The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  It was almost dark, almost time for C. E. Reed’s reading when Harriet flew up and up to hover above the duck pond. This is me, she thought. This is me having a picnic with Jefferson Carr, looking down at the scattered groups around the shore, the water rippling in the chill breeze, the sudden flurry of blowing leaves, the lights coming on like magic among the trees along the path and all across the campus. This is me, she thought before she took Jeff’s outstretched hand and was pulled to her feet and set back down in the world, cheeks wet with tears she hoped nobody could see in the dusk.

  “Harriet? Ready?”

  “I just need to run up to the dorm for a sweater,” she said, because it was suddenly too much, she felt too much, she couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’ll meet you at the reading, okay? It’s in the same place, just save me a seat.” The pounding of her feet filled her whole body as she ran up the hill to Old South. Their room looked like a hurricane had hit it: light on, door wide open. Baby was not there. Harriet grabbed a sweater and raked a comb through her hair.

  “Harriet, honey, what’s wrong?” Courtney stood poised in the doorway, waiting for Hawk, her new boyfriend, to pick her up.

  Instead of answering, Harriet hugged her, fast and hard, and ran out the door. Wasn’t this how she was supposed to feel, finally? A girl with a boy she liked, waiting for her? She ran down all three flights of stairs and made it over to the auditorium just as C. E. Reed began to read from his famous book in a deep lugubrious voice. “He sounds like that guy, you know, on The Munsters,” she whispered to Jeff, slipping into the seat he had saved for her.

  “Herman,” Jeff said. “You’re right. He does.” Jeff started laughing and then Harriet was laughing too, uncontrollably, even though she knew she couldn’t make a sound. Every time they looked at each other for the next ten or fifteen minutes, they started up again.

  Finally the essay came to its depressing end (man falling forward into the snow, crows reeling overhead) and Harriet led them all over to the party at Miss Auerbach’s house up on faculty row.

  “Why … Harriet!” Miss Auerbach seemed very surprised to see her show up with so many boys. “Er … come in!” It was funny to see the big cadets push through Miss Auerbach’s bead curtain into the world of art. Miss Auerbach ran her house as a sort of literary salon which she presided over unguently, pendulous breasts and lots of beads swinging with her purple caftan. English majors were everywhere: on the Turkish rugs, on the batik cushions, on the floor around Big Jim Francisco who was playing his guitar in a corner. “As long as we keep him playing the guitar, he keeps his hands to himself,” Anna told them, coming up with two beers.

  Now Anna was wearing a long crinkly yellow dress, with her frizzy red hair pulled straight back in a way that gave her a slightly surprised expression. “You all go on in the kitchen and get a drink,” she said, heading back to the corner. Harriet introduced Jeff to Mr. Gaines, who embarrassed her by launching into a testimonial about what a good baby-sitter she was, as if he were giving her some kind of recommendation for marriage. Harriet’s face grew warm at the very idea, while Mr. Gaines went on and on.

  Finally, she was able to pull Jeff into the crowded kitchen where he fell deep into conversation with Mr. Duff, the old Yeats scholar with the goofy smile and the wild white hair. Everybody adored him, the way he leaned toward you cupping his ear with his hand and seemed to really care what you said in class, no matter how dumb it was. Mr. Arlington, the new drama professor, dressed all in black, glowered against the green refrigerator. His wife had left him, rumor had it, a week after they moved to Mary Scott. He gestured wildly with his hands, talking to Catherine Wilson. So much intensity would have terrified Harriet, but Catherine didn’t seem to mind, nodding and sipping her beer, smoking a cigarette, throwing her head back to laugh. A skinny, agitated young man Harriet had never seen before stood in front of the stove, talking to Kevin and some of the other guys from UVA. “So I write this novel about this alienated guy in Memphis who can’t deal with real life, so he goes to the movies all the time, right? It take me three years, right?” They nod solemnly, nursing their beers. “Then what happens? Walker Percy publishes The Moviegoer and it gets all this attention. So what happens to me? I had this publisher who was really interested and now he says, ‘Sorry, man.’ I mean you really can’t blame him, it’s pretty similar, I admit it. But then my agent surprises me by saying, ‘Sorry, man,’ too. So here I am, kicked out in the cold on my ass. Now, what are the odds on that?” Kevin shook his head. Harriet managed to slip past them to the sink which was filled with ice and beer. She grabbed two and handed one to Jeff who took it and pressed her arm in thanks without ever looking away from Mr. Duff. But he held on to her arm, so Harriet stayed by his side.

