Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Let’s go now,” he said. “We don’t need to see this damn parade.”

  There was a party at the house that night and Malcolm drank gin martinis and danced a crazy dance he learned from his mother’s gardener. “I call it the hootchy-cootchy,” he would yell, and laugh uproariously and do it again. His legs and feet moved like liquid. I could barely keep up with him. “Oh, it’s me and I’m in love again,” he kept singing. “Oh, it’s me and I’m in love again.”

  At intermission I went out into the backyard. One of Charles William’s projects had been turning the backyard of the KA house into a garden. There were rows of holly bushes and flower beds and a goldfish pond. Charles William and Davie were standing by the pond. As I watched, Charles William took Davie in his arms and kissed him on the mouth. He knows I’m watching, I thought. He knows I see him doing that. I was in a strange conflicted sensual mood anyway. The things that Malcolm and I had been doing all afternoon were all over me. I didn’t feel guilty about doing them, just surprised and interested and amazed. I turned away from the pond. I thought of the weight of Malcolm’s body on mine, the smell and taste of him, how I had thought I could kiss through his shoulder to the bone and taste the birth of blood. I had melted into his body and he into mine and that was what was meant by love. And that was what Charles William was doing now to Davie.

  “Rhoda, where are you?” It was Malcolm, coming across the patio looking for me. “Come dance with me,” I said. “I want to dance some more.”

  “What’s going on?” He looked toward the pond. “Oh, that. Well, he won the Wreck Parade for us, didn’t he?”

  “Why is he kissing Davie?” I took his arm. “Why is he kissing him?”

  “Don’t you know, Rhoda? You really don’t know?”

  “No. And I don’t want to stay here anymore. I want to leave. I’m sick of this party. Sick of people getting drunk. Let’s go back to Putty’s. I want to leave right now.”

  “I can’t leave right now. Come on inside. Don’t worry about other people.” He led me back into the crowded living room. The KA’s and their dates were becoming sweaty and wrinkled and incoherent. I saw Irise in a corner dancing with her cousin from Dunleith. A harsh yellow light filled the hallway near the front door, fell down the stairs into the darkened room where everyone was dancing. “I have to get out of here,” I said. “I’m very sensitive, Malcolm. Sometimes I can’t stand to be in crowds.”

  We found my coat and my sequined scarf and my white gloves with rhinestones sewn around the cuffs and got into the car and drove back to Putty’s. “I have to leave in the morning,” I said. “How can I go home after this? How can I leave you?”

  “You can come back up. You can write to me. We can write each other letters. Come sit by me. Come over here. Put your hand back on my leg.”

  “I can’t leave you. I won’t be able to leave after this.” I began to cry. Terrible tears rolled down my cheeks. I held on to his sleeve. It was Saturday night. The next afternoon I would leave. “Why did we start doing that? We shouldn’t have done it. What did we do it for? Now I have to leave you. How can I go away?”

  “It’s all right. We’ll see each other again. You can come up any time you want to.” He patted my leg. He drove the car. We were going back to Putty’s. We would do it again and then I would go away and never see him. It was the same thing always with my life. If something was valuable to me it would disappear. No one would ever be there to hold me in their arms when I needed them. I would always be wandering through strange houses, through unknown rooms. Malcolm pulled the car over to the side of the street and turned off the motor and pulled me into his arms. He held me while I cried. “It’s all right, Rhoda,” he said. “We’ll see each other again very soon. It isn’t only you, you know. I’m in this too.” He held me away from him. He began to laugh, a wonderful boyish happy laugh. “Oh, it’s me and I’m in love again,” he sang in a crazy voice. “I’m in love in Georgia. Hootchy-cootchy’s in the air.”

  It was a full moon. We did it again that night and when he left I slept and dreamed of horses racing down hills toward the water. In the middle of the night Irise came in and got in bed with me and put her small sweet hands on my back and patted me awhile. In the morning I started menstruating. Rich red blood poured out of my body so I didn’t even have to fear that I was pregnant.

