The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  But that was years and years back.

  More recently, just three weeks ago, Harriet practically accosted a strange man on a Saturday morning at the farmers market in her own hometown. Well, that’s an exaggeration. She didn’t accost him. But she spoke to him first, which is not like her, to be sure. She still can’t believe she did it. It was one of her first trips out of the house following her hysterectomy. He was a man she’d never seen before, a stocky, rumpled, pleasant-looking man about her own age with a bald head on top and one of those little gray ponytails Harriet has always liked. He was examining tomatoes.

  “That’s a German Johnson,” she blurted out. “They’re real good. You probably think it’s not ripe, but it is, it’s just pink instead of red. They’re pink tomatoes, German Johnsons.”

  He turned around, smiling, to see who had so much to say about tomatoes. “Thanks,” he said to Harriet. “I’ll take two,” he said to the tomato lady, old Mrs. Irons, still looking at Harriet. “Hey,” he said, right out of the blue, “let’s go get a cup of coffee, what do you say?” But he didn’t give her time to say anything. “Just a minute, let me pay for these tomatoes, okay?”

  While his back was turned, Harriet made her escape, ducking behind the quilt lady’s booth, past the Girl Scout lemonade stand, around the corner and into her waiting car. Safe at last, Harriet burst into tears. She cried all the way home, and not only because her stitches hurt but out of some deep, sad longing she didn’t know she felt. Now she’s sorry, or almost sorry, that she ran away. She wonders who he was. And sometimes she finds herself—if she’s stopped for a light downtown for instance—scanning the streets, looking for that blue denim shirt. Which is perfectly ridiculous. As is her continued crying, which continues to happen at the strangest times . . . this hysterectomy has given her too much time to think.

  Harriet always thought she’d get her Ph.D. and publish papers in learned journals while writing brilliant novels on the side. Why, even Dr. Tompkins wrote “Brilliant” across the top of her term paper once—now whatever was it about? “The Concept of Courtly Love in . . .” something. So why didn’t she ever get her Ph.D.? Why didn’t she ever marry? Why didn’t she have that cup of coffee? These things strike Harriet now as a simple failure of nerve. Of course, she’s always been a bit shy, a bit passive, though certainly she’s a good person, and loyal . . . oh dear! These things could be said of a dog. She’s never been as focused as other people somehow. She’s never had as much energy, and energy is fate, finally. Maybe she’ll have more energy now, since she’s had this hysterectomy. Maybe all that progestin was just confusing her, messing things up. Now she’s on estrogen—“unopposed estrogen,” her young doctor called it—writing out the prescription in his illegible script. “Go out and have some fun,” he said.

  Instead, Harriet is experiencing another failure of nerve here at the desk in the lobby of the Peabody hotel, the entrance to Mississippi. She writes her name on the line, she hands over her Visa card and her driver’s license. She takes the massive gold room key which pleases her somehow; she’s glad they haven’t gone over to those little electric card things.

  “Oh yes, a package arrived for you this morning, Federal Express,” the frail clerk says in an apparent afterthought. He plucks the orange-and-purple cardboard box from the shelf of packages behind him and pushes it across the counter toward Harriet, who steps back from the desk involuntarily. She knows what it is. “El Destino, Sweet Springs, Mississippi,” reads the return address. The clerk hesitates, watching her, watery-eyed. Has he been weeping? He slides the package a little farther across the counter.

  “Shall I take that for you, ma’am?” the bellboy asks at her elbow with her luggage already on his cart. Dumbly Harriet nods. Then it’s over and done, it’s all decided, and it is with a certain sense of relief that she follows the back of his red-and-gold uniform through the lobby toward the elevator, past more ladies drinking in high fragile chairs at the mirrored mahogany bar. Baby should be here, too; she was raised to be a lady though she didn’t give a damn about it. Sometimes Harriet actually hates Baby. To have everything given to you on a silver platter, then to just throw it all away. . . . If anything is immoral, Harriet believes, then that is immoral. Waste. Harriet follows the bellboy past the fountain where the famous ducks swim round and round.

