A Peach of a Pair

by Kim Boykin

  “Miss Eldridge, I really am doing the best I can, and that is to say the best that modern medicine can do. These pills will make Miss Lurleen more comfortable, but they will not cure her.”

  “Well then what in the name of Mary and Moses would she take the fool things for? I declare, I just don’t know about you doctors these days, passing out God knows what kinds of drugs, and nobody’s getting any better from them. Especially Lurleen.”

  He stood and looked at her like he was really going to make Emily believe all of his foolishness. “You’re going to need some help to take care of her. Live-in help. Miss Lurleen agrees, and I told her I’d have my receptionist put out some feelers, maybe place an ad for y’all in the newspaper. Miss Lurleen asked me to help screen them, and I’m happy to do so if that would make things easier on you or make you feel better. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you all of this, Miss Emily. Really, I am.”

  Well he ought to be, for saying such things. Emily heard Sister calling her. He picked up his bag and said he was sorry again. Like that meant something. Why, Emily had a good mind to call his mother anyway, g damn it. Forgive me, Jesus.

  Emily never used to swear, unless it was absolutely necessary, especially when she worked as a teacher. She was afraid that the words would become second nature and when one of her students started sassing off, she’d say something she’d regret. Something that might get her fired. But lately, Emily cursed, a lot and for good reason. Especially when that so-called doctor was about.

  But she believed if God really thought long and hard about her situation, He’d agree wholeheartedly that swearing was completely called for under the circumstances, if not a necessity. And He probably appreciated the fact that the swearing was mostly in her head.

  “See yourself out, Remmy. You’re doctoring is as worthless as rubber lips on a woodpecker.”

  Even without the half smile that played at his lips, he was a handsome man, for a pissant. Why, if Emily were his age, he definitely would have turned her head. When she was a young girl, Emily was quite the looker. All she had to do was snap her fingers, and she’d have a dozen boys begging to be her beau. She touched her hair like she was twenty-one instead of seventy-one. She didn’t feel that old, but sometimes, when she walked by a mirror, she was flabbergasted to see the wrinkled face looking back at her. Most days, she didn’t feel a minute over twenty back when she was the belle of the ball, and her mother had to beat her suitors away with a peach tree switch.

  “Emily, for goodness’ sake. Where are you?” Lurleen called as the door closed behind Dr. Remmy Foster Wilkes. Bah.

  “Coming,” Emily yelled, because the old girl’s hearing was not what it used to be. She tucked that prescription into her pocket and then remembered the way her mind slips when she does the wash. She took it out and stuffed it up her sleeve along with a clean tissue.

  “Hungry?” Emily looked in the refrigerator to see what she could fix for lunch.

  “Just a little bite, maybe something sweet,” Sister hollered. Oh, yes, she was quite feeble until it was sugar time.

  Emily warmed up some squash and onions from dinner last night on the stovetop along with a fried pork chop from the day before. She set a piece of loaf bread on the plate and a dab of tapioca pudding for Lurleen’s ever-loving sweet tooth and started to the bedroom. But then she remembered the tea, and the fact that she poured the last glass for that g.d. doctor.

  Hurrying back to the kitchen, she put two cups of sugar in the pitcher, not three like Lurleen did, and put the kettle on. She sat down at the kitchen table and looked over an old magazine and waited for the pot to call. The old girl must have dozed off, because she was quiet, for a change. But Emily couldn’t read a thing without her glasses.

  They were not in the fruit bowl where she always kept them. Had Lurleen gotten out of bed during the night and straightened up? Emily absolutely hated it when she did, because Lurleen could not put one g.d. thing back where it belonged.

  The kettle let out an earsplitting whistle. Emily let it go on for a little to wake the old girl up. A few seconds later, Lurleen hollered for her dinner.

  “You’re not some kind of invalid, Sister. Get out of the bed.” Emily rinsed out her mother’s good crystal tea pitcher. “Why I’m fixing and doing for you when you can fix and do for yourself is beyond understanding. And having live-in help? Well, if you’re not dying, which you certainly are not, you’ve lost your mind.”

