Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Fifty-seven minutes later Irise woke me and handed me a piece of chewing gum. “We’re almost there,” she said. “You can see the city.” The plane lurched toward the ground. We stuck the gum in our mouths, chewed furiously. A baby screamed. Our ears popped, the motors roared. We slammed into the ground and rolled down the runway.

  “There they are,” she said. “They’re waiting for us.” The plane came to a stop near the end of a board-floored covered walkway. Charles William and a tall boy in a blue shirt stood at the very edge of the walkway. Charles William was waving his hands in the air.

  “What do you think?” Irise asked. “How do you think he looks?”

  We climbed down the stairway from the plane and the young men walked out to meet us. Then we walked back down the boardwalk four abreast. I had barely glanced at Malcolm. I was having a hard time remembering his name. “Oh, God,” I said. “You should have seen this baby on the plane. It screamed all the time. I wouldn’t have a baby for all the tea in China. If I had a baby, I’d give it away.”

  “When’s the Wreck Parade?” Irise asked. “Are we going to be on time?”

  “It’s in the morning,” Charles William answered. “All we have to do this afternoon is get you settled and go eat dinner. Oh, Dee, there’s this fabulous record shop I want to take you to. Then we’re going to dinner at Cotton’s Gin. Then there’s a party at the house.”

  “Oh, God. I can’t wait. Where are we going to stay?”

  “At Putty LaValle’s apartment. She’s from Dunleith. She’s gone for the weekend. She’s letting you have the place.”

  “Oh, God. I can’t wait.” I stepped in a crack between the boards and caught my heel. “Well, goddamnit.” I threw my pocketbook down and tried to extricate my foot. Malcolm knelt down beside me and took hold of my ankle and pulled it out of my shoe. Then he pulled the shoe up from the crack and put it on my foot. He kept his hand on my calf. I stood very still. Charles William and Irise faded into the background. I looked down into his face. He stood up beside me. “I’m glad you could come,” he said. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

  We collected the luggage and piled it into Charles William’s car. Two of my suitcases had to go in the backseat. Because of that I ended up riding into Atlanta on Malcolm’s lap. Talk about libido. Talk about desire. I didn’t understand what we were into but I guess he did since he had been raised on a cattle farm. “You sure do smell good,” he said at one point. “That’s nice perfume.” More profound, Anna said she should have written. And much, much older.

  “It’s Nuit de Noël,” I said. “My mother always wears it on her furs.”

  “Dee,” Charles William was saying from the front seat. “Did you bring the green dress? I can’t wait for you to see this record shop. The owner is a friend of mine. He’s dying to meet you. Malcolm, you’re going to have to give her to me for a while. I have a surprise for her.” Irise leaned into his arm, happy that he loved me too. What a strange and gentle girl she was and without jealousy. A girl who could believe that she was loved.

  We drove down into the neighborhoods near the Georgia Tech campus. The fraternity houses were decorated and boys and girls were in the yards drinking beer and putting the finishing touches on the Wrecks.

  “What are they about?” I asked. “What do they have to do?”

  “They have to run.” Malcolm laughed and moved me from one side of his knees to the other. I was sweating in my wool suit. My body was suffused with heat and I squirmed around and pulled off my jacket. The smell of the starch in his shirt, the smell of shaving lotion and the fine hard line of his head beneath his crewcut. His green eyes and thick lips so near to me I could hear him breathing. “What are you going to do with all those suitcases?” he said. “What do you have in all of them?”

  “We have to have them.” Irise turned around on the seat and smiled her bright freckled smile. “Wait till you see this green dress. Then you won’t mind carrying them for her.”

  “There’s the shopping center,” Charles William called out. “There’s the record store. There it is.” He pulled into a parking place and we all piled out and went into the store and were introduced to the owner. Then Charles William took my arm and pulled me around a corner and into a soundproof room with a turntable and bins full of classical records and Caedmon recordings of poets reading their poetry. At that time customers were allowed to play records before they bought them. “I’ve been dying to play this for you,” Charles William said. “I can’t wait till you hear it.” He took a recording out of its cover and put it on the turntable. “Listen, Dee, just listen to this.” He dropped the needle into its groove and Siobhan McKenna’s incomparable voice began to speak the Molly Bloom soliloquy from Ulysses. “Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs. Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice . . .” I was gasping with delight. It was the book Sarah Worley’s sister had studied at Wellesley. It was the book about Ireland. “Oh, God, Charles William, I’ve been looking for that. I can’t believe it’s on a record. Let me see the cover.”

  “It’s Siobhan McKenna, Dee. Someday we’ll go to London and hear all these people and see them on the stage. We’ll go and spend a summer and hear all the great people of the world and talk to them. We won’t always be here, in this little place where we were born. But, listen, listen to it.”

  “. . . O, tragic and the dyinglooking one off the south circular when he sprained his foot at the choir party at the sugarloaf Mountain the day I wore that dress Miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could find at the bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bedroom with her old maids voice . . .”

  “Oh, God, I can’t believe you found this.”

