Barbara brushed back her bangs and looked thoughtful. She didn’t ask me how I planned to eat and pay the rent on a writer’s erratic earnings; and she didn’t laugh. She did smile again, suddenly. ‘You’ll be the Don Quixote of the English department,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you started.’
For forty-five minutes we went over the hours I’d accumulated at my first college and made out a list of courses I wanted and courses I was required to take as an English major – certainly not a synonymous list. Finally we hammered out a schedule I thought I just might be able to handle.
But I kept reminding myself I’d been over six years away from the academic routine. As Barbara signed forms, I blew out a sigh of relief and apprehension.
‘You’re certainly going to be an interesting addition to the student body,’ Barbara commented cheerfully.
‘Does Houghton have many older students?’ I asked.
‘Not that many, but you’ll have some company, don’t worry. And the older students we do have almost always make higher grades than the average-age student. They seem to have a better idea of why they’re going to college.’
That was heartening. I wondered again how it was going to feel, seeing those nineteen-year-old faces surrounding me. ‘I’ll probably be a mother figure,’ I said ruefully.
Barbara whooped. ‘Believe me, Nickie,’ she gasped. ‘No one is going to think of you as a mother figure.’
‘What’s all the merriment?’ asked a voice behind me. I started, then twisted in the chair to look.
A man had stuck his head through the gap left by the partially open door. Now he looked as though he felt extremely foolish. ‘I’m sorry, Barbara, I didn’t know you had anyone in here,’ he apologized.
‘Come all the way in, Stan, and meet Houghton’s newest sophomore-and-a-half,’ Barbara invited.
The man smiled a little shyly and edged into the room. He was a few years older than Barbara, whom I’d placed at around thirty-five. His neat brown beard was well salted with white and his face was seamed. He managed to look comfortable with himself.
As Barbara performed introductions (his full name was Dr Stanley Haskell), I got the firm impression that the two were a couple. They shared the ease that comes of intimacy and long association; and Barbara seemed not the least disturbed when his eyes stayed glued to me.
They were obviously going out for lunch together. I quickly thanked Barbara for her time and gathered up my papers. Since Dr Haskell was going to be instructing me in Chaucer (at eight o’clock Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), I told him I’d see him in class and took my departure, my heels tap-tapping again down the stairs.
As I pulled the Chevrolet cautiously out of the parking lot, I spotted the two English professors at a stoplight at the edge of the campus. They were laughing. The sun was shining. I beamed idiotically to myself. Ah, love!
Mimi’s narrow driveway led around to the back of the house, where it formed a wide apron, affording room to turn around; but she’d asked me to leave the car out front, since she meant to use it. I parked across the street from the house. The yard sloped up from the sidewalk, so I had to climb steps up to the yard, and then more steps up to the wide porch that girdled three sides of the house.
Panting a little from the heat and the stairs, sweating like a pig, I flung open the front door with that silly smile still pasted on my face – and there stood Cully.
. . . I was fourteen again. A tall, thin, black-headed boy, a lofty senior in high school, slipped into the chair opposite mine at the Houghtons’ dining table. Hazel eyes summed me up and dismissed me.
‘This is Mimi’s brother, Cully,’ Elaine Houghton had said proudly. Mimi kicked me because I was gaping like a fool. I was abruptly sick, stricken with first love; and those light-brown eyes with little green streaks were utterly cool when they rested on me . . .
Mimi wasn’t in the living room to kick me now, so I did the job myself – mentally, of course. Cully’s eyes were just as cool now, though the rest of him had changed a little. He was still very tall and too slender, but a little gray streaked the black hair of his head and mustache. There were a few wrinkles at the corners of those eyes. His cheekbones and arched nose jutted a little more sharply; the parentheses from nose to mouth were deeper.
‘Hello, Nickie,’ that mouth said calmly.
‘Hi,’ I said, and slung my notebook down on one of the couches. ‘Where’s Mimi?’ Charm and grace, that’s me.
‘She and Alicia Merritt are in the kitchen planning the party.’
‘Alicia! What party?’
‘Your party,’ he said, and relaxed enough to smile faintly.
