A Southern Exposure (20 page)

“I want you to tell me more about Russ,” Clyde continues. “You almost never talk to me about Russ, do you know that?” He says some more, but SallyJane has stopped listening to the words, and hears only the sound, which she recognizes as the sound of pain. This drunken man, her doctor, is in the most terrible pain. Is he going to cry? SallyJane believes that he is. She has never seen a man cry, and she knows that she could not bear it.

But at that moment both SallyJane and Clyde Drake hear the back door open, and close, and then Russ’s heavy footsteps through the house. With a terrible, anguished
parting look at SallyJane, Clyde Drake gets up to his feet, and more quickly than SallyJane would have believed he could manage, he is out of the room, and headed upstairs to his room.

Later, all those moments are very hard for SallyJane to remember; it is as though she, and not Clyde Drake, had been drunk. Which was surely not the case; she does not drink at all, these days. But all the words between them blur, so that she cannot remember which of them said what. Was she telling Clyde how much she loved Russ? That is a large and apparently permanent fact of her life. Or was it Clyde who was saying that he loved Russ? That seems so unlikely; she must be crazy even to have thought of such a thing.

Was it Clyde, so heartbroken-sad that he almost wept—or was it herself, often-weeping SallyJane?

The next morning Clyde is sad and quiet, but that is how he always is, except when he drinks. He has his regular three Cokes, and he even says to SallyJane, “You’re sure looking pretty these days, little Sal. I never did care for a skinny woman. Lord knows why I married one.”

SallyJane feels she is not looking pretty at all; she has suddenly got so fat. She wonders if it could have something to do with the pills Clyde gave her, not even on the market yet but very effective, he says. How could pills make you fat? And Clyde would have warned her about that, wouldn’t he?

She thinks she remembers that Clyde said she should talk more about Russ, but there is so much about Russ she could never, never tell anyone. How she married him, really, because otherwise he would not make love to her: he had to “marry pure.” (Russ had grown up a Baptist and that was how Baptists talked, she guessed.) Anyway, he
wouldn’t do it to her, really, no matter what they were actually doing. Squirming around on the sofa in the game room of her parents’ house in Hilton (the president’s house). All that touching and kissing, breathing words of love.

But that cannot be the sort of thing that Clyde would like to hear about.

As Cynthia, at night, looks out her bedroom windows to the garden below, for most of that April before the war she sees only white flowers. Dim white shapes, white clouds of petals, their mingled fragrances drifting on a light evening breeze. White-blossoming trees, beds of white, everything pale and white. She wonders if Esther planned it, either romantically or sadly, for these hours. For whiteness.

Certainly Cynthia’s own thoughts, as she gazes there, are both romantic and sad. She misses Harry, and she feels that their lives are separating. He seems increasingly involved in Washington, in the Navy. Doing things, seeing people about whom he is jovially mysterious, smilingly discreet. How men love wars, thinks Cynthia. No wonder we have so many, with them in charge.

She senses that Harry has never been happier in his life, and she wonders if they will ever again converge into a marriage, a family. They should have had more children, she thinks—though at the time, after Abby, their lives were so uncertain economically—Harry with his unsatisfactory job, and she with her stupid shopping debts. But if along with Abby they had had another one or maybe two little children—a boy and a girl, perhaps—at this point Cynthia imagines that she would be both busier and less lonely.

However, just look at poor SallyJane, down the road. Five children and a husband who works at home, and she is very busy. And crazy. Poor SallyJane is clearly crazy, and fatter every day. Cynthia often thinks she should go to see her, but what do you say to someone who is having a “nervous breakdown”?

Cynthia is lonely. Although she hates the word, she has to face it: she is, and even just thinking the word “lonely” makes it worse, and brings her close to tears. A lonely aging woman on an April night, staring out to flowers, inhaling them. Her eyes blurred, her throat tight. Alone.

