Up Island (11 page)

“We haven’t met, but we should,” she said, including Charlotte and me both in the smile. She held out her hand.

I noticed that the fingers were blunt, spatulate, and the nails were bitten to the quick. I did not speak.

“You’re right,” Charlotte said in a voice like iced steel. “We haven’t.”

She walked unhurriedly around Sheri Scroggins, then paused and looked down at her son. He sat with his mouth open, simply looking at us. We might have been apparitions.

“I never thought I raised a fool, Theron,” she said to Tee, and walked off the terrace and was swallowed by the huge old rose bushes, drooping with their fragrant cargo, that shielded the entrance. I could not move.

“Molly…” Sheri Scroggins said.

I looked at her, straight into her eyes.

“Mrs. Redwine,” I said, and walked away after Charlotte.

Behind me I heard Tee call, “Molly. Mom…”

I shook my head without looking back. The myriad eyes seemed to leave smoking pits in the flesh of
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my back. I could still feel them when the attendant brought our cars around to where we waited, silent now, under the stone porte cochere.

“This will never happen to either one of us again,” Charlotte said grimly as she got into her big blue Mercedes. The Redwines had a driver, but she hardly ever used him.

I smiled at her, surprised that I could make my mouth move, and got into my little Toyota wagon and drove home through the silent, snaking streets of Ansley Park, grateful for once that we lived there instead of Brookwood Hills or Buckhead. This trip took only minutes. I don’t remember thinking anything at all during it.

Teddy was out when I got home, but Lazarus was there, thumping his tail from under the wrought-iron table on the patio, where he retreated in hot weather.

“Have you been out? Want to go for a walk?” I said to him, but he only thumped his tail harder and grinned at me, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and dripping. Lazarus was a sensible dog. He could not be lured out in midafternoon during a heat wave.

“Later,” I said, and went up the stairs to the bedroom. My bedroom now. I closed the shutters against the hot, gray whiteness outside, took off my dress and shoes, and lay down on the bed.

I had thought perhaps that I might need to cry, or at least wrestle with feelings too powerful to permit yet. I waited.

But I did not cry and I did not feel anything except the familiar sleepiness. Sleep tugged at me like an undertow, and finally I turned on my side and let myself slide down into it.

It was thick and black and deep, and I don’t know how long it would have held me under if the telephone had not waked me two hours

UP ISLAND / 89

later. By then the white heat was seeping out of the afternoon behind the shutters, and the idiot throbbing of the television from the downstairs library said that Teddy was home.

I fumbled with the receiver, dropped it, retrieved it, and finally put it to my ear.

“Hello,” I said thickly. I sounded to my own ears as if I were drunk.

It was my mother’s voice, round and full and carrying, trained. For some reason the sheer perfection of it irritated me almost beyond reason.

“Oh, I woke you, didn’t I?” she said, and I thought I could hear the creamy smugness of one who never, under any circumstances, slept in the daytime.

“That’s okay. What’s up?” I sought to exorcize the treacly stupidity with briskness.

“I have a lovely plan,” she caroled. It was the voice she had used when I was small and she wanted to motivate me to make some change in my imperfect self, to amend somehow the sheer unsuitableness that this large, square child was for a dancer, a feather, a curl of flame. The irritation mounted.

“And that is?” I said.

“That is a day of pampering just for us. Like I told you the other night at dinner. I have us an appointment at Noelle in the morning—hair, makeup, massage, nails, a salt scrub, whirlpool—and then you can take me to the club for lunch and we’ll show off our fabulous new selves. And then I’m taking you shopping. To Neiman Marcus. No more of those little wrap skirt thingies. Real glamour clothes. Something you’ve never worn in your life. New shoes, too, with four-inch heels. And after that a little workout at Jeanne’s. Don’t worry. I’ll do the beginner’s with you this time.

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Once you see how good you feel, you’ll want to go on with it, I know…”

“Mother,” I said. “Just once, do you think you could take me just like I am? Could you bear to have lunch with me without the makeover and the four-inch heels? Plain old me in a little wrap skirt thingy? Just once?”

