By the time Emily had galvanized herself into action, Elvis had put both paws on Lulu’s shoulders and was licking at the vomit on her face.
A child raised on an animal farm knows instinctively and immediately what to do about dying. Death may be beyond him, but life, even if fading, is not. Emily lunged at Lulu and rolled her onto her side. The vomiting continued, as steadily as if pumped, but the choking stopped. Afterward Emily did not remember what she did during that time, but she did remember Elvis had sat still and at attention beside Lulu’s matted head.
The vomiting slowed and stopped, and Lulu rolled over on her back once more. She was breathing in slow, shallow, wheezing gasps, but she was not conscious.
“No, you don’t,” Emily murmured, furiously, and pulled her to a sitting position, and then dragged her by her arms into the bathroom and heaved her into the tub. She turned on the shower full force. The caked stains of vomit and whiskey soon whirled down the drain, and Lulu’s hair was clean once more, and her face and body shone with water. Beneath it, she was still a decayed, bruised white. Her eyes were still closed.
“Wake up, Lulu,” Emily said fiercely, over and over, shaking Lulu’s shoulders, not knowing she was doing it. “Goddamnit, wake up and sit up! This isn’t fair. I don’t know what to do about this. Don’t you dare die!”
She did not consider getting help from the house. Somewhere deep inside she knew that to do so she might save Lulu’s life, but would kill her soul. She was still savagely shaking Lulu’s shoulders when Lulu made a small, strangled sound and opened her eyes and looked up at Emily. For a long moment they simply stared at one another, and then Lulu looked down at herself and the dirty water, and up at Emily’s spattered clothes, and closed her eyes again.
“Go away, Emily,” she whispered in a cracked old woman’s voice. “Leave me alone.”
“I will not,” Emily said, beginning to cry with fright and relief. “You were choking. You almost died!”
“I wish I had,” Lulu said, beginning to cry, too. “I wish I had.”
Lulu woke at first light, just as the dogs were beginning to stir out in the kennels, and the puppies were starting to yip frantically for their mothers’ teats. On a branch of the huge old crape myrtle that pressed at Lulu’s open window, a cardinal tuned up his first rusty Pretty-Pretty-Pretty Cheer! Cheer! Cheer!
Nodding stiff-necked in the slipper chair beside the little bed, Emily heard Buddy whisper, “The bird of dawning singeth all night long: And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad.”
She came fully awake, heart jolting, mouth sour and dry, bladder bursting. She had been sitting in the chair ever since Lulu had fallen asleep in the deep hours of the night. She was as uncomfortable as she could ever remember being, but she had been afraid to leave the chair. Lulu’s sleep was cold and total, like death. Wrapped still in the damp bath sheet and towel Emily had found and wrapped her body and hair in, she had lain ever since on her back, covered only with a lace-edged linen sheet. She was so white and still that more than once Emily had gotten up and leaned over to see if she was still breathing. Beside Emily’s chair, Elvis sat motionless, alert eyes on Lulu, guarding.
Hours had passed in this quasi-death watch, but Emily had felt, profoundly and without doubt, that if she left the bedroom even for an instant, Lulu would simply stop her slow, shallow breathing. When she heard Buddy’s words she jerked out of the half-sleep she had fallen into. She looked wildly around the shadowy room, uncertain where she was for an instant, and aware only of the painful need to urinate. When she looked at the bed, Lulu was awake, though still motionless, and as white as a boiled onion. Her electric blue eyes were dulled to gray, but she was smiling ever so slightly, a ghastly death’s-head rictus.
“Shakespeare always got it right, didn’t he?” she whispered in a voice that sounded as if it must scar her throat. Emily realized then that it had been Lulu who had spoken, not Buddy.
“Only spirits did walk, didn’t they? I’m so ashamed, Emily. I can’t even imagine what I’ve put you through. I keep doing that, don’t I? When I should be taking care of you.”
She sighed, a rasping, phlegmy sound, and closed her eyes again.
