“I’d as soon kiss a pig,” Peyton said sullenly.
“What’s all this?” her father said, smiling at her with one dark eyebrow raised. “Anything I should know about?”
“Not for several years yet,” Nora said. “And not Jeremy Tucker, I don’t think. It is widely accepted that he is what is commonly known as a creep. Or maybe a jerk. I forget which is worse.”
On their way home Peyton was silent in the backseat. When they got out, Nora looked at her questioningly but said nothing.
“The old person will be like my grandmother,” Peyton said that afternoon. “The things she would love and remember wouldn’t be like anybody else’s.”
“Rule two of writing: The art is in the particulars. There never was a good generic character in all of literature.”
Peyton worked in her notebook every afternoon and did not once think about the Losers Club. At night, when she came out for supper, she felt as if she were breathing air and seeing lights for the first time in a long while. Suppers now were near-magical times. Chloe laughed and sang in the kitchen and made enough pies and cakes and cookies to stock a bakery. They sat long at the table, talking about their days, or rather Frazier and Nora talked and Peyton listened, and when they finally got up it was to move onto the screened porch and sit in the mothy dark, hearing the ghostly nighttime dissonance of the katydids, breathing the fragrance of the hardy early roses that grew wild in the bed that Peyton’s mother had tended. Nora and her father almost always lingered when Peyton got up to go to bed. Where once she would have spied on them, now Peyton wrote more in her notebook, or read over what she had written earlier. But once she went to the window that gave onto the porch and saw her father putting out his hand to Nora to pull her up out of the glider, and saw Nora hold his hand longer than necessary, and saw him reach out and touch her cheek. Peyton scrambled into bed with her heart beating hard, but there was a small smile on her mouth, too. Another time she went into the living room to ask Nora how to spell something and saw her sitting on the couch watching the soundless television. Her father was stretched out on the sofa with his head in Nora’s lap, fast asleep. Nora heard Peyton and looked up and put a finger to her lips.
“Don’t wake him. He’s had an awful day,” she whispered.
Peyton felt as though she were walking on tiptoe in those days, afraid she might crush something fragile. It felt like waiting for Christmas when you were a small child, she thought. You knew in your mind that it would come, but you were afraid in your heart that you would do something so clumsy and awful that there would be no Christmas at all that year.
“Please,” she would whisper over and over to herself, without having the slightest idea what she pled for. “Oh, please.”
Nora and Chloe undertook to teach her to cook, and were successful enough that she produced, amid choking laughter from all three of them, a glutinous pot of macaroni and cheese and a pear salad with mayonnaise on it. She put a maraschino cherry on top of the mayonnaise and laid the whole thing on a leaf of iceberg lettuce.
“Ah, the dreaded iceberg,” Nora said, licking mayonnaise off her fingers. “Next we’re going to learn about really good lettuce. Boston and romaine and red leaf. Iceberg is for the Rotary Club.”
“Where would you get those in Lytton?”
“Where, indeed? It’ll be worth a trip to Atlanta to get them. Once you taste them you’ll never go back to iceberg.”
Her father gamely had two helpings of the macaroni that night and pronounced it as good as her grandmother’s. Peyton knew he was lying, but she basked in the praise anyway. It made her feel strangely nurturing and wise, a woman capable of sustaining multitudes.
“You can take over some of the cooking now,” her father said. “Give Nora a break when Chloe has the night off.”
In her mind’s eye Peyton could see it unrolling like a movie: night after night of suppers at this table, salted with laughter, warmed with wonderful smells. Her father praising her chicken and her rolls and her pecan pie, Nora smiling at his appetite.
Peyton did not try to see the end of the film. She was content just to let it roll down through months and years of suppers.
She saw Boot one afternoon in the parking lot of the A&P. He was pushing a cart teetering full of groceries, gimping along behind a large woman headed purposefully for a dirty Pontiac. When Peyton came out of the store with the eggs she had been sent for, he was waiting for her at the curb.
