Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

I’m a published author by the way, in case you want some credentials. I’m an ex-alcoholic. My face is wrinkled but my legs are good and I’m in perfect health except for the allergies. Pollen, house dust, grasses, and seven kinds of mold. What else? I’m a lot of fun. People like to be with me. I’m likable and aware. Sometimes I’m smart. Lots of times I’m smart.

  But back to the light in the cockpit. By the time they got it fixed the fog had rolled in and by the time it cleared I’d missed my connection in Memphis. The stewardess finally opened the door and told us to go back into the terminal and we did. I ran for it and reached the desk first and began to demand satisfaction.

  There was none to be had. The best I could do by flying around half of Arkansas and Louisiana was to get to Jackson at two-forty. Give me back my money, I demanded. I’m driving. I had just spent seven hundred dollars putting Pirelli racing tires on my BMW and I was in the mood to drive. I collected my suitcase and ran for the car.

  It was ten to eight. I have a friend who once made the trip from Fayetteville to Jackson in seven and a half hours and I thought I could do it. If I failed I would still make it to the reception. Seven and a half hours to drive, five minutes to dress, ten minutes to make it to the church. If I didn’t stop to eat or drink I could make it. It was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. I could make it if I tried.

  I started up the curving mountain road leading from Fayetteville to Alma. I once killed a character in a novel on that road. Later, I brought him back to life in a short story.

  Meanwhile, at Momma’s house in Jackson, she is waiting for me. “I knew something was going on,” she said, when I called to tell her where I was. She’s an intuitive. Nothing gets past her. She is eighty-five years old and she has been there for every minute of her life. She is beloved in the world, worshiped really. She has never put down her pack for a moment or stopped to complain, except once when Daddy was going through his midlife crisis and “acting like a horse’s ass.” There are three profane things my mother has been heard to say. Hell’s bells, tacky, and “he was acting like a horse’s ass.” She was a classics major. She believes in the Graces, in service and gentleness. I love her, that’s the long and short of that, and I have given her plenty of heartbreak and disappointment. Also, I have acted out for her the life she never got to lead, have been selfish, spoiled, hot-tempered, all the things she married my father for. Is it my fault that’s how the genes fell out? Is it my fault I have red hair?

  So she is in Jackson waiting for me. Putting the bedspread I sent her from London on the bed in my room, making the pound cake, putting out the towels and the pink Vitabath, picking roses for the dresser. Here I am, up in the Ozark Mountains, dying of allergies and she is out in her backyard spraying poison on the roses without a sneeze. She could have given me her immune system in the gene exchange. I wouldn’t have minded that.

  The Pirelli tires were great. I drove up the mountain taking the curves at twice the speed on the posted signs and the car was sweet. The sun was bright, the mountains were beautiful, I had Mozart on the CD player, and I was going to make it. I stopped once to buy gasoline and a bottle of drinking water and kept on driving. At nine I drove into Alma and took the ramp to Highway 40, bound for Little Rock. Not a policeman on the road. Hardly any traffic. Holy Saturday. Everyone who was going anywhere was already there.

  Wildflowers were growing in profusion along the highway. Blue cornflowers and the vibrant red triflora Lady Bird Johnson caused to be planted when she was First Lady. They bloom beside the highways all over the American South.

  I drove eighty for a while, then eighty-five. The radar detector I paid five hundred dollars for in a fit of thinking the movies were going to make me rich scans five miles to the front and five miles to the back. Not a sound, not a beep.

  Back at Momma’s house she has decided what to do. Wait for me even if she’s late to her great-grandchild’s wedding. She wants to enter the church with her daughter on her arm. Her other choices are driving with Daddy or one of my brother Dudley’s wives. The first one, the grandmother of the bride, the second one, who is still everyone’s friend, or the fourth one, a twenty-eight-year-old student in graduate school. The third wife had not been able to come.