“I don’t know why you stayed,” she said, “but I guess I’m glad you did. I would have died, I know I would have. And maybe I should have. How did you know?”
Emily nodded mutely at Elvis, who jumped up on Lulu’s bed and settled down in the crook of her arm.
“I’m sorry,” his face said to Emily. “I need to be here. I’ll be back with you soon.”
“I should have known,” Lulu said, tears starting again. “I owe the Parmenters, dogs and all, for more than my life. It can’t be repaid.”
Back from the bathroom, Emily’s fear was turning to anger.
“I didn’t know you drank like that,” she said coldly. “I don’t think Daddy would have let you come if he’d known. But maybe he would have. He wants to get me in Charlotte Hall awfully bad.”
Lulu turned her head away on the pillow, tears sliding silently down her sallow cheeks.
“Please don’t tell Walter,” Lulu whispered. “Please don’t. I don’t drink like this, not anymore. It’s the first time I’ve had a drink in I don’t know how long. I’ve been trying my best to stop doing a lot of things that were wrecking me, and I was doing okay, being out here and all, until last night. I should never have brought the bottle here with me, but I thought it would be a good test, to know it was here and be able to ignore it.”
Emily said nothing.
Lulu opened her eyes again and said, “Will you bring me a glass of water? I want to tell you about all this, and I’m just too dry to talk much.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Emily said tightly. “I wish you wouldn’t tell me. I don’t want to know any more about it. I won’t tell Daddy. Let’s just forget about it.”
“No,” said Lulu. “I care more about your understanding than I do anybody else’s in the world. Mother and Daddy could never in a million years understand, and I wouldn’t ask it of Grand. I don’t think she could take it.”
“Why do you think I can?” Emily said.
“Because you’ve taken in so much that was new and hard for you this summer. I’ve watched you do it. I think you can take in this, too. I’ve lost almost everything, Emily. I don’t want to lose you. Young as you are, you’re as good a friend as I’ve ever had.”
Emily felt her throat close up, but she would not show Lulu her face. She went to the sink and got the water, and gave it to Lulu. She wanted none of this pain, whatever it was; it had the smell of something that would change her forever. She had had enough of that this summer. But she sat down again.
Lulu drank water in grateful gulps and then sighed again, and waited.
“You haven’t really known me,” she said after a long moment. “Not like I used to be. I used to be the strong one, the free one, the one who went her own way and didn’t give a flip what people thought. I was alive in every cell in my body. My friends didn’t understand me, but they put up with me. My parents tried their best to civilize it all out of me. Only Grand understood. She always said that I was a great deal like her when she was young. Grand thinks I hung the moon—that I can do no wrong. I guess I lived a sort of wild, kiss-off life for Charleston, but I loved it and it worked for me.
“And then, almost exactly two years ago, I met somebody at a house party on Wadmalaw, and it all went to hell.”
“The person who was with your mother last night,” Emily said, her mind making the leap with ease. “I knew it wasn’t just her that scared you so.”
“That’s right. The person who was with my mother. The man. I don’t know how he got to the party; he lives in Virginia and I haven’t seen him for four months. I didn’t even think he knew where I was; I hoped to hell that he didn’t. I never thought he would find me out here. I guess my mother invited him to the party. She knew I’d probably be there, and she’s been absolutely wild for me
to get back together with him since I told her I wouldn’t see him again. He’s exactly what every Charleston mother wants for her daughter. He’s charming and handsome and funny; he’s so well-born that he practically stinks of First Family of Virginia. And he stands to inherit about a gazillion dollars and the biggest plantation in Virginia. It’s on the James River, and it’s five times as big as ours. And he’s sweet and polite with my mother and father, and first in his class at Virginia Law, and there’s just no doubt that he’s going to be one of the South’s great men of the law, to quote my mother. Governor. Senator. Who knows? And he seemed to absolutely adore me. If I told them how it really was with him and me, they simply would not believe me.”
“So how was it?” Emily said. She was terrified. She wanted to grab Elvis and run, back to her room, back to the way things had been before Lulu Foxworth. But still, she sat.
