Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  So then I really had to go on a diet. Had to starve myself morning, night, and noon and add three miles a day to the miles I ran and go up to six aerobic classes a week.

  By the time the dress arrived I was a ten. Almost. It was blue and pink and green and flowered. It came down to my ankles. Its full skirt covered up the only thin part of my body. Its coy little neckline made my strong shoulders and arms look absurd. Worst of all, there was a see-through garden hat trimmed in flowers.

  Was I actually going to wear this out in public? I had the hots for a guy who had to have everything I take for granted explained to him. In exchange for which he had given me a dead wife, three C-sections performed in the middle of the night wearing double gloves, two dozen roses, a check for two thousand dollars, and one long slow hug by the elevator. You figure it out. Women and their desire to please wealthy, self-made men. Think about that sometime if you get stuck in traffic in the rain.

  I found a Chinese seamstress and we managed to make the dress fit me by taking material out of the seams and adding it to the waist. We undid the elastic in the sleeves and lengthened them with part of the band on the hat. I found an old Merry Widow in my mother’s cedar chest. Strapped into that I managed to look like a tennis player masquerading as a shepherdess.

  In the end I packed two suitcases. One with the Laura Ashley special and its accoutrements. The other with my white shantung suit and some extremely high platform shoes, to make me as tall as he was.

  I left Jackson with the two suitcases, two hatboxes, and a cosmetic kit. An extra carry-on contained my retainer, my Xanax, a package of rubbers and a tube of contraceptive jelly containing nonoxynol-9 and a book of poems by Anne Sexton.

  He was waiting at the gate, wearing a seersucker suit and an open shirt. He was taking the weekend off. We went to his town house first and he showed me all around it, telling me about the antiques and where he and his wife had bought them. “My first wife will be at the wedding,” he said at last. “Don’t worry about it. She’s very nice. She’s the bride’s mother.”

  “How many wives have you had?”

  “Just those two. You don’t mind, do you? There’s a guest cottage at the country house. She and her husband are staying there.”

  “Oh, sure. I mean, that’s fine. Why would that matter to me?”

  “You won’t have to see her if you don’t want to. I thought we’d stay in town tonight and go out there tomorrow morning. The wedding is in the afternoon. Everything’s done. The caterer is taking care of everything, and Donna is there to oversee him.”

  “Donna?”

  “The bride’s mother.”

  “And I’m your date.”

  “If you don’t mind. I thought we’d go downtown and hear jazz tonight. There’s a good group playing at the Meridien.”

  My antennae were going up, up, up. This was turning into a minefield. I had starved myself for two weeks to show off for his ex-wife and tiptoe around this minefield? I could have been in New Orleans with my cousins. I could have been in New York City seeing the American Ballet Theatre. I could have been in San Francisco visiting Lydia. I could have gone to Belize to go scuba-diving. I could have driven to the Grand Canyon.

  “I can’t wait to see the country house,” I said. “Since you’ve told me so much about it.” But that was a thrill postponed. We went first to his town house.

  He showed me to my room. A Laura Ashley special. Enough chintz to start an empire. So many ruffles, so many little oblong mirrors and dainty painted chairs.

  “You want me to sleep in here?” I asked. “Where do you sleep?”

  “You can sleep wherever you like. I just thought you’d like your own room. Would you like to see the other ones? To see if there is one you might like better?”

  Always play your own game, my old man had taught me. Never play someone else’s game. “The room’s fine. I mean, aren’t you going to sleep with me? I’m a grown woman, Carter. I didn’t come down here to dress up like a shepherdess and let you show me off to your friends. I thought you wanted to make love to me. What was all that talk on the phone? I mean, what are we doing here?” I sat back on the chintz bed. It was not the sort of atmosphere in which a fifty-year-old woman can feel sexy, but I tried.

  “I wanted to take you to dinner first. Then to hear some jazz.”

  “What’s wrong with now? We are alone, aren’t we?”

