by Lee Smith
I smoked another cigarette. Davy whimpered like a puppy in his sleep.
“It’s all about love,” Pearl said.
The air-conditioner wind barely moved her hair, she had sprayed it so high and tight.
Davy woke up and started hollering and I changed his diaper and let him nurse. There is something about a baby’s pull on your nipple that puts you in mind of a man, but it is entirely different from that—it’s different from everything else. And there’s a lot of things, like that and what Pearl was saying, you can’t explain.
Pearl powdered her face and drew on some new red lips.
“Who is it you’re marrying?” I said.
“Earl Bingham, he’s an upholsterer in Abingdon, he does the most beautiful work. He’s twenty years older than me, he just adores me,” Pearl said. “He just loves me to death.” But she seemed absent-minded, fishing around in her purse.
“There was something else,” she said and then trailed it away. She stood up, smoothed down her skirt. “I’m sorry.” She hugged me suddenly so hard I almost dropped Davy.
“Pearl, Pearl,” I said—and again I surprised myself, I didn’t realize what I was fixing to say—“You’d better watch out,” I said.
Pearl hugged me again and left me there in my six-room respectable house on Potter Street near the nylon hose company with Davy and Rosy and Ding-a-ling, doing the best I could. Which wasn’t so hot at the time!
I watched through the venetian blinds as she went down the walk on her white high heels and got in her car—pale gray Buick, Pearl was so goddamn tasteful—and left. Watch out, watch out, I thought. This is the closest thing to a premonition which I have ever had to the kind of ESP like you see nowadays in the National Enquirer. Of course it might of been purely post-partum depression. But the air conditioner clicked up a notch—it was hot that day, as I said—and the way it droned sounded suddenly awful to me, like war planes across the sky.
When my husband left me and Roy moved in, some years after that, Pearl called me up on the phone.
“Hello?” I said, kind of frazzled. It had been a snowstorm going on, lines down all over the place, and the phone had been ringing off the hook for Roy who had not had but three or four hours of sleep a night in the whole past week.
“It’s me,” she said.
Trust Pearl to say “It’s me” and expect you to know who it is.
“Me who?” I asked.
“Pearl,” she said.
“Long time no see,” I told her, grinning. I was back to being myself then, from living just that long with Roy. All that time of working so hard and trying so hard and not talking had passed away like a dream.
“I’m sorry about you and your husband,” she said. “Ora Mae told me about it when I called to tell her the news.”
“Well, I’m not sorry,” I said. Then I said, “What news?”
“I’m going to have a baby,” Pearl said, “like you.”
Not like me, I wanted to scream. Not like me at all, you fool, no one is ever alike, I thought, don’t say that.
“Well, that’s real nice, Pearl,” I said.
“Why did he leave you?” she asked me with that high strained note in her voice that I knew from before. Obviously she had not heard the whole story. “You had his baby and then he left you,” she said. “Sally, why?”
There was never any way to tell Pearl that there are things you cannot ask about, or things you can’t explain. No small talk: that was one of her problems.
“It’s a long, long story,” was all I said. “But I’m lots better off, believe me.”
“I thought you had decided—I thought you had made your—” Pearl was crying, I think, but the connection went bad then too and all I could hear was static. I hung up the phone, imagining the long black wires strung out across the snow and all the snowy mountains between my house and hers where she lived with that poor old upholsterer who loved her to death—in a way, I guess, like old Ding-a-ling had loved me, but sometimes that’s not enough, and for Pearl I knew already that nothing was ever going to be enough. I thought about the long black wires, and Pearl over there, the night coming on, and Roy out in the middle of it somewhere, working on the power lines. I did not—maybe I should have—call her back. Instead I thought about Roy some more, and ran another load of wash, you know how kids change clothes about five times a day when it snows, and made some potato soup.
The next time I saw Pearl was two or three years after that, when her little girl Jennifer was, I guess, maybe three, and this time I went myself to see her because Billy had called me up. This is the only part that Roy already knew, and he thinks it’s funny and it is, but it isn’t really. Billy calling me up was unusual to say the least. Oh, Billy stayed in a kind of distant jittery contact with all of us, I guess, not much more than Christmas cards but that at least, better than Lewis Ray. I think Billy just kept in touch so he wouldn’t get caught by surprise. Anyway, Billy said that a man from his electrical supply house went over there to put in a chandelier which Pearl and her upholsterer had ordered for their new house, and while he was over there, Pearl came halfway down the stairs wearing nothing but a see-through blue nylon nightie and holding a box of Kleenex, and she sat down right there on the stairs and cried into the Kleenex and wadded them up one by one and threw them down over the banister. The electrician from Billy’s company didn’t know what he ought to do, as you can imagine. He went on working on the chandelier for a little while, getting more and more nervous, as you can imagine, and then at noon when the upholsterer came in with the little girl, Jennifer, and they started hollering at each other, the electrician packed up his tools and got out of there.
