Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Lucy made her move rather elegantly, even I had to admit, if not particularly subtly. She left home ahead of me in the mornings, claiming an early homeroom, and promptly upon arrival at North Fulton went into the ground-floor girls’ rest room and made her face up. Since Aunt Willa had also forbidden makeup, Lucy had simply stolen what she needed from Wender & Roberts, and when she emerged from the rest room it was under a vivid, expertly applied frosting of Maybelline and Revlon. She needed no mascara or eyeliner, but I seldom saw her during those days at school without a hectic slash of “Cherries in the Snow” on her soft mouth, and she smelled exotically of a scent called Tabu, which she loved and wore all through high school and beyond, until her bluestocking classmates at Agnes Scott College told her she smelled like a cocotte.

  “They meant French whore, of course,” she told me that year, “but God forbid that word should cross a Scottie’s lips. You should see their faces when I say ‘fuck’ and ‘shit.’ They call fuck ‘the F word.’ And they say ‘the Black Act’ or ‘the Dirty Deed’ when they mean fucking. I don’t know what they’re going to tell their children: ‘Daddy and I got you the night we did the Black Act,’ do you think?”

  Lucy did not have to steal the Tabu. I bought it for her the Christmas of her freshman year, and gave it to her in the summerhouse, so my parents and Aunt Willa wouldn’t know she had it. She only dabbed it on after she left for school, and solved the problem of its lingering ghost by telling Aunt Willa that her sixth-period teacher sprayed it lavishly on herself just before the final bell rang, and invariably got some on Lucy and those other students who sat in the front rows.

  “I’d move, Mama, but Miss Cleckler puts the best students right up front. It’s an honor. I don’t want to hurt her feelings,” she said earnestly.

  Silky, facile lying was another social skill she picked up in that supremely formative year at North Fulton. On the main, it served her better than the business with men.

  She wore the same skirts and pullovers and cardigans and Bass Weejuns with a penny in them as the other budding Pinks did, but she tucked her sweaters into the band of her skirts and pulled them tight, and unbuttoned the cardigans one or even two buttons lower than anyone else did. Nothing showed; the North Fulton faculty could find no reason to tell demure little Lucy Bondurant to pull out her sweaters and button up, but they smelled the trouble in the air around her, and watched her with a scrutiny nearly as hawklike as that bent upon her by the boys. Lucy smiled her full, angelic smile and crinkled her Madonna-blue eyes at one and all, and never put a foot wrong. It was a bravura performance, and left to her own devices, she could have sustained the delicate sexual shadow play, I am sure, for as long as she had wished. Once again, it was Aunt Willa who pushed her over the line from covert to overt.

  For a long time that year, I had been aware that there was a kind of tension, a high, humming sexual energy, running through any group around Lucy. Several times clustered boys would redden and fall silent when I approached, as they had that day on the athletic field, and I knew at once that it was Lucy they had been talking about. Once or twice I heard her rich, free laugh before I saw her, and there was in it such an alien note of promise and lushness that before I recognized it, I would think, “God, who is that?” I really thought, once, that some new young woman teacher had come to the school and stood, incredibly, in the middle of a crowd of panting, sniffing male students, promising things that most of us only dreamed about with her laugh. And then the group would part and I would see that it was Lucy, and the laughter of the boys would stop at my appearance, but Lucy’s did not.

  As she could not date, and had to be at home within thirty minutes of the last class at North Fulton, she took to skipping classes and going off the school premises with one boy or another. I know that nothing happened during these occasional fifty-minute forays, because I would have heard about it instantly. As it was, the whole student body knew when Lucy began to vanish quietly from one class or another. She did not do it often, but she made no secret of these absences, and the boy in question inevitably crowed about it like a bursting little bantam cock, so the Pinks and the Jells knew to nearly the second how long she spent with Floyd Sutton down in Moseley Park, smoking cigarettes, or when she went down to Rusty’s at lunchtime with Snake Cheatham in the Black Booger and drank a hot beer he had brought along in a paper sack. I suppose it was just a matter of time until she connected with Boo Cutler.

