The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  THEY’D NAMED THE RAFT for an early Mary Scott College alumna from Paducah whose sister, Lucille Pickett, had entertained them for tea in her gingerbread family home on the bluff several days before the launch. Harriet remembers that tea as if it were a scene in a play, the crowded musty parlor like a stage set, the old lady sitting up ramrod straight on one of those terrible tufted horsehair sofas, referring again and again to “Sis-tah Daisy,” whose photographs lined the walls. A dark-haired beauty, Sis-tah Daisy had been a concert pianist, they were told. After her graduation from Mary Scott, she had performed in “all the grand capitals of Europe,” settling at length in Paris where her brilliant career continued until a personal tragedy forced her to return to Paducah. Miss Pickett had said “personal tragedy” in such a way that no one, not even Baby, dared to ask what it was.

  “Here she gave private lessons at that very piano until her untimely death,” Miss Pickett continued, pointing at the piano with her cane. (Catherine Wilson, on the piano bench, jumped up as if shot, then sat back down shamefaced.) “But I must say,” Miss Pickett continued, “after her return from Europe, a certain luster was lost. A certain luster was most assuredly lost.” She seemed lost in thought herself for a moment, then began banging her cane on the floor with such force that everyone was startled.

  A tiny black maid who looked as old as Miss Pickett herself came scurrying out of the kitchen bearing a tarnished silver tray piled high with slices of fruitcake, of all things, and passed it around. Harriet ate hers dutifully, though she got the giggles when she happened to catch, out of the corner of her eye, Baby slipping her own slice of fruitcake into her purse. Of course it was left over from Christmas! Of course it was. Or maybe the Christmas before that.

  Finally they escaped, running down the sidewalk toward the nondescript motel near the dock where they were staying, laughing all the way. Who could even imagine how old that woman was! And what about the fruitcake? By the time they reached the river, they’d named the raft: the Daisy Pickett. Harriet felt that they had cheapened the memory of the mysterious Daisy by doing so; she hoped that Miss Lucille would never know it, but of course this was impossible. They were celebrities in Paducah for the next four days as they bought provisions and made commercials to finance the trip. Everything they did was on the news.

  Now she reads to the end of the article. “The girls wore white T-shirts with yellow daisies painted on them and sang, ‘Good-bye, Paducah,’ to the tune of ‘Hello, Dolly’ as the unusual craft departed.” In fact, in Harriet’s memory, they sang relentlessly, all the time, all the way down the Mississippi. They sang in spite of all their mishaps and travails: the tail of the hurricane that hit them before they even got to Cairo, a diet consisting mostly of tuna and doughnuts, mosquito bites beyond belief, and rainstorms that soaked everything they owned. If anything really bad happened to them, they knew they could call up somebody’s parents collect, and the parents would come and fix things. They expected to be taken care of. Nobody had yet suggested to them that they might ever have to make a living or that somebody wouldn’t marry them and look after them for the rest of their lives. They all smoked cigarettes. They were all cute. They headed down the river with absolute confidence that they would get where they were going.

  How ignorant they were! But it was just as well, really, wasn’t it? Because everything is going to happen to you sooner or later anyway, whether you know it or not. Maybe it’s better not to know. Harriet flips through the rest of the soft yellowed clippings. Datelines read Helena, Arkansas; Caruthersville, Missouri; Vicksburg; Natchez; Baton Rouge . . . Here’s a close-up of Baby and Harriet on the front page of the Memphis paper, bandannas tied around their heads, squinting into the sun, grinning raffish sailors’ grins at the camera. Here’s another one, a group shot of them all on the daisy-painted bow, waving and cheering except for Baby who stares moodily off to the side, Harriet notices now, across the wide water.

