Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” Pearl said, but her hand was already out and her eyes were glittering.

  “For me,” Maggie said. “I want you to keep them.”

  Pearl took the earrings and ran straight out of the room.

  “Luther!” Ora Mae said suddenly, grabbing the arms of her chair.

  “Luther, I think it’s time,” she said, and Pappy got up and got her bag and I helped him get her down the mountain to the car, which was not easy, the pains coming close together and Ora Mae such a stout woman anyway, and no spring chicken either. I’ll swear they looked just about comical—Ora Mae so tall and fat, and Pappy like a little bug or something, hopping all around her. “Just take it easy, honey,” he said.

  “You take it easy,” said Ora Mae.

  I stayed with Maggie while they were gone.

  The baby as you know was a big healthy baby, not Mongoloid at all like the woman at the County Health had said he might be, and since we all thought Maggie was dying, they let her name him.

  Maggie named the baby Almarine.

  “Not hardly!” Ora Mae snorted when she heard, but for one time Pappy stood up to her and said if that’s what Maggie wanted to name him, then by God that was that. He said Maggie could name him whatever she wanted. Ora Mae said if that was the case, why then she’d call him Al.

  Ora Mae went out on the porch where I was and smoked three Lucky Strikes and then she came back in and nursed Al.

  Pearl came out on the porch with me.

  At the Honors Banquet, she had been named Most Artistic. I was stringing beans.

  “I don’t think I can stand it,” she said. She wore Mama’s earrings all the time.

  “Stand what?” I went on stringing beans and looking out at the mountains.

  “Ora Mae and that baby,” Pearl said. “Her in there nursing him like that.”

  “Well, Pearl” I said. “He’s got to eat.”

  “Oh, but it’s just so gross,” she said. She was holding tight to the porch rail, I could see her veins through her hands.

  “It’s just natural,” I said, which was true, but I never liked Ora Mae much myself as you recall. I couldn’t bring myself to stand up for her.

  “Well you would say that,” Pearl snapped out at me. “I know what you do.”

  I went on stringing beans. I knew what I did too. But whatever I do, or ever have done, it is right out in the open, for one and all to see.

  What could I say?

  “Listen, Sally, I’ve got to leave here. I’m going ahead and start in summer school, start now instead of fall”—Pearl had this full scholarship at East Tennessee State—“and I know it leaves you with a lot on you”—she meant Maggie dying—“but it’s all I can do. I want . . . I want . . .” Pearl burst into tears then, big old horrible gut-wrenching sobs, and came over and threw herself down on the porch floor and buried her head in my lap, beans and newspaper and all.

  “What do you want, Pearl?” I asked.

  “I don’t want anything to be like this. I want things to be pretty,” Pearl said. “I want to be in love.”

  I kept on stroking her hair, and two weeks later she left.

  I’m going to speed this story up now.

  Oh, I could go on and on—draw it out, you can draw anything out—but when I was telling it to Roy, it was the middle of the afternoon by then and I knew if I wanted to finish by dinner, I’d have to move right along.

  We hadn’t even gotten to the part Roy really wanted to hear about anyway—the only part he knew, about Pearl and the high school boy.

  Here’s what happened.

  All of us grew up and left.

  Maggie did not die at all. She got well and married a visiting evangelist, John Diamond, who has been perfect for her. They had four kids right off the bat and she has never been sick a day in her life since, that I know of. She lives in Marietta, Ga., right now in a brick house next door to her husband’s Baptist Church, but they move about every four years.

  Pearl went to East Tennessee State where she made the Dean’s List every time, majoring in art, and then she got a job teaching high school in Abingdon. Lewis Ray went into the Army and then to two years of college at V.P.I. He runs an insurance agency in Pikeville, Ky., and does real well. Married—I never see him. I bet he’s still stingy and mean as a snake.

