The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  “Oh my God.” She has been so absorbed that she didn’t even notice Sandy coming back to stand by her end seat with a real live alligator, a little one, wiggling in his arms. He gets a better grip on it, strokes it, and it closes its heavy-lidded eyes which look ancient, even though it’s a baby.

  “Wanna hold it?” Sandy asks.

  “No, I certainly do not!” Anna says.

  He steps closer. “I don’t mean the alligator.” He gives her a big wink. Even Anna has to laugh. “Hey, no kidding, it’s not slimy at all, in fact it’s dry and kind of leathery. Come on, just touch it—”

  “You don’t have to do that, ma’am,” Bill yells from the rear of the launch. Honestly, these guys are like the Smothers Brothers, or Cheech and Chong, or those car guys on NPR.

  Suddenly, Harriet sticks her hand out and strokes its back.

  “See? It’s not slimy at all, is it?” Sandy asks.

  “Not a bit,” says Harriet firmly, flushed with success.

  Then Sandy changes the subject to birds, which Anna couldn’t care less about. She must have dozed a little, for when she opens her eyes again, he’s back up at the front of the launch wearing a—what is that? It looks like a washboard hung around his neck, like they used back in West Virginia to scrub their clothes clean in the creek.

  “Zydeco music is like a good jambalaya,” Sandy says. “It’s got a little bit of everything in it. Basically, it’s an accordion, a scrub board, and a fiddle, playing a waltz tune. But it’s a waltz tune with a difference. You’ll hear some African rhythms in it, some country-and-western swing, and some Delta blues. But mostly this is Cajun music, Cajuns being those French-speaking Acadians who were exiled from Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s.”

  A lively accordion melody comes from Bill at the back of the launch. Everybody claps. Sandy joins him on the washboard as a huge white bird lands on the dark water ahead and the giant cypresses close like a canopy over the launch. Sandy dips and sways, scraping on the washboard with two forks and singing, “Jambalaya, crayfish pie, filé gumbo.” Sandy dances all over the deck in spite of those hiking boots. “Gimme a little more music, copain!” he yells to Bill. “I feel like dancin’ today! Let’s show them how it’s done.” Bill starts a new melody on the accordion. “All right! Laissez les bon temps rouler!” Sandy yells. He takes off the washboard. He kicks up his clodhopper heels. “I need me a woman!” Eyes closed, he sways across the deck with an imaginary partner, holding one hand high and the other around her waist. Harriet’s heart starts to race in her chest. In confusion she looks away from the dancing Sandy to the nearest bank of the bayou where a red-flowered vine trails down from a tree and a log slips into the water and glides away, giving Harriet a cold chill which runs up her spine exactly like Emily Dickinson described in that poem, “The Snake (A Narrow Fellow in the Grass).” Oh my God. Didn’t anybody else see that alligator? But no, they’re all watching Sandy dance.

  “I said, I need me a woman!” he cries with his head thrown back, eyes closed. The accordion notes jangle in Harriet’s head and she’s not even surprised when he moves her way, dipping and weaving, eyes still closed, engaged in some mysterious yet inevitable selection process. This is the end of the world, she thinks. Le bout du monde. Full circle, Sandy wheels around. He comes to a stop at the end of their row. “Ma cherie?” Now he’s looking straight at Harriet. He bows low and holds out his hand. Harriet rises. She slips past Catherine and Courtney and Anna. Sandy pulls her to him, putting his other hand firmly around her waist, until they’re cheek to cheek. Her right hand stays high in the air, gripping his. “Good girl,” he says into her ear. His breath is hot. He smells like sweat, like swamp. “Just follow me. Ready?” Harriet doesn’t have time to reply. Bill cranks the accordion into another chorus and they’re off, step step step, step step step, dipping swaying and swinging around in a circle step step step, step step step, step. Harriet is actually sorry when the song winds up with a flourish and it’s all over. Sandy bows, still holding her hand, while Harriet curtsies low to the crowd as if she’s been doing this all her life.

