“I’ll flip you,” he said, and he came into the room.
He moved to the bed and stood looking down at Peyton. She could not look back. She felt stricken to stone, her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. Her heart hammered. What if Nora had been wrong? What if the faint, cool distaste she had been sure he felt for so long was still there, and he now felt that he had to disguise it with little pats and hugs and chats about her mother? Not talking about anything of import had served them well for a very long time. Suddenly Peyton wanted desperately to keep it that way.
Frazier sat down on the edge of her bed as Nora had done, and looked at her. He lifted her chin with his hand so she would have to look at him. He was smiling faintly; his gray eyes were crinkled with it.
“I let you think a terrible thing, and I didn’t even know it,” he said. “We’ll have to talk about that. But right now I just want you to know that you are my dearly loved daughter, and my best thing, and that I am very, very proud of you, and that I promise not to put my hands over my eyes again if you promise not to put yours over your mouth. OK?”
Peyton nodded. She thought hopelessly that if she cried again her throat and nose would finally burst with it.
He leaned forward and hugged her hard and then got up and stood beside Nora. The scent of his pipe and shaving soap lingered.
“Your mother would have loved you totally,” he said. “It would have been impossible for her not to. I’m telling you the truth about that. Can you be dressed and ready for clams in an hour or so?”
“Yes,” Peyton whispered. “I can.”
The crystal shell burst, and the world came flooding back in, rude and loud and charged with joy.
Peyton went through the next week with the careful deliberation of the newly sighted, carefully placing one foot after another on the earth, not quite trusting it to bear her up, not quite believing that the old blindness would not strike her again. It was not the profound dissociation of the past Sunday, but it was strange enough to keep her preternaturally aware of everything around her, of her own body. When did the cheerleaders stop looking celestial and start looking as though they needed to wash their faces? When did the bank of wild honeysuckle drowning the fence by the schoolyard begin to smell like the breath of heaven? Why had she never noticed how the golden dust motes danced in the slanting afternoon light in her last class? Why had she not noticed that people nodded to her, and many spoke, and some even smiled when they passed her in the hallways?
Why did the very weight of her body feel different, as if its center had shifted to her hips? At Nora’s suggestion she had reluctantly pulled out the loathsome training bras, which she had hidden in a shoebox in the top of her closet. When she looked down she could see her chest, like a shelf. When had that happened? Jeremy Tucker from the tenth grade had run up and kissed her on the cheek at recess, obviously on a dare from the other applauding sophomores. What was she supposed to do about that? Her cheek burned all afternoon.
But it was not a particularly fearful, threatening time, only a confusing one. If Peyton did not know what to do about herself and this new world, she had a dim but certain sense that she would soon. For the moment that was enough.
When Nora came in from her last tutorial that Friday afternoon she found Peyton and Trailways curled up on her bed, air conditioner thundering, record player braying out Brahms. Peyton was in a tight ball with her eyes closed.
Nora sighed.
“Who stole your bubble gum, toots?” she said, coming across the room to sit beside Peyton. The smoke from her Salem curled around Peyton’s head like incense. Peyton opened her eyes.
“I have to make a speech,” she said through stiff lips. “I have to write it. I have to get up onstage and say it at graduation. It’s supposed to be some kind of honor, but I told Mrs. Manning I couldn’t do it. So she made it an assignment. I’ll get a ‘barely passing’ in English if I don’t. But I’m not doing it. I don’t care about the grade.”
“You could do it wonderfully,” Nora said. “You’d be better than anybody I can think of. We could practice it until you weren’t frightened anymore. It would be a really grown-up thing to do.”
“I’d die. I’d forget what I was supposed to say. I’d throw up onstage. Everybody would laugh at me. They already think I’m drippy. You know I look like a stork.”
Nora leaned back and blew smoke and studied her.
