“Oh, darling, please don’t start anything. There are people in the house. Don’t come down here and make everyone’s life a hell. There’s a wonderful country club in town. Tomorrow we’ll go out and you can see the pool. So you can keep up with your swimming.”
“Leave me alone, Mother, will you? And I’m not going to a doctor. I’m not fat. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m going to kill myself if you don’t leave me alone.” She moved toward the door and I pushed her through it and slammed it shut and walked over and lay down on the bed and cried myself to sleep.
Chapter
4
Of course in the end I agreed to go to the doctor. By ten o’clock the next morning my mother and I were down at old Doctor Freer’s office and he had weighed and measured me and given me a diet and a prescription for some “pink pills” to take half an hour before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I took one at the drugstore as soon as we had the prescription filled. By the time we got home and started fixing my diet lunch I was in a marvelous mood. Momma ran the cook out of the kitchen and fixed the lunch herself. She fixed me four ounces of steak and a very small lettuce and tomato salad and a piece of melba toast. She set the dining room table with a crocheted placemat and heavy Strasbourg silver and made me a glass of iced coffee and sat with me while I ate. I was chattering away, happy as a lamb on twelve milligrams of Dexedrine.
After lunch I went out onto one of the screened-in porches to sand a chair. I had the record player in the den blaring away, playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 1, a perfect complement for a brain speeding away on Dex. I was feeling thin already. This was a great diet. You didn’t even get hungry. This was perfect.
“We heard you were coming. We’ve been waiting for days for you.”
I looked up. Outside the screen door were the boy and girl I had seen the day before. They were standing side by side, a tall heavy-looking boy with his shirt unbuttoned to the navel and some odd-looking cross hanging down on a chain. He was barefooted. Beside him was the girl I had seen on the porch of the blue house. “I’m Charles William Waters,” the boy said. “And this is Irise Lane. We know your name is Rhoda, but I’m always going to call you Dee. For Dirty old Rhoda, for what you did to Lizzie.”
“Who is Lizzie? I never knew a Lizzie in my life. What did you hear about me?” I opened the door and they walked in, both smiling widely.
“Lizzie used to live here. She’s furious because she had to leave. This used to be her house.”
“To hell with some goddamn mythical Lizzie. I don’t know why Daddy bought this goddamn monstrosity anyway. We’re completely redoing it. It’s going to take months to fix it so anyone can live here. Well, anyway, hello. I saw you yesterday. I’m Rhoda.”
“Excuse me for not wearing shoes. I never wear them in the summer.”
“He always goes barefooted,” Irise said. “Because he is flat-footed.”
“We’re dying to see the house,” Charles William added. “I came over about a week ago but they were still tearing out walls. Is that Tchaikovsky? I love classical music. The only other thing I listen to is jazz.”
“I love jazz. The boy I love taught me all about it. He plays a saxophone. But I’ll probably never see him again. He’s in southern Illinois dying of cancer.”
“Oh, Rhoda, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” Irise moved near to me and I really looked at her. She was very small, smaller than she had seemed from my upstairs window, and she was very old-fashioned looking, like a girl out of an old picture of a perfect life. She had soft brown hair and wide eyes that could fix on you and hold. She was wearing a thin white cotton dress trimmed in lace. She put her hand upon my arm and moved nearer. I caught a whiff of roses, some divine soft smell.
“I don’t know. He may be all right. I had to move away and leave him anyway. Well, I don’t care. What’s that perfume? What a great perfume.”
“It’s Joy. Charles William got it for me. He brought it back from Cuba.”
“A woman in a bar was wearing it,” he said. He laughed out loud. “I said, what is that perfume? Joy, she answered. The most expensive perfume in the world. Then she got her husband and brought him over. They were these fabulous tacky Yankee people. He’d made a million dollars before he was forty and he was trying to retire but he didn’t know how. Hunter McCormick and I had gone to Cuba for two weeks, this was last summer, we saw all these blue movies. You wouldn’t believe what we saw, Dee. So then I got Hunter and we started helping these people have fun. They rented a fifty-foot sailboat for the weekend and took us out on it. They kept trying to give us money and all they talked about was money. Every time we’d admire something, they’d tell us how much it cost.” He laughed again and hugged Irise to his side.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “How tacky. Well, look, come on in and see what Momma’s doing. She’s got this whole place full of carpenters. They woke me up at seven o’clock this morning. I may have to go to Cuba.”
“You’d love it, Dee. I know everywhere to stay. By the time we got through helping Patsy and Myron, that was their names, have fun we had seen the island.”
“I wish I could go. I’ve never been anywhere. My life’s passing me by.”
“Let’s see the house,” Irise said. “I’ve been visiting here forever. I can’t wait to see what your momma’s doing.”
“She’s doing everything. She didn’t want this monstrosity, but Daddy had to have it. He said she could do anything she wants to with it, so she’s doing it.”
“We love Ariane,” Charles William said. “We met her at Saint James’s. We think she’s a doll, an absolute doll.” He stopped to inspect a piece of wainscoting that was being nailed up beside a chimney. As if on cue, my mother came flying down the stairs with her hair tied up in a turban. She was trying to look like a person who could boss workmen around and had taken to tying up her hair and wearing canvas wedgies instead of her usual two-inch heels.