  “Hey, try some of this.” Suddenly Baby was there, too, pouring straight bourbon into a lot of little paper cups she’d lined up on the kitchen counter. She smiled at Jeff. “Haven’t I seen you someplace before, soldier boy?” Jeff smiled back. He picked up his paper cup and tossed it down in one gulp, so Harriet did the same.

  “We didn’t go to the reading,” Baby said. “How was it?”

  “You didn’t miss anything,” Jeff said.

  “That’s right,” Harriet said, but nobody heard her because somebody put on an album just then, the Beatles singing “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Jim Francisco must have finally gotten tired of playing his guitar, Harriet thought.

  Baby started moving in time to the beat. She loved to dance. “We had a fight,” she said over the music.

  “I’m sorry,” Harriet said.

  “Don’t bother.” Baby closed her eyes, dancing, still barefoot. Soon she was joined by Catherine Wilson and Bowen Montague who had all done a Supremes act to “My Girl” for Spring Follies last year. They’d called themselves the Virginia Wolves. Harriet and Jeff and the guys from UVA moved back to make room. Harriet filled up all the paper cups again. “What the hell, fiction is dead anyway,” Kevin told the guy who wrote the novel about the moviegoer. The music switched to James Brown’s Live at the Apollo album: “Please please please please.” Some of the guys from UVA and the biggest cadet, Price, joined the girls in the middle of the floor. People jammed the doorway, trying to see. Harriet’s back was pushed against the counter. Baby danced with her eyes closed, a streak of dirt down the back of her shirt. Catherine Wilson did the pony while everyone cheered. The bourbon was good, Harriet found, fiery but sort of calming, too, you could feel it go all the way down. The girls were dancing doubletime.

  And then, though Jeff kept his hand on her arm and Harriet was still pressed right up against him, so close she could feel his hip joint, his actual bones, she knew he had left her. He was there, but somehow he wasn’t. She realized that she was rubbing an inch of his oxford cloth shirt back and forth between her fingers and that she had been doing this for quite some time, the way her mother used to finger clothes surreptitiously in a store, say, a dress she was planning to copy, or the way Jill played with the satin edge of that baby blanket she dragged everyplace for years and years. The oxford cloth felt strong and grainy, a little bit damp with his sweat. Harriet rubbed it back and forth between her fingers and her thumb. She did this until the music stopped and Jeff Carr gently loosened her hand and gave it sort of a pat. “Hey, it’s been great to catch up with you, Harriet,” he said into her ear, over the noise of everybody suddenly talking. “We’ll see each other again soon, okay? Real soon.” And then he was gone, out the kitchen door, with Baby. They left the door wide open when they went.

  Kevin’s face was suddenly inches away from Harriet’s. “Well, fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get drunk.” He waved a wine bottle at her.

  Harriet smiled, or tried to smile. “Okay,” she said, and they did, but it wasn’t much good really and then Miss Auerbach was kicking everybody out. Harriet left Kevin passed out in a hammock on Miss Auerbach’s porch and walked back across the campus by herself, breathing the crisp air. There was smoke in it from some place far away. She f
ell across her bed fully dressed and did not even awaken for the famous scene which took place a little later, when Anna, trying to escape from Jim Francisco, told him that she’d go to the Whipping Post with him if he’d just let her run back to the dorm first to pick up her nightie and her diaphragm. But she never reappeared, leaving him stranded in her car in the Old South parking lot. Soon Big Jim was in a rage, bellowing “Anna! Anna!” exactly like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, as several people pointed out later. Security finally came to haul him away. Big Jim did not show up for the coffee and Danish good-bye party the next morning, nor did Anna, nor did Harriet who was hung over all day long and even into Monday, when her first class was Irish Literature with Mr. Duff, whose wild white hair looked even wilder than usual, electrified, a dandelion going to seed. They had been assigned a group of poems by William Butler Yeats; Harriet had read “The Song of Wandering Aengus” over and over.

