Rhoda left the house on Webster Street early in the morning on a November day. Teddy may have already left to go to school. Maybe the school bus had picked him up to take him to Metairie Park Country Day School and maybe it had not. She didn’t mother him anymore. Eric mothered him. He was all that Eric had because she was almost never there. It was a marriage that had failed. She wouldn’t have a child for Eric and he wouldn’t fuck her anymore. Not that sex between them had ever made either of them happy. It had always been a tortured, patched-up affair. Because they didn’t love each other. She loved his money and he loved her cousins getting them into the tennis club. He loved Faulkner. Had written his paper on Faulkner in undergraduate school. Now he was living Faulkner. He was in the middle of a Grecian Faulkner tragedy.
After Rhoda drove off in the new green car, the green Mercedes she had bought with the bonds her father gave her, Eric got Teddy up and made breakfast for him and walked with him to where he caught the bus.
“Your mother’s going to be gone awhile,” he said. “Let’s have some fun while she’s gone. Let’s go out on the boat. Invite some of your friends.”
“Sure.” Teddy turned to his stepfather. Trying to decide how to make him feel better. Teddy felt responsible for Eric. “She’ll be back, Eric. She always comes back.”
“Yeah, I know. Look, there’s Robert Skelton hanging out the window looking at you.” Eric patted Teddy on the arm. They were the same height now. Every month Teddy grew another inch. He was fifteen years old. Had grown so tall, so sweet, such a sweet young man, such big brown eyes. Eric’s heart melted when he looked into those eyes.
Teddy climbed aboard the bus and joined his friends. They waved to Eric. They all loved Eric. He was the best of the best. The best parent any of them had.
The bus drove off down Webster Street in a cloud of black exhaust. Eric walked back to the house to get the dogs and take them for a walk. Three Old English sheepdogs, an outrageous collection of dogs, an unbelievable problem on a fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lot in uptown New Orleans.
The day was cool and fresh. The dogs went crazy when they got outside the fence. They ran everywhere, jumping and turning, making their low muffled sheepdog barks. They overwhelmed Eric, licking him and jumping up beside him. They trembled, waiting to run to the park, in the cool of the morning, waiting to jump into the lagoon and swim out through the lily pads, chasing the geese and ducks.
Aboard the bus Teddy went to the back where the dealing was being done. Robert had a bottle of pills he had stolen from his physician father. David Altmont had a small amount of marijuana. Crazy Eddy had a bottle of whiskey in his lunch box. He was too crazy. He was going to get them all in trouble. Teddy had the sheet of Windowpane he had bought the day before at Benjamin Franklin. “I tried it last night. I want to save most of it for the weekend, but I’ll sell ten hits. For cash. I’m not giving this stuff away and I’m not trading.”
In the front of the bus the kids who weren’t into dope yet looked straight ahead. They pretended not to notice what was going on behind them. “You kids sit down back there,” the bus driver yelled. “Sit down and behave yourselves.” Teddy took a seat next to his best friend, Robert. “We can go out on the boat this weekend if you want to,” he said. “Eric’s going to take me. Momma’s gone.”
“Where’d she go?” Robert liked Teddy’s mother. She was always nice to him and talked to him about his father.
“To Arkansas. She’s gone up there to find an apartment. She’s going to be gone all winter.”
“Where will you stay?”
“With Eric and Grandmother.”
“So where’d you get the Windowpane?”
“They made a batch at Benjamin Franklin last week. It’s good. I had a good time last night.” He pushed up the window of the bus and stuck his arm out to shoot the peace sign to some kids in a car. He was in a good mood. Nobody was going to bother him this week. The coach was letting him suit up for the game on Saturday morning. Ellie Marcus was going to let him see her Friday night. It was okay. If only he could stay away from his grandmother, he’d be all right.
Rhoda pulled out onto the Bonnet Carré Spillway and speeded up. Hammond, then Brookhaven, then Jackson, then Vicksburg, and Raine would be waiting to drive her up to Arkansas. Well, I’m not in love with him, she was thinking. I just want him to show me how to get there. Arkansas. My God! I don’t even know where it is. And I won’t feel guilty. It’s Eric’s fault, goddammit. He shouldn’t have stopped fucking me. I can’t have a baby. It would kill the children if I did that. It would kill me. She shuddered, thinking of it.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. She had loved them with all her heart and they were breaking her heart. Especially the oldest, Malcolm, who was so beautiful it seemed the sun came out when he walked into a room. Now he was gone, God knows where. Walking like a god among the hippies. Her golden son, the one who was going to swim the channel for her. She tightened her mouth, speeded up, took a curve doing ninety. It didn’t matter. To hell with them. She’d do it herself, would be a poet, would have her name everywhere. Fools’ names and fools’ faces, always seen in public places. But it wouldn’t be like that. It would be like Anne Sexton. Women would weep when they read her poems, would be fused together and save themselves because of it. She slowed down. Tears were welling up in her eyes, the tears she shed every time she thought about the day she started writing. It had happened because of a poem she read. She had gone on her bike to the Tulane track to run. Then she had changed her mind and gone to the Maple Street Bookstore instead and bought a book of Anne Sexton’s poems. A posthumous book. 45 Mercy Street. She had ridden over to the track and sat down upon a bench and started reading. “I am torn in two, but I will conquer myself. I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me.” Then she started crying.
