The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  “Harriet—what’s the matter?”

  “Let me go.”

  Baby sat back.

  Harriet finally stood. “You bitch,” she said. “I can’t believe you would do this to him.”

  Baby stood up, too, her back still to the light; Harriet couldn’t see her face. “I was no good for him, Harriet,” she said. “He thought I was—oh, I don’t know—he made me feel so—he actually wanted me to marry him—can you imagine? I mean, can you imagine living on a military base in some godawful place like East Jesus, Georgia, or something?” Harriet could imagine this. But Baby went on. “Listen, he’ll be better off, you know he will. He didn’t have any business with somebody like me.”

  “What does that mean, somebody like you? What do you mean when you say that?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I don’t mean anything.”

  “You think you’re so special.” Harriet was surprised by her own voice.

  “You hate me, don’t you? You hate me, too.” Baby took a deep, ragged breath. “I don’t blame you, any of you.”

  “Oh, quit being so melodramatic! What is it, you met some other guy, is that it?”

  “No, I told you, I just decided, that’s all. This is the only good thing I’ve done in ages, and now you’re trying to make me feel bad about it.”

  “So who’s the new boy?”

  “There’s not any new boy, I’m telling you. I mean, I did meet somebody, actually, but he’s not a boy, he’s this businessman from Memphis that knows Daddy. Anyway, I’m not going to marry him or anybody else. Jeff got too damn serious. I just want to have some fun, what’s wrong with that?”

  “But you’re not—,” Harriet started.

  “Not what?”

  “Not having fun.”

  “I am, too!” Baby stomped her foot. “I am so having fun. I always have fun. What do you know? You don’t know anything about it.” She was breathing hard in the dark room. “Okay, so this guy is my kind, and Jeff was not my kind. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me and Jeff. You know me better than anybody in the world, Harriet. You’re my best friend. I don’t know why you’re being so mean.”

  Harriet went over and sat at her desk, looking out at the dark campus, at the dark moving trees, at the light from the lamppost making its shiny path across the duck pond. It seemed—almost—no. For a second, Harriet thought she had seen something moving beneath the water. She turned back. “Look, what does Jeff have to say about all this?”

  “He doesn’t get it either, not yet. But he will. You know I’m right.” Baby put two cigarettes in her mouth and lit them and gave one to Harriet. Her face flared up for a minute in the light from the match.

  Harriet inhaled deeply. It made her a little dizzy. It helped.

  “Hey,” Baby said after a while. “I forgot to tell you, I’ve got this cute new little car, wait till you see it. It’s a red convertible.”

  Of course it is, Harriet thought.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON Baby talked Anna and Harriet into shooting some pool down at the Cabin on Route 86, where she was a favorite with the locals. “Hi, Freddie,” she called to the proprietor, big and grinning, who brought them three beers on the house and then stood there moving his mouth.

  “H-how are my g-g-g-girrls?” he finally said.

  “Great.” Baby had a glint in her eye as she broke the balls, pounding her cue stick on the floor when the four ball went into the corner pocket. Harriet was sure Baby knew that those two old truckers were standing behind her, watching her shoot, sure that was why she paused for so long with her ass stuck up in the air. “Two,” Baby said, and made it, and made the five ball and the six ball, too. She ran five balls before she missed. “Not bad for the first day back at Freddie’s,” she said, lifting her beer to him before she drained it.

  “You drink too fast,” Anna said, chalking her cue.

  “I drink as fast as I drink.” Baby sat back down at the table with Harriet and they shot pool all afternoon, and Baby did not mention Jeff then or later, not once during the whole next week, so Harriet didn’t either, though she thought about him all the time, wondering how he was taking it, wondering what he was doing, how he felt. She thought about the time he cried for his father and how he looked in his uniform. She thought about the little vertical line that appeared between his eyebrows when he was worried or when he was figuring something out. Harriet found herself making excuses to stay in the room, by the phone, but he didn’t call. Of course, he would never show up in the middle of the night yelling for Baby outside the window like that boy had done freshman year, that was not Jeff’s style, but Harriet had thought at least he’d call. At least he’d call her. But he never did. Two weeks passed. Harriet thought about calling him, just to see how he was doing, but she couldn’t, somehow. Another week went by.

