Net of Jewels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  I was awakened the next morning by our president.

  “Rhoda, get up. The dean of women is furious about the skit. We have to go and see her.”

  “What about? What is she mad about?” I sat up in the bed and pushed the covers from my legs. “What are you talking about? How could she be mad?”

  “She’s mad about the language Slut uses. We have to go over there right now. You and me and the panhellenic representative.”

  “What in the name of God is there to be mad about? My God. This is the goddamnedest thing I ever heard of. Just because we won.”

  “She didn’t like her calling the muses hussies. And the part where she keeps saying she’ll drink all the G.D. whiskey she likes.”

  “Oh, Christ. Listen, Cammie, did you see the play? I mean, were you there? Were you listening? That’s the best line in the play. She doesn’t call them hussies. She says, ‘Get out of here, you goddamn hussies, you hell damn incorporeal bodies.’ My English teacher said it was a great line. He’s letting me turn the skit in for a paper. Tell the dean to call Dr. Whitehead and see what he thinks.”

  “We need to go right after breakfast. You can have an excuse if you have to miss a class.”

  So after breakfast the president and the panhellenic representative and I went to the dean’s office to argue our case. Or, more exactly, they went to grovel and apologize and I went to argue. “Good wins out in the end,” I began. “It’s a moral lesson, for God’s sake. It’s about civilizing men and stopping people from drinking whiskey. What more do you want?” The dean and I had had nice conversations in the past. She had interviewed me when I first came to the campus and since then I had gone by her office several times to talk about books. She had seemed to be an island of sanity and had even helped me change my English class to find one with a better professor. “Just calm down, Rhoda. No one’s judging your play. Some people were bothered by your language.”

  “Who was?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Several students came in this morning to talk about it.”

  “They’re just mad because I won. How can anyone get mad about language in a play? It’s a free country, isn’t it? Don’t we have freedom of speech anymore?”

  “Rhoda, please calm down.” The president came around and stood beside my chair.

  “I won the goddamn contest for you, didn’t I? Did you even see it?” I asked the dean. “Or did some nasty little tattletale come in here complaining to you? Somebody who lost?”

  “Rhoda, would you wait outside for us?” The dean came around her desk and took me by the arm. “I know you’re upset. Artists are sensitive about their work. We’ll work out something. Come on, come out here and wait in the outside room.” She led me through a door and sat me down by her secretary’s desk. She patted me on the shoulder. She patted me on the head. “I didn’t see it,” she said, “but I wish I had.”

  She went back into the office, leaving the door ajar, and I heard her ask the other girls to promise to submit future skits in writing before they were performed before an audience. The president and the panhellenic representative were satisfied but I was in a funk. I moped around all day and cut my classes. In the late afternoon I went for one of my long lonely walks. I walked past the Tri Delt house and thought about going in to see if May Garth wanted to swallow some iodine or get drunk but I didn’t even feel like having May Garth for company. I wanted to wander around alone and figure out why every time I was happy something terrible happened next.

  That Saturday I agreed to go with Hap Dumas to a football game. After all, a good-natured boy who loved me was better than no boyfriend at all.

  We ran into May Garth at the game. She was with her cousin Sheffield Catledge from Guntersville. “Hi, Rhoda,” she called out, stooping before I even came in range. “Come here a minute. Come meet my cousin Sheffield.” He hove into sight, a good-looking blond boy about her height. He was carrying two hot dogs and shook his chin at me to make up for not being able to shake hands. “Sheffield is down for the weekend from Sewanee,” May Garth said. “We’re going tonight to see the Harlem Globetrotters. He just got here last night. He’s going to stay all weekend.” She was ecstatic to have her cousin there. I guess it was the first time she had had a date all year with a boy as tall as she was. He smiled and looked straight at me. A very fine good-looking boy to squire her around all weekend. I was glad for her. Hap began to talk to Sheffield about people he knew at Sewanee and I complimented May Garth on her outfit. She was wearing a pale gold suit with a matching blouse and a pillbox hat. I looked down at her feet. She had on heels. Not three-inch heels like everyone else was wearing, but at least they were heels.