She came around the last curve of the Bonnet Carré Spillway and out onto the long flat bridge across the marshes. Up ahead was the high span of the bridge at Pass Manchac, then the farmlands would begin, then Mississippi, her home. Then Vicksburg, and Raine would be waiting for her, her lover, her one and only love, the one who never stopped loving her no matter how long it was or what she did. Because she was as bad as he was. Because someday she would be as strong. Someday she would overpower him, but she did not know that yet. All she knew now was that he owed her favors and she was going to collect one.
She went to the motel where she had arranged to meet him and got a room and called him and sat down upon the bed to wait. Then he was there, with his exotic smell so terrible and real, so far away from the Chi Omega sorority and anything to do with modern poetry. It was a smell for Homer and the Greeks, for Odysseus, Julius Caesar, the Kha Khan. “How’ve you been?” she asked him.
“I’ve been great, baby. How about you?”
Then she took off her clothes and lay down upon the bed with him and tried to remember how to be his baby. Yes, she thought, I do not love him anymore but I will fuck him before I use him as a chauffeur.
Later she cried, because he could always make her cry. Maybe she really wanted to kill him. After they made love they went into the motel dining room and had dinner and then he left her and went back to his house and slept with his wife.
In the morning he came and got her and drove her up to Arkansas, to his state, past the small town where he had been a hero, past towns where he had fucked every other cheerleader, past plantations that belonged to men who paid to shake his hand, past Little Rock, where his sister had died in a dirty hospital, and on up to the northwest Arkansas hills, which did not belong to him or anyone, which were going to belong to Rhoda now, because that was what she wanted.
It was late in the afternoon when they found the campus of the University of Arkansas and parked outside the tall building that housed the English Department. She had been reading the poems to him. Reading some of them two or three times. They were in a blue loose-leaf notebook, more than a hundred of them. A hundred poems she had written that summer in a hundred days. “You stay here,” she said, getting out of the car. “I won’t be long. I just want to say hello and tell them that I’m here.” She stood holding the door of the Lincoln. She was dressed in a black wool suit with a fur collar and black silk hose and high-heeled shoes. “I hate to leave you here.”
“It’s okay. I’ll read the poems.”
“Oh, good.” She smiled. For a moment she stopped being scared.
She’s scared to death, Raine thought. Poor baby, this is her big chance and she doesn’t want to blow it. It’s just a bunch of underpaid college professors but she doesn’t know it. She thinks these guys can teach her something.
He smiled the smile he used for his Little League team. “Go knock ’em dead, baby. I’ll be right here.” She walked across the street and into the double glass doors of the building. It was growing dark. The swift dark that falls in November. Raine took a Sporting News out of the glove compartment and started reading it. Then he put it down and began to leaf through the poems. He liked the one about him. The one she had written years ago at Millsaps. “Pernicious sidewinder, coiled and waiting. Cold and free.” She could do it. She was a winner. Well, he was pulling for her. He was on her side.
He had been a champion. He would never have to wait on jealousy, would never have to begrudge a moment’s glory to another soul. He bowed his head. Raine paid obeisance to the gods of any place. He was a decent man. Most of the time he played fair and told the truth. He looked off into the west, between two buildings. What was left of the light was spreading out into the low blue clouds on the horizon. It was pretty country, no doubt about that. If she stayed up here it might be good for her.
“Raine.” He looked back toward the building. She was hurrying his way with a big man beside her. “Come meet Randolph,” she was saying. “He adores you. He had a fit when he found out you were with me.”
Raine got out and shook the man’s hand. “I’m honored,” the man said. “I saw you play when I was a kid. I couldn’t believe it when she told me you were sitting outside in the car.”