“No,” she said finally. “I don’t know you look like a stork. Haven’t you looked at yourself lately? Really looked? You have a waist and hips and breasts. They may be small, but they’re there. Your legs are starting to fit the rest of you. Your hair is great. You’re a pretty girl; you have your grandmother’s cheekbones. You have your father’s wonderful profile, and his eyes. Lord, Peyton. Lots of girls would kill to look like you.”
“Can you see me leading cheers?” Peyton said bitterly. She looked down at her bare legs, though. They were faintly tanned from the late-spring sun, and there did not seem to be quite so many knobs on them. The old scar on her knee from a long-ago bicycle collision was gone.
“No, and you should be glad. Is that really what you want to look like? Is that really what you want to do? Come on, Peyton. Let’s do this thing. We can work on your speech together. We can practice it. I’ll stand in the wings grinning and juggling plates on speech night. We’ll get you a knockout new dress. Something you and I pick out this time.”
“Oh, God,” Peyton whispered, and she turned and buried her face in the pillow. Trailways swatted her desultorily and curled back into sleep.
Nora waited, silent.
Peyton turned back over and looked at her.
“I can’t write,” she said. “What would I write about?”
“You’ve been writing,” Nora said. “You’ve written every night in your diary. If that’s not writing, I don’t know what it is.”
“I can’t get up there and read my diary!”
“I’ll bet you could, come to that. But I wouldn’t ask that of you. Look, I have an idea. You know how much you liked Our Town. What if you did an Our Town about Lytton? You could be the Stage Manager and read all the other parts. It could be short, and it would be about things you know in your own mind and heart. That’s what a writer works with.”
“You mean write about dead people? I don’t know any except my mother and Nana. Nobody wants to hear about dead people at a graduation. They want to hear all that stuff about the future and going forth from Lytton Grammar ready to lick your weight in wildcats.”
“Wildcat shit is more like it.” Nora grinned. “So why not give them something different from anything they’ve ever heard? Dead people don’t have to be tragic. You’d make them up to fit what you wanted to say. A young girl like you talking about how sweet it was to be young in Lytton, Georgia, and about making the most of your precious time. An honored old man telling about the past here, and all the things he witnessed while he was alive, and what he learned over a long lifetime. A person who thought Lytton was small potatoes and left, and wandered the wide world over, and then came home at the end because there was no place better. A mother who grew up here and is overjoyed because she watches her children grow up as happy as she was. You’d talk about the things they remembered—that you remember: the long summer twilights, roller-skating in the fall, the town Christmas decorations, old people rocking on white porches in green chairs, teenagers on their way to dances at the teen center, dogs trotting home to supper. You know; all that.…”
“Oh, Nora.”
“Your father would simply burst with pride,” Nora said.
After a long silence, Peyton said, “Would you absolutely and positively be there in the wings? Would you help me all the way, and tell me when it gets silly, and fix the things that are wrong with it?”
“I’ll most certainly be there,” Nora said. “But I’m not going to tell you it’s silly unless it begins to sound like the Marx Brothers. And you’re going to have to fix the wrong things y
ourself. I’m not writing it for you. But I’ll read it all along the way, and I’ll rehearse you. You might just surprise yourself by having a good time.”
The next morning Peyton went to the library and checked out Our Town. She had known when Nora mentioned her father that she was going to do it. She was trembling, though, when she brought the book home, and it took her days to work up enough courage to open it.
Finally she did, and she had not read more than two pages before she picked up her pencil and school notebook and began to write. She wrote so fast that the pencil slashed through the flimsy paper in some spots, and the words tumbled over themselves and piled up on the page. She wrote for a long time, and when she looked up it had grown dark and she could hear the voices of Nora and her father out on the front porch, where they sometimes sat after dinner in the soft, fragrant night. She shook her head as if she were coming up from the ocean’s floor. She could smell the cool bite of Nora’s cigarette, and a sweeter, thicker scent that meant her father was smoking his pipe. The old porch glider creaked. All at once Peyton was powerfully, giddily happy, and very hungry.