“Well, you needn’t get snippy with me,” she said, injured or projecting injury, I was never sure which. “Of course I’ll take you like you are. You’re my daughter. Only…well, just like you are doesn’t seem to have gotten you very far, does it? Oh, darling, I didn’t mean it that way…”

“That’s just what you meant,” I said, irritation suddenly flaring into rage and past that into something else entirely, a kind of wildfire that swept everything inside me away and left only surging, boiling red.

“That’s just what you meant and it’s what you’ve always meant. I’ve never been good enough for you; too big, too awkward, too…too plodding, too
earth-bound
…”

“Darling, not at all! Forget the spa stuff and the shopping, then; we’ll just go sit on the patio at the club and talk, like we haven’t done in ages. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“No!” I shouted. “It would not be fun! It would not be fun at all! I did that today, Mother, with Charlotte, and you’ll never guess who else was there. Tee and his new lay. Tee and the famous other woman. Tee and his little brown whore, dripping wet and falling out of her bathing suit, playing kissy-face with my husband for all of Atlanta to see. No, it was not fun and it never will be again, because I am never setting UP ISLAND / 91

foot there again as long as I live. So if you want to go to lunch with me, you’re going to have to go somewhere where you don’t know the waiters and they bring you a check. Like practically everybody else in the world does. I hate to tell you this, Mother, but you can kiss the Driving Club good-bye.”

My mother’s voice dropped into that low, thrilling timbre that she used when she played dark, tragic heroines or did serious public service television spots.

“You mean you’re going to give up your own club, give up Teddy’s very birthright, just for some little tramp who isn’t going to last another six months? I thought better of you. I truly did, Molly.”

“No you didn’t,” I said, my voice shaking with fury. Where did this endless boiling redness come from? I was afraid I could not stop it, and I did not really want to.

“No you didn’t. You never thought better of me in my life.

You aren’t even thinking of me now, you’re thinking of you, and how it’s you who’re going to have to give up hanging around the goddamned Driving Club. Do you have any idea how it felt today? To sit there and see a woman kissing your husband, a woman who could have been you, thirty years before? To sit there and feel like a damned Clydesdale and watch a…a fucking water nymph sitting where you should be sitting? No. I don’t think you do.”

I paused for a breath, and my mother was silent. Then she said, thoughtfully, as if she were giving the matter judicious consideration, “I really should have let you study dance when you were little. I see now that it was a mistake not to let you.

Dancers don’t go soft and thick and puddingy when they get older. They turn into greyhounds, not oxen.”

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Only someone who had known her intimately for all the scalding years that I had could have heard the cold, silvery desire to wound under her sorrowful words. The red rage exploded.

Through ringing ears I heard myself say, “No. Not greyhounds. They don’t turn into greyhounds. Have you looked at yourself lately, Mother? Old dancers turn into hyenas. And you know what hyenas do, don’t you? They eat their young.”

There was a long silence, a kind of hollow rushing, over the wire, and then she hung up. She did not slam the phone down, but replaced it with infinite gentleness. I remember thinking very clearly, sometime soon I’m going to be terribly sorry I said that. But at that moment I felt only the need, urgent and smothering, to go back to sleep. The blinding redness had faded as if it had never been, and I felt emptied out and aching to be filled with simple oblivion.

I slept until nearly midnight, when the phone rang again, and when I answered it, it was my father, telling me that my mother had had a stroke or a seizure of some sort while she was working out at her makeshift barre in the spare bedroom, and had died in the ambulance on the way to Piedmont Hospital.

I
N THE DAYS AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, I had the same dream over and over: I was walking down a crowded city sidewalk washed in graying late-afternoon light, and I passed one of those sets of steps leading down to basement doors that you see so often in New York and London, though not, in my experience, in any other cities. But instead of a door leading to a shop or apartment, there was a kind of grating that gave way to a subterranean tunnel, like a subway tunnel, and there, looking out through the grating along with several other people, was my mother. In the dream I stopped, though no one else around me did. It was as if I alone saw the grated window and the tunnel.