  Billy went to technical school at Radford and then he went in the Army—that’s where Lewis Ray got the idea, I guess, since Billy went first—and then he started an electrical supply business and married a stuck-up bitch from Richlands. Her daddy was a surgeon and she had a pool in her backyard. That’s where their wedding was, around the pool, and my Davy who was three then was the ringbearer. I had to buy him a little white three-piece suit to be in the wedding, cost me an arm and a leg, and then he cried at the last minute and refused to do it at all! The surgeon never thought Billy was good enough for his daughter, and neither did she. I don’t know why she married him. She had been married once before, and I guess she was tired of being single in a little town like Richlands where everybody is just naturally married, and drinking gin and tonic with couples at the country club gets old real fast. Billy was already bald then, and picked at his fingernails. But he wanted to move up in the world. Trouble ahead, you could see it. I said as much.

  “Trouble ahead,” I told my husband right at the wedding, and he agreed. I looked down into the pink champagne fountain they had put up there by the diving board, at the bubbles coming up and how they popped when they got to the surface. Those bubbles kept coming, and somehow I was reminded of Billy the time he fell down in the well.

  That pink champagne gave me the creeps.

  Of course it was trouble ahead for me too.

  I forgot to say I ran off to Florida with a disc jockey from Gate City, Tennessee, who came in the Rexall one time. I did this soon after Maggie got well. I won’t say too much about it—this part is Pearl’s story, not mine, from here on out, and I’ll get to her in a minute—but I had a hard time down there. Things were not like I thought, and I still have this scar on my leg to prove it. I won’t even tell the disc jockey’s name because he didn’t last long, and neither did any of the others. I stayed down there a long time, until the day I was leaning over the side of some old scummy falling-down bridge in North Florida, didn’t even have grocery money that day, and I was pregnant, looking out over this flat white water with the trees standing up in it. Some planes went by overhead and I was wondering a little bit where they were going, Miami or where, and then I started back to the trailer.

  It was so hot, it was always so hot down there. The heat would beat in on your head. When I was almost to the trailer, two big black birds rose up out of noplace, right out of the swamp grass in front of my feet it seemed like, straight up out of the swamp, flapping their wings and screaming like cats. They almost scared me to death. I stood there shaking and watched them fly away over the water, thinking about my baby.

  I went back home. Not to Pappy and Ora Mae’s house in Hoot Owl Holler—or not for long—I got me and Rosy a two-room apartment in Black Rock over the Western Auto store, where I got a job, and then I took over the books and then I got a job at the bank as a teller, and by and by I married old Ding-a-ling and we had Davy.

  I shouldn’t call him that. But he married me to save me, or so he said, and I married him because I wanted to be saved and make something of myself—“improve my condition” as Mr. Bristol had told me, all those years ago. Have a respectable life.

  We had it, too. I wish to hell it had all worked out. I mean, we were married for years and years. But all we did was work and come home from work and as I said we never talked. We didn’t have much to say, and you’ll think that’s funny coming from me, the way I run on, but it’s true. I didn’t have anything to say and neither did he. What scares me now is that we might have gone our whole lives like that. Plenty of people do. Not knowing anything better but knowing a lot about worse, you know they really do.

  What h
appened was I met Roy.

  “You weren’t worth saving,” my husband said the day he left. All those years I had gone to church with him and been in the Home Extension Club which I hated, and done the best I could.

  “I guess not,” I told him, which was true. I was glad to hear it. I was happy I didn’t have to be saved anymore, tired of putting up a front. You can put up a front for years until it becomes a part of you, you don’t even know you’re doing it. I was glad it was over with.

  Pearl did that too, I guess. It’s her story from here on out—hers and Pappy’s and Ora Mae’s, some of it Al’s too.