She wonders a lot about Russ, about the inconclusiveness of their connection. When she remembers her early decision and plans to come down to Pinehill, and thinks of the drive itself, the deep shades of this land, her first sightings of this countryside—she remembers feeling then an infusion of Russ. Lines of his poetry were always in her head, back then. All her fantasies in his direction were basically romantic; they were, she supposes—well, sexy. Something that certainly has not happened between them. But she also feels that there is some more even essential connection missing. Which could be an important conversation that they have never had. It is as though she had come all the way down here for something that never happened. Was that stupid and embarrassing pig conversation to be forever the high point, the most intense moment together?
And, come to think of it, that took place in the very garden to which she now looks out with such loneliness.

Cynthia has even worked it out that at the very moment when she and Harry were driving south, her heart and mind so full of James Russell Lowell Byrd, Russ was driving through Kansas. With SallyJane and all those children. Running into the pig. When, in a sense, he should have been running into her. Metaphorically speaking.

Cynthia has never precisely articulated what she “believes,” not to herself and certainly to no one else. But she does believe in order, even a universal order. Order is more or less like gravity, she vaguely believes. If there is no order, no reason for the being of everything, then the earth might fly apart, with no center. Gravity gone.

These are not thoughts that ordinarily or consciously occupy her for long, though. She is far more likely to be thinking, in the scented white April night: Why aren’t Russ and I at least, or maybe at most, great friends?

The curious fact that she moved to the Hightower house must have had something to do with Russ, she reasons; fate cannot have brought them so close together for no reason. No “order.”

Cynthia also sometimes thinks that she misses Dolly. Or she misses seeing her in the old easy intimate way that they had just established when it all went wrong. They do see each other still, but almost always in groups, with Irene Lee, for instance, and other local ladies. But Cynthia catches something in Dolly’s eyes, when focused on her, a black gleam of the purest disapproval, as though Cynthia had broken or tried to break certain basic rules. Which, she supposes, she did.

Dolly is funny and smart and very observant, all the Southern nonsense notwithstanding, the layers of bias and
worse. She is a truly great gossip; it is this that Cynthia misses, the gossip and what she felt as Dolly’s affection for her; Dolly had “taken to” her from the start, as no one else in town entirely had, which made Dolly’s current disapproval the harder to withstand.

But one morning “out of the blue,” Dolly telephones. Her voice is high, almost breaking with distress. She says that she would really like to see Cynthia.

“
Sure.
Of course. Do you want to meet downtown for a Coke?”

No. Dolly would rather come to Cynthia’s house, if that’s all right with Cynthia. What she has to say is private. Very private.

Okay. Certainly. Dolly can come right over.

Too much powder does little to hide the fact that Dolly has surely, very recently been crying. Crying a lot, Cynthia would judge, but she admires the visible effort that Dolly has made to pull herself together: the pretty pale pink spring blouse, the careful curls and lipstick.

Dolly even manages a smile as she makes her announcement. Or, rather, her first announcement. “You are not going to believe this,” she starts out. “But maybe you will—probably up North folks’ help quits them all the time. But down here they don’t. We don’t fire and they don’t quit. It’s like a contract you don’t even have to sign, everyone just
knows
. But Odessa has done it. She up and quit on me. Says her husband’s coming back. Horace. Some husband, that man hasn’t been around these parts for it must be nigh onto two years, and he’s getting a job over to the defense plant. Odessa’s got it in her mind to do some work at the laundry—they’re real short of help right now, ’cause of defense. And she and her sister going to put in more time at their dyeing and weaving. Said somebody’s been talking to her about the textile mill, over to Boynton. One of them Communist students, I’ll be bound.”

Cynthia has two reactions to this saga. Even as she is murmuring words of sympathy—of condolence, even—she is thinking: (1) that this is not what Dolly has been crying about; she is not all that emotionally attached to Odessa. And (2) she is thinking, Hurray for Odessa for quitting her job! Three cheers!

Dolly just sits there, staring straight ahead, out into the soft April day, into Esther’s garden, until quite abruptly she says, “And Willard won’t even speak to me.”

Unable to connect this fact with the surely unrelated fact of Odessa’s defection, Cynthia looks a question.

