Each year, summer seems to arrive earlier in the Lowcountry: it’s only May third, and already the springtime riot of blossoms has budded, bloomed, and shriveled. Brown petals—vestiges of lavender wisteria, butterscotch jasmine, and taffy pink azaleas—litter sidewalks these days, spoiled confetti leftover from a party.
I bike through the stewing haze to visit my grandparents before my afternoon shift at the news station. Steam travels from the hot, wet asphalt up to the hot, wet clouds. Caught in the middle of this heat transfer, I might as well be pedaling a radiator.
For generations, we Charlestonians have endured the heat. This is our home, after all. My family, like the others who grew up within the historic district, will never leave. So, we do what we can to keep from dissolving into the thick humidity that weighs down this southern coastal town as much as its complicated history does. We wear linen and guzzle iced tea. We exercise early in the morning, late in the day, or not at all. We put on sun hats and slather on sunscreen. Still, the sun blasts through, emblazoning us with burns, blisters, and sweat stains.
The sun cooks our doorknobs. It toasts cars, roasting the seat belt buckles until they’re lava-hot across our laps. It sears the crabgrass and gums the blacktop. The Lowcountry sun drains and wilts and simmers the flatlands below. But no matter how much the mercury soars, the zinnias stand tall, their candy-colored petals reaching high toward the sun.
My grandmother Claudia taught me to love zinnias. My gardening lessons began years ago, on an Easter Sunday after our two o’clock dinner beside her zinnia bed, which still runs out past the swimming pool, a sort of marital DMZ where my grandfather rarely ventures. He thought the flowers too tawdry and common for an English garden noted for its formal Ligustrum hedges and boxwood topiaries. “But I think they’re pretty,” she said, with a wary eye pointed at the back door. She told me to keep quiet about our annual planting project. We’ve kept quiet about many things.
A chorus of St. Michael’s bells rang around us as she slowly, almost reverently, studied the seed packets labeled Persian Carpet, Queen Red Lime, and Uproar Rose. Some packets were open already from last season, thriftily rolled up and sealed to preserve the extra seeds. Though my grandparents own one of the most handsome houses in the city—and one of the biggest, on nearly half an acre—they were also children of the Depression. They are savers; they practice frugality. She instructed me, “Simons, plant last year’s first.”
Laudie—as my sisters and I call her—showed me how to poke holes into the dirt in orderly rows, drop a seed in each, cover it with earth. When I was six, two months seemed an eternity to wait for the first blooms. Every time I came by for a swim, I would weed and water and fuss over the seedlings, hoping there was something I could do to hurry them up. “They’ll come, Simons,” she would say. Since that long-ago afternoon, we’ve planted zinnias every Easter in that same flower bed in that same garden. It’s been twenty years.
I pop my bike up on a curb. The jolt reactivates the throbbing in my head. I was reckless last night, for sure, but I also fear I crossed a line. I’ll have to ask Martha for advice. She’ll tell it to me straight.
I round the corner from Meeting Street onto South Battery, once the neighborhood of wealthy indigo and cotton planters escaping the malarial summer heat on their plantations. The most architecturally elaborate houses in the city line these three blocks facing White Point Garden, known to us locals simply as “the Battery.” The antebellum park is situated on the tip of the old peninsula, where any native will tell you, grandiosely, the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet and join to become the Atlantic Ocean.
Live oaks with long, undulating branches canopy its walking paths and benches. At its center is an old-fashioned bandstand; scattered throughout are statues from the wars: Revolutionary, Confederate, and twentieth-century. Symbols abound here of both war and peace: old cannons aimed at Fort Sumter in the harbor; a bronze angel sculpture, which doubles as a water fountain.
The most prominent installation lunges from the corner of the park, where the two rivers intersect. Standing on an octagonal pedestal, a naked man raises a sword, his muscles rippling. He defends a woman cloaked in a robe. In one hand, she holds a garland of laurel. With the other, she points to the enemy, the Union Army, out at sea.
As a child, I climbed around the base of that statue, groping for footholds along the slick granite. I had stared at the naked figure, a fig leaf covering his penis. It wasn’t until some bubba started driving his truck here every Sunday with a Confederate flag mounted on an absurdly large pole that I realized the naked man embodied the battle cry of the Confederacy. And that beautiful woman, her hair lifted by the breeze, cast frozen in time, was an allegory for my city at the time of the Civil War. Had she known better, she would have waved the Northern soldiers in, maybe offered them some tomato sandwiches.
