The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Sally tried to think about the Lord, but her thoughts kept straying to Jed and their fight at the quarry that afternoon. She had told him to keep his hands above her waist and outside her madras dress.

  “Now, I think that’s fair, Jed honey. That means we can do whatever we want above the waist and outside the clothes.”

  “Fair? You call that fair?” He folded his muscled arms and leaned against his door. “All right, it’s a deal if we say above the waist but inside the clothes.”

  “No. Absolutely not.” Sally studied the gold-plated megaphone on her charm bracelet.

  “All right, Sally. We’ll try it your way. No hands below the waist, or inside the clothes. No hands anywhere. No nothing.” He ran his hand up the front of his flat-top.

  “All right. That suits me just fine.” She leaned against her door and stared out at the walls of limestone all around them.

  Jed started the car. “Where are we going?” she asked nervously.

  “I’m taking you home.”

  “Home? Why?”

  “Ain’t no point in us setting out here in a gully if you don’t want to do nothing.”

  “But I do, Jed. I want to hold you and kiss you. I want us to talk about what we did today. I just don’t want all that other stuff.”

  “Well, holding and kissing may be what you want, but it ain’t enough for me.” He gunned the Chevy onto the dirt road, the tires throwing up clouds of dust and gravel. “You get me all worked up, and then you get offended if I try to do anything about it.”

  “Are we breaking up then, or what?” she inquired.

  “I’ll go with you to the Sadie Hawkins Dance like we agreed. But I ain’t touching you no more, Sally. That should make you real happy. I’ll find me some girl who’d like to be touched by Jed Tatro. Lots would, you know.”

  Tears welled up in Sally’s eyes. Jed threw her a look of hatred and pleasure.

  Just thinking about it, Sally felt the tears massing again. It was so hard to know what to do. She liked to kiss and hug, but that was never enough for Jed. He wasn’t even very interested in kissing, it seemed to her, did it just to get her to relax so that he could slip his hands under her shirt or up her skirt. She had developed the ability to kiss him with one eye open, keeping track of his hands and directing them to the agreed-upon areas. She had also developed the ability to shut down any creeping sensations of enjoyment that might interfere with these powers of surveillance.

  She loved Jed. At least that was what she heard herself telling him one night in his car at the Wilderness Trail Drive-in as the fog swirled around and obscured the screen. She wasn’t sure what that word meant. It had a lot to do with not wanting to be alone on Saturday nights. But she didn’t see why telling him that meant that suddenly he could do whatever he wanted with her body. She had thought nice girls didn’t do what he wanted her to do. But he insisted that the difference between nice girls and not-nice girls was that not-nice girls talked about what they did, whereas nice girls just did it.

  She knew that women were supposed to do whatever they could to please men. When her daddy came in from the mill, she jumped up so he could have his favorite overstuffed brown leather chair. She brought him the newspaper, switched the television to the news. In contrast Emily sat where she was, nodded, and went on with whatever she was doing. But Sally loved doing these things. Her daddy worked hard all day for them. He deserved to be catered to when he came home tired and hungry. Her mother often brought him supper on a tray, so that he wouldn’t even have to move. He said that Southern women treated their men like kings; that if word got out, the South would be flooded with men from every other part of the country.

  Here was Jed asking her for something that would please him very much. How could she deny it to him? But how could she grant it either, knowing how her daddy would feel about it? And she certainly didn’t want to get into the business of deceiving her daddy. Whenever Jed came to pick her up, he’d try to be polite and pleasant. But her daddy, usually so well-mannered, would either ignore Jed, or grunt a reply, or get up and walk out. Sally couldn’t figure it out. Several times when she and Jed had broken up, she’d dated other boys. Her father had always asked, “What does his father do?” But he knew what Jed’s daddy did, had known the whole family for years. So what could he have against Jed?