  Harriet pauses at a photograph of activities on deck—Courtney and Suzanne are playing cards, several girls (is that Ruth under the brim of that Panama hat?) are reading, while Bowen does her nails and Baby sleeps. Smack in the middle of them all, clearly oblivious to the rest, Anna sits cross-legged, writing in a notebook. “If it looks confusing, you’ve got the right idea!” this article reads. “This literary crew contains several writers. At center, Anna Todd, junior English major from Ivy, West Virginia, is writing her first novel.” Not even her first, Harriet thinks. And certainly not her last. Now she’s written how many? Twenty or so? Thirty? All these romances, Harriet hasn’t read them but she’s sure they’re terrible, simply because Anna is so famous, frequently mentioned in People magazine and even Parade. Oh dear. How will Harriet ever be able to ask Anna about her work? She should have tried to read them at least; her own mother had read romances all the time. Harriet’s mother’s bed was strewn with paperbacks, all those shiny lurid covers with the girls bursting out of their bodices and a castle in the background someplace. For this old newspaper photograph, Anna had taken an ostentatiously literary pose—pen raised, lips pursed, brow furrowed in concentration, red hair rippling all down her back.

  But she had been writing, too, Harriet remembers with a start. She was writing a novel. She’d begun it on the raft and then failed to complete it, of course, when everything happened. But yes—Harriet was writing a novel, in between stints as cook and navigator, in between hands of bridge. It was an initiation story. An eight-year-old girl trying to come to terms with the loss of her father, with her mother’s promiscuity. Harriet had outlined it as precisely as she used to outline the pictures in her coloring books as a child, with thick dark exact lines, pressing down hard. Then all she’d had to do was color the insides. A snap. Harriet had written two or three pages of the novel every day on the raft. (Anna wrote a daily ten or twelve pages of hers, while Baby scribbled sometimes on little scraps of paper then jammed them down into the pockets of her cutoff jeans.)

  They’d all been in visiting writer Lucian Delgado’s creative writing class that spring, Lucian Delgado with his rumpled three-piece white suits and all the pain in the world behind his weary, hooded eyes. Terrible things had happened to him and were happening to him still. He conveyed this without words; they could just tell. Scandals, wrecks, arrests, divorces . . . “Don’t write, my lovelies!” Lucian Delgado would tell them in class. “Stop if you possibly can!” Of course, this made them all work harder than ever. Once when Harriet went to his office for a conference, she found Lucian Delgado passed out cold across his desk, silk tie thrown on the floor, typewritten pages strewn everywhere. Harriet had picked them up and put them in a stack on a corner of the desk. She read one sentence, which said, “From his balcony, the pointed roofs of the city lay below him like a great sea, devoid of hope or even interest.” Harriet tiptoed over and bent down to stare at him curiously, his mouth slack with a little drool in the corner, his cheek smashed down on an open copy of the New York Review of Books. A fly buzzed noisily at the window, striking the frosted pane again and again. Harriet had tiptoed out. Lucian Delgado gave everybody an A, then disappeared before the end of the term, never returning their final stories.

  But on the raft, Harriet was writing a novel. It’s all coming back to her now. She followed her outline resolutely. They had learned how plot works: beginning, middle, and end; conflict, complication, and resolution. It was as simple as that. Harriet was twenty years old. She knew all about plot. Her outline seems so silly to her now, ridiculous; such plots may have been suited only to boys’ books anyway. Certainly these forms don’t fit Harriet’s life, or the lives of any women she knows, or the lives of any of the women she works with in the COMEBACK! program. In her Write for Your Life workshop, where Harriet tries to help her students tell their own life stories, she has learned that there are more ways to tell stories than she could ever have dreamed. And all the stories are different.

  Mr. Gaines had explained that Huck—their inspiration—was an American Odysseus of
f on an archetypal journey, the oldest plot of all. According to the archetype, the traveler learns something about himself along the way. What did we learn? Harriet wonders now. Not much. Only that if you’re cute and sing a lot of songs, people will come out whenever you dock and bring you pound cake and ham and beer and keys to the city, and when you get to New Orleans, you will be met by the band from Preservation Hall on a tugboat and showered by red roses dropped from a helicopter, paid for by somebody’s daddy.

