Bound South

by Susan Rebecca White

  IT’S OPENING NIGHT and I nailed it. I was good. I was great. I got a standing ovation. Frederick gives me a card and six pink roses after the performance. The card says that he couldn’t imagine a more talented and lovely actress to play Antigone. It says that if we both end up in New York I should give him a call and we will get a drink. I bury the card in my bag after opening it. He could get fired for writing something like that.

  He has the most beautiful handwriting. Each letter looks worked over.

  I TELL MYSELF I’m not going to cheat again, but I end up once again memorizing the answers from Amanda’s old test. I try to figure the problems out on my own, but I have no idea what any of it means. And I can’t call Amanda for help. We haven’t talked since that day in the Shack.

  BESIDE MY 92 Dr. Mack writes, “Way to Go!” I feel frantic looking at his red words. I am sure he is being sarcastic.

  I CAN’T STAND it any longer, this waiting to be kicked out. I drive to Jim’s house after school, my window rolled down because it’s such a nice day. The leaves on the trees are red and orange and yellow and if things were normal Amanda and I would be at the park eating ice cream or drinking beers.

  Jim’s dad is an economics professor at Emory, so they live near there, even though it’s sort of far away from Coventry. Jim’s house is smaller than ours, but it’s really nice. It looks like an old English cottage—it has these little diamond-shaped windows—and it’s set on this huge lot that backs up to the woods. Jim’s old Jeep Wagoneer is parked in the driveway. I park behind it, noticing for the millionth time his bumper sticker that reads “Wherever You Go, There You Are.”

  His mother answers the door wearing a blue denim jumper on top of a white T-shirt. She looks matronly, a look my mother avoids at all costs. (My mother wouldn’t be caught dead in denim anything. Not even jeans.)

  Mrs. Watanabe calls for Jim, and when he doesn’t answer, she says he’s probably out back. She leads me through the front hall, lined with black-and-white photos of Jim and his two sisters, through the kitchen, and out the back door. The kitchen smells of melting chocolate. She says she’s baking cookies.

  In the very back of the yard, just where the woods come in, Jim is walking the labyrinth, his chin tucked to his chest, his eyes to the ground. I stand on the edge and watch as he makes his way to the center, coming right up to it and then hitting a wall, which is really just a line he is not supposed to step over. He doesn’t. Instead he dutifully follows the course set out for him, walking toward one of its outer rings. Despite its tricks, if you continue to follow the labyrinth you will eventually get to heaven, even when it seems you are being led the wrong way. When Jim finally reaches the center he looks up, sees me, and smiles.

  “Caroline. I’m so pleased that you are here. I was just thinking about you.”

  He sits down, Indian-style, in the center circle, in heaven.

  “Come sit with me,” he says. “The stones are nice and warm from the sun.”

  I walk to the center of the maze, stepping over the lines. I sit beside him, stretching my legs out and trying to hold my back very straight. The sun shines on my shoulders, and the warm rocks feel wonderful against the backs of my legs.

  I wish I could just relax, just sit and be still, but that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here for information, for reassurance.

  “Jim, I’m freaking out. Every day I think Skip Peterson is going to come pull me out of class and drag me in front of the Honor Council.”

  “Would you like some jerky?” he asks, pulling a Slim Jim out of his pocket.

  “Um, no thanks,” I say, indicating with my (sarcastic) tone how odd the timing of his offer is. Then, remembering how much I need him to help me, I try to be funny. “Do you always eat snacks named after you?”

  He smiles beatifically as if he is a wise old monk and I am a harmless but annoying fly. He tears the plastic wrapper off the top of his Slim Jim and takes one small bite.

  “Please tell me,” I say. “Is the case going to come up?”

  He doesn’t answer while his mouth is full, just stares straight ahead and chews and chews.