My mother looked straight ahead, not sad, not happy, not angry, not alive, not dead. She had on one of her hats, I think the black one that she had worn the last time we had had dinner, at the Ritz-Carlton. She and the others looked as if they were waiting for something, perhaps a train to somewhere.

I bent down and said to her, “What are you doing down there?” She looked at me then, and though she did not smile, I thought that she regarded me with favor, or at least not with anger.

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“We come here every afternoon at four to wait,” she said.

I always woke up after that, my hair soaked with sweat, my heart pounding. It was a terrible dream, though I could not have told why. And indeed I did not, for I found that there was simply no one now to tell my dreams to.

Lying there in the damp, tangled bedclothes I would realize over and over again the first and realest loss that divorce brings with it. There is no longer anybody to tell your dreams to, not on the pulse of the moment, when they are most vivid and need most to be told. There is nobody to talk to about the most intimate and secret tendrils that curl through your mind, at least not at the time of their flowering. No one to laugh with, to show things to, to wish casual wishes with—not when those impulses are first born.

So the first great loss is immediacy, spontaneity. You can tell the dreams, voice the fears and longings, laugh the laughter, wish the wishes, of course, but it will be later, to someone deliberately chosen, at a remove, a considered sharing. There is no longer anyone there to be a mirror for you, so that you lose first a primal sense of yourself that has been a part of you for so long. Or, at least, I found that was so for me. Perhaps this is true of death, too, and long separ-ations; I cannot speak to those yet. My mother had not been a mirror for me in many years. It was Tee who had listened in the nights, laughed, argued, received, given back. It was Tee who had been as there to me as I was to myself, and now he no longer was. For a long time I really hated him for that simple removal of his presence when I had something I needed to say.

I could not tell my dream to my father, who was UP ISLAND / 95

dumb and still and leaden with loss; I could not have added my anguish to the weight he bore. I could not tell Kevin, who came immediately with Sally, nearly wild with grief for his mother. He was furious with me and would not speak to me at all; I had blurted out to him the details of my last conversation with Mother, and for months, indeed almost a year after, he was adamant in his belief that I had killed her.

My father flared at him when he first voiced that sentiment, the first and last sign of animation I saw in Daddy during the whole terrible time of mother’s death and funeral, and after that Kevin blamed me only with his cold silence. Telling him of the dream or anything else was out of the question.

I did not know pretty, one-surfaced Sally well enough, and never would, and I could not burden Teddy with the weight of the dream. He had not been especially close to his grandmother, but loss is loss, and Teddy had had enough of that recently. Caroline, still wounded, did not come home. So finally I told Livvy.

“What do you think it means?” I said on the afternoon before Mother’s funeral, while she lay in her closed coffin in the dim, tribal splendor of Patterson’s and received her last homage from her students and admirers. Livvy had come with sandwiches and a bottle of cold white wine, and we sat in her car in the parking lot while we ate and drank. Kevin was doing noon chatelain duty, and would not have welcomed my presence. I knew I had an hour or so free, and the dream was a burden I desperately needed to share.

“I think it means you’ve got a lot of unfinished business with your mother,” Livvy said. “I think
you
think your mother can’t go on to her rest or whatever until you’ve atoned in some way for, quote, killing her,

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unquote, or paid some kind of stupid penance. And I think you’re nuts. Your mother said something really shitty to you and when you got mad and talked back to her, she went home like a spoiled little girl and danced herself to death. I think it’s just like her, and I’m pissed off at her because she’s left you drowning in guilt and gone off where you can’t possibly follow and make it right. And I also think that your father knows that in his heart of hearts, and who the hell cares what Kevin thinks? He’d have found a way to blame you if you’d been on Uranus when she died.”

As always, Livvy was a powerful anodyne, but I had the feeling that the relief was temporary. I knew that my mother wasn’t going to let me walk away that easily.