On the day of my husband’s annual fund-raising gala, I was down by the river liberating rats.
There were two of them on this day, massive, stolid, blunt-snouted beasts who bore no more resemblance to common house mice than beavers, or the nutria from the bayous of my childhood. Rattus rattus they were, or, more familiarly, European black rats. I looked them up in Webster’s Unabridged when Pom first designated me their official executioner. I figured that if you’re going to drown something, the least you can do is know its proper name. That was a fatal mistake. Name something, the old folk saying goes, and you have made it your own. Rattus rattus became mine the instant I closed Webster’s, and after that I simply took the victims caught in Pom’s traps down to the river and, instead of drowning them, let them go. Who, after all, would know? Only the dogs went with me, and, being bird dogs, they were uninterested in anything without wings. The leaden-footed, trundling rats were as far from the winged denizens of God’s bestiary as it was possible to be. My hideous charges waddled to freedom unmolested.
There were two and three of them a day in those first steaming days of June. Pom was delighted with the humane traps. The poison put down by the exterminating company had worked even better, but the rats had all died in the walls and for almost a month before we tried the traps the house smelled like a charnel house, sick-sweet and a pestilential. We’d had to cancel several meetings and a dinner party. The exterminators had promised that the rats would all go outside to die, but none of them had, and Pom was furious with both man and beast.
“Why the hell aren’t they going outside?” he said over and over.
“Would you, if you could die in a nice warm pile of insulation?” I said. “Why on earth did either of us believe they’d go outside? Why would they? They probably start to feel the pain almost immediately. They’re not going to run a 10K with arsenic in their guts.”
I hated the poisoning. I hated the thought of the writhing and the squeaking and scrabbling and dying. I never actually heard it, but somehow that was even worse. My mind fashioned grand guignol dances of death nightly behind my Sheetrock. I took to leaving the radio on softly all night, in fear that I would hear. The only result of that was that I would come awake at dawn with my heart jolting when the morning deejay started his drive-time assault and would lie there blearily for long seconds, wondering if it had been the phone I heard, or Pom’s beeper, or Glynn calling, or some new banshee alarm from Mommee upstairs. Only when I had listened for a couple of minutes did it sink in that I was hearing Fred the Undead blasting Atlanta out of bed and onto the road.
As early as I wakened on those mornings, Pom was invariably up earlier and was almost always gone to the clinic by the time I padded into the kitchen in search of coffee. I would find his usual note propped up against the big white Braun coffeemaker: “Merritt: 3 more, 2, in lv. rm. and 1 in libr. Call A. about Fri, I think there’s something. Blue blazer in cleaners? Worm capsules, 2 @. Mommee restless last night, check and call me. Home late, big bucks in town. See you A.M. if not P.M. XXX, P.”
Translated, this meant there were three new captives in the rat traps, and I was to dispatch them in the river. Then I was to call his secretary, Amy Crittenden, who loved him with the fierce, chaste passion of the middle-aged office wife, and see what our plans were for Friday evening; Pom frequently made social arrangements for us and forgot to tell me, so Amy became a willing go-between. I liked and valued her and seldom chafed at her fussy peremptoriness, though I was not above a moment’s satisfaction when I was able to say, “Oh, Amy, he’s forgotten we have plans for Friday. You really need to check with me first.” Then I was to locate his blue blazer and fetch it from the cleaners if it was there, which meant that the Friday mystery evening was casual and funky, like a rib dinner down in the Southwest part of the city, to show the flag in the affluent black community there. Much of Pom’s clinic’s work was done in and for the black communities south of downtown, and he endured the socializing as coin that paid for the free clinical work that was his passion. Pom was as impatient with the River Club as he was with the rib dinner, but knew better than anyone the necessity for both. In the twenty years that the network of Fowler clinics had been in operation, he had become a consummate fund-raiser. He was an eloquent speaker, a tireless listener to fragile egos, and without vanity himself, a rare thing indeed in a physician. The day his board of directors and auxiliary discovered this was the day that he began to move, imperceptibly at first, out of the office and onto the hustings. Because he was unwilling to surrender even a moment of what he considered his real work, diagnosing and healing the poor, he solved the conflict by simply getting up earlier and earlier to get to the clinic and coming home later and later. Now, two decades later, I virtually never saw him by morning light and often not by lamplight, either. Of course he didn’t have time to get his blue blazer out of the cleaners; of course I would do it for him. It was in our contract, his and ours. He would care for the poor and the sick; I would care for him and our family. If this grew tedious at times, I had only to remind myself that Pom and I were in a partnership beyond moral reproach. Caretaking, any sort of caretaking, was my hot button. The smallest allegation of moral slipshoddiness was my Achilles’ heel.
Next, the note bade me give the two bird dogs who lived in the run down by the river their worm capsules, two each. Samson and Delilah were liver-spotted setters, rangy and lean and sleek, seeming always to vibrate with nerves and energy and readiness. Pom had grown up bird hunting with his father, the Judge, on a vast South Georgia timber plantation, and he thought to take the sport up again when we bought the house on the river five years before, so he kept a brace of hounds in the river run at all times. But he had yet to get back out into the autumn fields with them, even though he belonged to an exclusive hunting club over in South Carolina, on the Big Pee Dee River. He did not spend much time with the dogs, and did not want me to make pets of them. It spoiled them for hunting, he said, and it wasn’t as if they were neglected or abused. Their quarters were weatherproof and sumptuous, their runs enormous, and he ran them for a couple of hours on weekends, or had me do it, if he couldn’t. Besides, they were littermates, brother and sister, and they had each other for company. I will take them the pills in late afternoon when I decant the rats, I would think. Then I can spend some time with them and no one will be the wiser.
It had not yet struck me, at the beginning of that summer, how much of my time was spent doing things about which no one was the wiser.
Mommee restless: Nothing ambiguous about that. Glynnis Parsons Fowler spent her entire married life in her big house on the edge of the great plantation and ruled her husband, sons, and household help with an iron hand in the lace mitt of a perennial wiregrass debutante. As far as I know she was never called Glynnis in her life; her adoring Papa called her Punkin, her sons called her Mommee, and her husband Little Bit, but despite the cloying nicknames and her diminutive stature, she was a formidable presence always. Even now, ten years widowed and five years into Alzheimer’s, two of them spent under our roof, she ruled, only now with mania instead of will and wiles. A restless night meant muttering and shuffling around her room at all hours, which Pom, no matter how weary, never failed to hear and I, no matter how well rested, seldom did. The note meant that he had had to get up and calm her again, and I whose task this was, had not…again. I knew that Pom had no thought of shaming me about this. The shame I felt was born entirely within me. I should have heard her. I will spend the morning with her, I would think, and Ina can go for the groceries and dry cleaning.
Finally, the note told me that someone with the potential for major financial support for the clinic was in town, and Pom was wining and dining him, and might be taking him somewhere afterwards for a nightcap. Many of the clinic’s benefactors were from the smaller cities across the South, and liked to see what they thought of as the bright lights of the big city when they came to Atlanta. Not infrequently, that meant one of the glossier nude dancing clubs over on Cheshire Bridge Road. The first time Pom had come in very late from one of those evenings I whooped with helpless laughter.