Later, they all went over to the big man’s house and the man’s wife cooked dinner. Then they sat around the living room and some young people who were trying to learn to be writers came in and met them. Raine and Randolph talked about football. Rhoda and the young people talked about poetry. She acted as if she was happy. She thinks she knows what she is doing, Raine decided. She thinks this is going to save her.
The next day they drove around and found her an apartment to rent and gave a man a deposit on it and arranged for the heat and electricity to be turned on in her name the first of January. Then they went to the big man’s office and told him good-bye and then they started driving home.
They stopped in Gould, Arkansas, and bought cheese and crackers and ate them in the car as they drove. It was the first thing she had eaten in days. “I’m glad to see you eat something, baby. You don’t eat enough.”
“Do you think they liked me? Did Randolph say anything to you?”
“They like you, baby. Hell, compared to those women that we met, I think that skinny blonde one is a lesbian. I’d watch out for her if I was you.”
“She was strange, wasn’t she? They said she was a good poet but I can’t believe it. She’s so ugly. I don’t believe in ugly poets.” She scooted over closer to him and let him put his arm around her. She dropped cracker crumbs on his pants, then brushed them off. She closed her eyes and lay her head down into the crook of his shoulder. It was over. It was done. She was going to join the poets. It was okay. On the second of January she would come up here to live. Nothing else mattered. Not Eric or Teddy or Malcolm or Jimmy. Nothing mattered but the poems. The poems she would write to make women cry and break them open. To have her name in lights, to be famous, lauded and beloved. She would make it happen. It had started. Nothing could stop her now.
The skinny blonde girl did turn out to be a part-time lesbian. She would be whatever her ambition needed her to be. She dug her nails into poetry and held on for dear life. Poison pen, Rhoda thought of her, and it would turn out to be true.
There was also a real poet, a sweet soft girl who was married to a carpenter. The Ally, Rhoda decided. The one I can trust. The night they met they had gotten drunk on gin and laughed until two in the morning.
There was a gorgeous preppie from New England. He recognized a blanket on her bed as coming from a store in Boston. My husband went to Harvard, Rhoda told him. So they formed a bond. He’s the one I’ll fuck, Rhoda thought. If I can get him.
There was a dope addict and a man who ate too much and a cynical graduate student who was going to make a career of going to school. And five or six more. It was nineteen seventy-six. Writing schools were new things on the horizon. Their staffs were small and made up of people who were still writing. The students were dedicated and poor. Some of them lived on welfare and food stamps. They didn’t care if they had a car. They ate and drank and slept poetry and literature.
Strangely enough, a body of poetry was arising from this heat. There was a network of poets and writing schools across the United States. Men and women were writing morning, night, and noon. Some of it was very, very good. “Like a Diamondback in the Trunk of the Witness’s Buick” was a title Rhoda loved, after the poet, Francis Alter, took over her education. After he took her away from the writing program and she only listened to him.
But on this first week, this ice-cold week in January, when Rhoda drove to Fayetteville alone and moved into her freezing cold, ugly, little ground-floor apartment, the main thing she had to do was keep warm. “I don’t know if you can stand the freezing winters,” the director of the program had told her. “It’s hard up here in winter.” Now she knew what he meant. The first night she slept in the apartment she piled all her clothes on the bed and slept beneath them. It was five above zero outside. It was ten above in the apartment. The next day she went to the office of the apartment building to complain. A gas pipe was broken, she was told. We’ll have it fixed sometime today.
That afternoon she went out and rented a better apartment. One in a better neighborhood, which cost twice as much. Who am I fooling? she decided. Who am I trying to fool?
Later that afternoon she walked through the snow to the English department and found Randolph, and sat around and talked to him. Another man was there, a completely beautiful man of uncertain age. “Meet Francis Alter,” Randolph said. “The best poet in the state.”
Their eyes met. From that moment on they would be friends. Until the day he told her good-bye and left her and went home and shot himself, not a single moment would be cruel or jealous or untrue. Many years later she knew that even the days before he did it were not untrue. He kept saying things to her that she remembered later. Look, he would say, making her look at a revision he had suggested to a poem. Look at it, Rhoda. Really listen. I won’t always be here to tell you this.
Good-bye, he had said, when he embraced her, on the day before he left New Orleans and went home and shot himself. Good-bye, remember this, remember me.
She had been so lucky. All the women who made love to him, who held him in the sleepless dark nights of his soul, had never had what she had from him. She had his friendship and his help with her work. It was a gift she had longed for all her life.
So there was that first afternoon and she had met Francis in Randolph’s office and they had sat around and talked, the crazy talk that writers talk, talk that transcends the food stamps and old cars and cold apartments, talk that lifts the spirit out of the realm of houses or clothes or cars. “Farewell is a sword that has worn out its scabbard,” Francis had written. “Men with names like water poured from stone jugs” was the kind of line they read and talked about and marveled over.