  “I’m so glad I saw you,” she said. “I want you to come over again. Come play. We had a great game last week. We had six people. We played all night. We had two pints of whiskey and we had some cheese straws my mother sent. You think you can come sometime?” She held me with her hand. The conversation between Sheffield and Hap was waning. The crowd was filing into their seats. The band was playing. The Crimson Tide were taking the field.

  “We’ll miss the kickoff,” the boys said.

  “I might,” I whispered to May Garth. “I’ll come if I can.” Hap took my arm and we parted. May Garth kept looking back over her shoulder at me as she walked away. Not stooping, with her cousin Sheffield at her side, but still longing. I was only a little half-baked nineteen-year-old girl, how could I have filled her longing? I had longings of my own.

  “Who was that?” Hap asked.

  “May Garth Sheffield. Her family owns a bunch of banks. She’s brilliant, but she’s very eccentric. She’s always trying to get me to come to a poker game she has in the Tri Delt house. But I barely know her. I don’t know her very well.”

  “It’s a shame she’s so tall. She has a pretty face, a really pretty face.”

  “She does crazy things.” I stopped at that. “I mean, she’s nuts about this poker business. I don’t know why people want to play games for money. When I played with my brother I would always lose. Every game I ever played for money I would lose.” I leaned into Hap’s soft jacket. He was getting more and more valuable to me, dangerously valuable, in the cold fall weather, underneath the stands.

  “Let’s go sit down,” he said. He pulled my arm into his arm, he was so kind, so loving, it embarrassed me to death.

  “I hope they have some whiskey,” was all I could think of to say. “I love to get drunk at football games.”

  We went to our seats in the stands. The Sigma Chis had a section of seats together. Hap’s fraternity brothers were all around us with their girlfriends. They slapped us on the back and offered us some whiskey. We drank the whiskey, then stood up for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The football players ran out onto the field. The whiskey crossed the blood-brain barrier. I dug my hands into Hap’s arms. I buried my face in his jacket sleeve.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is something wrong with you?”

  That night I necked with him on a bed in the fraternity house. Wearing all our clothes we struggled against each other for several hours. “Do you want my new pin when I get it?” he asked me. “I lost the one I had last year, but I ordered a new one. If you want it you can have it.”

  “Wait till you get it. When you get it, I might take it.” I sat up on the bed, straightened my sweater, looked down at him, ran my hands across his fine soft face, caressed his soft brown hair, pushed his shoulders down upon the pillows.

  “Something terrible happened to me last summer,” I began. “And now I keep thinking about death all the time. I think I’m the only one who thinks about it.”

  “No, you aren’t.” He sat up beside me. He took my hands. “My grandfather died last year. He was the greatest man. I went to sit by him while he was dying. He told me a lot of things. He said it was okay to die because he had all of us. He said he’d had a good life. He was the newspaper editor in Hope. He’d gone to a war. But I didn’t see him die. I was asleep w
hen he died.” He pulled me back into his arms. “You’re a funny girl, Rhoda. I can’t tell if you like me or not.”

  “I like you. I’m just in a funny mood right now. I’m so mad about the dean saying all that stuff about my play. She made me so mad.” I lay back down against his chest. I stretched my legs down beside his legs. I thought about a boy in junior high who had put his hands inside my pants one night. The silky wet memory of that night overwhelmed me and when Hap put his hand beneath my sweater I did not move it. Later, when he lay his hand across my stomach, I let him leave it there. “I love you,” I said finally. “I think I love you to death.”

