“What will we do tonight?” I said finally. We were leaving the mountains and turning onto the four-lane highway. “We could go get some Italian food and celebrate. I’d really like to drink some Chianti.”
“I’m going back to the house and study,” he said. “I’ve got classes all day on Monday.”
“You’re going to the house? You’re going to leave me?”
“We’ve been gone two days. . . . I’m taking ten hours, Rhoda. I have to do some work.”
“We could go up to Stone Mountain and have a picnic. You can’t just take me home.”
“I have to take you home. I’ll be up studying all night as it is.”
“Okay. Never mind. It’s okay. Take me back to Emory then. What difference does it make.” I stared out the window at the ugly midsummer road. I looked down at my ugly wedding ring. I was married. Well, I wasn’t giving up. I would keep on trying. I wanted to be happy so much I would do anything, even keep on looking out the window, even keep from crying.
Adoration
It was Christmas in Atlanta and Rhoda was sick every day. She was so sick she could hardly go to work. She would get better, then get worse. It couldn’t have happened at a more inconvenient time because she had just been promoted to the Shopping Service at J. P. Allen’s Department Store. She ran up and down the stairs in a red dress buying things for people to give to other people. She ran up and down and talked on the phone to rich ladies about their shopping problems.
She was nineteen years old and she had been married six months and she was putting her husband through school. She made four hundred dollars a month and his parents gave them four hundred more and her father gave her anything she asked him for.
She had made love to a boy one night after a fraternity party. The next week they ran away and got married. A month later she was living in a garage apartment in Atlanta putting him through school. Sex had been a big surprise to Rhoda. She had felt its mighty hand.
“What are you doing this for?” Her friend Daniel, who was an artist, had stopped by the store to take her out to lunch. “Why did you quit school?”
“I had to. I have to put him through college.”
“You’re crazy. Throwing yourself away.”
“Of course I’m crazy, darling. Aren’t we all?” She laughed a wonderful sophisticated laugh. It was Rhoda’s main affectation when she was nineteen to say darling as many times as possible every day. Her other obsession was learning to dress like the salesladies at J. P. Allen’s, especially a slim dark woman with a bun who wore black leather heels trimmed in brass. Rhoda made four hundred dollars a month and she charged about six hundred a month to the store and her father was still coming out ahead. Then she got sick and it all stopped.
She couldn’t believe this terrible sickness, this bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. She couldn’t be pregnant because she almost always wore the diaphragm. She lay in bed in the garage apartment and bled and bled and bled. Her young husband sat on the edge of the bed and worried. He thought he had wounded her. He was scared to death of Rhoda’s terrible blood. He wished he had never run off and married her no matter how much money her father had. It was terrible. She was a terrible cook and she followed him around all the time and now all she did was bleed.
“Let me call my aunt Lillian. You’d better go to a doctor, Rhoda. You’d better find out what’s wrong.”
“I can’t get up. Tell the doctor to come over here.”
“They don’t come out in Atlanta. Let me call my aunt.”
“All right. Call her then.” Rhoda lay back on the pillows. The room was dark, shrouded by the bamboo blinds she had installed in all the windows. The room was a mess, clothes were scattered everywhere. She was bleeding to death in a messy room.
“You’ve got an appointment this afternoon. They said to bring you in.”
“I can’t get up.”
“Yes you can. I’ll help you.” Then he pulled her to the side of the bed and handed her some clothes and she put them on. Then he picked her up and carried her across the room and down the stairs and out the door. At least he’s strong, Rhoda told herself. At least I had enough sense to marry someone strong.
They drove downtown and parked in a parking lot and went into a building and up an elevator and the nurse met them at the door and took them inside and put her on a table. “I’m bleeding all the time,” Rhoda said. “I’ve been bleeding for days.”
“We know,” the nurse said. She put her hand on Rhoda’s arm and Rhoda went to sleep. Maybe she went to sleep. She never could remember what happened next or when they told her. It always seemed she heard the news from deep within a dream. When she woke up she was in the back seat of the car. Her husband was driving her to Alabama to her mother. “What are we doing?” she said. “Where are we going? What’s going on?”
“We’re going to Decatur. You’re going to have a baby. Rhoda, please lie down.”
“Oh, my God. I don’t believe it. Oh, I hope it’s a boy. I want a boy.” She fell into a dream. She was on Finley Island by the water. Her little boy was with her. He held onto her hand. She would teach him to swim. He would swim the English Channel. He would dive from cliffs and be a hero to end all heroes. She woke up because blood was running down her legs again, over her skirt, her legs, the car. “You have to stop and buy me some Kotex,” she said. “I have to have some new pajamas. I can’t show up at Momma’s like this.” They stopped at a store in a small town on the Alabama line and she went in and bought clean clothes and a pair of blue silk pajamas and a robe. A musty-smelling lady in a bun helped her back into the car. She lay down on the seat holding her packages and when she woke again she was in the hospital and they were all around her, her mother and her father and her husband and Doctor Greer, her own doctor who was kin to her.
“Am I going to have a baby?” she asked.
“I don’t know. We’ll wait and see.”
