street, leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette and waiting. One foot on top of the other foot, his soft gray trousers loose around the ankles, his soft white skin, his tall lanky body fighting every minute for its fife.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m glad to see you. Let me see this goddamn car. Where did you get this car? My God, that’s some car.”

  “He’s getting rich. Just like he said he would. Who cares. I hate it there. There isn’t anything to do. No one to talk to. I think about you all the time.” He slid into the driver’s seat and turned around and took her into his arms. It was the first time in two months that she had been happy. Now, suddenly, it seemed as if this moment would be enough to last forever, would make up for all the time that would follow.

  “I ought to just turn around and go home now,” she said. “I guess I just wanted to make sure you were real.”

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea to get in the habit of loving me. I shouldn’t have let you come up here.”

  “I asked to come.”

  “So you did. Well, look here. Let’s go to the Sweet Shop and get a sandwich and see who’s there. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten all day.”

  “I don’t want to eat anything.” She pulled away. “I want to do it. You said you’d do it to me. You promised me. You swore you would.”

  “When did I do that?”

  “You know.”

  “Rhoda, Rhoda, Rhoda. Jesus. Exactly where did you envision this deflowering taking place?”

  “In the car, I guess. Or anywhere. Where do people go?”

  “I don’t go anywhere with sixteen-year-old girls. I’d go to jail, that’s where I’d go. Come here.” He pulled her across his legs and kissed her again, then turned around toward the steering wheel and turned on the ignition. “Talk while I drive. I’ll take you out to the roadside park. It’s completely dark out there. You can see a thousand stars. Remember that night Doc Stanford was here from Louisville and we played music out there? You were having that goddamn slumber party and I had to take all your goddamn friends to get you out of the house. My friends still haven’t let me stop hearing about that. That cousin of yours from Mississippi was there. Do you remember that night?”

  “You won’t do it?”

  “Hell, no, I won’t do it. But I want to. If it gives you any satisfaction you’d better believe I want to.” They were cruising very slowly down a dark street that led upward through a field of poplars. There was one streetlight at the very top of the deserted street. “I drive by your house every now and then. It seems like the whole street died when your family left. Everyone misses you. So your father’s doing well?”

  “They’re getting a divorce. He’s having an affair and my mother acts like she’s crazy. That’s why I got to come. They’re too busy to care what I do. They sent Dudley off to a boys’ school and next year I’m going to Virginia. I’ll never get to come back here. If we don’t do it tonight, we never will. That’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

  “No, we are going to the Sweet Shop and get a malt and a ham sandwich and see who’s there. Then I’m going to take you over to the Buchanans’ house where you’re supposed to be before someone calls out the state cops. Did you call and tell them you’re in town?”

  “No, they don’t even know I’m coming. No one knows but Augusta. And Jane Anne. She had to tell Jane Anne.” He shook his head and pulled her very close to him. She was so close to him she could feel him breathe. I’m like a pet dog to him, she decided. I’m just some little kid he’s nice to. He doesn’t even listen to what I say. What does he want me here for? He doesn’t need me for a thing. It was dark all around them now, the strange quiet weekend dark of small midwestern towns in the innocent years of the nineteen fifties. Rhoda shuddered. It was so exciting. So terrible and sad and exciting, so stifled and sad and terrible and real. This is really happening, she was thinking. This feeling, this loving him more than anything in the world and in a second it will be over. It ends as it happens and it will never be again in any way, never happen again or stop happening. It is so thick, so tight around me. I think this is what those old fairy tales meant. This is how those old stories always made me feel.

  “I want you to know something,” he said. He had stopped the car. “I want you to know that I would have made love to you if I had been well. If you had been older and I had been well and things had been different. You are wonder
ful girl, Rhoda. A blessing I got handed that I can’t ever figure out. DeLisle loves you. You know that? He asks me about you all the time. He says he can’t figure out what I did to deserve you writing me letters all the time.”

  “I don’t want to talk about DeLisle.”

