Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Let’s get Dudley and go off somewhere and get drunk. I’m tired of being good. How about you? Love, Rhoda.

  In five days Rhoda heard back from Dudley. “Hello, Sister,” the message said on the answering machine. “It’s your brother. You want to go to Mexico? Come on down to San Antonio and we’ll go to Mexico.”

  Rhoda stood by the answering machine. She was wearing tennis clothes. Outside the windows of her comfortable house the clean comfortable little town continued its easygoing boring life. Why did I start this with Dudley? Rhoda thought. I don’t want to go to Mexico with him. Why did I even write to him? My analyst will have a fit. He’ll say it’s my fascination with aggression and power. Well, it’s all I know how to do. I wrote to Dudley because he looked so great at Anna’s funeral, so powerful and strong, immortal. The immortal Eagle Scout who lived through polio and scarlet fever and shot a lion, ten lions, a thousand lions.

  Now Saint John will call me too. I shouldn’t do this. I have outgrown them. I have better things to do than go down to Mexico with Saint John and Dudley. What else do I have to do? Name one thing. Water the fucking lawn? I can get out the sprinklers and waste water by watering the lawn.

  Rhoda slipped on her sandals and walked out the door of her house into the sweltering midmorning heat. She set up the sprinklers on the front lawn and turned them on. Then reached down and began to scratch her chigger bites. Fucking Ozarks, she decided. Why in the name of God did I come up here to live in this deserted barren cultural waste? What in the name of God possessed me to think I wanted to live in this little worn-out university town with no one to flirt with and nowhere to eat lunch?

  She pulled the last sprinkler out from under the woodpile and set it on the stone wall of the patio. Scientific method, she was thinking. Germ theory. I’ll go down there with them and the next thing I know I’ll have amoebic dysentery for five years. Saint John will bring his convertible and I’ll get skin cancer and ruin the color of my hair and then Dudley will get me to eat some weird Mexican food and I’ll die or spend the rest of my life in the hospital.

  Rhoda stared off into the branches of the pear tree. She was afraid that by watering the lawn she might make the roots of the trees come up to the surface. World full of danger, she decided. How did I come to believe that?

  She reached down to pick up the sprinkler. Her index finger closed down upon a fat yellow and orange wasp who stuck his proboscis into her sweat glands and emitted his sweet thin poison. “Oh, my God,” Rhoda screamed. “Now I have been bit by a wasp.”

  An hour later she lay on the sofa in the air conditioning with a pot of coffee on the table beside her. Hot coffee in a beautiful blue-and-white thermos and two cups in case anyone should come by and a small plate holding five Danish cookies and an ironed linen napkin. She was wearing a silk robe and a pair of white satin house shoes. Her head was resting on a blue satin pillow her mother had sent for her birthday. Her swollen finger was curled upon her stomach. She dialed Dudley’s number and the phone in San Antonio rang six times and finally Dudley answered.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Watching the boats on the lake. Waiting for you. Are you coming down? You want to go or not?”

  “I want to go. Call Saint John.”

  “I already called him. He’s free. Gayleen’s up in Boston, as you noted. When do you want to go?”

  “Right away.”

  “How about the fourth of July?”

  “I’ll be there. Where do I fly to?”

  “Fly to San Antonio. We’ll drive down. There’s a hunting lodge down there I need to visit anyway. A hacienda. We can stay there for free.”

  “How hot is it?”

  “No worse than where you are.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so mean to you the last few years.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it was mean as shit. I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Let me know when you get a flight.”

  “A wasp bit me.”

  “You know what Kurt Vonnegut said about nature, don’t you?”

  “No, what did he say?”

  “He said anybody who thinks nature is on their side doesn’t need any enemies.”

  “I miss you, Dudley. You know that?”

  “You know what a wedding ring is, don’t you?”

  “No. What?”

  “A blow job repellent.”

  “Jesus,” Rhoda answered.

  “You know what the four most feared words in the United States are, don’t you?”

  “No. What?”

  “I is your president.”