  Soon, she knows, the ducks will waddle out of the fountain and shake their feathers and walk in a line across the lobby and get into an elevator and ride upstairs to wherever they’re kept. The ducks do this every day. What would happen, Harriet wonders, if somebody shooed them out the door and down the street and into the river? This is what’s going to happen to Harriet.

  For here is the great river itself, filling up the whole picture window of her eleventh-floor room. Unable to take her eyes off it, Harriet absentmindedly gives the bellboy a ten-dollar bill. (Oh well, that’s too much but she’s got a lot of luggage; she couldn’t decide what to bring, so she just brought it all.) The bellboy puts the FedEx package down on the glass coffee table next to a potted plant and a local tourist magazine with Elvis on the cover. VISIT THE KING, the headline reads. Harriet moves over toward the window, staring at the river. She does not answer when the bellboy tells her to have a good day; she does not turn around when he leaves. Across the lower rooftops, past the Memphis Business Journal building and the Cotton Exchange and the big NBC building blocking her view to the right, across the street and the trolley tracks, there’s Mud Island where the steamboats dock.

  Improbable as something out of a dream, two of them sit placidly at anchor like dressed-up ladies in church, flags flying, smokestacks gleaming, decks lined with people tiny as ants. While Harriet watches, one of the paddle wheelers detaches itself from Mud Island and steams gaily out into the channel, heading upriver. The ants wave. The whistle toots and the calliope is playing, Harriet knows, though she can’t really hear it, it’s too far, and you can’t open these hotel windows. But she imagines it is playing “Dixie.” Now the steamboat looks like a floating wedding cake, its wake spread out in a glistening V behind it. Can this be the Belle of Natchez herself, the boat Harriet will board in the morning? Probably not. Probably this is just one of the day cruisers, maybe the sunset cruise or the evening dinner cruise already leaving. Harriet certainly doesn’t have much time to get herself together before she is supposed to meet Courtney in the dining room. Now why did she ever say she’d do that? Married, organized, and rich, Courtney is everything Harriet is not. Each year she sends Harriet a Christmas card with a picture of herself and her family posed in front of an enormous stone house. Two sons, two daughters, a cheery husband in a red vest. Tall. All of them very tall.

  The river is brown and glossy, shining in the sun like the brown glass of old bottles. Here at Memphis it is almost a mile wide; you can barely see across it. The Hernando de Soto bridge arches into Arkansas, into oblivion, carrying lines of brightly colored cars like so many little beetles. Light glints off them in thousands of tiny arrows. The sun hangs like a white-hot plate burning a hole in the sky all around, its sunbeams leaping back from the steamboat’s brown wake and off the shiny motorboats flashing by. Harriet is getting dizzy. She’s glad to be here, up so high in the Peabody hotel, behind this frosty glass. Across the river, along the low dreamy horizon, clouds stack themselves like pillows into the sky. A thunderstorm in the making? Too much is happening too fast. At her window, behind the glass, Harriet feels insignificant before this big river, this big sky. Surely it won’t matter if she leaves now, quickly and inconspicuously, before Courtney finds out she’s here. Oh she should lie down, she should hang up her dress, she should go back home.

  The river . . . it all started with the river. How amazing that they ever did it, twelve girls, ever went down this river on that raft, how amazing that they ever thought of it in the first place.

  WELL, THEY WERE YOUNG. Young enough to think why not when Baby said it, and then to do it: just like that. Just like Huck Finn and Jim in The Adve
ntures of Huckleberry Finn which they were reading in Mr. Gaines’s Great Authors class at Mary Scott, sophomore year.

  Tom Gaines was the closest thing to a hippie on the faculty at Mary Scott, the closest thing to a hippie that most of them had ever seen in 1965, since the sixties had not yet come to girls’ schools in Virginia. So far, the sixties had only happened in Time magazine and on television. Life at the fairy-tale Blue Ridge campus was proceeding much as it had for decades past, with only an occasional emissary from the changing world beyond, such as somebody’s longhaired folk-singing cousin from up north incongruously flailing his twelve-string guitar on the steps of the white-columned administration building. And Professor Tom Gaines, who wore jeans and work boots to class (along with the required tie and tweed sports jacket), bushy beard hiding half his face, curly reddish-brown hair falling down past his collar. Harriet was sure he’d been hired by mistake. But here he was anyway, big as life and right here on their own ancient campus among the pink brick buildings and giant oaks and long green lawns and little stone benches and urns. Girls stood in line to sign up for his classes. He is so cute, ran the consensus.