“Am I or not? I want to know.”
“I’m not sure if you still have it. In the morning we’ll know.” They gave her a shot and she slept some more. She slept for eighteen hours. In the morning they bathed her and brought her food and Doctor Greer was alone with her, his snow-white head was beside her bed, his hand was on her hands. “I think we will have to go on and get rid of this one, Rhoda. There will be plenty more.” Good, Rhoda thought, I didn’t want to have a baby anyway. Then she began to cry. Terrible tears. Doctor Greer patted her hand and said, “This too shall pass away.”
“I like it,” she said. “I want it. I like it inside of me.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll wait another day.” A nurse appeared and gave her another shot and she went back to sleep, back into the dream of the island and the water and the boy. The boy was floating away. Come back, she screamed. She tore out into the water, swimming her best Australian crawl. He drifted farther and farther away. Come back, Rhoda called, with her mouth half full of water. Come back. I want you. Come back to me. He floated on his back, so beautiful, so perfect, so new. He would not drag her down and drown her. He was her little boy. Her father appeared on the pier. “Catch him. Goddammit, Sister. Swim, show me what you’re made of.” A group of ladies were around her father, in their dresses and their heels and their perfume. They loved him and he loved them. He talked to them and listened when they spoke. He never pushed them away. Was never cold to them.
It was dark when Rhoda woke again. She thought she must have been asleep for hours. Everything was very dreamy in the room. The white curtains swayed on their stems, the silver utensils gleamed on the enamel table. A nurse with her hat awry was by her side. A needle was in her arm. Doctor Greer was so close she could smell his shaving cream. “How’re we doing?” he said.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“I think it’s all right, Rhoda. I think you’ll keep the baby.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, make up your mind. You tell me one thing and then yo
u tell me another. Where’s my husband?”
“He’s here. He wants to see you.” Her husband was in the doorway. He looked very handsome in his suit. He looked very sure of himself, like a grown man, tall and brave and wide. He took her hands. He kissed her very gently. “I hope it’s true,” he said.
“It will be a boy,” Rhoda said. “I wouldn’t have anything else.”
They moved to the new apartment in January. Rhoda threw the last box on the bedroom floor and sank down on the bed. Her husband came into the room. The baby was asleep in his crib. He was two months old. He was perfect. He was so beautiful they looked at him all day. They looked at him so much they almost forgot to argue. They liked him so much they were almost happy.
“Don’t do that,” Rhoda said. “I’m out of jelly.”
“We won’t do anything. We’ll just put it in.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s make another one. They come out so nice. I want some more.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Please.”
“Okay.”
“You’re an angel.”
“You are too.”
It was an ecstatic pregnancy. Rhoda lived on diet pills and potato chips and gin. She lived on vegetable soup and cornbread and Cokes and gin. She went to the doctor every two weeks because he was the best-looking man in Atlanta. She went down one day in July and had the baby because it was coming too soon. They cut her open and took him out and sewed her back up and later that night she wrote her father a long letter. Some days later he wrote her back and sent her some money. Her mother came and stayed and took care of her and got her a new maid and bought her some books to read. It was a good month to have a baby. There was a new book by Ernest Hemingway on the shelves. Across the River and into the Trees. It was a wonderful book about the excitement and romance of love in Venice between a young countess and an old army colonel who was about to die. Thank God for books, Rhoda was thinking. Since nothing ever happens around here.
It was dark in the house. A dark house at the end of a curved street on a hill in Kansas City, Kansas. It was two o’clock in the morning and it was Rhoda’s birthday. She had been twenty-six years old for two drunken hours and she woke up in the dark and felt for her husband and began to laugh at something they had done at a bar. Drunk, drunk, drunk. They had been drunk since six o’clock the night before and they hadn’t even had a fight yet. “Make love to me,” she said. “I mean it. Do it now.”
“Go put on your diaphragm.”
“I don’t want to. Use a rubber.”
“Oh, shit, that’s no good.”
“It will do.” She reached in a drawer beside the bed and got one out that had been there for ages. They began to giggle, laughing and making love because it felt good and was fun. In a while it became apparent that the rubber was not doing a bit of good. “Go take a douche.”
“Oh, shit, I’m too tired to move.”
“Go on.”
“All right.” She climbed out of bed and went into the bathroom and turned on the light and stood against the doorframe giggling some more. She was wearing a white silk nightgown with blue embroidery on the top and she was making a baby right that very minute and she knew it and she didn’t give a damn because it was her birthday and she thought it was funny. He would be a laughing baby who would love music and have a thousand freckles. I might as well go on and have him and get it over with, Rhoda decided. I might as well go on and get him here. She put her head against the doorframe and saw his face smiling up at her and she thought it was just as funny as it could be and she adored it and she sat down on the floor and laughed some more.
“What are you laughing at?” the father of Rhoda’s babies said to her. “What’s all that goddamn laughing?”
“It’s just funny, that’s all. It’s hilarious.”
“Are you going to take a douche?”
“No, it’s too much trouble.”
“Then get back in bed.”
“I will in a minute.”
