Edisto Revisited

by Padgett Powell

  That I took to be that. It was a disappointment surprising in its force. Why Patricia Hod meant this much to me I could not have said. The deliberate not saying before, during our little month’s halcyon, accounted, though, for part of the force now that the cat, as it were, was out of the bag. I was holding a bag of sorts. It was empty. The house looked stolid, the beach brave, the surf as fine and brutal, as gentle and seductive, as … as it always does. I couldn’t stand this aloneness. I could not recall suffering it like this before. It brought the Southern Historian to mind: Maybe he was inexplicably, irrepressibly lonely, too, and that is why if you put cameras on him in his study and told him to tell apocrypha about, say, Custer, he wept. “The Wawer! The Wawer!” really meant “I’m lonely! Don’t you … Yankees ever get lonely? No, of course you don’t. Y’all have never … lost!”

  I went back up to Jake’s and marched around back to the old house where I didn’t know for sure he was staying but which I wanted to see. It had none of the fake-brick siding I’d remembered but looked vaguely creosoted and vaguely painted brightly about the windows—some Mediterranean blue had chipped down to some white, or off-white, giving the window trim the look of china. Beside the house, where the dog that I diagnosed as having mice in his ears (a remark that charmed two generations of militant slave descendants into liking this unmilitant slave-owner descendant) had been chained, was that dog’s rear axle, driven into the ground, and on the axle the chain the dog had worn in its constant prowl and yelp and circling for release until it had been released, forever. That bulldog got its Patricia Hod, I thought, standing there beside Jake’s shack, and took a leak. Don’t forget, you’re an architect came the next thought, so improbably that I looked over my head to see if there were an absurd balloon above it. What I saw was Jake’s face studying me from a window of the house.

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  “Jake!”

  “Peein’ on the house!”

  “No. Just here, Jake.” I took a step away so he could see my lack of harm. I should have told him an architect would never pee on a house.

  “Allreetden,” Jake said.

  As protocol suggested, I waited for Jake to come out. I looked in the dog’s excavated hole—it looked like an old Confederate earthwork, come to think about it—to make sure nothing of mine had run in it, which at that moment seemed a worse profanation than peeing on the house. It hadn’t. The urine would have stood in that dry bowl like spit on face powder. I remembered clearly at that moment my having as a child spit on the Doctor’s face powder. It would roll harmlessly around and you could pour it off. Perhaps I was mistaking it for shoe polish, her powder, in tins and cakes like the old man’s pucks of Kiwi wax that you were supposed to spit on—

  “What you doin’ heah?”

  “Supposed be a woman at my house and they ain’t.”

  He took a long look at me and then beyond me toward the Grand, as if looking for others, whether for help or for a compounding of this trouble I couldn’t say.

  “So what,” he said, very distinctly, “is the prob-lem?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Spose be a woman at all our house and ain’t.”

  “I know that,” I said, and it almost made us both laugh.

  “So why you up here peein’ on my house what I want to know.”

  “Where’s that worm pit you had around here?”

  “That what?”

  “Worm pit.”

  “Woim pit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What in hell a woim pit?”

  “Pit with worms in it.”

  “Pit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ain’t no pit. They woim round heah, ain’ need no pit.”

  “You had a pit, a good pit.”

  “You are peein’ on man’s house before business hour say he got woims in a pit. I had a pit I know I have a pit.”

  “What happened to this dog?” I indicated the earthworks.

  “What dog?”

  I picked up and hefted the chain, a good heavy one. “This dog.”

  “That a chain.”

  At this point he was self-consciously scudging me, as Athenia was wont to put it. We’d lost the fine moment of genuine humor we’d had—a miracle that we’d had such a moment, really. I felt like going fishing—the same kind of emotion I’d had in Louisiana when being shown the door by Taurus. Here I was, being shown the door in Edisto. After a certain point, in life or in the modern world, I’m not sure, you can’t go fishing when being shown the door. You can’t go fishing again.

