The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  “Thomas, I have to go in,” Harriet said, struggling under his weight. He did not respond, breathing heavily, one hand finally inside her coat, then down her skirt, inside her panty hose. Next time she would wear a panty girdle. Even though she didn’t really need one, it was a lot safer.

  “Come on, baby,” Thomas said into her hair. He pulled her panty hose down until they were like fetters around her knees. His fingers hurt inside her. His thing was out, and hard. Immediately Harriet’s mind went up above the two of them, up above Thomas Lee’s little red MGB convertible which he was so proud of, up above the crowd on the chaperone’s lighted porch where lingering kisses went on and on. Harriet’s head hurt, pushed against the door. But somehow, with a sudden burst of strength, she was able to reach back and open the latch, catapulting both herself and Thomas Lee out onto the icy bank, where he let out a yelp of pain. “Bitch,” he said. “You goddamn bitch.” Harriet didn’t care, trying to pull her panty hose up far enough so she could walk. In the light from the porch, Thomas Lee’s breath came out in little white puffs like cartoon conversation. Finally Harriet stumbled up the stone steps and into the house, leaving Thomas Lee there by the side of the road leaning over the top of his little car. He stood like that for a long time after the other boys had left, stood there until Harriet started to get really worried about him, but then finally he got back into his car and drove off into the night.

  Forehead pressed against the cold glass of the dormer window, Harriet watched his red taillights wink out of sight. She knew he wouldn’t pick her up tomorrow morning for the Bloody Mary party at the KA house, she knew he’d never call her again. She had broken one of the cardinal rules in the elaborate game of dating at Mary Scott; she had not been charming, she’d embarrassed him. Therefore she would be penalized. She didn’t care; she could work on her Milton paper in the morning; in fact, she’d rather do that anyway. By then Harriet was starting to worry there was something a little bit wrong with her, as far as dating was concerned. She hadn’t understood that the whole object of college was to graduate with an engagement ring as well as a diploma, though everybody else seemed to understand this very well—everybody except Baby, who didn’t give a damn, and was already becoming famous for it. At Mary Scott, girls either fell into the Whore or the Saint category, at least until they became engaged. Then, and only then, was it okay to Do It. In fact it was required, Harriet believed. But if you made a miscalculation and lost your Most Precious Possession somehow along the way, or bet on the Wrong Boy, you lost everything. In spite of this—in spite of the seriousness of what you had to lose—the boys tried valiantly to make you lose it, getting you drunk, sweet-talking you, telling you lies (“My mama just died” or “My sister’s got this incurable disease, we just found out”). Harriet understood that the boys were not bad, to do this. They were just boys. This was their role. The girl’s role was even harder. Girls were supposed to get turned on, be sexy, yet not quite do it, ever, without that ring. Simply by ignoring it, Baby had escaped the whole system of dating at Mary Scott. But for Harriet, it was all exhausting, and she was glad to be out of it for that Sunday morning at least, glad to stay in bed and read Milton. She could not help remarking that the devil was much more interesting than God, just as Baby was much more interesting than, say, Courtney.

  Ironically, Harriet had to ride back to Mary Scott with a girl who had gotten engaged that very weekend, a senior with the unlikely name of Muffy Tortuga. Muffy almost drove off the mountain road three times, admiring her own ring. She went on and on about the merits of her fiancé, a Deke. Harriet’s whole face ached from smiling by the time Muffy finally dropped her off at Old South.

  They were gathered in the lounge waiting for her: Courtney, Baby, and Anna. Courtney turned off the Joan Baez album, and they all stood up when she came in. “For God’s sake,” Harriet said from the doorway. Something seemed to be draining out of her head and down into her stomach, leaving her light-headed and nauseated and very, very tired. “What is it?”

  Baby came over and wrapped around Harriet like a vine. Anna stroked her hair. “Jill died last night,” Courtney said. “Actually it was early this morning, around four o’clock.”

  “But she . . .” Harriet started. “Mama didn’t . . .”

  “It was a surprise,” Courtney said. “Your mama said Jill’s heart just gave out. She said you’d known it could happen, all along. A failure of heart, she called it.”

  “I’ll have to . . .”

  Anna had kept on stroking her hair. “Some doctor friend of your mom’s is going to pick you up first thing tomorrow morning,” she said, “and then we’ll all come for the funeral, which will be on Tuesday.”