She went out onto the porch. She could not stop smiling.
“Hey,” she said to them.
“Hey, yourself,” her father said. “Did you just wake up? We saved you some supper.”
“I wasn’t asleep,” Peyton said.
Nora looked at her keenly and then reached over and picked up her hand and squeezed it. “We’re off,” she said, grinning.
“Off where?” Frazier said.
“Off to see the Wizard,” Nora said, and she laughed joyously. “Off our rockers. Off down Moon River. You just wait and see where we land.”
“I gather I’m not supposed to ask.”
“No. But you’ll hear about it soon. Literally. Chicken salad in there, Peyton.”
And Peyton went off to eat her late supper and find a way to think about herself that was not, perhaps, so drippy after all.
It was as if she had two sets of eyes in those first days of working on the speech. The first set was the one she had had since birth—more educated now, perhaps, more focused on the rapidly expanding world. But still her own vision.
The other set was somewhere inside her, and it filtered everything through the scrim of her writing. She was usually unaware of this second set, but occasionally it would surface and blast her awake with the urgency of its vision. She would see a canopy of old roses on a crumbling well-house, so vivid in the sun that they seemed to burn there, and she would think, That has to be in the speech. It could be where the young girl is talking. Or no, I think it would be more what an old man would remember. The farm, and the well-house, and the roses.
She would hear the two teenaged Crowell sisters from three houses down walking in the spring dark toward town, and their laughter would sound like running water. Something would tug at her heart, and she would think, This is what the young girl would remember.
Coming back from Atlanta in the Thunder-bird in the late afternoon she would see the Lytton water tank before she saw anything else of the town, and the setting sun would strike the metal into a million facets of glittering color, and she would think, This is what the person who went away and came back would see first.
She spoke of it to Nora, shyly.
“It’s like everything I hear and see and do wants to go into the speech,” she said. “I saw two horses in Mr. Milam’s field the other day and I actually thought I might write about what the dead horses would remember. What they saw in their lifetimes. What they thought about the people in the town.”
“That’s what makes a writer,” Nora said. “That you see the story in everything. That you go through your life with all your senses open, that you think ‘what if’ a thousand times a day. I knew you’d be good with words, but I didn’t know about the seeing. It’s not given to many people.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means you could be a real writer if you wanted it badly enough. Not many people who have just the words can. You can learn the craft, but the vision is a gift. Either you have it or you don’t. It’s your choice what you do with it, Peyton, but you can’t ever again think of yourself as a loser, as you say. Or even ordinary.”
Peyton’s head swam. Pride and fear in equal measure flooded her. To be a real writer…but then you’d stand naked before all the eyes that read you.
“Do you have it?”
“Not really. If I did I wouldn’t be teaching other people about it. I envy you, I really do. To know this early what it is you’re meant for—”
“But maybe I’m not! I don’t have to be! There’s nothing that says I have to be just because I’ve got this thing you’re talking about. I can be just…a person if I want to.”
“Absolutely. But I can tell you that if you don’t use those other eyes they’ll pull at you all your life. They won’t give you a minute’s peace. Have you read Frost yet? If you haven’t, we’ll read ‘The Road Not Taken.’ Frost knew. By the way, the thing about the horses is wonderful.”
And so Peyton went back to her notebook and wrote furiously through the warming afternoons of May. Five weeks. She had only five weeks before graduation.
It was as if Nora’s words had opened the second pair of eyes, and everything Peyton saw flamed with life and import. There had never been a more beautiful spring, she thought. The mimosas and early roses almost burned her eyes and took her breath. It was as if she saw for the first time the fountains of white spirea in Mrs. Cuddy’s yard next door, or tasted for the first time the nectar in the honeysuckle that grew wild in a vacant lot on the way to school. The sound of the tiny frogs in the lily pond at night, and thwacking of tennis balls on the old dirt courts at the recreation center, almost made her weep. The last of Trailways’s baby fur, on his speckled belly, did.