  “Jake, do I owe you for any beer or anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, can you give me that soup tureen I left here?”

  “That casserole thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  He went back in the house and came out wearing, I swear to God, a pair of high heels and carrying a large dildo of the sort—squeeze bulb and all—I had seen on the roadside months ago in Texas.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “This? Oh. This something somebody left heah.”

  “I see. And those?” I indicated, falling in alongside him, the shoes.

  “These something somebody left heah, too.”

  That covered it. Inside the Grand, Jake rang up a case of beer and I paid him—I did not want it, but it seemed the neighborly thing to do under the circumstances. He found the tureen, which had an errant cue ball in it. He put the dildo and the shoes in a paper grocery sack and wrote You on it and put the bag behind the bar. His own boots were sitting neatly on the bar itself.

  “Thanks, Jake.”

  “Anytime.”

  I left. I felt much, much better. It was still gloomy, purple, with a promise of a light but steady rain, but there was a little wind, as if what was in the offing was something better. It was July. It was early for hurricane, but possible. My hurricane kit does not include window tape and batteries and bottled water and radios. I buy ice and liquor, do all the laundry, vacuum the house. I watch the television until the comic, brave reporters doing everything they are insisting we not do—these are invariably women reporters, I’ve noticed—are blown in their sexy yellow sou’westers from the frame. When that goes off, watch the ocean and pray for direct hit. I went home.

  25

  BEFORE I HEARD OR saw anything I felt a humidity that was unusual in a closed house and then immediately smelled a smell that was entirely strange in a closed or open house, and it was a wet sweetness that announced, a second before she appeared herself, in a terry-cloth robe cinched tight, with her bare feet and bare chest matching in their dark, moist, firm contrast to the terry cloth—and over that a towel turbaned on her head making her look like Queen Nefertiti, the same rig my mother wore—Patricia Hod.

  She stood there with her lips pursed in mid-gesture, waiting for me to decide things. I stood there too long, so she went on to her (my) room as she had been going.

  I followed her into the room, where she was at work in the mirror doing something to her eyebrows. I still couldn’t come up with anything to say. I managed to remember that she had somehow appeared here the first time as well without benefit of telltale car.

  “What did that prove, and what does this prove?” Patricia Hod said.

  I wrestled this one right to the floor and held it there best I could: “I was nervous and now I’m not. Or now I’m—”

  “Now you’re lonely. Now you’re brave. Now you’re a man. Now you’re a true coward. You blew it. Do I have it right?” And she turned back to the mirror in her tall white Nefertiti headdress and readdressed her eyebrows, arching them and licking a pencil and holding it braced against her forehead with a little finger out in space like an outrigger for balance, the way a Southern pulp heroine would drink a Coke from one of the little bottles you can’t get anymore, at least not the returnable kind with the proper mix in it. You could in the days when they had cocaine in them and you had people, innocent, solid people
like this girl and not unlike me, for example, addicted to them, especially in the morning, in lieu of coffee—people who would graduate at some point in the day to liquor and reinvoke, or reinvent, the South. What was left of the South, its reinvention or its convention, was in her errant, gorgeous, hi-ho little finger, which stood out like a vestigial antenna in the perfumy air of her. This still air was separated from the air of the Atlantic Ocean by an Andersen window and Corning fiberglass and Georgia-Pacific T-I-II siding and Wal-Mart house paint. On this side of all that, her finger was poised in the charged humid air of a showered fresh woman who wasn’t—it just barely was occurring to me—freshly showered for nothing. “What are you standing there like that for? Don’t fripper it up,” she said, turning and coming to me, a little less brave-looking herself.

  In standing my ground I signed a little contract with fine clauses I did not want to read then or ever. I kissed Patricia Hod, and she was kissing me, with ink.

  I did not fripper it up.