“Oh, God, I can just see you with huge silicone boobs on each side of your face, hanging over your ears,” I choked. “Even better, I can see you with huge silicone boobs over your ears and half an inch of five o’clock shadow, glaring out from the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. ‘Prominent physician caught in raid on unlicensed nude dancing club.’ What would Amy say?”
Pom’s square face reddened, and his black hair flopped over his eyes as if he had spent the evening shimmying with a parade of danseuses, but he grinned, a reluctant white grin that split the aforementioned five o’clock shadow like a knife blade through dark plush. By the end of a long day Pom frequently looks like a pirate in a child’s book.
“She’d say it never hurt a real man to sow a few oats,” he said, leering showily at me and twirling an imaginary mustache. And I laughed again, because it was just what she would say, and because he looked, in the lamplight, so much like the much younger and far lighter-hearted man I had married eighteen years before. That man was intense and impulsive and endearingly clumsy, and somehow astonishingly innocent, though he was certainly no stranger to strip joints and bovine boobs. I had not seen that man in a long time. I held out my arms to him that night, and he came into them, and it was near dawn before we slept. That had not happened in a long time, either.
Pom has amazing eyes. They are so blue that you can see them from a distance; you notice them immediately in photographs, and the times I have seen him on television they dominate the screen as if they were fluorescent. It may be because they are fringed with dense, dark lashes and shadowed over by slashes of level black brows, and set into flesh that looks tenderly and perpetually bruised. His thick black hair is usually in his eyes. All of this darkness makes the whites extraordinarily white, and very often they seem so wide open that the white makes a slight ring around the irises. All that white should, I tell him, make him look demented, a mad Irish visionary, but it is the genesis of his apparent innocence, I think. Much of the time Pom seems wide-eyed with surprise at the world.
The rest of him is solid and muscular, and he moves lithely and fast on the balls of his feet, a tight package of coiled energy and strength. He has always reminded me, in his stature, of one of the great cinema dancers, Jimmy Cagney perhaps, or Gene Kelly. But Pom is an abysmal dancer. He is always in a hurry, and frequently stumbles and bumps into things. Oddly, he is an awesome tennis player, fast and savagely focused and powerful. He shows no mercy. I hate playing with him.
He is short, or at least not tall: five nine. My height almost exactly. He pads when he walks, like a tomcat or a street punk, and looks as disheveled as if he had been in a fist fight an hour after dressing, no matter how carefully his shirts are done by the specialty cleaners over in Vinings, or how perfectly Clifford at Ham Stockton’s fits his suits. The shirts and suits are my arsenal, my weapons against the sartorial entropy with which he flirts daily. Pom doesn’t care what he wears. He remembers the blue blazer because his father told him when he sent him off to Woodbury Forest that a man needed nothing else but a good dark suit and a tuxedo to dress like a gentleman. I think his heart leaped up when he discovered white medical coats. He would wear them everywhere if he could, not because he considers them becoming (they are), but because they are comfortable, correct, and there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of them both at home and at the office. Amy sends them home to be washed twice a week, tenderly folded in tissue paper. She would wash and iron them herself if she could, I am sure. Pom said he saw her polishing his stethoscope once.
Mommee has always insisted that the Fowlers are of old Saxon stock, but both Pom and his brother, Clay, have Celt written all over them, as did his father before him, and his oldest son Chip is the same small, powerful dark creature of the Cornish caves or the wild cliffs of Connaught. Mommee herself is small and birdlike, with a thin, high-bridged nose, pale hazel eyes, and the jaw of a mastiff. A little Teuton in the Tudor gene pool there, no doubt about it. I think Jeff, the younger boy, looks like her, but since Pom’s first wife, Lilly, is short and giltblond too I can’t be sure of that. But in Lilly’s case the smallness is of the small-town high school cheerleader variety, not the Blanche du Bois sort, as Mommee’s is, and runs now to thumping curves that strain at her Chanels and Bill Blasses. And even I, with no eye at all for such things, can tell that the polished hair comes weekly from Carter Barnes. English or Irish, the Fowler provenance matters not at all to anyone but Mommee. Atlanta, and indeed most of Georgia except the old Creole coast, is far too raw and new and self-involved to make much of a distinction, requiring only strong Caucasian chromosomes and good teeth.
I met Pom at a fund-raising party for the new outpatient diagnostic center at Buckhead Hospital, on a spring afternoon in 1978. It was an old-fashioned all-day barbecue on the enormous back lawn of an estate on Cherokee Road in Buckhead that had been built in the early twenties for a former governor of Georgia and had just been renovated by the New Jersey-born administrator of the hospital. There was a gruesome whole hog turning on a spit over a pit of banked coals, hams and pork shoulders on grills, huge iron pots of Brunswick stew, and great bowls of potato salad and coleslaw iced and waiting in the pantry off the cavernous kitchen. Sweating black men and women in starched white and chef’s hats stirred and carried and grinned, looking for all the world like devoted family retainers, but they were, I knew, the cream of the cafeteria staff from the hospital. Others, bearing trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres across the blue-shadowed green lawn, were waiters and bartenders from the Piedmont Driving Club, imported for the occasion not by the New Jersey administrator, who was not a member, but the silver-haired chief of Internal Medicine, who was. The miniature carousel and the aging clowns and the mulish Shetland pony and crisp young attendants minding the shrieking small children in the blue, oval pool at the far end of the lawn were from the city’s oldest and most favored party-planning establishment. The same sagging clowns had doubtless frightened many of the adults present and the same evil-tempered pony had certainly nipped them on their short, bare legs when its tender was not looking twenty years before.
I knew all this because I had planned the party, or at least had helped. My advertising and public relations agency had long had Buckhead Hospital for a client, and had long done the PR and printed materials for its various fund-raisers without billing anyone’s time. Most agencies had these gratis clients, whose work was handled solely for the prestige and worthiness of their causes. I had been at the agency for four years, long enough to work my way up to copy chief and be in line for associate creative director, and this was my fourth Buckhead Hospital fundraiser. We had had a Parisian Street circus, a Night at the Winter Palace ball, and an Arabian bazaar. This time the board wanted to include families, and so Christine Cross, my art director friend, and I had suggested the barbecue and modeled it partly on the barbecue at Twelve Oaks from Gone With the Wind.
“Hell, it won’t be any work at all,” Crisscross said, dumping the ashes from her Virginia Slim into my tepid coke. “The board’s got ten Twelve Oakses between ’em, and about a thousand slaves. We won’t have to lift a finger.”
And we hadn’t, hardly. When I walked around the side of the big white house and stood looking down from the veranda at the barbecue in progress, it seemed to be surging and swarming along under its own volition, with everyone knowing exactly what part they were to play, and doing it faultlessly. The lawn was a sea of pink linen tablecloths and green tents and seersucker suits and pastel cocktail dresses and butterfly pinafores and sunsuits. The only jarring note was a thick-shouldered, dark-faced young man with his hair in his eyes and a red-splotched white physician’s jacket, crouching on one knee at the bottom of the veranda steps and attempting to mop a veritable bath of red off the furious purple face and arms of a bellowing, struggling small boy. The red looked shockingly like blood but a vinegary tang in the still air told me it was barbecue sauce. Behind the man a slightly older boy was dancing up and down, stark naked and dripping, waving a tiny wet bathing suit in his hand and shrieking, “Dry me off! Dry me off! Jeff peed in the pool and it’s all over me!”