  “Tell me again where you’re going,” she said to Baby, who was in a turmoil of packing on a Friday afternoon.

  “I told you.” Baby slammed her suitcase shut. “It’s a hotel named the Homestead, in Virginia. A resort, actually. It’s very famous.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “Well, so what? You wouldn’t have, necessarily.” Baby was brushing her hair. She made a face at herself in the mirror. “He likes makeup,” she said, “Look, he bought me some.” She showed Harriet the silver bag full of little silver tubes and pots, then poured it out on the top of her dresser. Baby outlined her eyes in black, followed by mascara. “Well, what do you think?” She batted her eyelashes at Harriet in the mirror. “Come on, try some of it. He got it in New York. It’s very expensive.”

  “I’ll bet.” Harriet went to stand beside her, then chose the green eyeliner and drew it across her eyelids.

  “Oh, wow,” Baby said, looking at her. “Here.”

  Harriet put on the mascara.

  “Now look at yourself,” Baby said. “Don’t you look pretty?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, come on. Of course you do! And now for some lipstick. He likes red.” Baby’s mouth turned into a bright slash. She giggled at herself in the mirror. “Oh God, I look like a whore. Don’t I look just like a whore?”

  “Yes,” Harriet said. Then she said, “Just kidding,” when Baby threw a tube of lipstick at her.

  “I was just wondering,” Baby said in a carefully offhand voice as she pulled the black sweaterdress down over her head, “if you’ve heard anything from Jeff.” Her face was covered up by the dress when she said his name.

  “No, why?” Harriet tried to sound as casual as Baby.

  “Oh—I—I just wondered. Sometimes I really miss him,” she said, smoothing the dress down over her hips.

  “You need to wear stockings with that dress,” Harriet said. Anna stuck her head in the door.

  Baby made a face. “Oh, y’all know I can’t stand them,” she said. “Not even to go to the Homestead. Okay!” She put on her leather jacket and grabbed her bag. “See you Sunday.” She looked really glamorous, like a girl in a magazine.

  “Baby, this is stupid,” Harriet said. “Don’t you know how dangerous those little planes are?” The man from Memphis was picking her up at the airport in his private plane.

  “Yes,” Baby said.

  “Don’t we get to meet him?” Anna asked.

  “No,” Baby said. “Honestly, you wouldn’t want to,” and then she was gone. Anna went to the library.

  Harriet sat on her bed and stared at the phone until it rang, startling her. It was as if she had willed it. “Hello?” she said, picking it up. “Hello?” No answer. Harriet hung up. Wrong number. Or . . . her heart started pounding and everything around her went into sharp relief. It was up to her. She should go over there and tell him what Baby had said. Then they’d get back together. She stood up, trying to breathe. She went over to Baby’s dresser and looked at herself in the mirror and put on some lipstick, a dusty pink, and some blush. There now. “Okey-dokey,” as Jill used to say. Then she walked straight over to Miss Auerbach’s house an
d asked to borrow her car which turned out to be an ancient humpbacked Vauxhall, a kind of car Harriet had never heard of. Miss Auerbach called the car “Jane Austen.”

  Jane Austen slowed down to forty miles per hour on the uphill grades of Route 81, which was okay, since Harriet needed to slow down anyway, to fix this day forever in her mind. Luckily it was beautiful. There were times when the Blue Ridge really looked blue, and this was one of them, the huge blue mountains spiking the horizon, then closer, grassy hills rolling out like waves, dotted with farms and cows and fields and dark-green patches of standing trees. In a week it would be autumn. But for now it was summer still, the noon sun spread out thick and golden as butter over everything, the sky a vast dome which reminded Harriet of some cathedral from art history, Della Robbia blue.

