The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  THE FOG HAS FINALLY LIFTED; sun sparkles on the water. Harriet hears people in the corridor outside her door. She gets up. On the dock, men are unloading boxes off trucks and onto the Belle. Passengers are walking across the gangplank. There’s Russell already doing his leg stretches against a concrete post. Vicksburg rises steeply behind the dock. All Harriet can remember about it from the raft trip is a lot of statues, Confederate cavalry, somewhere up there on the hill. It was late, dark. They’d been drinking, walking down a street full of statues shining white in the light of the moon. “But what about the citizens? Where are the citizens?” Baby kept asking, which cracked them all up. They seemed to have the whole town to themselves.

  Now Harriet is ready to look at the poems again. She unzips the pocket of her big suitcase and removes the battered folder, then spreads them all out on the bed as best she can, though some are so crumpled that this is impossible. Baby wrote most of them in pencil on pages torn out of the little spiral notebook she kept in the back pocket of her cutoff jeans. She left them all in the drawer of her bedside table in the room she shared with Harriet at the Royal Sonesta Hotel when they reached New Orleans, along with some loose change (Baby never kept change), an empty pack of Winston cigarettes, a man’s comb, two strings of Mardi Gras beads, and the address of a boy in Indianola, Mississippi. Harriet found them there after she’d left.

  OLD LIARS ON THE AIR

  The crackly burst

  of men’s voices

  on the shortwave radio:

  Where they at?

  You seen em yet?

  Yeah, I seen em

  Back around Friars Point

  They’re all riding topless

  It’s a sight for sore eyes

  I’m telling you.

  MAMA I

  Mama wore red short shorts

  and high-heeled sandals

  she was too much

  for this town

  PLEA

  When Jeff first put me up here

  I liked it

  Oh I liked it a lot

  On a clear day

  I could see forever

  in the words of the song

  Sweet breezes

  blew sun on my face

  Nothing I had to do

  Except my nails

  So I got a great tan

  Watched TV

  Read novels

  Ate petits fours

  pepperoni pizza

  anything I wanted

  Drank champagne

  But, though idyllic,

  this surface is very hard

  And the ladder has proved

  Retractable

  So if you could possibly

  Assist me off this pedestal please

  It’s hurting my ass

  MAMA II

  drank gin like water

  all day long

  in the pink glass goblet

  with the twisted stem

  Daddy bought her in Venice

  on their honeymoon

  BIG BROTHER

  either out

  or in his room,

  door closed

  wouldn’t talk to anybody

  he called Elise that whore

  drinking hard liquor

  at eleven or twelve

  with the boys in Dinkins Bottom

  I said, Dinkins Bottom! Isnt that funny?

  Isnt that funny, Ricky?

  I lived to make him laugh

  I lived for a word, a glance

  from that face the most like mine

  in all the world

  DAY ROOM

  They all think

  They’re Jesus

  Why?

  Maybe the first Jesus

  Wasn’t Jesus either

  Maybe he was only

  Schizophrenic

  BRONCHITIS

  Cool pressed sheets

  curtains drawn

  Shutters down

  Spirit lamp hissing

  in the corner

  Mama’s special medicine

  on my nightstand

  Jack Daniels, sugar, and lemon juice

  mixed in a china cup

  with a silver spoon

  Take as much as you want

  you know what you need

  Mama said

  COMING OUT

  Baby Ballou

  how do you do

  at your debut

  Ricky Ballou

  how do you do

  pushing up pansies

  two by two

  VANITY

  Mama’s dressing table

  with the rose silk skirt

  held her sterling silver

  comb and brush,

  a million bottles, tubes, and vials,

  little balls of cotton in a Chinese jar.

  Cigarettes spill from the crumpled pack.

  Ashes on the carpet,

  ashes on the gold-and-velvet chair.

  One high-heeled satin mule—

  a pool of pink chiffon.

  The oval mirror framed by lights

  is glamorous

  or clinical

  depending upon her mood.

  (but always theatrical)

  Larger than life as they say

  I stood at her elbow

  as she made up her face

  I mean made it up

  created it from scratch

  and claw and slash and burn.