Lulu turned her head back toward Emily. She seemed to really see her for the first time since she had wakened. The swimming blue eyes focused.
“For God’s sake, what am I thinking of? I can’t tell you this stuff. You’re not even thirteen years old. I shouldn’t tell anybody, but especially not you. With any luck you may never have to know about stuff like this. I ought to just get out of here and take my dirt with me, before I ruin you. I’ve done enough to you this summer.”
“I know about things like that,” Emily said. “There’s stuff written on the walls in the bathrooms at school that you wouldn’t believe. Pictures, too. I know what it means. And I’ve heard the boys talking when they didn’t know I was around. I know what people do—”
“No, you don’t,” Lulu said. Her voice had a little more energy now; the fishlike gasping had gone from her throat. Fresh tears started in her eyes.
“You don’t have any idea on earth about what we did, he and I. I didn’t know about it until I met him. I didn’t know stuff like that existed. There wasn’t anything he didn’t do to me, and I went back for more, and sometimes I begged him for it. At first I was so ashamed that I thought I would die, and then it got so that nothing mattered except that I see him again, be with him again. I knew what I had turned into and I didn’t care.”
Emily sat motionless, not speaking. She was nauseated. This was beyond embarrassment. This was a look into the terrible blackness that she had always known lay beyond the everyday world, but so far had never really surfaced, like a great black malformed shark that hovered always just below consciousness. She had never spoken of it, not even to Buddy. It shamed her in some obscure way that it hung inside her. She had always thought she was the only one in the world who harbored such a shark, but now Lulu was pulling another up from her own depths for Emily to see.
“I want somebody to take care of me,” Emily thought, the thought leaden with grief. “I want Buddy. I want my mother.”
Neither would come, of course, so she simply sat still and waited for Lulu to boat her monstrous fish.
“His family kept a little apartment in Charlottesville for when they visited him,” Lulu went on, her voice dead. “We’d go there. Every Friday I’d sign out and he’d pick me up just off campus and we’d go straight there. Most of the time we didn’t come out until early Monday morning, in time for me to make my first class. He kept a little food there, and a lot of liquor. Other things, too. He made me try them all. But it was only the liquor that took hold of me, that became an addiction. The liquor and him. During the week, while I went about my business like I always had, I was burning inside, dying for the minute that he would open the car door so I could climb in. The minute that he would look at me and touch me. The miraculous thing was that neither of us let our schoolwork go. I was hanging on by my teeth and nails, bleeding to death inside trying to maintain that normalcy. But what we were doing didn’t seem to affect him at all, not the liquor, not the drugs, not the…other stuff. He could go right back to UVA and ace another law exam, write another brilliant paper, visit other girls in their big river houses, charm their parents just like he did mine. I knew about the other girls. Southern schools are linked up like jungle drums. It didn’t matter, as long as I had those weekends. Later we started just staying on, two or three days longer after the weekend. I don’t know what he told his parents, or how he handled it with school. I told mine I was involved with so many extracurricular things that I really needed a blanket permission for all the times I had to go off campus. I think if I hadn’t just…stopped it, I would eventually have never left that horrible little apartment. I would have died there.”
“But you didn’t,” Emily said, just to toss something into the deadly silence. It seemed important that Lulu not sense her revulsion.
“No. I didn’t. One morning after we had been there for four days and had drunk I don’t know how much liquor and taken God knows how much of what, he got dressed and went out to class without even looking back at me, and I dragged myself to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. It was like seeing what I had become for the first time. I saw this degraded, dehydrated, yellow-pale, bruised and starved zombie woman whose eyes even then burned for the time he would come back, and behind her I could barely see what I had been when I met him. All that health and vitality and laughter and up-yours attitude. All that intelligence. That was what had gone out of me the first night I met him. The intelligence.