Poetry was alive in the United States in nineteen seventy-six. I read everything that’s written, Francis said. So do I, Rhoda answered. I subscribe to forty magazines.
So that was the first night and the first day. Then the classes began and Rhoda was busy from morning to night, going to classes, writing poetry, making friends. She had the new apartment with a fireplace. She had the green Mercedes. She had enough money to pay for things. She was kind and wanted to be friends with everyone. The snow fell and people had to walk uphill on dangerous icy streets to get to classes. She never complained. She never worried about the ice. She got up at dawn and wrote poetry about everything in the world, everything she could see, every person that she met. Her soul unfolded like a lotus in the freezing cold January weather, in the little mountain town, with her young brilliant broke friends.
Only the thin blonde girl was mean-spirited and angry. Rhoda tried to stay away from her, but it was hard to do. She was married to the preppie, it turned out. So Rhoda gave up on him and fucked a fiction writer instead.
In New Orleans her family was getting along quite well, so they said. “I’m fine,” Teddy said, when she called him. “Stay as long as you want.”
A friend of Teddy’s killed himself at a party in uptown New Orleans on a Saturday night. Shot himself in the head while sitting in a car outside his girlfriend’s house. We don’t know why he did it, Teddy told her. It’s a mystery to me.
It was not a mystery. It was LSD. The sixteen-year-old children who knew it did not tell. It never made the papers. LSD was something Rhoda could not understand. It was inconceivable to her that anyone would do something that messed with their brain. She did not know alcohol was a drug. She was dumb as a post about the brain and the things that harm it. All she knew was poetry. All she knew was fantasy and escape.
Francis had that kind of imagination. Rhoda and Francis. They had learned to throw their minds like ventriloquists. And the language they shared came from the same place, from the Mississippi Delta, from the flat black bottom lands on the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Francis steals from black people, his detractors said. I think I’m part black, Francis told Rhoda several times. I have the body of the black people of the Delta, the tribes from western Africa. After he said it, Rhoda began to believe it. He did have that body, those huge hip muscles, the stout intense beauty of the football players in the line at Ole Miss. I wish I had some, she answered. But I don’t think I do. They made the language, Francis went on. When Africa lent its drums to English, southern speech began. Listen to the drums in Faulkner, in García Marquez, who learned from Faulkner. Can’t you hear it, can’t you hear the heart, the beat.
The winter wore on. Rhoda sent hundreds of poems out in envelopes to magazines she read and liked. Francis told her of other magazines, gave her things to read, the names of editors, the addresses of small presses and magazines, and, slowly at first, and then faster, Rhoda’s poems began to be published. Now she didn’t have as many friends as she had had at first. Now only Francis and the sweet girl poet really loved her. And Eric began to call and tell her to come home. He was lonesome for her. He was worried about Teddy. He wanted to patch up the marriage and start again.
In April, before the semester was really over, she began to leave. She took her tests, won a poetry award that made some more people hate her, began to fly home to New Orleans on the weekends. She was saying farewell to this thing she had wanted so much and now was tired of. She was tired of acting like she was poor, tired of never getting dressed up in nice clothes. She was tired of the small, poor restaurants, tired of the skinny blonde girl saying arch jealous things to her.
At that time Rhoda always kept her word. Any promise, even if she made it when she was drunk, was treated as a sacred bond. She had not learned yet how to stop people from manipulating her, had not learned how to say, I reserve the right to change my mind. I will take back promises you curry from me in moments of weakness. She was many years away from that sort of wisdom. Which is how the skinny blonde girl ended up living in her apartment, wearing all her clothes, losing half her papers, and other hardly-to-be-spoken-of invasions.
It was the last day of classes and Rhoda was preparing to go home to New Orleans. She was keeping the apartment for the summer in case she might want to come back in the fall. The clothes she wore in Fayetteville were not anything she would wear in New Orleans so she left them in the drawers and closets. The worksheets of three hundred poems and five short stories were in the dresser with underwear and flannel gowns and heavy socks on top of them.
Rhoda woke up early and packed the car, meaning to begin driving at three o’clock. She left the car in the parking lot and walked to school. It was a lovely spring day, the trees were covered with small new leaves so delicate and clean they took Rhoda’s breath away. She had been living in New Orleans for so many years she had forgotten how the seasons come and go. How one day there are buds, then fatter buds, then tiny leaves which grow and darken. There was a hickory tree behind her apartment that she had been watching with great delight. On this day, at the very first of May, the leaves were half the size of her hand and she marveled at them as she walked to school.
