Net of Jewels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  I laid my head back against the seat. My arms went limp and he let go of them. Usually I fought him longer and harder than this but today it didn’t seem to matter. He pulled back out onto the road and began to drive. I closed my eyes. I tried to remember standing by the storm cellar and Doctor Morgan talking to me. Atoms into molecules, molecules into bases, bases into amino acids, into something else. Remember that, he had said. Remember I told you that.

  “We’ll get you down to Tuscaloosa where you can know some real people,” Daddy was saying. “Where we can keep an eye on you and you can know some folks that are our kind of people.”

  Part Two

  TUSCALOOSA

  Chapter

  7

  So the con was on. He knew when to strike. Whether or not the accident had been my fault the guilt was mine and it was a vein anyone could mine for years. So of course Daddy was the first to get a pick and go to work on it. I felt guilty and I was vulnerable. For many nights I would wake up in the middle of the night with lights coming at me and the car turning and turning into the crash. Sometimes the impact would be on my side and I would be lying in the coffin. Sometimes alive in the grave. Sometimes the car would be coming toward me and I would turn the wheel to sacrifice Clay. Always in the dreams Doctor Morgan and Patricia and Mother and Daddy would line up to call me to judgment.

  It’s a wonder I went back to college at all. Also, Doctor Freer had taken away my diet pills and I suppose I was having what would later be called withdrawal. I spent a lot of hours plotting ways to get him to give them back to me, then I forgot it in the aftermath of the accident. It would be almost a year before I found another source for Dexedrine.

  For now, I let Daddy con me and tell me not to worry and buy me a baby blue Chevrolet with leather seats and put six times too much money in a bank account for me and send me down to Tuscaloosa to join the Crimson Tide.

  “You be careful down there,” my mother said. “Be careful of your reputation, Rhoda. Try to act like a lady. Let people love you.”

  “Let people respect you,” my father said. “You don’t need a bunch of love.”

  About my father and the con job he did to get me to quit Vanderbilt. Well, we owed him a lot that year, although we didn’t know it. He had given up his true love for us. So we owed him our lives, didn’t we? Not that he didn’t already know about Abraham and Isaac. He knew children had to sometimes be sacrificed. He was big on young men going off to war and was almost ashamed when my uncle came home unscathed from the South Pacific. That was his code and his culture that had been beat into him in Aberdeen and he had beat it into my brothers. He never hit me again after I was thirteen. I always said I was menstruating and that terrified him. Besides I was fiercer than my brothers. I might have killed him if he hit me. There were furies I went into that no one dared mess with. Lack of pigment, red hair, those old ancestors sacrificing their strawmen, king for a day, oak knives. I was a throwback to that Celtic violence. I was also the shortest person in my family, several inches shorter than my mother. Enough of all that for now.

  As I was saying, Daddy had given up his true love in Kentucky, although we didn’t know it yet. A short, large-hipped, slightly tacky lady who had done his books the year he made a million dollars. By the time that first summer in Dunleith was over my brothers and I had figured all this out. So the reason for the new house and the new life and my discomfort was a woman. Doesn’t it always come down to a woman? someone would later write. Not just a woman either, but my brother’s mother-in-law. My sister-in-law Annie’s mother.

  Still, if we imprisoned him, forced him to move back to a place that was sixty percent black at a time when it was out of fashion to keep slaves, later it was we who set him free. When we got bad enough, when we started taking what we wanted in the world, he went on and took his too. More about that later. For now, I was packing up my new blue car and heading south to Tuscaloosa.

  * * *

  Irise was driving with me. I backed the car across the street and added her bags to mine. Charles William stood on the sidewalk waving and throwing kisses to us. “Don’t forget you’re coming to Homecoming,” he called to me. “I’ve got you a date picked out. He’s got the greatest body in the state of Georgia.”

  “How can we leave him?” I said, turning to Irise. “God, I wish he was going with us.”

  “We have to. It won’t be for long. We might get married next year, Rhoda. If his grades are good enough they’re going to let us.”