  Finally he swallows. He looks right at me, his eyes darker and even more intense than usual. “You’re going to be all right. I promise. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

  For a moment I believe him and the relief I feel is palpable. It’s like being granted a pardon and knowing I get to return to the living. And then I see the partially eaten Slim Jim on the stone in front of me and I feel a pressure on my leg, which I realize is his hand, rubbing, working its way up my thigh.

  “You are going to be just fine,” he says and he is moving his hand up my skirt while we sit in the middle of the labyrinth, his mother only a grassy backyard away.

  But what does that matter? She is busy baking chocolate cookies or washing her denim jumpers or hanging another photo of her son on the wall. And their house is private, on a corner lot, bordered by spruce trees on the neighbor’s side, woods in the back. Jim and Amanda have had sex on a blanket in those woods. Amanda told me.

  No one but me can see what his hand is doing, see where it is creeping, feel his fingers gently stroke my thigh.

  I want to tell him to stop. I need to tell him to stop. But I realize with sudden clarity that I have a choice: it’s this or the Honor Council. And I know, in my gut, that my cheating was never discussed at a council meeting. They would have called me in by now; they would have questioned me when they first got wind of it. Jim and Amanda are the only two people—besides me—who know what I did.

  But that could change. Jim could turn me in. He’s looking at me, watching to see how I react to his hand.

  I open my legs just the slightest bit.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Joie de Vivre Means Pain in My Ass, Right?

  (Louise, Spring 2000)

  Remember Susan Smith, the woman from South Carolina who drowned her two children? Everyone was talking about carjackings back then. You were supposed to lock your door the second you got in. Susan Smith said she’d been carjacked, that a black man held a gun to her head and forced her out of the car before he drove off with her kids.

  That story scared us. As I was waiting for my low-impact aerobics class to begin, the ladies stretching in front of me whispered that this sort of tragedy would never, ever have happened back when they were girls. “Maybe things weren’t always fair,” said the one in the purple leotard, “but the world was safer. A black man would not dare go after a white baby.”

  As I was waiting for Caroline to finish her acting class at the Alliance, Bootsey Brook told me about all the ways a man could get into your house when you weren’t looking.

  “Lock your door even if you’re just going back and forth carrying groceries in from the car,” she said. “You never know who might be waiting to get at you.”

  And then the truth came out, that there had been no kidnapping, that Susan Smith had rolled the car off the boat ramp herself, her three-year-old and eighteen-month-old strapped inside, crying for their mommy before their cries were swallowed by the cold dark water. After that only one word was heard at the grocery, at church, waiting in the carpool line at Coventry: monster. What kind of a monster would do such a thing?

  LORD HELP ME, but I could relate to Susan Smith. Not to her actions, but to her thoughts. Once when Caroline was two and a half, she and I were in the kitchen, in our nightgowns, fixing breakfast while her daddy slept in. Caroline was standing not a foot away from me when I reached under the cabinet to pull out the iron skillet I use to fry bacon. Feeling the weight of the skillet in my hand, a thought flashed in my mind: What if I were to bring this down on her head?

  Quick as I had it the thought was gone and I was asking Caroline how many pieces of oink-oink she wanted and I tried to write it off as that time of the month.

  But it lodged in my brain. Not the urge to kill my daughter—Lord no, that was fast and fleeting—but the fact that I had the thought at all. Maybe having it
meant I had inherited Mother’s craziness and it was just now coming out. Maybe I wasn’t fit to raise a child. Most disturbing was the fact that such a violent image could enter my mind during a time when I was not even upset with my daughter. What might happen the next time Caroline acted difficult?

  Believe me, she was not an ideal child. Not like Charles, who came around five years later and was fifty times easier. There were times when I thought Caroline had it in for me, when I thought she was sent to this earth simply to make me snap.

  Like the time she was four and kept trying to get my attention while I was on the phone with Tiny. Tiny was making me laugh so hard, telling me about how she clipped off her husband Anders’s comb-over while he was asleep, that I ignored my daughter, told her I’d take her for ice cream if she would leave me alone for ten minutes. I should have noticed how quiet things got after she left the room. But it had been so long since I had had an uninterrupted conversation with Tiny that I decided to take the silence as a blessing.