  “Emily, I’m too sick to argue. Please. I’m hungry,” she huffed. Lately, Sister was really good at sounding weak and pathetic. Why, she’d never been either of those in her life.

  “No. You’re just spoiled,” Emily shot back, but not loud enough to be heard. Completely rotten from all those times everybody made over her because they thought Lurleen was going to die.

  “She’s too mean to die,” Daddy had said, while at the same time slipping her a little sack of candy from Zemp’s Drug Store.

  Truly, she was not mean, but that was what Daddy always said when any of his children got hurt and started to whine, even Teddy. Like the time Tilara Jones’s old milk cow stepped on Emily’s foot and broke it. The pain was so great, Emily cried and cried and begged Jesus to take her home. When Daddy came to pick her up from the Joneses’ place, he just laughed and told Emily she was too mean to die.

  Emily poured the hot tea in the pitcher and stirred the sugar until it dissolved. Lurleen always let it sit for a while, which just turned it into a syrupy mess. She said lemons cut the syrup, but they don’t. How Lurleen could drink it that way was a great wonder. It was not good tea.

  With the glass and dinner plate on the tray, Emily headed down the hall, even though Lurleen could come out here and sit and eat with Emily if she had a mind to. But she took to bed after church, three weeks ago Sunday. Emily didn’t let on that she knew Lurleen was okay. She just played along and fussed over her. Sister loved that almost as much as her syrupy tea.

  4

  NETTIE

  Sue has cried enough for both of us; still, through my tears, my roommate looked like a kaleidoscope. A very lovely clown dressed in an orange poodle skirt, a blinding red blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a chameleon green sweater draped over her shoulders.

  “Don’t go.” Her voice tailed off into a whine again.

  “We’ve been through this, sweet girl. You know I can’t stay.” I stroked her hair, taking in the scent of the Chanel No. 5 her boyfriend splurged on for Valentine’s Day. She puts a dab behind her ears every day, but only on her wrists on Sundays. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Come home with me, Nettie. You can share my room until the wedding. Mama and Daddy want you to come. Please do.”

  Sue was the oldest of five girls and one lone boy they all doted on. Their home was as tumultuous as the tiny plot sandwiched between two orchards back home. Four houses squeezed together. Mine, Nana Gilbert’s, Aunt Opal’s, and Uncle Doak’s.

  “You’re going to graduate and go home and marry Jimmy. And I—” Daddy had always called me the queen bee, said I came into the world so sure of myself. But for the first time in my life, I didn’t have any idea what came next or what to do. Nothing was certain. Everything was broken, but I’d be damned before I’d let Brooks or Sissy or Mother break me. “You’d better get going, Sue. You have class.”

  She nodded and ran her hand over the top of my suitcase. “But a bed at the Y, Nettie?”

  Dean Kerrigan had been kind enough to see to it that I had a place to go. I knew she had lived at the Y when she first moved to Columbia, a lot of the single teachers at the college still did. “You make it sound like it’s some sort of flophouse. It’s not.” She nodded, giving my arm a gentle squeeze. “Now go to class. I’ll be here when you get back. Promise.”

  Going through the motions of packing felt good. Better than wallowing in heartbreak. The rest of my belongings fit easily into the yellow Samsonite war
drobe Daddy gave me for high school graduation. I’d already taken most of my things home at Christmastime.

  I stiffened at the memory of Brooks touching me in the orchard that night. The way his breath felt on my neck as he told me how much he loved me. Wanted me. Was that how he seduced my sister? Or had my sister’s childhood crush grown into something feral and devious, something that was bigger than her? I shook my head, trying to get the image of Sissy’s face out of my mind, that prissy sly smile when she’d interrupted Brooks and me that now obviously had nothing to do with Parcheesi.

  “Damn you, Sissy.” I’d never sworn out loud in my life, and yet the words tripped off my tongue. “Damn you and Brooks.” And the baby? Brooks’s baby?

  A wave of nausea dropped me to my knees. Gritting my teeth, I would not damn that child, but I wouldn’t shed another tear over the fact that it had taken a place in my family. My place.