“Oh, Charles William,” she exclaimed. “Irise. You darlings. How nice to have you here. You’ve met Rhoda. Isn’t she precious?” She stopped by me and squeezed my shoulder. It was still early in the day and we hadn’t had time to have an argument yet. Every day she woke up thinking she could understand me and “stop fighting with me.” Every day I broke her heart.
“Make your guests some coffee, honey,” she said. “Take them in the den. Charles William knows all about decorating. He helped your cousin Martha Ann do her whole house. See if you think the sofas are all right, Charles William. I can still send them back. Joe January said he’d take them back if I decided I didn’t like them.”
“I can find you a mantel for that chimney in the hall, Ariane,” he said. “If you want one. They’re tearing down a place in Fairfields that has some fabulous ones still in it.”
“Oh, would you? Please get one. Whatever you think will fit.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll take Dee with me. Do you mind if I call her Dee, Ariane? Rhoda is too closed for her. She needs an open sound.”
“He always gives people nicknames,” Irise said. “He never even calls pets the names you give them.”
Twenty minutes later we were in the den smoking Pall Malls and drinking coffee and listening to Ravel’s “Pavanne for a Dead Princess.”
“It’s divine,” Charles William said. “I could listen to it forever. I think I’ll play it at my funeral.”
“You won’t be at your funeral,” I answered. “You’ll be dead.”
“‘This I do being mad: gather baubles about me, sit in a circle of toys.’ Edna Millay.” He raised his coffee cup, exhaled a lungful of smoke.
“My favorite poet,” I answered. “‘Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand.’ No, listen to this. This is my absolute favorite. ‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain under my head till morning.’”
“‘But the rain is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh, upon the glass and listen for reply
, and in my heart there stirs a quiet pain. For unremembered lads that not again will turn to me at midnight with a cry.’”
“Oh, my God, you really know it.” I jumped up, ran up to my room, got all my books of poetry and we sat in the den for half the afternoon, reading poetry out loud, talking about death, drinking coffee, smoking Pall Malls, totally enraptured with each other. Irise fell asleep on the sofa, all curled up in her soft white dress and sandals. Charles William sat cross-legged on the floor, his fat legs sticking out of his camp shorts. I sat on a chair, my fat stomach sticking out of a midriff. We kept on listening to the Ravel while we read. Wanda Landowska’s brilliant renditions of “Pavanne pour une infante défunte,” “A la manière de Chabrier,” “A la manière de Borodin,” and “Sonatine” played over and over on the record player.
They stayed all afternoon. At six I took another one of my pills and Mother asked Charles William and Irise to stay for dinner. “Rhoda’s on a diet,” she said. “But we can fix you a real dinner.”
“I’ll go on the diet with her,” Charles William said. “I’ll eat whatever she’s having.”
“I can eat anything,” Irise said. “Let me help you set the table.”
At six-thirty I sliced the artery between my thumb and index finger with a steak knife in my excitement over not being hungry for the four-ounce steak Mother cooked me.
Irise and Charles William rode with us in the car to get my hand stitched up at the hospital. “We needed some excitement,” Charles William said, when we were driving home with my hand bandaged. “And here you are, willing to amputate your hand, just for us.”
“He loves excitement,” Irise said. “He never stops doing things.”
“Neither do I. Well, meeting you has made this town seem like someplace I can live. I’ll see you in the morning, won’t I? Will you come back over?”
“As soon as we get up,” Charles William promised. “We’ll go find Ariane a mantel and have you an ankh made.”
“A what?”
“This.” He removed the strange cross from his neck. “It’s the Egyptian symbol of everlasting life. See, the circle represents the female sexual organs and the cross represents the male. Put them together and you have a key to unlock everlasting life. Isn’t it marvelous? I found a man in Huntsville who can make them. Here, put it on. You can wear mine until your hand gets better.” He lifted the chain and put it around my neck.
“My goodness,” Mother said, and stopped the car before Irise’s driveway.
“He loves old things and cultures,” Irise said. “Egypt is his favorite now. He knows everything about Egypt.”
“It’s getting late,” Mother said. “Rhoda better get to bed.”
“I was interested in the Greeks,” Charles William added, getting out of the car and giving me a kiss on the cheek. “But then I moved into the Egyptians. Good night, Ariane, thanks for bringing Dee here. We’ll see her in the morning.”
Mother backed the car across the street and pulled into our driveway. I was sitting in the seat with my bandaged hand in my lap and the other hand holding the ankh.
“I wouldn’t wear that pagan thing if I were you,” she began, but I got out of the car and walked away.
“Shut up, Mother,” I called over my shoulder. “Please mind your own goddamn business.”