The preppie rode up beside her on his bicycle. When he was alone he was a lovely man. He got down off the bike and walked along beside her. “I really liked the story you put on the worksheet. The one that Intro took. It’s really good, Rhoda. The best thing that’s been written all year. I bet it made Ketch jealous.”
“He’s mad about it. He liked me as long as I stuck to poetry. You wouldn’t believe what he did to me the other night. Well, who cares. Let him fuck his boring little wife. I’m going home.”
“I wish you weren’t leaving. We’re having a party this afternoon. That’s why I stopped. To ask you to join us. We’re going to barbecue a goat. Wedge is bringing it from his mother’s farm.”
“You’re going to sacrifice a goat?” She started laughing. The preppie laughed too.
“No, it’s been in a freezer. I think it’s an old goat.”
“Who all is coming?”
“Randolph and his wife and Doctor Wheeler. We’re going to have a symposium. Judy got some acid. Have you ever done it?”
“God, no. I couldn’t do anything that changed my brain. I’ve only smoked marijuana once and then I got paranoid and almost went crazy. I stick to gin and vodka and I’ve about stopped that.”
“You ought to try it. Everyone ought to try it once.”
“Not me. I’m too afraid.”
“Well, we’re going to this afternoon. You can watch. If you decide to stay, come on out.”
Understand this. Rhoda had no intention of going to the goat roast even if Randolph and Doctor Wheeler were going to be there. All she wanted to do was go to her last two classes, tell a few people good-bye, and start driving.
She went to her nine o’clock Form and Theory class. Then she wandered upstairs to see if she had any mail. She had three letters. A story had been accepted in the Prairie Schooner. A poem had been accepted by the Paris Review. Her mother had written to say she better hurry home.
She threw her mother’s letter in the trash can and ran into Randolph’s office to tell him about the poem and the story. “This demands a celebration,” he said. “Are you coming out to Ron and Judy’s this afternoon?”
“They’re going to take LSD.”
“No one told me that. Where’d you hear that?”
“I just did. Well, I meant to drive on home. But I might as well stay another night. I’d be too excited to drive. I can’t believe it. They want the story.”
“It’s a good story. You can write fiction as well as poems.”
“Oh, God. I can’t believe it. It’s too good to be true.” She held the letter up in the air. She shimmered. She levitated. She left the earth and flew around the ceiling of Randolph’s room. He was elated too. Students being published made them all look good, made the program defensible to the dean and the board of directors of the university.
“You better come on out there this afternoon and celebrate,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen. They’re just going to barbecue a goat, for Christ’s sake.”
So she went to the party. She took half an Antabuse so she couldn’t drink and ate part of a sandwich she had made the night before. She hadn’t learned how to be happy yet. She didn’t even know how to feed herself or treat herself to the simple joys of life. All she knew how to do was to run from pathology and become ecstatic when someone in Nebraska, whom she’d never met, told her that her work was good. That’s all most people ever learn. To see their reflections in other faces.
She ate her paltry little chicken sandwich and took a bath and changed her clothes and put on tennis shoes and socks and drove out to Markham’s Hill. She went up a gravel road to a yellow mailbox and turned onto a dirt road that led to a pasture on the top of the hill. An old lady owned most of the houses on the hill. She imagined herself to be a patron of the arts and rented the various houses and shacks to painters and potters and writers. It was a little community, with an open-air hot tub built by hippies in the sixties that was said to be the place where twenty people got hepatitis one winter. Rhoda was fascinated and repelled by Markham’s Hill, as she always was by squalor.
Not that anything seemed squalid to her that afternoon. She had sold a story and a poem. She was going home in glory. She had come and seen and conquered. If Judy and Ron were taking LSD, or dropping acid as they called it, it would be all right. Randolph would protect her and maybe later she could write about it. Nothing is ever lost on a writer, she told herself. Since today she believed she was one.
The barbecue pit was dug. The goat was roasting on the coals. Ketch was standing by the pit looking glum. He barely glanced up when she said hello to him. She shrugged it off and went over to the steps where the overeater poet was holding forth about hogscalds in the Ozark Mountains.
Judy came down the stairs wearing a cotton dress that made her look like a farm wife. “I sold a story and a poem,” Rhoda couldn’t resist saying.
“Who to?” Judy asked.
“The Paris Review and the Prairie Schooner.”
“You ought to send them to Ironwood. It would be better.”
“Is Randolph here yet?”
