The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  “Well, I’m sure he’s just fine, why wouldn’t he be?” Harriet said.

  Baby looked over at her. “What’s the matter with you? Are you mad about something?”

  Harriet shook her head no. “Of course not. Let’s go on over to the dining room and eat dinner early,” she suggested, but Baby said she was on her way to the Cabin and left, jingling her keys.

  The phone rang.

  “Is this Baby?” a somehow familiar voice asked.

  “No, it’s Harriet. Baby’s not here right now.”

  “This is Kyle”—one of Jeff’s housemates, Harriet held her breath— “Listen, I know they’re supposed to be broken up and all, but I thought Baby might have heard from Jeff or something. Fact is, he’s disappeared. Nobody knows where he is.”

  “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “He’s just gone. It’s the weirdest thing. I guess we didn’t realize it at first because he left all his stuff here, or lots of it anyway.” Kyle had a flat Midwestern accent.

  “What kind of stuff?” Harriet asked cautiously.

  “Clothes, books, you know, the works. Albums. Everything. But he’s definitely gone. No note, no nothing. We can’t figure it out. I thought Baby might have heard from him.”

  “No, she hasn’t.” Harriet’s own voice rang hollow in her ears, distorted, as if she were calling down into a well or a tunnel.

  “Harriet?”

  “Sorry, I’m here.”

  “Yeah, well, please call me if you or Baby hear from him, or if anybody else does. You can get me at school, or on weekends at the house. You know. Or you can call Price.” Rick Price was the other housemate. “I think Jeff will call her. It’s her fault anyway. Man, is he ever messed up! You haven’t ever seen anybody so messed up.”

  “I know.”

  “This whole thing is such a bitch because once you’re out of the institute, they act like you’re dead. They act like they never heard of you. But I guess I’ll have to go over to the office anyway and try to get his sisters’ phone numbers, and call them,” Kyle said. “You know both his parents are dead.”

  “I know,” Harriet said again. Later, she could not remember the rest of their conversation.

  After they hung up, she lay down and stayed there all afternoon, skipping supper. Finally Baby came back and went to sit on the edge of Harriet’s bed, stroking her hair. “Harriet, are you awake? Harriet?” She smelled like smoke.

  Harriet breathed in deeply and kept her eyes closed.

  “Harriet?”

  “Oh, hi. I’m not feeling very well,” Harriet said, which was true. She sat up on her elbows and steeled herself to do it. “Listen, Baby, you got a phone call.”

  Baby sat back. “Who was it?”

  Harriet hesitated. Then she said, “Elise. She said to call her back tomorrow.”

  “Oh. Okay. You want me to get you a Coke or anything? I can run down to the snack bar.”

  “A Coke would be great,” Harriet said. “And maybe some nabs?”

  When Baby had left the room, Harriet sat up and snapped on the light. The clock read eight-thirty, that’s all, she’d thought it was later than that. She looked around the room as if she were seeing it for the very first time: Baby’s bed piled high with clothes and books, her jumbled desk; Harriet’s neat desk, her own closet door neatly closed. Her own framed print of Monet’s Water Lilies on the wall. Baby’s Janis Joplin and Elvis posters, the Slow Children sign she’d ripped off the road by faculty row, the dead roses in a florist vase. Harriet saw all these things as if they held a secret that could be decoded, as if she were an anthropologist. Everything seemed significant. This was our room, mine and Baby’s, she said to herself, at Mary Scott College, 1965. That kind of thrumming began behind her ears and then she was gulping air and then Baby came back.

  “Here,” Baby said, handing over the Coke.

  “Thanks.” Harriet sipped it, and the hard bright edge went off of things. “Thanks,” she said again. She looked at Baby. “So what have you been up to? You and—”

  “Red.” Baby took off her T-shirt and dropped it on the floor. “Same old thing.” She grinned. “Actually we went up to the quarry.”

  Where you went with Jeff and me.

  “You know what Red can do?” Baby asked.

  “What?”

  “He picked up this green lizard? This little green lizard that was running across the rock out there? And then he said, ‘Watch this,’ and held it up to his head and the lizard bit his earlobe and hung on like an earring. It stayed till he took it off. It was the most amazing thing.”