  There is central air conditioning and there is another air, not central, not conditioned. I was resting easy in it, deigning not fripper.

  26

  AND WHAT OF MY MOTHER? What of the Doctor who bade me become seer and sayer and has had to content herself so far with a visionless architect shacked up with his cousin? She does not disapprove. She does not despair. Potato salad comes to mind.

  My mother, the Doctor, is capable of a kind of iconic metonymy that will steer her, and you, if you allow it, through the complex dance of despairing, fretting, bourgeois others about you. If you can have metonymy when those about you are losing theirs, she implies, you’ll be a man. She does this not infrequently with food. In a case I am thinking of recently, it was potato salad.

  There was a family reunion of sorts scheduled—unique in this our fractured dissolute clan. There has not been an earnest reunion under that name that purported to include all living members of this kennel since a time I vaguely recall that included, among other things, some beer bottles left in a freezer too long, resulting in frozen ropes of beer and glass that resembled small intestines, with children playing with the intestines and adults cussing and others laughing and those cussing going to Jake’s and those laughing continuing to laugh and the children getting cut as they were warned not to. That was a long time ago. There was a snake shot on the beach during that convocation, as I recall. Snakes now know the health hazards of appearing on the open beach. There has most certainly not been a reunion that included our upland lessers—Winn and Sasa and Patricia Hod, among others—since then.

  But lo! Patricia Hod was already, like the Yankees torturing our boys during the Wawer, down heah, so someone called the question. A reunion. An unheard-of reunion that just happened to tacitly acknowledge that the uplander clan we should include was already present in a vigorous and apparently lasting knot of first-rate consenting incest. “Potato salad,” my mother gets on the phone from Hilton Head to say. “You do that. I’ll do that. And Sasa will do that. Then, well, we have it.”

  “We have what, Mother?”

  “A reunion, with enough potato salad.”

  “I see.”

  “I have never, Son, had the courage to do what I really wanted to do.” She let this ride out there for a while. I refused to question her meaning. I knew the meaning. As her man Taurus would show you the nadir of sexual opportunity on a lost bayou and an institutional assortment of ur hippies to scare you back into the batter’s box, my mother would show the hapless relations potato salad on the hands of the incestuous. The Dinah Shore covered dish on the Sade plates. “Have Patricia make a hot German style if she will, or you make it, and I’ll do, you know, my Joy of Cooking mayo with potato in it, and Sasa can do that, too, or …”

  I waited. She never completed the sentence.

  “Bye.” She was gone. It was the same bye Sasa had used: curt, frisky, looking-forward-to-something farewells coming from these profoundly disappointed women happily marrying children to cousins.

  Potato salad in the South is nothing less than the principal smuggler of cholesterol into the festive, careless heart. It is pure poison beneath the facade of bland puritan propriety. It is the food of choice at any fond banquet of smiling relatives who celebrate tacitly among themselves the dark twining of two of their promising youth. My mother thinks this way instinctively. She can provide the deconstructive grid, but she prefers just doing it. And I must say she is good at it.

  At the reunion there were the three bowls of potato salad, and they were provided by the mother of the son in the incest tango, the mother of the daughter in the incest tango, and the son and the daughter in the incest tango. The four of us ate the three potato salads Communion-style until we were Confirmed to the gills.

  My mother and my aunt Sasa demonstrate a curious non-speaking solidarity in all of this, and I’ve come to think of them as rival tribal chiefs with iron livers. They approve, each, of her child and the other’s child, but they don’t deign chat. A kind of silent crossing of arms, liver to liver, as it were.

  Sasa tries a bite of the Doctor’s potato salad, says, nodding, “Manny”—the rare affectionate diminutive for her customary “Dr. Manigault,” slur of low-country eggheads—and the Doctor tries a bite of Sasa’s potato salad, says, nodding, “Sasa.” Patricia Hod and I cavort in the lee of this détente of mothers. Neither of them will have another bite of food all day and neither of them has cooked a meal in twenty years.

