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Authors: Lee Smith

Tags: #Contemporary, #Adult

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BOOK: The Last Girls
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The river . . . it all started with the river. How amazing that they ever did it, twelve girls, ever went down this river on that raft, how amazing that they ever thought of it in the first place.

W
ELL, THEY WERE YOUNG
. Young enough to think
why not
when Baby said it, and then to do it: just like that. Just like Huck Finn and Jim in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
which they were reading in Mr. Gaines's Great Authors class at Mary Scott, sophomore year.

Tom Gaines was the closest thing to a hippie on the faculty at Mary Scott, the closest thing to a hippie that most of them had ever seen in 1965, since the sixties had not yet come to girls' schools in Virginia. So far, the sixties had only happened in
Time
magazine and on television. Life at the fairy-tale Blue Ridge campus was proceeding much as it had for decades past, with only an occasional emissary from the changing world beyond, such as somebody's longhaired folk-singing
cousin from up north incongruously flailing his twelve-string guitar on the steps of the white-columned administration building. And Professor Tom Gaines, who wore jeans and work boots to class (along with the required tie and tweed sports jacket), bushy beard hiding half his face, curly reddish-brown hair falling down past his collar. Harriet was sure he'd been hired by mistake. But here he was anyway, big as life and right here on their own ancient campus among the pink brick buildings and giant oaks and long green lawns and little stone benches and urns. Girls stood in line to sign up for his classes.
He is so cute,
ran the consensus.

But it was more than that, Harriet realized later. Mr. Gaines was passionate. He wept in class, reading “The Dead” aloud. He clenched his fist in fury over
Invisible Man,
he practically acted out
Absalom, Absalom,
trying to make them understand it. Unfortunately for all the students, Mr. Gaines was already married to a dark, frizzy-haired Jewish beauty who wore long tie-dyed skirts and no bra. They carried their little hippie baby, Maeve, with them everywhere in something like a knapsack except when Harriet, widely known as the most responsible English major, came to baby-sit. Now people take babies everywhere, but nobody did it then. You were supposed to stay home with your baby, but Sheila Gaines did not. She had even been seen breast-feeding Maeve publicly in Dana Auditorium, watching her husband act in a Chekov drama. He played Uncle Vanya and wore a waistcoat. They had powdered his hair and put him in little gold spectacles but nothing could obscure the fact that he was really young and actually gorgeous, a young hippie professor playing an old Russian man. Due to the extreme shortage of men at Mary Scott, Mr. Gaines was in all the plays. He was Hamlet and Stanley Kowalski. His wife breast-fed Maeve until she could talk, to everyone's revulsion.

But Mr. Gaines's dramatic streak was what made his classes so wonderful. For
Huck Finn,
he adopted a sort of Mark Twain persona as he read aloud from the book, striding around the old high-ceilinged
room with his thumbs hooked under imaginary galluses. Even this jovial approach failed to charm Harriet, who had read the famous novel once before, in childhood, but now found it disturbing not only in the questions it raised about race but also in Huck's loneliness, which Harriet had overlooked the first time through, caught up as she was in the adventure. In Mr. Gaines's class, Harriet got goose-bumps all over when he read aloud:

Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippoorwill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die, and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of sound that a ghost makes . . .

This passage could have been describing Harriet; it could have been describing her life right then. Mr. Gaines was saying something about Huck's “estrangement” as “existential,” as “presaging the modern novel,” but Harriet felt it as personal, deep in her bones. She believed it was what country people meant when they said they felt somebody walking across their grave. For even in the midst of college, here at Mary Scott where she was happier than she would ever be again, Harriet Holding continued to have these moments she'd had ever since she could remember, as a girl and as a young woman, ever since she was a child. Suddenly a stillness would come over everything, a hush, then a dimming of the light, followed by a burst of radiance during which she could see everything truly,
everything,
each leaf on a tree in all its distinctness and brief beauty, each hair on the top of somebody's hand, each crumb on a tablecloth, each black and
inevitable marching word on a page. During these moments Harriet was aware of herself and her beating heart and the perilous world with a kind of rapture that could not be borne, really, leaving her finally with a little headache right between the eyes and a craving for chocolate and a sense of relief. She was still prone to such intensity. There was no predicting it either. You couldn't tell when these times might occur or when they would go away. Her mother used to call it “getting all wrought up.” “Harriet,” she often said, “you're just getting all wrought up. Calm down, honey.”