  The next day was Sunday. I woke up in my dorm room and thought a long time about the events of the day before. I had let Hap Dumas put his hand inside my bra. I had let him lay his hand upon my stomach. I was as good as married. It scared me to death to think such things. I rolled my head down underneath the covers. I made a tent of the covers and rolled myself up into a ball and thought as hard as I could think about it. It was like the summer before last when I had been engaged for three weeks. From the moment I took the ring until I gave it back I had been in a state of perpetual trauma. I had no dream of marriage. I had no desire to run a house or be a wife or live forever with a man. I wanted to be popular and have dates and act like I was normal, but I didn’t want to belong to anyone. I belonged somewhere else. Somewhere I had never been … I rolled my head down into my arms. I stretched my arms and legs until they stuck off the ends of the bed. I belonged somewhere in laboratories full of men and women looking through microscopes … I belonged somewhere where people talked of poetry and didn’t have to have things they read explained to them. I was going to be an old maid. I was a bluestocking and an old maid. No one understood me but Charles William and he was in Atlanta.

  I was getting up now. The thought of how I had suffered made me feel better and I began to think of what I would wear to the Chi O house for lunch. I had a brand-new red cashmere sweater set I had charged to my father the day before. I would wear my red cashmere sweater set and my tweed wraparound skirt and my pearls. I made up the bed and began to dress. I had forgotten all about Hap Dumas. He belonged to Saturday night. Now it was Sunday and I was going to concentrate on biology all day. Who knows, my redheaded lab instructor might be falling in love with me. He might ask me to marry him and we could go to Chicago and split open atoms or invent vaccines.

  All the way to the Chi O house I worked on my plan to marry my lab instructor. I had us in a convertible driving up the road to Chicago, Illinois, as I turned from the sidewalk and began to walk up the path to the Chi O house. “Oklahoma,” I was singing. “Every night my honey lamb and I . . .”

  “Rhoda.” It was my big sister in Chi O, Donie Marsh.

  “What’s up?”

  “Isn’t May Garth Sheffield a friend of yours?”

  “Sort of. Why? What happened? Why do you look that way?”

  “She’s had her appendix out. They had to take her in the middle of the night. She almost died. They barely got her there in time.”

  “It’s iodine. I should have told someone. I shouldn’t have let her do it. People are dying all around me. Where is she? Can I go see her?”

  “Come in and eat lunch first. Sure you can. I’ll go with you if you want me to. We’re supposed to visit people if they’re sick. You can get blue points if you go.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I can go alone. I don’t need anyone to go with me.”

  That evening I went to the hospital to visit May Garth. She was propped up on the pillows wearing a blue nightgown with little flowers embroidered on the yoke. “I guess it was the iodine,” I said. “Did you tell them you’d done it?”

  “It wasn’t the iodine,” she said. “My appendix burst. It happens all the time. Where have you been? You never came back to play cards. I thought you were coming.”

  “That was only yesterday when I saw you. Are you okay? Are you sure you are all right?” I pulled a chair up closer to the bed.

  “I’ve got a crush on a football player,” she said. “This great big guy. He’s from Guntersville. He’s in my English literature class and the teacher asked me to tutor him. He came over to the house the other day.” She drifted off, her hands played with the tubes going into her arm. “Listen, this guy is so crazy about me. Look here.” She pulled the sheets down across her legs. “I bet I lost ten pounds having this operation. You should have seen the blood. You never saw so much blood in your life.”

  “How’d you see the blood? You weren’t awake, were you?”

  “I was wide awake. They doped me up, then they stuck a needle in my back, then they rolled me in and started cutting me open. There were people all over the place, they were screaming.”

  “Where’s your mother and daddy? Aren’t they coming?”

  “They can’t. They’re in Europe. My aunt’s driving down. She’ll be here tomorrow. Listen, I found out where the football players go in the afternoon. You know that Quonset hut that has a bookstore in it? Over by the married dorms. That’s where they hang out. I’m going to meet him there the next time I tutor him. You can go with me if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to. I’m scared of them. They’re too big. They act like animals.”

  “I’m thinking about getting some arsenic.” She waited for that to sink in. “I read about it in this book called The Moor at Midnight. Women used to do it all the time. You take arsenic and it makes you pale. You get really thin and pale. It can make your bones thinner even. But you have to take the right amount. You have to be careful how much you take.”

  “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

  “I might. If I can find out the right amount.” She lay back against the pillows. “It’s really nice of you to come by, Rhoda. My sorority sisters came this afternoon, but they all left together. I’m glad you’re here.” She reached out with the hand that didn’t have tubes in it and I stood up and put my hand on top of hers.