  Checking under the bed, I pushed the rumpled twin away from the wall. Doris Shelley’s pink sweater fell to the floor. I had no recollection of taking it off the day my world came to an end, no recollection of much of anything after reading my mother’s plea for me to return home to Satsuma. For Sissy. But there it was, shoved between the bed and wall, as soft as cotton candy, pink, with little white pearl buttons.

  I folded it neatly and got to my feet to get back to the business of moving on. To where or to what I had no idea, but moving forward was imperative. The only way not to feel the gaping wound Sissy and Brooks had made inside me when they made that baby.

  Since Mother’s letter, the rumor mill at the college had been gushing with all kinds of scenarios, which Sue felt duty bound to squelch. But her efforts only served to make things worse, and made nice girls like Doris feel sorry for me. I hurried down the hallway, the sweater clutched to my chest. Returning it seemed almost silly; I knew she’d never ask for it back.

  For most of the school year, everyone had heard her tearful conversations with her boyfriend on the hall phone. He was handsome, a frat boy at the University of South Carolina with a sporty black convertible. A lot of girls thought Doris let him do her wrong because his family came from money and hers didn’t. She knew he was catting around, but she always took him back. I’d always wondered how she could forgive him, just like that.

  Could I offer a polite acceptance if Brooks apologized, begged me to take him back? After all, I was still Dorothy Gilbert’s daughter, bound by blood and good manners. Would I take him back? I placed the sweater on Doris’s pillow along with a heartfelt thank-you note and hurried out of the room, grateful she wasn’t there. I couldn’t have taken another mournful look from her piercing blue eyes that said she knew exactly what it felt like to be me.

  Pages on the hallway bulletin board ruffled as I pulled Doris’s door to, advertisements with neatly cut fringes with phone numbers written in perfect script. Requests for transportation, ads for students who wanted to get a jump on finding a summer job. Hurrying home to Brooks the moment summer vacation began, I’d never had any cause to peruse the board. But with only a few dollars and a bus ticket to my name, I’d definitely need a job.

  The telephone rang at the opposite end of the hall. A girl dashed out of her room to answer it. I could feel her eyeing me as I studied the board. Summer work babysitting an infant? Definitely not. Three offerings for camp counselors? Nothing that lasted for more than a couple of weeks. Lifeguard? I was a horrible dog paddler and couldn’t save anyone without drowning myself. Besides, I’d heard the girls go on about the cute boys from USC who lifeguarded at Sesquicentennial State Park and the city swimming pools, and wanted no part of that.

  Caregiver? I’d helped nurse Nana Gilbert through a horrible bout of the croup once; I could do that. But the position was in Camden, not Columbia. I took the advertisement off of the board, stuffed it in my pocket, and hurried back to my room. Justine, the cattiest of the mean girls, was on the phone, looking at me, twirling the phone cord around her finger. Her smile devious. “For you,” she said, dangling the phone toward me.

  After Dean Kerrigan filed the paperwork, one of Justine’s catty minions who worked part-time in the registrar’s office broadcasted that I was withdrawing from school. The only pleasure I had in this horrible mess was that it was killing every last one of them to know why.

  Justine was a well-sculpted beauty who was never without a date and there was a good reason for that. While the rest of us dressed like young girls in poodle skirts and tasteful sweater sets, Justine, the ringleader of the mean girls, wore cotton peekaboo blouses with tight skirts and high heels. All of us had covered for her on more than one occasion.

  Just a few weeks ago, when she didn’t come back to the dorm after a fraternity party at USC, our housemother, Miss Beaumont, was on a mission to find her and wasn’t about to give up until I stepped in and assured her Justine was at the library. On a Saturday morning. Studying. Something Miss Beaumont knew probably was not true, but she liked me, trusted me, and my word was good enough for her.

  “I’m not here,” I whispered to Justine, eyes pleading for her to follow the unspoken code we all shared.

