Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  When she came back to the table, she said, not looking at Donny, “Woo, honey! That Leon, he bad!”

  From the way she said it, he knew that “bad” here meant “good.”

  Leon came over. “And how’s Mr. Junior Church Usher this evening?”

  After Rochelle and her mother and the kids left, Donny sat watching “Ramar of the Jungle” on television. A white man and woman in shorts and helmets had their hands tied behind their backs, and anxious frowns on their faces. A row of natives in these grass skirt jobs, with bones and junk through their lips and noses, were chanting and pounding their spears on the ground. The white woman’s eyes was all wide and terrified. This fat black cat in shorts and a helmet was hiding behind a grass hut whispering reassuring things to the man with the tied-up hands. Everybody in shorts was good guys. Everybody in grass skirts was bad guys. But what was in it for that chubby nigger there in his shorts, except getting to be thought of as a good guy by bwana and pussy? Donny shrugged and bit into an apple.

  Chapter Twelve

  Graduation

  After receiving her medal for Most Studious, Emily climbed back up to the stage and stood behind the podium in her rented black gown. Her classmates sat on the gym floor in folding chairs, having processed to “Pomp and Circumstance,” repeated by the band twenty-three tedious times. Families sat in the bleachers looking bored.

  “Percy Bysshe Shelley said in a poem, ‘Nought may endure but mutability.’” began Emily. “We can never be sure how things will change. We can only be sure that change will occur. Five billion years ago our sun was born from a cloud of hydrogen. Ever since, two competing forces have been at work—the tendency toward change and the tendency toward stagnation. Charles Darwin in the 1800s proposed a mechanical process of adaptation: Creatures best adjusted to altered physical conditions survived. Today some scientists prefer the notion that life as a whole reaches out, not just to survive but to develop any new potentiality. Otherwise, they ask, how can we explain snow crystals, or the staggering variety of flowers, or the instinct to make music?”

  Sally sat with her legs spread and her hands holding up her enormous belly, which looked as though it would burst open like a seed pod at any moment. Emily’s mother had a faint smile on her face. Her father, with his legs crossed, seemed to be listening. Earl was gazing at her with a bemused frown. When she had told him last month that she’d sent in her acceptance to a college in New York, he’d stared at her just as he was doing now.

  “But you’re going to State.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “But Emily … I mean, what do they have in New York City that we don’t have down here?”

  “I have no idea. Nothing maybe.”

  “Why, I bet they don’t even have Chi O in New York City.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, if you changed your mind once, you can change it back again.”

  “I’m not changing it back, Earl.”

  “But Emily … Christ, I love you, Emily.”

  “I love you, Earl.”

  “Then why? I mean, I had it all mapped out. We’ll have next year together at State. Then I’ll go to work at Dad’s plant. When you’re a junior, I’ll give you your diamond. Then when you graduate, we’ll get married.”

  “I can’t, Earl.”

  “But why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You keep saying that. Don’t you think you’d better know before you go wrecking our lives?”

  “For God’s sake, don’t be so melodramatic, Earl. I’ll be home for holidays and during the summers. You can come to New York. We can write letters and talk on the phone. It doesn’t mean it’s all over.”

  He laughed. “Jesus, you’re still just a dumb little high school punk. You don’t even know that that’s not how things work.”

  “They can if we want them to.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Oh come on, Earl. You could make this much easier.”

  “Goddam, I don’t want to make it easy! It’s not easy. I love you. I want you to go to State. I want you to be my wife. I want you to have my babies and share my life.”

  “I can’t, Earl.”

  “Why not? What are you going to do instead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Earlier that spring she and Earl had gone riding one afternoon at his farm. Earl rode the mare he’d trained at camp. Emily rode a retired show horse, a gelded Tennessee Walker who, even without the weights in his hooves, pointed them during his running walk as though he were an aging ballerina. Earl trotted beside her, posting.