  “Well, which way do we go?” I had pulled out onto the main street.

  “Just find Highway Sixty-five and start driving. I’ll show you what to do. I’ve been on it a thousand times.”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this. I haven’t even told Vanderbilt I’m not coming.”

  “Maybe you won’t like it and you’ll go back up there.”

  “No, I’ll like it. I can’t wait. They really have parties on week nights?”

  “They really do.”

  “And the Chi O’s are good?”

  “They’re the best, except for KD.”

  Chapter

  8

  We arrived in Tuscaloosa in the middle of the afternoon. It was a brilliant fall day. The streets near the campus seemed gentle and familiar. I would be welcome here. I had Irise by my side and a trunk full of pretty clothes and a car. They would love me and let me be a college cheerleader or a yearbook beauty or something worthy of me. “Let’s go by the Chi O house,” Irise said. “I’ll go in with you if you want me to. They know you’re coming. Your momma said she called.”

  “Would you go with me? Oh, would you do that?”

  “Sure I will. I told Ariane I’d take care of you.” She seemed larger suddenly, sprightlier, here on her turf, where she was a Kappa Delta. “Turn down that street right there. It’s the house on the corner.” She pointed down a street lined with oak trees. I drove down it and came to a stop before a white frame house with girls in the yard putting up signs for rush week. Follow the Yellow Brick Road, the signs said. We’re off to see the Wizard. We went in and Irise introduced me to the Chi Omegas. “She makes A’s,” she told everyone. “She’s a genius. She wrote for a newspaper. She’s so wonderful. You’re so lucky to have her here.” They drew around me, really pretty girls, girls with beautiful clothes and faces. “Oh, we’re so glad to have you. It’s so good you’re here. Will you help us with rush? We don’t even have a skit yet.”

  “I’ll write you a skit. What do you want it to be about?”

  “She’s going to write a skit.” It echoed up and down the living rooms. “There’s a transfer from Dunleith who can write.”

  Two of the girls went with me to drop Irise off at the KD house. Then we put my stuff in the dorm room I had been assigned. “Don’t worry about that,” the girls said. “We’ll get you in the house soon. It takes a while but someone always leaves. As soon as someone leaves you can have their room.”

  “Just put those clothes in the closet and get my typewriter,” I directed. “Let’s go back to the house and get started.” We drove back to the Chi Omega house and I set my typewriter up on a dining room table and wrote a skit while they watched. It had two acts and three songs set to the music of popular ballads. In the finale the star (to be played by me) came out on the stage wearing a red towel and sat down on the edge of the stage and sang:

  I’m tired of wearing my clothes.

  I’d rather go naked, God knows.

  I’d much rather wear Chi O pins in my hair

  And sit on the curb till I froze.

  They adored it. We rehearsed it six times, ordered the costumes prepared, and went in to dinner in the dining hall. I was surrounded by admirers. I had campus beauties all around me. I was a hit. I was going to be popular. “She wrote for a newspaper. She won a writing prize at Vanderbilt. She can write book reports and everything. She makes wonderful grades. Can you believe she came here? We’re so lucky to have her. Oh, maybe now we can get off academic prob
ation after all.”

  The honeymoon between me and the Nu Beta chapter of Chi Omega lasted about three weeks. It lasted through rush week, during which time I was still such a celebrity that I was able to pick out two girls I really wanted and railroad them through. One of them was the niece of Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda. It was a great disappointment to me to learn that she had never read his books. “Oh, they wouldn’t let me,” she said. “They have disgraced the family.”

  It lasted for the first week and a half of classes and the first three meetings in the crowded attic room where the votes were taken on burning issues such as whether or not to accept an invitation to enter the Sigma Chi Derby. “Rhoda can write us a skit,” the president said. “Rhoda, will you do it for us?”

  “If you’ll find me a room in the house. I hate that dorm. I want to live here in the house.”

  “As soon as one’s available. As soon as someone leaves. Someone usually flunks out after midterms. The minute there’s a room you can have it. We want you here.” All eyes were upon me. I was their whole new thing, their writer, a girl who was smart and also reasonably pretty.