  “A Raft of Girls,” another caption reads, beneath a picture of them dancing on a dock someplace, Harriet believes it was Baton Rouge. Would she remember the trip at all if she didn’t have the clippings? Certainly she wouldn’t remember these details: Baby’s bandanna and the captain’s umbrella and all those tunafish sandwiches. They did an ad for some tuna company, wasn’t that it? And an ad for some blue jeans company that photographed their butts from behind, leaning over the Daisy Pickett’s rail. If they made the same trip today, they would not be referred to as “girls” in any of these articles. They would be called “women.” And they would never, ever, consent to that butt shot.

  It’s twilight when Harriet wakes, strangely and fully rested from her brief nap, yet flushed and disoriented. She springs up, her body tingling all over. She is drawn toward the window. A wide apricot swath of light lies now across the river, solemn and elegaic, fading even as Harriet watches. Buoys glow red and green. Lights twinkle across the bridge and move on the dark water. It’s a “monstrous big river” out here, as Huck said. Harriet can feel it now, she can already feel its suck and pull and hear its whisper in her ear as she imagines herself floating farther and farther from shore, borne out into the current on a rising tide of unopposed estrogen.

  Mile 736

  Memphis, Tennessee

  Friday 5/7/99

  1900 hours

  “I’LL MEET YOU AT the entrance to Chez Philippe, it’s right off the lobby,” Courtney had said in her gentle North Carolina accent, and sure enough there she is now, waving. Harriet spots her the minute she alights from the elevator. Harriet waves back. Suddenly she’s aware of her own bitten nails, no rings—as opposed to Courtney’s hands which glitter with diamonds and taper to bright red oval nails. Magazine hands. In fact, Courtney herself could have stepped from the pages of Vogue, with her perfect black suit, her pearls, her elegant cap of smooth blond hair. Here beside her, Harriet feels like a caricature: the old maid in the deck of Old Maid cards they used to play with when she was a girl back home.

  But Courtney is just as friendly as can be, kissing Harriet on the cheek, taking her by the elbow to steer her through the dining room to their table, keeping up a patter of small talk. She reminds Harriet of all the ladies who used to come to her mother’s little sewing shop in Staunton, ladies who could easily make charming conversation all afternoon as they stood up straight and turned slowly around and around on the stool like music boxes while Harriet’s mother sat cross-legged on the floor below, mouth full of straight pins, turning up their hems. They were not to look down, and didn’t. Harriet’s mother had held these ladies up to Harriet as a kind of model: this is how she should behave, this is how she should look, this is the life she should aspire to. Clearly, it’s Courtney’s life.

  The waiter appears. They order, and then Courtney chooses a bottle of Chardonnay which goes straight to Harriet’s head. She nods a lot as they eat and Courtney tells her all about her children and about her husband’s success in business and about her own community work on behalf of the library and the church and rape crisis and Harriet forgets what else. “It sounds like you’re so busy,” she finally says. “I guess it was probably pretty hard for you to arrange to take a whole week away from home for this trip. Especially without Hawk, I mean.”

  “Oh no.” Courtney signals the waiter, who takes their plates. “We often travel”—she hesitates—“separately. I’ll be staying on in New Orleans for the weekend, in fact. Also, I wanted to see the plantations along the river, especially the gardens—I’m something of a photographer these days. But of course I wanted to see all of you, too, and in any case, it would have been almost impossible to turn down Charlie Mahan on the phone. It was not a request that one could refuse, was it?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Baby ever since I learned about her death anyway,” Courtney goes on. “It was such a shock. Tragic, really.”

  “Yes.” Harriet twists her napkin, suddenly fighting back tears.

  “Did he say anything else to you about it?” Courtney leans forward. “How it happened or anything? Anything more than that brief report in the Alumnae News?”

  “He said it was an accident,” Harriet whispers. “An automobile accident just before Christmas. There’d been an ice storm the night before, so the roads were still slick. Apparently she drove off a bridge on the way to Jackson to do some Christmas shopping.”

  “A single car accident?”

  Harriet nods.