  “I’m taking you to the Sweet Shop now.” He put the brake on the car and kissed her for a very long time underneath the streetlight. Their shadows were all around them and the wind moved the light and made the street alive with shadows and they held each other while the wind blew the light everywhere and her fingers found the scars on his neck and behind his ear and caressed them and there was nothing else to say or nothing else to do and they expanded and took in the sadness and shared it.

  After a while he started the car and they went to the Sweet Shop and ate ham sandwiches and talked to people and then drove over to the Buchanans’ house and he left her there and walked the six blocks home with his hands in his pockets. He was counting the months he might live. He thought it would be twenty-four but it turned out to be a lifetime after all.

  EXCERPTS FROM

  Net of Jewels

  After the night with Stanley I decided to settle down. I had had all the blind dates and sorority bullshit I could bear. Sorority meetings were held in a hot cramped attic room with everyone sworn to secrecy at the door. After we swore we sat around and talked about appointing people to committees and how to raise the grade-point average. Then we voted on things and planned the initiation ceremony.

  I had been going to meetings regularly ever since I moved into the house but finally one night I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Look here,” I said, getting up from my chair. “The best way to raise the grade-point average is to let me go downstairs and study. I’m behind in two subjects.”

  “You’re out of order,” the president said, looking around for help. No one ever asked to leave a meeting. The girls looked embarrassed.

  “I’m behind in biology lab. I need to work.”

  “Well, go on then. We’re almost through anyway. We’re almost to the prayer.”

  “Okay. I’m leaving.” I made my escape and went down to my room and found some change and bought a couple of Butterfinger candy bars out of a machine and tried to settle down to study. I worked on biology for a while, memorizing the classifications of animals. Then I decided to work on world history. I was writing a paper on the Great Ages of Man. “The great ages of man all began with political organization. There has to be a leader, whether he is a pharaoh, a king, a caesar or a pope. The problem comes in when the leader starts thinking he is God and can do whatever he likes. That’s why democracy was invented. If the leader has to be voted on by the people, he has to keep in touch with them and give them what they want.”

  “Rhoda.” It was Irise. I hadn’t seen much of her in the past few weeks as she belonged to a different sorority and didn’t go out much except to classes.

  “Irise. Where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you in so long. I have a thousand things to tell you.” I got up and went to the door and pulled her into the room.

  “Charles William said to tell you he’s got it all fixed up for Homecoming. He got you a date with a wonderful boy. You’re going to go, aren’t you? Are you still going to go with me?” She sat down on a corner of my bed. She was all dressed up in a green corduroy jumper and a soft white blouse with puffed sleeves. Her face smiled out from her short brown hair. I had forgotten how much I liked her, how much it brightened up a room to have Irise around.

  “God, I’m glad to see you. Everybody’s driving me crazy.”

  “Can you go? He wants us to call him tonight and talk to him about it.”

  “When is it?”

  “Weekend after next. Can you go? Will you go? He’s building the Wreck again, this thing they build out of old cars. His won last year. It was a mountain made of beer cans with a goat on top.”

  “God, yes, I’ll go. I’m dying to get away from here. I shouldn’t have moved in the house, Irise. They’re driving me crazy. I have to study in the middle of the night. So what’s his name, my wonderful date?”

  “His name’s Malcolm. Charles William sent me a picture to show you. Isn’t he cute? Charles William said he was a Greek god.” She produced a photograph of a young man with a crew cut that stood straight up on end and big features and a somber smile. I took it from her and stared down into the paper eyes. Paper and silver oxide, black and white and shadows, icon, omen, prophecy? Do the genes know what they are seeking? Do our ends seek our beginnings?

  “Don’t you think he’s cute?”

  “I guess so. What’s wrong with his hair?”

  “He was Charles William’s roommate last year. Charles William says he’s a Greek god.”

  “Well, I want to go. You know I want to go.”

  “You have to buy an airline ticket. It costs twenty-six dollars.”

