They watched TV together. Emily thought it was a gargantuan achievement.
“It’s barbaric, the way you three sneak off down there and let that thing blare all over the house without a word to Emily or me,” Jenny said. “You might as well be living in a log cabin in the Yukon. What good does it do Emily to learn to be a young lady if she has to bring her friends home to that?”
And soon they all gathered for an hour or so, and compromised on CNN, and then Emily and Jenny went up to their rooms—Jenny had Buddy’s—and chatted or maybe watched Emily’s little TV, and went to bed early. If her aunt was sad or homesick for her previous life, if she staggered under the burden of this new family, or wept for the one in this house that she had never had, Emily never heard it. The rooms were too far apart.
The images of her mother, leaving, faded.
The specter of change shrank back under the weight of the pleasant, nearly identical, altogether ordinary spring days. Emily floated on the sameness and ordinariness, and was soothed.
On an early May Saturday afternoon she and her aunt sat on the old silver-gray wooden benches at the end of the long dock out over the Wadmalaw, sipping lemonade from a thermos and stretching their legs to the young sun. The marsh was almost totally green now, and alive with its teeming, gliding, scuttling, splashing denizens, and the smaller creeks cutting it ran full. It was nearly high tide. Behind Emily’s closed eyelids the sun made red whorls and pinwheels, and was tender on her face.
Jenny took a deep breath and exhaled.
“Smell that?” she murmured sleepily. “Wisteria and honeysuckle. Summer’s coming. You can smell the change.”
But what came, on the new wings of summer, was Lulu Foxworth, as glistening and beautiful and vulnerable as a beached Portuguese man-o-war, and just as dangerous. And for everyone at Sweetwater everything changed, and nothing ever went back to the way it was before.
5
PEOPLE WHO LIVE beside moving water have been given the gift of living light, and even if they never come to recognize it as such, any other light, no matter how clear or brilliant, is pale and static to them, leaving them with a sense of loss, of vulnerability, as if they have suddenly found themselves without clothes.
“I have to be near the water,” they will say. “I can’t live away from the ocean”…or the river or the creek, or whatever water throws back to them the sun, or the boiling storm clouds, or the pearl of moving fog, or the wash of sunset.
But what most of them are really saying, without knowing it, is, “I can’t live without that light that dances with me. I wear it like a living skin. Without it I am incomplete.”
This epidermis of light is what keeps the waterman, the shrimper, the lobsterman at his work long after his home waters are fished out, dead. You see them sometimes, sunburnt old men sitting on benches at the end of docks, indigent now, but unable to leave and go inland because it would be to live without skin.
Emily felt the absence of waterlight deeply and miserably when she was away from the river. Once, on a school trip to Washington, she lost herself from her group and stayed behind beside the fast-moving Potomac while her class went on to the Air and Space Museum. She could never explain why. And the only time she was sent to camp in the North Carolina mountains, when she was seven, the deep, still, opaque lake that threw her back no connecting spark haunted her days and nights until she wept inconsolably and had to be brought home five days early. Her father thought she was homesick, and was impatient with such childishness. Emily knew her grief was not homesickness, but she did not know what it was, so she was silent on the trip home.
But when she got to Sweetwater, the Wadmalaw, running deep in full tide, wrapped her in trembling waterlight, and she felt full and healed. For a long time after that, she refused to leave the river except for such routine trips as school and doctors and dentists, and even then she knew in her heart the number of miles and minutes it took to get back.
When she was older, she told Buddy about that panicky feeling of grief and loss she had had when she left the river for camp, and he had said, “You don’t have to be afraid of leaving people and places. You take them with you somewhere inside you.”
“You mean, like in your heart?”
“Or your liver or your spleen, or your medulla oblongata. Who knows? Everybody has a different place inside he stuffs things he needs to keep.”
Emily thought perhaps her own place was in the pit of her stomach. Everything that hurt or frightened her settled there indelibly, and often she first felt joy there, too.
“My stomach leaps with joy,” she said to Elvis. “It could be worse, though. What if I had to say, ‘My colon leaps with joy?’”