  “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t her voice the greatest thing you ever heard?” He drew near to me. His sweet embattled face above his wide soft powerful body moved in to tell me once again what he needed so desperately for me to know. “Davie discovered it. He brought me here. I want you to meet him while you’re here, Dee.”

  “Who is Davie?”

  “A boy who’s very special to me. A freshman from Valdosta. I’m gay, Dee. You never listen when I try to tell you that. I love Irise. I’m going to marry her. But I like Davie too. He wants to meet you. You’re going to love each other. I know you will.”

  I spun around, pulled a record out of a bin, shook my head, tried not to hear it. I did not want to let it in. I wanted the world to be something I could understand. I was not safe enough to grow into a larger understanding. If I changed my spin I might disappear, be dissolved, sink back into sand, heat, broom, air, as Anna would later write. “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” Where had I heard that? Why could I not forget it? How did I know that it was true so long ago and so encapsulated and so lost?

  “What are you all doing in here?” Irise came into the room. “What are you listening to?”

  “I thought we were going out to eat,” Malcolm said. He followed Irise into the room and came and stood by me. “I thought we were going to eat and then take you to where you’re staying.”

  My eyes met Charles William’s around their heads. I didn’t smile or frown or react. I couldn’t react because I didn’t know what to think. It was very dangerous, what he had told me, and I didn’t want to be involved in danger.

  “Well, let’s go then,” I said. �
��Bring the record, Charles William. We’ll buy it and take it home.” I took hold of Malcolm’s arm. His arm was as strong as my daddy’s. I leaned into his arm, into his one hundred and twenty-five I.Q. and his normalcy. What passes in the world for normalcy. I decided to ignore what Charles William had been telling me. I didn’t see what I could do about it. I didn’t want to be involved in it. So I turned my attention to Malcolm Martin and his perfect body and decided to forget it. “Not that I care two straws who he does it with or knew before that way though I’d like to find out so long as I don’t have the two of them under my nose all the time like that slut that Mary . . .” Charles William lifted the needle from the groove and picked up the record and slid it into its cover and handed it to me. Then he pulled a second recording out of a bin and laid it on top of the first one. It was Edna St. Vincent Millay. My favorite poet. A recording of her voice. No one else gives me such gifts, a poet would later write, and I would think of Charles William when I read it.

  We paid for the records and left the store and went across the street to a restaurant called Cotton’s Gin and went inside and were seated at long plank tables. We ordered beer and salads and platters of french fries. “Tell about the Wreck,” Irise said. “Tell us what it looks like.”

  “It’s hidden.” Charles William waved his beer glass in the air. “Over by the engineering building. We finished it last night. It’s a surprise. You’ll see it in the morning.”

  “It’s the best one we’ve ever had,” Malcolm added. “One of our alumni saw it. He said it was the best one he’d ever seen. It’s sure to win.”

  “I wanted to decorate the house to match it but they made me stop.” Charles William laughed again. “Davie and I started on a sofa, making it match the Wreck decor, but they all came in and stopped us.”

  “You wouldn’t believe what he did.” Malcom finished his beer and moved closer to me. He put his hand on my arm as he talked. Later he put his hand on my leg and I let him leave it there. This was what I had been waiting for. Poetry and music and gay conversation. Yes, I said in Molly’s voice. Yes and yes and yes and yes. I forgot the disturbing elements of Charles William’s life. I forgot everything but Malcolm’s hand on my leg and the way it made me feel. By the time we finished lunch all I wanted in the world was to let him kiss me. Later he did kiss me, on the way to the apartment in the car and on the couch in the living room while Charles William and Irise did whatever they were doing in the bedroom.

  The green dress, that’s part of what happened next whether anyone wants to believe it or not. Last week, when Charles William called me from the hospital to talk for seven hours, the first thing he wanted to talk about was that dress. “Do you remember that green dress, Dee?” he asked. “That you wore to Homecoming with Malcolm?”

  “Of course I do. How could anyone forget that dress? I would never even have tried it on if you hadn’t been with me.”

  “You were gorgeous in it.”

  “I was, wasn’t I? Or anyway I thought I was and I guess that’s the same thing.”

  A green satin dress, the green of Irish hills, so very green, so shiny and tight and short, cut down so low in the bosom that my nipples almost showed. Only Charles William could have found that dress and made me believe I was beautiful in it. Only Charles William could have talked me into wearing it. I put it on that night with my gold high-heeled sandals and wore it out to vamp poor Malcolm Martin who was already thoroughly vamped from my having sat on his lap all the way into Atlanta. Poor Malcolm Martin, a boy as vain and cold and unloving as my father, a perfect match for my animus.

  Later, much much later, we locked ourselves into the bedroom of Putty LaValle’s apartment and I took off the dress and we did it. Whatever I had thought doing it would be, this was more terrible and exciting and interesting and endless than anything I could have imagined and even if I was doing it wrong I wanted to go on doing it.

  “You might get pregnant,” he said at last. “I have to get some rubbers if we’re going to keep on doing this.”

  “Are we going to?”

  “I don’t see why not. I hope so.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I guess so. Sure, I think I do.”