  Mile 229.4

  Baton Rogue, Louisiana

  Wednesday 5/12/99

  2300 hours

  THE CHOCOLATE, CHOCOLATE, CHOCOLATE late-night buffet features chocolate mousse, German chocolate cake, chocolate hazelnut cake, profiteroles, chocolate-glazed pears, Mississippi mud cake, and chocolate truffles, among other things. Courtney, sitting alone, takes the very last bite of chocolate pecan pie, holding it on her tongue to savor it for as long as she can. She closes her eyes. There’s really nothing quite like chocolate, is there? But then Courtney feels someone staring at her, sure as the world. She opens her eyes and turns around to see Anna, two tables back. Anna smiles conspiratorially beneath her smoked glasses. She stands and rustles toward Courtney. “I caught you,” Anna says.

  Courtney jumps right up. “Actually, I—”

  Anna puts a heavy hand on Courtney’s thin arm. Close up, Anna smells like, what is it? Patchouli or something, the way it always smells in Pier 1. “It’s okay,” she says. “Forget it. Come on, let’s go out on the deck and have a smoke.”

  They take two rockers at the stern looking down on the wake which streams out in a giant V behind them. The Mississippi is narrower here. The banks on both sides are dark and mysterious, though a few lights dot the shoreline. The moon, almost full, has turned a dark, peachy yellow. “Pollution,” Courtney offers, waving her cigarette to indicate it. “All that pollution from Baton Rouge, not to mention these refineries and chemical plants. I guess it’ll be like this from here on into New Orleans.”

  “I expect so.” Anna’s match flares. “Where’s Harriet?”

  “I haven’t seen her since the show,” Courtney says. “She went somewhere to have a drink with Pete.”

  “Oh my.” Anna sucks deep on her cigar as the moon dips under a cloud. They smoke in silence until Harriet’s soft voice cuts into the night. “Hi! I thought I’d check—I can’t believe y’all are still up.” She slips into the rocker next to Anna.

  “So, did you have fun?” Courtney just has to ask.

  “Yes,” says Harriet. “Yes,” she repeats but not really to Courtney, as the yellow moon pops out to sail forth across the cloudy sky.

  “I’m so glad,” Courtney says. This is not true. She puts her cigarette out and stands up. “Good night, then,” she tells them abruptly.

  “In spite of all her good manners, sometimes she seems almost angry, doesn’t she?” Anna says after she’s gone. “What’s going on with her, do you know?”

  “Hawk is having some medical tests this week, maybe that’s it. Maybe she’s just worried about him.”

  “Probably. Ah well, we’ve all got our little histories, haven’t we?” Anna takes a drag on the cigar.

  Harriet turns to look at Anna’s face, smooth as a Buddha’s in the moon’s yellow light. Of them all, Anna has changed the most. They’re the only people out on the deck now. “Oh, Anna.” On impulse, Harriet reaches over to touch her plump, ringed hand. “Anna—whatever has happened to you?”

  “What do you mean?” Something inside Anna that has been expanding, opening up, quivers and stills.

  “Obviously your first marriage didn’t work out, to Kenneth Trethaway, I mean. But what did you do after that? Did you ever remarry? You did find someone eventually, didn’t you? Something you said earlier made me think that.”

  “Oh yes.” Anna’s face flares up as she lights another cigar; she looks softer now, smiling in a way they haven’t seen. “He was the love of my life,” she says simply.

  “And—”

  “And I can’t talk about it,” Anna finally says, “not even to you. It’s too awful, too sad. I simply can’t go there. This is why I write romances. They end at a certain point. Every true story ends terribly, if you follow it far enough, I mean. Don’t you know that?” Now her voice is shaking.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. It’s late anyway. I believe I’ll
go on to bed now.” Suddenly Harriet is almost too exhausted to stand up, walk back to her stateroom. “Good night.” She squeezes Anna’s shoulder.

  “Good night, dear.”

  Anna feels years older than Harriet, watching her slim back disappear down the deck. She feels a whole generation older. A snatch of music comes over the water. A cluster of lights appear on the riverbank, twinkling like jewels, then disappear. A little town. A whole town full of people asleep in their beds, dreaming, or not dreaming, not asleep, worrying, remembering. Each one filled with love, pain, joy, loss, whatever. Anna is shaking. Real life is entirely too much to bear. Sweet, innocent Harriet: Anna, Anna, whatever has happened to you?