  But it was a football weekend in Lexington, with home games at both SMI and W&L. The hilly little streets were jammed with cars, and guys and dates with their arms entwined, jaywalking haphazardly. “’Lo Harriet!” yelled Frannie Kernodle from the Redbud staff, while one of the W&L Dekes that Harriet knew slapped the Vauxhall’s puke-green flank in greeting, as if it were a horse. Harriet had been hoping she would not run into anybody she knew, especially not Trent Ogilvie, a Phi Delt, who had asked her up this weekend. Trent was a nice enough guy, no sense in hurting his feelings. Harriet drove past the infamous Liquid Lunch, where things were already hopping, and turned left down Washington Street to the big old brick house on the corner where Jeff and a couple of other cadets had rented the basement apartment, dirt cheap. The house, owned by the historical society, was due for renovation next year. In the meantime, wasn’t it nice to have these upstanding young cadets as part-time caretakers? Harriet could imagine how the initial interview had gone, the wonderful impression Jeff had made. She would have rented it to them, that’s for sure, and closed her eyes to the girls who showed up on the weekends and the occasional beer cans, always picked up later, in the overgrown formal garden. Harriet loved this garden with its old stone walls and its mossy green fountain, a boy holding a fish which dribbled water down the boy’s chubby tummy. She parked on the street and entered the garden through the heavy wooden gate. She didn’t really expect anybody to be there—after all, it was a big weekend. Shenandoah Military Institute was playing Virginia Polytechnic Institute from Blacksburg, down the road, a traditional rivalry and a very big deal. Harriet didn’t really expect to see Jeff. He’d be over on campus. Maybe he even had a date. She could just leave him a note.

  But first Harriet sat down on the big warm rock at the top of the garden in the sun, feeling curiously drowsy. Bees buzzed. Sunflowers nodded by the wall. As she sat on the rock, surrounded by bees and mint, Harriet’s head felt as heavy as a sunflower. She might have slept for a little while. In any case she woke up filled with energy, heart in her throat, pulse pounding just behind her temple. She could hear a band playing somewhere. Down the hill, the garden lay gold and dreamy in the sun. The blue hydrangea bush by the back door was dusty, droopy; a scarlet leaf came spiraling down through the crystal air to land like an arrow, pointed at Harriet’s foot. She stood, looking down at it. I’m going to remember this, she thought, for the rest of my life.

  She walked down the hill and pushed the door open. “Hello?” she called. “It’s me.” Somehow she knew he was there. She made her way through the pizza boxes, beer cans, and Coke cans which littered the kitchen floor. Flies buzzed around an overflowing trash can; the sink was full of dishes. An open copy of Steppenwolf lay on the kitchen counter. She kept going.

  Jeff half lay, half sat up against the pillows in the old brass bed in the first bedroom, holding a water glass. The bed had been pushed against the open window. He turned his head toward Harriet, but slowly, as if he were blind. With its gray stone walls and its only window blocked by branches, the bedroom was almost dark. Of course they were partly underground. Jeff was looking at her. He had several days’ growth of beard.

  “Harriet,” he said. “You’re here.” He did not smile. His dark eyes had circles under them.

  Harriet sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. “You look awful,” she said.

  “I haven’t slept,” he said.

  “Since when?”

  “Since, oh . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Harriet tried again. “Shouldn’t you be at the game?” she said. “Don’t you have to march or something?”

  Jeff smiled at her, a tired smile, as if he were very old. “Oh, honey,” he said, “I’m through with all that.” He lifted the glass and drank and Harriet saw the pint bottle of Gilbey’s gin on the windowsill.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I quit.” His grin was weird, jagged, different. “In fact, I’m going to enlist.”

  “Soldier boy,” Harriet said before she remembered that this was what Baby had always called him.

  “Soldier boy,” Jeff said.

  “Don’t do that. Don’t enlist.”

  “I have to,” he said. “I have to do something.”

  “Can I have a drink?” Harriet edged closer, across the dirty sheets.

  “You don’t need a drink.”

  “I want one.”

  “No, you don’t.” Jeff drained his glass and turned to look at her. The light coming in through the leaves was a pale, strange greenygold. “What do you want, Harriet? Why did you come over here anyway?”

  “I wanted to tell you . . . I wanted . . .” Harriet couldn’t talk.

  “What?” Jeff’s eyes were like holes in his head.

