Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  It was late in the afternoon when they found the campus of the University of Arkansas and parked outside the tall building that housed the English Department. She had been reading the poems to him. Reading some of them two or three times. They were in a blue loose-leaf notebook, more than a hundred of them. A hundred poems she had written that summer in a hundred days. “You stay here,” she said, getting out of the car. “I won’t be long. I just want to say hello and tell them that I’m here.” She stood holding the door of the Lincoln. She was dressed in a black wool suit with a fur collar and black silk hose and high-heeled shoes. “I hate to leave you here.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll read the poems.”

  “Oh, good.” She smiled. For a moment she stopped being scared.

  She’s scared to death, Raine thought. Poor baby, this is her big chance and she doesn’t want to blow it. It’s just a bunch of underpaid college professors but she doesn’t know it. She thinks these guys can teach her something.

  He smiled the smile he used for his Little League team. “Go knock ’em dead, baby. I’ll be right here.” She walked across the street and into the double glass doors of the building. It was growing dark. The swift dark that falls in November. Raine took a Sporting News out of the glove compartment and started reading it. Then he put it down and began to leaf through the poems. He liked the one about him. The one she had written years ago at Millsaps. “Pernicious sidewinder, coiled and waiting. Cold and free.” She could do it. She was a winner. Well, he was pulling for her. He was on her side.

  He had been a champion. He would never have to wait on jealousy, would never have to begrudge a moment’s glory to another soul. He bowed his head. Raine paid obeisance to the gods of any place. He was a decent man. Most of the time he played fair and told the truth. He looked off into the west, between two buildings. What was left of the light was spreading out into the low blue clouds on the horizon. It was pretty country, no doubt about that. If she stayed up here it might be good for her.

  “Raine.” He looked back toward the building. She was hurrying his way with a big man beside her. “Come meet Randolph,” she was saying. “He adores you. He had a fit when he found out you were with me.”

  Raine got out and shook the man’s hand. “I’m honored,” the man said. “I saw you play when I was a kid. I couldn’t believe it when she told me you were sitting outside in the car.”

  Later, they all went over to the big man’s house and the man’s wife cooked dinner. Then they sat around the living room and some young people who were trying to learn to be writers came in and met them. Raine and Randolph talked about football. Rhoda and the young people talked about poetry. She acted as if she was happy. She thinks she knows what she is doing, Raine decided. She thinks this is going to save her.

  The next day they drove around and found her an apartment to rent and gave a man a deposit on it and arranged for the heat and electricity to be turned on in her name the first of January. Then they went to the big man’s office and told him good-bye and then they started driving home.

  They stopped in Gould, Arkansas, and bought cheese and crackers and ate them in the car as they drove. It was the first thing she had eaten in days. “I’m glad to see you eat something, baby. You don’t eat enough.”

  “Do you think they liked me? Did Randolph say anything to you?”

  “They like you, baby. Hell, compared to those women that we met, I think that skinny blonde one is a lesbian. I’d watch out for her if I was you.”

  “She was strange, wasn’t she? They said she was a good poet but I can’t believe it. She’s so ugly. I don’t believe in ugly poets.” She scooted over closer to him and let him put his arm around her. She dropped cracker crumbs on his pants, then brushed them off. She closed her eyes and lay her head down into the crook of his shoulder. It was over. It was done. She was going to join the poets. It was okay. On the second of January she would come up here to live. Nothing else mattered. Not Eric or Teddy or Malcolm or Jimmy. Nothing mattered but the poems. The poems she would write to make women cry and break them open. To have her name in lights, to be famous, lauded and beloved. She would make it happen. It had started. Nothing could stop her now.

  II

  The skinny blonde girl did turn out to be a part-time lesbian. She would be whatever her ambition needed her to be. She dug her nails into poetry and held on for dear life. Poison pen, Rhoda thought of her, and it would turn out to be true.

  There was also a real poet, a sweet soft girl who was married to a carpenter. The Ally, Rhoda decided. The one I can trust. The night they met they had gotten drunk on gin and laughed until two in the morning.

  There was a gorgeous preppie from New England. He recognized a blanket on her bed as coming from a store in Boston. My husband went to Harvard, Rhoda told him. So they formed a bond. He’s the one I’ll fuck, Rhoda thought. If I can get him.

  There was a dope addict and a man who ate too much and a cynical graduate student who was going to make a career of going to school. And five or six more. It was nineteen seventy-six. Writing schools were new things on the horizon. Their staffs were small and made up of people who were still writing. The students were dedicated and poor. Some of them lived on welfare and food stamps. They didn’t care if they had a car. They ate and drank and slept poetry and literature.

  Strangely enough, a body of poetry was arising from this heat. There was a network of poets and writing schools across the United States. Men and women were writing morning, night, and noon. Some of it was very, very good. “Like a Diamondback in the Trunk of the Witness’s Buick” was a title Rhoda loved, after the poet, Francis Alter, took over her education. After he took her away from the writing program and she only listened to him.