  “Well, it makes you wonder, then, doesn’t it? I mean, whether it was suicide or not. Remember how dramatic she always was? And how . . . troubled. Of course, he’d probably never say, if it was, because of the children and all. I’d never say, myself.” Courtney takes a compact from her purse and looks in the mirror to reapply her red lipstick. “Well? What do you think, Harriet? You were her best friend.”

  Harriet opens her mouth, then closes it. No, I wasn’t. Well, yes, I was. “I don’t know if she killed herself or not,” she tells Courtney now. “I’ll admit, it came into my mind, too, but Charlie certainly didn’t say anything that would indicate it. And remember how fast she always drove?”

  “Well.” Courtney clears her throat. “In any case, I presume you brought the ashes with you?”

  “I just got them,” Harriet says. “Charlie FedExed them here to the hotel. Or at least I’m assuming that’s what’s in the FedEx box. It’s not very big. I mean, it’s just some of her ashes anyway. But I haven’t had the nerve to open the box yet.”

  “Just wait, then.” Courtney pats her hand. “We’ll all do it together, when we’re coming into New Orleans, like Charlie requested. You shouldn’t have to deal with it all by yourself.”

  Oh yes I should, Harriet’s thinking as Courtney signs the check. “Wait,” she says too late. “Let’s go Dutch on this.”

  “Oh heavens no.” Courtney waves to the waiter. “My treat.”

  In school, Harriet remembers, Courtney was poor, too, like she was. It’s nice that she’s apparently gotten rich now, she always wanted it. She was always so concerned about the “right” thing to wear or the “right” thing to do. Now she epitomizes the right thing. And yet she’s still nice, too, she really is, just as nice as she was when she was a girl. Harriet remembers Courtney as wearing badges all the time which identified her as helpful in various ways: freshman orientation leader, student government representative, dorm counselor, Honor Court. She remembers Courtney staying up all night with Baby on a bad drunk, Courtney vacuuming their dormitory lounge. And Courtney’s brown eyes still look out on the world with that same level gaze; her smile is just as frank and open. Harriet fights back an impulse to throw herself into Courtney’s capable manicured hands, to say, for instance, Okay now, Courtney, what about me? Whatever happened to me?

  But Courtney is asking her something. “Weren’t you from some place fairly close to school? Was it Lexington? Or Charlottesville?”

  “Staunton,” Harriet says.

  “Oh yes, of course, I remember Staunton.” Courtney is so polite that it’s impossible to know whether this is true or not. “Staunton is a charming town. Historic, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Harriet says. “Very. Yes, it is. Historic, I mean.”

  “And you went back there right after college?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you never married, you smart girl?”

  Harriet knows that Courtney is just saying it this way to be nice.

  “No.” Something
more seems called for here, some further explanation, but Harriet can’t think what it could possibly be. “I always thought I would,” she says, “but then I didn’t, somehow. You know.”

  Courtney nods, but of course she doesn’t know. “But really, Harriet, here you are, still looking exactly the same—it’s eerie, honestly! How do you manage it? What’s your secret? And you still live in the very town where you grew up . . . That’s unusual, I think, at least by today’s standards. So, whatever have you been doing all these years? Tell me about yourself.”

  Harriet drains her glass. “I don’t have any secrets,” she says apologetically, standing, a little wobbly. “There’s really nothing to tell.”

  Nothing she can tell anyway. It all began in her mother’s little sewing shop on Water Street in Staunton so many years ago, and in many ways, she’s never really left. Oh, she has her own house now, of course, on Confederate Hill up near the hospital, she’s been there for years and she loves it, really she does, with everything arranged just the way she likes. Flowered wallpaper in the dining room, stenciled borders in the hall (she did them herself), and the cutest little Chinese red library with a gas log fireplace, everyone comments on it. Her mother’s old table Singer sewing machine sits in the library now, holding a lamp and a Boston fern.

  But Harriet still gets the funniest feeling in her stomach every time she drives past the boarded-up sewing shop on Water Street. She would feel better if it were a yogurt shop or a travel agency or, well, anything. As it is now, Harriet has the awful sense that their life—her life—is still going on behind that blackened, dusty pane, those ramshackle boards, that nothing has ever changed.