Now that was interesting. Cully had been very tense.
‘Mimi just decided she wanted to celebrate your arrival and have a housewarming at the same time,’ he continued.
We stood in uneasy silence for a moment.
‘By the way . . .’ He hesitated for an awkward length of time, and I stared. Cully always knew what he wanted to say. ‘I’m sure coming back here fitted in with your plans, but I’m glad you did come back to town and move in with Mimi,’ he finished.
Surely not for the sake of my beaux yeux.
The slap and the stroke, or the stroke and the slap. Cully had never said an unmitigated thing to me in our whole acquaintance. I’m sure you came back to Knolls for your own, doubtless selfish, reasons, but I’m also glad it’s what my sister wanted and needed.
One thing I could say for Cully – he’d always adored Mimi, and the feeling was mutual. Now, I decided, Cully was angling toward something. But I wasn’t going to bite.
Things had never, never been simple between us.
‘I’m glad too,’ I said briefly. ‘Now when, and where, is this party going to be?’
‘Friday night, here. I’m going to bartend.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ I said sincerely. Mimi had never mixed a decent drink in her life. Then my mind started racing. Friday was two days away. Some of our moving boxes were still strewn through the house. I was itching to make a list of things that had to be done. I began rummaging through my purse for a pencil and a pad.
‘Listen, as long as we’re alone . . .’ Cully began, capturing my undivided attention.
‘Yes?’ I fixed my eyes on his. That usually either frightens men or inflames them. One of my photographers, a romantic, had said that my eyes were exactly like opals – a compliment that had pleased me no end, of course.
Just as a little voice inside me was protesting that I had promised to stop using my face as bait – and I’d told that little voice to shut up – Cully went on: ‘I want you to watch out for Mimi.’
I was back in the real world, with a thud.
‘I’ll tell you something in confidence—’ He broke off as Alicia Merritt and Mimi blew into the living room.
I had to jump and scream and embrace Alicia in the accepted fashion. If I’d done less, she would have thought I wasn’t happy to see her. Alicia was refreshingly the same, her accent still one of the heaviest I’d ever heard. Her voice dripped magnolias and molasses. When she exclaimed ‘You sweet thing!’ the product sounded like ‘Yew sweeet thang!’ I held our former schoolmate at arm’s length to take a survey.
‘You look great, Alicia,’ I said. And I meant it.
Her short hair was more golden than God had made it, and curlier; but her figure was definitely her own, and still tempting as a ripe peach. Alicia had the happy face and assured manner of someone who has seldom in life denied herself an impulse – someone who has pretty nice impulses, that is.
‘How’s Ray?’ I asked, when I decided we’d gushed enough. Mimi beamed in the background.
‘Oh, he’s just fine, Nickie. He still has that same old job, though, and he’s on the road all week. At least he comes back home on the weekends. I’m glad I’m not the jealous type!’
‘You don’t have anything to worry about,’ I assured her.
‘Oh, I’m fat as a butterball,’ Alicia p
rotested untruthfully. ‘And you’re still long and thin and totally gorgeous. It must be staying single that does it.’
I’d forgotten Alicia’s little needles, the way you tend to forget little faults in otherwise nice people. For a second, this little barb almost got to me. I was off guard and back in the ambience of girlhood, and I actually found myself defensively totting up the proposals I’d received. Shame! If I’d been alone, I would’ve slapped myself for my regression. As it was, I had to clamp my mouth shut: I had been on the verge of retorting, ‘Oh, Alicia, I’m just so picky!’
‘Where are you all living now?’ I said instead, and promised myself something nice for my restraint. Earrings?
‘Didn’t Mimi tell you?’ Alicia gave Mimi a look of mock reproach. ‘We bought the house two doors down from here, the other side of Mrs Harbison, oh I guess about a year ago. So I’ll get to see a lot of you! When I have a second, that is,’ she added, to my relief.
‘Are you still in every club in town?’
‘And on a bunch of college committees, too. Got to support the old alma mater, and I have to do something while Ray’s gone!’
