by Lee Smith
Baby and her father were the best-looking couple on the floor.
The next day the girls slept until afternoon, getting up just in time to greet Baby’s family which was arriving from everywhere, dozens of them, to congratulate Nina Wade and meet Margaret’s soldier boy and eat the little fish deep-fried in a big drum of hot oil and a whole pig cooked on a huge iron spit over an open fire. Black men did all the cooking, out in the yard. You ate the whole fish, bones and all. You crunched them between your teeth.
Baby’s brothers loved Jeff, following him everywhere. They all shot mistletoe out in the woods and then rode motorcycles down to the river, full speed ahead across the frosty fields, Baby hanging on behind Jeff. Harriet sat on the front porch and watched the three motorcycles disappear into the big red sky of sunset while she answered Baby’s relatives’ questions as best she could. Now, where was she from? And where was that boy from? And who were his people? And what did they do? These old women were much too curious, Harriet thought. In fact, it wore her out, how much everybody in Alabama liked to talk. They went on and on about nothing, really, but nobody—nobody!—ever said one word about Baby’s mother, who was not pictured among all the portraits lining the long gallery, most of them old, serious, stern-faced Ballous, but some of them more recent: teenaged Baby on Satan, her much-mourned horse, winning a ribbon, winning a trophy; Mr. Ballou and Elise someplace tropical, pictured in evening dress; the twin boys, little, playing in the sand on a wide, sunny beach—and that must be Baby’s other brother, that tall dark thin boy standing with her in front of a church. They look just alike. Maybe it’s Easter. Baby, about eight, wears a striped dress with a wide white collar and a straw hat with cherries on it. The boy wears a light-colored suit that has gotten too short for him—suddenly, Harriet imagines—maybe he’s in a growing spurt. Though other people are also in the picture behind them, walking up the steps into the church, Baby and her brother stand stock still facing forward, hands barely touching, staring into the camera. Baby smiles happily. But it’s as if her brother can see into the future somehow; his hollow boy’s face looks haunted and sad.
“There you are! Want to play bridge?” It was Aunt Honey, huffing and puffing, hand to her heart.
Harriet turned away from the wall of photographs with a shiver, glad to join Aunt Honey and some of the two-name cousins, glad that Alice had taught her how to play bridge.
Harriet was amazed by the extent of Elise’s Christmas decorations. “Oh, she does it for months!” Baby said scornfully, but yet, Harriet thought, the house was beautiful, a work of art, each mantel draped in greenery, each door with its wreath, each tabletop with its bit of holly. Harriet’s favorite was the wooden manger with all the little wooden animals and people and angels on the table in the hall. It had been carved, Harriet was told, by a black man who worked for Baby’s daddy. Harriet could never pass it without picking up the little Jesus and marveling at him, carved from a walnut, big as a fingernail.
Especially Harriet was amazed by Elise’s Christmas china, a full set for sixteen, each piece with a seasonal picture in the middle surrounded by a border of evergreen.
“Isn’t this tacky?” Baby whispered, drying a platter with a Santa on it. It was the cook’s night off, and Harriet had volunteered them for the dishes.
“Well, actually, no, I think it’s kind of cute. I like it.” Harriet was glad she’d said this because Elise swooped into the kitchen suddenly, enveloping them in the heady cloud of her perfume.
“You’ll have one, too,” Elise said. “Everybody does.”
“Have one what?” Harriet asked.
Baby kept drying pans. She was mad because her father had taken Jeff off with him to Rotary.
“Christmas china, of course. Everybody needs three sets—your good china, your everyday china, and your holiday china.” Elise ticked them off on her perfectly manicured hands. “You’ll have yours before you know it, girls.”
“I will never, ever, have any Christmas china.” Baby gritted her teeth.
“Oh, Baby, you do say the silliest things! Of course you will, if you want any!” Elise left the kitchen in a trail of laughter. “You girls are just angels,” she called back. “I don’t know what we’ll do without you, Harriet, I swear I don’t. You be sure and come back as quick as you can.”