The man raised his face to me, and there was such a look of desperation and entreaty on it, such utter helplessness in eyes of a color I had literally never seen in a human face before, that I ran down the shallow stone steps and reached for the wet, naked child before I even thought.
“If you don’t stop right this minute you’re going to turn to stone, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life naked in this backyard, and pigeons will crap all over you,” I said, pinning the slick, small arms firmly. The child stopped dancing and looked at me. The smaller child stopped bellowing and looked, too.
“Oh, God, are you married?” the man said. “If not, will you marry me in fifteen minutes?”
“So tell me about his eyes again,” Crisscross said the next day at lunch. She had pleaded cramps and missed the party. Crisscross did not go to parties where no recreational drugs were offered. It was a matter of policy with her; I knew she did not indulge. She had gone to Bennington, and regarded the social doings of old Atlanta society, or what passed for it, as she might the ponderous frolicking of dinosaurs. Once was interesting, more was grotesque.
“I never saw eyes that color,” I said. “Such an intense blue they could burn you—”
“What kind of blue? Be specific.”
“The blue of…of…the blue of those lights on the top of police cars,” I said.
“Jesus,” Crisscross said. “How utterly charming. Is his last name Mengele, by any chance?”
“No. It’s Fowler. Pomeroy Fowler. Dr. Pomeroy Fowler. Pom to his friends.”
“Of which you are now one.”
“I guess I am.”
“So. Two kids, both brats. Cop car-blue eyes, five o’clock shadow, slept-in clothes. Wife at Sea Island, or Brawner’s?”
I glared at her. Sea Island is where much of old Atlanta goes to re-create itself. The Brawner Clinic is where it goes for its breakups, breakdowns, and substance addictions. The latter, Crisscross maintained, ran primarily to booze and Coca-Cola. The sixties never quite got to Atlanta, she said, much less the seventies.
“Why should it be either one?” I said.
“Because no Nawthside Atlanta matron goes anywhere else and leaves her chirrun behind, don’chall know? Especially during the Little Season.”
Crisscross had not been in the South long. Her southern accent, even in parody, was execrable.
“As a matter of fact, she’s on Hilton Head,” I said. “She ran off with the architect down the street when he decided to go live on an island and free himself of conventional restraints. Pom got the children without even going to court.”
“I’d give a lot to know how you free yourself from conventional restraints on Hilton Head,” Crisscross grinned. “What do you do, join the Young Democrats? Violate the landscape code?”
“He wanted to build experimental low-cost housing for the Gullahs,” I said, grinning back at her. “But none of them would move into the prototype. The one family that finally did tacked tin over the cedar shake roof and painted the door blue. That’s to ward off evil spirits. You still see it on the Gullah shacks down there.”
Crisscross folded her arms over her stomach and bent over laughing. I began to laugh, too.
“Maybe they’ll find out it wards off Republicans, too,” I gasped. Despite our seeming lack of anything at all in common, Crisscross and I became instant friends when she joined the agency, and we spent much of our billable time laughing. Of all my old advertising crowd, she is the only one I still see with any regularity. She has her own agency now. We still laugh.
“So after you shut his kids up what happened?” she said on the day after the barbecue.
“I took both of them into the house and bathed them and got clean clothes on them and we left and went back to his house. He made supper for them and I put them to bed and we had a drink. We had several, in fact. And then we ordered in pizza because all he had in the house was hot dogs and stale potato chips and strawberry Jell-O, and the kitchen looked like an army had been camping in it for weeks. The whole house did, for that matter. It’s a nice Cape Cod in Garden Hills, but his baby-sitter doesn’t clean, and he doesn’t get home until late from the clinic most nights, and he thinks it’s more important to spend what time he has with the boys, instead of cleaning. I sort of straightened things up for him; it looked a lot better. I’m going to see if Totsy Freeman’s housekeeper has a free day or two. I think she said she did. It could really be a pretty house.”
Crisscross looked at me silently for a time. Then she said, “Oh, Merritt. Merritt Mason. You did it again. There is absolutely no hope for you; you’re a goner.”
“Did what?”
But I knew what she was going to say.
She said it.
“Saw somebody in need of something and loped right in to fix things. Spied a creature in distress. I know you. ‘Oh, Lord, there’s something over there moving and breathing and looking like it might need help. Let me at it!’ What did you get out of it this time? A chance to go back next week and clean his basement?”
“I got asked out for dinner this weekend and one hell of a goodnight kiss,” I snapped.
“I’m glad about the dinner,” she said. “I hope the kiss was worth all the fussing and nurturing you’re going to do. For that he could at least have screwed you.”
“The kiss was terrific,” I said, reddening. “The other comes next week. I can tell.”
“Thank you, Jesus,” she said, and folded her hands as in prayer, and rolled her wicked brown eyes heavenward. She looked back at me, waiting.
I looked away from her sharp, expectant little fox’s face. I was not a virgin when I met Pom, but I had slept with very few men. I had not even been out with many, and in the Atlanta of that time, with singles’ apartments sprouting like weeds and young men pouring in to catch the city’s soaring comet’s tail, that was downright difficult to accomplish. Every woman I knew dated all the time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attractive; I am not pretty, but I am tall and thin and wear clothes well, and I know that I have an appealing smile. One of my last boyfriends had told me, “You’re just a tall, skinny drink of water with exploding hair until you smile. Then there’s nobody else in the room.”
It was nice to hear, but it did not make me feel any more comfortable with the young man who said it, and gradually I stopped seeing him. It was what happened to most of my relationships. I had slept with one man at LSU, after a rock concert, where the pot smoke had drifted thick and sweet, and had lived in mute terror of pregnancy and other things until the next month. The next man I slept with, years later, was a rock-climbing, sports car-driving investment banker who told me flatly that there was absolutely nothing attractive about a twenty-eight-year-old virgin. By then I was on the pill, because you never knew when, et cetera, et cetera, but I might as well not have been, because I enjoyed the sex so little that after being shamed into bed by the investment banker I did not do it again, and he stopped calling. I was thirty when I met Pom. For the first time, I wanted, with no reservations, to go to bed with a man. I could hardly wait, in fact. If he did not initiate it on our next date, I was going to. When he had first kissed me my whole body ignited. When we finished it was near meltdown.
It was the first time in my life I had not heard, in my mind, my mother’s bled-out voice saying bitterly, “Go ahead and do it with the first boy that tries it, if you’re ready to die, because doing it will kill you. It will hurt you and hurt you, and then it will kill you.”
My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was thirteen and my sister Laura was three. She was terribly sick for a year before that. I used to pull the covers over my head at night so that I could not hear her crying. She died thinking that she had gotten the cancer from having sexual relations with my father, who, she said, wasn’t satisfied unless he was on her every night. By that time, he had moved into the downstairs guest room and they seldom spoke. Our maid, Felicia, took care of her and my sister during the daytime, and a succession of Felicia’s relatives from the bayou came in and cooked. I took care of mother after school and at night. I didn’t miss much of the progress of the cancer as it chewed its way through her vitals. Later, when I got close enough to someone to want sex, or had necked in the back of a car until it seemed inevitable, I always stopped things abruptly. I knew with the top part of my mind that whatever else I got from the dirty deed, it wasn’t going to be cancer, but the bottom part of it didn’t know that. Whenever a hand touched my bare breast, or found the warm dark between my legs, I heard her voice: It will hurt you and hurt you, and then it will kill you. None of my relationships overrode that voice.
