“What time do you have to be in?” Malcolm whispered. He was holding me between his legs in the backseat. His tweed coat, the muscles of his arms, the power of his legs and hands.
“I don’t have to go in,” I answered. “As soon as we sign in, I’m coming back out.”
“I’ll get us a motel room,” he whispered. “Charles William said I could take the car. Where will you be? What time can you get back out?”
At eleven o’clock Irise and I signed back into the KD house and the housemother turned out the lights and the house settled down. The only sound was the furnace and the fans on the back of the refrigerators in the kitchen and the girls dreaming in their beds. At 12:15 I got out of bed and put on my clothes and walked down the stairs to the kitchen and opened the kitchen window and climbed out. I dropped down into the spirea bushes. Then I walked across the yard and out onto the sidewalk and Malcolm was waiting in the car. We drove to a motel and went inside and took off all our clothes and lay down on the bed. Then for timeless unforgettable hours we did it. For timeless unforgettable hours nothing seemed to exist but that room and the strange light coming in the closed curtains and the bed with us on it. It seemed to mean something so vast and endless, as though our arms and legs and bodies were made of marble and each instant was recorded somewhere forever.
“I can see the face of our grandson,” I said to him. “We will be very old and still in love with each other and our grandson will come and visit us and we will tell him about the way we fell in love.”
“God. Don’t say that.”
“Don’t say what?”
“About us being old.”
“Everyone gets old.” I pulled my body away from him. “Why are you getting mad? Why do you care what I say? What’s wrong? What’s wrong with you?”
“You just say the weirdest things. What time is it? See if you can find my watch over there.” I got out of the bed and pulled the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around my breasts and tied it. Then I hobbled over to the dresser and found his watch and went into the bathroom and turned on the light and read the time.
“It’s four-thirty.”
“We’ve got to get you back. It will be light soon. Get dressed. Come on. Let’s get dressed.” He got out of the bed and pulled on his pants and I turned on the light and went into the bathroom and put on my clothes and came back out into the room and tried to look at him but now he was a stranger. He was scared to death of what we had been doing. He was scared to death of me. He thought the things I said were weird and I was tired of the things we had been doing and I was getting angry and tired of trying to figure out how to please him.
* * *
I climbed back in the kitchen window and closed it and found a loaf of bread on a cabinet and some mayonnaise in a refrigerator and made a couple of mayonnaise sandwiches and ate them and then I drank some milk and then I went upstairs and got into Irise’s bed. “What happened?” she said. “I’ve been worried to death. I bet I hardly slept all night.”
“I wish you hadn’t introduced me to him. He thinks I’m weird. He got mad because I said we were going to get old some day. He always gets mad at things I say. He gets mad when we’re making love. What do you and Charles William do when you make love? What does he say to you?”
“I don’t know. He just tells me things. About things he’s interested in.”
“No, I mean when you make love to him. What do you do? What do you say? I have to talk to someone about it. I have to know what to do.”
“We just lie around and laugh about things and listen to music if we can be at his house alone. When Eula goes to play bridge. Then he just tells me things or I put on his kimonos and he ties them around my waist and we tell each other things. Maybe we can go to sleep now, Rhoda. Let’s go to sleep.” Her soft little hands patted my back. Her sweet voice soothed me and I slept.
The next day we went to a party at the Beta house and then to a football game and then to a party at the Kappa Sig house and then to a party at the SAE house and I got drunk and threw up for about an hour and went to sleep on a sofa. Somehow they got me home.
On Sunday morning Malcolm came over alone to the Chi O house to tell me goodbye. I felt so bad I could hardly get dressed and go downstairs to talk to him.
“I’m really sorry,” I kept saying. “I’m sorry it happened.”
“You aren’t the only one who got drunk. We all got drunk.”
“I thought you would give me your pin.”
“What?”
“I thought when you got here you would give me your pin. If you want to ever do it with me again you have to give me your pin.”
I was standing beside a brocade sofa in the living room. He was sitting on a chair. He was wearing a white oxford cloth shirt and a pair of khaki pants and a sweater. Monk, they called him at Darlington. He looked like a monkey to me at that moment, like a great beast or orangutan or chimpanzee. “Are you going to give it to me or not?”
“Not today. Not like this.”
“Then forget it. Forget the whole thing.” I walked out the front door of the Chi Omega house and left him standing there. I walked out into the front yard and went over beneath a tree and started counting the leaves that were piled up underneath the tree. Atoms into molecules, molecules into bases. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. He walked out the front door and started my way, but I turned around and waved him off. I was so angry I thought I might go crazy.
“Rhoda. Talk to me a minute.”
“You better go on. Charles William is waiting for you, isn’t he?”
“I wish you’d talk to me.”