Alicia’s energy was something of a legend. Underneath all the gush and flutter, which apparently she found necessary to assume, Alicia was actually a very efficient woman. Mimi had told me that in college Alicia had invariably made the dean’s list. But if Ray’s fraternity brothers mentioned that achievement to her, she would blink and giggle and tell them it must have been a fluke.
‘You know,’ our old friend was saying now with a great display of roguery, ‘Mimi was on every board at Houghton, and they finally gave up and started paying her for it. I’m just hoping that some day this town will give me a salary for running it!’
‘You sure deserve it,’ I murmured. I was tiring already. It had been a long time since I’d met Alicia broadside.
‘Ray and I are going to start working on a baby,’ she told us cheerfully. ‘He says that’ll keep me at home, if nothing else will. He thought buying our own house would do that too. But you know, I had the whole thing done over in no time.’
‘I don’t doubt it for a minute,’ Cully said with a smile that robbed his words of any sting.
Alicia looped her purse straps over her shoulder and moved to the door. ‘Nick, I’m just thrilled to death you’re back in town to stay. We’ll see you at the party Friday night. Ray’ll be back in time, and we’ll be here with bells on. You call me, Mimi, you hear? If you need any help!’
All at once she was gone, leaving us standing in a daze, as if a tornado had passed close by.
‘Still the same,’ Mimi said with a grin of half-admiration, half-regret.
I nodded. ‘What’s all this about a party?’
‘Oh, just some people you met when you used to stay with me, and some of the people from the college,’ she said smoothly.
‘Like the entire English faculty?’ I asked with suspicion.
‘Oh, don’t worry! Just the ones I really know and like. I’m not trying to butter anyone up for you.’
‘Oh. Okay,’ I said, feeling some doubt. ‘When is this going to be? What kind of party?’
‘It kicks off at eight, and from the length of the bar list, it’s going to be a drunken brawl,’ Cully interposed. ‘Listen, Mimi, are you sure this is everything you need from the store?’
A list I hadn’t gotten to make. I eyed it sadly. Then I realized that Cully was going to the grocery for us, and I felt a jolt of amazement. I just couldn’t imagine Cully Houghton doing something as tedious and universal as wheeling a cart through the supermarket to buy groceries. It occurred to me that I had perhaps been idealizing Cully a wee bit all these years.
‘I’m sure,’ Mimi said firmly. ‘Listen, are you sure you’ve got the bar list?’
‘Right here.’ He pulled the edge of another list from his pants pocket to prove it to her.
‘Good. Thanks, Cully, that’ll save us time. We’ve got to get cracking on cleaning up this house, and we’ll have plenty for you to haul off to the dump, starting tomorrow.’
‘Maybe I should try to borrow Charles’s pickup?’
‘Good idea. Drop by his office and see if he’ll need it. Generally he just uses it on weekends.’
There was a little something about the way Mimi smoothed her hair . . .
‘Charles?’ I asked, after Cully had left.
‘Oh, you’ll meet him at the party. I’ve known him forever,’ Mimi said nonchalantly.
Right. Uh-huh. Here we go again.
But I swore to myself I wouldn’t say anything. Mimi was always prickly in the first stages of any attachment. There are some lines even a best friend – or especially a best friend – shouldn’t cross. I’d upset Mimi in the past with my criticism of her choice of men, before I’d gotten wiser. That was why Mimi was being so clamlike with me now.
I withheld my sigh until I reached my bedroom. Then I heaved it to the mirror, as if I were practicing ‘Exasperation’ for a pantomime. We’ll just see about Charles, I told myself grimly while I changed into my oldest cutoffs and my T-shirt with the paint stains. Reserve judgment, Nickie.
Mimi had excellent taste in clothes, furniture, jewelry, and (of course) friends, but she completely lost that taste when it came to men. Husband Number One had at least been harmless; Mimi had just gotten tired of packing ice chests with beer for fishing trips and whooping it up at fraternity parties. Richard had been more dangerous; an effete would-be painter who lived on an allowance from his parents – who could well afford it, granted. But he too had never denied himself an impulse, and his impulses, unlike Alicia Merritt’s, were apt to be rather nasty. There’d been others she hadn’t married, of course. I remembered best the cadet who had painted a glowing picture of an army officer’s wife’s life, and the budding rock star who’d wanted to have a baby (via Mimi) and name the child Acidstar.