At which Dolly looks away, and can be seen to blush under all that powder. After a pause she looks back, and then she says, still not quite facing Cynthia, “The dumbest thing. We were over to the Lees’ last night for dinner, and sometime late in the evening—we’d had our wits about us we’d have been home already, in our bed. But we all seemed along about then to need another drink, and guess what, out of ice, so Clifton said he’d take a run over to the storage plant, and didn’t I want to come ’long, keep him company. Well, it all took a little longer than anyone thought it would, including me and Clifton, and when we got back, there was this little bitty smear of lipstick on Clifton’s collar. Irene, of course, by that time was much too pickled to notice, but old bright eyes, to whom I’m supposed to be married, he noticed right off, and talk about raising Cain!—though at least he waited till we were out of the house, and on our way home. Which was pretty quick, I can tell you that. But then, accusing, accusing, things he said he’d always noticed—” She broke off, sniffling into her handkerchief.

Was it true, though? Cynthia wants to ask, but does not.
Is
there something going on between you and Clifton Lee? That was not a first kiss that got the lipstick on his collar?
What
has Willard always noticed?

Cynthia has not noticed anything at all between Dolly and Clifton. They are always flirtatious with each other, always full of little compliments, all of which Cynthia has assumed were only half meant. That is how both of them are with almost everyone. They are Southern. By Cynthia’s social logic, if anything had been seriously happening between them, the clue would have been an absence of just such flirting as she has observed. But undoubtedly the rules down here are different.

Clever, observant Harry once remarked, “Odd, you and Jack don’t dance together much anymore. You must be madly in love.” Which was not so far from the truth, and partly for that reason, Harry’s observation, Cynthia decided that whatever had been going on had to stop; it was dangerous, and not quite all that much fun.

But do Clifton and Dolly actually do it somewhere? she wonders. She finds that she more or less hopes not. Clifton is so red and fleshy; he looks as though he should be a football coach, though in actual fact he teaches business administration.

Because she cares much more for Odessa than she does for Clifton Lee, Cynthia chooses next to ask, “About Odessa, do you think you can get her back someway?”

“Oh, I just don’t know. Sounds to me like she’s looking to find her own path.” And then, with a perky, upward twist of her chin, Dolly says, “As a matter of fact, which Willard will never in this world believe, I was asking Clifton about the store we had thought about, you know, with the things that Odessa made and all …” She trails off, clearly not wanting to return to that source of trouble with Cynthia, and smiling to indicate that now it’s all over, they can begin again.

And then she gets back to the store. “Clifton said nothing easier. We just rent some little old storefront on Main Street—there’s several of them going for peanuts these
days, he said—and we get this permit from City Hall, and then we go out and collect these pillows and napkins, all handmade country things, and we fix some sort of a contract with these ladies, and we sell the things. But of course if Willard found out I was in any way involved with Clifton, even in a business way, that’d be just the end of everything—”

She gives Cynthia a ravaged, pleading look, from which Cynthia understands a great deal. What Dolly wants from her is a sort of unquestioning partnership in this project, this little store. Cynthia, of course, will be the one to talk to Clifton, and probably to Odessa too, at first. Thus Dolly’s bridges will be mended for her, without any overt, unpleasant effort on her part. Cynthia has to admire, in a way, the simple, almost childlike directness of Dolly’s operation.

Cynthia understands too that the whole other, much more painful and difficult issue, the whole problem of Negro and white women both contributing to the store, is to be glazed over; it will simply not be mentioned. No more discussion. Just smiles. The Southern way.

Surprisingly, though (Cynthia herself is surprised), her instinct is to go along with all this. Not especially liking Clifton, she still does not mind going to him for business advice. She can also ask Harry, and maybe Jimmy High-tower. She knows Harry to be very smart and practical; she believes that Jimmy is too.

She also likes the idea, the possibility of mending her own bridges with Odessa. As she imagines it, she can just go over to the cleaning establishment where Odessa works now (God knows not back out to Odessa’s house). And she can talk in a sensible way about the store. Explain about contracts, maybe. The idea of consignments.