  She slid her delicate hand over the receiver and couldn’t look any more like the cat who ate the cream. “You haven’t had a phone call in over a month, Nettie, and it finally rings for you and you aren’t lunging for it? Must have something to do with your leaving school.”

  “Please, Justine, I’m not here.”

  “Oh, but you are, though not for long I’m told,” she gloated. “Tell me why you’re leaving, and I’ll tell them you’re at supper.”

  “Justine,” I said, begging her to lie for me the way I had for her a thousand times.

  “Oh, this is too rich. The perfect ’Bama belle in a tizzy, leaving school so suddenly. Who got you knocked up, Nettie? Because your precious Brooks sure isn’t the daddy.” She might as well have punched me in the stomach. “Who is it? One of the boys from Fort Jackson? From USC?”

  My heart pounded out of my chest. “Justine. Please.”

  She licked her bright red lips and took her hand off of the receiver. Her smile put the Devil to shame. “Here she is, Mrs. Gilbert,” she said, slapping the phone in my hand.

  “Hello? Nettie, honey? Hello? Hello?” I could picture my mother by the telephone table next to the blue platform rocker in the living room. Sitting on the edge of the seat, reading glasses dangling on the end of her nose. “Nettie Jean Gilbert! You speak to me this instant,” she ground out in a motherly tone that had always made me snap to.

  But how could she love me and command me to attend Sissy’s wedding? How could she welcome Brooks into our family after what he did to me? And how could she choose Sissy over me? Because of a baby?

  “Mother.” The word sucked the air right out of my lungs; my stomach roiled.

  “Oh, how the mighty ’Bama belle has fallen,” Justine laughed. “And I’m enjoying every minute of it.”

  I gave her a hard look, opened the door next to the phone, and stepped inside; the cord reached just enough for it to close. Thankfully neither Patrice nor Halley, nice girls, the only two Catholics at this Methodist school, were not in their room. The girls shared a bulletin board beside the door, decked out with pictures of their sizable families. Not a single one of them looked traitorous, but then Sissy had never looked that way. Mother certainly didn’t either.

  “Nettie. You listen to me, young lady, you—”

  Nobody really stops to notice that solitary moment when the apron strings snap. The bile that had crept up my throat was replaced by fury that had simmered under heartbreak for days.

  “No, Mother, you listen to me.” She gasped at my tone. “When you phoned me after the tornado, I waited thirty-two days believing something horrible had happened, that Brooks was dead. I heard nothing from anyone, not even you, until I got your primly worded letter and an invite to Sissy’s wedding, demanding my presence. My b
lessing.”

  “I don’t expect you to bless this union, Nettie. After the tornado, everyone around here was out of sorts, especially with it coming on the heels of the hurricane. I’m not making excuses for Brooks or Sissy, but the milk has been spilt, Nettie.”

  “Enough with the spilt milk. My sister stole my fiancé. There is no spilt milk. There’s betrayal. And a baby I want nothing to do with. I don’t ever want to see Brooks or Sissy again. And how could you possibly think I’d stand up at their wedding? Condone what they did, what they did to me?”

  “Nettie. Lower your voice.”

  “Why, Mother? Because you don’t want people to know Sissy didn’t follow proper etiquette? Did she miss a step in the chapter on how to felicitously betray her own sister? Or did she just skip straight to the point of no return when she got pregnant with my fiancé’s baby?”

  “Rail if it makes you feel better, but Sissy isn’t entirely to blame.”

  “You’re right. I don’t just blame Sissy. I don’t know what happened between her and Brooks; all I know is that Sissy has wanted him to notice her since she was old enough to tag after me. And she finally got him.”

  “You can pile all the blame on your sister, Nettie, but it takes two people to make a baby. What about Brooks?”

  “Brooks is none of your business.”

  “None of my business? Young lady, I am still your mother.”

  “No, you’re not my mother. You chose. Between your daughters. You chose.”

  “Maybe if you had a daughter with a baby on the way you’d understand that I didn’t choose.”

  “Is the baby in danger?” I snapped.

  “Why, no. Nettie, honey, I’m just trying to do right by that baby, and if it means having you here for Sissy, so be it.”