  They crossed the valley and went up into the hills. The farm buildings and tobacco beds fell away beneath them. They passed through a strip of woods and into a field. Stopping under a tree, Earl unloaded the knapsack that held their picnic. Then he uncinched his saddle and laid it under the tree. His mare snorted and twitched with pleasure, like a woman shedding a girdle. Emily unbuckled her saddle and dumped it. Earl jumped up and hooked his elbows over his horse’s backbone, then threw a leg over the rump and wiggled into sitting position. He looked at Emily. She smiled, then duplicated the procedure. “Thought I couldn’t do it, didn’t you?”

  “You can do anything you set your mind to.”

  “Damn right.”

  Without a word both horses and riders gathered themselves up, then sprang forward into canters. They raced across the field, hooves thudding, grass swishing, breeze whipping manes and tails and human hair into flying tumbleweed.

  At first Emily was afraid: If a horse stepped in a woodchuck hole, its leg would break; its rider would catapult onto his or her head. But after a while, she felt as though her horse’s hooves were scarcely grazing the ground. No chance to become lodged in a hole. It was one of the rare times when she felt she wasn’t a burden to a long-suffering horse. The horses, saddleless under a bright blue sky and hot sun, were enjoying the race.

  She hugged her horse’s sides with her knees; her calves and feet hung loosely, swaying with the rocking motion of the horse as it plunged through the sea of high grass. She and Earl rode side by side, each trying unsuccessfully to pull ahead.

  For a moment Emily felt as though the four of them had become a unit, a rocking, floating, gasping creature, plunging in place under a white-hot sky as the earth turned beneath.

  Abruptly the horses shied and reared and danced to a halt. A barbed wire fence stretched across their path. The horses stood heaving and drooling foam, their bodies black with sweat. Earl and Emily slid down and lay on their backs in the high grass, breathing heavily.

  “You ride pretty good for a girl,” Earl finally murmured.

  “Pretty good for anybody.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You wish I didn’t, don’t you?”

  “Who me? Why would I wish that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He rolled over and kissed her. She drew his tongue into her mouth greedily and pressed her hips against his. Was this what people meant when they said they were “in love”? This craving for Earl’s flesh, was it love? His hands moved over her body, removing clothing. He was whispering things she couldn’t catch. Their horses had moved away, grazing quietly. The sun screamed overhead.

  His chest pressed against her breasts. His lips and tongue moved across her face and down her neck.

  What happens if I go ahead, she asked herself. I could get pregnant. What else?

  And just as abruptly as the woodchuck holes had ceased to matter, so did these questions. The race was the only thing that mattered—the straining and the rocking, the plunging.

  The exhausted slide from the horse’s sweaty back.

  The smile on Earl’s face as he lay beside her she had seen last summer when he maneuvered the mare into taking a higher jump than ever before.

  She stood up and began pulling on clothes. Earl grinned lazily from their hollow in the grass. “What’s the rush?”

  Grimly she zipped her jeans and fastened he
r belt. “What color are you going to paint that rock—black?”

  He sat up. “What’s wrong? Are you OK? Didn’t you like it?”

  He looked so crestfallen that she muttered, “I loved it. That’s the trouble.”

  “Why’s that trouble?”

  “What if I started wanting it, needing it? Having to have it?”

  “So much the better for me,” he said, smiling.

  “What’s good for you doesn’t necessarily coincide with what’s good for me.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, jumping up and taking her in his arms.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. As his tongue gently prodded open her reluctant mouth, she realized that it was exactly how you put a bit into a horse’s mouth—just prior to quietly slipping the leather straps over its ears. Bridle. Bridal.

  As Earl tried to drag her back down into their nest of grass, she was seized by a shortness of breath and gasped for air.

  Shortly after, she went to visit Sally. As she walked in, she was greeted by an aroma from the stove. In the living room she found Sally on her knees in a maternity jumper, cleaning the molding with a Q-tip.

  “What you cooking? Smells good.”