  Later Harriet could scarcely remember the funeral at all. It was very small and very sad, held in the Methodist church because one of Alice’s most loyal clients was Marge Hammond, the minister’s glamorous wife, for whom Alice had slipcovered all that ugly old furniture in the parsonage when the Hammonds first came to town. So Jill had a proper Methodist funeral even though as far back as Harriet could remember, neither Jill nor she nor even Alice had ever been to that church, or to any church, not even once in all their lives. Harriet had lost her gloves, so her hands were still cold long after the burial in the Methodist churchyard, still cold that night back in her room at Mary Scott when she finally got to bed after what had seemed the longest day of her life. Still she could not sleep. She lay in bed jerking at each sound—each high-pitched laugh, each slamming door, each car horn, each tower chime—until nearly midnight when the dorm finally quieted down. Everybody had been so nice. Notes, cards, and four bunches of flowers had awaited her return. Several times, as she lay sleepless in bed, steps had approached their room and then retreated once they saw the index card she had taped to the door: SLEEPING. Finally (it must have been well after one) Baby came back. “Harriet?” she said into the darkness. Lord knows how she got into the locked dorm.

  “I’m here,” Harriet said.

  “Oh God, thank God,” Baby said. She stripped down to her T-shirt and panties and got in bed with Harriet, hugging her from behind, covering up Harriet’s cold hands with her own, twitchy and nail-bitten as always. Baby’s hair spread out over Harriet’s shoulders smelling like smoke, like bourbon, totally familiar somehow, and totally comforting. They breathed in and out as one. “Listen,” Baby said. “I had a brother once.”

  “You’ve got two brothers now,” Harriet said.

  “No, no, that’s not what I mean. Those are Daddy and Elise’s twins. I mean I had a real brother. He died when I was ten.”

  “Baby! You never told me that! How old was he?”

  “Thirteen,” Baby said. “His name was Richard. Richard Ross Ballou.”

  “That’s a nice name,” Harriet said.

  “He hanged himself,” Baby said. “Or maybe not. Maybe he fell out of a tree. He was fooling around with a rope in the woods, we had this fort.”

  “Oh, how awful. How awful, awful,” Harriet whispered.

  “Depends.”

  “Depends on what? What do you mean? Of course it was awful.”

  “Listen, I know more than you do. I was there, remember. But now sometimes I think, oh well, at least he didn’t have to live to see all this shit.”

  “What shit?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. It’s just that I’m sorry, okay? I am just so fucking sorry, honey, that’s all.” Baby spoke into Harriet’s hair, each word a warm breath on her neck.

  “How come you never told me about your brother before?” Harriet asked.

  “I never tell anybody,” Baby said. “It’s okay. It’s all in the past. I just wanted you to know, that’s all. So, look, are you still pissed at your mom?”

  “No.” Harriet was so tired now that she couldn’t remember why she had gotten so upset in the first place. Why shouldn’t Alice have a new “friend,” this little Dr. Piccolo, with his shiny bald head and his stupid Mensa watch chain? Mr. Carr was gone. Jill was gone. Harriet�
�s whole life was gone, gone in an instant, as if it had never existed. And only Harriet seemed doomed to remember and remember and remember, to remember everything. After a while Baby’s arm relaxed its grip on Harriet’s waist and her breathing slowed down. The tower clock chimed three. Harriet kept staring at the soft, glowing rectangle of the window, where the light from the lamppost by the duck pond caught the blowing flakes of snow which seemed not to fall so much as to whirl around and around, dancing, like the snowflakes in Jill’s paperweight collection from Mr. Carr.

  Mile 516

  Fanny Bullit Towhead

  Sunday 5/9/99

  2200 hours

  “AFTER YOU, LADIES”—Russell Hurt ushers his women into the Night Owls Club in the Paddlewheel Lounge. They’re lucky—they get the last available table before the show starts. Little Bobby Blue is already seated at the piano playing bebop. Russell orders grasshoppers all around.