Pom silenced it with one kiss. Or perhaps the sheer need I saw in him overrode it. I knew, somehow, that I would not hear the voice again. I would sleep with him. I would marry him if he asked me. I would make him ask me. I would make such fine love with him that he would ask me; I would make such a good and orderly world for him and his children that he would ask me. I knew just how to do that.
After my mother died I took care of my sister and my father. It pleased him that I wanted to. It pleased me that it pleased him. He was a lawyer, a remote man who lived among paper and dust, or so I thought. Later I would learn that he lived most fully in the company of attractive women; my mother had been right about his sexual appetite. But he was discreet about it, and only remarried after I started college. Perhaps he was remote only to me and my sister; to Laura, especially. I knew she had not been a planned baby because I overheard the hushed, hissing quarrel over my mother’s pregnancy. Laura sensed it, long before Mother died. She cried inconsolably for much of her babyhood, and only I could seem to soothe her. By the time she was walking Mother was past caring for her. The only real approbation I remember seeing in my father’s eyes was when I had ministered particularly well to his second, changeling child.
I soon learned to care for him as well, acting as a grave, correct young hostess for him when he required it, seeing that his house was orderly and polished and quiet at all times. He would compliment me and I would feel my entire face light up, would grin from ear to ear despite myself. He was the first to tell me I had a wonderful smile. It earned him years of comfort. It earned me years of what amounted to servitude to my sister and father and our big house in Baton Rouge. I didn’t mind. I thought that it would keep him with me forever. When he remarried and moved into the perfectly run home of a rich seafaring lady who lived in Pascagoula, I was stunned, lost. But I still took care of Laura, because by that time it was what I knew best, was most comfortable doing. Caring for. Tending. I brought her to live with me in Atlanta when I came here after college to try my wings in advertising, and when I met Pom she was still living with me and attending sporadic classes in theater arts at Georgia State University downtown. Up until that time I could not imagine a world in which I did not care for Laura.
Fragile, lovely, hungry Laura. Edge-dancer, wing-walker, windmill-tilter, limits-pusher. From babyhood she could stand no boundaries, tolerated none. In the airless world of a small Louisiana city, even in the volatile sixties, boundaries swarmed thicker than June bugs. Her entire life was a starved scrabble after two things: freedom and love. Since the two are mutually exclusive, she achieved neither, except minimally, but she never abandoned her hectic quest. Freedom of a sort she might have had if she had been a less difficult child; Felicia was too old to keep up with her, and my father simply did not seem to see her. I was a nurturer, but no real threat as a disciplinarian. She might have soared like a small butterfly in an empty blue sky except that her need for love was visceral and unending and dragged her down out of the air, time after time, to dog the footsteps of those who could not seem to give it to her. Ravenous for love, she pursued it shrieking; repulsed, love fled her.
“Hush up that yellin’, Laura. I ain’t studyin’ you,” Felicia would say over and over. “You looks like a little ol’ baby bird, with yo’ eyes squoze shut and yo’ mouth open a mile wide. Cain’t nobody fill you up. Go on and find yo’ sister and tell her what you want.”
“Laura, get down now and let Papa work,” I would hear my father say stiffly from his study. “You’re getting that jam all over my shirt. You’re far too big to sit in laps. You should see yourself; it’s really very unattractive. And don’t cry! You cry more than any little girl your age I ever saw. Your sister doesn’t cry. You should take a leaf from her book and try smiling every now and then. People would treat you a lot better, I can tell you. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Laura Louise! Merritt! Come in here and get your sister, will you please?”
And once again I would take my beautiful, fragmented little sister, dancing and sobbing her rage and hunger, up to her room and cuddle her and shush her and whisper silliness to her, and soon she would let me dry her tears and wash her face and brush out the tangled chestnut curls that were so like our mother’s, and in an hour she would be off again, flouting rules, testing limits, pushing, pushing, pushing.
“It’s not really fair to you,” my father said in the spring of my last year in high school, after I had come back downstairs to watch TV with him after settling a wailing Laura into bed. “You’re only seventeen. You don’t have much of a life of your own, do you? It’s mostly studying and Laura. But I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re the only one who can handle her. I admit she’s too much for me. I don’t know, maybe if her mother had lived…what in the world are we going to do next year when you go to school? Should I put her in boarding school?”
“Oh, Papa, she’ll only be eight then,” I said.
I was flattered at the adult tone of the conversation and felt mature and important to be consulted about the future of my little sister. I knew that for once I had his entire attention and that he would probably take my advice. I was the one, after all, who knew her best. I sensed suddenly what sort of relationship we might have had if I had been alone with him in the house, without the hovering, importunate Laura to define and absorb me and isolate him. I knew too that I could probably create that relationship if I told him to send her away.
But in my mind there was the white rush of wings beating at windowless walls and a thin silver wailing from an empty, dark place. I knew that boarding school would send Laura mad or kill her. My stomach literally turned over. My first taste of power frightened me badly.
“No, I don’t really think that would be good for her,” I said judiciously, hoping he could not hear the pounding of my heart. “Maybe we should get someone to come in and take care of her, a live-in housekeeper, or something. Somebody younger, closer to my age so she wouldn’t seem strange. Then Felicia and the others could go on and do their work. I could ask our guidance counselor at school about it. She knows about things like that. I could even interview people, if you wanted me to.”
“See? You always know just the right thing to do,” my father said in relief, and smiled at me, and I felt the tremor of my answering smile begin on my mouth. We turned back to John Chancellor with relief, like two old married people who had just settled, indulgently, the problem of a troublesome child.
I found a young black woman to come and stay with Laura after school and half-days on Saturday. Matilda was a lunch server at my high school cafeteria and had the same hours free that Laura did. She was only two years older than I, but she seemed far ahead of me, across a chasm of adulthood. She had cared for a half-dozen younger siblings and cousins, and she had a matter-of-fact, cheerful firmness about her that soothed me and seemed, for a while, to be just the anchor to earth that Laura needed. She stopped a good bit of the acting out at her elementary school and much of the needy fussing at home. During that time it was easy to love Laura; her awful emptiness seemingly filled, we saw more of her quicksilver charm and the vein of whimsy that lay deep inside her. Her imagination was lightning quick and her ability to mime and posture was funny and true. And, her face unbloated by tears and rage, she was beautiful enough to turn heads in crowds. She was all my mother, with pale, thick, magnolia-petal skin that she never allowed the sun to stain, and Mother’s slanted sherry-colored eyes and rich spill of chestnut satin hair. Laura’s hair was glorious. She wore it tied in a high ponytail, cascading down her back, or let it fly free in shining curtains around her face. She never let anyone cut it past shoulder length, and even that was an occasion to be feared, fraught with tears and temper. The first time she had it bleached, when she was a sophomore at Westminster, I cried.
“It’s not you anymore,” I said.
“Au contraire,” she said, trying out her appalling first-year French. “It’s exactly who I am. The other was somebody else.”
But when I went away to LSU she changed again, back to the frantic, hungry small bird we had known, and began the trapped-bird battering at everyone and everything once more. We could get no sensible explanation from her for the change, except that she didn’t feel safe.
“I feel like I’m walking way up high with nothing to hold on to,” she would cry over and over. “I feel like I’m going to fall forever and ever.”