  “You know, Harriet,” Mr. Duff stopped her in his formal way as she went back to find a seat in his classroom, “it was nice to see you at the reading this weekend, and I so much enjoyed meeting your friend the cadet—Jeff, isn’t it?—at the gathering on Saturday night. He is a lovely young man.”

  She turned to look at him, at his blotchy skin, his pale blue vulnerable eyes. “Yes,” she said simply. “He is a lovely man.”

  BABY WAS CAMPUSED for a week, turned in by Louise Burr, that fat bitch, who would clearly never have a date in her whole life and hated everybody who did. At first Baby was furious, claiming this was ridiculous, that she would die if she couldn’t see Jeff Carr for a whole week, but she calmed down after talking to him for an hour on the phone Monday night. “I can’t ever see him during the week anyway,” she told Harriet, in a surprisingly cheerful mood. “You wouldn’t believe what all they make them do over there, it’s just amazing. So I might as well write my goddamn Shakespeare paper and get it over with.” Baby gathered up her books and headed for the library, a first. “Oh, Harriet”—she paused on the stairs, looking back at Harriet framed in the doorway—“let’s drive up there next weekend for the Grand Parade, okay? I can’t wait to see him do his thing, you know. He invited us to come.”

  “I thought you were going down to Duke.”

  Baby made a face. “Oh hell no,” she said, as if it were the farthest thing from her mind. “Will you come with me? Road trip.” She grinned.

  “Sure,” Harriet said.

  From the very beginning, Harriet was part of it—it was like being in love herself, but not as scary. Jeff and Baby suddenly became the most beautiful couple on campus, the most visible. Everybody noticed them—you had to notice them whenever they walked into a room. It was like they had a light around them. You couldn’t quit watching them. They insisted on taking Harriet everywhere: to the campus movies, to the snack bar, over to Lexington for parties, fixing her up with Jeff’s friends, none of whom ever fell in love with her, though it didn’t seem to matter—they loved her, Baby and Jeff, and it was enough. Somehow Harriet was necessary. She completed them. And everybody said it was the most beautiful autumn in many years, day after day of clear blue weather with Morrow Mountain a blaze of color in the distance. Harriet felt it was happening just for them.

  “Doesn’t it seem like the stars are bigger than they used to be?” Baby asked one night when the three of them were lying on a quilt beside the duck pond looking up.

  “You’re right. At least they’re brighter than they used to be,” Jeff said.

  In a way, this seemed true of everything.

  As days turned into weeks and then a month, then two, it became clear that Baby was undergoing a transformation. She stopped biting her bottom lip and drawing in her breath with that little gasp when she talked to you. She quit chewing her hair and her nails. She started turning in her assignments when they were due, or mostly, since the time she could spend with Jeff was so limited that she actually started studying. She quit drinking so much. She gained some weight. “I never thought I’d even like anybody who was a good influence on me!” she told Harriet, giggling. Every night she slept in his SMI T-shirt with his name stamped across the back. She spent hours writing to him, even though they talked on the phone every day. She did not return calls from other boys, and after a while, they quit calling. Baby’s parents flew in for a day on their way home from a trip to New York, “to meet Margaret’s little soldier boy,” as her glitzy stepmother Elise put it, but even their approval didn’t seem to bother Baby. The only people who didn’t like Jeff were those few, such as Miss Auerbach, who didn’t take to his politics. (“Hey, I don’t have any politics,” Jeff said. “Miss Auerbach is the one with the politics.”)

  Though Harriet considered herself “not political” either, it was undeniably stirring to see the cadets come marching across the field in their weekly Grand Parade, eight hundred strong, all those white hats and white shoes and belts, the flags flying, the band playing John Philip Sousa, the sun glinting off the guns, the inexorable drumbeat underneath it all. Harriet cried every time they played the national anthem and raised the flag, she couldn’t help it. It was thrilling. The whole thing was thrilling.