“No hanky-panky!” Baby had told Jeff, wagging her finger, showing him to his room on the day they got there. “And Harriet stays with me.” Yet whenever Harriet awoke, Baby was never beside her in the heavy canopied bed, and on the last night, she stayed awake until early gray light came in the window through the wavy old glass and Baby came to sleep beside her like a child. Harriet lay propped up on one elbow watching Baby’s shallow breath slip in and out, in and out, until the alarm finally went off and it was time to get up and pack and leave.
BACK AT SCHOOL, winter dragged on forever, gray and messy. Harriet was doing research for a play about Mary Shelley which she planned to write as her big project in Mr. Arlington’s modern drama seminar. She had a secret crush on Mr. Arlington, but she’d die if anybody, even Baby, found this out. It was a pretty safe crush, actually, since the only student Mr. Arlington really seemed to like was Catherine, who had a steady boyfriend at W&L. It was close to curfew one Sunday night when Harriet came back from the library and entered their dark room to the ringing of the telephone. She threw down her book bag and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Is she there?”
“What?”
“Baby. Is she there?”
“Well—I—don’t know. I just came in, actually.”
“Okay. I’ll wait. Look around.” Brusque, nearly rude, Jeff didn’t sound like himself.
“Listen, I—what’s the matter?”
“I just need to know if she’s there.”
“I thought she was with you. In Lexington.”
“Harriet. Please.”
“Okay. Hang on.” Harriet put the receiver down and switched on the lights. Baby might not be here right now, but clearly she had come back from Lexington. There was her black dress, thrown across her unmade bed, there was her overnight case on the floor. The bathroom door was closed.
“Baby,” Harriet said outside it. “Baby, are you in there?”
It was not a sound, but almost a sound.
Something made Harriet pause, then turn on her heel and go back to the telephone before she opened the door. “Jeff, she’s here someplace, but I don’t know where, exactly. I mean, her bag is here. Maybe she went down to the snack bar.”
“Well, tell her to call me whenever you see her.” Jeff sounded relieved. “And Harriet …”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.” He hung up.
Harriet went back to the bathroom door. “Baby,” she said loudly and—she hoped—calmly, “I’m coming in there. I’m going to open this door.”
But it wasn’t locked. Baby was sitting in the tub with her legs drawn up, arms crossed on her knees, face down on her arms. She didn’t look up when Harriet opened the door.
“Baby!” Harriet drew her breath in sharply. The water in the tub was red. Baby’s dark hair hung down into it. Finally she looked up, her face dead white in the stark fluorescent light. She had black shadows like smudges under her eyes and no expression, none whatsoever, in them.
“Let me see your arms,” Harriet said.
Baby stared at her.
“Arms. Hold out your arms!”
Still staring at her, Baby held out her arms one at a time. Harriet had never noticed how thin they were, actually the word was scrawny. A short diagonal red slash crossed Baby’s left forearm, halfway between elbow and wrist. It was still bleeding.
“Is that the only one?”
Baby nodded.
“You didn’t really mean it then, right? Or you would have gone for the vein.” Harriet swung from fear to fury in an instant, shocking herself. What was the matter with her? “I just can’t believe you would do this to us.”
Baby
sank back against the tub, knees drawn up again, watching her. “Don’t be mad,” she said like a little girl.
“Don’t be mad!” Harriet repeated. “Mad! Are you crazy? Come on. Get out of there, right now.”
“No.” Baby shook her head so hard that a long wet strand of her hair stuck against her cheek.
“Yes,” Harriet said firmly. “We’re going to the infirmary.”
“No.” Baby struggled to sit up, looking a little bit more like herself. “No, please, it’s not even deep, you can see for yourself. I didn’t really mean it. Haven’t we got some Band-Aids someplace? I feel a whole lot better now.” She stood up, holding on to the edge of the tub. Her hipbones stuck out, you could see her ribs. Her breasts looked like something stuck onto her skinny chest, their nipples all shriveled up. Harriet held out her hand for balance as Baby stepped out of the tub. The minute Baby touched her, Harriet’s anger disappeared, leaving a profound anxiety in its place.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t go to the infirmary? Maybe they could give you a pill, like a tranquilizer or something.” In the back of her mind, Harriet thought that it might actually be breaking the rules not to take Baby to the infirmary. She put a big towel around Baby’s shoulders as she stepped from the tub.