  At eleven Malcolm and Charles William came and got us and took us out to breakfast and then took us to the airport and put us on the plane.

  “You fell in love with him, didn’t you?” Irise asked, when we were high above the city, rocking our way south and west to Tuscaloosa.

  “Why are people always leaving each other? It seems like a dumb thing to do.”

  “It’s just when you’re young. When you get older I think you stay.”

  * * *

  So I went to Atlanta for the summer. I enrolled in summer school at Emory University and moved into a dorm overlooking the medical school. It had been reasonably tricky talking my parents into the plan but I persevered and they were so caught up in their new life in Dunleith with their seven hundred admiring friends coming over to get drunk on the porch every night that they weren’t as wary as they had been in the small world of Franklin, Kentucky. Also, they were sick of my sarcasm and tired of my refusal to be polite to their endless stream of visitors. They were probably relieved to think I would be somewhere in summer school. They could say to their relatives, Oh, yes, Rhoda’s in summer school at Emory. She’s such a bookworm, yes, she’s a mess but what can we do. A mess, that’s the word my north Alabama relatives used to describe me. They had had other messes to contend with, my fox-hunting grandfather being one and Tallulah Bankhead another, but in my generation I was the main mess. So I got to do what I wanted that summer, while my daddy made money and my momma spent it and my brother Dudley and his wife, Annie, tried to make a marriage out of a real mess and my little brothers threw basketballs through the hoop and shot at each other with BB guns and chased goats through the woods at Finley Island and the porch filled up at night with whiskey drinkers. When I read the Odyssey I thought of Dunleith. How the suitors filled our porches and drank our wine and ate our meat.

  I had hardly been in Atlanta a week when I started wanting to get married. It was too hard to do it if we weren’t married. It was impossible to do it in the car. It just wasn’t big enough. And it was hard to do it in Malcolm’s room in the KA house because people kept slamming in and out the front door and scaring me to death and because half the time we had to sneak out the kitchen door when we got through. Don’t get me wrong. Doing it was worth it. Doing it was divine. The more we did it, the more I wanted to do it and the more he wanted to do it. All we wanted to do was do it. It was what we had in common and it was plenty.

  “Don’t you want to get married?” I asked him finally. We were parked outside the Echo Hot Dog Stand, The World’s Largest Drive-In. The place was a great favorite with Tech boys and their dates. On any given night we would see two or three couples we knew. Couples coupling in their cars, couples eating hot dogs and drinking Cokes, couples in varying stages of emotional excitement and disarray. I’ll say one thing for Malcolm and me, we were up to the task. We didn’t have enough guilt or depression between us to fill an ashtray. “Everyone’s running away,” I added, taking a Parliament out of a box and lighting it with the car lighter. “We wouldn’t have to tell anyone. We could keep it a secret.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not? You love me, don’t you? Then we could rent a little apartment and have a place to do it. God, it’s driving me crazy not to have anywhere to do it.”

  “Where would we go?”

  “To South Carolina, where Avery and Mary Adair ran away. Ask Avery where they went.”

  “They told their folks last week. They just moved into the married dorm.”

  “We don’t have to tell anyone. I’ve got enough money to get us an apartment. Let’s do it. Please let’s do it.” I moved over to his
side of the seat, put my hand on his leg, moved my hand up and down his thigh. “Oh, please, Malcolm. I want to have a place to live with you. I want it so much.”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. I guess we could. When do you want to go?” He put his hot dog down on the dashboard and turned around to me. My hand was still on his leg. Now there wasn’t any hot dog or steering wheel or drive-in or car. There was only desire. I had to get some bonding energy to keep from thinking I was going to die and he had to get some pussy to keep from being in pain, so there we were, in love in Georgia, being bounced around like the electrons and protons of which we are in all probability composed.

  “Next weekend. On Saturday. We could go on Friday and get married and spend the weekend. Oh, let’s do it. Say we can.”