Across the street from the old park are a seawall and a long promenade, where tourists and townspeople walk or jog or push baby strollers. The clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages, the shriek of herring gulls, and the murmur of pigeons make the Battery sound old-fashioned and out of time. Every day, the waters lick the barrier between the city and the sea. The insidious, salty tongues reach higher and higher and, some days, the water flows over the retaining wall. Drivers take detours. Runners leap over puddles. Tourists take photographs. Those some days come more often these days. Our city is sinking. Maybe the lady statue was warning us about the sea rise all along.
Laudie’s imposing brick house, capped by a mansard roof, anchors the middle block. Two-story piazzas—the old-fashioned Charleston name for porches—grace the front of her house. Once almost blindingly white, the piazza columns now collect grime in their flutes, giving them permanent shadows.
I take a hard left, my wheels crunching the oyster-shell driveway, the high porticos rising to my right. I lean my bike against an old crepe myrtle and push the squeaky wrought iron gate that opens into the deep lot behind the house.
The grounds are divided into thirds. The section closest to the house is a formal garden, with symmetrical paths bordered by low-growing boxwood and accented by giant topiaries. It’s a miniature version of Versailles.
Behind the garden is the pool, which is nestled into the brick patio like a gem in an antique ring. Finally, far from view of the house and obscured by a fortress of greenery—aspidistra at the walkway, sago palms at shoulder height, and ancient camellias at the top of this hidden urban canopy—is the wild land left for Laudie.
In this little outdoor room, fully open to the sun, is a garden of Eden. Fat-leafed hydrangeas grow beneath alligator-green ferns. Butterflies lazily sip from patches of hearty milkweed. A Ficus vine begins its summertime crawl up the back brick wall. Mint and rosemary hover over our prized treasures, collected through years of beachcombing and tucked into the flower beds: whelks, bull’s-eyes, lettered olives, cockles, and blood ark shells. Feathery plumbago leaves shake in the breeze. Lantana petals are scattered over the brick path that leads to the potting shed in the corner.
Rimmed by the greenery, planted in the exact middle of the garden to soak in the high-noon sun, are the kaleidoscopic zinnias. Cherry, canary, margarine, bubblegum, grape. I’ve always known that these plucky flowers, with their intense colors and firm stalks, are hardworking, but even I am surprised by how they’ve grown so fast. I’ll give my report to Laudie.
I head back toward the pool, through the tunnel of deep shade. I stop at an Adirondack chair, strip down to my bathing suit. With my toes gripping the warm bricks, heels hovered over the lip of the pool, I lift my face to the unrelenting sun. I close my eyes and fall backward into the pool.
The water cools my throbbing temples. It hides me from my possible indiscretions. This amniotic space cocoons me from the hot, nagging world. I wish I could stay here all day—away from work, away from Trip, away from the lingering suspicion that I did something idiotic last night. In the pool, I am cleansed. Baptized. In the water, my sins are forgiven. Eventually, though, I have to surface.
“Simons, is that you?” My grandfather’s spotted, bald head peers out from behind the screen door. He shuffles to the top of the back steps, waves his cane in greeting. This little back porch has practically become the perimeter of his world.
“Hi, Tito! I’ll be there in a minute.”
Tito was a tax attorney and worked at his father’s firm, which had been established by his great-grandfather in 1858. Tito ran it until his retirement. He has reaped the benefits of privilege all his life, including memberships in exclusive clubs and friendships with local politicians and bankers.
He worked, but as a southern white male, most of his day-to-day tasks were done for him. Maids washed his laundry and ironed his shirts. They dusted his dresser and mopped his bathroom floor. Laudie ran his errands, fixed his meals, raised their children. Though Tito hasn’t been to the office in fifteen years, I’ve never seen him make a sandwich, set the table, or clean a dish.
“Don’t let her cause you any trouble.” That’s what Laudie’s mother warned Tito the day they got married. As family history goes, Laudie was a stubborn girl who didn’t take well to authority. She snuck out of Sunday school to go crabbing. When the boy down the street tried to kiss her, she threw rocks at him; one took a chunk out of his cheek. She hid her stockings under the logs in the fireplace and tossed her dolls up in the magnolia trees. Neighbors whispered about the eerie black smoke wafting from the chimney; the baby-doll-eating trees spooked the kids down the block.
But the Laudie we know has always been serene. Although they have a cook for the midday meal, Laudie serves breakfast every morning at eight and supper every evening at seven on the dot. She always wears a dress or a skirt, never pants. (Tito doesn’t like women in pants.) When I first became consciously aware of Tito’s chiding her—complaining that the shrimp creole was too salty—I licked my fork to test the tomato sauce, which tasted fine to me. When he said she looked frumpy in a shift dress, I followed her up the stairs to help her pick out a belt. When he asked her for more iced tea the moment she finally got to join us at the table, I found myself digging my nails into my chair cushion.