“What would it take to make you feel safe?” I said desperately. Matilda was threatening to quit if Laura did not stop shrieking and plucking at her and dogging her every step. My father had the boarding school brochures out again.
“You! I want you! I want you to come back home,” Laura wept. She was shuddering with sobs and retching. There was no doubting her sincerity. At Christmas I moved back home and began attending day classes. My father’s gratitude and Laura’s subsequent blooming were enough, I thought, to make up for the dorm and campus life that I forswore. I made a number of new friends anyway. I dated a good bit. I joined a sorority. And my grades undoubtedly benefited. I made Phi Beta Kappa, and basked in the modest glow of a number of minor achievements and awards. At my graduation, my father’s proud smile and Laura’s shining eyes gave me a salt lump in my throat and a tickle in my nose.
My graduation picture shows a tall, arresting, stooped man with thick brown hair just beginning to go gray at the temples; a tall, slightly stooped young woman in a cap and gown who looks ridiculously like him, down to the unruly shock of curly ash-brown hair and the tilted nose and sharp cheekbones; and a young girl of such vivid, blinding beauty that you cannot look away from her. She might be a budding movie actress graciously posing with tourists. Her presence captures the camera and eclipses the other two. I noticed anew that spring Saturday how eyes followed her, in her new mini that showed a great deal of white leg at the bottom and a precocious swell of white breasts at the top.
I also noticed that she was aware on every inch of her of the eyes. I remember feeling a small frisson of dread. Despite the calming presence of Matilda, there had been enough transgressions, tears, conferences with teachers, trips to smooth things over in her principal’s office, promises. Always, Laura insisted that she had been wronged and misunderstood; always the contrition was heartfelt and her fear of reproach real. And always I was the one who went, who apologized, who smoothed, who promised. I did not need trouble of a sexual nature from her, but on that day I knew, as portentously as if I had read it in sheeps’ entrails, that I was going to get it.
That night, after he had taken us to dinner in a new, baroquely awful French restaurant to celebrate and Laura had gone, reluctantly, to bed, my father told me he was getting married again. I sat still and looked at him, feeling a sort of percussion against my face as if there had been a silent explosion in the room. My mind was empty and ringing with it.
“I didn’t know you knew anybody,” I said stupidly.
“A nice woman,” he said, looking away. “Her name is Andrea. I call her Andy. She’s a widow. She lives in Pascagoula and she has a great big sailboat. She and her husband used to go all over the world in it. You and Laura will have a good time on that boat.”
I was silent, staring at him. I could think of nothing to say. A boat? All of us, him and Laura and me, on a huge boat with a woman from Pascagoula called Andy? I had never known my father to call me by any sort of nickname, nor Laura, either. Not even Mother. I had never known him to evince the slightest interest in boats or the sea. When we vacationed, we usually went to Highlands, North Carolina, where he played golf and bridge with other lawyers. I could find no picture of us as a merry, seagoing family in my mind.
“But who will run it?” I said. “Can you? Have you learned to run a boat?”
He smiled. “She has a captain who looks after it and does the actual sailing and a crew to help him. We won’t have to do anything but lie back and get suntans and eat great food and sleep with the waves rocking us. Forget the world for weeks at a time. You could get used to that, couldn’t you?”
I felt my face redden at the thought of my father and this Andy woman, in a bed rocked by the waves. In my mind she was massive and blond, and very tanned, and walked in a rolling swagger.
“When did you…I mean, I never knew you even were…you know, seeing someone,” I said, feeling the sofa rock under me as if I were already riding waves.
“Well, for some time now,” he said. “She has a little place here and one in New Orleans, too. Say, you all will really like that. It’s in the Quarter. I guess I thought you knew. Laura does.”
“Laura does?”
Nothing seemed to connect, to fit together, to make any sense.
“I told her a while back,” he said a shade too casually. “I was sure she would have told you by now.”
“I wish you’d felt you could tell me, too,” I said thickly around the tears that were pooling in my throat. “I thought you told me everything—”
“I told her because I had to talk to her about something else, and I want to tell you about that now; see what you think,” he said. “You were in the middle of your thesis when it came up. I didn’t want to bother you then. This all depends on you, Merritt. If you’re uncomfortable with it in any way, at all, we’ll make other arrangements.”
“Uncomfortable with what? You mean you wouldn’t get married if I didn’t want you to? I’d never interfere in that, Papa, if it’s what you really want—”
“No, no. We’re definitely getting married. Too late to back out now.” He laughed, and then coughed and went on. “Here’s the thing. Andy has never had children of her own, and while she’s really looking forward to getting to know you two, she feels…we feel…that she needs a little time to get used to me and my strange ways before she takes on Laura. Laura isn’t the easiest…well, you know. We thought we might take a long honeymoon cruise, maybe down around South America, maybe even as far as the Galapagos. Take our time, just bum around…and I thought it might be fun for both of you if Laura came with you to Atlanta for a year or two. I’m prepared to pay her way, of course, and she’s already accepted at Westminster. It’s the best private school up there. I had a couple of friends in the Georgia Bar Association look into it; their kids go there, too. They pulled some strings. She’s already accepted, and I’ve made all the arrangements. She starts this summer because she needs to get up to speed with the rest of her class. I know it sounds like a big responsibility, but they’ve got a bus that picks students up and drops them off, and there’s a program for students who need to stay until six or so. I’ll give her a clothes and living allowance as well as her tuition, of course. All you need to do is keep an eye on her in the evening and on weekends. You know you can handle her; you always could. And of course she’ll make friends and be out of your hair a lot of the time, and she’s surely old enough to stay by herself occasionally when you want to go out. And you will, because you’re going to knock ’em dead in Atlanta. She isn’t going to be any trouble. I’ve already talked to her about it.”
“No trouble,” I whispered. “Papa, that’s all she knows how to be. In a new city, a big one, with all those new kids and…I don’t know, the drugs and the rock concerts, and the hippies and the war protests and civil rights…she’ll be like a bomb with the fuse lit. I can’t work and run around bailing Laura out all the time; it’s going to be different up there. I’ll be trying to get a career going—”
“And fighting off the guys. I know,” he said jocularly. But he would not look at me.
“She promised,” he said. “I told her all that, and she swore on her mother’s Bible that she would do everything her teachers and you told her to do, and not make any trouble at all. I believe her. She knows I’ll have her out of there and in Saint Ida’s before she can blink if she makes one misstep. And I will. That’s a promise. But of course, if you really think it’s too much—”
Saint Ida’s. A New Orleans convent school so thoroughly and murderously cloistered that not even fathers and brothers were allowed to go further in than the beautiful old courtyard. Academically first rate, socially beyond reproach, culturally luminous in matters pertaining to the late Renaissance and backward from that. The nuns of Saint Ida’s had no truck with Rousseau and his kindred romantic sauvages, nor with much that followed them. The sixth and seventh decades of the twentieth century simply did not exist. Little outside the thick, high walls did. I had known three girls at LSU who had gone there; two were said to be lovers and the other dropped out pregnant during her first year. Stories of suicides and breakdowns among its alumni made the rounds regularly. Laura would not last a month there.
“It’s not too much,” I said in a low voice, looking down at my new rope-soled wedgies. “I wouldn’t want her at Saint Ida’s.”
“Neither would I, really, but she’s as good as there the instant she causes you any trouble,” my father said.
