The Last Girls (24 page)

“No, I'm fine now, really I am.” Baby managed a fake smile, pressing a wad of toilet paper against the cut. “See? It's quit anyway.” She moved the paper and together they watched the drops of blood come up like little red beads on a string. “Well,
almost
quit,” she said.

“I think you need stitches.”

“No, please, Harriet, then I'll just get in a lot of trouble like before, please don't, please don't make me go, and please don't tell. Just get a Band-Aid, I know we've got some around here someplace.”

Harriet knew where they were. “If you promise,” she said, “really promise, that you will never, ever, do anything like this again. I
mean
it, Baby.”

“Cross my heart.” Baby said solemnly.

“Okay then.” Harriet rummaged in her desk drawer and found the Band-Aids and put two across the cut. “There now,” she said. “Get dressed. Here, put this shirt on. But call Jeff before you go to bed.”

“Okay.” Baby pulled the SMI T-shirt over her head. “But you have to promise me that you won't tell on me, okay, Harriet? You won't tell Jeff or anybody.”

“Why should I promise that?” Harriet was exhausted, and disgusted with her.

“Because I'll never do it again, Scouts honor.”

“You weren't a scout.”

“Neither were you. Listen”—Baby looked at her—“it's just something that I used to do, okay? I really wasn't trying to kill myself.”

“Well, then, what the hell
were
you trying to do?”

“Feel better,” Baby said.

“Wait a minute. It makes you feel
better
to cut yourself?”

Baby nodded. “It … it … takes the pressure off, some way.”

“What pressure?” Harriet didn't get it.

“The … I don't know how to tell you,” Baby said. “It's just, I just can't stand it sometimes, that's all.” She was shaking inside the big shirt.

“Can't stand
what?
”

“Oh, Harriet, I'm so bad for Jeff, can't you see that? I'm so bad for him, I should just leave him alone, but I can't, you know. I just can't, I never could. But I'll ruin him, I know I will, I'm just so bad.”

“You are
not bad,
” Harriet said. “But what happened? Something must have happened.”

“Oh, well, we—first I got caught up in his room when it wasn't visitors' hours, and then also he was late for drill, whatever that is, and then his grades are dropping, too, and then I guess the final straw was, he let me hold his gun.”

“His gun?” Harriet repeated stupidly.

“Well, I wanted to see it, I really did, you know I grew up knowing how to shoot, so he took it along when we went up to Goshen yesterday, no,
today
I guess, this morning, it seems like so long ago. And he was showing me how to shoot it out in the woods up there. Nobody at all was around. It
kicked
”—a little light came into her eye—“and it was really, really fun. But then we got caught.”

“Who caught you, way up there?”

“Oh, some dumb guy from SMI. Some stupid little history professor up there on a picnic with his stupid little wife and his stupid little kids.”

“So what happened?”

“Oh, I don't know, they're going to hold an inquiry, it's something like a court martial only not such a big deal. But anyway, Jeff got stripped of his title or his rank or whatever it is. He's not the prefect anymore.”

“What does
he
say about that? Jeff, I mean?”

Baby managed a little smile. “He said he doesn't want to be the prefect anyway. He said he doesn't care. He doesn't care about anything but me. That's what he said. And now he'll have more time to spend with me. But I'll ruin him, Harriet, you know I will. He shouldn't be having anything to do with a girl like me.”

“That is ridiculous,” Harriet said firmly just as the phone began to ring. “He called a minute ago, and that's probably him calling back.”

Baby squeezed Harriet's upper arm so hard it hurt. “You didn't promise yet. Promise you won't tell Jeff.”

Harriet hugged her. “Scouts honor,” she said. Baby smiled. Baby's shoulder bones felt like little bony wings beneath Jeff's T-shirt.

“Okay.” Baby picked up the phone. “Hello,” she said, and then she listened for a minute, and then she started crying. “You know I love you,” she said.

Harriet went into the bathroom to clean the tub, shutting the door behind her.

A
LL DURING SECOND SEMESTER
the romance continued, intense as ever, but the best part had passed. Baby flirted with other guys and made him jealous. She didn't mean to, she said. She couldn't help it. She said she had never loved anybody like this before. She loved him so much she was scaring herself to death, she said. “Then
why don't you just leave him alone?” asked Harriet, who didn't understand any of it. Harriet loved Baby but felt sorriest for Jeff, who had lost about ten pounds through pure suffering.

“I can't,” Baby had said simply. “Oh, honey, I will never, ever, do that.” They'd fight, make up, fight again, make up again. The struggle seemed huge and almost mythic to Harriet, like the stories of the gods and goddesses in Greek mythology. Often, Harriet was the one who made it work. She took and delivered the messages, sometimes rephrasing things. After all this time, she felt she knew what Jeff Carr really intended to say and what he didn't. Baby was harder to interpret, even more prone to say things she didn't mean. Harriet had to edit her carefully. It was a hard job. Harriet felt exhausted and exalted all at once.

Sometimes she couldn't decide what
she
wanted either. Clearly, Jeff would be better off without Baby. He could get back on the straight-ahead career path he'd been following before he met her. But Baby would probably die without him. And if they broke up, would Harriet ever see Jefferson Carr again? She couldn't stand that; she'd die, too. Now, Harriet got to talk to him constantly and see him every few days. Since he was no longer a class prefect, he drove over to Mary Scott even more often.