“You can’t blame him,” Billy said, and I agreed. Then Billy said maybe I ought to go over there and see what was going on, since I was the only one as far as he knew that Pearl might think to talk to, and he himself didn’t need any more gossip and innuendo and tales circulating around about him and our family, there had been too goddamn much of that already. I knew what he meant, of course. I knew Billy was harder pressed than ever to keep that wife of his satisfied, and be a member of the country club and everything else I knew they did because I read about them in the social column of the Mountain Gazette all the time.
Billy himself had a hard row to hoe.
So I went.
Part of it, I’ll admit, was curiosity. I wanted to see how Pearl, who had been so high-falutin and arty, how Pearl lived. I also went because I was happy by then and that made me nicer, I guess. And Pearl had laid that claim on me way back, the time I told you about when she said, “Mama.” Maggie was gone, and there was nobody else to see about her. Blood is thicker than water, when you get right down to it: it is.
Pearl had the damnedest new house you ever saw. It was exactly what I expected, and I wouldn’t have had it myself for a million bucks. Just dusting would take you two days. A long curved driveway out front, winding up to the house itself which was set up on one of those rolling hills they have over there around Abingdon, not like here where the mountains are so high and so close together that the sun won’t come up until ten o’clock. Anyway this long driveway curved up to the front, where they had kind of a big paved parking area with shrubs all around it, and around the house, which had a big porch on the main section of it, and columns. Columns! I thought I’d die. Two wings spread out on either side of the main section with the columns.
Pearl’s house was huge. It looked like the Old South Motor Inn in Roanoke, where Roy and I stay sometimes when we go over there to the Tech football games.
I rang the doorbell and when nobody came, I rang again. I knew somebody was home because a pale-blue Lincoln was parked in the drive.
Finally I heard a noise from behind the big Spanish-looking door, and then Pearl’s voice saying “Who is it?” Only it didn’t really sound like her voice.
“It’s Sally,” I said. “Now you open up,” and after another wait, she did.
This time I looked pret
ty good—a chicken hawk will age well—and Pearl was the one who looked terrible. She was wearing a kind of a long housedress, or housecoat, which under normal circumstances she would not have been caught dead in. She was skinny as a rail, with white blotchy skin, and no makeup. It was the first time I’d ever seen Pearl without makeup since we were thirteen or fourteen years old. She stood there twisting Kleenex into a tight little ball in her hand.
“Sally,” she said, with no feeling at all in her voice, exactly like she might have been saying “five o’clock” or any other damn thing.
“Well, it’s me,” I said. Now that I was there, I didn’t know what to say.
Pearl looked at me. Her eyes were bloodshot, old.
Somehow they put me in mind of Ora Mae.
Somehow they gave me the creeps.
“Let’s go sit down, honey,” I said, and turned to the left, but Pearl said, “No, this way,” and I went with her in the other direction. She had all these living rooms, all of them naturally gorgeous. It looked like nobody lived there.
I sat down on a tufted brocade loveseat with about a million little buttons in it, I wondered if Earl had done it himself.
“Some house,” I said.
Pearl blew her nose.
“I wouldn’t keep on teaching high school if my husband could set me up in a house like this,” I said, which was not true at all, I was just trying to think of something to say. Now that I’m an accountant and work out of the house I wouldn’t give it up for a thing, I like to have funds of my own. Mad money, Roy calls it. I’m glad I’ve got it and so is he.
“Well, Sally, that’s not the point,” Pearl said. She blew her nose again.
“What is the point,” I said. “Pearl, honey, what’s going on?”
She stared off into her empty dining room.
“They fired me,” she said next.
“Who?” I was so surprised.
“The high school,” Pearl said. “You don’t know what-all has happened.” She started crying into her little wadded-up ball of Kleenex again.
“Now honey—” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Don’t honey me,” Pearl said. “I’m moving out, packing. I’m in the process of packing right now.” For a minute she sounded like herself again, that “in the process of packing.”
“Well where are you going?” I was thunderstruck.
“Back,” she said, “back up on Hoot Owl Holler, back to Pappy and Ora Mae. Where do you think? Where else can I go? Me and my poor little baby Jennifer.” This “poor little baby Jennifer” set her off crying again.
“Whoa, Pearl,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but if I was you, I’d think twice before I left my husband and this perfectly beautiful house.”
“It’s not paid for,” Pearl said. “He can’t pay for it, he’s going to have to file for bankruptcy he says, he says he just built it to try and make me happy and it didn’t work.”
“I guess not.”
“You see that loveseat you’re sitting on? He did it himself,” she said.
“Well, it looks like hell,” I told her.
For the first time, Pearl smiled. “Piss and vinegar,” she said. “That’s what they used to say about you.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Oh, everybody . . .” Pearl let her voice trail off.
“Pearl,” I said. “What’s happened?”
Pearl leaned back in her wing chair—crewel work, you know it cost her a mint—and brought her knees up to her chin and tucked her housecoat in around her feet. She looked like a little old woman, with no makeup, like Granny Hibbitts used to look. Granny Hibbitts used to wear a housecoat all the time.
“I fell in love with a high school boy,” she said, back in that no-tone voice. “Or at least he fell in love with me. With one of my students. That’s awful, isn’t it.”