  In addition to his monstrous, pulsing Merc, Boo had an enormous Harley-Davidson motorcycle that he said he had won in a crap game up in Floyd County one weekend, and though he was forbidden by the school authorities to bring it onto the school grounds, he kept it stashed at Winton Gladney’s Shell station just around the corner on Peachtree Road, and sauntered to and from there and school. Jell or not, there was not a boy at North Fulton who would not have sold a small shard of his soul to the devil to ride with Boo Cutler on the mammoth, growling Harley, but no North Fulton boy but Floyd Sutton ever did. Instead, Boo would ride out during lunch hours, and just about whenever else he chose, with one young Atlanta woman after another, half-terrified and half-proud and near to choking with nonchalance, riding pillion. The girls of his choice were always the bright, hard, thinly pretty ones who belonged to no club or group at all, the sorority of Pinkhood most especially; perhaps they figured they had nothing to lose by a ride with Boo, and much in the way of panache to gain. They were almost invariably apprehended and punished by the faculty, and never rode again behind Boo on the Harley, but the knowledge that they had once done so put real color in their cheeks over the Tangee, and a lift beyond elastic in their shoulders. Boo himself never observed the punishments meted out to him; he simply continued to come and go in classes and on and off the campus as he pleased, and no one ever managed to separate him from the Harley. We learned early on that the rules by which we lived our lives were not the ones Boo Cutler observed. For some reason, the knowledge did not rankle.

  Boo broke his moratorium on Pinks when Lucy started at North Fulton, and even though he was a junior to her freshman, he paid his own brand of cool, lounging court to her from the very beginning. He would appear beside her in the cafeteria line, silent and heavy-faced, and the jostling pack of boys who had been bent on sitting at her table at lunch melted away like April snow, and she and Boo would eat alone, talking of who knows what…for no one had ever heard Boo say more than a mumbled word or two.

  He would walk down the long central hall between classes with his gold-pelted arm draped heavily around her shoulders, their heads, one dark, one blond and cut in so short a crew cut that the burned pink scalp showed through, close together. He would simply saunter along, a cigarette behind one ear and the pack rolled into the cuff of his white T-shirt, saying nothing, and Lucy would match him stride for stride, looking up at him with those eyes like Caribbean water, laughing her dark, fudgy laugh.

  Once, for the space of a week, she wore his letter jacket, and then, as abruptly as she had accepted it, gave it back. No one had ever given Boo’s jacket back to him without being commanded to do so. Lucy’s legend waxed. My whole crowd was waiting for me when I got to homeroom the next morning, pressing me for details, but I had none to give. Lucy would not talk about Boo Cutler with me, or about much else that happened during the day at school. At home with me she was as she had always been: fierce, funny, direct, candid, imaginative and wholeheartedly approving. Lucy the flamboyant little temptress became Lucy the enchanted changeling child again when the walls of Peachtree Road closed around her. I ignored the temptress and welcomed the changeling. I hated her new public role, and the direction in which it was taking her, but she did not speak of it and so I did not, either. That had always been the unspoken contract between us.

  On an April afternoon of sudden showers and swelling earth, Lucy left her fifth-period American history class and rode with Boo Cutler on the Harley out Peachtree Road to Brookhaven, where they drank beer and smoked a cigarette or two on the front lawn
of Oglethorpe University. She had always had an uncanny sense of timing about her cuts, so that no faculty member had ever seen her leave, and even if she was missed in class, could produce a better-than-good forgery of Aunt Willa’s signature on a brief, typed note of excuse. It was sheer accident that on this day, Mr. Bovis Hardin, the cadaverous and ardently Calvinistic assistant principal, was leaving a lunchtime seminar on distributive education at Oglethorpe, and saw them there together on the grass. Everyone knew Boo Cutler, faculty included, and by this time there was no mistaking Lucy Bondurant, either. Bovis Hardin did not even pause to Brylcreem his hair before he was in the principal’s office with news of the sighting, and they wasted no time calling Aunt Willa in her little assistant buyer’s cubicle in the back of the lingerie department of Rich’s. By the time Lucy got back to the school and was walking nonchalantly into her sixth and last period class, Armageddon was at hand.

  “That old letch said that Boo and I were kissing on the grass, and that he had my skirt up around my neck,” Lucy said later.

  “Did he?” I asked.