  “Jesus. Listen, I’m coming. I’ll be there.”

  “I’ll call Saint John. He’ll be glad.”

  Rhoda hung up the phone, lay back against the satin pillow. My rubbish heap of a heart, she decided. I’m regressing. Well, they are my oldest compadres. Besides, where else will I find two men my own age who are that good-looking and that well-preserved and that brave? Where else will I find anybody to go to Mexico with in the middle of the summer? My ex-husbands are all snuggled down with their wifelets on little trips to Europe. Thank God I’m not sitting somewhere in a hotel room in London with someone I’m married to. About to make love to someone I’ve fucked a thousand times.

  Well, I wouldn’t mind having one of my old husbands here this afternoon. Yes, I must face it, I have painted myself into a corner where my sex life is concerned. I should get up and get dressed and do something with my hair and go downtown and find a new lover but I have run out of hope in that department. I don’t even know what I would want to find. No, it’s better to call the travel agent and go off with my brother and my cousin. Mexico it is, then. As Dudley always says, why not, or else, whatever.

  Rhoda slept for a while, resigned or else content. When she woke she called Saint John at his office in New Orleans and they made their plans. Rhoda would fly to New Orleans and meet Saint John and they would go together to San Antonio and pick up Dudley and the three of them would drive down into Mexico. She would leave on July second. A week away.

  During the week Rhoda’s wasp sting got better. So did her mood. She dyed her hair a lighter blond and bought some new clothes and early on the morning of July second she boarded a plane and flew down to New Orleans. She took a taxi into town and was delivered to Saint John’s office on Prytania Street. A secretary came out and took her bags and paid the taxi and Saint John embraced her and introduced her to his nurses. Then a driver brought Saint John’s car around from the garage. A brand-new baby blue BMW convertible with pale leather seats and an off-white canvas top. “Let’s take the top down,” Saint John said. “You aren’t worried about your hair, are you?”

  “Of course not,” Rhoda said. “This old hair. I’ve been bored to death, Saint John. Take that top down. Let’s go and have some fun.”

  “We’ll go to lunch,” he said. “The plane doesn’t leave until four.”

  “Great. Let’s go.”

  They drove down Prytania to Camp Street, then over to Magazine and across Canal and down into the hot sweaty Latin air of the French Quarter. Tourists strolled along like divers walking underwater. Natives lounged in doorways. Cars moved sluggishly on the narrow cobblestone streets. Saint John’s convertible came to a standstill on the corner of Royal and Dumaine, across the street from the old courthouse where one of Rhoda’s lovers had written films for the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission. “Do you ever hear from Mims Waterson?” she asked.

  “No,” Saint John said. “I think he went back to North Carolina.”

  “If I hear North Carolina I think of Anna.” They hung their heads, mourning their famous cousin.

  “Anna,” Saint John said, and moved the car a few feet farther down the street. “She was a strange one.”

  “Not strange, just different from us. Gifted. Talented, and besides, her father was mean to her. Her death taught me something.”

  “And what was that?”

  “To be happ
y while I’m here. To love life. Tolstoy said to love life. He said it was the hardest thing to do and the most important. He said life was God and to love life was to love God.”

  “I don’t know about all that.” Saint John was a good Episcopalian. It bothered him when his cousins said things like that. He wasn’t sure it was good to say that God was life. God was God, and if you started fucking around with that idea there wouldn’t be any moral order or law.

  “I thought we’d go to Galatoire’s,” he said. “Will that be all right?”

  “That’s perfect. Stop in the Royal Orleans and let me work on my face, will you? I can’t go letting anyone in this town think I let myself go. I might have to come down here and scarf up a new husband if something doesn’t happen soon with my life.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Writing a travel book. Anna’s agent is handling it for me. It might make me some money. At least pay my bills and get me out of debt.”

  “Will you write about this trip? About Mexico?”