  “Now?” He stood very still. I could see the receding hairline and the bags under his eyes and there was no spark, no tinder, sulfur, or electricity.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Well, if you’ll leave me, I’ll unpack. I wouldn’t want my wedding clothes to be wrinkled.”

  “If you really want to . . .”

  “Never mind. I just wanted to know what was going on. Go on, I’ll unpack and freshen up and we can go out to dinner.”

  “I have reservations at the club at eight.”

  “Fine. I’ll be ready.”

  I patted him on the arm and he turned and left the room. I opened the suitcases and hung up the dress and suit. I took a bath and put on a black silk Donna Karan with small pearl earrings and went downstairs and waited in the overstuffed living room. In a while he joined me and we went out and had dinner and he got drunk and then we heard some jazz and he got drunker and then we went home and he got into the chintz-covered bed with me and made me come with his fingers. I’ll say this for him, he lived up to my expectations in that corner. He knew how to use his fingers. In maybe two minutes he made me have an incredible orgasm and he had done it with his fingers. “I can’t make love,” he moaned into my shoulder after it was over. “I can’t desire women I admire. I can only desire young girls that I can’t stand to talk to. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Go to sleep. Go on to sleep.”

  I woke up in a really good mood. An orgasm is an orgasm and it’s a hell of a lot better than Xanax. By nine o’clock we were in the Lincoln headed for the country house. I had one suitcase in the trunk. The one with the white suit and extremely high platform heels.

  The country house was very nice. Most of the chintz and printed cotton was green and white and there were plants everywhere and plenty going on in every room. His interior decorator was there and his first wife and her husband and all four of the children and their wives and husbands. The bride-to-be and the groom-to-be were busting around fixing flowers and watching the caterers set up the tents and the bandstand. The children were all loudly and publicly fighting over a diamond ring the bride-to-be was wearing. It had belonged to wife number two and her children claimed it and were angry that Carter had given it to his daughter. Since he had given it to wife number two Carter thought it was his to bestow and he had given it to the bride because her impecunious bridegroom couldn’t afford one yet. “She’ll give it back to you in time,” he told the stepchildren. “Don’t spoil her wedding day.”

  But it was being spoiled so there was no chance of my being bored that morning. The hostility rose to fever pitch now that Carter was there to suffer it and I sat at the kitchen table with wife number one, who was sipping rum and tonic, and I thought, it’s true I could be somewhere where the natives speak my language, still, nothing is ever lost on a writer. Notice everything, the older stepdaughter washing dishes in a fury. The grandchildren, the first wife smoking, the pool cleaners trying to clean the pool, the striped tent being raised, the lobster salad, the uncomfortable sofas, the yard full of BMWs, the permanent waves, the eyelash liner, the way the ring has taken the heat off my being Daddy’s date. “I have ten grandchildren,” I told Donna and her dishwashing daughter. “Things won’t always be this hectic in your family. It will settle down when you reach my age.”

  “How old are you?” they asked.

  “I’m pushing sixty,” I told them. “The older you get the better.”

  The day went from bad to worse. It got hot and hotter. The air conditioning couldn’t deal with the doors being opened and slamm
ed as the hour for the wedding drew near and the two-carat diamond ring belonging to the dead wife’s children was still on the bride-to-be’s hand.

  I went upstairs and put on the white suit and heels. The guests arrived. An anorexic internist cornered me in the hall and told me about his addiction to running. Two of his colleagues joined the conversation, praising him for looking fatter. I talked to the interior decorator. I talked to the husband of the mother of the bride, who was getting drunk enough to be jolly.

  The wedding party gathered. We all pressed around. A minister read the ceremony. Video cameras were everywhere. I hid behind a group of pedestals holding potted ferns. The guests went out to the tent and began to eat and drink and listen to the music. I went upstairs and lay down on a bed and read medical journals and a bestseller on the doctor’s bedside table. I read his little black book, which was beside it. There was a list of women with their names checked off. Mine was at the bottom. I went back to the novel, Russia House.

  After a long time Carter came upstairs to find me. “What’s wrong?” he said drunkenly. “Aren’t you having a good time?”

