The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  In the middle of “This Little Light of Mine,” everyone began waving flashlights around the truck. In the sweeping beams, Jude spotted Ace and Molly buried in hay in the rear corner, bodies pressed together, mouths gasping like dying fish. Apparently, they had decided to ignore the strictures against the illicit pleasures of the flesh.

  Molly glanced up for a moment and her glazed eyes met Jude’s. They gazed at each other for a long moment, and Jude thought that her heart was going to shatter into a thousand jagged shards right there on the blanket of hay. Eyes still interlocked with Molly’s, Jude turned her head toward Jerry’s and finally opened her lips to his. Through angry eyes, she watched Molly watch her as she drew Jerry’s tongue into her mouth and placed his rough crustacean hand on her newly swelling breast.

  AS THEY WALKED HOME from school beneath the flying red Texaco horse, Molly announced that she and Ace had registered together for a Baptist Youth retreat in the Virginia mountains the next weekend. Although she urged Jude to sign up with Jerry, Jude had by now accepted her Waterloo. She had been trying to save Molly from Ace, but she had finally understood that Molly didn’t want to be saved.

  Since she no longer had anything to lose, Jude said, “I wouldn’t even go to heaven if I knew Ace Kilgore would be there.”

  Molly’s blue eyes flared liquid ice. “Ace may not be very nice sometimes,” she snapped, “but at least he’s not boring.”

  “Meaning I bore you?” Jude clenched her jaws to keep from crying.

  “No, you don’t bore me,” said Molly, retreating hastily. “It’s just that sometimes I feel a little bit suffocated with you, Jude. It’s like you want us to build a cabin on the ridge and stay children forever.”

  “Well, you won’t have to worry about Ace Kilgore’s suffocating you,” muttered Jude, “because he’ll probably be in prison soon.”

  “You and I are the ones who are in danger of prison,” she said, staring at the sidewalk.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Some of the things we’ve done—they’re just not right.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, you know.” Molly gazed across the street. “Playing Pecan. All that stuff.”

  “What was wrong with it?” It hadn’t felt wrong at the time. It had felt right—for both of them. Now Molly, in addition to destroying their future, was rewriting their past.

  “Two girls aren’t supposed to do that together.”

  “Who says?” asked Jude weakly.

  “God does,” replied Molly with serene conviction. “The Bible says that a virtuous woman should be a crown to her husband.”

  Jude stopped walking and turned to look at her. “Since when have you cared what the Bible says?”

  “Since I accepted God as my Lord and Master at that revival.” She looked at Jude with defiance, blue eyes gone stone gray.

  As Jude looked back, she felt her jaw fall open. Taking on God as well as Ace Kilgore was clearly hopeless. “But, Molly, I love you,” she said softly, accepting defeat.

  For a moment, Molly looked confused, her present self warring with a more ancient one. “Maybe I love you, too, Jude,” she finally replied in a choked voice. “But not like that.”

  “Like what?” asked Jude with sudden urgency. She watched Molly closely.

  Molly said nothing for a long time, staring hard at a cluster of red ants dragging a dead wasp along the pavement. “Not like that night on the raft.”

  THE SATURDAY AFTERNOON of the Baptist Youth retreat, Jude’s father came into the kitchen to ask, “Do you and Molly want to go drive the jeep with me?”

  Jude was lying facedown on the fake-brick kitchen linoleum. “Molly’s gone.”

  He stood over her and looked down. “Oh?”

  “She’s in Virginia on a retreat.”

  “Didn’t you want to go, too?”

  “No.” Jude had spent the past several days swinging violently between elation and despair. The dream about Molly and herself on the raft hadn’t been a dream after all. Or if it had been, Molly had dreamed it, too. Together, they had experienced something profound. After loving each other for nearly a decade, they had set aside the boundaries that normally separated two people. They had merged with each other and with all creation. No one and nothing could ever take that knowledge away from Jude. But Molly wanted to. First she pretended it hadn’t happened. Now she insisted it wasn’t important.