“He’s in the backyard, at the horseshoe pit.” She motioned around the side of the house. Rhoda walked that way and found him pitching horseshoes with two of the students.
This afternoon was going to be a wash. That much was clear. This afternoon would waste the fine happiness of the morning, not to mention a day of driving time.
“Here’s Rhoda,” Randolph said. “She sold a story and a poem. Give her a drink, somebody. Come on, girl, you want to pitch horseshoes with us?”
“Not that I know of. I’ll just watch. I just want a Coke, Tom. A Coke will be fine.” The young man walked over to a tub of ice and reached down and retrieved a Coke and gave it to her. The preppie who was married to the skinny blonde bitch was behind him.
“I heard there was a hot tub that spread hepatitis from here to Maine,” Rhoda said to the preppie. “Where is it? I’d like to see it.”
“Come on. It isn’t far. I’ll walk you there.” They set off down a path behind the house.
“Should you leave?” Rhoda asked. “What about the goat?”
“They’ll take care of it. Wedge is doing it.” He took her arm. They walked in silence for a hundred yards or so. When they were out of sight of the house, he pulled her to him and kissed her. “There,” he said. “Sooner or later I had to do that.”
“You’re married to Judy,” Rhoda said. “I’m swearing off married men.”
“I married her when I was drunk. I’d leave today if I had anywhere to go. We live together because it’s convenient. We don’t fuck.”
“Well, I don’t want her mad at me. I’m scared to death of Judy.” Rhoda stepped farther back.
“She’s dropping acid. She wouldn’t care if you fucked me by the barbecue pit.”
“When is she going to do it?”
“She’s doing it now. She did it this morning. Didn’t you think she looked sweet? She gets sweet when she’s high.”
“Let’s go back. I really want to go on back. I need to start driving. I need to get to Little Rock by midnight.” Rhoda started back up the path. Judy was coming down the other way to meet them. Randolph was behind her. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” Judy said, when the four of them met at a clearing in the path.
“Sure,” Rhoda said.
“I was wondering. We’re being evicted here in two weeks. I wonder if you’d let us sleep in your apartment for a few days while we wait to get our new apartment. I know it’s an imposition, but Randolph said you were keeping it for the summer. It would be such a help. We have all this stuff and nowhere to put it.”
“Sure,” Rhoda said. “If it’s only for a few days. But you have to take care of things. I left all my papers there. And I might come back at any time. I mean, I’m not going to be gone all summer. I have to come and get my mail.”
“How could we get in?” Judy asked. She was beaming, standing in the shadow of divine Randolph, who was the most generous of men. Weighed down with Randolph’s goodness and the triumph of the day and the need to escape and the shameful burden of her husband’s money, Rhoda looked at the preppie, not at Judy, and said yes.
“You have to stay clear of my papers,” she repeated. “I don’t want anyone to even touch them.”
“Of course,” they said. So Rhoda took a key ring out of her pocketbook and removed a key and handed it over.
“Thanks so much,” Judy exclaimed. “You don’t know what this means to us.”
Randolph was shaking his head from side to side. Randolph was not pleased.
By seven o’clock that night Rhoda was on the road. By ten she was in Little Rock. She stopped at a restaurant and called home and talked to her husband and Teddy. “I miss you so much,” she told them and it was true. Then she called Raine and told him to come and meet her and he did. He got into a car and drove to Dumas, Arkansas, and met her there in the middle of the night and held her in his arms and made her cry. “Everything you said came true,” she told him. “My work is being published everywhere. It terrifies me and I love it. I don’t know what I’m doing. I have to go home and see what’s wrong with Teddy. I have to mend my marriage. No one can live two lives at once. I’m schizophrenic from all this traveling. Now that bitch is going to stay in my apartment. I’m scared to death to have her in the same place as my papers. I’m paranoid and schizophrenic and I miss my sons.”
“It’s okay, baby,” he said to her. “Go to sleep now. It will be better in the morning.”
It was better. She spent the morning with Raine and took strength from him. She showed him the poems she had been writing. She sat beside him on a bed and ate breakfast on a tray and giggled and was happy. Then she dressed and drove home to New Orleans. It would be all right. The world was a goodly place. People could be trusted. There was time for everything.
In New Orleans Teddy and Eric were straightening up the house to get ready for her homecoming. They had been vacuuming for hours to get the dog hairs off the rugs and sofas. They had filled the refrigerator. Their mother was coming home.
