by Lee Smith
“You’re damn right!” Gladiola says. “They was too young to marry in the first place. Plus they was too crazy about each other, if you know what I mean. They would of wore each other out or killed each other, or killed somebody else. It wasn’t no way they could of stayed together.”
The front doorbell rings and Gladiola goes to answer it, leaving Sarah alone in the kitchen, where she rocks back and forth slightly, hugging herself. Sarah feels like she is hovering over her whole life in this rocking chair, she feels way high up, like a hummingbird. It occurs to her that the change of life might not be so bad. No change of life might be worse.
“What is it?” She struggles to her feet.
Everett Sharp has to repeat himself.
“I do hope I haven’t come at a bad time,” he says, “although no time is good, in such a season of sorrow. I just wanted to thank you for your business and tell you I hope that everything met with your standards. I guess we probably do things different up here in the mountains….” Everett Sharp trails off, looking at her. He has to look down, he’s such a tall man; this makes Sarah feel small, a feeling she likes.
“Sally Woodall,” he says suddenly, with a catch in his voice. “Aren’t you Sally Woodall? From high school?”
And then Sarah realizes he didn’t know who she was at all, not really, he hadn’t even connected her with her teenage self of so many years before. Everett Sharp moves closer, staring at her. His long white bony arms poke out of his short white shirtsleeves; his forearms are covered with thick red hair. Sarah feels so hot and dizzy she’s afraid she might pass out.
“My wife died last year,” Everett Sharp says. “I married Betty Robinson, you might remember her. She was in the band.”
Sarah nods.
“Clarinet,” says Everett Sharp. Then he says, “Why don’t I take you out to dinner tonight? It might do you good to get out some. They’ve got a seafood buffet on Fridays now, at the Holiday Inn on the interstate.”
“All right,” Sarah says, but she can’t take in much of what happens after that. Everett Sharp soon leaves. It’s so hot. Gladiola leaves. It’s so hot. Sarah takes a notion to look for her father’s vodka, which she finally finds in the filing cabinet in his study. She pours some into her iced tea and goes out on the porch, hoping for a breeze. She sits in the old glider and stares into the shady backyard, planning her outfit for tonight. Certainly not the beige linen suit she’s worn practically ever since she got here. Maybe the blue sheath with the bolero jacket, maybe the floral two-piece with the scoop neck and the flared skirt. Yes! And those red pumps she bought on sale at Montaldo’s last month and hasn’t even worn yet, it’s a good thing she just happened to throw them into her traveling bag. This strikes her as fortuitous, an omen. She sips her drink. The glider trembles on the edge of the afternoon.
Then Sarah remembers something that happened years ago, she couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Oddly enough, she was sitting right here on this glider, watching her parents, who sat out on the curly wrought-iron chairs beneath the big tree drinking cocktails, as they did every evening. Sarah was the kind of little girl who sat quietly, and noticed things. Actually she spied on people. Her mama and her daddy were leaning forward, all dressed up.
Mama’s dress is white. It glows in the dark. Lightning bugs rise from the grass all around, katydids sing, frogs croak down by the creek. Sally has already had her supper. She wants to go back inside to play paper dolls, but something holds her there on the porch, still watching Mama and Daddy as they start to argue (jerky, scary movements, voices raised), and then as they stand, and then as Daddy kicks over the table, moving toward Mama to kiss her long and hard in the humming dark. Daddy puts his hands on Mama’s dress.
The force of this memory sends Sarah back inside for another iced tea and vodka, and then she decides to count the napkins and place mats, and then she has another iced tea and vodka, and then she realizes it’s time to get ready for her dinner date, but before she’s through dressing she realizes she’d better go through the whole upstairs linen closet just to see what’s in there, so she’s not ready, not at all, not by a long shot, when Everett Sharp calls for her at seven, as he said.
He rings the front doorbell, then waits. He rings again. He doesn’t know!—he couldn’t even imagine!—that Sarah is right on the other side of the heavy door, not even a foot away from him, where she now sits propped up against it like a rag doll, her satin slip shining in the gloom of the dark hallway, with her fingers pressed over her mouth so she won’t laugh out loud to think how she’s fooled him, or start crying to think—as she will, again and again and again—how Sean must have felt when his very bones cracked and the red blood poured down the side of his face, or how she must have felt, hitting him.