  “Well, I love you. I can tell you that. I think I love you to death.” I had pulled the sheet up around my breasts. Doing it was bad enough. Letting someone look at my breasts was going too far. “Where are Charles William and Irise?”

  “I don’t know. Are they in the living room? I don’t know if they came in or not. I wasn’t listening.”

  “How will we find out?”

  “We better look. God, we’re drunk, aren’t we? What time is it?”

  “It’s four-fifteen.”

  “I’m going to look out the door.” I got up and found a bathrobe and put it on and looked out the door. Irise was asleep on the sofa. Charles William was nowhere to be seen. A light was burning in the kitchen.

  “Come back to bed,” he said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

  “Okay. I guess it’s too late to worry about them anyway.” I lay back down beside him and covered us with the bedclothes. Then I curled up into his arms and fell asleep. I had done it. I was as good as married.

  The next morning Charles William introduced me to Davie. We were at the KA house waiting for the Wreck Parade to begin. Our Wreck had already been hauled by truck to the starting line on Shaw Street. It was a surreal room mounted on the chassis of a yellow jeep. Walls melted down into the wheels. Windows curved down into the seats. The steering wheel was an ellipse of melted stars. A fake motor was mounted on the side. Colored smoke poured out of the motor, red, yellow, blue, green. An engineering major was driving the thing. All Charles William had to do was stand on the street and watch it go by and wait to pick up his award as the designer.

  “Dee, come here a minute.” He was drinking a Bloody Mary from a silver mint julep cup. “Come back here with me, I want you to meet someone.” He took my hand and led me into the kitchen where a boy with golden hair was polishing glasses with a cloth.

  “This is Davie,” Charles William said. “Davie, this is Dee. I want you two to love each other.” The young man put down the cloth and the glass and held out a hand to me. He was shorter than Charles William, not much taller than I was, but he was very beautiful, as beautiful as a girl. He smiled at me and held out his hand. Charles William bent down and kissed him on the cheek. Light poured in the kitchen windows onto the brass pots hanging above the stove. Light rang out against the brass and fell down onto the painted cabinets and spotted our arms and hands.

  “I’m so glad to know you, Dee,” Davie said. “He talks about you all the time. He thinks you’re wonderful.”

  “I need to go find Malcolm,” I said. “I want to walk on down and see where the parade is going to start.”

  “Davie’s in architecture,” Charles William went on. “He’s my assistant this semester. We’re building a cathedral all of wood, aren’t we, Davie?” He still had his arm around him. He was holding him as he would a girl. Their bodies melted into each other. Surreal. “So you and Malcolm hit it off.” He giggled. “I tried to talk to him this morning, but all he would say is that you’re pretty.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I said, Don’t you think she’s gorgeous? and he said yes.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Not much. He doesn’t talk much, haven’t you noticed that by now?”

  “I think I’m in love with him. I mean it.” I took Charles William’s hand. I forgot Davie was there. “Do you think he likes me? Did he say he did?”

  “I told you, he said you were gorgeous. And you are, isn’t she, Davie?”

  “She sure is. I’ve been dying to meet you, Dee. He talks about you all the time.”

  “Well, I’m going to go and find Malcolm.” I stood in the circle of the two young men. The three of us were perfectly safe at that moment, safe in each other’s good graces with the sunlight pouring down through the
windows and the morning of the world all around us. “I think I’ll get a Bloody Mary,” I added. “Is that a pitcher of them over there?”

  “I’ll pour you one.” Davie took the glass he had been polishing and filled it with ice and poured in vodka and Bloody Mary mix. He handed it to me.

  “Thank you. I’m going to find Malcolm. Are you sure I look all right?”

  “Wait a minute,” Charles William said. “Get me a comb.” I took a comb out of my pocketbook and then, as if it were the most important thing in the world, Charles William combed my bangs down across my forehead and stood back to admire his work. “Perfect,” he said. “You look absolutely beautiful.”

  “She does,” Davie added. “You’re gorgeous, Dee.” I took my Bloody Mary, and, believing I was beautiful, I went back into the living room and found Malcolm and made him believe it too. We walked out onto the sidewalk and started down the hill toward the engineering school. The sidewalks were lined with young men and women in bright fall clothes. The sky was a brilliant blue. The sycamore trees golden in the clear fall air. An incorruptible mirror that cannot be contaminated by experience, Anna once wrote, meaning life. So I suppose whatever price Malcolm and I were going to have to pay for that day’s ecstasy would be the proper price. “I love you,” I said and took his arm.

  “I love you too. You want to go back to Putty’s apartment after a while?”

  “I have the key.” His leg brushed against mine. A marching band began to play. The first Wreck hove into view, a vehicle with a bed mounted on top. On the bed were two young men dressed as women. They were wearing pantaloons and huge balloon breasts and they were locked in an embrace. Now even the trees seemed sexual, locked in the ground by their roots. The sycamore leaves made golden beds upon the grass. Light coming down between the buildings seemed a sexual thrust. I looked up into Malcolm’s face. There were specks of gold in his green eyes. Gold on the freckles of his arms.