But Harriet couldn't help it.

Another day Mr. Gaines read from the section where Huck and Jim are living on the river:

Sometimes we'd have that whole river to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water, and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window . . . and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft.

His words had rung out singly, like bells, in the old classroom. Harriet could hear each one in her head. It was a cold pale day in February. Out the window, bare trees stood blackly amid the gray tatters of snow.

Then Baby had said, “I'd love to do that. Go down the Mississippi River on a raft, I mean.” It was a typical response from Baby, who personalized everything, who was famous for saying, “Well,
I'd
never do
that!
” at the end of
The Awakening
when Edna Pontellier walks into the ocean. Baby was not capable of abstract thought. She had too much imagination. Everything was real for her, close up and personal.

“We
could
do it, you know,” Suzanne St. John spoke up. “My uncle owns a plantation right on the river, my mother was raised there.
She'd know who to talk to. I'll bet we could do it if we wanted to.” Next to Courtney, Suzanne St. John was the most organized girl in school, an angular forthright girl with a businesslike grown-up hairdo who ran a mail-order stationery business out of her dorm room.

“Girls, girls,” Mr. Gaines had said disapprovingly. He wanted to get back to the book, he wanted to be the star. But the girls were all looking at each other. Baby's eyes were shining. “YES!” she wrote on a piece of paper, handing it to Harriet, who passed it along to Suzanne.
Yes.
This was Baby's response to everything.

Harriet shivers. She hangs up the new navy dress with the matching jacket she'll wear to dinner tonight. She orders all her clothes from catalogs; it confuses her too much to shop. She unpacks a jumble of cosmetics and medications (vitamins, cold cream, calcium, Advil, lipstick, the alarming estrogen) and tosses the old envelope of clippings onto the bed. She steps out of her sensible flats and takes off her denim jumper and white T-shirt (Lands' End) and hangs them up in the closet alongside the navy dress. All these clothes she might have owned in college, she realizes, confirming her suspicion that whatever you're like in your youth, you only get more so with age.

She remembers believing, as a girl, that wisdom would set in somehow, sometime, as a matter of course. Now she doubts it. There are no grown-ups—this is the big dirty secret that nobody ever tells you. No grown-ups at all, including herself. She cannot think of an exception—except, probably, Courtney, the suitemate she'll be having dinner with later tonight. The very thought of Courtney makes Harriet feel like her bra strap is showing or her period has started and she's got blood on the back of her skirt. But this is ridiculous! Harriet has had a complete hysterectomy and now she has to lie down. Her doctor has prescribed a daily rest for the first four months after surgery, and in fact, Harriet cannot imagine doing without it. She's so tired . . . They say that for every hour you're under anesthesia, a month of recuperation is required. Maybe that's an old wives' tale. One thing
that's perfectly clear is that Harriet Holding will never be an old wife. It's too late now.

Though she doesn't really
look
old . . . Harriet slides off her slip to stand before the mirror in her white underwear. The only real difference is that her brown pageboy is cropped below her ears now instead of at her shoulders, the way she used to wear it. But her hair is not yet gray, only a softer, duller brown. Suddenly she remembers overhearing Baby on the phone once during freshman year, arranging blind dates for them all. “Harriet? I don't know exactly what you mean by ‘good-looking,' but she's very attractive, and she's got the most interesting face . . .” It's just a bit asymmetrical, actually, with a wide forehead and big hazel eyes set slightly too far apart; a pretty, straight nose like her mother's; and a rueful, mobile mouth. The color comes and goes too easily in her face. Which has always embarrassed her. And she can't hide any of her feelings. Now flushed in the sunset's last glow which illumines the whole room, Harriet could almost be the girl who went down the Mississippi River on that raft so many years ago. She's still trim, her skin pale and softly freckled and luminous in this odd peachy light. Her stomach is flat, her breasts firm. Children have not worn her out.