In Fayetteville the skinny blonde poet and her husband and a lesbian friend were moving into Rhoda’s apartment. They took all her clothes and papers out of the drawers and put them in boxes and lined them up against the wall. They brought in their typewriters and bicycles and the remains of the goat. They turned the air conditioning down to sixty-eight degrees. It was going to be a splendid summer. Living off the rich bitch from New Orleans. Off the fat of the land.
Rhoda walked into her house in New Orleans late that afternoon. Eric and Teddy were waiting for her. They had taken the sheepdogs to the vet to have them cleaned. They had put on clean shirts and combed their hair. They took her to the darkroom and showed her the photographs they had made of people in the park. After a while Teddy went down the street to a friend’s house and Rhoda awkwardly made love to her husband. “I love you,” she said, and she meant it. She did love Eric, his intelligence and goodness, his kindness and hope and gentle charm, his love for her child.
“We will start again,” he said.
“Good,” she answered. They both hoped it was so.
May went by and June and July. Rhoda took Teddy to a child psychiatrist. Teddy went to the psychiatrist on Monday and Wednesday and Friday. Eric and Rhoda talked to the psychiatrist on Thursdays. “You have to discipline him,” the psychiatrist said. “He wants you to.”
“Well, we aren’t going to hit him.” Rhoda laughed and looked at Eric. The psychiatrist was seventy years old. He was a friend of Eric’s parents. Both of his children were doing all right. In a world of insane children, his children were married and sane. Rhoda and Eric had decided to take his advice.
“Be stronger than he is. Don’t give him money.”
“Is he taking dope?” They leaned toward the psychiatrist.
“I don’t think so. But his friends are. Watch his friends. Keep him busy.”
“He won’t go to camp. He came home the first week last year. We wasted two thousand dollars on that camp.”
“Get him a job.”
“Okay. We’ll try.”
Teddy got himself a job. He got a job being a roadie for the Neville Brothers. He carried their instruments in and out of Tipitina’s when they did their gigs.
Eric and Rhoda didn’t know what to think about Teddy’s job. They didn’t know what was going on in the world enough to understand Tipitina’s. Rhoda had seen the graduate students taking dope in Fayetteville but she didn’t believe that applied to Teddy. Not sweet little Teddy with his sheepdogs and his camera and his bright red hair.
“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Eric said. “It’s a bar.”
“At least it’s music,” Rhoda answered. “At least it’s art.”
“We’ll wait and see.” Eric was in a quandary. He was so glad to have his wife back that he didn’t want to queer it by being too suspicious of Teddy. He took Rhoda’s arm. He smiled his Holden Caulfield smile. He was rewarded. She took him into the bedroom and made love to him.
In July Rhoda got an electric bill from Fayetteville for three hundred dollars. She got a phone bill for more than that. “I’d better go up there and see what’s going on,” she told Eric. “I want to get my mail. I have to kick those kids out of my apartment.”
“Okay,” he said. “If you have to. But don’t stay too long. We need you here. Teddy needs you. I need you.” He held his breath. He controlled his mind. He was a mensch.
In the morning Rhoda called her apartment and told the skinny blonde girl that she was coming to Fayetteville. “Be sure you’re gone by then,” she said. “I’m going to be real tired when I get there.”
“Don’t worry about the bills,” the skinny blonde girl said. “We’ll pay you back. I applied for a National Endowment grant. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get it.”
“Just be sure you’re out of my apartment, Judy.”
“Oh, we will be. Don’t worry about that. It was nice of you to let us stay.”
Rhoda drove all afternoon and spent the night in Little Rock. The next morning she drove to Fayetteville and got there at noon. Judy and Ron were just getting up. The lesbian on the sofa was still asleep. They had had a party the night before.
“My God,” Rhoda said. “I can’t believe this. You promised me you’d be gone.”
“Our place wasn’t ready yet.”
“Well, you have to get out of here. I mean right now.” Rhoda stood in the living room trying not to look at the lesbian, who was a small, thin girl who only seemed to be along for the ride. Rhoda kept on standing there while Ron and Judy got dressed and packed some things and started taking them to the car. “I want all this stuff out of here right now,” Rhoda said. “I mean it. My God, where are my things?”
“Calm down,” Judy said. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand that this is my apartment and you said you were going to stay a few days and it’s July. For Christ’s sake. And you owe me six hundred dollars for the phone and electric bill.”
“You can afford it,” Judy said. “Get your husband to pay for it.” She shifted the canvas bag to her other side. She waited.
“Get that typewriter off the dining room table. I mean it, Judy. Get all this junk out of here by the time I get back. I’m going to see Randolph.”
“He knows we’re staying here. We had him over one night to eat supper.”