“Hey, Peyton,” he said cheerfully.
“Hey, Boot,” she said, sweetness and familiarity flooding over her. She had, she realized, missed Boot enormously.
“Mamaw says you learnin’ to cook.” He grinned. “Whooee. I’d like to see that. I ain’t sure I’d like to taste it, though.”
“I’m doing better,” Peyton said. “I’ll send you some of my biscuits next time I make ’em, if I don’t ruin them. The last ones were like rocks.”
He laughed delightedly, and Peyton realized she had fallen unconsciously into the mode of the Losers Club. The thought made her uneasy.
“Have you seen Ernie?” she asked.
“Don’t you know nothin’?” Boot said, swollen with the importance of real news to impart. “Ernie gone. His mean ol’ mama broke her hip and he had to put her in a home up to Hapeville. He sold that little old house and moved in a ’partment to be near her. I think he workin’ at McDonald’s, like Doreen, only not the same one. He a manager; you know he real smart.”
Ernie in a little paper cap, taking orders from empty-headed teens and fat, blue-rinsed old women who would never in their lifetime know as much as one hundredth of what Ernie’s brain held. Ernie in a costume. Peyton felt tears start.
“Oh, Boot, when?”
“Week and a half ago. It was real sudden. He came by to see me before they left. I asked him if he couldn’t find him a graveyard up in Hapeville to take care of, and he say it don’t bring in enough money. That home cost an arm an’ a leg, he say. He working double shifts.”
Peyton would not look at him. She did not want him to see the tears pooling on her lower lashes.
“Did he say anything about me?” she whispered. Guilt choked her voice.
“Naw. He ain’t said nothin’ about you since the last time you was at the Losers Club. We shut it down right after that. I miss it, though. It was a lot of fun.”
“I miss it, too,” Peyton said, and she turned away. The tears were streaking down her cheeks now. If Boot saw them he would broadcast it that Peyton McKenzie was crying in the parking lot of the A&P.
“I’ll see you soon, Boot,” she called over her shoulder.
“Yeah,” he called back. “Tell Mamaw I say hey.”
Peyton did not write in her notebook that afternoon. She lay on her bed and cried and cried, and when the tears finally stopped and she washed her swollen face, she saw for a moment the watery reflection of the pale, pig-tailed girl in the too-large blue jeans who used to cut through the undergrowth every afternoon to reach the sanctuary of the Losers Club, and she began to cry again.
“Wow,” Nora said, shuffling pages. “I don’t know whether we need an editor or a surgeon.”
They were sitting cross-legged on Nora’s bed on a Sunday afternoon, surrounded by drifts of tablet paper. It was thickly hot, and airless with a coming storm, but they could not turn on the air conditioner because the pages would scatter like leaves in a tornado. Trailways had been banned because he insisted on rolling joyfully on the piles of paper, and he now howled dismally from the other side of the closed door. Peyton was dripping sweat in one of her old sleeveless blouses—too tight across the chest now—and a pair of the cutoffs Nora had showed her how to make. Nora wore underpants and an enormous, frayed blue oxford-cloth shirt. She was smoking and turning pages intently.
“Is that Daddy’s shirt?” Peyton asked, more to forestall the announcement that the pages were no good than to solicit information.
“God, no,” Nora said, not looking up. “This shirt be
longed to the priest…you know, the one I told you about, whom I went to Cuba with.”
“A priest’s shirt,” Peyton said. “Maybe it will make you saintly.”
“Not likely. Not this priest, though he did give me the shirt off his back,” Nora said, and she finished stacking paper into piles and thumped the last one smartly.
“Now,” she said. “We’re going to have to cut so much that it will make you weep, but you can save the rest for a book of essays. The thing to do first is decide what you want this speech to say.”
“Say?”
“What do you want people to remember about it?”
“Well…I guess just…how good it was to live in Lytton years ago, and how everybody sees it differently, but it’s still Lytton.”
“Good. You have your theme. Everything has to have a theme, a central spine. Now how would you go about telling that?”