  That afternoon, Jude had forced herself to face the fact that Molly loved Ace because he was so awful. She liked the idea of saving a sinner, taming a wild beast, reforming an outlaw. Since he was a bad boy, she could feel like a good girl. Unless Jude could have a personality transplant and become even more wicked than Ace, there was absolutely nothing she could do to compete.

  That night in the living room, Aunt Audrey passed Danny to Jude to hold as they all chuckled over the antics of Sid Caesar on “Your Show of Shows.” Danny was cuddly and sweet-smelling in his flannel Dr. Denton’s. Holding him upright, Jude let him tread her lap, his chubby legs churning as he pretended to walk. Then he reached out with his tiny, perfect fingers to grab her lower lip. Clutching it, he stared into her eyes with his open, trusting, quizzical gaze. He was so uncomplicated and innocent and vulnerable, loving to seize and examine anything within reach, loving to have any area of his soft velvet skin stroked by anyone anytime. How did an enchanting creature like this turn into an Ace Kilgore? Jude wondered.

  Her father was holding Sam, his older son, on his lap. Sam also wore flannel Dr. Denton’s. He was squirming as Jude remembered squirming, climbing all around the puffy leather armchair, experimenting to find the most comfortable position in relation to his father’s large frame. Then he played hide-and-seek with Jude, believing that if he covered his eyes so that he couldn’t see her, she couldn’t see him, either. Her father laughed at this until his face turned scarlet. Jude was glad to see him so happy.

  Molly was happy, too, with someone besides Jude. But Jude wasn’t a lonely motherless child anymore. She was first in her class and in line to be secretary of the student council. The president, a ninth grader from Pittsburgh who lived on Poplar Bluff, had invited her to a party at his house the following weekend. She had a life apart from Molly and her father, just as they did from her.

  The phone rang. Her father answered. His cheerful face contorted. “I’ll be right down,” he said in a voice turned suddenly terrible.

  He stood for a moment with his hand on the receiver before facing Jude. “Baby, Molly’s been in a car wreck. I have to go to the emergency room.”

  Aunt Audrey put her hands to her face but said nothing.

  Jude looked up from her armchair. “Can I come, too?”

  “Maybe you’d better not.”

  “It’s bad?”

  “It’s real bad.”

  “I’m coming.”

  Jude sat in the waiting room with Molly’s parents as people in rust-stained white rushed in and out. Ace’s parents were there, too. Jude kept looking at Mr. Kilgore in his khakis and sports shirt, trying to figure out why he wasn’t a nice man. Apart from his dull black eyes, he looked like every other father in town. Other parents Jude didn’t know were also there.

  Seven Baptist Youth had been riding in a car driven by a high-school junior. Ace had taunted him to go faster on the winding mountain road, yelling encouragement as the speedometer needle climbed higher and higher. He cheered as it reached fifty, then sixty, then seventy. Molly, who was sitting on Ace’s lap beside an open back window, began yelling at the driver to slow down. The other girls screamed and wept.

  The car missed a curve, skidded off the shoulder, and rolled down a steep embankment. Molly was thrown partway out the window on the first roll. On the second roll, the car landed on top of her.

  Molly’s mother was holding Jude’s hand and crying softly. Molly’s father was pacing the room. Jude was on an ice floe at the South Pole, floating silently on a frozen silver sea.

  Ace came out
on crutches, explaining to his mother, “So I tried to hold on to her. I tried to pull her back in. I had her around the waist. But then we were upside down and I lost her.…” He looked at Jude and stopped talking. She looked back at him. He swung out the door between his parents.

  Hours later, Molly was rolled out on a stretcher. Her dark, wavy hair had been shaved off, and careful catgut stitches snaked across her skull like lacing on a softball. Her face was black and purple. One arm was in a cast. Plastic tubing from her nose and hand attached to bags of liquid on a rack being pushed by a nurse.

  Jude’s father appeared in green scrub clothes stained with Molly’s blood.

  “Is she going to be okay?” asked Jude. Adults died, not kids.

  “I’ve done everything I can.” But his maroon eyes were squinty, as though seeking refuge in the caverns formed by his high cheekbones.