  “No. I hiked it up to keep from getting motorcycle grease on it. We weren’t even kissing, he was telling me a dirty joke, whispering in my ear,” she said. “Old man Hardin saw what he wanted to see. Don’t think for a minute he wouldn’t like to get my skirt over my head himself. I’ve seen the way he looks at me in the halls.”

  I believed her when I heard the story. It wasn’t that she did not lie, it was just that I always knew when she did. In any case, it did not matter. She was given a staggering number of demerits, and Boo Cutler was suspended for the remainder of the year—which undoubtedly suited him just fine. The dirt track out at Lakewood was just getting ripe for racing, and in any case, he had gone as far with Lucy as she would allow. He promptly transferred his attentions to Caroline Gentry, an alliance that was more fruitful in every way than the one with Lucy had promised to be. Lucy, he told Floyd Sutton and his cadre of cronies at the Peachtree Hills Pub, was a cockteaser. It was an epithet that doomed her with the hood element at North Fulton, but only served to send the Jells into fresh transports of anticipation. Someone, they reasoned, had to be first.

  Lucy was taken home in white, crackling silence by Aunt Willa in the taxi in which she had arrived, but the inevitable battle was joined just inside the door, in the foyer, and I walked straight into it when I got home from school. Five different students had rushed to tell me of the showdown in the principal’s office, and I had hurried. I knew that Willa Bondurant would not take this new blot on her escutcheon with grace.

  She didn’t. I could hear her screaming from the street, through the heavy, closed front door. By the time I gained the foyer, she had just about spent herself; her voice had a winding-down quality to it, and her breath came so fast and hard that her breasts hove like buoys in a heavy swell under the seemly challis of her little Wood Valley shirtwaist. Lucy stood opposite her, very straight, back against the newel post of the staircase, face white as a new gardenia, but still and expressionless. Her hands were behind her back.

  “…common as gully dirt, nothing but white trash!” Aunt Willa yowled, nothing of Old Atlanta in her voice now. Wire grass and chicken wire fairly sang in it. “You’ll be pregnant as a yard dog before you’re sixteen, and then what in God’s name do you think is going to happen to you? Because you pure-and-tee can’t stay in this house if you get yourself knocked up, sister. I won’t have a streetwalker for a daughter!”

  There was a ringing silence.

  “Like you were, Mama?” Lucy drawled sweetly. She smiled.

  Aunt Willa slapped her daughter so hard that Lucy’s head rocked back, revealing a tender and somehow heartbreaking crescent of white neck. Her mother wheeled on her stiletto heels and clattered up the stairs to her room. We heard her door slam. No other sound came from the top of the house. My father must have been out; the Chrysler was gone. I don’t know to this day if my mother was in her room and heard the exchange. She usually was at this time of day, napping or reading. But she never mentioned the scene, and needless to say, I did not either. She did not even inquire, this time, why Lucy was once again confined to her tiny third-floor room and was sent her meals on trays for nearly two weeks before she came back downstairs to join us. During those high school years, my mother was enigmatically silent on the subject of Lucy, though her finely arched eyebrows stayed near her lustrous hairline most of the time. Indeed, she managed so completely to disassociate herself from Willa Bondurant and her errant daughter that she was able to murmur scurrilous and wickedly funny things about them to her friends with perfect composure, as if they were nothing to do, really, with her. I heard her do it quite often. She gained something of a reputation as a wit for these sallies, as well as for being “a saint for putting up with those two under your roof all these years,” as Madge Slaton said to her during bridge in the drawing room toward the end of that year. Mother had a way of turning even the grimmest situations to her own advantage. It was a matter of superb, impenetrable detachment. She became, in time, a past master at it.

  I was left alone with Lucy in the foyer for a moment that afternoon, and we stood silent, watching flying cloud shadow dappling the black and white harlequin tiles of the floor.

  “But she was a streetwalker, or worse,” Lucy said too gaily to me, the red imprint of her mother’s hand still bloodlike on her cheek. “Anybody who can count knows that. Why on earth would Daddy have married her if she hadn’t been pregnant with me? Poor white trash like she was? At least he was a gentleman.”

  And she went upstairs to begin again her exile.