“No, I’m fine now, really I am.” Baby managed a fake smile, pressing a wad of toilet paper against the cut. “See? It’s quit anyway.” She moved the paper and together they watched the drops of blood come up like little red beads on a string. “Well, almost quit,” she said.
“I think you need stitches.”
“No, please, Harriet, then I’ll just get in a lot of trouble like before, please don’t, please don’t make me go, and please don’t tell. Just get a Band-Aid, I know we’ve got some around here someplace.”
Harriet knew where they were. “If you promise,” she said, “really promise, that you will never, ever, do anything like this again. I mean it, Baby.”
“Cross my heart.” Baby said solemnly.
“Okay then.” Harriet rummaged in her desk drawer and found the Band-Aids and put two across the cut. “There now,” she said. “Get dressed. Here, put this shirt on. But call Jeff before you go to bed.”
“Okay.” Baby pulled the SMI T-shirt over her head. “But you have to promise me that you won’t tell on me, okay, Harriet? You won’t tell Jeff or anybody.”
“Why should I promise that?” Harriet was exhausted, and disgusted with her.
“Because I’ll never do it again, Scouts honor.”
“You weren’t a scout.”
“Neither were you. Listen”—Baby looked at her—“it’s just something that I used to do, okay? I really wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
“Well, then, what the hell were you trying to do?”
“Feel better,” Baby said.
“Wait a minute. It makes you feel better to cut yourself?”
Baby nodded. “It … it … takes the pressure off, some way.”
“What pressure?” Harriet didn’t get it.
“The … I don’t know how to tell you,” Baby said. “It’s just, I just can’t stand it sometimes, that’s all.” She was shaking inside the big shirt.
“Can’t stand what?”
“Oh, Harriet, I’m so bad for Jeff, can’t you see that? I’m so bad for him, I should just leave him alone, but I can’t, you know. I just can’t, I never could. But I’ll ruin him, I know I will, I’m just so bad.”
“You are not bad,” Harriet said. “But what happened? Something must have happened.”
“Oh, well, we—first I got caught up in his room when it wasn’t visitors’ hours, and then also he was late for drill, whatever that is, and then his grades are dropping, too, and then I guess the final straw was, he let me hold his gun.”
“His gun?” Harriet repeated stupidly.
“Well, I wanted to see it, I really did, you know I grew up knowing how to shoot, so he took it along when we went up to Goshen yesterday, no, today I guess, this morning, it seems like so long ago. And he was showing me how to shoot it out in the woods up there. Nobody at all was around. It kicked”—a little light came into her eye—“and it was really, really fun. But then we got caught.”
“Who caught you, way up there?”
“Oh, some dumb guy from SMI. Some stupid little history professor up there on a picnic with his stupid little wife and his stupid little kids.”
“So what happened?”
“Oh, I don’t know, they’re going to hold an inquiry, it’s something like a court martial only not such a big deal. But anyway, Jeff got stripped of his title or his rank or whatever it is. He’s not the prefect anymore.”
“What does he say about that? Jeff, I mean?”
Baby managed a little smile. “He said he doesn’t want to be the prefect anyway. He said he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything but me. That’s what he said. And now he’ll have more time to spend with me. But I’ll ruin him, Harriet, you know I will. He shouldn’t be having anything to do with a girl like me.”
“That is ridiculous,” Harriet said firmly just as the phone began to ring. “He called a minute ago, and that’s probably him calling back.”
Baby squeezed Harriet’s upper arm so hard it hurt. “You didn’t promise yet. Promise you won’t tell Jeff.”
Harriet hugged her. “Scouts honor,” she said. Baby smiled. Baby’s shoulder bones felt like little bony wings beneath Jeff’s T-shirt.
“Okay.” Baby picked up the phone. “Hello,” she said, and then she listened for a minute, and then she started crying. “You know I love you,” she said.
Harriet went into the bathroom to clean the tub, shutting the door behind her.