  Jude, her father, and the Elkinses followed the stretcher to a small room and watched orderlies transfer the body to a narrow white bed. Jude’s father routinely saved lives, or so people all over town told her. He’d save Molly.

  “Go home and have a rest,” said Molly’s mother, stroking Molly’s inert arm.

  “Good idea,” said Jude’s father. “I’m beat. We’ll be back soon.”

  While her father showered and changed, Jude put some things into a paper bag—Mademoiselle and Seventeen to read to Molly once she was awake; nail polish so she could paint Molly’s nails, which had gotten chipped during the wreck; a piece of Mrs. Starnes’s orange-blossom cake, Molly’s favorite, wrapped in foil.

  Leaving the house to wait for her father in the car, Jude discovered Sidney sitting by the back door. She squatted down and patted him. Looking up, she saw Molly standing under the mulberry tree by the garage.

  “Oh, you’re back already?” said Jude, standing up. Sidney stood up, too, staring at Molly and whimpering.

  As Jude walked toward her, she realized it wasn’t Molly after all. It was just a shadow cast by the moon through the mulberry branches. But Sidney was still staring at the shadow, trembling all over.

  WHEN JUDE AND HER father got back to the hospital, Molly was dead.

  JUDE REFUSED TO GO to the funeral. She didn’t want to hear Noreen keening by the grave as though over a lost football game. And she didn’t want to meet Ace Kilgore’s gaze. She lay on her bed eating raspberry sherbet and wondering if she’d gone on that retreat whether Molly would be lying beside her right now. Molly had once saved her from the Commie Killers, but she had not saved Molly.

  She heard Sidney howling outside. Inviting him in, she let him lie on her bed and listlessly lick sherbet from her spoon.

  She was gazing across a vast, empty snowfìeld that glistened under a merciless sun. She looked into the electric blue overhead for a cloud to carry her mother, but the sky was empty.

  Out the window, Sandy and her father, dressed in suits and ties, were returning from the cemetery alongside Aunt Audrey, who was carrying Danny zipped into a padded powder-blue snowsuit. Their breath was frosty. Her father came into the house and up to her room. He sat down on the bed and patted Sidney.

  “I don’t know what to say, Jude. Just that I know how awful you feel right now. The years roll by and life goes on and new people come along. But some people can never ever be replaced.”

  Jude kept eating her sherbet. If he had just died in the war in France, her mother would still be alive. Besides, he was a quack. He hadn’t saved Molly.

  Sometime later, Sandy appeared in her doorway, still dressed in his suit and tie. “I’m really sorry, Jude.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll always have your memories of Molly. No one can ever take those away.”

  Jude looked at him. “That may be all I ever had.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think dreams are real?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve read they’re wish fulfillment. Or just random firings of neurons at rest.”

  “I thought Molly and I loved each other, but maybe I made the whole thing up.”

  “No, Jude. Molly loved you.”

  “Then why did she stop?”

  “She didn’t stop. But I think she got scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Scared of being different. Scared of losing herself in you. Molly wasn’t as strong as you are.”

  Jude frowned. It didn’t make sense. Molly was older. She had usually been the leader. And Jude didn’t feel strong. She felt like crawling under her bed and never coming out.

  He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, and when she thought to look up again, he was gone.

  That night she went down to her father’s office and found an Ace bandage. Removing her shirt and bra, she bound her new breasts so tightly that they ached. Then she let Sidney outside to pee and got some more raspberry sherbet.

  When Clementine arrived the next morning, Jude and Sidney were lying on her bed surrounded by sticky bowls of melted sherbet, even though it was a school day.

  “Sugar, I’m just so sorry,” said Clementine.

  “If Molly and I have a graveyard love, I guess we’re halfway home,” said Jude.

  “You’ll feel better by and by, I promise you.”

  Clementine stroked her back. Feeling the Ace bandage, she unbuttoned Jude’s shirt and looked down at her tightly wrapped chest and the angry chafed flesh around the edges. “What you done to yourself, Miss Judith?”