“Private school must be awfully expensive in Atlanta,” I said, only then feeling the heat and anger. “Are you sure you can afford it?”
He flushed.
“I can handle it,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“I won’t, then,” I said, and thought with a small curl of malice that I knew just how he could afford it. Cap’n Andy, or whatever he called her, obviously had truly big bucks, and counted them well spent if they kept a troublesome adolescent out of her venue. I would, I thought, be harboring a remittance sister.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Laura later, when I had gone upstairs and found her crouching at the top of the stairs, listening.
“I didn’t want you to worry,” she said, looking up at me through her thick gold lashes.
“Bullshit,” I said, forgetting my resolution not to use sorority language in front of her. “That’s just what you want me to do. C’mon. Why didn’t you tell me?”
She was silent. The skin at the base of her nostrils whitened. Finally she said, “I was afraid if you had time to think about it you wouldn’t let me come to Atlanta with you, and I’d have to go live with him and her. I know she doesn’t want me, but I was afraid he’d have to take me if you didn’t, or put me in some boarding school. If I had to go to Saint Ida’s I’d jump out the highest window there. If I had to go on that stupid boat with her I’d drown myself. I really would, you know.”
I didn’t know, not really, but I did know that Laura had long been half in love with easeful death, a line she espoused after I read Ode to a Nightingale to her when she was six. I thought that the darkness of death called out to a corresponding darkness in her, without her understanding its import in the least. I have always been afraid that the part of Laura that dances with self-destruction might one day win. That, knowing nothing of halfway measures, she might well jump onto broken old paving stones or into the warm, deep Gulf.
“Well, you don’t have to jump because I said you could come, as you well know, since you’ve been listening,” I said. “What about it, Pie? Do you think you can hold it in the road so I can have a job and live like a grownup? I really will have to call Papa if you can’t. This is the real world now.”
“I can,” she said fervently. “I will. I’ll grow up fast. I’ll be so grownup and responsible you won’t believe it’s me. You can get to be president of the world and I’ll be a great actress. Westminster has a super drama department. They win stuff all the time. They’ll be auditioning in September for Li’l Abner. I’m going to be in that play, Merritt. The brochure says eighth grade and up is eligible.”
I had to smile at her, even though I did not for a moment believe she would be capable of keeping her promise about responsibility. But I did believe that she would try. And her ardor was infectious; it always was. And there was something else. Much later, a continent away, she would fling it at me: “It wasn’t all give! You got your kicks for years through me! You lived a life through me you never could have had on your own!” Her words stung, but even in my anger I had to admit there was truth in them. During the years with Laura I soared to heights and sank to depths that I would never have reached on my own. It was as powerful a glue as the protective instinct she called out in me, and my love for her when she was at her best. I’ve always thought that if we had been nearer in age I couldn’t have stayed close to her, but there was never any filial competitiveness between Laura and me. On my side it was all parent; on hers, all child.
“So who’re you going to be? Daisy Mae, no doubt,” I said, ruffling her silky hair.
“Uh-uh. Moonbeam McSwine. She gets to show off everything she’s got. And you’ve got to admit I’ve got plenty.”
She pulled her Peter Max T-shirt tight over her breasts and hips. She was right. In the last year she had bloomed physically into the woman she would be, and that woman lacked nothing. I felt again the unease I had felt when I looked at her earlier that day, at graduation. It wasn’t, after all, a child I would be tending in Atlanta.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” I said. “There’s not going to be any funny stuff about sex. The first time there is I’m calling Papa. I might put up with the other stuff more than once, but the first strike is out when it comes to sex. I’m going to have to be at work late a lot of the time, and I’ll be going out with my own friends, and you’re going to be on your honor. I need to know I can trust you not to go wild with boys.”
“Are you a virgin, Merritt?” she said sweetly, crinkling her eyes at me.
“What I am is twenty-two years old,” I said coldly, angry to the core of me. The backseat of the pot-smogged Chevrolet and the damp, hot hands of the man whose name I had nearly forgotten floated into my mind and were gone again. “It’s none of your business whether I am or not. I know how to handle myself. Nothing you’ve ever done has shown me you can do that.”
“Bet you’re on the pill,” she singsonged. “Bet you’re not taking any chances on getting PG. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to get some for me? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about me getting knocked up.”
I was up and halfway down the stairs toward the living room, where my father still sat in front of the TV, before I heard her first shriek of fright. It was so desperate that I stopped and turned around to look at her. She clung rigidly to the banister, and her face and knuckles and lips were bleached white.
“I won’t ever say anything like that again,” she whispered.
“You won’t if you’re coming with me,” I said grimly.
She dropped her head onto her chest and let the curtain of hair hide her eyes. But I saw the silver snail’s tracks of tears on her chin anyway. I reached over and wiped them away with the tips of my fingers.
“Why do you do that?” I said gently. “Why do you always push things with me?”
She flipped the hair off her face and looked squarely at me. There was nothing childish in the topaz eyes.
“I have to know I can’t run you off,” she said. “I have to know you’ll stay with me no matter what I do. I have to know you won’t leave me.”
“You must know that by now. The only exception is the sex business. I will send you away over that if I have to. But you must know that I’ll stay with you otherwise. Haven’t I always?”
After a silence she said, “Are you on the pill?”
“Laura—”
“I need to know,” she said fiercely. “I need to know you won’t get pregnant and have some awful baby you’ll have to take care of!”
“I’m not on the pill and I’m not going to get pregnant,” I said in annoyance. “But if I did, I wouldn’t stop taking care of you. You could help me take care of the baby—”
“No! No baby.”
“That’s what I just said,” I said, and led her back to bed and tucked her in. She was asleep before I closed her door. But it was dawn before I finally slept.
She was as good as her word, or almost. Through most of the sprawl and scrabble of the seventies, Laura lived with me in the pretty little carriage house I found behind a big brick Buckhead estate and managed, with more success than not, to stay out of harm’s way. She never did get into the creamy little clique of sorority girls at Westminster whose fathers were the cadet corps of the city’s leadership; she went to few of the house parties and debutante balls at the Piedmont Driving Club or the Cherokee Club, and she did no volunteer work for hospitals and hotlines. She wore no starched shirtwaists and wrap skirts and kilts, either, and her grades were just enough to keep her in school. But she grew fully into the voluptuous beauty that her preteens had portended, and she had many suitors from the big houses on Habersham and West Wesley Roads. She ignored them and became thick with a small clique of taciturn, bearded, bell-bottomed, pot-smoking renegades, the ones on art and theater and dance scholarships, the ones who hung out in the burgeoning Virginia-Highlands and Little Five Points sections after school, talking endlessly about creativity and their stake in it, about their art, about their work. I was never quite sure what most of them worked at, but work they did. Or at least, they did not seem to play. They were the most detached, uncommunicative group of young people I ever saw, except among themselves. They might have existed in any decade; in any decade they would have been the ones who painted the flats and fiddled with the lights and drowned themselves in booming, jittering music, their ears stoppered with plugs and their faces empty and inward. They acted and rehearsed and danced and plucked or tooted at instruments; they stayed late and alone in stark, white-lit painting and sculpture laboratories, on empty stages. In my time we would have called them beats, LSU being a good ten years behind the rest of the country in its argot. I think they called themselves freaks. The decade washed over them carrying the flotsam and jetsam of revolt: Kent State and terrorists and protests and pornography and drugs and gas shortages and streakers and Richard Nixon’s disgrace and fall and disco and Roots and NOW. And they scarcely noticed. They worked. I did not know whether to be glad or sorry.