LIVE BOTTOMLESS
In 1958, when my father had his famous affair with Carroll Byrd, I knew it before anybody. I don’t know how long he’d been having the affair before I found out about it—or, to be exact, before I realized it. Before it came over me. One day I was riding my bike all over town the way I always did, and the next day I was riding my bike all over town knowing it, and this knowledge gave an extra depth, a heightened dimension and color, to everything. Before, I’d been just any old thirteen-year-old girl on a bike. Now, I was a girl whose father was having an affair—a tragic girl, a dramatic girl. A girl with a burning secret. Everything was different.
All my conversations, especially my conversations with my mother, became almost electrical, charged with hidden import: “pregnant with meaning,” in the lingo of the love magazines and movie magazines she was constantly reading. Well, okay, we were constantly reading. For my mother loved the lives of the stars above all else. She hated regular newspapers. She hated facts. She also hated club meetings, housework, politics, business, and her mother-in-law. She was not civic. She adored shopping, friends, cooking, gardening, dancing, children and babies and kittens (all little helpless things, actually), and my father. Especially she adored my father. Mama’s favorite word was “sweet.” She’d cry at the drop of a hat, and kept a clump of pink Kleenex tucked into her bosom at all times, just in case. She called people “poor souls.”
That spring, Elizabeth Taylor was the poorest soul around, when Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash one week before the Academy Awards. Elizabeth, clutching their tiny baby, Liza, was in shock as her Hollywood and New York friends rallied to her side. The industry had never seen such a dynamo as Todd, whose electric energy sparked everyone. Just a few weeks before Todd’s death, he had celebrated Elizabeth’s twenty-sixth birthday by giving her a dazzling diamond necklace at the Golden Globe Awards dinner.
Not a “poor soul” was Ava Gardner, who had divorced Frank Sinatra for the Italian actor Walter Chiari and now was trying to steal Shelley Winters’s husband, Anthony Franciosa, playing opposite her in The Naked Maja, currently being filmed in Rome.
“Can you imagine?” My mother, clutching Photoplay, was outraged. “Isn’t Ava ever satisfied? Just think how Shelley Winters must feel!”
“It’s terrible,” I agreed. If you only knew, I thought. I sat down on the edge of the chaise longue to peer at the pictures of Ava and Shelley and Tony in a Roman nightclub.
“Look at that dress.” Mama pointed to Ava.
“What a bitch,” I said loyally. If you only knew, I thought.
“Honestly, Jenny, such language!” But Mama was giggling. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”
Nothing, was the answer to that, already clear to both of us. The fact is, I was just too much for Mama, coming along to them so late in life (a “surprise”), after my two older sisters had already “sapped her strength” and “lowered her resistance,” as she said, to all kinds of things, including migraine headaches, asthma, and a heart murmur. These ailments required her to lie down a lot but did not prevent her from being perfectly beautiful, as always.
My mother was widely known as one of the most beautiful women in Virginia, everybody said so. Previous
ly she had been the most beautiful girl in Charleston, South Carolina, where she had grown up as Billie Rutledge and lived until she married my father, John Fitzhugh Dale, Jr., a naval officer stationed there briefly during the war. “Just long enough to sweep me off my feet,” as she put it. He was a divine dancer, and my most cherished image of my parents involved them waltzing grandly around a ballroom floor, she in a long white gown, he in a snappy uniform, her hair and the buttons on the uniform gleaming golden in the light from the sparkling chandeliers.
Thus she became Billie Rutledge Dale, in a ceremony I loved to imagine. It was a wedding of superlatives: the handsomest couple in the world, a wedding cake six feet high, a gown with a train fifteen feet long, ten bridesmaids, a horse and buggy—not to mention a former suitor’s suicide attempt the night before, while everybody else was dancing the night away at the rehearsal dinner. I was especially fascinated by this unsuccessful project, which had involved the young man’s trying to hang himself from a coat rack in a downtown men’s club, after which he was forever referred to as Bobby “Too Tall” Burkes.