  “All right. If you really want to. If that’s really what you want to do.” He honked the horn for the waiter to come and take the tray from the window of the car. He put the half-eaten hot dog on the tray.

  “I’ll have to get a wedding ring,” I said. “I guess we can go buy one tomorrow.”

  “I guess we can.”

  “Let’s go to Stone Mountain,” I added. “Let’s go do it on a blanket on the ground.”

  Four days later, on Thursday morning, I cut all my classes and drove down to Rich’s department store and went shopping. I bought a white piqué dress with pearl buttons down the front and a white satin slip and a long white negligee and a robe. I bought some white satin slippers with fuzzy white balls on the toes. I bought a book on how to have sexual intercourse. I bought a gray and white striped sundress with a jacket and some red Capezio sandals and a tube of contraceptive jelly. I went downstairs to the coffee shop and bought two doughnuts and a cup of coffee and ate the sugar off the first doughnut while I read the book. It looked as though we had been doing it right. But the stuff about getting pregnant sounded bad. I polished off the doughnut and thought it over. The redheaded black girl behind the counter came over and stood beside me looking at the cover of the book. “Is that any good?” she asked. I was the only customer in the shop so she had time to chat.

  “I guess so. Except about the contraceptives. It keeps saying something works fifty percent of the time or ninety percent of the time. But it doesn’t say which one is best.”

  “What you been doing?”

  “Nothing. I’m getting married tomorrow.” I looked around to make sure no one had come in. “We’re running away. My boyfriend and I. We’re going to Walhalla, South Carolina. So I thought maybe I should be finding out what to do.”

  “Better late than never, I suppose. You better get you some rubbers and start to pray. Them babies have a way of finding their way into the world.”

  “Have you got any?”

  “I got three. Three more than I got any use for but I love them. Don’t be doing any of that rhythm business. That doesn’t work. Nothing works but rubbers and they don’t work too good. You ought to get you a pessary or a diaphragm.”

  “There’s a part in here about them. I guess I could go to a doctor after I get married and get one, couldn’t I?”

  “Honey, you don’t have to be married to get one. They give them to anybody.” She reached behind her and got the pot of coffee and refilled my cup. “When’s the wedding going to be?”

  “We’re going to drive up tomorrow and get married Saturday. You have to get the license, then you have to wait twenty-four hours before you can get married. Some friends of ours did it. So we know where to go.”

  “Well, I wish you luck. What you got in all them packages?”

  “A wedding dress and a trousseau. I thought I ought to have a trousseau.”

  “Honey, I sure am glad you came in today. I’ll be thinking about you tomorrow and I’ll be thinking about you on Saturday. What time you think you’ll be getting married?”

  “About noon I guess. High noon.” I giggled. “Shoot-out in Carolina.” The waitress laughed with me. We kept on laughing harder and harder and she filled my cup one more time and I gobbled down the second doughnut and drank the coffee while I laughed.

  * * *

  A boy and girl walking into a gray stone building to get married. It is very early in the morning. He is wearing a pair of chinos. She is wearing a long white dress with tiny pearl buttons down the front. They are holding hands. Her hand is beautiful and plump and the color of apricots. His hand is large and bony and covered with fine brown hair. They look like brother and sister. Neither of them has slept in days.

  “What if we can’t get it?”

  “We’ll get it.”

  “Did you bring the blood tests?”

  “I told you I did.”

  “Oh, Malcolm. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we’re doing it.”

  “I bet they aren’t open.”

  “Yes they are. People are going in.” A man wearing suspenders walked up the steps and disappeared into the heavy polished doors. Walhalla, South Carolina, June 25, 1955. Malcolm and I are going to get married.

  The night before we had made love all night in a small motel room on a lumpy bed. The motel was on a rise of land surrounded by pine trees. All night the wind sang in the trees and pine needles fell on the asphalt roof above our heads. All night long we moved our hands up and down each other’s bodies and told each other secrets and said a hundred times, Are you awake, are you still awake, are you asleep yet? I love, love, love you, I said a hundred times. I love you too, he answered. Get on top of me. Stay like that. Do that some more. Don’t move until I tell you to.