  Maybe Mother is not waiting on me because she doesn’t want to pick and choose among my brother’s wives. Maybe she is waiting on me because she loves me. There’s a thought. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and so forth. The squeaky middle child, that’s me. Whoever is in need. Isn’t that the deepest truth of the maternal instinct? Once a physician and I were sitting in a bar in New Orleans on a rainy day in August discussing that. One of those hot muggy New Orleans days that has finally turned into rain. We were in the Napoleon House on Royal Street looking out into the rain and talking about women. This was years ago, before I believed in Germaine Greer, when I only read her in a sort of dazzled haze. “There is an act of volition in every pregnancy,” he was saying. “And something else. If I threw a baby down on the floor every woman in sight would rush to pick it up. And some men too.” I looked around me. It was true. Even the woman wearing black and pretending to be gay. Even the girl in the lace hat and patterned stockings, even the two charmers at the bar.

  “Then how will we ever control the world’s population?” I asked.

  “We won’t. How about another drink?”

  I passed the turnoff to Subaico, the Benedictine Academy where the poet Francis Alter is buried. He was my first true writer friend. The first blessed, gifted, cursed poet that I knew. Also, the most beautiful human being I have ever seen. To be in his presence was to understand why men became the disciples of Christ. Existence changed when he was around, became finer, clearer, more alive. He dedicated his life to beauty, art, poetry, freedom. Then he killed himself. He showed me how to make my first book, chose the poems, put them into order. He taught me how to find a cover, how to demand perfection. But that’s another story. I didn’t have time to take the turnoff and visit his grave. Francis’s bones are laid to rest. He has been in the grave for fourteen years, has turned to dust. Dust also the roses we laid upon his coffin, the tears the poets of Arkansas shed upon that hill on that cloudy day that later turned to rain.

  The highway from Russellville to Little Rock was deserted. Not a beep on the radar detector as I cruised along at ninety miles an hour. I was getting cocky now. If I got a ticket I could get it fixed. So I was driving along like that, confident and cocky, and I made it to Little Rock in three and a half hours. I cruised through the town and on down to Pine Bluff, the ugliest town in the world. Then I was into the hardest part of the trip. The two-lane road from Pine Bluff to the Greenville, Mississippi, bridge.

  The hardest and most sentimental. My most perfect lover was raised in a small town I was passing through. He had led his schoolmates to state victories in three sports. I could have stopped on any corner and said, I used to be Raine’s girlfriend, and men would have bowed to me.

  Instead I kept on driving. I passed the state penitentiary at Cummins. I passed catfish ponds. I passed rice fields. I passed the place where I had been stopped once by a good-looking black patrolman who was immune to my scrawny white charms. Once I was going into a courthouse in New Orleans to pay a parking ticket and a black prisoner hanging out of a window in a neighboring jail had yelled down to me. “Where you going, you little ole dried-up white pussy?” I cherish that memory. It was such a beautiful piece of language, so funny and so bitter and so true. The sun had been so hot that day, beating down on the parking lot, and I had thought I looked so great in my new green dress.

  At one o’clock I crossed the old suspension bridge that spans the Mississippi River at Greenville. I turned right onto Highway 454 and the vast fields of the Delta were all around me. The place that I call home. I passed the house built on top of an Indian mound. To my left were plowed fields, flat and verdant, waiting for seed. On my right were the dense woods of Leroy Percy Park, where I was taken for picnics as a child. I turned onto the R
iver Road, Highway 1, famed in literature and legends. At the entrance to the park I turned left and headed east to Yazoo City. Nothing could stop me now. I was in the Delta and could drive a hundred miles an hour if I liked. No traffic, no policemen, roads as flat and straight as a line drawn with a T-square. Nothing to run into and nowhere to go but into a cotton field.

  In Yazoo City I was stopped by a train crossing the main street of town. Forty minutes from my mother’s house. One hour and ten minutes until the wedding and there I was, on the main street of Yazoo City with the streets full of Easter shoppers and a slow-moving train barring every street going east. I turned off the ignition and ran around to the back of the car and started getting out my things. I hung the suit up in the car. I got out high heels and hose. I put on a string of pearls and the earrings. I took the hat out of the hatbox and put it on my head.