  She covered it over

  smoothed it out

  rouged those cheekbones

  painted on the pouting lips,

  the arched surprise of brow.

  Cobalt liner. Cat’s eyes

  were all the rage then.

  Sweet, sweet powder

  from a feather puff

  Perfume: Je Reviens

  again and again.

  Standing, smoothing, she

  stoops to kiss my cheeks

  before she leaves.

  The air quivers,

  charged with her beauty.

  Now in the mirror

  I, too, have cheekbones

  To die for.

  Mile 437.2

  Vicksburg, Mississippi

  Monday 5/10/99

  0900 hours

  COURTNEY HAS DECIDED that it’ll be okay for her to go ahead and smoke on this trip—after all, she’s under such pressure, and she can quit the minute they steam into New Orleans. Or sooner—she’ll quit the night before, so Gene won’t even be able to smell it in her hair. She often has a cigarette or two when Hawk is out of town anyway—just a little boost, a little present, something for Courtney. So she might as well go ahead and buy herself a whole pack while they’re docked here in Vicksburg. Wearing her walking shoes and her dark glasses, she heads up the long hill. This is a real workout. But what a seedy, wretched town Vicksburg is, in spite of all its history; don’t they have any civic pride here at all?

  Weeds grow up through cracks in the sidewalk. Many houses and businesses are advertised for sale; two very old brick buildings on her right are being demolished. Others stand vacant, their gaping windows like blind eyes gazing down the hill, brooding over the muddy river. A little wind has come up, blowing dust and bits of paper trash all along Grove Street, swirling them around Courtney’s ankles. At the top of the hill sits a Shell station with a big sign on it that says SMOKE SHOP. Courtney buys a carton of Ultralights since they don’t really count anyway, you hardly get any tobacco. Then she goes outside to the phone booth. The phone at Magnolia Court rings four times before she hears the click that means voice mail is picking up. But then a girl’s high breathless voice says hello.

  “Vangie?”

  “Mama?”

  It is Vangie, with a funny little note in her voice. Now Courtney remembers. Vangie’s band was at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill last night. How could she have forgotten? She even wrote it on the calendar in the kitchen at home, where Vangie is right now. Maybe Courtney is the one with Alzheimer’s, not Hawk, only of cours
e it’s not Alzheimer’s, he’s too young.

  “Mama? Hello, Mama, is that you?”

  “Oh yes, hi honey. How are you? And Nate? How was the show?” Thank God Courtney wasn’t at home in Raleigh, she’d have had to go over to Chapel Hill for it.

  “Oh, it was okay,” Vangie says. “You know.” Vangie says “you know” and “like” all the time, it drives her mother wild. “Mama, when are you going to come home?”

  “Monday,” Courtney says. “My schedule is right there, taped on the refrigerator. It tells you exactly where we are all the time. See it?” Courtney hears herself going on brightly about the Belle of Natchez, the food, the weather—

  “Mama.” Vangie interrupts. “Can’t you come home sooner?”

  “No, I can’t,” Courtney says. “I absolutely cannot. You can’t get off a cruise once you’re on it,” which is not true at all, especially not this cruise, since it stops at so many towns. “Why?” she finally asks.

  “Why didn’t anybody tell me Daddy was sick?” Suddenly Vangie sounds very young and very angry, like she used to as a teenager.

  “Well, honey, he’s not sick, he’s just having some tests this week, that’s all, it’s no big deal. We didn’t see any reason to bother you while you are on tour. It’s just an evaluation, basically.”

  “But Daddy is sick,” Vangie says slowly. Each word sinks like a stone into Courtney’s consciousness. She thinks of those boys she saw on the bank earlier this morning, throwing rocks into the river; each stone made a widening circle on the water. Courtney leans against the warm metal side of the phone booth. “It’s all these lists,” Vangie says.

  “Oh, you know your father, he’s always made lots of little lists.” Courtney’s voice sounds hollow to her own ears. “He’s a very organized man.”