  “I guess so.” Harriet could see it all: the dark water, the rocks, the iridescent lizard swinging from Red’s ear.

  “So, are you getting up or going back to bed or what? I mean, I can read out in the study room—”

  “Oh no.” Harriet sat up and swung her feet out of bed. “I’ve got to study for French. So stay here,” she said. “With me.”

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Harriet came back to their room from the library, dropped her books on the floor, switched on the light, and jumped to find Baby sitting in a chair at the window looking out at the late gray afternoon. “Oh!” she said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “I’m not, really,” Baby said. She turned slowly to look at Harriet. She was wearing her old jeans jacket. “Jeff’s in the army,” she said.

  “He is? How do you know?” Harriet sat down on the edge of her bed.

  “Rick called a little while ago.”

  “But where is he, exactly?”

  “He’s in basic training, I guess, in some horrible place. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t even know why Rick called me anyway, it’s got nothing to do with me. Nothing, nothing, nothing. That’s what I told him, too. I said, just leave me out of it. I don’t care. It’s none of my business. I don’t give a damn.” Now Harriet could tell that Baby was quietly, terribly, agitated. She stood up so abruptly that her chair fell over. “I’m going out to the Cabin for a while,” she said, jingling her car keys. She slammed the door and was gone.

  When Harriet went over to pick up the chair, she saw the crumpled slip of paper half under the bed: Jeff’s address at Fort Benning, Georgia. She smoothed it out and put it in her desk drawer.

  HARRIET HAD WRITTEN him several letters, with no response, when the phone rang early on a Tuesday morning just after Thanksgiving break. She sat up in bed and looked over at Baby who was still sound asleep, face lost in the dark tangle of her hair. Outside it was barely light. The phone rang again. Harriet got up and grabbed it. “Hello,” she said.

  “This is Marianne Carr Kingsley,” Jeff’s older sister said in her cultured Tidewater drawl. “Could I please speak with Margaret Ballou, er, Baby?”

  “This is Baby,” Harriet said immediately, looking over at Baby who did not stir.

  “I’m afraid I have some terrible news.” But the sister’s voice remained neutral, expressionless. “Jefferson is dead. He was killed in a helicopter accident down at Fort Benning where he was in basic training. But I guess you already know all that.”

  “What happened?” Harriet can’t seem to talk right.

  “I’m sorry—I can’t hear you.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were notified two days ago by a summary courts officer, a man who also knew him, apparently. Basically Jefferson was on a training mission. It was a troop lift in a Huey helicopter which had just taken off with a full load of fuel when it crashed into a field and burned. They’re still investigating, but they think it was hydraulic failure, the man said. We haven’t gotten the full report yet, of course. He said everybody on the helicopter died instantly, the pilot and six recruits. Nobody even got out before it went up in flames. It was at night, Friday night.” Then Jeff’s sister seemed to choke or strangle. “This never would have happened if he’d stayed at school. If he hadn’t signed up,” she said. “He could have had a commission. He’d still be alive. What did you do?” Now
she was screaming. “What did you do to him?”

  Harriet replaced the receiver carefully and got up and went to stand at the window. In a way, Jeff’s sister was right. But it was her fault, it was all her fault: Harriet’s fault, not Baby’s. She could have told Jeff that Baby missed him—it was all she had to do. He would have driven straight over here, they would have made up, he wouldn’t have dropped out of the institute, he wouldn’t have joined the army. “Soldier boy, oh my little soldier boy, I’ll be true to you.” The words from the pop song ran through her head. She had danced to that song at a recent fraternity party at W&L with a boy she had never seen before and would never see again.

  Harriet looked out the window at the cold, overcast campus. The still surface of the duck pond shone like pewter. A girl in a black raincoat walked down the path between the boxwoods and was gone. Shivering, Harriet hugged herself, squeezing her arms to make sure she was real. For suddenly she was that girl, disappearing entirely into the boxwood hedge. And it was cold in here, too. Harriet stared down into the dark where Jeff blazed up suddenly out of the blackness, outlined in flames, his burning arms outstretched as if to push her away, his mouth a round black screaming O. NO—a round black screaming NO. Harriet wanted to go to him but she was cold, just so cold, and she couldn’t get there, her feet wouldn’t move. All she could do was cry, or maybe that was Baby crying. Now Baby was crying, too.