“Oh, my God.” Rhoda walked through the apartment opening drawers and closets. The bedroom closets were stuffed with piles of half-clean clothes. There were milk crates marked Do Not Remove From Premises, filled with bric-a-brac.
Rhoda walked back into the living room and glared at Ron and the lesbian and went out to her car and drove over to Wheeler Hall.
“I wondered what you’d think,” Randolph said. “I should have called you, but they said you knew. Christ, the suitors from Ulysses. We went over there one night. Shannon was appalled. She told me to call you. I should have done it.”
“They’d better be gone when I get back.”
“Good luck.”
“I’ll go get my mail.”
“Why wouldn’t you let us forward it?”
“I don’t know. There’s something about having a mailbox here. It’s important to me somehow. It feels lucky.” She smiled. Her work. Something of value that she alone had created. Her heart lifted, as it often did in Randolph’s presence. How did he have the bounty, the largess, to go on giving and giving and giving. “I feel bad about being so mean to them. After all, they’re broke.”
“They’re grown people, Rhoda. Her parents are physicians in Kansas City. She went to Duke. She’s doing what she wants to do.”
“Who’s the lesbian?”
“Someone from Sassafras in Eureka Springs. They rescue housewives.” He started laughing. Rhoda started laughing too. They wept with laughter at the madness and divinity of humankind. Above Randolph’s desk was a poster of Botticelli’s Primavera. Rhoda laughed into the flowers on the heavenly woman’s dress.
The day got better. There were five good letters in the stacks of mail. Two were acceptances of poems. Another was an encouraging letter from the Atlantic Monthly. One was an apology from Ketch. He was working in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress. He was reading the Christian Existentialists. He said he was sorry he had treated Rhoda as a Thou.
The fifth was from the Prairie Schooner. They were giving her a prize. A thousand-dollar prize for the story they were publishing in October.
Rhoda clasped the letters to her bosom. She was lucky again. Fayetteville was lucky for her. She was the luckiest woman on the earth. She went back over to the apartment and helped Ron and Judy pack up their things. She let them leave some of their stuff in the coat closet in the hall. She let them leave a whole closet full of musty half-clean clothes piled from floor to ceiling in the only storage closet in the house. She forgave them their debt. She offered to buy them dinner soon. She watched them drive away. She took an envelope the lesbian had given her into the house and wrote a check for fifty dollars to the place in Eureka Springs that saved the housewives and almost mailed it. She found the vacuum sweeper. She vacuumed the rugs. She called a housecleaning service and made a date with them for the following afternoon. She wiped off the table. She got her old Royal portable typewriter out of the pantry and set it on the table. She put a new ribbon in it. She found a ream of bond paper and set it on the table. She was a writer. In the morning she would begin to write.
She put on her old shoes and left the apartment and began to walk. She walked up to the campus and watched the sun go down. What the hell, this was her life as a writer. This crazy town that she had found that had nothing to do with any other life that she had ever led. She was here. She was back where she belonged. She could stay awhile. Maybe she would come back in the fall.
That night Eric called. She told him about the prize from the Prairie Schooner. She told him about the lesbian. She told him about the piles of dirty clothes. She laughed uproariously as she told it. “Fateville,” she said. “Home of the Hogs and the Poets.”
“Sounds like the suitors from Ulysses,” Eric answered.
“That’s what Randolph said. God, Eric, I forget how smart you are. How educated. I envy you your education. Listen, I won’t stay long. Just a week or so. I need to clean this place up for the fall and answer all this mail. Is Teddy okay?”
“He’s fine. You’re going back in the fall? You definitely have to do that?” He sighed. He looked off into a bank of ferns growing in the dormer windows of his kitchen. His wifeless kitchen.
“Oh, please. Don’t be mad about it. I have to have my turn. I never had a turn, Eric. All I had were babies.”
“It’s all right. But come home soon if you’re going back in the fall.”
“I’ll fly home every weekend. I’ll fix it so I don’t have classes on Friday. I’ll stay here from Monday to Thursday and be home every weekend. I thought about that driving up here. I figured it out. I love you, Eric. The happier I am, the more I love you. Don’t you know that? Be happy for me. Let me have this. I have to have this. It’s so important to me.” She drew in her breath. She waited.
“Of course. Whatever you want, Rhoda. Whatever you have to have. But I miss you.”
“I miss you. I love you. Take care of Teddy. It won’t be long. Well, I better go now. I want to do some work.”
She hung up the phone. Then she took it off the hook. Then she made a pot of coffee and went to her typewriter and decided to write all night. It was her one and only life. Her one and only chance. The best year of her life. The year her dreams might all come true.