  Terrible things, my dear.

  Which will come to us all eventually, though in Anna’s case they came sooner than most … ah well. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, she believes. She has to believe this. But of course she has never believed in talking about it either, preferring to grow strong in silence, in darkness and privacy, as she has done. Her books speak for her now, and they are a comfort, to herself as well as to her readers. She has written so many—so very many—books. She will write many more. She has to. And yet in some ways it still feels like yesterday when she wrote the first one, just after leaving Kenneth Trethaway.

  SHE ARRIVED AT PIGGOTT’S ISLAND, Georgia, just at sunset, wading ankle-deep into the ocean in spite of the cold, stretching her arms out to the wind. Stretching her arms out to the wind, she thought. She could probably get the hang of this. She drove around until she found the Flamingo, a peeling, pink-painted boardinghouse set down in the dunes, with a cheap vacant room and two old sisters who loved to feed people. When they found out she was pregnant, there was no stopping them. Crab cakes, smothered chicken, she-crab soup. Anna swelled up like a tick. She got dimples. She wrote the book in the mornings and walked miles on the beach in the afternoon. Every man who stayed at the Flamingo made a pass at her; she knew she had never looked better.

  Her money lasted about as long as her pregnancy.

  When the time came, the sisters drove her to the hospital in Savannah. “Spare no expense!” they screeched at her astonished old doctor, who had assumed all along that she was married. She went into labor laughing.

  It lasted all night and into the next day, until Anna really thought she could bear it no more, until the town clock struck noon and suddenly her body bent up double like a nutcracker and then there was her baby in the old doctor’s arms, long and—blue?—but just for a second, and then the doctor gave Anna a shot, and then she went to sleep. She woke up in a sweat, a panic. “Where’s my baby?” she screamed at the soothing nurse.

  “Now, now,” the nurse said.

  “I want my baby!” she was crying.

  “Miss Todd,” the old doctor said. “I regret to tell you that this infant was dead upon delivery. It happens sometimes. It is nobody’s fault. That is all I can say. I’m terribly, terribly sorry.” Dark lines cut into his face; his hooded eyes were bloodshot. He had been up all night, too.

  “I want to hold her,” Anna said.

  The old doctor nodded to the nurse.

  When they brought her in and put her on the pillow beside Anna, she unwrapped the soft white blanket and touched her baby’s lips, her nose, her funny spot of reddish hair—“Little carrot-top,” she whispered. She counted her baby’s fingers and toes. Mothers are supposed to do that. She gently opened her baby’s eyes and as she had expected, they were blue, not a pale misty blue but a bright solid blue, like wooden beads. “Your name is Anna Carolina,” Anna said. “Anna Carolina Todd.” She closed the little eyelids and bent down to kiss both cheeks. “Can I have that bag over there?” she asked, and somebody jumped to get it for her. Anna opened it and dressed her baby in the long white dress with the blue cross-stitching that she had brought to take her home in. She tied on the little blue hat. “Oh God,” somebody said. Somebody else said, “Isn’t there anyone…” But there was not. And she had killed her own baby, strangled her to death with the cord.

  Anna doesn’t remember the whole next year. For some months she was in the mental hospital in Milledgeville, then she was back at the Flamingo, then she was in the hospital again, then she was back at the Flamingo again. One of the sisters had died and the other one, Miss Bette, was having a hell of a time keeping the bank from foreclosing on the property. When Anna got well enough to understand this, she knew she must pay Bette back. She thought of asking her old friends for money—Baby, who was so rich, or Courtney, who had married well—but somehow she just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t even imagine doing it. She thought of her days at Mary Scott as days in another world, a sunny blue enclosed world like that model of the Globe Theatre she had built painstakingly with popsicle sticks for extra credit in English while she lived with Miss Todd. She couldn’t even imagine how to tell her friends what had happened to her or where she was. Also it seemed to Anna that once you set out on a course, you had to finish it. You had to keep going forward, not back.