  When I walked into the living room half an hour later, the built-in bookshelves were empty. Every single one of my hardback books—their bindings, that is—was flung on the floor, the pages torn out. Paper floated in the air. I could smell it, the smell of my destroyed books from college, back when I could not wait for my future to begin, when I could not wait for John Henry to propose to me so I could become a wife and a mother. And there was my beautiful four-year-old, her eyes shining, looking up at me with an expression that showed she knew exactly what she had just done, tearing one last page from one last book while I watched, my jaw hanging.

  I wanted to cause damage. I really did. And I suppose that is the difference between a child abuser and me: I didn’t let myself touch her. Oh, I knew a spanking was justified, but I also knew that if my hands got hold of her I might do some real harm.

  I turned and left the room and then kept on walking out the front door. I walked all the way to Peachtree Street. That’s it, I told myself. I’m just going to leave this time. I wouldn’t even go back to get the car. I would walk to the Amtrak station, which was just a mile down the road. I would take the first train that was leaving Atlanta.

  I only made it a few blocks down Peachtree before I began worrying about Caroline, in the house, alone. I wasn’t worried that she might get hurt; I was worried that she might destroy something else. I turned around and started walking back. A car honked and I looked up to see Bootsey in her wood-paneled station wagon, waving like crazy as she sped past me. I smiled and waved, just as cheerful as I could be. I never let Bootsey see me upset. You had to be careful with that woman. She was a vicious gossip. She would believe the most ludicrous stories and then spread them all over Atlanta. Once she had Tiny practically ready to file for divorce from Anders even though we all know that Anders adores Tiny and never, ever would have slept with that niece of theirs who was staying with them over the summer.

  Probably it was a good thing Bootsey drove by because afterwards I was able to transfer some of my anger at Caroline onto her. By the time I got home I had calmed down. That is, until I looked into the living room and again saw all of my destroyed books, my child trying to stick the pages back into them.

  THE DAY CAROLINE started kindergarten was the happiest day of my life, second only, I am sure, to the day she will leave for college.

  Oh, I’ll miss her. I will. And there are things I miss already about Caroline and Charles’s baby years: Caroline’s dark curls, which grew tight as corkscrews until she was five and they loosened, the downy feel of Charles’s hair against my hand while I nursed him. (Though I would have preferred he stopped nursing sooner. At two he was still trying to unbutton my shirt at the grocery store, wanting a little midday snack.)

  I miss their sticky cheeks and their warm breath and the little cards they would color for me on days I felt so down I could not get out of bed, days I would tell them they could watch as much TV as they wanted, eat cookies until their stomachs hurt, just be quiet—please, keep it down.

  Probably I should have been on antidepressants. My mother was a new woman once the doctors discovered Prozac.

  I USED TO worry that I might have scarred Caroline. But she’s turned out better than I expected, so far. It all makes sense now; it fits together perfectly. Caroline was difficult because Caroline is an artist. Does she not have the lead role in every play at Coventry? Is it not impossible to turn away from her when she is on stage, her presence so burning, so alive? People could not stop talking about the intensity of her stage presence during Antigone.

  I should have been credited. Surely our difficult relationship helped her develop her onstage fire.

  She’s still incorrigible, only now she’s seventeen and gorgeous, which makes her powerful as well. Tiny says that Caroline looks like “sex on legs.” I would be more offended by her description if it weren’t so dead on. Sometimes I watch Caroline enter a room and I think, Where on earth did you come from? And are those the same clothes I bought for you at Lenox Square mall? She wears her jeans, which seemed strictly utilitarian in Macy’s fluorescent-lit dressing room, so low that her hip bone is exposed. And they are so much tighter than when we first bought them, as if she put them in the dryer for hours and hours. Her shirts, nice button-down ones that follow Coventry’s dress code, are always unbuttoned one too many at the neck, and she must have stuck them in the same dryer with her jeans, because they too are tight and form-fitting.