Spring came in too fast, too hot; summer rushed straight at them, gathering speed. Baby was flunking math and chemistry, but the poems kept pouring out. It was like automatic writing, like taking dictation, Harriet often thought, watching Baby jot them down as she stared into space, listening. What did she hear? Not the poem, she'd told Harriet once, but the
voice
of the poem. This didn't make any sense to Harriet. And it wasn't fair either, she thought, struggling with her own stories. Visiting writer Lucian Delgado was lukewarm to these stories in workshop, but Harriet loved his class anyway, held on Wednesday nights at the Abbot Guest House where they'd put
him, up on faculty row. Lucian Delgado gave them beer and wine and let them smoke. He smoked a pipe himself, wearing a deep-blue velvet jacket and bedroom shoes, his hooded eyes surprisingly intent while they read their work aloud.

Just before exams started, Harriet and Baby cut their Tuesday afternoon classes and went swimming with Jeff in the quarry halfway up Morrow Mountain behind the college, officially off limits to Mary Scott students. They had to pull apart the strands of barbwire fence and hold them up carefully in order to duck inside. The lake was like a bowl of black water surrounded by rocks, then tangled green woods with kudzu-covered trees, then high blue sky arching above it all. They were the only people there. Dozing on her stomach in the sun, Harriet lifted her head just in time to see Baby stand up on the big rock by the deepest part, shuck off her red bathing suit in one swift movement and take a running dive into the dark water over Jeff's loud “No!” He waded furiously into the lake, hands on hips, waiting for her to surface, then grabbed her as she swam in, pulling her up, shaking her shoulders until her head snapped back and she struggled in earnest to free herself. He slapped her once, across the face; she cried out; and then he was kissing her.

Heart thudding, hot all over, Harriet put her face back down on the towel. They were crazy. She could not stand to see this, yet she could not stand
not
to see it either. She hated them both. She hated herself. When she looked up again, they were gone. They had disappeared into the woods. Harriet lay flat on her stomach in the sun and felt her blood running through every vein in her body; she could feel her whole body pulsing in the heat. She touched herself until she was gasping in delight or dismay, she couldn't even tell which. Harriet was glad when the raft trip came up in Mr. Gaines's class, to distract them all a little bit, to siphon off some of that awful energy that kept Baby up until all hours even when she wasn't out with Jeff, kept her shooting
off poems like firecrackers. Harriet was even glad when Jeff had to leave in mid-May for summer “maneuvers,” a word Baby always said with a sneer, as if it had quotation marks around it.

“We'll kill each other before we're done,” Baby had said once, but Harriet thought they'd kill
her
first. They kept her all wrought up. What had seemed so much like love now seemed almost like hatred sometimes, at least to Harriet, who hated being with them as much as she loved it, as much as she loved them. But the sweet part was already gone.

T
HE FOG HAS FINALLY LIFTED
; sun sparkles on the water. Harriet hears people in the corridor outside her door. She gets up. On the dock, men are unloading boxes off trucks and onto the
Belle
. Passengers are walking across the gangplank. There's Russell already doing his leg stretches against a concrete post. Vicksburg rises steeply behind the dock. All Harriet can remember about it from the raft trip is a lot of statues, Confederate cavalry, somewhere up there on the hill. It was late, dark. They'd been drinking, walking down a street full of statues shining white in the light of the moon. “But what about the
citizens?
Where are the citizens?” Baby kept asking, which cracked them all up. They seemed to have the whole town to themselves.

Now Harriet is ready to look at the poems again. She unzips the pocket of her big suitcase and removes the battered folder, then spreads them all out on the bed as best she can, though some are so crumpled that this is impossible. Baby wrote most of them in pencil on pages torn out of the little spiral notebook she kept in the back pocket of her cutoff jeans. She left them all in the drawer of her bedside table in the room she shared with Harriet at the Royal Sonesta Hotel when they reached New Orleans, along with some loose change (Baby never kept change), an empty pack of Winston cigarettes, a
man's comb, two strings of Mardi Gras beads, and the address of a boy in Indianola, Mississippi. Harriet found them there after she'd left.

OLD LIARS ON THE AIR

The crackly burst

of men's voices

on the shortwave radio:

Where they at?

You seen em yet?

Yeah, I seen em

Back around Friars Point

They're all riding topless

It's a sight for sore eyes

I'm telling you.

MAMA I

Mama wore red short shorts

and high-heeled sandals

she was too much

for this town

PLEA

When Jeff first put me up here

I liked it

Oh I liked it a lot

On a clear day

I could see forever

in the words of the song

Sweet breezes

blew sun on my face

Nothing I had to do

Except my nails

So I got a great tan

Watched TV

Read novels

Ate petits fours

pepperoni pizza

anything I wanted

Drank champagne

But, though idyllic,

this surface is very hard

And the ladder has proved

Retractable

So if you could possibly

Assist me off this pedestal please

It's hurting my ass

MAMA II

drank gin like water

all day long

in the pink glass goblet

with the twisted stem

Daddy bought her in Venice

on their honeymoon

BIG BROTHER

either out

or in his room,

door closed

wouldn't talk to anybody

he called Elise
that whore

drinking hard liquor

at eleven or twelve

with the boys in Dinkins Bottom

I said, Dinkins Bottom! Isnt that funny?

Isnt that funny, Ricky?

I lived to make him laugh

I lived for a word, a glance

from that face the most like mine

in all the world

DAY ROOM

They all think

They're Jesus

Why?

Maybe the first Jesus

Wasn't Jesus either

Maybe he was only

Schizophrenic

BRONCHITIS