“We have to stop drinking so much. We have to save some money.”
“I know. I think we should. I’m going to start tomorrow.”
She climbed back into bed and cuddled up in her husband’s arms. This one will be the swimmer, she decided. This is the one who will swim the channel for me.
1957, a Romance
It was June in northern Alabama. Upstairs Rhoda’s small sons lay sleeping. Somewhere in North Carolina her young husband sulked because she’d left him.
Rhoda had the name. She had fucked her fat, balding gynecologist all Wednesday afternoon to get the name. She had fucked him on the daybed in his office and on the examining table and on the rug in the waiting room. Now all she needed was five hundred dollars.
No one was going to cut Rhoda’s stomach open again. She had come home to get help. She had come home to the one person who had never let her down.
She went into the downstairs bathroom, washed her face, and went up to his room to wake him.
“I have to talk to you, Daddy,” she said, touching him on the shoulder. “Come downstairs. Don’t wake up Mother.”
They sat down together in the parlor, close together on the little sofa. He was waking up, shaking sleep from his handsome Scotch face. The old T-shirt he wore for a pajama top seemed very dear to Rhoda. She touched it while she talked.
“I have to get some money, Daddy,” she said. “I’m pregnant again. I have to have an abortion. I can’t stand to have another baby. I’ll die if they keep cutting me open. You can’t go on having cesarean sections like that.”
“Oh, my,” he said, his old outfielder’s body going very still inside. “Does Malcolm know all this?” Usually he pretended to have forgotten her husband’s name.
“No one knows. I have to do this right away, do you understand? I have to do something about it right away.”
“You don’t want to tell Malcolm?”
“I can’t tell Malcolm. He’d never let me do it. I know that. And no one is going to stop me. He got me pregnant on purpose, Daddy. He did it because he knew I was going to leave him sooner or later.”
Rhoda was really getting angry. She always believed her own stories as soon as she told them.
“We’ll have to find you a doctor, honey. It’s hard to find a doctor that will do that.”
“I have a doctor. I have the name of a man in Houston. A Doctor Van Zandt. A friend of mine went to him. Daddy, you have to help me with this. I’m going crazy. Imagine Malcolm doing this to me. He did it to keep me from leaving . . . I begged him not to.”
“Oh, honey,” he said. “Please don’t tell me all that now. I can’t stand to hear all that. It doesn’t matter. All that doesn’t matter. We have to take care of you now. Let me think a minute.”
He put his head down in his hands and conferred with his maker. Well, Sir, he said, I’ve spoiled her rotten. There’s no getting around that. But she’s mine and I’m sticking by her. You know I’d like to kill that little son of a bitch with my bare hands but I’ll keep myself from doing it. So you help us out of this. You get us out of this one and I’ll buy you a stained-glass window with nobody’s name on it, or a new roof for the vestry if you’d rather.
Rhoda was afraid he’d gone back to sleep. “It’s not my fault, Daddy,” she said. “He made me do it. He did it to me on purpose. He did it to keep me from leaving . . .”
“All right, honey,” he said. “Don’t think about any of that anymore. I’ll take care of it. I’ll call your Uncle James in the morning and check up on the doctor. We’ll leave tomorrow as soon as I got things lined up.”
“You’re going with me,” she said.
“Of course I’m going with you,” he said. “We’ll leave your mother with the babies. But, Rhoda, we can’t tell your mother about this. I’ll tell her I’m taking you to Tennessee to see the mines.”
“It costs five hundred dollars, Daddy.”
“Yes?”
“I really don’t want your mother to know about this. She’s got a lot on her mind right now. And she’s not going to like this one bit.”
“All right, Daddy. I don’t want to tell her, anyway. Daddy, I could have a legal abortion if Malcolm would agree to it. You know that, don’t you? People aren’t supposed to go on having cesarean sections one right after the other. I know I could get a legal abortion. But you have to have three doctors sign the paper. And that takes too long. It might be too late by the time I do all that. And, besides, Malcolm would try to stop me. I can’t take a chance on that. I think he wants to kill me.”
“It’s all right, honey. I’m going to take care of it. You go to bed and get some sleep.”
Rhoda watched him climb the stairs, sliding his hand along the polished stair rail, looking so vulnerable in his cotton pajama bottoms and his old T-shirt, with his broad shoulders and his big head and his tall, courteous body.
He had been a professional baseball player until she was born. He had been famous in the old Southern League, playing left field for the Nashville Volunteers.
There was a scrapbook full of his old clippings. Rhoda and her brothers had worn it out over the years. DUDLEY MANNING HITS ONE OVER THE FENCE; MANNING DOES IT AGAIN; DUDLEY LEADS THE LEAGUE.
You couldn’t eat headlines in the 1930s, so when Rhoda was born he had given in to her mother’s pleadings, quit baseball, and gone to work to make money.
He had made money. He had made two million dollars by getting up at four o’clock every morning and working his ass off every single day for years. And he had loved it, loved getting up before the sun rose, loved eating his quiet lonely breakfasts, loved learning to control his temper, loved being smarter and better and luckier than everyone else.
Rhoda Page 17