  And her hair. Lord, her hair. What started out as precious little corkscrew curls when she was a child has turned into a mass of long brown tangles and knots. I am forever buying her conditioners that would allow her to run a comb through her curls every now and then, but Caroline, surprise, surprise, does not allow a thing about her to be tamed. Her hair is so messy that she can stick a pencil into it and the pencil won’t fall out.

  Sometimes I think she must keep her eyeliner pencil stuck in there at all times so that she can constantly reapply it. The first time I saw Caroline with her eyes rimmed the way she likes I thought, Thank God she goes to Coventry. Surely such distracting makeup breaks the dress code. But she came home with it still on. And with a child like Caroline, you have to choose your battles, so even though I thought the thick smoky lines around her eyes made her look like a drug addict contemplating robbery to feed her habit, I kept my mouth shut. I figured, if Coventry is okay with it, I guess I have to be too.

  Her father notices none of this, of course. He lets her get away with murder. All the men in her life do. Coventry requires that teachers send a note if a student’s grade drops below a 75. Once her math teacher—a young man in his twenties—sent home a deficiency notice that ended with “Brava!”

  “Your daughter is a delight,” he wrote. “She has a real joie de vivre.”

  She has to be in homeroom every morning by 8:00 a.m. She has her license, and the brand-new Honda Accord we bought for her, but don’t think that means she gets to school on time. Every morning when her alarm clock sounds, she punches it off. I go to her room, knock, and cheerfully inform her it’s time to rise and shine. She doesn’t move a muscle. I send her father, who taps her on the shoulder before he begins to shake her awake. She doesn’t budge. Finally he will carry her, slung over his shoulder, to the bathroom and dump her in the shower. And half the time that doesn’t even work! We will find her, minutes later, slumped against the shower wall, having turned the water off and fallen back to sleep. It is almost as if she has a neurological disorder.

  Last semester she received so many detentions for being late that she was suspended and had to go in front of the Discipline Council. Now her drama teacher, another young man in his twenties, gives her a wake-up call every morning.

  Really, it’s ridiculous. I told John Henry that we needed either to send her to boarding school or to wash our hands of her. I mean John Henry and I worry so much about her bad grades and her pile-up of detentions that she doesn’t have to do an ounce of worrying herself. And she doesn’t. At least not
in any way I can tell.

  Yesterday she and I were driving to this little shop off Peachtree Road. She had seen a dress there she liked, and I was going to buy it for her. She had spent the night at a friend’s house, and when she arrived home that morning she smelled like stale beer. I didn’t say anything. I just did not want to get into it with her. See, I have been reading about Buddhism and have been trying to learn detachment.

  But it was hard not to say anything with her sitting in the front seat of my Lexus. The smell of alcohol was overpowering. I glanced over, noticing her matted curls and the smudge of last night’s liner under her eye. She was wearing an old pinstriped shirt of her daddy’s, unbuttoned one too many, as always. She didn’t just smell like beer. She smelled like sex. She smelled like some boy’s dried semen, probably caked on that flat stomach of hers.

  Lord knows what my daddy would have done if I came home smelling like a sperm depository. And then that girl had the gall to tell me that she was getting deficiency notices again in chemistry and French (but not algebra! she added, as if I should be proud of her for failing only two subjects).

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve got it under control.” She said all this without looking at me. Not unfriendly, just bored.

  I didn’t know what to say. I did not want to play the same role as always, to yell and plead and look up every tutor in town to try to get her in shape. I felt a flash of anger, but then I detached. I looked at my daughter, at the seventeen-year-old who would fit in better on a street corner than in my car, and I just did not care at all.

  “I feel sorry for you,” I said.