“Through the people who are talking from the cemetery,” Peyton said.
“Yeah, but which ones? And what’s most important about what they remember? You’ve got ten minutes, you know.”
“I can’t choose,” Peyton said. “I like all of it. How do I know which ones are best?”
“There’s no best. There’s just what works best to accomplish your intention, to show people about that early Lytton. It’s all good, Peyton. I’m not kidding you.”
“You choose,” Peyton said, Wanting to cry. No one had ever said that writing meant amputating your work.
“I’ll help,” Nora said. “I’ve been an editor, and I’m good at it. A lot of times an outside person can see things better than the one who wrote it. But you’re going to have to help me. Let’s start with the beginning. Since you’re the Stage Manager, what do you want to say?”
“I want to say what the Stage Manager in Our Town says.”
“Well, you can’t use his exact words, or you’d get sued, but you could say that the play inspired you to think about Lytton and how it must have been long ago, and that you wanted to show people that, because that Lytton won’t come again. And you might tell them a little about the form of the play, and that the people who’ll be speaking are in the cemetery, but in one way are as alive and present as they ever were.”
“I want to say exactly that,” Peyton said.
“OK. But it’s the only part of it I’m going to write for you. Now let’s get into the body of it. I think you could handle maybe three soliloquies. The old woman and the girl are perfect. Whom do you want for your third? The young mother?”
“No,” Peyton said, knowing suddenly how it should be, seeing the shape of it. “The horses. Their field is on the edge of town, and it would be a way to show Lytton as you came into it back then, and to talk about how it was when people were mainly farmers. And then the young girl, who lived in the middle of town. And then the old woman, because she lived on the other edge of it. It sort of takes you through the town, see?”
“I do indeed.” Nora smiled. “You ready to start pruning?”
They worked all that afternoon and into the night. Frazier was at a board of stewards’ meeting at the church, and Chloe had left cold chicken. They ate it on the bed, licking greasy fingers, tossing shreds to the liberated Trailways. His howls had finally worn them down. When at last they stopped, Peyton was amazed to see that it was nearly midnight, and her head was pounding. They had culled out the three segments, though. It remained only to put them together.
The next afternoon Nora wrote out the brief introduction, and Peyton read it aloud for the first time:
“More than twenty years ago Thornton Wilder wrote a play called Our Town. I went to see it this year in Atlanta, and it made me cry and laugh and wonder. It takes place mainly in the cemetery of the little town, where the dead talk to the Stage Manager, but to me they are as vivid and real as if they were alive. In a sense, they are, through their memories, and I’d like to show you what I think Lytton might have been like through the eyes of some of us who aren’t here anymore, and yet are totally here.”
Peyton looked up at Nora, her eyes brimming.
“It’s just right,” she said. “I could never have thought of it. I sound stupid, don’t I? My voice is just…silly. And the stuff I wrote just sounds so young.”
“I’m a good voice coach,” Nora said. “And you are young. You should always sound like who you are.”
She was a good coach. Before long Peyton was not mumbling anymore, and she was beginning to find the cadence and the sense in the words. In the beginning sequence, when the good, big horses were speaking of their masters and their work, her voice broke, and she had to stop. In the young girl’s segment she found the essential, lovely foolishness of the young and laughed aloud with it.
“’Scuse me,” she said to Nora. “I won’t do that when I’m onstage.”
“I wish you would,” Nora said. “It’s charming. You’ll have people crying and laughing with you.”
“Oh, Nora, what if I mess it up? What if I stammer or mispronounce something? It’s just so different from anything I’ve ever heard of at graduation.”
“Precisely. If you screw up, grin and go on. But you won’t. I’ll be right there in the wings. All you have to do is look at me. I’ll be your lucky charm.”
Over the next few days the speech took shape and Peyton grew if not easy, then at least familiar with it. She stopped dropping her eyes and looked out as if at an audience. She paused to allow phrases to have their effect. She let her voice swell when the prose did, and fade when it faded. Nora listened and smoked and applauded.