  “I’ll write it. But not this week. I really have to start going to my classes.”

  It lasted through going to my classes. It lasted through the knowledge that I didn’t have a single teacher who inspired or interested me. Through the dirty chemistry lab with its antiquated equipment and the distracted young woman teaching American literature who didn’t even know poetry. It lasted until I got bored. All of a sudden the exhilaration dropped out of the adventure and I was walking around in the afternoons all over the campus of the University of Alabama trying to find someone to talk to. I thought about going to the newspaper office and asking for a job on the student newspaper but when I dropped by one afternoon it was closed. I took a copy of the paper home and read it and it bored me. Everything bored me. I was getting deeply tragically bored and there is nothing in the world as dangerous as a bored Celt.

  It was on such a walk one Sunday afternoon that I met May Garth Sheffield at last. Charles William had told me about her. “Be sure and look up May Garth Sheffield from Birmingham,” he told me. “She’s the craziest girl I’ve ever known. She’s crazier than you are, Dee. She’s six feet tall. I went to Episcopal camp with her when I was little. Wait till you meet her. I’ll tell her that you’re coming. Don’t forget to look her up. I’ve got a feeling you will need her before it’s over. Remember I told you this.”

  Prophetic. I needed anything I could find but I had forgotten about the conversation because I had been so caught up in solving my sorority status problem and making sure I could be popular. Then one Sunday I was out wandering around by myself, quoting T. S. Eliot out loud and thinking about death and how I would end up a dried leaf in the wind and probably in hell, if there was one, for killing Clay. The universe will not forgive such a slight, I was thinking. It will shadow me wherever I go. Who knows, maybe I’m like that man in the Li’l Abner cartoon, wherever I go, clouds of death are overhead. Everyone I love, first Bob Rosen, then Clay. Well, I might have fallen in love with him. We might have been madly in love and I could have gone up to Brown with him and met some poets. When you are dead, think no more of me from your heavenly cloud. Oh, my beloved, oh, my darling lost husband. Well, I don’t want to marry anyone as long as I live anyway. I don’t want to wash dishes and run the vacuum cleaner and have babies. I wouldn’t have a baby for all the tea in China. I couldn’t stand to do that. I wouldn’t let anyone do that to me no matter how much I liked them. Maybe I find people that are going to die so I won’t ever have to swell up like Dudley’s wife. I can’t stand to think about it. It’s so disgusting. Oh, world, I cannot hold thee close enough. If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. I shouldn’t have come down here. The minute this semester’s over I’m going back to Vanderbilt.

  So my little nineteen-year-old mind would meander through its maze of hope and fear as I moved from one end of the campus to the other, walking hurriedly, usually in the early evening and always alone. With other people I was always cheerful and hopeful and optimistic and in a good mood. I had too much pride to allow anyone to know I was unhappy. Of course, I would throw Bob Rosen into a conversation to let them know I was human and had darknesses and secret sorrows. In the same way I would pretend to hate school to make stupid people feel at ease. I had never needed Nietzsche to tell me that the weak hate and fear the strong. I knew how to play that game. The wonderful thing about the past summer with Charles William was not the Dexedrine or the freedom but the fact that every morning I could walk down the street and find someone to talk to who wanted the best I had to give, the best my mind could offer. I had not found anyone in Tuscaloosa who sparked that in me. It certainly never occurred to me that I could find a boyfriend who was smart. My mother had programmed me to breed with her kind of man. He had to be six feet tall and a good dancer. Nothing else would do. I kept having a hard time finding anyone who fit the bill. The tall boys couldn’t dance and I wasn’t supposed to take the short ones seriously. None of them could think as fast as I could or read or write as well. The brilliant, intellectually curious boys were all off hiding somewhere, as miserable and unfinished as I was. The higher the intelligence the slower the rate of maturation, I would learn later. For now, I knew nothing and I was passing by the boys I could have talked to. Contemptuous of their needfulness, I wandered around being in love with mythical Bob Rosen and an occasional professor and drunken fraternity boys when they were drunk enough to be self-assured. I spit on the grave of my twenties, one of the Algonquin wits had written. It should have been engraved over the lintel of the Chi Omega house.