Laura did indeed make the cast of L’il Abner, and everything else that Westminster mounted on its sleek new proscenium thrust stage. She was electric on a stage. She was beautiful and more than that; she was compelling far past her years. She had an eccentric, focused talent that would have been notable in one ten years older. She went about with the pack of darkling young who were her constant companions, her family, and, I suspected, her safety net. If she had a boyfriend I never knew it. If the group had sex, casual or otherwise, among themselves, I never knew that either. When Laura wasn’t in a play she was in rehearsals, writing scripts and screenplays, at the movies with the group, or talking about all of it in one coffee shop or basement rec room or black-painted, spotlit bedroom or another. I might have wished a more balanced life for her, better grades, more college and matrimonial prospects, but in truth, I was mainly relieved that she was happy in her amniotic bubble of obsession, and thankful that she felt safe there. I knew she did feel safe. Laura safe was Laura grooving on an even keel. I seldom went over to Westminster for anything but a conference on her grades or to see her perform.
“She should go on to a good drama school,” one of her advisors told me when she was a sophomore. “She has a real gift. I think she could be one of the ones who makes it on TV or Broadway. Maybe even movies. Providing she’s tough enough to stick out the lean times, of course, and that’s something neither I nor she can know yet. What’s your feeling about that?”
“I don’t know either,” I said. “I expect if she had some support, some help, somebody with her all the time, she could stick it.”
“This she’d have to do alone,” he said. “And she’d have to do it in New York or L.A. She can’t get what she needs here. She’s talking about the Actor’s Workshop in New York. I think she could get in. Could you and her father swing that, do you think?”
“We could swing the money,” I said slowly, thinking of the never-ceasing largesse of Cap’n Andy that kept Laura off her boat and out of her salt-blond hair. “I don’t know about her going away by herself, though. She’s never been alone—”
“Could you handle New York by yourself if you went to Actor’s Workshop?” I asked her toward the end of her junior year. “I mean, with just a roommate? You know I can’t pick up and leave the agency and go with you.”
“Sure I could,” she said. “I could come home whenever I wanted to. You could come up. Would you let me go, that’s the question.”
“You’ll be eighteen then,” I said. “It will be your decision, not mine. If you think you can handle it, it’s entirely your business.”
She frowned. “But I want you to tell me it’s all right to go.”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “You need to know that inside yourself.”
“No, you tell me,” she said stubbornly.
“I’m your sister, Laura, not your mother,” I said crisply. It seemed to me, suddenly, that we both needed to hear me say that.
“Well, I know that,” Laura said, and flung away trailing the fringes of her tattered blue jeans over her bare feet. But at the door she stopped and looked back at me. There were fine white rings around her eyes; I had not seen them there for a long time. I would, I knew, do a lot of thinking about New York. I hoped she would, too.
In the end, it was academic, because my father died the next winter. He had a heart attack somewhere at sea off Baja, California, and was dead by the time the rescue helicopter came scissoring in. I was shocked and stricken, but somehow dimly, as if he had existed on another plane than Laura and me, and perhaps by then he did. A death unseen, I have learned, is a death unrealized. I watched my mother die, touched her new coldness. It is not she who comes to trouble, tentatively, my dreams, to seek validation. It is, even now, my father.
Laura was cool and flip, whether protectively or not I could not tell.
“Yo, ho ho,” she said. “We’ll get enough money for Actor’s Workshop, won’t we?”
We didn’t. He left the Baton Rouge house and his meager estate to Cap’n Andy, and she promptly sold the house, withdrew her support to Laura, and bought a bigger boat. By the time her lawyers got around to telling us that we were essentially on our own, she was casting her net in the rich waters off Sardinia. I found it was hardly difficult at all to bury the pain of that, but Laura was frantic.
“What am I going to do?” she sobbed. “My grades aren’t good enough for a scholarship. Can you send me? Do you make enough?”
“I just can’t, Pie,” I said, in anguish at her pain, but somehow relieved, too. The thought of Laura in New York alone had been a stone in my heart for a long time. “I could probably send you to Georgia, or Georgia State, but I’m not making the kind of money for anything else. I don’t even know if I can swing the next two years at Westminster.”
“Then get another job,” she shouted, her face suddenly contorted with rage and grief. “Work nights! Borrow it! Or I’ll run away, I swear I will; I’ll go to New York or Hollywood on my own! Bootsie Cohn is going after graduation; I’ll go with her! I’ll be a hooker if I have to! I hate him! I hate her! I hate you!”
Her words were a knife in my heart, but I was angry with her, too. I loved her and the need to protect her ran deep, but I had had her in the fullest sense of the word since her babyhood, and I was suddenly weary of the roller coaster that was life with Laura.
“Then by all means hit the road,” I said coldly. “Maybe you could send me a buck or two along the way. You could probably pay me back for what I’ve spent on you in twenty or thirty years.”
She slammed out of the house, and did not come home for three days. After learning from Westminster that she had been in school all three days, and calling around until I reached the mother of the emaciated redhead to whose house she had gone, I did not try to contact her further. She’ll come home when her clothes get dirty, I thought. She’ll come home when she needs some money. I went to work, came home, cooked my dinners, and settled down with my checkbook and records to see how we were going to be able to live. I will at least have some peace and privacy for a little while, I thought. But I did not enjoy it. Her absence clamored in the house. Even gone, Laura pulled at me like the moon the tide. She still does.
She did come home, eventually, but that was the real beginning of her long, careening odyssey away from me. She was either sullen or rebellious, spent more and more time with her flock of gifted starlings, and began to get into trouble. She skipped school, flew into rages when she was there, smoked cigarettes in the restrooms and on the grounds, smelled of a sweeter, slyer smoke when she finally came in. The conferences concerning her behavior began. I was soon averaging one a week. Luckily, my boss was a laid-back ex-flower child who did not care when his staff got their work done, so long as they did. I did a lot of mine at home, at night, trying not to watch the clock as I waited for my sister to come home, trying to think that things would soon right themselves. I suppose I always knew that I was a timid disciplinarian, that I feared her pain more than her capacity for self-destruction. I had always been able to redeem Laura with love.
The night she came in frankly drunk, with magenta suck marks on her neck and shoulders and her now-blond hair in her eyes and her skirt conspicuously backward, I lowered the boom on her. My heart quailed, but I hardened it.
“Maybe I can’t pay for Saint Ida’s,” I said, “but I can manage one or two boarding schools you would like a whole lot less. There’s one in the mountains where you work in the kitchen and the pigsty to help pay your tuition. I don’t think it’s got a proscenium thrust to its name. Stop this crap or you’re up there, I promise you. I called them today. And if you don’t think I mean it, try me. I told you I wasn’t going to put up with any slutty stuff, and that includes drinking.”
I hoped she would mistake the tremor in my voice for anger.
“You can’t make me,” she slurred. “You’re not my fucking mother.”
“No? I fucking well thought I was, the way you’ve been behaving,” I threw back at her furiously. “Decide now, toots, I’m not going to tell you again.”
“How’re you gonna stop me?” she said truculently, but I thought I saw hesitation on her face. Even like this, slack-faced and with her mouth pulped and smeared, she was still one of the prettiest things I had ever seen. Fear and anger and love warred inside me.