  But on this first week, this ice-cold week in January, when Rhoda drove to Fayetteville alone and moved into her freezing cold, ugly, little ground-floor apartment, the main thing she had to do was keep warm. “I don’t know if you can stand the freezing winters,” the director of the program had told her. “It’s hard up here in winter.” Now she knew what he meant. The first night she slept in the apartment she piled all her clothes on the bed and slept beneath them. It was five above zero outside. It was ten above in the apartment. The next day she went to the office of the apartment building to complain. A gas pipe was broken, she was told. We’ll have it fixed sometime today.

  That afternoon she went out and rented a better apartment. One in a better neighborhood, which cost twice as much. Who am I fooling? she decided. Who am I trying to fool?

  Later that afternoon she walked through the snow to the English department and found Randolph, and sat around and talked to him. Another man was there, a completely beautiful man of uncertain age. “Meet Francis Alter,” Randolph said. “The best poet in the state.”

  Their eyes met. From that moment on they would be friends. Until the day he told her good-bye and left her and went home and shot himself, not a single moment would be cruel or jealous or untrue. Many years later she knew that even the days before he did it were not untrue. He kept saying things to her that she remembered later. Look, he would say, making her look at a revision he had suggested to a poem. Look at it, Rhoda. Really listen. I won’t always be here to tell you this.

  Good-bye, he had said, when he embraced her, on the day before he left New Orleans and went home and shot himself. Good-bye, remember this, remember me.

  She had been so lucky. All the women who made love to him, who held him in the sleepless dark nights of his soul, had never had what she had from him. She had his friendship and his help with her work. It was a gift she had longed for all her life.

  So there was that first afternoon and she had met Francis in Randolph’s office and they had sat around and talked, the crazy talk that writers talk, talk that transcends the food stamps and old cars and cold apartments, talk that lifts the spirit out of the realm of houses or clothes or cars. “Farewell is a sword that has worn out its scabbard,” Francis had written. �
�Men with names like water poured from stone jugs” was the kind of line they read and talked about and marveled over.

  Poetry was alive in the United States in nineteen seventy-six. I read everything that’s written, Francis said. So do I, Rhoda answered. I subscribe to forty magazines.

  So that was the first night and the first day. Then the classes began and Rhoda was busy from morning to night, going to classes, writing poetry, making friends. She had the new apartment with a fireplace. She had the green Mercedes. She had enough money to pay for things. She was kind and wanted to be friends with everyone. The snow fell and people had to walk uphill on dangerous icy streets to get to classes. She never complained. She never worried about the ice. She got up at dawn and wrote poetry about everything in the world, everything she could see, every person that she met. Her soul unfolded like a lotus in the freezing cold January weather, in the little mountain town, with her young brilliant broke friends.

  Only the thin blonde girl was mean-spirited and angry. Rhoda tried to stay away from her, but it was hard to do. She was married to the preppie, it turned out. So Rhoda gave up on him and fucked a fiction writer instead.

  In New Orleans her family was getting along quite well, so they said. “I’m fine,” Teddy said, when she called him. “Stay as long as you want.”

  A friend of Teddy’s killed himself at a party in uptown New Orleans on a Saturday night. Shot himself in the head while sitting in a car outside his girlfriend’s house. We don’t know why he did it, Teddy told her. It’s a mystery to me.

  It was not a mystery. It was LSD. The sixteen-year-old children who knew it did not tell. It never made the papers. LSD was something Rhoda could not understand. It was inconceivable to her that anyone would do something that messed with their brain. She did not know alcohol was a drug. She was dumb as a post about the brain and the things that harm it. All she knew was poetry. All she knew was fantasy and escape.

  Francis had that kind of imagination. Rhoda and Francis. They had learned to throw their minds like ventriloquists. And the language they shared came from the same place, from the Mississippi Delta, from the flat black bottom lands on the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Francis steals from black people, his detractors said. I think I’m part black, Francis told Rhoda several times. I have the body of the black people of the Delta, the tribes from western Africa. After he said it, Rhoda began to believe it. He did have that body, those huge hip muscles, the stout intense beauty of the football players in the line at Ole Miss. I wish I had some, she answered. But I don’t think I do. They made the language, Francis went on. When Africa lent its drums to English, southern speech began. Listen to the drums in Faulkner, in García Marquez, who learned from Faulkner. Can’t you hear it, can’t you hear the heart, the beat.

  The winter wore on. Rhoda sent hundreds of poems out in envelopes to magazines she read and liked. Francis told her of other magazines, gave her things to read, the names of editors, the addresses of small presses and magazines, and, slowly at first, and then faster, Rhoda’s poems began to be published. Now she didn’t have as many friends as she had had at first. Now only Francis and the sweet girl poet really loved her. And Eric began to call and tell her to come home. He was lonesome for her. He was worried about Teddy. He wanted to patch up the marriage and start again.

  In April, before the semester was really over, she began to leave. She took her tests, won a poetry award that made some more people hate her, began to fly home to New Orleans on the weekends. She was saying farewell to this thing she had wanted so much and now was tired of. She was tired of acting like she was poor, tired of never getting dressed up in nice clothes. She was tired of the small, poor restaurants, tired of the skinny blonde girl saying arch jealous things to her.