  So it went until the sun rose above the hills and we slept awhile. At eight o’clock I woke up and looked at my watch. “Get up,” I said. “It’s eight o’clock. Let’s get up and go get married.”

  “Let’s sleep some more. Come get back in bed.”

  “No. I want to do it now. I’m afraid you won’t marry me. I have to do it now.”

  “Oh, Rhoda.”

  “I can’t help it. It’s how I am. Come on, get up, I want to be the first person married today. I want to be the first person in the world to get married on this Saturday.”

  “Let’s sleep a little longer.”

  “No, I can’t wait. Please get up. Please let’s do it now.” I picked up a pair of cotton underpants from the floor and put them on. I picked up a white satin slip and pulled it over my head. He reached out and pulled me into the bed and climbed on top of me. “Move,” he said. “See if you can move.”

  “I want to have ten sons who look like you. Ten tall sons to carry my coffin to the grave.”

  “Why do you always talk about dying?” He got up and stood beside the bed. “You’re only twenty years old.”

  “I can’t help it. That’s how I think.”

  “Don’t get your feelings hurt. I’m getting dressed. Come on, see if you still have the license. You didn’t lose it, did you?”

  “No, it’s right here. I have it here.” I pulled the license out of my pocketbook and read it. He came and stood beside me. We moved into each other’s arms. Electromagnetism, Aphrodite, sunspots, whatever explains such things.

  “Do you want to get breakfast first?”

  “No. I want to be the first person married today in South Carolina or in the world.”

  “Okay, get dressed. Let’s go.”

  The sheriff of Milan County had bought a pickup truck and a motorboat with the money he had made performing marriages on weekends, he later told us. Ten dollars here, five dollars there. It added up.

  “Come on in,” he said. “Have a seat while I round up the bailiff. He likes to be my witness. Well, you got a pretty day for it. I’ll say that. How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty,” I said. “He’ll be twenty next month.”

  “Marrying an older woman. You both from Atlanta?”

  “We go to school there.” Malcolm shook hands solemnly with the sheriff and handed him the license.

  “That will be twenty-five dollars,” the sheriff said and Malcolm got out the money and handed
it to him.

  “We could let Denise witness it, if we can’t find Bobby. There he is. Come on in, Robert. They’re chomping at the bit to say the vows. Come on in. Stand by her, boy, that’s the way. Take her hand. You got the ring?”

  “I’ve got it,” I said and produced it from my pocket and gave it to Malcolm. I had been wearing it off and on for days.

  “Let’s go then,” the preacher said. “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here in the presence of this company, to join together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony, which is an honorable estate, instituted of God and like unto the union between the church and our maker. Therefore, let no one enter into it lightly, but reverently, soberly and in the sight of God. . . .” I looked at the book he was holding, at the light coming in the dusty window, at the suspenders, the chairs, my shoes. I did not believe I was worthy of such a moment. I could not bear such happiness.

  An hour later we were back at the motel packing to leave. We had stopped and eaten breakfast at a small café and endured the stares of the patrons. Every Saturday at least two or three couples found their way to Walhalla to get married. We’re turning into the runaway capital of the world, the citizens must have told themselves. Old Bud Halbritton’s getting rich marrying kids from Atlanta. We ought to build a new motel, now that Walhalla’s finally on the map.

  I didn’t have to wait long for the reaction to set in. We had hardly driven fifty miles back toward Atlanta before we had an argument. God knows what it was about. Maybe I touched his leg and he told me not to. Maybe he started desiring me and it embarrassed him. Maybe he was sorry he had done it and I picked that up. I am deeply intuitive about other people’s reactions and there was plenty to react to that day. My mania was rising to a fever pitch. I am married, I kept saying to myself. Now I will never be alone, never be afraid, never be sad again. Isn’t that true? It must be true. If getting married doesn’t work, nothing will. If getting married doesn’t work, I’ll never be happy. Never, never, never, never, never.