  “But he’s not,” Vangie wails. “He’s making too many lists. It’s like, his bedside table is covered with lists, I saw them when I went in there to get some aspirin. There’s something the matter with him, Mama. And we’ve got to leave for Philadelphia.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, we’ll drive all day. Or, like, Van will drive. We’ll be asleep, you know. In the back. Then wow, presto, we’re there.”

  Presto, indeed, Courtney thinks. Kids are supposed to grow up and leave and go everywhere and do everything. But we’re supposed to stay home, frozen in time exactly the way we were, and they don’t like it if we leave. Or if we change. Not one bit. It’s getting so hot in this phone booth. Right in front of her, a fat man drives a long blue Buick up to the curb and gets out, mopping his face with the biggest handkerchief Courtney has ever seen. He’s waiting. He wants to use the phone.

  “I wish you’d come home,” Vangie says. “Just fly home from the next city, what is it?”

  “Natchez.”

  “Fly home from Natchez, then.” Vangie is the voice of responsibility, certainly a bizarre turnaround considering all those nights when nobody even knew where she was. Why, one summer she was gone for three weeks, Courtney was just beside herself with anxiety, but did Vangie care? Heavens, no. Finally she called from Austin asking for money, which Courtney wired to her. Then she came waltzing back home with buzz-cut hair, dyed maroon. Friends of the Library, indeed! But Courtney was so glad to see her that she bought her a new electric guitar and never told Hawk.

  “Dad looks different, too,” Vangie says unexpectedly.

  “What do you mean, different?”

  “It’s like, he’s like, looking out of his face. It’s hard to describe. It’s not all the time, either. Like right now, this morning, he’s just fine. He’s being the nicest he’s ever been to Nate, for instance. Nate never even really spent any time with Dad before, he’s always been sort of like, well, scared of him. You know. But it was yesterday I’m talking about, when we came in and there he was, just sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper only he wasn’t really reading it, you know, he was just like sitting there looking out of his face and when I said ‘Hi, Dad, surprise!’ he came back.”

  “Came back?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Look, Vangie, what’s your dad doing right now?” Courtney asks. “I’d like to talk to him, too.”

  “He and Nate went out to pick up some doughnuts. Mary Bell was determined to make a big deal and set the table and cook up this huge breakfast, but we don’t have time. So right now Mary Bell is upstairs lying down or pouting or something, God knows, she’s so weird, Nate can’t even believe how Gothic this whole thing is, but anyway, Daddy got, like, all excited about this new Krispy Kreme place over on Glenwood, so that’s where they went. I guess Dad seems like he’s pretty happy to see us. He put the top down on his car.”

  “See? Everything’s going to be just fine.”

  Vangie sounds tired. “Mama, you have spent your whole life saying that. But this time, I’m telling you, it won’t work.”

  Courtney feels the sides of the phone booth closing in, a vise around her heart. The fat man is walking up and down on the sidewalk; he catches her eye and points to his watch. “Listen, honey, I’ve got to go. It’s so hot in this phone booth, I feel like I’m going to faint. You have a great show, and give Nate and your daddy big hugs from me. I’ll be back on Monday night.”

  “Whatever,” Vangie says. The line goes dead.

  The fat man heads for the phone booth as Courtney comes out. Sidling much too close to her, he catches her eye and winks, licking his bottom lip. His sweat smells like beer. Courtney turns on her heel and runs, all the way down Grove Street onto the dock and back to the boat.

  Mile 437.2

  Vicksburg, Mississippi

  Monday 5/10/99

  1015 hours

  CATHERINE HAS BEEN MARRIED for as long as she can remember, stretching out luxuriously in the big bed in their stateroom, this bed that goes on forever, it seems to her now. She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t married, or at least when she wasn’t with a man. But to be honest, she’s never thought much about it one way or the other. Men have simply occurred, like images, the way they’ll come to her at the most surprising times and places in the midst of life, when she’s doing something else completely, such as unloading the washing machine, and suddenly she’ll see a shape in her mind’s eye, a triangle, for instance, then a chair made out of triangles, and she’ll just have to leave the wash or whatever she’s doing, and go out to the shop and start making that chair. All her life, Catherine has been easily overtaken: by her husbands, by her children, by her images and ideas, by life itself.