“I talked to you.” He was standing on the sidewalk. He turned away from me then and walked on to the car and got in and drove away. I leaned over and began to pick up the leaves. It was a maple tree and the leaves were the shape of my hand. I tried to find the largest leaves I could find. I tried to find the ones that were the same size as my hand. My hands were shaped like my father’s hands. They were very large for my size. My arms were very long and my hands were big and a long time ago I had used them to pull my body through the water. A long time ago I had been a great swimmer. I was training to swim the English Channel and the only reason I quit was because I hated to be smeared with grease to swim it. I had to gain a lot of weight and be fat and let them smear me with grease. Then, at night, in the black night, I would be swimming against the waves. My father was beside me in the rowboat. He would never let me drown. Swim, Sister, he coached me. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Keep swimming. You can make it. I’m right here. You can do it, Sister. Let me see you swim. Pull, pull, pull. Pull your heart out.
Chapter
13
Dear May Garth:
So much for love. That was the worst weekend I ever spent in my life. Sunday afternoon, after they were gone, I went over to the pool and swam for about three hours. I have to get back in training. Maybe next week I’ll see about getting on the team here. I hope I never see him again. His roommate calls him Monk. It’s because he looks like an orangutan. He really does, now that I think about it. He lifts weights all the time to make his body bigger. There isn’t a single soft place anywhere on his whole body. He cuts his hair off so short he looks like he is bald. He doesn’t even have soft hair.
Well, three more weeks and it’s Christmas vacation and we’ll all be back in Dunleith and Charles William and Irise will be getting married. The dresses are waiting for us. I hope your diet goes well so you’ll fit in yours. I’m as thin as a rail. I got so I don’t care if I ever eat.
I’m writing this paper on Stevens now. It’s all I can think about. “Among twenty snowy mountains the only moving thing was the eye of the blackbird.”
Irise and I will be home on the eighteenth. When do you get there? Are you coming on the train? They are going to have lobster for the reception and all the champagne anyone can drink. “Three be the things I shall never obtain. Envy, content, and suf
ficient champagne.”
Hurry home,
Rhoda
Dec. 15, 1955 (unmailed)
Dear Malcolm,
I have tried to write this letter about a hundred times. So this time I will mail whatever I write. I am not writing it of course. I am typing it on my Royal portable typewriter I have had since I was thirteen. I learned how to type in three days. Did I ever tell you that? I am a very smart girl. Did you ever realize that? What do I know? Nothing. “Once a fear pierced him, in that he mistook the shadow of his equipage for blackbirds.”
Dec. 16, 1955 (mailed)
Dear Malcolm,
I am going to mail this no matter what it says. I’m sorry that last weekend was so horrible. I’m sorry I got drunk. I’m sorry that we got into an argument in the motel. I’m sorry it’s so hard to know what to do every day of our lives.
Charles William called me last week and said you were really sorry about all of it too. He said you looked like you were unhappy so that’s why I’m writing to you.
I started menstruating so at least I’m not pregnant. Charles William and Irise are getting married at Christmas. I’m the maid of honor. I guess you know that. I think we’ll really have a great party. I’m helping Irise plan the wedding. Charles William wants everything perfect as you can imagine. Here’s a poem I wrote while looking at the photograph of you Charles William sent me (was that two thousand years ago, turning and turning in a widening gyre) to get me to go with you to Homecoming. Things get started in the world and they seem so fresh and white and hopeful and then they usually end up like this. Well, onward, as they used to say when the wagons headed west.
Yours in the human race,
Rhoda
POEM IN JANUARY
The rain, the rain, is kind to come
It sings its song, dumb, dumb,
It sings that things aren’t what they seem
And love, my love, is still a dream
And so I have to sit and stare
At a tiny little two-inch square
A photograph of a dream I had
Like one who is entirely mad.
There might be life outside this place
Where I worship your tiny paper face.
Dear Rhoda,
My roommate thinks he is going to get to read the letter you wrote me and read the poem but he won’t get to read that one. I have read it a lot. I think it means a lot. I think we should forget about that weekend.
I wish I could come to the wedding but I have to stay home at Christmas. My parents need me there. My father is in a lot of trouble now about money and I’m going to be helping him.
I got an A on the paper. Then my teacher asked me to stay after class. He said, Mr. Martin, I would never have picked you out to be a fan of Dorothy Parker.
I love you,
Malcolm
Dear Rhoda,
Did you get the letter I wrote to you before Christmas? I mailed it to your address in Dunleith? I thought you would write back to me if you got it. Let me know if you got it.
Yours truly, love,
Malcolm
(unmailed)
Dear Malcolm,
This letter will not be mailed. I don’t think I can get back into that stuff we were doing. I’ll get back into it and I’ll be so happy I think my feet don’t touch the ground and the whole world will be so beautiful it’s like a place I never saw before except heard about in Wallace Stevens’ poetry or maybe Wordsworth’s or maybe Housman, or “Wild Peaches” by Elinor Wylie:
When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,
You’ll wear a coonskin cap and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold colour.