  “I never drink after dinner,” Anna remarks, sipping hers, “though for the life of me, I can’t remember why not.” She joins the laughter; she’s loosening up. Tonight she wears all black, her flaming hair pinned up with rhinestone combs. But after all, it’s the captain’s special dinner, and what a fine-looking man he has turned out to be! Anna imagines a lonely young woman, recently widowed in a tragic freak accident, locked up in her cabin sobbing for two days on a cruise down the Mississippi with her dotty aunt Dot. Reluctantly, this young widow dries her tears, puts on her dowdy pathetic best, and attends the Captain’s Champagne Reception. He’s a dark swarthy passionate Mediterranean type of the sort she has always hated. He steps forward and opens his brawny commanding arms. His medals gleam on his chest. “Welcome to my world . . .” he sings in a deep baritone packed with testosterone. He is magnificent. The crowd presses forward. But suddenly, he glances her way. Their eyes lock. An electric current shoots between them. (Little does he know that the tragic young widow has just inherited this whole steamship company . . .)

  “Well, I suppose they’re basically all right, but I still don’t see why they had to put them at our table.” Courtney’s referring to the couple who were seated with them at dinner earlier. “What are their names again?”

  “Leonard and Bridget,” Russell says. “Oh, they’re okay. In fact, Bridget’s pretty much of a fox.” He winks at Catherine.

  “How old do you think she is?” Harriet asks.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Thirty-five, maybe? She’s a lot younger than he is, that’s for sure.”

  “Russell, you don’t know anything. She’s at least forty-five. I mean, she’s forty if she’s a day. She’s had a lot of work done—can’t you tell? She’s a trophy wife,” Catherine says.

  “And what are you—an atrophy wife?” Russell shoots back as a singer billed as Diamond Lil comes to the piano and launches into a sultry version of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

  “On the other hand, she’s not very foxy, is she?” Harriet means Diamond Lil. “Don’t you think she looks like a big hefty milkmaid in that get-up?” Diamond Lil wears a low-cut peasant blouse and a full red skirt. Her breasts swell as she leans forward.

  “Milkmaids have their charms,” Russell says. “I wouldn’t mind meeting her two friends either.”

  “Russell!” Catherine slaps his hand.

  Diamond Lil sings “Summertime” and “Crazy.” She really does have a very good voice in addition to those impressive breasts. Harriet wonders what her story is, why she’s here on this boat singing with the albino Little Bobby Blue instead of in some famous nightclub in New York or New Orleans. Something must have happened to her, Harriet thinks. Something happens to everybody.

  Diamond Lil sings “The Sounds of Silence,” one of Russell’s favorites, he remembers when it was a hit back in the sixties, sung by, who was it? Simon and Garfunkel. It was on the juke box in the basement of the Beta house, Russell remembers punching A5 again and again, sinking back into that old leather couch while it played. There was something about it, it was so plaintive. “Hello darkness, my old friend.” The strangest feeling used to come over Russell then, it was indescribable, really, and yet here it is again, years later. Many years later.

  “Really, I have to go to bed,” Anna is saying. “I can’t believe I’ve stayed up this late.”

  “We’ll see you tomorrow,” says Courtney. “Are you going on the battlefield tour? Or just into Vicksburg?”

  “Neither, I’m afraid.” Anna adjusts her layers. “I’m here to work, you know.”

  No, Harriet does not say. No, don’t you remember? Doesn’t anybody remember anything but me? We’re all here for Baby . . . For some reason Harriet remembers the way Baby used to sit on her bed with her legs flat out to the sides. She was double-jointed . . .

  “Harriet, Harriet, listen, you’ve got to hear this!” Courtney is laughing, Anna is laughing, Russell is laughing, Catherine is poking her in the side. Up front at the piano, Diamond Lil has changed the words of “Can I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life?” She’s singing, “Will I wear Depends for the rest of my life?”

  “I’m not so sure this is funny,” Russell says.

  “Look, look.” Courtney is hysterical. “They don’t even get it.” And in truth they don’t seem to, most of the older people in the bar nodding to the music with the same vague smiles they’ve worn all night. Two couples are waltzing. Diamond Lil finishes up with a flourish. “That’s it! Good night, ladies and gentlemen!” Harriet stands up with the others, and Diamond Lil sings them all out the door with “Goodnight Irene.”

  “Good night! Good night!” Russell and Catherine echo, slipping off. “See you in the morning.” Courtney disappears, but Anna pauses at the rail, even though she seemed to be in such a hurry to get to bed, so Harriet lingers, too. The air out here is thick and steamy.