  “Oh, hi. Nothing. I just keep an onion simmering on the stove so it will smell to Jed like I’m taking as good care of him as his mama.” Sally stood up slowly, her hands holding up her swelling belly. She pushed her blonde hair off her face and smiled her pep-squad smile.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Oh fine. Great. Never better. You know, I really love being pregnant.”

  “Good. It must be fun to have your own house, and do what you want when you want.”

  “Yeah, it is. Jed and I are just loving it. We’re like a couple of honeymooners. Can’t keep away from each other.”

  “No kidding? That’s really nice.” Probably the last thing in the world she wanted to know about was her sister’s sex life. She looked into the bedroom at Jed and Sally’s bed, though. She’d begun craving sex, and imagined what it was like being able to have it whenever you wanted in a bed all your own. By now Earl and she were devoting most of their energy and intelligence to finding places where they could be alone. Once when she was a guest at his parents’, he let himself into the bathroom while she was brushing her teeth. She gasped at his daring. He closed the toilet cover, sat down, and pulled her down on his erection. Right in the middle his father knocked on the door. “Be out in a minute, Dad,” Earl called.

  One afternoon when Earl’s parents were out, they drove toward the farm past his father’s plant. A high chain-link fence with barbed wire on top surrounded it. There were warning signs. Tinker-toy towers that supported hundreds of power lines, rows of colored glass insulators, turned the scene into a giant abacus. Towers like silos. Long low grey concrete bunkers with no windows. Uniformed guards at gatehouses.

  “Gosh, this place is creepy,” murmured Emily.

  Earl laughed. “Only if you don’t understand what’s going on in there.” He explained how to construct a uranium core.

  “Yeah, that sounds OK. It’s what happens next that’s creepy.”

  “What? Installing them in nuclear reactors so people can have lights and heat and things?”

  “No, installing them in bombs.”

  “That doesn’t happen here. They’re shipped to New Mexico and Washington State.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  Earl and Emily sat in the breakfast room the following morning. Hot spring sunlight poured through the sparkling-clean multipaned windows onto place mats and napkins. Fresh flowers were everywhere. Hanging baskets of houseplants. Freshly polished antique flatware with script initials. An entire shelf of matching china dishes for each person. Gleaming antique chest and corner cupboard.

  Lottie, the fat Negro maid in a starched white uniform, carried in heaps of cut-up fresh fruit, platters of country ham and biscuits. Earl gazed at Emily as he ate, smiling. He often said, in Mrs. Prince’s presence, that if you wanted to know what a girl would be like as a woman, look at her mother. He’d add to Mrs. Prince that this was why he’d picked Emily. Emily extended this procedure: If you wanted to know what a boy was looking for in a girl, look at his mother.

  Through the doorway Emily could see her, in a wide-brimmed straw hat and silk dress, pulling on white gloves and looking out the window across the flower-bordered brick terrace. On a far hill the tenant and his hired man in faded blue overalls and limp felt hats hoed in the tobacco seedling bed.

  “Missus, you want me to stuff some chicken salad in them pastry shells?” Lottie asked.

  “Those pastry shells. Yes please, Lottie, if you don’t mind. And would you take a roast out of the freezer for supper, please?” “Yessum.”

  “It’s nice here,” Emily said.

  “Thank you,” said Earl. “Dad’s finally got him his plantation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s a city boy. From New York. Came down during the war. Top-secret stuff at the plant for the Pentagon. Afterward he stayed on. Started buying up land. Says all he wants is all the land that borders his.”

  “Sounds like Alexander the Great.”

  They walked into the living room with its mellow antiques and oriental carpets, flowers and bowls of fruit, paintings on the walls. Earl’s mother was on the terrace instructing the gardener. In the bright sunlight Emily could see the makeup she’d applied skillfully. Her bouffant hairdo was perfect, hemline straight, stockings un-run, shoes polished, nails polished. Emily felt a tightening in her chest. She wheezed.