“I’m going to stop paying your tuition at Westminster,” I said. “And you can kiss your allowance good-bye. I’m going to tell the mothers of all your little playmates not to let you in their houses. And I’m going to call the cops the first night you aren’t in this house. You’re underage, and they’ll pick you up within the hour. I don’t think you’d like juvie any more than you would Saint Ida’s or Lottie Brewster Academy.”
She stared at me for a long time, and then dropped her eyes and ran, stumbling, to her room and slammed her door. She did not do it again.
For a long time after that she seemed fairly content, if never quite the winged thing she had been. She finished Westminster with barely passing grades and a string of triumphs on the stage, and started at Georgia State, with resignation if little enthusiasm, in the fall of her eighteenth year. There was a good, if not remarkable, drama department there, and considerable lagniappe in the person of a charismatic young professor who eventually directed her in some truly luminous, innovative plays. Her awesome focus kicked back in and her strange, canted gift throve. She won raves in the local newspapers and more when the troupe toured around the South. She was invited to try out for several local professional productions and the cast of one national touring company, and garnered high praise there, too. She had, apparently, no time for anything but the theater; for that entire first year I do not think she went out with a young man. I praised her, went to all her performances, stayed up to have cocoa and cookies with her when she came late from rehearsals and performances. Often we would talk and laugh until nearly dawn. My own work did not seem to suffer, nor did hers. I was, after all, still only twenty-eight, and she was eighteen. The gap between us seemed far smaller than it had when she was a child. She had, as she had once promised, grown up fast. For the first time I felt that the bond between us was more that of best friends, of true sisters, than that of parent and child. My own star was rising steadily at my agency, with a creative directorship in view, and I had several pleasant, if not flammable, relationships with attractive young men. And I had my sustaining friendship with Crisscross. She had her theater and her future. Things were, for a time, really good between us. Looking back, I can see that it was the best time by far.
And then I met Pom Fowler, and it was as if the year of peace and affection had never been. From the beginning, she hated him. She had not liked most of my other men friends, but there had been none of the spitting animosity that Pom called out. More than that, he seemed somehow to actually frighten her.
“He looks like that stupid little asshole on the top of wedding cakes,” she said scornfully, her voice shaking. “He’s ugly and stupid and he smells like a hospital, and goes on and on about the poor people till you want to barf. Shit, why can’t he pay that kind of attention to you? To us? We’re poor, too! He doesn’t even act like I’m in the room. And those snotty-nosed little brats…how can you oooh and ahhh over them like that? They’re horrible children! They hate you, anybody could see that.”
I knew that she had grasped the seriousness of Pom’s and my relationship, even though I was careful to downplay it and he, having been warned, tried his best to do so, too. He succeeded only in seeming to ignore her; even I could see that. Only the two little boys made much over Laura, and they could not keep away from her. Something in her face and manner drew them like magnets. They were at her heels constantly when Pom brought them over. But she was so sharp with them that he did not do it often. We stayed mostly at his house, where she would not go. She did not tell me why until nearly a year after she met Pom.
“You think I get a big thrill out of watching those brats act like you’re going to poison them and waiting for you and him to go upstairs to hump and leave me with them?” she hissed then, on a day when I had asked her, once again, to spend Sunday with us and the boys at the house in Garden Hills.
“You’re being terribly unfair,” I said to her. “They’re just little boys who’ve lost their mother, and now they’re afraid they’re going to lose their father, too. They’re much better about me than they were. You can see that. It’s going to be fine eventually, I promise. Why can’t you see that Pom likes you and wants to be friends?”
“Wrong! He doesn’t want to be my friend, he wants me to be gone! He doesn’t give a shit about anything but getting you to take care of his precious little house apes so he can go make millions healing the fucking sick! But he’s too big a coward to tell me to butt out himself; he wants you to do it. You think I can’t tell, but I can.”
She was so upset that there was a choking whistling sound in her chest, and her white face was splotched with red welts. I put my arms around her and drew her down on the sofa beside me so I could look into her face.
“He doesn’t have a cowardly bone in his body,” I said. “He’s the bravest man I’ve ever known and the best. He’s been beaten and hosed in the civil rights marches; he was in Africa in the Peace Corps. He’s spent the last two years working eighteen hours a day in a clinic that treats people for free, down in the worst of the housing projects where all the rioting is, and the drugs and the crime and everything. He wants to spend his life doing that; he’s going to establish his own free clinic when he can. He doesn’t care anything about money; he’ll probably never have a dime to call his own. And he doesn’t want you to butt out. He wants you to butt in. He wants you to come and live with us for as long as you like…if we should get married, that is.”
She stared at me for a long time, and then she said, softly and bitterly, “If you do that you will never see me again. If you move in there and play wifey to that man and mother to those retarded kids, I’ll be gone before you’ve unpacked your suitcases. If you’d rather take care of another bitch’s little bastards than your own sister, go right ahead and see how long I hang around here.”
I looked at her in shock and incredulity. Her jealousy and terror were so complete and devouring that I could not seem to breathe the air in which they reverberated. I don’t know, now, why I was so utterly dumbfounded by her words, but I was.
Finally I whispered, “What has gotten into you? You’re nineteen years old! You’re a junior in college, with a wonderful career ahead of you; you’ve been planning to go to New York when you graduate for a long time now. You don’t need me to take care of you any longer. For goodness sake, Laura! You’re my sister, not my child. You don’t need me!”
“You promised,” she said, the tears beginning.
Pom and I were married in the little Mikell Chapel of Saint Philip’s Cathedral the following June, with only his parents and brother and sister-in-law and the boys and Crisscross present. Laura was not there. She had left a week before to go with the vulpine, redheaded Bootsie Cohn to California where, she said, Bootsie had been promised a part in a movie being shot in the Sonoma wine country. The second unit director, who was Bootsie’s boyfriend, had promised he could get Laura a job in the production company.
“Give my regards to Dr. Kildare and tell him to go fuck himself,” the note that I found on the kitchen table the next morning said. “Tell him not to worry, he won’t see me again. Neither will you. I’m taking your Mastercard. Maybe I’ll even pay you back one day, but don’t hold your breath.”
It was signed Laura Louise Mason.
And, except for a very few times when she came through town on some theater movie business or another, I did not touch the sweet white flesh of my sister Laura again for a long, long time, though I sometimes glimpsed a bit of it, briefly, on film.
There was never a day between that one and this that I have not missed her.
On the hot afternoon in the early summer of 1995, when I went down through the parched grass to the Chattahoochee River behind our house to set the latest Rattus ratti free, I still missed her as sharply as ever. I could almost see the child she had been skipping ahead of me on the path in the heat shimmer; I could almost see the angry, beautiful nineteen-year-old she had been when she left.
“I miss my girls,” I whispered to the big black rats I was bearing to freedom in the wire trap. “I miss Laura. I miss Glynn.”
My sister. My daughter. My sister, Laura, my daughter, Glynn, the thought of whom still, after sixteen years, gave me a small, fresh shock of joy and surprise. My daughter, my good, good girl…
The rats, who had been quiet, looked at me with their whiskered Chinese faces and black, glinting little eyes, and began again to scrabble and squeak in their prison.
“Chill out,” I said, shaking the cages slightly. “You’re almost home free.”