“Well it doesn’t sound too good,” I admitted. “Right on the face of it. But you know I am the last person in the world to go pointing a finger, or say anything is awful, or say anything about anything anybody ever does. The very last in the world. Tell me about it.”
“He was in my art class,” she said, “and he’s just the most beautiful boy. Real shy. And talented, real talented in art, but he spent all his time down in the shop with Mr. Pegram, had terrible grades. He wanted to be a carpenter, was what he said.”
“Well, that’s all right,” I allowed.
But Pearl went on like she hadn’t heard me. “A carpenter! Can you imagine? With all that talent? He could have been a real sculptor, Sally, or anything else he wanted. So I got him to stay after school two days a week for some extra art classes with me, and there we’d be in the art room with the sun slanting in the window on all his curly hair, and nobody else around. Sometimes you could hear the sound of band practice away off in the other end of the building, but it was just him and me.”
“Then what? ” I asked.
I couldn’t believe it!
“He looks like a Greek god,” Pearl said. This didn’t tell me a thing. “Oh, I know how bad this sounds!”
“Go on,” I said, “Get to it.”
“Well one afternoon we were in there, just the two of us, and—you’ve got to believe me, Sally, I never laid a finger on him before that day—oh this is not but two weeks ago, it seems like years—anyway, I went up to him and laid my hand on his shoulder and he turned around and stood up and kissed me.”
“Lord,” I said.
“You think that’s something? That’s nothing to what came next,” Pearl said. “Mr. Robinson, that’s the assistant principal, just happened to come along the hall right then checking a fuse, or that’s what he said, and looked in the door of the art room and said ‘Aha!’ and then it was all over.” Pearl bit at her bottom lip.
“All over?” I said. “Sounds to me like it hadn’t started.”
“It goes on from there,” she said. “Mr. Robinson called Paul Fuqua, that’s the principal, and then called the boy’s mother who is a terrible, terrible woman, I just can’t tell you the things she said to me, the terrible things she said when all in the world I ever intended to do was just give him a taste, one taste of the finer things in life, show him what it was like, I never meant to touch him at all.”
“Then why did you?” I said. “What’s this boy’s name anyway?” I asked.
“I don’t know why I did it,” Pearl said. “It was like a voice told me to do it and I did. I couldn’t help myself,” Pearl said, “any more than fly to the moon.
“His name is Donnie Osborne,” she said next.
“Anyway, that night Earl took Jennifer and went over to his sister’s to spend the night, he said he was ruined, and I was unfit, I was distraught as you can imagine. I was just beside myself. Then there came this ringing of the doorbell and when I opened the door there stood Donnie Osborne with a suitcase and his mother’s car out in the drive. Only he wasn’t supposed to drive it, he just had a learner’s permit.”
My God, I thought. “Well what did he want?” I said.
“What do you think? He wanted me to go away with him, he said he didn’t care what his mother or anybody else thought, it was all his fault for kissing me, he was packed and ready to go.”
“So what did you do?”
Pearl looked straight at me.
“I went,” she said.
“Oh Pearl.” It was all I could manage to say and you know me—I’m not one to be at a loss for words. “How long were you gone for?” I asked.
“Two days,” she said. “But I want you to know one thing, Sally. I was the one who made us come back. I’m proud of that. I mean, the police were looking and all, I found that out later, but I was the one,” she said. “I’ll never forget the moment it all came home. We were in a Howard Johnson’s—” (this is Roy’s favorite part) “—and he ordered a hamburger and French fries, which is all he’d had to eat on the whole trip so far, and I said—you won’t believe this, Sally—I said, Donny, you know you r
eally ought to order some vegetables. You know you’re a growing boy.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“So then I knew I had to bring him back and I did.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“You know what he told me?” Pearl had gone back to crying again. “He said, ‘I will always love you, Mrs. Bingham, and you’re the best teacher I ever had.’”
I stood up. “Pearl, let’s get your stuff packed,” I said. “I’ll drive you and Jennifer home.”
I wish I could have stopped the telling there. Because that part—that last part, Roy’s favorite—is funny, even though it is also bad, and the rest of it is just bad. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
It’s not hard from here on out.
And most of this is so bad I’ll have to tell it real fast, the way I did Mama dying. I had to tell it real fast to Roy that day anyway, we were pushing suppertime by then.
When I got up to Hoot Owl Holler with Pearl and Jennifer, Pappy listened to what I had to say with his little head cocked to one side like a robin, and then he turned his face away, over toward Snowman Mountain.
“She can come in here, I reckon,” he said, “but she’s none of my get and never was. I don’t give a damn what she does.”
Well!!! You could have knocked me over with a feather when he said that.
“You’re kidding,” Roy said. “You mean you didn’t know?” And then Roy told me that half the county knew that or at least suspected. He said he had heard it himself, he thought, and then forgot. Something about a schoolteacher—came and went.
Nobody had ever told me.
After Pappy said it, a lot of things made more sense to me though, like Pearl’s smart ways. It took me a long while to get over the shock of it, I might not be over it yet. I really might never get over the way you live your life, I mean, and not know what a lot of it’s all about. Connections, Roy said. Well, he’s a good man, but sometimes you can make those connections and sometimes you can’t.