“Where did you go, you silly kitten?” she sobbed into his stomach. “I wasn’t ready for you to grow up yet.”
She might have been speaking of herself. Everything that spring was underlaid with the poignancy of impermanence. For the first time she felt keenly the passage of time. For the first time she thought, many times a day, The last time. This could be the last time I see this as I am now. This could be the last time the Peyton I know hears this. The next time maybe I won’t be the same person.
She drank in the days like a person dying of thirst. It all went into the notebook, which by now bulged with scribbled pages.
“When are you going to show some of that to me?” Nora would say.
“Soon. Real soon.”
“Well, don’t wait too long. I know you’ve got a book’s worth in that notebook, and we’ve got to pull a ten-minute speech out of it, and then you’ve got to practice it.”
On a warm, cloudy Saturday they went with Frazier down to the farm where her grandmother had lived all the days that Peyton knew her. She had not been back since Agnes McKenzie died. She had hardly thought of the house, or even of her grandmother. It was simply too painful to remember the mute, clawing, furious thing she had become at the end.
The house put its arms around her and drew her in. She followed as her father walked Nora through the dim, musty rooms, and in each one she felt, so vividly that she almost saw it, the presence of her grandmother. She and Agnes McKenzie had sat in this parlor on winter Sundays after lunch, Agnes talking of the old days in Scotland and the more recent past, when her father and uncle were children, warming themselves before this fireplace. She wondered if they had seen the firelight making of her grandmother’s face something mythic, archaic, like the face of a goddess in the days before there were words to write about such things. She had watched her grandmother shelling peas and stringing beans on this screened porch in the cool of late-summer afternoons, the tink of the vegetables in the old tin bucket providing the only sound for long, companionable minutes. And the kitchen…how many times had she sat in this kitchen while her grandmother measured and stirred and listened to her with her whole being and smiled at her
, and told her more stories? She realized now that her grandmother had been a storyteller in an old and tribal way. The old person in her speech had to be Agnes McKenzie, Peyton realized, picking up one of her grandmother’s aprons and holding it to her face, smelling vanilla and the wild, musky scent of the herbs she grew. It was here that she told me I would have power, she thought. The day I showed her my haircut. I wonder if she could have meant the writing? How could she know about that? But she knew about almost everything. Peyton felt a great salt lump in her throat.
“I feel like she’s here,” she said, and her father smiled.
“Me, too. Like she was before the stroke. We’re lucky we have this house. We’ll have her as long as we have it.”
“Would you ever sell it?” Nora said, fingering the old spice rack that hung on the wall. In it, among the basil and thyme and block-hard oregano, were unlabeled glass pickle jars full of powders and liquids: her grandmother’s tools.
“I don’t think so,” Frazier said. “We might rent, I suppose. Although the day may come when we have to sell. Charlie says he doesn’t want to, but I expect the land is worth a good bit of money now. His half could keep them for a long time.”
“Augusta will be all over him to do it,” Nora said. “Maybe they could come and live here. Sell that overblown monstrosity. Of course, the only way you could get Augusta onto a farm would be to bridle her and tie her to a stake in the yard. Not a bad idea. Well, then, maybe Peyton will want it one day. Or her children. It’s a wonderful house. I’d love to live here myself.”
“Would you?” Frazier said, smiling down at her. “You and your pink Thunderbird all alone down on the farm. What on earth would you do in this isolated old place by yourself?”
“I didn’t say I would be by myself,” Nora said, and she looked up at him obliquely.
“I’ll never have children,” Peyton said. “I’m never going to get married. I’ve never met anybody I would want to marry. And who would want to marry me?”
“Well, I heard via the grammar school grapevine that Jeremy Tucker kissed you the other day.” Nora grinned. “That’s a start.”
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