On a Saturday morning in early June the dancing stipple of light off the river woke her, and she lay looking at it play on the ceiling and walls of her room, and stretched her arms and legs as far as they would go, and smelled, through her open window, perhaps the very last of the cool, sweet, fresh mornings of early summer. Wet punishing heat hung like a fog bank in the distance, waiting to stun the Lowcountry into somnolence. It would soon be here. Everything would be full, ripe. What you would smell for the rest of the summer through your window would be rich, fecund marsh and the amniotic sweat of the summer river.
She was usually up with the light, not for chores, just to be in the world. But on a few mornings like this, she lingered half-asleep in bed, stroking Elvis and thinking dreamy, abstracted thoughts that never occurred to her any other time or place.
“If you’ve been with somebody for a long time and then they leave, are you the same person alone as you were with them?”
“Does the furniture freeze in the Antarctic? Do sofas freeze?”
“Has anybody ever stopped growing up just because they wanted to bad enough?”
“Is it all right to pray if you don’t believe in God?”
She had asked Buddy this once. He had considered it, and said, yes, he thought it was both all right and a good thing. People might not believe in their heads, but their hearts knew there simply had to be something bigger and more powerful than they were, otherwise, everybody would be scared to death all the time, and it was that that they talked to in prayer. Or whatever you wanted to call it.
“Then, do dogs pray to us?”
“Could be. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
The dapple of light on her ceiling had moved to the wall. She stretched again. This day had promise. Her father and the twins had probably already left for North Charleston, where a regional Boykin Spaniel Council was meeting in yet another of the endless attempts to get the high-nosed American Kennel Club to recognize Boykins as a breed. Since the South Carolina Boykin breeders and owners stubbornly refused to accept any of the AKC’s tenets and restrictions (“No goddamned New Yorker is going to tell me how to raise my spaniels, by God”), Boykin recognition seemed about as attainable as Saturn. The need to fight the marauding Yankees never quite died in the Lowcountry. But the meetings went on.
Emily was going to love this day. She could work unhampered with the starters and begin training a beautiful new Boykin bitch puppy someone had brought to be polished, and there was a new litter of milky-sweet, mewling babies in Gloria’s box in the kennels. Later she was going to show her aunt the dolphin slide over at Sweetwater Creek, and then they were going to pack a picnic lunch and take the whaler far down the Wadmalaw, almost to Bears Bluff, and see if it was warm enough to swim. Probably not; in early June the deepest rivers were warm and seductive on their surfaces, but an electric chill like frozen ginger ale lurked just below. It didn’t matter. It would be a sweet day.
It was near ten when she emerged to sit on the front steps with a cup of milky coffee and a doughnut, simply looking at the morning. Aunt Jenny came and sat beside her, shelling new peas, and Elvis lolled at her feet.
“Don’t you need to get going?” Jenny said. “You’ll spend at least two hours with those dogs, and by the time we get down river we’ll be starving to dea
th.”
“Yeah,” Emily said, not moving.
They sat in another small silence.
Beside her, Elvis lifted his head and swung it sharply toward the door behind them. A second later they heard Walter Parmenter’s brisk steps and the twang-thud of the screen door, and he was with them on the steps, military-crisp in pressed khakis and a blue oxford cloth shirt, his face shining from its close shave and his thick hair still showing damp comb tracks.
“Morning,” Jenny said. “I thought you’d be halfway through your meeting by now.”
“Morning, Daddy,” Emily mumbled.
“Ladies,” her father said. “We’re in for a real treat this morning. And a real shot at the brass ring. Rhett Foxworth called last night after you’d both gone to bed and said he was looking to buy a Boykin, and Towny Chappelle told him ours were the best in South Carolina. I guess something good came of that Thanksgiving business after all. Foxworth is coming out about noon to look at the pups and see some of the older dogs work. He’s bringing his wife and daughter with him, and I want us all to make a good impression. Jenny, maybe you could make some mint iced tea. Emily, I’m going to let you work the dogs this morning, but not in shorts and a shirt like that. A dress or skirt, please, and Elvis goes to your room.”