  By the time she finally came down, Aunt Willa had retreated into some impregnable inner citadel of imagined Atlanta ladyhood, and had withdrawn, emotionally and actually, as far as possible from her wayward daughter. There had been a wall of cool near-dislike, a kind of critical distance, between Lucy and her mother ever since little Jamie had died and Aunt Willa had begun to lavish her expectations and affection so openly on Little Lady. Now the wall thickened and grew taller, until she barely spoke to Lucy when they met at meals.

  By some tacit washing of her fleshy, well-tended little hands, she had withdrawn the ban on dating and Lucy began to go about openly with the boys she had met and teased in secrecy all that year. In a way it seemed to slow her down some. We heard no more talk, for a little while, of openly sexual activities centering around Lucy, though there was always innuendo. At least she made her dates pick her up at the house on Peachtree Road. My parents or her mother were seldom around to meet them, but I made it a point to be somewhere in the vicinity of the front door whenever Lucy was going out. I already knew all the boys who dated her, of course; I simply thought it dishonorable that nobody from the family was about to see to the small, important social ritual of leave-taking. I was, by that time, irredeemably a creature of a thousand immutable, iron tenets and rules, whether I liked it or not. My mother had done her early work well.

  I knew there was talk among the Jells about my hovering, and a good bit of avid speculation about the nature of my attachment to my cousin Lucy. I hated the idea of the talk, but I hated even more the lack of interest that the absence of parents and relatives when her dates called implied. It seemed to me tawdry and lax, a disgrace on the family and the house. I knew the neglect and its implication could mark Lucy as “easy” faster than almost anything she might do herself. And so, like Anias, I watched at the gate.

  Aunt Willa watched, too, though not openly and publicly. She hovered when Lucy got a telephone call from a boy, and always seemed to be outside the little downstairs sun-room that had become Lucy’s teenaged haunt when boys were in the house. They almost always were that year. She openly forbade her the summerhouse with anyone other than me, and early on in Lucy’s dating career there were hushed, hissing tirades behind the closed door of Lucy’s room when she came home late, which she did increasingly. After a while Aunt Willa stopped sitting up, and the futile tongue-lashings ceased, and no one
waited up for Lucy anymore. I knew that the lack of supervision was common knowledge at school, and that the early-morning necking and petting sessions in the shadows of our porte cochere lengthened accordingly, because I heard the cars as they drove in, and I usually heard them much later as they ghosted guiltily away. I would wait until I saw the flush of yellow from the portico light go out, and then, finally, I would sleep. After that first year, I did not lie awake listening for Lucy.

  When I was fully grown and well away from there, I came to see that Lucy’s powerful and burgeoning seductiveness was not only a reminder to Aunt Willa of her own teen persona, but a threat to the flimsy respectability and social acceptability she had managed to draw around herself. Willa Bondurant’s presence in the drawing rooms and clubs and at the luncheons and fashion shows and charity balls of Atlanta was too hard won and tenuous for her to allow talk about Lucy to jeopardize it. But not even I could control Lucy, much less her mother, and so Willa simply withdrew, hoping, ostrichlike, that she would draw down upon herself no guilt by association.

  For her part, Lucy, who had begun employing her natural seductiveness to keep herself comfortingly surrounded by and, more often, in the arms of the various highborn young men who were copies, albeit pale ones, of her father, began then to use her sexuality as a weapon of defiance against her mother. She dated more and more frequently, often having an engagement with one young man for an afternoon movie, another for a milkshake afterward and a third that evening. She pulled her belts tight and thrust her breasts forward and rolled her hips. She went to every dinner and dance and breakfast given by every high school sorority and fraternity in Atlanta for the next four years, and came in from each of them smeared and crumpled and heavy-eyed and hick-eyed and irrepressible. Her smile grew steadily more brilliant and promissory, and her laugh richer, and her eyes bluer and more intense, and her whole flamelike ethos more glittering. The talk began in earnest in her sophomore year and never ceased, and I heard every bit of it, and suffered. The only thing I did not hear was that she had finally done the Dirty Deed with one of the groaning Jells, and so I knew that technically she was still a virgin, although that technicality hung by the thinnest of filaments imaginable. Lucy in those years left a trail of tumescence behind her as thick as the Great Wall of China.