  This time she fought it. There was nothing wrong with this scene. There was order here, beauty and peace. Careful perfection. The wheezing subsided. If this was what she had to do to have Earl whenever she wanted him, she’d do it.

  On the morning news on television, uniformed men were flailing with night sticks at some people, white and Negro, who knelt in postures of prayer. Snarling police dogs were lunging at them. Blasts of water shot out from fire hoses. Earl switched off the set.

  At the Wilderness Trail that night they watched a short about a Northwoods trapper who staked a tame female wolverine near a trap. She made mating sounds that lured a male. As he circled her with lustful intent, the iron teeth of the trap snapped shut on his leg. Eventually he gnawed his leg off to escape.

  The following afternoon Emily discussed with Earl whether she should pledge Tri Delt or Chi O at State next year. And that evening she mailed off her acceptance to college in New York.

  “… Three hundred and seventy-five million years ago, in lakes and swamps, creatures developed which we call crossopterygians. They were like fish, but with bony fins and air sacs. The regular fishes probably thought they were freaks. But eventually some crossopterygians left their ponds. Maybe they were chased out by the other fish. Maybe the food supply gave out. Maybe the swamp dried up. Maybe they were just curious. Nobody will ever know. But for some reason a few dragged themselves on their fins across dry land, gasping air into their sacs. They didn’t know until then what dry land was, much less whether it would suit them. Some probably flung themselves as fast as possible into new swamps. Maybe they were terrified. Maybe they were excited. Maybe they were just responding numbly to instinct. The fish in the swamps died out, while the descendants of the crossopterygians took over the earth for several million years …”

  A graduate farted loudly. Students tittered.

  “… So as we leave behind these friendly faces and familiar halls to go out into the world, we can fight change every step of the way. Or we can pledge ourselves to accept and assist the inevitable. The choice is ours. Thank you very much.”

  The band broke into “Pomp and Circumstance” for the twenty-fourth time, as the audience applauded politely and the graduates cheered to be getting it over with so they could take off their hot robes.

  Mr. Horde shook her hand and gave her her diploma. As she put her tassle on the other side of her mortar board,
she surveyed the restless crush of classmates moving forward on the gym floor. In their identical robes they resembled black bass minnows in a fish hatchery. Most of the boys would soon be working in the factories and stores and warehouses. Most of the girls would marry them and keep their houses and raise their children. Some would go to State. A few would leave the region. “The choice is ours.” She smiled. Who among them was choosing? Certainly not herself. If she could have chosen, she’d have stayed here with the scenes of her childhood and the graves of her forebears. It sure didn’t feel like choice.

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Emily

  Emily passed through a wrought-iron gate, emerging in a huge paved courtyard surrounded by neoclassical buildings of grey stone. Up a flight of steps, in front of a building with an elaborate frieze of cavorting gods and goddesses, was a landing on which sat a stone statue of a Greek goddess who held tablets. At her feet were fold-up tables and chairs, around which milled students, most dressed in faded denim. The tables held petitions, pamphlets, donation boxes, stacks of tickets. Signs read: “SUPPORT VOTER REGISTRATION IN THE SOUTH” and “SHARECROPPER BENEFIT TICKETS HERE.” Voices exhorted and disputed. The words “redneck” and “cracker” jumped out at Emily like pop-up pictures in storybooks.

  Emily’s dorm was one of several massive brick buildings dwarfing a tiny courtyard. A high iron fence separated the courtyard from the crowded sidewalks of Broadway. She had met her roommate an hour earlier. Joan had smiled in a way that indicated a smile was not her most compatible expression: The corners of her mouth turned up at sharp right angles, but her eyes continued a process of cold assessment. Emily unpacked while Joan lay on her bed and read a newspaper and sighed and muttered, “Oy, the things that go on in this world. They should rot, these people.”

  “Who should?”

  “These crackers in Alabama. These schmendricks who blow up churches. Four little girls those cretins murdered.”

  “I didn’t hear about it.”

  “What, they don’t tell you what your neighbors are doing down there?”