  “If there’s anything I can use. Okay, there’s the garage and they have space. Go on, Saint John, turn in there.” He pulled into the parking lot of the Royal Orleans Hotel. The hotel was filled with memories for both of them. Secret meetings, love affairs, drunken lunches at Antoine’s and Arnaud’s and Brennan’s. Once Rhoda had spent the night in the hotel with a British engineer she met at a Mardi Gras parade. Another time Saint John had had to come there to rescue her when she ran away from her husband at a ball. He had found her in a suite of rooms with one of her husband’s partner’s wives and a movie star from Jackson, Mississippi. Rhoda had decided the partner’s wife should run off with the movie star.

  “The wild glorious days of the Royal Orleans,” Rhoda said now. “We have had some fun in this hotel.”

  “We have gotten in some trouble,” Saint John answered.

  “What trouble did you ever get in? You weren’t even married.”

  “I was in medical school. That was worse. I was studying for my boards the night you had that movie star down here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rhoda said, and touched his sleeve. Then she abandoned him in the hotel lobby and disappeared into the ladies’ lounge. When she reappeared she had pulled her hair back into a chignon, added rouge and lipstick, tied a long peach and blue scarf in a double knot around her neck, and replaced the small earrings she had been wearing with large circles of real gold.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Wonderful,” Saint John said. “Let’s go.” She took his arm and they walked down Royal Street to Bourbon and over to Galatoire’s. Their cousin Bunky Biggs was standing outside the restaurant with two of his law partners. “Saint John,” he called out. “Cousin Rhoda, what are you doing in town?”

  “She’s taking me to Mexico,” Saint John said. “With Dudley.”

  “Oh, my Lord,” Bunky said. “That will be a trip. I wish I was going.”

  “He’s taking me,” Rhoda said, very softly. It was all working beautifully, the universe was cooperating for a change. Now it would be all over New Orleans that she and Saint John were off on a glorious adventure. Bunky could be depended upon to spread the word.

  “What are you going to do down there?” Bunky said. “There’s no hunting this time of year.”

  “We’re going to see some animals,” Saint John said. “To have some fun.” He was saved from further explanation. At that moment a delivery truck pulled up across the street and a tall black man emerged from the back of the truck carrying a huge silver fish. The man was six and a half feet tall. He hoisted the fish in his arms and carried it across the narrow crowded street. A small Japanese car squeaked to a stop. An older black man wearing a tall white hat opened a door and held it open and the fish and its bearer disappeared into the wall. We live in symbiosis with this mystery, Rhoda thought. No one understands it. Everything we think we know is wrong. Except their beauty. They are beautiful and we know it and I think they know it but I am far away from it now and get tired of trying to figure it out. Forget it.

  The maître d’ appeared and escorted them inside.

  The restaurant was crowded with people. The Friday afternoon professional crowd was out in force. Women Rhoda had known years before were seated at tables near the door, the same tables they might have occupied on the day she left town with the poet. People waved; waiters moved between the crowded tables carrying fabulous crabmeat salads and trout meunière and trout amandine and pompano en papillete and oysters Bienville and oysters Rockefeller and turtle soup and fettuccine and martinis and whiskey sours and beautiful French desserts and bread pudding and flán.

  “I should never have left,” Rhoda exclaimed. “God, I miss this town.”

  Two hours later they emerged from Galatoire’s and found the blue convertible and began to drive out to the airport.

  “Dudley’s been looking forward to this,” Saint John said. “I hope we don’t miss that plane.”

  “If we do there’ll be another one along.”

  “But he might be disappointed.”

  “What a strange thing to say.”

  “Why is that? Everyone gets disappointed, Rhoda. Nothing happens like we want it to. Like we think it will.”

  “Bullshit,” Rhoda said. “You’re getting soft in the head, Saint John. Drive the car. Get us there. You’re as rich as Croesus. What do you have to worry about? And take off that goddamn seat belt.” She reached behind her and undid her own and Saint John gunned the little car and began to drive recklessly in and out of the lanes of traffic. This satisfied some deep need in Rhoda and she sat back in the seat and watched in the rearview mirror for the cops.