  On the original raft trip, for instance, she was overtaken by her engagement, or by the idea of her engagement, to be exact. She was much more interested in her romance with Howie than she was in the river, or the trip itself. She didn’t give a damn about Mark Twain, who reminded her of her uncle Walt anyway, a filibustering Alabama legislator she despised. She was working on her tan, with her upcoming engagement party at the Club, given by Howie’s parents, in mind. To this end, Catherine basted herself each day on the raft with her own special mixture of iodine and baby oil, roasting first on one side, then the other. She timed the whole process, keeping her eyes closed with damp cotton balls on them so she wouldn’t get those squinty little wrinkles in the corners, opening them only to check the time or to look at her brand-new square-cut diamond engagement ring as it winked in the sun all the way down the river.

  She was a kind of a creation of herself. Her mother—the great belle, Mary Bernice—had instilled in Catherine and her younger sisters the idea that the whole point of college was to marry ASAP, and it was a vast relief to everybody that Catherine had already gotten this taken care of. In fact, that phrase “as soon as possible” seems to capture Catherine’s entire life. Everything has happened lickety-split with never a pause until now—menopause, actually, how ironic.

  Catherine props herself up on one elbow to glance out the window which gives out on the long brown sweep of the river, then the faint line of green trees, then the blue sky. Thre
e lines: brown, green, blue, going on and on forever out of the frame.

  The horizon reminds her of those summers she used to spend down on the farm at China Hill with Wesley when they were kids, visiting Gran-Gran and Pops. Dorothy and Frances never went. They were too little. But Catherine loved it. Things were different there. Slower, as if you were living in an earlier time. Gran-Gran never dressed until noon, for instance, and it took Pops ten minutes to light his pipe, and Sunshine cooked dinner all day long in the big old kitchen with its heartpine floor. Dinner was at three o’clock. Then you had to lie down in front of a fan, in summer, or on a pallet before the hearth in the wintertime.

  Catherine sees her China Hill self as a little girl in an old sepiatinted photograph in somebody’s album in the bottom of somebody’s chifforobe in the attic of an old, old house. In this photograph she and Wesley are pictured from behind, holding hands, walking into the woods, like children in a fairy-tale book. They are very small and the trees are huge, arching over them. They wear identical overalls and straw hats and carry trot lines all rigged up by Pops, though you can’t see the trot lines in the photograph nor can you see the Coosa River beyond the trees. They have been told to “go outside” which is what they are told every morning, with no suggestion as to what they should do there, unlike Birmingham where there are piano lessons and math tutoring and social dancing and homework. Down at the farm, they can do whatever they want as long as they come back when Sunshine rings the bell. Sometimes they ride the mules. Sometimes they walk all the way out to Dodson’s Crossroads for a Nehi orange drink and free penny candy from Sis Puckett, who chews tobacco like a man and don’t take no shit, she says, from nobody. Sometimes they walk the other way, down the river on the Dark Path to the railroad trestle bridge and climb up the steep bank into its web of steel arching over the river where they hang on for dear life, teeth chattering, while the Dixie Special roars overhead.

  They’ve built a house on a little point of land by the river, too, out of tar paper and plywood and for the roof an old piece of aluminum siding they found on the road and dragged down there. The drumming rain on the roof sounds wonderful and this is Catherine’s favorite memory of her childhood, sitting on the old car seat in the river house with Wesley watching the rain come across the river in spatters and swirls on the water and gusts in the willows along the bank. Wesley’s face was little and smart and pointed like a fox. They were sixteen months apart, “Irish twins” said Mary Bernice. Catherine was bigger, though Wesley was older. There was a wooden chest in the corner of the river house where they kept Wesley’s art supplies and their treasures gleaned from the river itself: a lady’s necklace, silver filigree entwined with weeds; a tin cup and two tin plates; a leather box with the initials E. E. M. embossed on the top; old coins; a white china figurine of a Japanese lady; and best of all, a wooden foot that Catherine liked to pick up and turn over and over in her hands. They smoked Sunshine’s cigarettes in the river house, and drank crème de menthe filched from the sideboard. Catherine knew she would never love anybody else as much as she did Wesley, ever.