  “You,” Harriet said simply. “I’ve always wanted you.” It was the truth. She held her breath. Jeff turned to her with a groan, his eyes dark and unreadable. “Look at me,” she said. Jeff came close to her then. He touched her face, cupping her chin for a moment to stare in her eyes. He put his hand on her knee then ran a finger up the inside of her leg. He was going away but it didn’t matter. This. She would have this, touching the little hollow at the base of his neck. “Oh, Harriet,” he said into her hair. Then he was unbuttoning her blouse and it was on the floor. She was all wet “down there,” as Alice always said, whatever went on down there? Harriet used to wonder but now she knew it was the Fourth of July, the bright explosions and sparks spinning off into darkness. “My God, Harriet,” he said and she was lying across his bed, she had never wanted to be anywhere else in the world. She knew it then. He would go away but she didn’t care, this would be hers, this open window this droning bee the hot little wind like a zephyr from a poem the smell of the mint and honeysuckle. His face above her, the boyface she had always loved. He moves over her now like a storm, like the pouring rain. She can’t see a thing but him. He kicks off his cutoffs, oh, he can do whatever he wants. This is Harriet rising to meet him, it’s Gypsy Park and they’re swinging in the late gray afternoon higher and higher, higher and higher, up even with the bars then out into the sweet open air and they’re flying through it up and up and up into the endless sky. She kissed his face and tasted salt. “Oh Harriet honey,” he said into her neck. Later he made a funny little noise that was not quite a snore but more like a bird flying, like the rush of a bird’s wings, while he slept through the long afternoon, his arm flung across her chest. Harriet did not sleep. She stayed awake while a beam of sunlight came in through the curtain of leaves and moved slowly across the room to touch the satiny heartpine floor, the dully glowing brass bedrail. Harriet rubbed her fingers back and forth on the rough stone wall, her toes on the gritty sheet, listening to the faraway sound of marches.

  She sat by the phone for the next two weeks, willing it to ring, willing it to be for her. But it was always for Baby. “Just a minute,” she’d say, handing the receiver over, or “I’ll see if she’s around,” if it was somebody Baby might not want to talk to, or “She’s not here right now, can I take a message?” when she was out. She was out a lot—with James Flood, the rich and mysterious Memphis businessman who kept flying over to see her in his private plane; with Lap-Dog Brown, a Sigma Nu f
rom W&L; with Red Robertson, a local greaser, a mechanic she’d met at Freddie’s. “Oh, come on,” Baby teased her. “You know I like a little rough trade.” But Harriet hated the way Red wore his T-shirts too tight, cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve, she hated the way he looked at you, she hated his hooded eyes. Harriet sat by the phone reading long English novels for Miss Auerbach’s class, trying not to imagine Jefferson Carr in his bed in his room across the mountains, all that pale green light. She wrote a pretty good paper on Thomas Hardy. She flunked her chemistry midterm. She did not climb Morrow Mountain on Mary Scott Day, watching the other girls instead. First they all converged upon the front quad, wearing crazy clothes, to the traditional ringing of the bell which announced the surprise cancellation of classes. Then they set off up the country road for the mountain in a long straggling line, later to be glimpsed as little figures up on Scott Knob, toy girls, waving their tiny hands across the sparkling air. Harriet could barely see them.

  It was finally fall. Harriet had found him again last fall, a million years ago. Now other girls and their dates sat on the grass around the duck pond, as they had once sat; Harriet watched them from her window. She imagined their conversations. Leaves drifted down past the window, turning slowly in the air. Wasn’t there some O. Henry story about some sick girl who believed she wouldn’t die until all the leaves fell off the tree outside her window? And then some artist went out in the cold and painted one leaf onto the window so she wouldn’t die but then he caught pneumonia out there and died himself? Miss Auerbach would hate that story if anybody wrote it and turned it in now—Miss Auerbach hated trick endings. She considered them cheating. Also, trick endings were not postmodern.

  “Oh Lord.” Baby came in, dropped her books, and sank down on the bed. “I keep wondering how he is.”

  Harriet’s heart began to flutter in her chest. “You mean Jeff, I take it?”

  Baby nodded, biting her lip, staring out the window.