  But it was more than that, Harriet realized later. Mr. Gaines was passionate. He wept in class, reading “The Dead” aloud. He clenched his fist in fury over Invisible Man, he practically acted out Absalom, Absalom, trying to make them understand it. Unfortunately for all the students, Mr. Gaines was already married to a dark, frizzy-haired Jewish beauty who wore long tie-dyed skirts and no bra. They carried their little hippie baby, Maeve, with them everywhere in something like a knapsack except when Harriet, widely known as the most responsible English major, came to baby-sit. Now people take babies everywhere, but nobody did it then. You were supposed to stay home with your baby, but Sheila Gaines did not. She had even been seen breast-feeding Maeve publicly in Dana Auditorium, watching her husband act in a Chekov drama. He played Uncle Vanya and wore a waistcoat. They had powdered his hair and put him in little gold spectacles but nothing could obscure the fact that he was really young and actually gorgeous, a young hippie professor playing an old Russian man. Due to the extreme shortage of men at Mary Scott, Mr. Gaines was in all the plays. He was Hamlet and Stanley Kowalski. His wife breast-fed Maeve until she could talk, to everyone’s revulsion.

  But Mr. Gaines’s dramatic streak was what made his classes so wonderful. For Huck Finn, he adopted a sort of Mark Twain persona as he read aloud from the book, striding around the old high-ceilinged room with his thumbs hooked under imaginary galluses. Even this jovial approach failed to charm Harriet, who had read the famous novel once before, in childhood, but now found it disturbing not only in the questions it raised about race but also in Huck’s loneliness, which Harriet had overlooked the first time through, caught up as she was in the adventure. In Mr. Gaines’s class, Harriet got goose-bumps all over when he read aloud:

  Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippoorwill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die, and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn’t make out what it was and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of sound that a ghost makes . . .

  This passage could have been describing Harriet; it could have been describing her life right then. Mr. Gaines was saying something about Huck’s “estrangement” as “existential,” as “presaging the modern novel,” but Harriet felt it as personal, deep in her bones. She believed it was what country people meant when they said they felt somebody walking across their grave. For even in the midst of college, here at Mary Scott where she was happier than she would ever be again, Harriet Holding continued to have these moments she’d had ever since she could remember, as a girl and as a young woman, ever since she was a child. Suddenly a stillness would come over everything, a hush, then a dimming of the light, followed by a burst of radiance during which she could see everything truly, everything, each leaf on a tree in all its distinctness and brief beauty, each hair on the top of somebody’s hand, each crumb on a tablecloth, each black and inevitable marching word on a page. During these moments Harriet was aware of herself and her beating heart and the perilous world with a kind of rapture that could not be borne, really, leaving her finally with a little headache right between the eyes and a craving for chocolate and a sense of relief. She was still prone to such intensity. There was no predicting it either. You couldn’t tell when these times might occur or when they would go away. Her mother used to call it “getting all wrought up.” “Harriet,” she often said, “you’re just getting all wrought up. Calm down, honey.”

  But Harriet couldn’t help it.

  Another day Mr. Gaines read from the section where Huck and Jim are living on the river:

  Sometimes we’d have that whole river to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water, and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window . . . and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft.

  His words had rung out singly, like bells, in the old classroom. Harriet could hear each one in her head. It was a cold pale day in February. Out the window, bare trees stood blackly amid the gray tatters of snow.

  Then Baby had said, “I’d love to do that. Go down the Mississippi River on a raft, I mean.” It was a typical response from Baby, who personalized everything, who was famous for saying, “Well, I’d never do that!” at the end of The Awakening when Edna Pontellier walks into the ocean. Baby was not capable of abstract thought. She had too much imagination. Everything was real for her, close up and personal.