By the time I entered high school, I spoke up. If he said the kitchen floor was a mess, I’d say it was my fault for tracking in dirt from the garden. When he complained about the room being too cold, I would say that Laudie probably didn’t notice because she was running around so much. In all those years, Laudie never answered back. She just bowed her head and stared at her folded hands. But sometimes I thought I almost saw her turn inward, as if drawing on some invisible, utterly private reserve of power.
When I turned sixteen, she asked me to drive her to visit a friend in Beaufort. For the full hour-and-a-half ride, she sat with her trademark perfect posture in the passenger seat, tapping her feet to the songs on the oldies station. She was wearing her customary Capezio shoes—they’re leather with a low block heel and a strap over the ankle; she never went barefoot. We had reached the exit to Adams Run; we still had another hour to go. Maybe it was then, on that boring stretch of the two-lane highway, that I began actively to wonder about Laudie’s past. Why did she always wear Capezios, a noted dance-shoe brand, when a mule or a pump would have suited the occasion better? And why did she not, after all those years, ever think to hurl one of them—no matter what the style—right between Tito’s critical eyes when he picked on her for the littlest of things? What happened to that truant girl with a contrarian heart and good aim? I thought I’d start with a softball question: “Laudie, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
“A dancer. A ballerina. You know that.”
Of course. I knew the story. Laudie ran off to Atlanta when she was twenty. She hitched a ride there with a friend returning to Agnes Scott College. For six months, Laudie lived in a boardinghouse and worked as a secretary for a Coca-Cola executive. But her real reason for going was to audition for a spot as a ballerina with the Atlanta Civic Ballet.
I hated the story, because it was always told by Tito—never by Laudie. He didn’t write it down, but he may as well have because the narrative never varied. He would say he had warned her, that she was being foolish, that she’d never make the cut. She telephoned him in the spring, begged him to pick her up when she wasn’t chosen for the corps de ballet. He always made sure to add “I told her so.” He drove her home to Charleston, and ever since, that wild thoroughbred was tame as an old broodmare.
“I’m sorry you didn’t make the company. I bet you were better than all of them.” I knew it must be a source of pain for her. She still obsessively practices her ballet moves, as though the audition is next week.
“Your grandfather doesn’t know the whole story. There’s more to it than that. I have my secrets.”
“Ooh. Was there a guy involved?” I teased.
“Yes”—she nodded—“that’s part of it.” I took my eyes from the road, hoping to catch a smile, but she just stared blankly at the flat road ahead. “I’ll tell you when you’re ready.”
“I am ready! I’m sixteen.”
She laughed and patted me on my thigh. “I’ll skip to the end. I’ll tell you the moral of the story.”
“What? That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair. And you’ve got more than your share of good fortune, so don’t complain.”
“Okay, fine. What’s the moral of the story?”
“To be brave.”
I felt brave in that car, a decade ago. I made the varsity volleyball team, I could legally drive at night on my own, and Martha, my best friend, had taken me to my first house party. It was also that year that I first skipped school to go to the Waffle House with a boy in a band named Harry.
“Simons?”
I yell back to Tito, this time louder. “Coming!” With another wave of his cane, he retreats indoors; the screen door slams shut behind him. I push myself up and over the lip of the pool and slip my dress over my wet bikini.
Laudie and Tito are in the kitchen, seated at what was known as the “children’s table.” My sisters and I weren’t allowed to eat in the formal dining room until we were teenagers. To be fair, the dining room is stuffed with fragile, perishable things: a rickety vitrine, stacks of old Limoges too good to use, sherry glasses on spindly stems, two Chippendale chairs no one is allowed to sit on.
The table is wedged next to the window. Tito sits at the head, as always. Laudie sits to his left, nibbling on half a pimento cheese sandwich. She does a little hop in her chair when she sees me. “Hi, Simons.”
Tito rises to pull out a chair for me.
“Our zinnias are looking good. We already have some blooms.” Laudie has lately become more vocal about our secret garden in Tito’s presence. I think she’s testing him, pushing back a bit.
Tito would never roll his eyes; that would be too tacky, but the muscle at the corner of his jaw visibly tenses.
I shimmy my chair away from my grandfather and lean across the table to make myself closer to Laudie. “I saw them; they look great. I think it’s all the heat we’ve been having.”
“We just planted them.”
“So crazy.”