Some people said Mama looked like Marilyn Monroe, but I didn’t think so; Mama was bigger, blonder, paler, softer, with a sort of inflatable celluloid prettiness. She looked like a great big baby doll. People also said I took after Mama, but this wasn’t true, either, at least not yet, and I didn’t want it to become true, at least not entirely, as I feared that taking after her too much might eventually damn me into lying down a lot of the time, which looked pretty boring.
On the other hand, I was simply dying to get my period, grow breasts, turn into a sexpot and do as much damage as Mama, who had broken every heart in Charleston and had a charm bracelet made out of fraternity pins to prove it. She used to tick them off for me one by one. “Now that was Smedes Black, a Phi Delt from UVA, such a darling boy, and this one was Parker Winthrop, a Sigma Chi at W and L, he used to play the ukulele….” I was drunk on the sound of so many alphabetical syllables. My mother had “come out” in Charleston; my sisters had attended St. Catherine’s School and then “come out” in Richmond, since nobody did such a thing in Lewisville, outside Lynchburg, where we lived. I was expected to follow in my sisters’ footsteps.
But then our paths would diverge, as I secretly planned to go up north to college before becoming (to everyone’s total astonishment) a writer. First I would write steamy novels about my own hot love life, eventually getting world-famous like Grace Metalious. I would make millions of dollars and give it all away to starving children in foreign lands. I would win the Nobel Prize. Then I would become a vegetarian poet in Greenwich Village. I would live for Art.
I had a big future ahead of me. But so far, nothing doing. No breasts, no period, no sex, no art. Though very blond, I was just any skinny, pale, wispy-haired kid on a bike, quick as a rabbit, fast as a bird, riding invisible all over town, bearing my awful secret.
I KNEW WHO SHE WAS, OF COURSE. EVERYONE KNEW. Her father, Old Man Byrd, had been the county judge for forty years. After retirement, he became a hermit—or as close to a hermit as it was possible to be in Lewisville, which was chock-full of neighborly curious people naturally bound and determined to look after one another all the time. (“I swear to God,” my father remarked once in exasperation, “if the devil himself moved into this town, I guess you’d take him a casserole, too!”) Judge Byrd was a wild-looking, white-haired, ugly old man whose eyebrows grew all the way across his face in the most alarming fashion; he walked bent over, leaning on a walking stick topped by a carved ivory skull, yelling at children. He smelled bad. He did not socialize. He did not go to church, and was rumored to be an atheist. When he died, everyone was shocked to learn that there would be no funeral, unheard of in our town. Furthermore, he was to be cremated.
I remember the conversation Mama and Daddy had about it at the time.
“Cremated…” Mama mused. “Isn’t that sort of…communist? Don’t they do it in Russia and places like that?”
“Lord, no, honey.” Daddy was laughing. “It’s perfectly common, in this country as well as abroad. For one thing, it’s a lot more economical.”
“Well, it certainly isn’t southern,” Mama sniffed. “And I certainly don’t intend to have it done to me, are you listening, John? I want my body to remain as intact as possible, and I want to be buried with all my rings on. And a nice suit, or maybe a dress with a little matching jacket. And I want lots of yellow roses, as in life.”
“Yes, Billie.” Daddy hid a smile as he went out the door. He was Old Man Byrd’s lawyer, and so was in charge of the arrangements. I couldn’t believe my own daddy was actually getting to go inside Old Man Byrd’s house, a vine-covered mansion outside town, which everyone called “The Ivy House.” But of course my father was the best lawyer in town, so it followed that he’d be the judge’s lawyer, too. And since he was the soul of discretion, it also followed that he’d never mentioned this to us, not even when my cousin Jinx and I got caught trying to peep in Old Man Byrd’s windows on a dare. I still remember what we saw: a gloomy sitting room full of dark, crouching furniture; a fat white cat on a chair; the housekeeper’s sudden furious face.
Jinx and I were grounded from our bikes for a whole week, during which I completed a paint-by-numbers version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, done mostly in shades of orange and gold, and presented it to my daddy, who seemed surprised.
“I’m sorry for trespassing,” I said. “I’ll never do it again.”
But I wasn’t sorry, not in the least. The incident marked the beginning of my secret career.