  It was on such a walk, full of such morbid thoughts, that I finally encountered May Garth Sheffield.

  As I came within sight of the Tri Delta house I saw an extremely tall girl standing on the steps that led down to an abandoned garden and wisteria arbor. She was standing alone, staring at the sky, so still I thought at first she was a statue. “Hi,” I called up. “I’ll bet you’re May Garth, aren’t you? I’m Rhoda Manning. Charles William Waters told me to look you up. Did he tell you about me?”

  “Oh, yes.” She came down the stairs and opened the iron gate and moved out onto the sidewalk. She was at least six feet tall. Back then that was the social equivalent of having terminal cancer. Back then girls were supposed to look like children. Not everywhere, of course, but certainly in the culture of the Deep South. Perhaps this was because southern men were so mother-ridden they had to believe they were kissing little girls to get excited. A woman as large as their mothers might suck them back into the womb, control them body and soul, make them keep on hating themselves forever. Fortunately for the human race the system was imperfect. There were very few mothers who could control their sons’ minds after the testosterone kicked in and very few women who could make their bodies smaller and keep them that way, so breeding kept getting done and babies kept getting born and the species rolled on to better days. Of course, even an imperfect system can be made to work by a genius, and May Garth was that. She was the most tenacious person, man or woman, I have ever known. She could focus and she could concentrate. If she had been born thirty years later she might have been a great basketball or tennis player or distance runner. Alas, she had been born in the wrong time in the wrong place. There she was, with that big brain and those long arms and legs and nothing to do all day but brood upon ways to squeeze herself onto the tiny little Procrustean bed of north Alabama society’s feminine ideals. The long torso bent like a mast in the wind, curved down to meet gravity and fate. Stooped. The long legs walked apologetically. The arms barely moved.

  She had status. She was a triple legacy to Tri Delt and in those days sororities took their legacies even if they were six feet tall. Also, there was the matter of her family’s banks. The Sheffields of north Alabama owned thousands of acres of cotton land, six gins, and several banks
, including the Bank of Birmingham.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “Are you going anywhere?”

  “I’m just walking around. What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. I’m just standing here.”

  “You want to go for a walk? I want to walk over to the architecture school. It’s a very inspiring place. I need to be inspired.”

  “Okay. I’ll go. I don’t have anything to do until six. I have to do something at six but I’m free until then.” When she spoke, she curved her back and stooped my way. When she listened, she did the same. Immediately I wanted to do nothing that would make her stoop. I began to walk. She walked beside me. If I so much as glanced her way, she stooped to meet my glance. “What are you doing at six o’clock?” I asked.

  “I have to take my iodine. I take it every eight hours. Two drops of iodine in a glass of milk. It makes you lose weight. I’m doing it to lose weight.”

  “My God. That’s great. I never heard of that.” I had a vision of poison iodine dripping into milk. Huge globules of iodine falling, falling through the white silky milk.

  “It burns the fat. It makes you burn the fat.”

  “How long have you been doing it?”

  “For two months. I lost nine pounds already.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “That’s really great.”

  We began to walk at a faster rate. We left the brick wall that surrounded the Tri Delt house and began to walk in the direction of the school of architecture. It was the newest building on the campus, very modern, an icon from a bright new world we had only begun to hear of in Alabama. We walked past a row of maple trees and up a flight of stairs to an atrium with tall glass windows on three sides. May Garth seemed even taller here, surrounded by this vast, high-ceilinged room. Perhaps this symbol of a new world cast a spell on me, or, perhaps, up here I didn’t have to worry about being seen out walking with a six-foot freak. One way or the other, here, in this tall marble-floored temple of a room, I began to see May Garth in a different light, as a Valkyrie or Joan of Arc, a female warrior who at any moment would go back to the Tri Delt house and drink iodine in milk. I had been on every diet I had ever heard of, but even I was not prepared to drink iodine in milk.