  In any case, there was no way to please both Jed and her daddy at once on this issue. But she couldn’t bear the thought of losing Jed to some girl from Cherokee Shoals who would give him everything. Why, the idea of seeing him with another girl was too repulsive. She’d kill herself first. Why couldn’t he be content just to hold her and kiss her and talk? She felt no compulsion to do more than this, and she couldn’t understand this urgent neediness he was always referring to. Was it true that boys had savage lusts they couldn’t control?

  Diane turned on the lights, blew out the candles and passed around butterscotch brownies. Sally dried her eyes as the others discussed whom to invite as their twelfth member.

  “I think Louise is real devout.”

  “But she smokes.”

  “That’s right. She does. We don’t want any smokers in Devouts.”

  “How about Laura?”

  “Laura? Laura Owens?”

  “Sure. Why not? Laura loves the Lord.”

  “That’s not all Laura Owens loves. So I hear.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Just that she’s got a bad rep. She’s not really Devout material.”

  “And you are, I suppose?”

  “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Just barely. You just barely made it, Clara, and if I was you, I’d watch my step.”

  “Watch my step! Who do you think you are? You can’t kick me out of this club!”

  “You may be a member, but you’re not an officer. And you never will be, at the rate you’re going….”

  Jed sauntered into the house. Raymond looked up from his study of the chart on the living room wall. Next to it hung an embroidered sampler that read: “Do nothing you wouldn’t want to be doing when Jesus comes.” Jed’s chinos bulged at the crotch. “And how is our Sally?” Raymond asked.

  Jed looked confused, then blushed, smirked, and sat down on the sofa, covering his lap with a pillow and running his hands against the front of his flat-top. “She’s all right.”

  “Well, I’m just delighted,” Raymond drawled. “It does my little old heart good to know that Newland’s own Miss Sally Prince is all right.”

  “Whadaya got against Sally?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She’s just not my type.”

  “Well, you’re not her type either.”

  “What a convenient arrangement. The Lord does look out for His own, doesn’t He?”

  “But she still likes you. I can’t imagine why.”

  “Well, I like Sally, too,” Raymond said wearily, returning to his study of the family tree. “Well, Mother!” he yelled. “I see you’ve finally done it!”

  “Done what, Junior honey?”

  Raymond scowled. He’d finally gotten everyone to call him Raymond except his parents and his relatives in Tatro Cove.

  “I see you finally traced our line back to Jesus.” He laughed silently.

  “You hadn’t oughta talk like that, Junior,” she called in a hurt voice from the kitchen where she was cutting out biscuit dough. That Junior worried her to death with his lack of respect. Always arguing with his father and taking the Lord’s name in vain. She didn’t know what would become of him when he left school at the end of the year. With that smart mouth of his, he’d never be able to hold a job. Her own parents had moved into Newland from a mountain farm when she was ten. Her father was a drunkard and her mother supported them all by turning their home into a boarding house for newly arrived mill workers. She’d been working all her life—first on the farm, then helping her mother with the boarders, then shift work at the mill, and now as secretary to Mr. Sutton at Sutton Insurance. He w
as the best agent in the office, and all the other girls looked up to her. She wore a hat and white gloves to work now instead of coveralls, and sat at a desk with a fresh flower in a bud vase. All this effort to get where they were, with a house and a car and all the food they wanted, and Junior took it for granted. Seemed like that he thought it all fell from the sky. It scared the wits out of her to think he’d take after her own father and look to the rest of them to carry him.

  “Shut up, Raymond,” Jed muttered from the couch. “Don’t joke about Mama’s tree thing. You know it means a lot to her.”

  “But not to me,” Raymond replied as he headed for his room. “Why she wants to keep track of a bunch of scruffy crackers and horse thieves and half-breeds, who sat rotting in a cove in Kentucky for centuries, is more than I’ll ever understand.” He slammed his door.

  “They wasn’t thieves,” Jed called. “They was pioneers. They was better men than you’ll ever be, prissing around with your camera like some kind of goddam Yankee newspaper reporter!”

  “Jed honey, watch your language,” his mother called.