But suddenly Harriet can't breathe. She leans forward clutching the dresser, staring into the mirror. The light flares up behind her somehow, throwing her face into darkness. Now she's a black cutout paper doll of a woman set against the glowing rectangle of sky, not a woman at all, nobody really, a dark silhouette. Tears sting her eyes; she gropes for the lamp switch and turns it on. The room comes back. Harriet throws herself down on the bed, heart beating through her body like her blood. Here it comes again: she's all wrought up. Of course she can't rest. Finally she sits up, gets the envelope, and fishes out a faded newspaper entry from the Lexington, Kentucky, newspaper, dated June 10, 1965.
OLD MAN RIVER, HERE WE COME
! the headline says. Harriet scans the article, smiling. She has not looked through these clippings for years.

T
HEY'D NAMED THE RAFT
for an early Mary Scott College alumna from Paducah whose sister, Lucille Pickett, had entertained them for tea in her gingerbread family home on the bluff several days before the launch. Harriet remembers that tea as if it were a scene in a play, the crowded musty parlor like a stage set, the old lady sitting up ramrod straight on one of those terrible tufted horsehair sofas, referring again and again to “Sis-tah Daisy,” whose photographs lined the walls. A dark-haired beauty, Sis-tah Daisy had been a concert pianist, they were told. After her graduation from Mary Scott, she had performed in “all the grand capitals of Europe,” settling at length in Paris where her brilliant career continued until a personal tragedy forced her to return to Paducah. Miss Pickett had said “personal tragedy” in such a way that no one, not even Baby, dared to ask what it was.

“Here she gave private lessons at that very piano until her untimely death,” Miss Pickett continued, pointing at the piano with her cane. (Catherine Wilson, on the piano bench, jumped up as if shot, then sat back down shamefaced.) “But I must say,” Miss Pickett continued, “after her return from Europe, a certain luster was lost. A certain luster was most assuredly lost.” She seemed lost in thought herself for a moment, then began banging her cane on the floor with such force that everyone was startled.

A tiny black maid who looked as old as Miss Pickett herself came scurrying out of the kitchen bearing a tarnished silver tray piled high with slices of fruitcake, of all things, and passed it around. Harriet ate hers dutifully, though she got the giggles when she happened to catch, out of the corner of her eye, Baby slipping her own slice of fruitcake into her purse. Of course it was left over from Christmas! Of course it was. Or maybe the Christmas before
that
.

Finally they escaped, running down the sidewalk toward the nondescript motel near the dock where they were staying, laughing all the way. Who could even imagine how
old
that woman was! And what
about the
fruitcake?
By the time they reached the river, they'd named the raft: the
Daisy Pickett
. Harriet felt that they had cheapened the memory of the mysterious Daisy by doing so; she hoped that Miss Lucille would never know it, but of course this was impossible. They were celebrities in Paducah for the next four days as they bought provisions and made commercials to finance the trip. Everything they did was on the news.

Now she reads to the end of the article. “The girls wore white T-shirts with yellow daisies painted on them and sang, ‘Good-bye, Paducah,' to the tune of ‘Hello, Dolly' as the unusual craft departed.” In fact, in Harriet's memory, they sang relentlessly, all the time, all the way down the Mississippi. They sang in spite of all their mishaps and travails: the tail of the hurricane that hit them before they even got to Cairo, a diet consisting mostly of tuna and doughnuts, mosquito bites beyond belief, and rainstorms that soaked everything they owned. If anything really bad happened to them, they knew they could call up somebody's parents collect, and the parents would come and fix things. They expected to be taken care of. Nobody had yet suggested to them that they might ever have to make a living or that somebody wouldn't marry them and look after them for the rest of their lives. They all smoked cigarettes. They were all cute. They headed down the river with absolute confidence that they would get where they were going.

BOOK: The Last Girls
12.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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