  “I’m late to a wedding,” I called out. All around me the black and white citizens of Yazoo had stopped to watch.

  “Hope you make it,” a man called back. “Good luck to you.” The caboose came into sight behind the broken skyline of the town. Everyone waved and pointed. I turned on the motor, clutched the wheel, got ready to drive, my wide straw-colored hat at a rakish angle on my head.

  At twenty minutes to four I pulled into my mother’s driveway and honked the horn. She came out the door to the kitchen and shook her head. I loved her. She loved me. We had lived so long since I was formed inside her womb. She had held my head when I threw up. Had taught me to believe in fairies. Did I get out of the car and throw my arms around her and say, I love you, love you, love you, never die?

  I did not. “Get that suit out of the backseat,” I yelled. “I’ll be dressed in five minutes.”

  She helped me carry the things into the house and stood leaning on the bedpost while I put them on.

  “Where’s the wedding?” I asked.

  “Out in Madison County. Don’t wear that silly hat, honey. This is only a little country wedding.”

  “I don’t care. I want to wear it. I’m going to be me no matter where I go.”

  “Well, it looks ridiculous.”

  “I told my granddaughters to wear theirs. I have to match them.”

  “All right. Do as you please, as always.”

  “Let’s go in your car. But I’m driving. I won’t drive fast, I promise.”

  “The key’s in the kitchen, on the rack.” She led me out through the den. Every flat surface of the den is covered with photographs of her children and her sisters and her nieces and nephews and their children and husbands and wives and stepchildren and dogs and prizes and awards and sports events. Every person who comes into that room goes from wall to wall looking at photographs of themselves, checking to make sure they are well represented. One of the great moments of my life was one day when I walked into that den and noticed she had removed a photograph of Dudley standing over a dead lion and replaced it with one of me that had been in Mississippi Magazine.

  We passed through this gallery and out into the hall and into the garage and got into her car and she opened the garage door with her genie.

  We arrived at the church just as my youngest niece and her husband were going in the door. We followed them and found ourselves in a wide hall full of costumed people. The main sanctuary was in the midst of a dress rehearsal for the Passion Play.

  There was a sign saying “Wedding” with an arrow pointing down a narrow hall and we followed it and made it to the ceremony just as the bride and groom were approaching the minister for the rites. I slid into a seat by my grandchildren and Momma sat with my brothers. The Baptist minister said a lot of things that burden the ear of an Episcopalian. Then the bridegroom kissed the bride and the recessional began. Everyone marched back down the aisle and the family rose and started kissing each other. I kissed my brother and his three wives and all their children and grandchildren. I kissed the people from Minnesota. I kissed my grandchildren, my ex-daughter-in-law, and her new boyfriend. He was a handsome man, as handsome as my son, who is the father of these children. She can pick them, I was thinking. She only wants the best. She doesn’t care how long it takes. She waits for what she wants.

  The boyfriend kept her close to him, his hand around her waist. He seemed kind, a kind man, the children seemed okay, at least the little girls did, they swirled around him, dancing with this idea of a daddy, even a borrowed one. I tried to get objective, really watch. In these days of reported child abuse everyone is suspect. The idea of a strange man in a house with their small precious bodies bothers me, even the kindest, most civilized-seeming man.

  I pulled my grandson to me. He had gained weight, grown taller, was almost as tall as me. He looked at me as from a distance, resisted me somehow. That has never happened before between us.

  “Let’s go to the reception,” Momma said. “They want us to get started.”

  “I’ll take the children with me,” I told my daughter-in-law. “Let Mother and me take them in the car.” I pulled my grandson to my side. I held him there. I wanted to overpower him, surround him, make him safe, but maybe this time he wasn’t going to let me tell him who to be.

  Mother took the little girls by the hand. I followed with my arm around my grandson. As we moved down the hall we passed some of the costumed players. A sixty-year-old Mary Magdelene and a pair of Roman soldiers. “What’s all that?” my grandson asked.

  “A reenactment of the passion of Jesus,” I answered. “A religious rite still practiced in many parts of the South.”