“Fabulous,” she said. “Just right. Nobody I know could do it better. You’ll be a sensation.”
And Peyton, flushed with success, began, hesitantly, to believe her.
Two weeks into their practice sessions, Nora came home and dumped her books loudly on the secretary and stood rubbing her forehead as if it ached.
“What’s the matter?” Peyton said in alarm, coming in from the kitchen. What if Nora was getting ill, and could not be with her onstage?
“Oh, nothing. Just a fuck-up at school. I threw a kid out of class and I didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t have any choice.”
“Was it one of the Negro kids?” Peyton said.
“No. It was one of the cheerleaders,” Nora said, and she began to laugh.
“You didn’t! How wonderful!” Peyton said. “Which one? What did she do?”
“Mary Jim Turnipseed. She’s been asking for it for weeks. This time she called one of the black kids a dimwit, and the child cried in front of the whole class and ran out. Mary Jim started to laugh. I’m afraid I yelled at her.”
“Mary Jim! Lord, Nora, she’s the cheerleader captain, and homecoming queen, and editor of the paper. Her father’s a judge.”
“And she’s a spoiled brat,” Nora said. “I don’t care if her father is the lord high executioner. I will not have that kind of thing in my classroom.”
“She’ll tell her father.”
“No doubt.”
“Are you scared?”
“No.”
Mary Jim not only told her father about the incident, but also informed her parents that Nora had been teaching them pornography for the last few months, and took home her heavily underlined copy of The Tropic of Cancer by way of proof. When her outraged parents asked why she hadn’t told them earlier, she said that Miss Findlay had said she’d flunk anybody who told his or her folks. Margaret Turnipseed was on the phone before the words died on Mary Jim’s trembling little lips.
They had finished supper and were sitting on the porch talking of the coming summer when the people came. Later, Peyton thought they must have walked; she had heard no cars. Frazier heard them first, and looked up. They stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. There must have been ten or twelve of them, people he had known all his life, neighbors, clients. He did not speak. It was easy to see that they had not come in friendship.
“All that’s missing is the lighted torches,” Nora muttered,
standing and moving up beside Frazier. Peyton instinctively stayed where she was, sitting still and silent.
Horace Turnipseed stepped out of the small knot of people and said, “Frazier, we don’t like doing this, but we can’t let it go on. Your…cousin, or whatever she is, expelled my daughter from her class today and said some pretty hard things to her. That might not be such a bad thing if Mary Jim deserved it, but she’s always been a good girl, a quiet girl. I can’t imagine what she could have done to warrant that kind of behavior. But the main thing we can’t let pass is what Miss Findlay is teaching our children. It’s pornography pure and simple. I never read anything so dirty. The idea that my child—anybody’s child—is reading this stuff is absolutely unacceptable. I’m afraid that we’re going to have to ask that you see that Miss Findlay is relieved of her position immediately.”
Frazier was silent, looking at them.
“What book are you referring to, Horace?” he asked. His voice was even and mild.
“This.” Horace Turnipseed held up the book. “This Tropic of Cancer thing. It wasn’t even allowed into this country until a year or two ago. There’s filth on every page. Every single one.”
“It must have been a real trial for you to have to finish it, Horace,” her father said. “Every page, think of it. And it’s a pretty big book, too.”
Horace Turnipseed’s face reddened. You could see it darken even in the urine-pale light from the street lamp.
“Have you ever heard of this book, Frazier?” he said.
“I’ve read that book,” her father answered. “I didn’t find it in the least offensive. Pretty basic and earthy, but not offensive.”
Peyton goggled. She knew her father had not read the book. She doubted he had even heard of it. Moreover, she had never known him to lie. Beside her father, Nora stirred and opened her mouth to speak. He put his hand lightly on her arm, silencing her.
“I will not ask her to resign, Horace,” he said.
There was a shuffling, murmuring silence, and then Aunt Augusta stepped forward into the lamplight.
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