“Well, be sure to take some home with you, dear.” Laudie wears her ash-blond hair in her everyday ’do, gathered in a bun at the back of her head. A simple pendant necklace rests at her sternum. Pearl clip-on earrings illumine each side of her oval face. As always, she’s wearing her Capezio shoes, this pair the palest of blush pinks, like the flesh beneath the nail. She holds a glass of iced tea in her right hand, accentuating the delicate curve of her wrist. It has been a lifelong habit of hers to rest in pretty poses.
She was born with long, willowy arms and legs. Even in her mid eighties, she’s still taller than I am. She has maintained a slender silhouette all her life. Genetics played a big part, but Laudie has also been fastidious and disciplined about her body. She watches her weight, which never fluctuates more than a pound or two. For cocktail hour, she allows herself one glass of Chardonnay, no peanuts or cheese. Her idea of dessert is to eat an apple or orange. She has maintained these disciplines throughout her life.
When she and Tito bought the house on South Battery, she instructed the movers to put her barre in the bedroom. Tito demanded she remove it. “A bedroom is for sleeping,” he told her. So Laudie moved it herself to the grand hallway and had a carpenter mount it to the wall. In that big hallway at the top of the grand staircase, there is ample light and space, though there isn’t any air conditioning. (Laudie and Tito use window units in their main rooms, but—characteristic of their thriftiness—leave the halls and storage rooms unair-conditioned.) If the heat bothers her, she never lets anyone know it.
Most days, Laudie wears a boatneck shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves, a long skirt, and stockings. This way, she’s always two minutes away from time at the barre. She removes her day skirt, lays it on the bed, and ties a ballet wrap skirt around her waist. She swaps her Capezio heels for her performa canvas flats and exits her bedroom, closing her eyes as she settles into first position.
In the winter, she exercises midday. In the summer, she divides her routine between the early morning, before breakfast, and the evening, after supper, when the dishes are put away and Tito is glued to the news.
Of course, Laudie encouraged the three of us girls to be dancers. From childhood, Weezy preferred rough sports: basketball and soccer. Caroline danced beautifully through middle school but quit in high school when she was elected cheer captain. I simply wasn’t graceful.
Laudie will turn eighty-seven this year. Three weeks ago, she felt her heart flutter—an arrhythmia. That night she stayed in the ICU. While I had noticed her normally square shoulders had started to curl inward and her arrow-straight spine had begun to bow, these diminutions grew more pronounced after that trip to the ICU and in the following days. She looks smaller now, as though Father Time himself is pressing on her from all sides, insistent on shrinking her completely until, poof, she vanishes.
In this room, time slows. The clock ticks forward reluctantly. The space between conversations yawns wide. Laudie and Tito don’t seem to notice the static silence. Or they do notice and don’t care. It’s as if time freezes everything but me, as if I can observe my grandparents as elements in a still life. A painterly tableau. Man, woman, bowl of grapes, glass of water. They sit, paused at their meal, staring at nothing. For how long have they been so old?
“I have something for you.” I slide a little white envelope across the kitchen table. On her left wrist, I see that she wears a removable cast. “What happened?”
“Oh, it was nothing. A little bump.”
“She was on that barre again.” Tito says. “I told her to stop it.”
After her most recent trip to the hospital, the doctors said she should stick to chair yoga. I hate to admit it, but I think it might be a good idea.
“Oh hush, I’m fine,” she says.
“I keep telling her the auditions were over sixty-five years ago.”
I start to protest, but Tito screens himself behind the back page of the Local section and all I see is a large ad for dentures. Laudie ignores him and removes two tickets from the envelope. She strains her eyes to read. “La Silly . . . La Silly—”
“La Sylphide,” I interrupt, not wanting to hear her struggle to read, to observe insidious reminders that she’s slipping away from me a bit each day. “The ballet is coming to the Gaillard in August. Will you come with me?”
Laudie brightens. “Yes, of course.”
A horn blasts. Tito’s ride to Battery Hall is here right on time to take him to the weekly chess tournament he and his friends started when they retired. He stands and places his hand on the table in front of Laudie, between the two of us. “Claudia, you could fall and break the other hand. I forbid it.” He shuffles across the kitchen, gets his cane, and heads out the back door.
I could follow him, loop a young arm through his skeletal one, guide him down the steps one at a time, but I stay put. Sometimes I imagine tripping him. I wouldn’t ever, of course, but the thought has crossed my mind.
Laudie eventually extends a feathery arm, brushes a finger on my cheek. “How is Trip?” She fixes her wide-set eyes on mine. A lot of people say I take after her. “Do you miss him all the way up there in Columbia?”