  In the end she took a job housecleaning the luxury rental estates at the end of the island. This got her back into shape, though she was heavier now, and it paid well, and best of all, it was solitary, as the maids went in when the renters left or before the owners came, so she never had to talk to anybody. These houses had everything: huge TVs, king-sized beds, ice makers, trash compactors. They had signed art on the walls, and hot tubs and gas grills and little green plots of grass in front, with sprinkler systems. Anna liked cleaning these houses. She liked opening the bottom dresser drawers and looking in the closets and finding their scrapbooks and family pictures and financial statements and trying to figure out what the owners were really like, since she never met them. She felt that she could reconstruct them completely just from the contents of their medicine chests and desks and bookcases and storage sheds. It amused her to think that she was a reconstructionist, the exact opposite of Kenneth the deconstructionist.

  One day she reconstructed a family with a wife who looked somehow familiar in their family photographs. Digging further in their master bedroom closet, she came upon a Mary Scott yearbook. The woman had graduated two years behind Anna, who had not really known her. But the yearbook was filled with pictures of people she did know, including … herself, as a junior. Anna stared and stared at her own pale face, surrounded by all that long curly hair. She’d been living for art then, and look where it had gotten her. Now she was cleaning houses. Still, she used to be a writer. She really did. Look at her here, holding on to the stupid daisy chain in the Calliope photograph. Maybe she’ll find that manuscript she started when she came to the island—isn’t it still under her bed?

  Anna turned back to the faculty section at the front of the yearbook and looked at Mr. Gaines. He must have been younger than she realized—he looked like a boy himself in this photograph, sitting on his desk, leaning forward, laughing. He looked so nice—engaged, interested, expansive. He was nice, damn it. She should never have written that anonymous letter to the dean. Anna shut the yearbook and pushed it back onto the shelf she had taken it from. She stood up, shaken. She cleaned their bathroom.

  It was a while before she reconstructed anybody else.

  But finally she had to; cleaning houses was too boring otherwise. She started to snoop again. She was especially fascinated by the marble monstrosity situated on the prime lot at the southern point of the island, a house which made no architectural concessions at all to the fact that it was located on an island, for God’s sake, reportedly full of expensive antiques and Oriental rugs and huge arrangements of silk flowers. From time to time it was rented by corporate clients for high-level strategy weekends. Anna could not imagine who would have built such a pretentious house, or why—it seemed out of sync with everything else on the island. Finally the service assigned it to her.

  The guys went in first, to vacuum and haul out the garbage and hose down the decks and carport.

  “Thanks!” Anna yelled after them,
starting in on the kitchen which was fairly tidy anyway since the last group had apparently brought their own chef along. This kitchen had black marble countertops, white cabinets, and a restaurant-sized stove. Anna scrubbed everything. Out the window, she watched the long line of green surf where the outgoing tide from the marsh behind the island met the ocean. It was the best view on the island; she should know. She’d been in enough houses.

  Anna worked her way through the guest rooms, each with its own bath, putting fresh sheets on each bed. The house slept sixteen. It was afternoon by the time she reached the master bedroom suite (described in the brochure as the “solarium suite” in the “aerie”) on the top floor. She was tired, but curious—surely there’d be something to indicate who these owners were.

  Carrying her basket of supplies, she rode up in the elevator, emerging into darkness. All the draperies in the semicircular master bedroom were pulled shut, hiding the view, which must be spectacular. Anna set her bucket down with a clatter, inching her way over toward the windows in the dark. She touched a switch and the draperies slid open to reveal the sky, the beach, the ocean, and the huge king-sized master bed with a man in it, half covered up by a wad of sheets.

  “What the hell!” He sat up abruptly.

  Anna screamed.

  “Shit,” he said. He was huge, his massive chest and back covered by black hair, like a bear, like a monster. He shook his big head back and forth to clear it.

  Anna screamed again.

  “Calm down, honey,” he said wearily. “I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  “What are you doing in this house?”

  “I own the goddamn house,” he said.