  I should say now that Al turned out to be the joy of Pappy’s life. I guess it’s a good thing he got some joy, finally. Al was a rough-and-tumble baby from the word Go, a cut-up, a clown, a go-getter. Pappy taught him to play the guitar when he was not but six. Pappy and Al had little Western shirts and string ties and cowboy hats exactly alike, they used to go and play at hoedowns and UMW meetings and political rallies. “Bunch of foolishness,” Ora Mae called it. She never went with them. But I bet she kind of liked it, all the same. She liked anything Al did. I was not around then but I’ve seen the pictures—Pappy and Al, cowboy hats cocked at exactly the same angle, grinning. Pappy and Al performing was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened in the world, according to Pearl. She said she could not stand even the thought of it, and didn’t go to see them when they played at the Miss Claytor Lake Contest right outside Bristol, not two miles from where she was in school. They said it hurt Pappy’s feelings real bad.

  Pearl grew more and more high-falutin.

  She wouldn’t associate with the rest of us, except Billy a little bit, and during all that time I lived over the Western Auto store she never once gave me the time of day.

  Which is why I was surprised that day when I was still married to old Ding-a-ling, who saved me, and Pearl showed up at my front door. No phone call, no warning, no nothing. We lived out of Black Rock on Potter Street then, by the nylon hose company.

  The doorbell rang and there she was.

  I was still in my bathrobe. Davy, who was about six weeks old at the time and had the worst case of colic you ever saw, was asleep. I never slept at night, it seemed like. I was always so tired with Davy. I had taken a two months’ maternity leave from the bank to have him. Anyway I squinched the venetian blinds apart to see who might be ringing my doorbell in the middle of the morning, and looked out there and saw her. I remember it was August, you could see the heat coming up in waves from the cement road in front of my house.

  Pearl looked as cool as a cucumber, though. She had on a white frilly dress and white shoes and looked like she was fixing to have her picture taken at Olan Mills. Red lipstick and bubble hair.

  It got all over me, the way she looked. I was still wearing Kotex from having Davy. Still bleeding. I had back pains and looked like hell.

  She rang the doorbell again.

  Finally I opened the door.

  “Sally!” Pearl said in the breathy way she’d taken up since she had gone to college and gotten so arty. “I guess you’re surprised to see me.”

  “I guess I am,” I said.

  “Oh, and I’ve brought the baby a present, where is the baby?” Pearl asked, and when I pointed at the bassinet over by the recliner she went over and pulled back his blanket and looked at him.

  “Oh, he’s so little!” she said. “Ooh, look how little he is!”

  “He’s not but six weeks old,” I said.

  “Are you sure his head’s OK?” Pearl asked. “I mean it’s so pointed and all.”

  “That’s forceps,” I told her. I got a cigarette and lit it. Pearl was making me nervous.

  “Well, is it normal?” Pearl said. “To be that pointed?”

  “Hell, yeah, it’s normal,” I told her. Davy was just adorable. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Then to my complete shock, Pearl sat down hard in the recliner and started wringing her hands. She looked like she was fixing to cry any minute already—wet eyes shining with tears to come—with Pearl you always felt like there was a nervous breakdown right around the corner anyway, right beneath those slick blue shifting eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked again.

  “I don’t know,” Pearl said. She looked around and around my house, at the pile of diapers folded and the other pile of diapers not folded on the floor beside the recliner, at Davy in his bassinet, at the picture I’d gotten with Green Stamps and hung up over the couch, at the antimacassars which my husband’s mother had crocheted.

  I saw my house for the first time through her eyes, I knew what she thought. I was trying so hard then, too. Then I got mad. It made me mad, what I thought Pearl thought. I don’t give a damn, I said to myself. I put the present she had brought me, still wrapped, on the coffee table in front of the couch. I sat on the couch and lit another cigarette.

  We both looked at the present—wrapped in blue, with a bow and a rattle, you know she had them do it at the store—sitting there on the coffee table. Neither one of us said anything. The air conditioner switched on.

  Pearl was twisting her hands. Platinum nail polish, that’s what she wore—

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  Pearl took a deep breath. “You may find this hard to believe, Sally,” she said, “but I want us to be friends. I want to talk to you.” She seemed to be making this decision in spite of the way my house looked.