I wish I missed him, but I don’t. And it’s the one thing I haven’t been able to tell Laudie. In all the conversations we’d had over the years, I’ve never held back. She would make me a glass of her sugar-free instant iced tea and clip the day’s coupons from the Post and Courier while I’d tell her every detail of my teenage life, and later, in my twenties, my romance with Trip. When Tito was in the kitchen, we’d wander up the stairs so she could exercise at the barre. I went to Laudie whenever I felt ostracized—as a fifth grader pocked with whiteheads, crowned with greasy hair, my eyes spaced so far apart my classmates called me “praying mantis.” I sought her out when I was mortified, like the time I borrowed a skirt from the most popular girl in the class, only to stain it with menstrual blood. Maybe it was because of her wisdom or her age or both; she always had a way of making sense of my world.
Perhaps because she recalls things from the past like butter and gasoline shortages, Laudie is grateful for all she has. She might live in a mansion, but she shops at Harris Teeter only on Thursdays because of the 5 percent senior discount. She saves gift wrap and string, cuts the spoiled parts off overripe fruit, and shops the sales, especially the clearance tables. And although she may have been a rebellious free spirit once, that was more than six decades ago. She’s been married to Tito for sixty-five years. How could she make sense of my doubting heart?
Trip is a good guy. He’s handsome. He loves me. He’s kind and ambitious in exactly the way my parents like. But as each new day brings me closer to marching down the aisle, a voice from inside me screams to run the other way, to run hard and fast and not look back. I can’t tell her. She’s so excited about the wedding, which will be sometime next May, or maybe June. There’s so much to celebrate in our family, with Caroline’s debut later this year and Weezy’s second baby on the way.
Still, I know she keeps a secret from me; if only I could decode it from the way she wears her hair, her choice of shoes, the tight smile her mouth forms during Tito’s nitpicking. And I know it has something to do with Atlanta, her dancing, and maybe a lover. I asked her about it constantly after our road trip to Beaufort and pestered her all through my college breaks. Mostly she laughed and changed the subject. A couple of times I saw her take a quick breath, like she was ready to talk, but then she’d pull her neck in and scrunch her nose, as though the idea smelled bad.
It was around my senior year, the year I met Trip, that I stopped asking at all. An aspiring lawyer, he told me once that some things are best left unsaid. Maybe that’s how she felt.
“He’s great, Laudie.” I squeeze her bony hand. “I’ve got to get to work.”
“Hmm.” She narrows her eyes.
“What?” I instinctively fold my arms over my chest, feeling a bit like an aphid on her zinnias.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this.” She starts to stand. “Before you leave, I have something for you.” Her body sways a bit, like she’s had too many martinis. If she were to fall, she’d snap in half. If I were to help her, to guide her through the kitchen maze with my hand against her skin—thin and white as film from boiled milk—I’d be telling her that I don’t trust her body, the temple that she toned, trained, and disciplined for the better part of a century. I remain seated, telling myself that she got herself downstairs to the kitchen table on her own, and she can probably still throw her leg up on the barre in the great hall upstairs.
Hands grazing the green countertops, she teeters toward the corner of the kitchen. I spin the porcelain saltshaker and pretend not to follow her every step, ready at any moment for a mad dash around Tito’s chair and a leap over the linoleum to dive beneath my collapsing grandmother.
She lifts a gold watch from the counter and extends it toward me. “I want to give this to you.”
I cross the room to get a better look. The slender watch has hash marks running throughout its surface, giving the band the look of golden snakeskin. “Laudie, that’s your watch. You still use it.” In the last year, she’s had the habit of giving away her finer things: a vase to me, silver platters to Mom and Weezy. I wish she’d stop. She isn’t dead yet.
“I can’t wear it with this thing on my hand. It won’t fit. I was going to give it to you anyway, so you might as well have it now.”
“Yeah, but your wrist will get better and you can wear it again. Let me put it on your right arm.”
“You’re stubborn.”
“You’re stubborn!”
She laughs. “Oh, all right.” She extends her arm, like a prima ballerina executing a classic port de bras. “Mother gave it to me when I left for Atlanta so that I’d call her every Sunday at exactly three o’clock.” She hasn’t mentioned Atlanta in years. Laudie’s eyes drift. She speaks as though in a trance. “I want you to have it later, as a reminder.”
“Laudie, I’ll never forget you.”
“Simons.” She beckons me closer, her milky eyes hardening to a bright crystal blue. “It’s not a reminder of me; it’s a reminder to be brave.”