  “That’s okay. How old is this guy?”

  “The same as us. He’s a sophomore.”

  “He looks like a baby.”

  “I think that was taken last year. We can get the airline tickets at the airport. Oh, Rhoda, you can wear your green dress we bought at Helen’s.”

  “I hope it fits.” I got up from the bed and rummaged around in my crowded messy closet for the dress. Right before we had gone back to school in September Charles William and Irise and I had gone shopping. Under Charles William’s tutelage I had bought an emerald green satin dress cut down so low in the bosom my nipples almost showed. It had a bustle of green satin in the back and was so tight I could hardly zip it.

  “I think you’re going to like this boy,” Irise giggled again. “Charles William says you’re going to like him a lot.”

  Prophetic. Twelve days later on a Friday afternoon Irise and I boarded a Southern Airlines plane and flew from Tuscaloosa to Atlanta. The plane bobbed up and down in the clouds, gained and lost altitude without warning. Passengers clutched their air-sickness bags, wrote mental wills, prayed to be forgiven, prayed to live. But I was too excited to be scared. I sat by Irise and thought about my luggage. I had three pieces of luggage and a hat box. In one suitcase was my green satin dress and some silver slippers and a pair of elbow-length white gloves and a Merry Widow and a girdle and some nylon hose. In another I had three sweaters, three skirts, three blouses, six pairs of underpants, three brassieres, four pairs of socks, some penny loafers and a suit. I was carrying the third piece of luggage, a cosmetic kit with my cosmetics and a fitted jewelry case and a book. The Collected Poetry of Emily Dickinson. I took out the book and began reading it as the plane dropped fifty feet, then recovered, then dropped again. I tore off a piece of airsickness bag to mark a poem.

  I died for Beauty—but was scarce

  Adjusted in the Tomb,

  When One who died for Truth, was lain

  In an adjoining Room—

  “‘Betrayed at length by no one but the wind whispering to the wing of the plane,’” I said out loud. “Edna Millay. How do you feel?”

  “I feel okay. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Birds fly, don’t they?” She put her hand on top of mine. “We’re going to have so much fun. We’re going to have a wonderful time.” The plane lurched again, then seemed to settle down. Outside the window were fields of clouds. Like a recurrent dream I had when I was small of being rolled in layers of clouds. I would wake from the dream dripping with sweat and run and jump into my mother’s bed.

  “How long does it take? I forgot what they said.”

  “An hour and forty minutes. I think forty have gone by, don’t you? At least forty.”

  “‘The young are so old. They are born with their fingers crossed. We shall get no help from them.’ That’s another part of the poem.”

  “You always tell me poetry. Tell me the one about your children are not your children.” She snuggled her shoulders down into the seat. I leaned toward her and began to recite The Prophet. “‘Then said, Almitra, speak to us of love. And he raised h
is head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said: When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.’”

  “Oh, it’s so beautiful. That’s how it is.”

  “When did you start loving Charles William?”

  “I always did. We went to kindergarten together. His momma would take me in their car. He’s always lived right there on the corner and I lived in my house. I haven’t ever had another boyfriend. I wouldn’t know what to do with anyone else.” She turned her face to mine. Her freckles stood up on her nose. Her beautiful small hands lay in her lap. The motors roared outside the window. The propellers turned. “He always takes care of me.”

  “We’re going to have a wonderful time,” I said. “I bet it’s going to be the best weekend there ever was.”

  “Do you know the part about the children? About your children are not your children?”

  “Oh, yeah. ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. . . . You may give them your love but not your thoughts . . . for they dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.’ Is that the part?”

  “I love that. I love to hear you say it.”

  “What time is it?” She looked down at her dainty little platinum watch and told me the time. “I’m going to sleep,” I said. “I’m going to sleep until we get there.” Then I closed my eyes and went into a dream of Almitra standing before the assembled people of some ancient village. The people moved their heads and swayed back and forth to the wisdom of her language.