  The plane ride was less exciting. They settled into their seats and promptly fell asleep until the flight got to Houston. They changed planes and fell back asleep.

  Rhoda woke up just before the plane began its descent into San Antonio. She was leaning against the sleeve of Saint John’s summer jacket. My grandmother’s oldest grandson, she thought. How alike we are, how our bodies are shaped the same, our arms and legs and hands and the bones of our faces and the shape of our heads. Apples from the same tree, how strange that one little grandmother put such a mark on us. I was dreaming of her, after she was widowed, after our grandfather was dead and her hair would stray out from underneath its net and she gave up corsets. Her corsets slipped to the floor of her closet and were replaced by shapeless summer dresses, so soft, she was so soft she seemed to have no bones. Her lovely little legs. “Tell me again the definition of tragedy, I always forget.” In my dream she was standing on the porch at Esperanza watching us play in the rain. We were running all over the front lawn and under the rainspouts, barefooted, in our underpants, with the rain pelting down, straight cold gray rain of Delta summers, wonderful rain. How burning we were in the cold rain, burning and hot, how like a force, powerful and wild, and Dan-Dan standing on the porch watching us, worrying, so we were free to burn with purpose in the rain. In the dream she is calling Dudley to come inside. Saint John and Floyd and I may run in the rain and Pop and Ted and Al but Dudley must come in. She holds out a towel to wrap him in. He was the sickly one, the one who had barely escaped with his life, three times, whooping cough and malaria and polio. And yet, he was stronger than we were. He was stronger than Saint John, stronger than Bunky Biggs, stronger than Phelan even. How could being sick and almost dying make you strong? Gunther told me once but I have forgotten. It was about being eaten and fighting, thinking you are being eaten and becoming impenetrable. Anna seemed impenetrable too but she turned out not to be. Rhoda shook off the thought. She got up very gingerly so as not to wake Saint John, and wandered down the aisle to the tiny bathroom to repair her makeup. She went inside and closed and locked the door. She peered into the mirror, took out her lipstick brush and began to apply a light peach-colored lipstick to her lips. A sign was flashing telling her to return to her seat but she ignored it. She added another layer of lipstick to her bottom lip a
nd began on her upper one. How did being sick when he was little make Dudley so powerful? What had Gunther said? It was some complicated psychological train of thought. Because a small child can imagine himself being consumed, eaten, burned up by fever, overwhelmed by germs, taken, as children were taken all the time before the invention of penicillin and streptomycin and corticosteroids. Before we had those medicines children died all the time. So Dudley must have lain in bed all those terrible winters and summers with Momma and Doctor Finley holding his hand and waged battle because they begged him to live, because they sat with him unfailingly and held his hand and gave him cool cloths for his head and sips of water from small beautiful cups and shored him up, because they won, because he won and did not die, he became immortal. Nothing could eat him, nothing could make him die.

  Rhoda blotted the lipstick on a paper towel. So, naturally, he likes soft-spoken blond women who hold his hand and he likes to take small sips of things from beautiful cups and he likes to hang out with physicians. He is always going somewhere to meet Saint John, they have hunted the whole world together. It is all too wonderful and strange, Rhoda decided, I could think about it all day. It’s a good thing I don’t live near them, I would never think of anything else.

  She put the lipstick away and took out a blusher and began to color her cheeks. The plane was descending. The sign was flashing. He loves the battle, Gunther had said. And he thinks he will always win.

  “He never gets sick,” Rhoda had said. “They were jaguar hunting in Brazil and three people died from some water they drank and Dudley didn’t even get sick. Everyone got sick but Dudley.”

  “He can’t lose,” Gunther said. “Because your mother held his hand.”

  “Sometimes they lose,” Rhoda said. “My grandmother lost a child.”

  “But Dudley didn’t lose.”

  “He thinks he is a god.”

  “What about you, Rhoda? Do you think you are a god?”

  “No, I am a human being and I need other human beings and that is what you are trying to teach me, isn’t it?”