  “I don’t believe any of that crap,” he said. “It’s just myth and superstition.”

  “Be quiet,” Momma whispered, and swept us out the door. “This is someone’s place of worship.”

  The reception was held at a lodge in the woods. An open building surrounded by pine trees and dogwoods in full bloom. There was a lake and a pier, which soon was filled with little girls in white dresses. Small boys fanned out along the lake’s edge looking for snakes and frogs.

  There were many delicate small trees just bursting into leaf. There were azalea bushes, pink and white and red with fresh May flowers. Inside were two huge cakes and a marvelous feast spread out upon a table. The bride and groom were shaking everyone’s hands. “I want to talk to the bride,” my six-year-old granddaughter whispered to me.

  “It’s just your cousin Annie Laurie. You’ve talked to her lots of times.”

  “I want to talk to her. Take me over there.” She took my hand and we went over and talked to the bride.

  I have mellowed. I went around to each of my sisters-in-law and embraced them with real tenderness. I danced with my brother. I danced with my oldest grandson and taught him the two-step. I danced with my youngest granddaughter and one of her friends. I danced with every little girl at the party who looked like she needed someone to dance with. By then I had abandoned the hat. Mother had been right about the hat. Live and learn and mellow. Drive as fast as you can and try not to get a ticket.

  At fifty-eight I have finally left my adolescence behind me. Lucky old fecund world. Whatever we lay down, there is always someone behind us to pick it up.

  My grandson was sitting glumly in a chair. He had never had to put up with his mother having a boyfriend and he wasn’t going to put up with it now. “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  “Him. Edward. He kicked me going into the hotel.”

  “You must be mistaken. He wouldn’t kick anyone. He’s a sweet man.”

  “He kicked me. I don’t like him.”

  “Oh, my. You want to ride around in the car for a while? Come on, get some cake and let’s get out of here.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please. I want to talk to you. I want to be alone with you. Get some cake and meet me at the door. Get me a piece of the chocolate one.” He went off to get the cake and I found my mother and asked her for the car keys.

  “What for?”

  “I have to talk to Malcolm. He’s having a fit.”

&n
bsp; “About the boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “It won’t do, Rhoda. He’s too young.”

  “No, he’s not. You don’t care how young Dudley’s wives are. Ingersol’s girlfriends. Why shouldn’t she have some happiness? She’s a wonderful mother. The best mother I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s the light of my life. I want her to be happy.”

  “Don’t talk so loud. This is Annie Laurie’s wedding. Well, here they are.” She found her keys in her pocketbook and gave them to me. “Don’t be gone long. I don’t want to stay forever. I don’t want to drive home with your father.” She looked in his direction. He has grown old this year, lost his power. All he cares for now is living, he wants to live forever, to go on breathing at any cost and she has begun to despise him for it. Her power, which was never physical, is still keen, and she still tries to use it.

  I collected Malcolm and we walked out on the porch to go to the car. His mother and the boyfriend were sitting at a glass-topped table, laughing and drinking wine, talking to my nieces and their husbands. “We’re going riding,” I told her. “We want to be alone.”

  We went out to the parking lot and got into the car and my daughter-in-law followed us and got in the backseat.

  “He’s mad at Edward,” I said. “He says Edward kicked him.”

  “They were just horsing around.” She leaned up into the front seat and touched my hand. “He’s the gentlest man on the earth. He wouldn’t harm a child.”

  “You have to let your mother have a boyfriend,” I began. “There’s nothing wrong with that. She loves you. So do I. We love you more than anything in the world. We would never let anyone harm you in any way. We would kill or die for you. But you ought to let her have a boyfriend. She lets you have friends. Edward’s a nice man. He’s the nicest man I’ve met in years.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s mean to me.” He scrunched down into the seat, looked at the floor. Heart of my heart, the dearest thing on earth to me. I touched his mother’s hand. My son had destroyed every relationship I’d ever had after I divorced his father. That was with us in the car. And the pain my son had caused this woman. And the pain she had caused my son. And these children, our inheritance and legacy, our treasure.