  “‘My life closed twice before its close,’” I began. “That’s the beginning of a poem.”

  “It’s beautiful. ‘My life closed twice.’ You should have felt it when they sewed me up. I could feel them make the stitches. They were pulling through the thread.” She was fading now. Her hand relaxed beneath my hand. It lay upon her stomach in the exact same place that Hap Dumas had laid his hand on mine. “I better go,” I said. “I better let you sleep.”

  “Come back tomorrow,” she said. “Come back tomorrow if you can.”

  I left the hospital in a strange mood. The sky was dark and overcast, no sun or stars or celestial light. I started walking toward the campus. Then I changed my mind. I wanted a hamburger. I wanted a hamburger and some french fries and I wanted to talk to someone who was normal. I went back to the hospital and found a pay phone and called Hap. “Come and pick me up,” I said. “I’ll buy you a hamburger if you’ll take me to a drive-in.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I have to get dressed though. Why did you call me? Why did you think of this all of a sudden?”

  “I’m at the city hospital. Someone I know almost died. We could die, Hap. Do you realize that? I mean, do you really know it?”

  “You want me to change clothes or come right now?”

  “Come right now. I’ll be walking down Halley Street in the direction of the campus. Come as fast as you can.” I hung up the phone and put my billfold back into my pocketbook and took my gloves out of my pocket and put them on. I pushed open the door leading out onto the dark street. I began to walk. I was thinking about hamburgers. I was thinking about juicy hamburgers with lettuce and tomato and mayonnaise and mustard and salt and pepper. I was thinking about chocolate milkshakes and how much I loved to suck them down through straws. I was going to kiss old Hap Dumas until he didn’t know what day it was. I was going to kiss and neck and let him put his hand on my breast and then I was going home and write some poems about it. I was going to get out my dictionary and find some great words t
o go in poems. Words like dark and rain and omnipotent and transported. Like blood and breath and food and cerulean blue and sapphires and atomic theory. Words like die and live and profound and mysterious and art.

  Chapter

  9

  The next week I moved into the Chi O house. A girl from Anniston had gone home so there was a small single room available on the second floor. I piled all my stuff in the car and hauled it up the stairs and put it away. Now my dream had come true and I was living in the Chi O house. The first night I was there my big sister in Chi O, Donie Marsh, called me into her room for a chat.

  “I think you’re gaining weight, Rhoda,” she said. “I want you to start watching it. What have you been doing?”

  “Going to the Waffle House at night. I get hungry, Donie. I can’t eat all this stuff they cook here.”

  “Well, stop eating waffles and get your hair cut. I’ve got some exciting news for you. A very big man on campus is interested in you. A law student. He saw you somewhere and called and asked about you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “His name’s Stanley Mabry. His father’s the lieutenant governor. He thinks you’re cute and he wants to take you out to dinner.”

  “Why did he call you? Why didn’t he call me?”

  “Because he doesn’t know you. Well, look, go on and get to bed. We’ll talk about it in the morning. You look like you’re tired.”

  “I’m not tired. I have a lot of things to read. I’ve got a lot of work to do.” I left her and went back to my room and lay down on my bed. I had only been there one day and already I was thinking it was a mistake to move into the house. Already I was feeling claustrophobic. I got up from the bed and began to pile things in my closet. In thirty minutes I had my room looking the way I had always liked my rooms. Everything put away and a plain bedspread on the bed. I took all the powder boxes and junk off the dresser and set my typewriter up on it and moved the lamp beside it. I opened the drapes and pushed open the window. I turned off the light and lay back down on the bed. Some old law student in a dark suit was coming to take me out to dinner. He was dark and tall and cold. He never smiled. He wanted me to act like a lady. He wanted me to be beautiful and thin. Sophisticated and aloof, quiet and soft and perfect. He was my father. He had come to get my mother. Together they walked down the path from the Chi Omega house to the car. They were going out to dinner. They were irritated and very sad.