  ONLY ONE WARNING BELL ever rang, in February after Harriet and Jeff had visited Baby in Alabama over Christmas vacation for her first cousin’s much-heralded debut. This cousin, Nina Wade Ballou, was two years younger than Baby, who had already made her own debut, apparently, though she had never once mentioned it. Sometimes Harriet felt that there were two Babys—one, the moody wild girl who stalked around Mary Scott; and two, the other girl Harriet saw fully for the first time on this trip, the lady-in-waiting who was also a lot like all the double-name cousins she introduced Harriet to: Nina Wade, Martha Fletcher, Emma Dell—it was impossible to keep them straight. They looked alike, too, all blonds.

  Harriet had been really nervous about the whole thing, but her green satin dress, made by Alice, was perfect. Both Elise and Baby’s aunt Honey exclaimed over it when Harriet emerged like Cinderella for the ball. Then Aunt Honey pinned her hair up, while Elise clipped some dangly diamond earrings to her ears.

  “Are those real? What if I lose them?” Harriet couldn’t quit looking at herself in the pier glass mirror in the downstairs hall—maybe it was the curve of the mirror, or the smoky old glass, but she really did look, well, beautiful.

  “Oh Lord, I can’t remember if they’re real or not,” Elise was laughing. “But if they are, I’m sure Troy has got them insured. Anyway,” she went on, “you won’t lose them. My, aren’t you just a picture? Isn’t she a picture, Honey?”

  And Honey, a fat replica of Elise, sitting squarely in the middle of a pink love seat with her legs stuck straight out in front of her like sausages, said, “Yes indeed, yes indeed,” sipping her sherry judiciously.

  “But look here!” cried Elise, and all three of them turned to the winding staircase to watch Jeff come slowly down with Baby on his arm, one step at a time, her red beaded skirt trailing out behind her. Jeff wore his gray dress uniform, its brass buttons shining. “Oh my! Oh my!” Aunt Honey dug her fists into her eyes as if she might cry and then she did cry, loud boo-hoos that Baby and Elise ignored.

  “What is the matter with your aunt?” Harriet couldn’t wait to ask as soon as they got into Elise’s little sports car, Baby driving.

  “Well, she’s crazy, of course!” Baby said. “They’re all nuts, I’m telling you. I mean, she had this fiancé or something, I forget. Who knows? She just cries at the drop of a hat.” Baby was struggling with her big skirt. “Shit!” She finally pulled it up to her waist and slung it back over the seat, pumping the accelerator. You could see her panties. “Sorry,” she said to Jeff beside her and Harriet in the tiny seat behind, both half covered in the glittery drift of satin.

  “Hey, I don’t mind,” Jeff said, squeezing her bare knobby knee. This was the Baby that Harriet knew, the one who went bare-legged no matter what.

  “Light me a cigarette, will you? If you think you can do it without
burning us all up,” she flung back to Harriet, who did, immediately woozy on that first great rush of nicotine.

  It seemed to Harriet that Baby drove for miles out into the vast empty countryside. Alabama was enormous anyway. Even Baby’s father’s farm was enormous, its stubbly fields rolling out forever to those sketchy feathery bare trees on the far horizon. You couldn’t even see to the end of his land. Baby went through a crossroads and over a black river and headed down a long lane lined with flaming torches for the last half mile. Massive and white-columned, the house rose up from the dusk like a vision before them, its upper gallery festooned with green magnolia branches. Harriet decided not to tell anybody that she’d never been to a debutante ball before. Uniformed boys were waiting to take the car. Heading up the great steps, clinging to Jeff’s arm with Baby on his other side, Harriet felt as if she were about to burst out of her skin. This is me, she thought. I will never be so beautiful again. Nodding, smiling, drinking the fizzy champagne, Harriet tried her best to notice the red poinsettias, the pearl and stephanotis arrangements, the chandeliers and candelabras and mirrors everywhere, tried to remember all these details to tell Alice, but then the music started and a boy came up and she was swept away, around and around the hall trying to keep up with him. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Baby dancing with Jeff and then she couldn’t see them anymore and then when she saw Baby again, she was dancing with her father whose thick, handsome face was full of pain and pride at the same time. (“Oh, sure, he loves me,” Baby had assured Harriet not long before. “He loves me too much. This is why he can’t stand to have me around.”)