Chapter
5
Then six weeks went by. I had lost my home and my budding profession as a newspaper columnist but I had found a friend and a new life so rich and spoiled and pampered and charming that I never shed another tear for the small town of Franklin, Kentucky, and its sensible midwestern inhabitants. My mother and father had turned their house into a party. My mother’s cousins came up from the Delta and my father’s cousins came in from their plantations near Aberdeen to eat and play bridge and sit on the porch discussing whether we should have dropped the atom bomb and if insurance was worth having and how soon it would be before the niggers took us over. Every afternoon by five o’clock they would gather on the screened-in porches while Mother ran in and out carrying whiskey sours and scotch mists and gin and tonics. Around the corner my brother Dudley and his wife were settling down into the red brick house Daddy had bought for them. Across the street his cousin Martha Ann held her own court and next door to that was another Victorian mansion Daddy was fixing to buy for his brother. Anywhere I moved, anything I touched belonged to him. Anything I wanted I could have. All I had to do was stay on my diet and be “nice to people“ and get acquainted with north Alabama. Charles William and Irise were my guides. They took me all over Dunleith and the outlying countryside. They took me to meet the famous Mimi Huffington who painted portraits of anyone who caught her fancy and sometimes even painted them for money. She had a Greek column in her living room and a bedroom she had turned into an artist’s studio. She was first cousin to the fabled Lizzie who hated me for living in her house. Finally I was even taken to meet Lizzie. “Come see what we did,” I volunteered. “Come over anytime you like.”
“I didn’t want to move,” she answered. “I can’t even drive by the place.” She squinted up her freckled face.
“If you change your mind, call me up,” I answered. “I didn’t want to move either. I didn’t want your house.”
Still, I had her house and I had her friends, Charles William and Irise. Charles William was my first true running buddy, my first imaginative peer. All my life I had wanted a friend who knew what I was talking about. I had angelized plenty of people, one in each town where I lived, endowed them with whatever it was I needed, then overwhelmed them and made them love me, but I had never before found anyone who didn’t need any filling in. Charles William was with me all the way. Of course, when two people like us get together there is always a chance things will get out of hand. We had Irise for an occasional voice of reason, but she was too polite to really put a brake on us. If we started doing something she didn’t like (such as wearing the ankhs to early communion), she just said she wanted to stay home. Which is why she wasn’t with us the night we went to meet the Klan.
“Y’all go on,” she said. “I’ll see you when you get back.”
It started out innocently enough. It was about six weeks after I moved to town and Charles William asked me if I wanted to go and see a cockfight.
“Sure,” I said. “Whyyy not.”
“It’s in a field they use for Klan meetings. I’ve been wanting to go and watch. If something like that’s going on, you ought to go and see it.”
“That’s great. I’d like to see it. I read about it but I don’t know what they do.” I didn’t know what they did. I had not lived in the Deep South since I was a child. Everything I knew about the Klan I had read in Gone With the Wind. I thought their job was to keep black men from raping me. I didn’t even know about the hangings.
All Charles William and I really wanted to do was to go and watch some white trash in their bad behavior in the night. We wanted to drift down into the real dark heart of the night and see what we could see. We wanted to do any exciting thing we could think up to do and we had already been caving, been swimming in a borrow pit, gotten drunk a dozen times, played bridge with an old lady who drank cough syrup all day, driven up to Guntersville Lake and gone through the locks in a motorboat, let Charles William’s cousin give us Stanford-Binet intelligence tests (we were waiting for the results to come back from California), had my ankh made by a silversmith in Huntsville, put in an order for a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be smuggled in from France, and anything else we could think up to do, not to mention taking the pink pills Doctor Freer gave me. Not to even mention that. I took them three times a day, and after he found out how good they made you feel, sometimes Charles William took them too.
Now we were in Charles William’s mother’s Buick going to a cockfight. It was eleven-thirty at night, a Tuesday, and I had sneaked out the side door after my parents went to sleep. “Don’t talk much when we get there,” Charles William was saying. “Just be quiet and
act like you’re interested in what they’re doing. Junior and Winston know we’re coming. They’ll take care of us, but don’t talk too much. They don’t really like women coming to these things.”
“Who are Junior and Winston? I forgot what you told me.”
“They used to work for my dad. They’ll do anything for me. Pass that bottle please.”
“The Coke or the bourbon?”
“The bourbon. The only way to understand white trash is to do what they do. I learned that in the theater. I want you to meet the theater people here, Dee. I bet they’ll want to put you in a play.”
“I was in a play once. I was the ingenue. I had to wear these lime green lounging pajamas Momma made me. They had frogs for fasteners. I hated them. I don’t look good in Chinese clothes.”
“Oh, Dee, I can just see Ariane making lounging pajamas for you. I don’t see you in green, though. I see you in mauve and violet and white. You’re so golden. You need mauve to cool you down.”
“Someday I’ll get rich and let you build me a house. What would you build?”
“White brick with many windows and gardens everywhere. A bedroom with a raised dais and a bed with mauve sheets and walls the color of shells.”
“God, it’s dark out here. Where are we?”
“Warwick County. It’s the worst place in Alabama. These people can’t even read. The white people can’t even read.”
“Then why are we going out here? It’s spooky. It gives me the creeps.”
“I think you ought to see this. If you’re going to live down here, you ought to see what you’re up against. Junior’s going to be waiting at the store. Nothing can happen to us.”
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