  Harriet was sick then. First she was sick in bed, then she was sick in the infirmary where Nurse Pam gave her tapioca pudding and said she would be all right (liar, liar, pants on fire), then she was sick at home with Alice flitting in and out of her bedroom, the front room she had shared for so long with Jill, Dr. Piccolo standing lugubriously in the doorway. He had a way of clicking his teeth that Harriet had never noticed before, it drove her wild. “Call me Ed,” he always said, but Harriet never could. She went back to school and took her exams but then she was home again. It was like she had never left except that Alice had suddenly grown so old. She looked like a crumpled pastel doll version of herself, or like an ancient child, one of those children that have that weird disease that they’re born old, whatever it’s called.

  “Ed!” Alice cried from Harriet’s bedside. “Whatever is the matter with her? Can’t you do something?”

  Dr. Piccolo shook his head and clicked his teeth. Alice smoothed Harriet’s top sheet, patted her shoulder, and followed him out of the room. Harriet looked around. There sat her foreign doll collection on top of the bureau, her schoolbooks in the nightstand, Jill’s paperweights on their shelves in front of the window. She saw the same view out the window from her bed as always: the red neon Jefferson Hotel sign, the white branches of the birch tree which grew beside the entrance to the sewing shop below, the Lucky Strike sign on the top of the Connor Building across the street, the roofs of the taller buildings beyond it, and someplace in that direction, someplace she couldn’t see from here, Gypsy Park. Harriet closed her eyes but could not sleep.

  DR. PICCOLO BROUGHT her three kinds of medication: a flat yellow pill, a round red pill, and two pale green capsules to take at night. They helped. She stayed in bed and read the books she could find in the apartment: Babbitt, The Call of the Wild, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Butterfield Eight. Dr. Piccolo came into her room at night and touched her face and her breasts. Harriet pretended to sleep; this seemed easiest. But then he began doing other things to her, too. Once she decided to tell her mother, but when she got up her nerve and went in the kitchen she found him and Alice playing rummy at the round oak table, bare feet entwined beneath it, in the rosy glow of the hanging Tiffany lamp. “Call-Me-Ed” was in an undershirt; Alice wore the pink silk wrapper of another day.

  “So whaddya got?” Dr. Piccolo’s hairy back was to Harriet, who stood in the dark. “Huh? Whaddya got?”

  “Gin!” Alice slapped the cards down with a flourish, then burst into giggles. She ran around the table to sit in his lap. “So you’ve got to pay up, big boy. Now what have you got for your little girl?”

  Harriet backed silently into the bedroom. The next day she answered an ad in the paper and got a part-time job in medical records at the famous hospital up on the hill where Jeff’s mother had stayed for so long. That summer she also took four courses, two each session, at UVA’s summer school, sharing a dorm room with a Men-nonite nursing student.

  Back at Mary Scott for senior year, Harriet moved into the single room she had requested in Ransom Hall. Anna had a single room in Cabell while Baby roomed with Catherine Wilson, in Oglethorpe. Four new freshmen had the Tower Suite in Old South. Harriet got a good look at them as she drove past the familiar old dorm in the Volkswagen that Mr. Carr had bought her from beyond the grave. Three of the new Tower Suite freshmen were carrying an old red leather sofa across the grass, while the fourth shouted encouragement down from the front window of what used to be Courtney’s room. The new girl’s long blond hair hung down from the window like Rapunzel’s, in a golden rope.

  A note from Courtney had been waiting in Harriet’s mailbox, written on heavy new informal stationery, engraved with her new initials, C. G. R. Harriet tore it open in the post office. “Of course I have not gotten any sleep since Scott was born,” Courtney wrote, “but somehow I don’t even care. Isn’t he cute??? I don’t need to sleep, I am so happy. I never knew I could love anything or anybody so much as I love this baby. I will bring him up to see you all later on. XOXOXO, Courtney.” The baby’s picture was inside: a funny little thing with a pointed head like a little cap, and squinty eyes.

  “Oooh! Let me see!” It was Catherine, grabbing the letter, hugging Harriet. “Oh shit, look at his head! Do you think he’s all right?”