  “Are you going to make me come again or not?” I asked. “I’m tired of waiting.”

  “Well, not right now,” he said.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with now?”

  “I don’t know, Rhoda. I don’t think this is working out, do you?”

  “No. As a matter of fact I was thinking of catching an earlier plane. I mean, now that we have them married and everything. There’s a plane that leaves at nine. Could someone take me there? Or perhaps you could lend me a car.” I got up off the bed. “You can mail the things I left at your house. Especially that nifty dress you bought me. Someday I might want it to wear to a Halloween party.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “What have I done wrong?”

  “It’s a class thing,” I answered. “Your M.D. doesn’t make up for the chintz.”

  Well, that isn’t exactly what I said. I said something more subtle than that but probably equally mean. He didn’t answer for a long time. Then he handed me the keys to the Lincoln and offered to have his son drive me to the airport but I refused. The band was playing Beatles’ songs. I sneaked out the kitchen door and got into the Lincoln and drove myself to the Atlanta airport and flew on home.

  Where did the rest of the ten thousand dollars come in? you might well ask. Well, that’s what it cost to call up my old boyfriend in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and get him to fly down to Jackson and take me to New Orleans to make love and eat oysters and beignets. That’s what it cost to spend a week at the Windsor Court getting nonoxynol-9 all over the sheets and then fly back to Fayetteville, Arkansas, with him and make a down payment on a house on the mountain.

  In a small city that needed me back so it wouldn’t be smaller still. In a small, free city where no one I am kin to lives and where being respectable means getting your yard cut every two weeks in the summer and not smoking dope or getting your hair dyed blue.

  Plus, three hundred and fifteen dollars for a reproduction of a statue of Aphrodite, which I belatedly mailed the bride and groom for a wedding present.

  Mexico

  July the twenty-second, nineteen hundred and eighty-eight, Agualeguas, Mexico, on the road to Elbaro, a Las Terras de Los Gatos Grandes.

  It was the last day of the trip to Mexico. Another six hours and Rhoda would have been safely back in the United States of America where she belonged. Instead she was on the ground with a broken ankle. She was lying down on the hard stubble-covered pasture and all she could see from where she lay was sky and yellow grass and the terrible tall cages. The cats did not move in the cages. The Bengal tigers did not move and the lionesses did not move and the black leopard did not move. My ankle is torn to pieces, Rhoda thought. Nothing ever hurt this much in all my life. This is real pain, the worst of all pains, my God. It’s karma from the bullfight, karma from the cats, lion karma, oh, God, it’s worse than wasp stings, worse than the fucking dentist, worse than anything. I’m going to die. I wish I’d die.

  Then Saint John was there, leaning over her with his civilized laconic face. He examined her ankle, turned it gently back into alignment, wrapped it in a strip of torn cloth. A long time seemed to go by. Rhoda began to moan. The Bengal tigers stirred in their cage. Their heads turned like huge sunflowers to look at her. They waited.

  Dudley stood beside the fence. The lion was sideways. He was as big as a Harley-Davidson, as wide as a Queen Anne chair. Dudley kept on standing beside the flimsy fence. No, Dudley was walking toward her. He was walking, not standing still. My sight is going, Rhoda decided. I have been blinded by the pain.

  “Now I’ll never get back across the border,” she moaned. She pulled on Saint John’s arm.

  “Yes, you will,” he said. “You’re a United States citizen. All you need is your driver’s license.”

  He carried her to the porch of the stone house. The caretaker’s children put down the baby jaguar and went inside and made tea and found a roll of adhesive tape. Saint John taped up Rhoda’s ankle while the children watched. They peered from around the canvas yard chairs, their beautiful dark-eyed faces very solemn, the baby jaguar hanging from the oldest boy’s arm. The youngest girl brought out the lukewarm tea and a plate of crackers which she passed around. Saint John took a bottle of Demerol capsules out of his bag and gave one to Rhoda to swallow with her tea. She swallowed the capsule, then took a proffered cracker and bit into it. “Yo soy injured,” she said to the child. “Muy triste, no es verdad?”