Lost, like our lotus-eating ancestor,
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.
The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot. . . .
This is how my mind works. Things like this are part of my psychological makeup. I don’t think you can deal with this. I don’t think you have the slightest idea who I am. You know what May Garth said when she was here at Christmas. She said, anyone who could study math could never understand a poet. She said, anyone can count. I got so mad at you for hurting me that I started thinking evil things about you, about the way you look and trashy stuff like that. I guess I’ll just go on and be a bluestocking and an old maid. If you were someone I should love I could mail this letter to you and you would know what it meant. I can’t and you can’t.
Sayonara.
Rhoda
Dear Rhoda,
We got back to school in a snowstorm. I wrote to you before Christmas and I wrote to you on January 2, 1956. Now I am writing to you on February 7, 1956. I am sorry you got mad at me and I don’t blame you. When you started that stuff about us having a grandson I felt like I was getting sick at my stomach. My parents are real old people. They were forty years old when I was born. I am afraid of getting old. I’m afraid I’ll never get out of Tech and get a job.
Please write to me. I have a lot of things on my mind right now. My brother is coming home from Europe and my mother hates his wife. They have three kids who were born over there. We have never even seen them. My brother’s wife is almost six feet tall. She was the valedictorian of Agnes Scott. She is really crazy. She drives my mother crazy. They have been letting the children run around with Greek people and send us pictures of them wearing weird clothes. It drives my mother crazy. Now they are coming home. We don’t know why Gray married her. She is really crazy. She wrote my mother and told her they put flowers in their toilets. She says anything that comes into her head.
I’m drinking beer. I was drinking it all afternoon and then it started to rain and I started thinking about you so I decided to write you. I don’t think I’m ever going to get out of this school. I have to get a degree because my father has lost all his money. He is working in a hardware store in Martinsville now. His ancestors built Martinsville and now he is working as a clerk in a hardware store. That is very hard on my mother.
I found Errington the other day. He was in my sock drawer so I got him out and let him drive around in the car with me. Please, come up here one weekend and let’s talk this over. I want you to come to Emory for the summer. I want you to do anything you want to do. I just have to study harder. My folks are spending a lot of money to keep me here and they can’t afford it anymore. I have to make better grades than I have been making.
I love you,
Malcolm
Dear Malcolm,
I have written you about a hundred letters since that weekend when I saw the face of your grandson (and mine) smiling at me from the ceiling of the room where you were making love to me. I have written you at least a hundred letters and at least twenty poems. What would you like to have first, a letter or a poem? I threw most of the letters away. But I will put one or two into this packet. Along with this tie which I bought for you for Christmas. That seems about a year ago. So here are four poems. If you read them and think you can keep on writing to a person with a mind this weird write back and I’ll send you a letter I wrote to you in January. It won’t scare you to death.
Love,
Rhoda
ONE THING ABOUT THE LIVING
EVERY NOW AND THEN ONE OF US
STOPS DYING FOR A MOMENT
After forty days it came back in December while the wind blew like Baltimore around this southern city. It came back. It walked around talking to gardeners, waving at football players, luring me back to your bed. It came back, colder, deeper, more terrible than I remembered. I knew th
e route it took to find me, the detours it made, the washed-out bridge, the dangerous ferry crossing. I pretended it was a cat wailing on another roof.
Later I took it to lunch. I fed it bread and wine. I gave some to Spooky and some to Irise and some to the football players and poured some into a letter and went upstairs and got into bed and held it while it took my arms and legs. I closed my eyes it grew heavier. I held still it grew heavier.
All afternoon I dreamed of Uncle Piljerk Peter. He lives on cloud nine. He ties his pill to a ten-pound test line and drops it down the first child’s throat and jerks it back up and drops it down the second child’s throat and jerks it back up and so on so forth until the pill loses its strength and no one can be saved anymore. This is a story out of a southern children’s book. It’s all about the black people and how funny it is when their children die. It’s all about dying and love and how there isn’t enough strength to go around. It’s about how you weren’t strong enough to love me but I don’t care. Why should I care? It’s not your fault my father ruined my mother’s life.
AUBADE
There was one night knowing all my songs
you came to me
and all night long you crossed my body
with your music
Oh, I can still sing every note
of all the songs you taught me
Every gaudy jaybird
Every yellow warbler
THE FLIES AND THE HONEY POT
A pot of honey having been upset in a grocer’s shop
the flies came around it in droves to eat it up nor would
they move from the spot while there was a drop left.
Finally they became so clogged in it they could not
fly. Miserable creatures, who, for the sake of a
moment’s pleasure, had thrown their lives away.
This is the wisdom of white-haired ladies
on verandah swings,
my early warners,
my corseted teachers.
Stifled in luscious sweets
Net of Jewels Page 16