  At that time Rhoda always kept her word. Any promise, even if she made it when she was drunk, was treated as a sacred bond. She had not learned yet how to stop people from manipulating her, had not learned how to say, I reserve the right to change my mind. I will take back promises you curry from me in moments of weakness. She was many years away from that sort of wisdom. Which is how the skinny blonde girl ended up living in her apartment, wearing all her clothes, losing half her papers, and other hardly-to-be-spoken-of invasions.

  It was the last day of classes and Rhoda was preparing to go home to New Orleans. She was keeping the apartment for the summer in case she might want to come back in the fall. The clothes she wore in Fayetteville were not anything she would wear in New Orleans so she left them in the drawers and closets. The worksheets of three hundred poems and five short stories were in the dresser with underwear and flannel gowns and heavy socks on top of them.

  Rhoda woke up early and packed the car, meaning to begin driving at three o’clock. She left the car in the parking lot and walked to school. It was a lovely spring day, the trees were covered with small new leaves so delicate and clean they took Rhoda’s breath away. She had been living in New Orleans for so many years she had forgotten how the seasons come and go. How one day there are buds, then fatter buds, then tiny leaves which grow and darken. There was a hickory tree behind her apartment that she had been watching with great delight. On this day, at the very first of May, the leaves were half the size of her hand and she marveled at them as she walked to school.

  The preppie rode up beside her on his bicycle. When he was alone he was a lovely man. He got down off the bike and walked along beside her. “I really liked the story you put on the worksheet. The one that Intro took. It’s really good, Rhoda. The best thing that’s been written all year. I bet it made Ketch jealous.”

  “He’s mad about it. He liked me as long as I stuck to poetry. You wouldn’t believe what he did to me the other night. Well, who cares. Let him fuck his boring little wife. I’m going home.”

  “I wish you weren’t leaving. We’re having a party this afternoon. That’s why I stopped. To ask you to join us. We’re going to barbecue a goat. Wedge is bringing it from his mother’s farm.”

  “You’re going to sacrifice a goat?” She started laughing. The preppie laughed too.

  “No, it’s been in a freezer. I think it’s an old goat.”

  “Who all is coming?”

  “Randolph and his wife and Doctor Wheeler. We’re going to have a symposium. Judy got some acid. Have you ever done it?”

  “God, no. I couldn’t do anything that changed my brain. I’ve only smoked marijuana once and then I got paranoid and almost went crazy. I stick to gin and vodka and I’ve about stopped that.”

  “You ought to try it. Everyone ought to try it once.”

  “Not me. I’m too afraid.”

  “Well, we’re going to this afternoon. You can watch. If you decide to stay, come on out.”

  Understand this. Rhoda had no intention of going to the goat roast even if Randolph and Doctor Wheeler were going to be there. All she wanted to do was go to her last two classes, tell a few people good-bye, and start driving.

  She went to her nine o’clock Form and Theory class. Then she wandered upstairs to see if she had any mail. She had three letters. A story had been accepted in the Prairie Schooner. A poem had been accepted by the Paris Review. Her mother had written to say she better hurry home.

  She threw her mother’s letter in the trash can and ran into Randolph’s office to tell him about the poem and the story. “This demands a celebration,” he said. “Are you coming out to Ron and Judy’s this afternoon?”

  “They’re going to take LSD.”

  “No one told me that. Where’d you hear that?”

  “I just did. Well, I meant to drive on home. But I might as well stay another night. I’d be too excited to drive. I can’t believe it. They want the story.”

  “It’s a good story. You can write fiction as well as poems.”

  “Oh, God. I can’t believe it. It’s too good to be true.” She held the letter up in the air. She shimmered. She levitated. She left the earth and flew around the ceiling of Randolph’s room. He was elated t
oo. Students being published made them all look good, made the program defensible to the dean and the board of directors of the university.

  “You better come on out there this afternoon and celebrate,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen. They’re just going to barbecue a goat, for Christ’s sake.”

  So she went to the party. She took half an Antabuse so she couldn’t drink and ate part of a sandwich she had made the night before. She hadn’t learned how to be happy yet. She didn’t even know how to feed herself or treat herself to the simple joys of life. All she knew how to do was to run from pathology and become ecstatic when someone in Nebraska, whom she’d never met, told her that her work was good. That’s all most people ever learn. To see their reflections in other faces.

  She ate her paltry little chicken sandwich and took a bath and changed her clothes and put on tennis shoes and socks and drove out to Markham’s Hill. She went up a gravel road to a yellow mailbox and turned onto a dirt road that led to a pasture on the top of the hill. An old lady owned most of the houses on the hill. She imagined herself to be a patron of the arts and rented the various houses and shacks to painters and potters and writers. It was a little community, with an open-air hot tub built by hippies in the sixties that was said to be the place where twenty people got hepatitis one winter. Rhoda was fascinated and repelled by Markham’s Hill, as she always was by squalor.

  Not that anything seemed squalid to her that afternoon. She had sold a story and a poem. She was going home in glory. She had come and seen and conquered. If Judy and Ron were taking LSD, or dropping acid as they called it, it would be all right. Randolph would protect her and maybe later she could write about it. Nothing is ever lost on a writer, she told herself. Since today she believed she was one.