“Who is Rhett Foxworth?” Emily muttered, already disliking the man and all his family, past and future.
“Rhett Foxworth is Charleston,” her father said. “One of the oldest families, most money, biggest plantation south of Hobcaw, house in town on the National Register. If the word gets out he’s bought dogs from us, we’ll be in solid with the Hunt Club crowd, and there’s no other place I’d rather be. Emily, after you’ve done the dogs, I want you to take his daughter and show her around, get to know her. I happen to know her mother’s on the board of Charlotte Hall.”
“Whoop-de-do,” Emily said under her breath.
“How old is this daughter?” she said aloud. “I’m not very good at baby-sitting.”
“She’s older than that,” her father replied. “I think her mother said she was out of school for the summer. Who knows, you might make a new friend. Now, run and change.”
“Daddy,” Emily began desperately, but her aunt cut in.
“Not a skirt on a June morning in the country, Walter. Maybe some nice pants and a matching shirt.”
“Whatever,” her father said, moving down the steps toward the kennels. “Just not those ragged blue jeans. And not that shirt. Oh, and comb your hair.”
Emily looked down at her chest. Her T-shirt had GOD IS DOG SPELLED BACKWARD written on it. It was obviously too tight.
“I’ll take the bone out of my nose, too,” she said resentfully as she stood up to go into the house.
“Go easy on him, Emily,” her aunt said. “This is a big deal for him. And he’s just now learning to think of you as a young woman. He’s not exactly the quickest study, you know. But he wants you to show the dogs, and that’s his way of saying he knows you’re better at it than he is.”
“He could just come right out and say it.”
“No,” her aunt said, “I don’t think he could. Not yet.”
The stipple of light was gone from her room when Emily came into it to change her clothes. Out the window the river shimmered, crumpled foil. “Glitter water,” Emily had called it when she was small. It had stuck.
She shucked off the jeans and T-shirt and, without looking at herself in the mirror, pulled on the cropped pink cotton pants and peasant blouse her aunt had bought her. She had never worn them; they did not seem to fit anywhere in her small arena. But they’d probably be right at home in the Foxworths’. She slid her feet into white sandals and combed her unruly red-gold hair straight back, and tied it with a shoelace. She thrust her face close to the watery mirror in the bathroom and winced. This girl would be far more at home shopping on King Street than working spaniels.
“You know you’ll have to stay here for a little while,” she said to Elvis. “Daddy’s doing the big dog breeder thing for some rich guy. I’ll let you out the minute they’re gone. It shouldn’t be long.”
At the door she turned and looked at him. He was already settled resignedly on the quilt at the foot of her bed.
“You won’t cry or bark, will you?”
He sighed and put his head down on his crossed front paws. She knew that he wouldn’t.
The family was assembled at the front door by a quarter to twelve. Aunt Jenny had changed into a long flowered skirt and sleeveless blue T-shirt; she looked young and pretty. Walt and Carter were echoes of their father in clean khakis and polo shirts.
“Ten-SHUN!” Emily whispered to her aunt, and Jenny grinned.
At noon exactly a mud-spattered Land Rover crunched up on the circular drive and stopped.
“If he’s that rich, why can’t he get his car washed?” Emily said under her breath to Jenny.
“I think it’s called shabby-chic,” her aunt whispered back.
Walter went down the steps to meet the Foxworths, who were getting out of the Rover.
“Welcome to Sweetwater,” he said jovially. “It’s good to have you here.”
“Thank you,” said a huge, sunburnt man with thinning black hair and a boy’s smooth pug face. “Walter Parmenter, isn’t it? Rhett Foxworth. Call me Rhett.”
He gestured at the two women standing behind him. “This is my wife Maybelle, and my daughter, Lulu. We’ve forgotten her real name.”
Everyone laughed and moved together and shook hands and bobbed heads and murmured greetings. Emily hung back and looked at the fabulous Foxworths, who were Charleston.
Maybelle Foxworth came forward with her hands outstretched to Walter Parmenter, smiling brilliantly with large Chiclet teeth and teetering just a bit on the rolling gravel of the driveway. Her yellow glacé flats, Emily thought, would last about two minutes in the dog ring. Maybelle was short and voluptuous and tanned to an impossible, silky cappuccino tan. Her silvery blond hair was held off her round face with a black velvet headband, and her flowered wrap skirt and yellow blouse matched the shoes and showed a trim waist and startling cleavage. Her blue eyes had smile and sun crinkles fanning out from their corners, and except for a certain crepey skin on her chest and neck, she might have been a much younger woman, far too young to have a grown daughter. Later, Jenny told Emily, with just a hint of laughter in her voice, that some women simply got stuck in the best time of their youth, and would do whatever it took to remain there. Maybelle Foxworth’s was obviously the Lilly Pulitzer era. Emily thought she had done a good job, all told.
“I have heard so much about you,” she trilled to Walter Parmenter. “Towny talks about nothing but your beautiful dogs, and said that your house was a fine specimen of the earliest river plantations, the modest, plain ones that had fine lines and almost always beautiful river views. I can see he was right!”
Walter took her outstretched hands in his own, and looked fleetingly and with puzzlement at his fine-lined modest plantation house, and almost stammered. Maybelle Foxworth often had that effect on people. Meeting her for the first time was rather like meeting a beautiful creature from a Disney theme park: vividly colored, animated, displacing too much air.
“We’re glad you could come,” Emily’s father said. “Towny Chappelle talked a lot about you.”
He hadn’t, Emily would have been willing to bet, but she was quiet, studying, absorbing. So this was how it was done.
“Nothing bad, I hope,” Maybelle Foxworth giggled. “Towny is so naughty! I’m going to have to get after him one of these days.”
“Oh, all good,” Walter said, nodding his head vigorously.
“Well, meet my daughter,” Maybelle said, and stepped aside so that they could see the young woman who had stood perfectly still and silent while her mother trilled and her father grinned his fierce baby’s grin.
She did not look up at first, and all Emily could see was the top of her silvery blond hair, so like her mother’s that she tho
ught perhaps Maybelle did not bleach hers after all. Her daughter’s was skinned back into a careless ponytail.
“This is my daughter, Lulu. Or Louisa, but I always have to check her birth certificate to remember,” her mother said.
The assorted Parmenters murmured hello. There was something almost eerie in the young woman’s stillness. The word “taboo” popped idiotically into Emily’s mind.
Lulu Foxworth lifted her head to them then, and Emily felt a tiny frisson of…was it shock? The first thing that went through her head, also idiotically, was that Lulu Foxworth was dead, mummified. Her face and arms and neck were so pure and carved that she might have been an effigy on a medieval tomb, or a marble saint. She was all-over tan, a matte bisque with no tonal gradations and almost no shadows, as if someone had carefully and lovingly painted her. Only her eyes were alive, but they made up in living flame for the rest of her. They were her mother’s blue, but in her face they blazed out like leaping fire, sparking blue. There was a very small sound as if a little wind had come up and then danced on by. Emily knew that it was the indrawn breath of the Parmenters. Those eyes made of Saint Lulu Foxworth something else altogether.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” she murmured, looking back down at her feet. They were narrow and tanned in glove-soft driving moccasins.
Emily’s eyes left the moccasins and traveled up the rest of Lulu. She wore jeans seated so low on her hips that it seemed that centrifugal force alone held them up, and in her navel there was a tiny gold ring. A cutoff T-shirt that just cleared her breasts showed an expanse of silky, tanned skin. She was thin; her ribs and collarbones and wrists were sharp. But her hips and breasts were sumptuous, and as tan as the rest of her.
“Holy shit,” Emily heard Walt Junior whisper reverently. Her father’s face turned a dark red, and he kept his gaze squarely on Rhett Foxworth. Emily looked down at her faux milkmaid outfit and shot him a glance of pure triumph. But he did not see.
Sweetwater Creek Page 9