“And I knew that if I saw him even one more time I would die. I hitched a ride back to school and told everybody that I had the flu and to leave me alone, and I locked myself in and I sweated it out. It was beyond horrible. I wouldn’t put a rabid animal through that. I couldn’t do it again. It would kill me; it nearly did. I can hardly talk about it, even now. But one morning I looked in the mirror again and saw the ghost of that other girl, plainer this time, and I knew that I had to get totally away from him or he would find me and it would start all over again. So I called Mother and said I had been sick so long, and was so run down, that I needed to come home, and she came and got me, and the whole time I was home I was locked in my bedroom trying not to sneak a drink or pick up the phone and call him. She thought I was ‘resting up for the season.’ The goddamned Charleston season at Christmas, with all these balls and parties and luncheons and teas and houseparties. All the liquor. Endless, endless. I knew he would be at a lot of those parties, because the South is a tiny little world and he was a prince of it.
“I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t come out here with them and seen the dogs, and seen that maybe out here I could get back my sense of self-worth again. It was just such a clean, sweet, slow world. And it was good; if I worked as hard as I could all day with you and the dogs, and spent what time I could with you all at night so I wouldn’t be alone with that bottle sitting out here, I could remember how it felt to be me and start to find my way back.”
“Scheherazade,” Emily thought. “Cleta was right. She saw it first. Aunt Jenny saw it, too. She was doing a performance for us every night, so that we’d want her back the next night. So she wouldn’t have to die. And all the time we thought it was us she liked so much. I’ll never listen to her tell one of those stupid Charleston stories again. I’ll never sit at a table with her again. And she sure as hell will never borrow Elvis again. Let her find somebody else to clutch on to.”
As if she caught the thought, Lulu reached a trembling hand out to Emily.
“You all taught me how to start living again,” she whispered. “You all saved me in as real a way as there is. I’ve come to love you for that. All of you, and you most of all. You and the dogs are the best thing in my life now. If I have to go I’ll die very soon. I’m not strong enough yet. When it comes to him, I may never be. It’s as sick an addiction as there is in the world. Way worse than the liquor, though that’s bad enough.”
Emily made no move to take her hand, and Lulu dropped it and looked away again.
“I’ve ruined it all now, haven’t I?” she said faintly. “I can’t stay and take the chance of putting you through this again. I c
an’t look at Walter and know that he knows. But I can’t go home either; Mother would have him at the house before I could blink an eye. I thought I was safe here. But now he knows where I am. You aren’t ever really safe, are you?”
Emily knew this fear; the black terror of a freefall into nothing. It had been born in her with the sound of the door closing behind her mother. Tears burned her nose.
She reached over and picked Lulu’s hand up in hers. The girl in the bed seemed a wasted child.
“We just won’t let him come, then,” she said. “If he shows up, Daddy and the boys will just run him off—”
“They can’t know!” Lulu’s face contorted with anguish.
“Then the dogs and I won’t let him,” Emily said. “I’ll be with you all day when we work the dogs, and I’ll stay with you at night. Elvis and I will just spend the nights out here. We can tell everybody we’re reading late. Or you can tell them that you’re teaching me to be a lady…”
A specter of Lulu’s old smile flitted across her corpse’s face.
“Even Yancey couldn’t get past you and the dogs,” she said.
“Yancey? What kind of name is that?” Emily said belligerently. That sick, spoiled prince was not going to get by her.
“Yancey Byrd. It’s the kind of name that opens doors all over the United States.”
“Well, it’s not going to open this one,” Emily said, and went over to sit on the side of Lulu’s bed. Elvis grinned at her and licked her arm.
“Oh, God, I’m hiding behind a twelve-year-old girl and a spaniel,” Lulu said, beginning to cry again. “I can’t do this to you. I can’t let you do this for me…”
“Hush,” Emily said, brushing the wet gilt hair off Lulu’s wasted face. “Hush. It’s going to be all right.”
Deep down in her memory the words surfaced, glinting: someone had said that to her once, someone with a soft, slow voice. She could not remember if things had been all right, but the words had been a powerful amulet ever since.
Sweetwater Creek Page 22