  “I think Courtney would tell us if he wasn’t, don’t you? She’s always been pretty up front about things,” Harriet said.

  “I guess so. But my goodness, just look at you!” Catherine hugged Harriet again and then held her out at arm’s length. “You look different,” she announced. “What’s different about you? Aren’t you doing something different with your hair?”

  Harriet shook her head no. “You just forgot,” she said. “I haven’t seen you all for almost a year, remember. It’s just the same old me.”

  But Catherine continued to peer closely at her as they walked out under the giant oaks of the front quadrangle. “That’s not true, is it?” Catherine said. “Something has changed. What is it, Harriet?”

  Harriet shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “I told you, I had mono, remember? And then it was too late in the semester to come back to Mary Scott so I got a job and went to summer school at UVA.”

  “So, how’s your mom?” Catherine sat down on the miller’s stone and lit a cigarette.

  “Fine.”

  “And the doctor?”

  “Hirsute as ever.” Harriet sat down beside her on the huge stone, still warm from the day’s sun.

  Catherine laughed. “That word was actually on my college board test. And now we’re graduating. Well, I’m ready to be out of here. You know, Howie has already gotten two raises at his job. And he loves it.” After one of the world’s longest engagements, Catherine’s wedding was still nine months away. “Exactly like a pregnancy,” she said, scooting across the rough stone to hug Harriet. “I’m just so glad to see you! But now tell me the truth—what’s with you and Baby?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She says you never wrote her back or answered her calls or anything after you left last year. It really hurt her feelings, Harriet.”

  Harriet studied the grass, too green.

  “Harriet? Tell me?”

  Harriet sighed and took off her sandals, digging her feet into the grass. “It’s a long story,” she said.

  “Well, she still wants to be friends. You know she got pretty messed up after Jeff died, everybody did, but she took it the hardest, of course. She got skinnier and skinnier and Nurse Pam made her go see this psychiatrist in Roanoke twice a week, or they said they would sen
d her home. But now, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “She’s engaged, too! To this older guy named Charlie Mahan that she’s known all her life practically, I think he may even be her cousin although of course I’m sure it’s her third or fourth cousin once removed or something like that. Baby says he’s from ‘the Delta’ like it’s a big deal or something.”

  “Charlie Mahan?” A sudden image of Charlie Mahan came into Harriet’s mind as he had appeared when she went down to Alabama for the cousin’s debut party, sophomore year—Charlie Mahan showing up at the airport in his big blue pickup truck, throwing Harriet’s suitcase into the back, helping her up into the cab in courteous, cowboy fashion. Baby always claimed Charlie wasn’t “all that smart” but he was clearly nice, one of the nicest boys Harriet could ever remember meeting. Too nice for Baby, went through her mind. Somehow she remembered that he had dropped out of Ole Miss to go home and run his family’s farm when his dad got sick.

  “The wedding is set for the end of June, three weeks after mine,” Catherine said with evident satisfaction that hers was first. “Just after Howie and I get back from Bermuda.”

  “I always thought Baby would go to graduate school,” Harriet said.

  “No, she’s not,” Catherine said. “You know what I think? I think she’s just tired, Harriet. I think she’s all worn out. It’s real hard to be Baby. I think she wants a normal life now, somebody to take care of her, and I must say, I don’t blame her. I, for one, am real happy for her. Didn’t you know she dropped out of the writing workshop?”

  “Really? When?”

  “Oh, way back last spring. Well, look, speak of the devil, here she is now! You’ll see. She’s missed you, Harriet.” Catherine touched Harriet’s hand lightly for emphasis; Harriet jumped back. Baby! In a way Harriet could not explain, she felt that Baby had died, too. She was as dead as Jeff, though here she came, loping across the grass with her big stride and her big lopsided grin. Harriet shrank back on the miller’s stone.

  “Hey, Harriet!” Baby leaned down and hugged Harriet fiercely. Her hair was much shorter, cut in a trim pageboy. She had gained weight. She didn’t look so haunted. Even her hands looked different, ragged nails now manicured. She wore a short flowered shift and sandals, legs as long and bare and tan as ever. “Oh, Harriet, I’ve missed you so much—how are you?”