I lived to spy, and this was mainly what I did on my bike trips around town. I’d seen some really neat stuff, too. For instance, I had seen Roger Ainsley, the coolest guy in our school, squeezing pimples in his bathroom mirror. I’d seen Mr. Bondurant whip his big son Earl with a belt a lot harder than anybody ever ought to, and later, when Earl dropped out of school and enlisted in the Army, I alone knew why. I had seen my fourth-grade teacher, prissy Miss Emily Horn, necking on the couch with her boyfriend and smoking cigarettes. Best of all, I had seen Mrs. Cecil Hertz come running past a picture window wearing nothing but an apron, followed shortly by Mr. Cecil Hertz himself, wearing nothing at all and carrying a spatula.
It was amazing how careless people were about drawing their drapes and pulling their shades down. It was amazing what you could see, especially if you were an athletic and enterprising girl such as myself. I wrote my observations down in a Davy Crockett spiral notebook I’d bought for this purpose. I wrote down everything: date, time, weather, physical descriptions, my reaction. I would use this stuff later, in my novels.
I saw Carroll Byrd the very first time I rode out there to spy on her, after the old man’s death. It was a cold gray day in January, and she was burning trash. The sky was so dark that I didn’t notice the smoke at first, not until I was halfway down the long lane that went from the road to the house—her house, now. In spite of the cold, she had opened the windows, flung the shutters outward, and left the front door wide open, too. Airing everything out, I guessed. The whole house wore a rattled, astonished expression. She had a regular bonfire going on the patio in the side yard—cardboard boxes, newspapers, old magazines. She emerged from the house with armful after armful of old papers to feed the yellow flames.
I had ditched my bike earlier, up the lane; now I dodged behind giant boxwoods, getting closer and closer. This was interesting. Neither my mother nor any of her friends would ever have acted like Carroll Byrd. In the first place, they all had constant help and never lifted a finger carrying anything. In the second place, Mama “would not be found dead” dressed the way Carroll Byrd was dressed that day: she wore work boots, just like a field hand; men’s pants, belted at the waist; and a tight, long-sleeved black sweater (leotard was a word I would not learn until college). Her dark hair, longer than any woman’s in town, was pulled back severely from her high forehead and tied with a string, and fell straight down her back. Indian hair, str
eaked with gray. I knew instinctively that she didn’t care about the gray, that she would never color it. Nor would she ever wear makeup. Her face was lean and hard, her cheekbones chiseled. She had inherited her father’s heavy brows, like dark wings above the deep-set black eyes.
While I watched, she paused in the middle of one of her trips to the house, and my heart leaped up to my throat as I thought that I had been discovered. But no. Carroll Byrd had stopped to eye an ornate white trellis, nonfunctional but pretty, which arched over the path between the house and the patio. Hand on hip, she considered it. She walked around it. Then, before I could believe what she was doing, she ripped it out of the ground and was breaking it up like so many matchsticks, throwing the pieces into the fire. Red flames shot toward the lowering sky. She laughed out loud. I noted her generous mouth, the flash of white teeth.
Then Carroll Byrd sat down on an iron bench to watch her fire burn for a while. She lit a cigarette, striking the match on her boot. Now I noticed that she wasn’t wearing a brassiere, something I had read about but never seen done among “nice” women. When she leaned over to stub out her cigarette on the patio tiles, I saw her breasts shift beneath the black sweater. Immediately I thought of “Selena’s brown nipples” on page 72 in Jinx’s and my dog-eared, hidden copy of Peyton Place. I was both disgusted and thrilled.
There in the cramped and pungent safety of the giant boxwood bush, I fell in love. We watched her fire, the two of us from our different vantage points, until it burned itself out. She ran a hose on the ashes before she went inside her father’s house and shut the door.
I sneaked back to my bike and rode down the long lane and then home, pedaling as fast as I could, freezing to death. But my own house seemed too warm, too bright, too soft—now I hated the baby-blue shag rug in my room, hated all my stuffed animals. I wanted fire and bare trees and cold gray sky. I went straight to bed and wouldn’t get up for dinner. After a while, Mama came in and took my temperature (normal) and brought me a bowl of milk toast on a tray. This was what you got in our house when you were sick, and it was delicious.