  Jed walked over to the chart. It was two halves of a circle, joined in the center by his and Raymond’s names. Radiating out from their names were hundreds of names of ancestors. Whenever he was feeling lousy—like right now when he’d been fighting with Sally, or when he brought home straight C’s on his report card, or when they’d lost a ball game—he’d come look at this thing and feel better. He was the hub of his entire family. Its whole purpose appeared to be to bring Jed Tatro into existence. It had taken a dozen generations to get from prison in England to Newland, Tennessee. All these dead people was expecting big things from him, and he intended not to disappoint them. Already he was varsity tackle on a state championship team. And at the end of every year his class had voted him “Best Personality.” He sometimes thought he hated Raymond for his scorn for this chart and his people, and for the way he used this scorn to hurt their mama. Raymond was always penciling in names that no one but him thought was funny—Alger Hiss and Martin Luther King and Stalin and Mae West. Raymond thought he was a regular scream. But it pretty much proved that nobody else did when his class never voted him “Best Sense of Humor.” They never voted old Raymond nothing. In the first place he looked almost thirty years old, with his big thick glasses and thin hair. Most Likely to Recede, they ought to vote him. (Now that was funny.) He had no friends. You saw him around school with that Audio-Visual Club bunch—those fairies that put together ham radios from kits. Hundreds of dollars those creeps spent, trying to talk about the weather to a bunch of foreigners. They all dressed like models for a rummage sale—rayon shirts, white socks, sweater vests with reindeers on them, pleated trousers. A bunch of brains. Hell, they played chess on Friday nights when everyone else in town was at the ball games. Yankees mostly. Didn’t know no better. Their fathers was chemists and stuff over at the paper plant. One of them’s father was that new man at the mill—Mackay or something. Jed’s daddy had come home the other night grumbling about Mackay bringing down this faggot from some Yankee university who sat around with a stopwatch timing how long everyone sat in the can.

  Jed didn’t like to think about his childhood. He’d been scrawny and weak. Raymond and Emily and Donny had been older and had bossed him around. Teachers always mentioned how smart Raymond was, how well he’d done on the tests Jed had just flunked. But he was showing them now. Raymond maybe had the brains, but Jed felt like that he had everything else. He lifted weights every day and probably had the best body in town. Sally said so. He dated Sally, who was the prettiest girl at school in a lot of people’s opinions. Their class always voted her “Most Popular Girl.” True, she wasn’t putting out for him much. But it was just a question of time. She made him angry sometimes, though—she could be such a prissy little hypocrite. She’d get out there on the gym floor during a pep rally, like this afternoon, and wiggle her ass at the whole entire student body. She’d leap up and try to touch the soles of her saddle shoes to the back of her bouffant hairdo. She’d flash her panties all over town. But get her alone in a car, and she became Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. She’d dribble her tits all up and down the basketball court, but just try to get ahold of one. Either she should put out, or she should make it clear she wouldn’t. As things was, about half the time when she said no, she meant yes. But you never knew which was which. Sometimes he suspected she’d like him just to go ahead and do it to her, so she wouldn’t have to take responsibility. Girls was like that. They wanted it, but they knew they wasn’t supposed to want it, so they tried to get you to force them into it. It got confusing. Sometimes he wished he was a girl and didn’t have to be the one to make everything happen. If you was a man, you wasn’t supposed to get confused. You was supposed to know all the time what you wanted and how to get it. That was partly why he loved football. Never any question what your goal was. Like Coach Clancy was always saying, “Winning ball games isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing. Why, I wouldn’t give the steam off of my shit for a man who don’t go out there to win.” But win or lose, you knew you could count on every man on that team if you was in trouble. You loved those men like they was your own … brother, he started to say, but he hated Raymond.