  “Triste,” the oldest boy agreed and shifted the jaguar to his left arm so he could eat with his right.

  Then Dudley brought the station wagon around and Rhoda was laid out in the back seat on a pillow that she was sure contained both hookworm larvae and hepatitis virus. She pulled the towel out from under the ice chest and covered the pillow with the towel, then settled down for the ride back through the fields of maize.

  “Well, Shorty, you got your adventure,” Dudley said. “Old Waylon didn’t raise a whisker when you started screaming. What a lion.”

  “I want another one of those pills, Saint John,” she said. “I think I need another one.”

  “In a while,” he said. “Wait a few minutes, honey.”

  “I’ll never get back across the border. If I don’t get back across the border, Dudley, it’s your fault and you can pay the lawyer.”

  “You’ll get across,” Saint John said. “You’re a United States citizen. All you need is your driver’s license.”

  It is nineteen eighty-eight in the lives of our heroes, of our heroine. Twelve years until the end of the second millennium, A.D. There have been many changes in the world and many changes in the lives of Rhoda and Dudley and Saint John since the days when they fought over the Broad Jump Pit in the pasture beside the house on Esperanza. The river they called the bayou was still a clean navigable waterway back then, there was no television, no civil rights, no atomic or nuclear bomb, no polio vaccine. Still, nothing has really changed. Saint John still loves pussy and has become a gynecologist. Dudley still likes to kill things, kill or be killed, that’s his motto. Rhoda still likes men and will do anything to get to run around with them, even be uncomfortable or in danger.

  Details: Dudley Manning runs a gun factory in San Antonio, Texas, and is overseeing the construction of Phelan Manning’s wildlife museum. Saint John practices medicine on Prytania Street in New Orleans, Louisiana. His second wife has just left him for another man to pay him back for his legendary infidelities. She has moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and is fucking an old hunting buddy of his. She was a waitress in Baton Rouge when Saint John aborted her and fell in love. A bartender’s daughter, a first-class, world-class, hardball player. Saint John has met his match. He is licking those wounds and not in top shape in nineteen eighty-eight. Rhoda Manning is in worse shape. She is fifty-three years old and she has run out of men. That’s how the trip to Mexico began. It began because Rhoda was
bored. Some people think death is the enemy of man. Rhoda believes the problem is boredom, outliving your gonads, not to mention your hopes, your dreams, your plans.

  Here is how the trip to Mexico began. It was two in the afternoon on a day in June. Rhoda was in her house on a mountain overlooking a sleepy little university town. There was a drought and a heat wave and everyone she knew had gone somewhere else for the summer. There was nothing to do and no one to go riding around with or fuck or even talk to on the phone. Stuck in the very heart of summer with no husband and no boyfriend and nothing to do. Fifty-three years old and bored to death.

  She decided to make up with Dudley and Saint John. She decided to write to them and tell them she was bored. Who knows, they might be bored too. Dudley was fifty-six and Saint John was fifty-eight. They might be bored to death. They might be running out of things to do.

  Dear Dudley [the first letter began],

  I am bored to death. How about you? Why did I go and get rid of all those nice husbands? Why did I use up all those nice boyfriends? Why am I so selfish and wasteful and vain? Yesterday I found out the IRS is going to make me pay twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of extra income tax. My accountant’s computer lost part of my income and figured my tax wrong. So now I am bored and broke. How did this happen to me? I think I have been too good and too sober for too long. Let’s get together and get drunk and have some fun. I miss you. Where is Saint John? I bet he’s as bored as I am. I bet he would like to get drunk with us. I heard that beastly woman he married was up in Boston fucking one of his safari club buddies. Is that true? I’m sorry I’ve been so mean to everyone for so long. It was good to see you at Anna’s funeral. You looked great. Considering everything, we are lucky to be alive. Write to me or call me. Your broke and lonely and undeserving sister, Rhoda Katherine.

  Dear Saint John [the second letter began],