  “We could do it, you know,” Suzanne St. John spoke up. “My uncle owns a plantation right on the river, my mother was raised there. She’d know who to talk to. I’ll bet we could do it if we wanted to.” Next to Courtney, Suzanne St. John was the most organized girl in school, an angular forthright girl with a businesslike grown-up hairdo who ran a mail-order stationery business out of her dorm room.

  “Girls, girls,” Mr. Gaines had said disapprovingly. He wanted to get back to the book, he wanted to be the star. But the girls were all looking at each other. Baby’s eyes were shining. “YES!” she wrote on a piece of paper, handing it to Harriet, who passed it along to Suzanne. Yes. This was Baby’s response to everything.

  Harriet shivers. She hangs up the new navy dress with the matching jacket she’ll wear to dinner tonight. She orders all her clothes from catalogs; it confuses her too much to shop. She unpacks a jumble of cosmetics and medications (vitamins, cold cream, calcium, Advil, lipstick, the alarming estrogen) and tosses the old envelope of clippings onto the bed. She steps out of her sensible flats and takes off her denim jumper and white T-shirt (Lands’ End) and hangs them up in the closet alongside the navy dress. All these clothes she might have owned in college, she realizes, confirming her suspicion that whatever you’re like in your youth, you only get more so with age.

  She remembers believing, as a girl, that wisdom would set in somehow, sometime, as a matter of course. Now she doubts it. There are no grown-ups—this is the big dirty secret that nobody ever tells you. No grown-ups at all, including herself. She cannot think of an exception—except, probably, Courtney, the suitemate she’ll be having dinner with later tonight. The very thought of Courtney makes Harriet feel like her bra strap is showing or her period has started and she’s got blood on the back of her skirt. But this is ridiculous! Harriet has had a complete hysterectomy and now she has to lie down. Her doctor has prescribed a daily rest for the first four months after surgery, and in fact, Harriet cannot imagine doing without it. She’s so tired . . . They say that for every hour you’re under anesthesia, a month of recuperation is required. Maybe that’s an old wives’ tale. One thing tha
t’s perfectly clear is that Harriet Holding will never be an old wife. It’s too late now.

  Though she doesn’t really look old . . . Harriet slides off her slip to stand before the mirror in her white underwear. The only real difference is that her brown pageboy is cropped below her ears now instead of at her shoulders, the way she used to wear it. But her hair is not yet gray, only a softer, duller brown. Suddenly she remembers overhearing Baby on the phone once during freshman year, arranging blind dates for them all. “Harriet? I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘good-looking,’ but she’s very attractive, and she’s got the most interesting face . . .” It’s just a bit asymmetrical, actually, with a wide forehead and big hazel eyes set slightly too far apart; a pretty, straight nose like her mother’s; and a rueful, mobile mouth. The color comes and goes too easily in her face. Which has always embarrassed her. And she can’t hide any of her feelings. Now flushed in the sunset’s last glow which illumines the whole room, Harriet could almost be the girl who went down the Mississippi River on that raft so many years ago. She’s still trim, her skin pale and softly freckled and luminous in this odd peachy light. Her stomach is flat, her breasts firm. Children have not worn her out.

  But suddenly Harriet can’t breathe. She leans forward clutching the dresser, staring into the mirror. The light flares up behind her somehow, throwing her face into darkness. Now she’s a black cutout paper doll of a woman set against the glowing rectangle of sky, not a woman at all, nobody really, a dark silhouette. Tears sting her eyes; she gropes for the lamp switch and turns it on. The room comes back. Harriet throws herself down on the bed, heart beating through her body like her blood. Here it comes again: she’s all wrought up. Of course she can’t rest. Finally she sits up, gets the envelope, and fishes out a faded newspaper entry from the Lexington, Kentucky, newspaper, dated June 10, 1965. OLD MAN RIVER, HERE WE COME! the headline says. Harriet scans the article, smiling. She has not looked through these clippings for years.