  “I don’t want to be a woman,” she said. “You become a woman, you love a man, and it destroys you.”

  “O Sweet Jesus, my poor lost lamb,” murmured Clementine, taking Jude into her arms, rocking her and humming a gospel tune about Christ gathering His flock into the fold at twilight.

  JUDE RODE HER BIKE into town. With her allowance, she bought a red-clay pot of white tulips. Holding it in one arm, she pedaled past her grandmother’s huge white house. She’d just received a card from the Great Wall saying: “The Chinese are so polite and gracious, very much like Virginians.”

  Entering the cemetery, Jude walked over to the hillock of fresh clay that now encased Molly’s bruised and broken body. As she set the clay pot among the withering wreaths from the service, Jude realized that to do anything at all, even to buy these flimsy flowers that would shrivel in the evening chill, was unnecessary. She and Molly had been dead to each other for nearly a year now.

  “Best friend. Buddy of mine. Pal of pals,” she murmured to the red-clay mound before turning away to ride back home, down the tunnel of arcing elms whose leprous limbs were coated with hoarfrost.

  PART TWO

  SANDY

  CHAPTER

  8

  “OH, MY,” said Sandy as he opened the door of his Riverside Drive apartment and discovered Jude in her cream blazer, navy-blue A-line skirt, and tassled loafers. “A coed.” He smiled whimsically. “Fancy that.”

  “And a hippie,” said Jude, studying his octagonal granny glasses, bleached overalls, and the strawberry blond hair that curled like maple shavings around his shirt collar.

  The focal point of the living room being an electric heater, they sat down before its orange glow in decrepit Danish-modern armchairs whose cushions were extruding foam. Not having seen each other for eight years, they had little to talk about except a past Sandy had repudiated, having refused to return home since leaving for college. They glanced at each other uneasily.

  “Tea!” said Sandy. “Whenever the English are at a loss for words, they make tea. I’ll make us some tea, shall I?”

  “We’re not British.”

  “No, but I worked at the National Opera in London when I was draft dodging, so I learned the drill.”

  As Sandy filled a kettle in the tiny kitchen and took tea bags from a canister on the counter, Jude studied his back. He’d filled out since high school, like a colt turning into a horse. He had a convex chest now and arms braided with muscles. The rumor around town was that, after dropping out of RPI, he’d been classified 4-F because
of asthma. Most young men Jude had known at Vanderbilt were in ROTC, awaiting their chance to defend democracy in the Delta. When it came to fight or flight, Jude’s ancestors had usually picked the latter, so her sympathies were with Sandy. If any one of her forebears had died a hero on some distant battlefield, disrupting the evolving chain of DNA, she wouldn’t have been here.

  Where would she have been instead? she wondered as she stood up and strolled across the battered parquet floor to peer out one window into an air shaft, then out another to the murky Hudson with the roller coaster of Palisades Amusement Park scalloping the far shore. A hallway with several doors off it led from the living room, the walls of which were papered with colorful posters announcing operas at the Met—FIDELIO and DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER and THE LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES.

  The door to the outside hallway opened, and in walked a lanky young man with black curls and a drooping mustache. He wore a cracked, brown leather motorcycle jacket with a fur collar and a navy-blue Greek fisherman’s cap. Studying Jude with the greenest eyes she’d ever seen outside of the cat kingdom, he said in a British accent, “Sandy’s mate from childhood, I presume?”

  “That’s right. Jude.”

  “I’m Simon. One of Sandy’s roommates.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Four of us at the moment, I believe.” He finally smiled, as though from duty. “Please. Make yourself comfortable, if that’s possible in these collapsing chairs.”

  Both sat. Jude fiddled with a button on her blazer. Simon inspected the blue braid on the cap in his hands. Finally Jude asked, “How do you know Sandy?”

  “We met at a bar in London.”

  “You’re English?” The kettle in the kitchen began to whistle like Sandy’s father’s tannery back home at high noon.

  “Yes.”

  “From London?” Yes.

  “Have you been in the U.S. long?” A year.

  “What’s your job?”

  “I’m a book editor.”