  Raymond locked his door. Sometimes he thought he’d go crazy in this madhouse if he weren’t able to lock himself in here. That chart—either it or he had to go one day soon. It made his insane family and their random matings and birthings and wanderings look like the whole point to the universe. There was his name in the center of that demented bunch, with the implication that he was not only accountable to them but inseparable from them. They’d pass some drunken hillbilly on the street when he was little and his mother would say, “Say howdy to Bill Flanders, your fifth cousin twice removed on your daddy’s side.” Everybody in this town was related; it was why they were all maniacs. His family were distant cousins to Emily’s, as his mother insisted on showing everyone who set foot in the house. One big happy family. One big happy, crazy-as-treed-coons family.

  Against one wall was a table holding his stamp albums. Over the table hung a map of the world. Better than anything he loved sorting through the packets of stamps he ordered from New York City and finding one from Mauritania or Sumatra or Afghanistan. In the beginning he’d had to check the map almost constantly. Now he knew where every country was and had a few stamps from most. There were people out there he was not related to. That knowledge was an incredible relief.

  People looked at him strangely and asked why he wanted to collect stamps from foreigners. He was never able to answer. He remembered seeing an English stamp on a Christmas card his father received from an army buddy. He’d salvaged it from the garbage and studied it for weeks. One day an acned older boy named Wayne who lived in a house on his paper route invited him inside to see his stamp albums. Raymond had been so enchanted by the huge books filled with colorful stamps from dozens of countries that he scarcely noticed Wayne’s hand moving gently but firmly in his pants. He went back often, at first for the stamps Wayne gave him, but soon for the pleasure of his touch and his talk—about other parts of the country his family had lived in. His father, a car salesman, was always on the road in search of a better job. When Wayne moved away, they kissed with tears running down their faces. Wayne presented Raymond with his best album. Raymond hadn’t realized until a couple of years later when boys at school began giggling and whispering about homos and queers and faggots that what he and Wayne had done was something to be ashamed of.

  Along another wall were shelves filled with his camera equipment—lenses, portable lights, tins of film. He worked for the newspaper. He’d also placed a few pictures with magazines and newspapers in New York City. He had always taken the family photos—endlessly rearranging people and backdrops until everyone lost patience and dispersed. The money from his paper route he used to buy sophisticated cameras and lenses.

  He suspected his stamp collection, his photography, had a lot to do wit
h his not making junior varsity football his freshman year. Too small, Coach Clancy said. Try again when he reached his growth. Three years later he was still short and skinny, with that ox of a younger brother to rub it in all the time. Coach Clancy had a huge chest and narrow hips. Destined for lower back pain in late middle age. Veins stood out on his red face. “Yall seniors is good students, but that’s about it. It’s all most of you’uns can do to stand up on two feet. Tatro over there, he slouches around here all doubled over like a dog trying to hump a football.” Everybody cracked up. They’d been calling him the Ball Banger ever since. That was their idea of a good joke. Ha ha. Coach Clancy was wrong, though: Raymond wasn’t a good student. An “underachiever,” the guidance counselor called him. Did well on tests but had lousy grades.

  Well, it figured. Jed got cheered for smashing heads. Him, he got called names for trying to stay out of the way and mind his own business. He sometimes thought he and Jed, by unspoken agreement, had laid claims to noncompeting areas. In any physical confrontation, Jed could beat him to a pulp, so he learned to fight with his tongue, mocking people, usually without their knowing it. Sometimes he felt like a gnat buzzing around a lion, just out of reach of its paws, driving it to distraction. But Jed had certainly claimed the more prestigious area in terms of living in Newland. Raymond couldn’t help but be aware of the pride in his parents’ eyes when their neighbors came over and said, “Some boy, your Jed. Did you see that tackle on the two-yard line against Chattanooga?” His parents had fifty-yard-line seats at the stadium for home games and drove all over the state to away games. They were outraged when Raymond began playing chess on Friday nights. “Your own brother, and you won’t even go see him!” his mother shrieked.

  “I see him all the time,” Raymond pointed out. “Much more than I want to.” Recently they’d given up, gazing at him glumly as they left the house with their cushions, blanket, and thermos.