At least apprehension about Mimi’s latest involvement temporarily smothered my curiosity about what Cully had been going to tell me before Alicia and Mimi had come into the living room. I had the distinct feeling that whatever it was, it was something unpleasant.
* * * *
For the remainder of that day and the bulk of the next two I hadn’t time to think of anything but Comet, Future, and Glass Plus.
After we’d taken the kitchen apart and put it back together, we turned our attention to the long living room that extended the width of the front of the house as the kitchen extended the back.
Mimi had tentatively arranged my heavy desk and bookcases in the empty dining room across the hall from my bedroom, but the living room was so scantily furnished that we had to move them back out to fill one corner. My two couches and chairs, which had filled my apartment in New York rather tightly, looked like an island perched around the fireplace at the right side of the living room. In despair, we lugged down a couple of chairs and a table of Mimi’s that blended with my stuff well enough. The result was passable.
Then Cully began to haul boxes and other moving debris, and we began to cook.
Of course Attila and Mao went wild in this maelstrom of upheaval. They’d scarcely had time to adjust to the move from Mimi’s former home. The cats dashed between our feet, pounced out of odd corners, and got shut in closets for indefinite periods. Thursday evening, when I called the two to supper and only Attila responded, Mimi leaped from her chair as if she’d been electrocuted and pounded up the stairs at full speed. She returned in a minute, her nose red with incipient tears, clutching Mao to her chest.
‘I just remembered the last time I’d seen her she was asleep in my underwear drawer, and then I pictured myself putting the wash away and shutting the drawer without even thinking about it,’ she explained in a shaky voice. ‘Oh, God, she could’ve suffocated!’
To Attila’s intense indignation, Mao had an extra treat for supper that night. Mao accepted her close brush with death quite placidly. In fact, when I asked Mimi if the cat had been frantic when she opened the draw
er, Mimi told me rather stiffly that Mao had still been fast asleep.
Cully was a great help; which, like his grocery shopping, surprised me – until I realized that he’d never watched me lift a finger to do anything practical, either. When he and Rachel had dropped by my apartment on their infrequent visits to Rachel’s family in New York, I’d of course had the place spotless hours beforehand.
I volunteered to go to the dump bins with Cully on Friday morning, since his load was especially heavy. I perched up high in the pickup that the mysterious Charles (whose last name I discovered to be Seward; occupation, lawyer) had obligingly donated. It had been years since I’d been in a pickup. I felt very down-home.
‘We ought to have a beer in our hands and country music on the radio,’ I told Cully as we bucked along the dirt road that led to the county landfill. It was good to get out of the hot kitchen.
‘It is kind of fun,’ Cully admitted cautiously. He was shifting gears with a certain macho air that tickled me. I had a feeling that if he’d been alone, he’d have been going ‘Brroom, brroom,’ pretending to be a cross between Mario Andretti and the Marlboro man.
When we got to the dump and Cully had let down the tailgate, I heaved garbage bags with tremendous panache.
‘That’s the one with all the cat litter and the broken glass in it,’ he protested when I grabbed the gathered neck of the last bag.
I gave him a scornful look. Since Cully was not only a man and a southerner but also a jogger, he tended to be smug about his superior strength. Pooey on you, Cully! I’m tall and I exercise every day – well, almost every day – and I’m not going to play clinging vine.
My training in the control of my facial muscles came in handy. I managed to swing the bag off the tailgate and onto the pile of dumped garbage with the requisite gusto, but I was glad Cully had to shut the tailgate. That gave me a moment to hop back into the pickup and have a blissful second to relieve my anguish by some down-home cussing.
I let out a few more unprintables when I discovered I was bleeding. Some of the broken glass had pierced the bag, and me. I believed the cut was small; but as hand injuries will, it bled profusely, and I couldn’t be sure. When Cully climbed in beside me, he may have had the hint of a smile on his face, but it vanished (fortunately for him) when he saw the blood.
A Secret Rage Page 4