ALL DURING SECOND SEMESTER the romance continued, intense as ever, but the best part had passed. Baby flirted with other guys and made him jealous. She didn’t mean to, she said. She couldn’t help it. She said she had never loved anybody like this before. She loved him so much she was scaring herself to death, she said. “Then why don’t you just leave him alone?” asked Harriet, who didn’t understand any of it. Harriet loved Baby but felt sorriest for Jeff, who had lost about ten pounds through pure suffering.
“I can’t,” Baby had said simply. “Oh, honey, I will never, ever, do that.” They’d fight, make up, fight again, make up again. The struggle seemed huge and almost mythic to Harriet, like the stories of the gods and goddesses in Greek mythology. Often, Harriet was the one who made it work. She took and delivered the messages, sometimes rephrasing things. After all this time, she felt she knew what Jeff Carr really intended to say and what he didn’t. Baby was harder to interpret, even more prone to say things she didn’t mean. Harriet had to edit her carefully. It was a hard job. Harriet felt exhausted and exalted all at once.
Sometimes she couldn’t decide what she wanted either. Clearly, Jeff would be better off without Baby. He could get back on the straight-ahead career path he’d been following before he met her. But Baby would probably die without him. And if they broke up, would Harriet ever see Jefferson Carr again? She couldn’t stand that; she’d die, too. Now, Harriet got to talk to him constantly and see him every few days. Since he was no longer a class prefect, he drove over to Mary Scott even more often.
Spring came in too fast, too hot; summer rushed straight at them, gathering speed. Baby was flunking math and chemistry, but the poems kept pouring out. It was like automatic writing, like taking dictation, Harriet often thought, watching Baby jot them down as she stared into space, listening. What did she hear? Not the poem, she’d told Harriet once, but the voice of the poem. This didn’t make any sense to Harriet. And it wasn’t fair either, she thought, struggling with her own stories. Visiting writer Lucian Delgado was lukewarm to these stories in workshop, but Harriet loved his class anyway, held on Wednesday nights at the Abbot Guest House where they’d put him, up on faculty row. Lucian Delgado gave them beer and wine and let them smoke. He smoked a pipe himself, wearing a deep-blue velvet jacket and bedroom s
hoes, his hooded eyes surprisingly intent while they read their work aloud.
Just before exams started, Harriet and Baby cut their Tuesday afternoon classes and went swimming with Jeff in the quarry halfway up Morrow Mountain behind the college, officially off limits to Mary Scott students. They had to pull apart the strands of barbwire fence and hold them up carefully in order to duck inside. The lake was like a bowl of black water surrounded by rocks, then tangled green woods with kudzu-covered trees, then high blue sky arching above it all. They were the only people there. Dozing on her stomach in the sun, Harriet lifted her head just in time to see Baby stand up on the big rock by the deepest part, shuck off her red bathing suit in one swift movement and take a running dive into the dark water over Jeff’s loud “No!” He waded furiously into the lake, hands on hips, waiting for her to surface, then grabbed her as she swam in, pulling her up, shaking her shoulders until her head snapped back and she struggled in earnest to free herself. He slapped her once, across the face; she cried out; and then he was kissing her.
Heart thudding, hot all over, Harriet put her face back down on the towel. They were crazy. She could not stand to see this, yet she could not stand not to see it either. She hated them both. She hated herself. When she looked up again, they were gone. They had disappeared into the woods. Harriet lay flat on her stomach in the sun and felt her blood running through every vein in her body; she could feel her whole body pulsing in the heat. She touched herself until she was gasping in delight or dismay, she couldn’t even tell which. Harriet was glad when the raft trip came up in Mr. Gaines’s class, to distract them all a little bit, to siphon off some of that awful energy that kept Baby up until all hours even when she wasn’t out with Jeff, kept her shooting off poems like firecrackers. Harriet was even glad when Jeff had to leave in mid-May for summer “maneuvers,” a word Baby always said with a sneer, as if it had quotation marks around it.
“We’ll kill each other before we’re done,” Baby had said once, but Harriet thought they’d kill her first. They kept her all wrought up. What had seemed so much like love now seemed almost like hatred sometimes, at least to Harriet, who hated being with them as much as she loved it, as much as she loved them. But the sweet part was already gone.