  “I was just thinking,” she says, “some of those old couples in there must have been married for more than fifty years. Why, even Courtney and Hawk have probably been married for thirty-five years. I just can’t even imagine it.”

  “You could imagine it,” Anna says, “if you’d ever run into the right man.”

  “Did you ever do that, Anna? Run into the right man, I mean?” Darkness gives Harriet the courage to ask.

  “Eventually,” Anna tells her, lighting up a cigar.

  “But it wasn’t that graduate student,” Harriet prompts, as a horn from another boat sounds across the dark water.

  “Kenneth Trethaway?” Anna gives her snorting laugh. “No. Hardly.”

  “We never really knew him, did we?” Harriet’s trying to remember.

  “You never really knew me either,” Anna says.

  EVEN HER CLOSEST FRIENDS in college—these suitemates—didn’t know her real name, Annie Stokes. Nor did they know that the plain woman who showed up sometimes at Mary Scott for Parents’ Day was not actually her mother.

  Ernest Stokes, Anna’s father, was a freelance evangelist who’d moved from church to church all over West Virginia, hauling his family along. By the time she was thirteen, Anna had been to seven different schools, though she did not always go to school, as her mother was sickly, and often Anna had had to stay at home to take care of the little boys. This she’d never minded, for they were adorable, blond angels all three—David, Mark, and John—each a year apart. They had nearly killed her mother. Helen Stokes was frail anyway, a beautiful girl with red-gold hair that fell to her waist who liked to sit by the kitchen door in the sunshine smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio which had to be turned off when Daddy came home, unless it was gospel, which Daddy approved of. Daddy did not approve of much. Anna was not allowed to dance, to take gym classes, or to try out for cheerleader at school. She could not wear jeans or sleeveless blouses or drink Coca-Colas either. But she had loved her daddy, who was handsome and sweet, tossing the little boys up in the air whenever he came back from a revival, ruffling her hair. He had a beautiful speaking voice, deep and resonant, like God. Anna could see why her mother had taken up with him when
she was just a girl, not much older than Anna. He had come through her town and saved her, then baptized her in the river, then married her. Then they had been fruitful and multiplied. But Anna’s mother started coughing blood. She went away to a hospital the year Anna was thirteen, and then Anna was in charge of everything, though people from the church were real nice, bringing food and hand-me-downs. When Mama came home, she was very thin, with red cheeks. She got Anna to put the radio on the table beside her bed so she could hear Randy’s Record Shop out of Gallatin, Tennessee. She loved Patsy Cline. At first all Mama would eat was cream of mushroom soup, but then she wouldn’t eat anything.

  The day she died, the boys were playing ball up the road and Anna’s daddy was preaching a funeral someplace else. Anna was folding the wash. Her mama had been asleep but all of a sudden she woke up strangling. “Oh my God!” she said, looking at Anna. Then she fell back against her pillow, then she died. Her fingers had curled up like ferns. Spit came out of her open mouth and ran down her neck into her nightgown.

  The day after the funeral, Daddy yelled bloody murder and broke up the kitchen furniture with the ax while Anna sat huddled in bed with the little boys, hugging them.

  Three weeks after that, Daddy married Mrs. Loretta Goudge, a widow in their church, twelve years older than he was. Everybody except Anna thought this was fine. “A man has to have help taking care of younguns,” they said, nodding. “A preacher has to have him a wife.”

  But though Mrs. Goudge was nice enough, Anna shriveled in her presence. At school, her grades went down. Her teacher sent her over to see Miss Todd, the old missionary health nurse. “Don’t tell your daddy,” the teacher said. Miss Todd was not from around there. “Child, child,” Miss Todd said, stroking Anna’s hair.

  When her daddy and Mrs. Goudge left town for a new church in Ohio, taking the boys, Anna had stayed on with Miss Todd to finish high school. Miss Todd had a leather-bound set of the classics in her living room; Anna went right through them. Under Miss Todd’s tutelage, she learned Latin and table manners and geography and memorized a poem a week which she recited to Miss Todd every Sunday morning before church, Miss Todd’s church, which was Presbyterian and not emotional. Anna declaimed from the stair landing to Miss Todd who sat below, sipping her tea: