Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Lulu’s smile widened.

  “That old lady is my grandmother,” she said, “and she’s never shot a living thing in her life. Once a year, at midnight on her birthday, she gets out the old Purdey that’s been in the family for a gazillion years and shoots straight up in the air. It’s her birthday party.”

  “Why does she do that?” Walt said with interest. Emily, still silent, thought that the twins were perhaps the only members of the Parmenter family who did not shudder at the name “Purdey.”

  “Because it’s her birthday. Because she loves the gun and the noise it makes. Because she can,” Lulu said.

  “And there’s a big party to watch her do that?” Carter said, incredulously. In his world old ladies did not shoot off shotguns on their birthday, much less hold parties for them.

  “There is a big party,” Lulu said. “It’s been held every year that I can remember, and way back before that. My grandfather Foxworth used to throw it for her, and when he died, my father kept on with it. Mother and Daddy do it at Maybud now. The only difference is that Grand doesn’t come to her own party anymore. She stays out in the lodge where she lives and only lets a few people she especially likes come out and be with her when she shoots the gun. She says any fool can shoot off a shotgun in the Lowcountry and she’s not about to be gawked at by five hundred of them when she does it. People listen for the gun, though, and when they hear it, there’s a big toast and all the guests throw their glasses in the fireplace, just like at the Queen’s birthday, and the party goes on until the wee hours, but Grand goes to bed. Some people are at Maybud the whole time without seeing her, if she doesn’t choose to come out and say a few words.”

  “They throw the glasses at the fireplace?” Walt Junior obviously thought this was on a par with old ladies shooting shotguns at midnight—unimaginable. “How many do your folks have left?”

  “Mama gets cheap ones from Wal-Mart,” Lulu said, grinning broadly. She was obviously enjoying spinning this tale for them in the candlelight, one more shimmering offering for her hosts.

  Emily was not enjoying any of it. She was furious with Lulu for asking her father in front of the whole table, before she had even asked Emily, if she might take Emily to the party. Emily could imagine pain or sadness from Lulu, but she had never imagined betrayal. And she was profoundly angry at her father and the boys, for their Uriah Heepish awe. She was determined not to go to the party, but now she would have to fight all of them, except Aunt Jenny. She kept her eyes on her plate, her stomach too twisted with rage to eat.

  “She’ll have to have a new dress, won’t you, Emmybug?” her father chortled. He did not seem to notice her silence.

  “Jenny will take you somewhere special to get a pretty one,” he plowed on. “Maybe one of those big stores at the mall? Or, if you want to, I’ll even spring for King Street. Maybe you’ll go along, too, Lulu. You know better than anybody what a young girl should wear to her first big party.”

  “I’ll be glad to,” Lulu said, not looking at Emily. “But I’m sure Jenny would be better at that than me. I haven’t been shopping in a coon’s age.”

  Emily finally found her tongue, or the ghost of it.

  “I’m not going to any mall and buy a new dress,” she whispered. “I’m not going to any stupid party where an old lady shoots off a shotgun, either. I’m not going to any party, period. If anybody had bothered to ask me, I could have told them that.”

  She looked straight at Lulu, who smiled gently at her.

  “You are going to the party, and you are going to have a decent dress, and you are going to apologize to Lulu and thank her for her generosity,” Walter Parmenter said in the tight voice he used when his children embarrassed him with their obstinance and ignorance, and threatened this new dream hovering just beyond his fingertips.

  Emily got up and stumbled out of the room. Behind her she heard her father calling angrily after her, and Lulu saying, “It’s okay. She’s right. I should have asked her first. I know my grandmother would have a good deal to say to her, if she’d listen, and she’d love Emily, but I’m not going to push it. I’ll talk to her in the morning. And if she means it about a new dress, I’ve got some stuff that would fit her, though it’s not very fancy.”

  Emily stopped in the hallway outside the dining room and listened to the disposition of her fate. Her aunt Jenny said evenly, “It’s a little much for a young girl who’s never been to a big party. I don’t think we should expect her to just move into a totally unfamiliar society at her age and with no notice. Maybe next year, if Lulu is still kind enough to ask her.”

  “Well, it’s never too early to learn to be a lady. She’s going to go if I have to make her do it. She’ll thank me afterward.”

  “How can you make her, if she’s determined not to?” Jenny said softly.

  “I’ll think of something. I could always put that dog of hers in the kennels and leave him there until she changed her mind.”

  Emily ran up the stairs choking on sorrow and panic. She knew she would go to the party. She did not hear Jenny and Lulu both protesting fervently.

  She climbed into bed, still in her cropped, flowered pants and matching tank top, and pulled the sheet over her head. She had thought she would cry, but the tears would not come. The pain in her heart was a dry one. Elvis got up off the rug beside her bed and jumped up beside her. He licked her hot, clenched face, and when she lifted the sheet, he crawled under and nestled against her side.

  She did cry, then. “I had one friend, this summer,” she wept into his curly neck, “and now I don’t. I’ll never speak to her again. I may have to work with her, but I don’t have to talk to her. And she doesn’t get to borrow you ever again. I need you now.”

  Against her cheek he groaned softly and put his nose into her hair. When she woke the next morning, neither she nor Elvis had moved.

  The first thing she saw was Lulu, sitting on the foot of her bed, hands dangling between her knees, head down, staring at the floor. Emily did not move, but somehow her wakening reached out to Lulu, and she turned her head and smiled at Emily. It was a small smile; tentative. Emily looked at her, but did not smile back.

  “I guess you’re pretty mad at me,” Lulu said.

  Emily said nothing.

  “Well, I’d be mad, too,” Lulu said. “I got you into something you’d rather die than do, and I didn’t give you any choice in the matter. You can refuse to speak to me for a month, or whatever you need to do, but please hear me out.”

  Still, Emily said nothing and did not move. Beside her Elvis stretched mightily and yawned, and looked at Lulu and thumped his tail, but he did not leave Emily’s side.

  “Here’s the thing,” Lulu said, her voice so low that Emily had to strain to hear her words. “There’s no way I can get out of going to that thing, and besides, I love Grand to death, and I wouldn’t hurt her feelings for anything. I’ve spent every one of her birthdays with her since I can remember. But Emily, I cannot go to that house by myself. I cannot. Those people are the very ones who’d rather see a daughter or a son drown than admit there was anything wrong, like Mother, and I simply do not have it in me to make bright little excuses about where I am this summer, or when I’m coming home, or any of that. And alone, they’d swamp me, but if you were along, they’d back off, because none of them would think it was proper to interrogate me when a…someone they didn’t know was with me, especially someone younger. So I ambushed you. I knew your father would make you go. And I really mean it when I said Grand could come to mean a lot to you. You ought to at least meet her.”

  She paused, and when Emily did not reply, she murmured, so quietly that Emily could hardly hear her, “Emily, please come. I need you.”

  “Why do you need me? Why not somebody who knows how to behave in a place like that, a big party like that? I don’t want to meet all those fancy people. I don’t even know how to talk to them. They’d think I was a swamp rat and you were slumming, and they’d be right. And I’m not
going to any mall and buy any new society dress, either. Besides, how am I supposed to get to know your famous grandmother in the middle of a big hoohaw like that?”

  Emily had started off heatedly, but by the time she was done talking her voice had faded. In her ears it was a childish whine. She shook her head angrily.

  “I need you precisely because you’re not like them,” Lulu said urgently. “You’re not like anybody I’ve known before. You’re like…this place. You have the dogs in you, and the river, and the dolphins and…the way the wind sounds in the pines at night. And you’ve got those incredible stars in you, too. If you were with me it would be like carrying a piece of all this with me. A talisman. So I could remember what I have out here and not get caught up in all that again. I wouldn’t survive that, Emily.”

  “If it’s all that awful, I couldn’t either,” Emily shuddered. “How can you expect me to stand around in the middle of that all night if you can’t?”

  “Oh, God,” Lulu said, leaning back and smiling tiredly. “It’s just a fucking party. That’s all it is. Nobody will conjure up the living Satan or sacrifice a baby. In fact, they can be fun. I can remember that they were fun sometimes. Just not now.”

  “It’s Elvis you need, not me,” Emily said, but the white-hot anger was fading. How could you refuse to help this glorious crippled unicorn of a girl?

  “I’d take him if I could,” Lulu said. “If he’d promise to poop on the Aubusson. But it’s you I need most. Will you just think about it? We don’t even have to go to the big party, or at least you don’t, and I could just drop in for a minute. Grand doesn’t come to these things anymore. As I said, she only sees who she wants to see. I know she’d like you. We two could be the only people with her the whole time.”

  “Then why do we need to dress up?” Emily realized she was speaking as if the deed were done.

  “I do it in case anybody from the party waylays me, and wonders why I look like a ragamuffin. And I do it for Grand. She says it’s important to fly your flags no matter what. She likes to see me dressed up. And as for you, I think you’d just feel more comfortable in something a little dressier than cutoffs. Besides, I’d like to give you a present. We’ll find something that you really like, and you can put it away for later, if you want to, until you need it. Please let me do that. Giving presents is one of the things I love most in the world, and I haven’t been able to give any to you all this whole summer.”

  Emily could not seem to get her mind around the notion of anyone wanting to give her a present. No one ever had, except for the obligatory offerings from her father and Aunt Jenny at Christmas and her birthday. Well, once Cleta had brought her a small black baby doll with a kerchief around its head; it was a long time ago, but Emily remembered. It was just after her mother had left. Emily had loved the doll fiercely. She did not know where it was now.

  “Well…all right, then,” she said ungraciously, and then, at Lulu’s smile, said, “Thank you.”

  And the deed was, indeed, done.

  In the week before the party Lulu burned, crackled, shimmered, fizzed, radiated light like a bonfire about to go out of control. At dinner she spun such outrageous and scurrilous tales of downtown Charleston that even Walter finally divined that she was making them up. By that time no one cared. There was more laughter in the old dining room in that one week, Emily thought, than there had been in this whole house in her lifetime. Watching Lulu across the table, face lit with candlelight and glee, hands weaving in and out of the shadows as she wove her stories, Emily suddenly remembered something Buddy had told her once, a tale about a woman…what was it?

  “A Thousand and One Nights,” Buddy said enigmatically, from deep inside Emily.

  “Well, that’s helpful,” Emily thought back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He was silent. Emily knew that once he was quiet, she could not lure him into a dialogue again. Buddy picked his moments.

  She did remember though, finally. It was a night just before the party, and her nerves were strung tight. It had been one of Lulu’s best nights; her pièce de rèsistance was the story of an impeccably groomed downtown matron who had sent out Christmas cards one year that featured herself buck naked, reclining on a chaise in the style of Goya’s Naked Maja.

  “Only she had waited a trifle too long,” Lulu said. “If she was going to do it, she should have done it about five years earlier when her boobs—’scuse me, Walter—didn’t rest on her stomach. Right after that she ran off and left her husband and children and joined a commune in Ohio. Nobody was really surprised. People just said, ‘Oh, yes, her people were always a little funny.’ Mother knew her at Charlotte Hall. She said she was always walking around the locker room after gym naked as a jaybird. Grand just says some people weren’t born to wear clothes.”

  “What did the card say?” Emily asked.

  “It said, ‘God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,’” Lulu said grinning. “Half of Charleston figured they knew just which gentlemen she meant, but I doubt if anybody really did. People always say that.”

  Emily and Elvis were heading up to bed when Emily heard her aunt and Cleta, who had brought Robert and Wanda over to see Gloria’s new puppies. In the kitchen the babies rolled on a folded quilt in a tangle of puppies, squealing blissfully. Jenny and Cleta stood at the bottom of the stairs, leaning on the banister, watching the babies and talking softly.

  “Lulu was in rare form tonight, wasn’t she?” Jenny said. “Did you hear that story about the lady who sent out the naked Christmas cards?”

  “Naw. Heard everybody laughing all night, though. She sho’ know how to tell a tale, don’t she? She remind me of that Sherry woman who had to tell fancy stories every night or the king lop off her head.”

  “Who on earth…? Oh, you mean Scheherazade. The wife of some Oriental king who was going to have her beheaded but kept her alive another night to hear the next one because her stories were so good. Why in the world would Lulu remind you of her?”

  “Ain’t you seen her face when she tell them stories, an’ her eyes, lookin’ around to see if y’all are laughin’? And them stories gets wilder and wilder every time she over here, almos’ like something bad gon’ happen to her if she don’t please y’all.”

  “What bad thing could we possibly do to her even if we didn’t like one of her stories?” Jenny Raiford said in honest puzzlement.

  “Send her home,” Cleta said briefly.

  “Surely that’s for her parents to decide,” Jenny said. “Where did you hear about Scheherazade?”

  “Buddy tol’ me and Emily ’bout her one day. He said, ‘Now there was a lady who knew how to look after herself.’”

  She went into the kitchen to untangle the mass of puppies and babies, and Jenny stood looking after her. The small Lulu frown creased her forehead. At the top of the stairs Emily remembered.

  It had been a gunmetal winter day; rain ticked against the windowpanes of Buddy’s room, and the fire spat damply. It was not particularly cold, but it seemed so in the big, dim room, and Buddy and Emily and Elvis sat close by the fire. Buddy was wrapped in an old plaid blanket that he said was the proper tartan of Clan McClellan, to which he had deduced, after weeks of perusing a book called The Clans and Plaids of Scotland, the Parmenters rightly belonged. A cadet branch, but valid just the same, he said. After he died Emily had brought the filthy old blanket into her room and put it away in the top shelf of her closet. Sometimes, on the nights when Buddy had been silent for a long time and loneliness howled in her heart, she got the blanket out and wrapped herself in it and drifted off to sleep to the sound of skirling pipes and clashing claymores. She knew she would keep it always.

  That day Cleta had come in with a pile of freshly folded laundry and stopped to listen to Buddy tell of Scheherazade and the tales of the Arabian Nights. Emily had forgotten, but now it came back: the rain and the fire and the empathetic terror and elation she felt with the young woman who knew that onl
y her wit and imagination were keeping her alive.

  What if you were just too tired one night? she had thought.

  In her mind’s eye she saw again Lulu at the dinner table, almost manic in her animation, totally absorbed in the tale she was spinning. Did she indeed look around at all of them to see if they were laughing? Emily had never noticed. Now she would. The notion of Lulu as Scheherazade was both unsettling and pitiable.

  “What do you think? Does she remind you of Scheherazade?” she said to Buddy.

  “Well, you thought of it first,” he said. “Earlier tonight, when you couldn’t quite remember who she reminded you of. Where do you think that came from? Jeez, Emily, do I have to spell everything out for you? Of course she’s Scheherazade.”

  “Of course,” Emily thought grumpily to him. “Of course you said it first. Like always. But what awful thing will happen to her if we don’t like one of her stories?”

  “You’d have to ask her,” he said, and faded away down deep. Emily knew the conversation was over. But she thought about it for a long time after she and Elvis piled into her bed and turned off the light, and when she finally slept, the bizarre image of Lulu performing for her life followed her down.

  Emily stood at the top of the staircase the next night, afraid to go down. At the bottom, Lulu and Walter and Jenny and the twins were ranged, waiting to see Cinderella off to the ball. Lulu had spent hours with her earlier, fussing with the dress and piling her hair this way and that, and brushing something rosy out of a little pot onto her cheeks with a soft, fat brush. Now there was nothing left but to take her quailing alien self downstairs for the first of the scrutinies she would face this night. The unaccustomed flush of makeup on her face, the strange weight of her piled-up curls felt as though they would both slide off if she moved her head suddenly. The tiny kitten heels on the new sandals threatened to topple her. If she could have turned and run, she would have done so. Elvis, for once, had pattered on down the stairs ahead of her, and she could not feel Buddy anywhere.