  “Why?” I asked. I wasn’t going to let her get away with anything.

  Davy twisted and sighed in sleep. I knew he’d wake up before long.

  “Well, as I said, you may find this hard to believe. But I’ve always admired you, Sally, and I feel like although we’ve taken different paths in life, we still have a lot in common.”

  Pearl is the only person I ever knew who said things like “paths in life” out loud.

  “Such as what?” I said.

  “Mama,” Pearl said then, and I jumped like I’d been shot.

  It was the only thing she could have said that would have kept me from running her straight out the door.

  Pearl took a deep breath. “I’m going to get married,” she said.

  “Well good,” I told her. “I guess.”

  Pearl looked like she didn’t know whether it was good or not.

  “I feel kind of funny about it,” she said. “I thought I’d come and ask you . . .” Her voice trailed off to nothing and she licked her red lips. I waited.

  “Listen, it seemed to me,” she said, “it always seemed to me when we were girls like you knew some kind of secret I didn’t know, I didn’t even know what it was about,” Pearl said. “You always knew what to do around the house and all. You always knew what you were doing, you always did what you wanted to.” (Now this, as you know, is not true. I didn’t know what I was doing any more than anybody else does. I just did what I had to, which goes for most.) Anyway, Pearl went on. “I mean the way you just up and quit school, and the things you did, and the way you ran away to Florida and then how you came back and had Rosy—it was like you always knew what you wanted and you always did it whatever the consequences, and I always admired that, Sally, I wanted to be like that, Sally, I wanted to be like that, I wanted to be you in fact and run off to Florida with a disc jockey, but you scared me too which is why I hated you then, although I didn’t really, I never really did. I went the other way, you know, as far as I could get from all that. And everything is just so right for me now but I still feel like there’s something I missed, something somewhere that you had ahold of.”

  Pearl was so upset by then that her language was slipping from the fancy way she’d come to talk, she sounded like a mountain girl again, like me. “I’ve done my best to better myself, to get away, to have a new life—”

  “Listen, Pearl,” I surprised myself by saying. “Honey, there’s no new life.” (Now where did that come from? I guess deep down inside I knew that already, in spite of being saved and listening
to Mr. Bristol so long ago.)

  “What?” Pearl said. “What?” She was all wrought up.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Go on.”

  “Anyway, I feel like we went about it different ways—me doing what I had to do to get away, and you doing what you had to, but now you’re all married, and you have this cute little pointy-headed baby, and that’s what I’m fixing to do, too, get married, and as you know it’s all I ever wanted”—(HA! I thought, but I held my peace.)—“and now I just don’t know. I mean, you had something else there for a while, something wild, you did whatever you wanted and never cared a minute what anybody else thought”—(Is that true? I thought. My problem is, I can’t decide, looking back, what is true and what’s not.)—“and now you’re married, and you have a daughter and a husband and a baby, and you’re just like anybody else, and I just thought I’d ask you—”

  “What?” I said.

  “How you like it.”

  I started laughing so hard I couldn’t stop. “Pearl, Pearl,” I said.

  “I mean, what else is there?” she said. “Or is there?”

  Nobody else would have asked it out loud.

  “Listen,” I said. “Who knows?”

  Not me, and not then, that’s for sure. They say experience is the best teacher, but I’ll be damned if I know what it teaches you. I’ll be damned if I know.

  “Well!” Pearl sat up straight in the recliner and then fell back again like she was having what they used to call a sinking spell. She closed her eyes and let the cool wind from the air conditioner, which she was right in front of, blow over her face.

  “It’s not like that, is it,” she said without opening her eyes. I didn’t even answer. I think she didn’t expect me to. “What I keep thinking is that there’s something else, you know, something that Mama knew about and never told us, something she was going to tell us when we got old enough, she said that one time, but then she died, and everything that comes up, I think well is this it? Is this it? but the thing is, you never know.”