  27

  THE FATHERS ARE FEEBLE. That, I am beginning to deduce, is the father’s lot in life. He enfeebles himself when he releases upstream the several million protozoans that engender a tender creature not unlike him but not enough unlike him, swimming downstream toward him—they have yellow footprints for the father painted on delivery-room floors, I hear—and toward his radically inexpert but presumptuous guidance. This is enfeebling. This defines feeble. So my old man and Patricia Hod’s old man, the kind of guys who had Parker shotguns and shot birds when there were birds, who know the whole skinny of the secular, who call a spade a spade or, failing that, have another drink and look at the interest points—these guys just stand there. Looks like a good piece of ass, my old man must think. Damned good, Patricia Hod’s old man counters. And that is that: feeble progenitors with the dog of incest at their Rotarian heels. I never have had direct contact with either of them on this.

  My father’s prostate vigilance has been successful: the gland has enlarged to the size of a “baking spud,” as it is hilariously put at the Yacht Club of a Saturday afternoon. (Early in that afternoon, too—these fellows do not waste the day like their landlubber inferiors doing eighteen; they walk down to see what’s been stolen off the boat and go get a drink and play cards, eighteen or so holes of that.) All the finger probing by his childhood friend and protector has netted him the security of knowing there is an expanding baking potato inside him. This is one of many reasons why a man might keep his counsel when his son takes up an attractive taboo, I suppose.

  Another might be that I do indeed manage a species of Republican portfolio. I build a handsome building ten or twelve times a year and reduce the coast another ten- or twelve-thousandth in its handsomeness. They ain’t making any more of it is what you chant when you haul onto site (palmettoed dune) your transit and plumb bob. I have annuity. It will not mature for thirty years, but I myself appear to be coming in under the wire. At this the Republican father can cross his arms and smile in the fat-cat sunshine. That the son may be Sade only makes the cat grin. These are the morals of the proper. The proper truss themselves so well that their herniations prove relief. Even thinking about my old man makes me talk like an idiot. Withal, I dislike him not. For the father provides beyond a definition of the feeble a benchmark of error: sons are given to make one fewer error in life than that which sired them. One. To youth this task appears laughably easy. Then … well, you begin to see that the scale and scope and kind of error available is proliferating like everything else. Error is on
a microchip today. In 1940 it was on an adding machine you had to have two hands and a strong arm to operate. I think this. I apply for help—but counseling, another aspect of the proliferation of error in our time, is quicksand in these my littoral terms.

  In the progenitor’s view, I’ve set out on a broken-field run as imprudent as they get but redeemed by the nature of the ball I carry: to his mind, the ball of carnal desire. I have noticed less protest in life from those you expect it from if the case is made or can be made that those getting away with something are getting away with something. The petty thief is to be shot, but the larcenist—who wanted it, and by God got it—is a hero. If I’d showed up, say, as a teenager, with my blue steel and a black girl, it could not have been tolerated past a weekend. But show up closer to thirty years old with your cousin beaming on your arm, your cousin looking truly marvelous, and you feeling truly marvelous, and there is a line of men forming to tell you, sometimes literally, Go for it!

  At his club we have a weekly set-to which I do not regularly enough avoid, and at one of these—shortly after it became known that the Hod affair, tawdry enough in its first phase, with matronly low-country chaperone present and upcountry approval, was back on, and now without chaperone and approbation—the Progenitor said, apropos of nothing, I thought, just stirring his drink with a red swizzle which he would shortly remove and place neatly on his napkin, diagonally from corner to corner, a red-and-white Diver Down flag, “Everybody has their shit.”

  “What?”

  “Everybody has their shit.”

  I laughed. “I suppose they do.”

  He looked at me. “You know they do.” This is his use of the imperative. He is not saying that I know by experience of what he speaks, but that I had best believe what he says. It is economical and annoying in the extreme.