by Lee Smith
About an hour later we heard the news, which was delivered to us by a tweed-jacketed professor who walked onstage, bringing the music to a ragged, grinding halt. He grabbed the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said thickly—and I remember thinking how odd this form of address seemed—“ladies and gentlemen, the President has been shot.”
The whole scene started to churn, as if we were in a kaleidoscope—the blue day, the green grass, the stately columned buildings. People were running and sobbing. Rutherford’s hand under my elbow steered me back to his fraternity house, where everyone was clustered around several TVs, talking too loud. All the weekend festivities were canceled. We were to return to school immediately. Rutherford seemed relieved by this prospect, having fallen silent—perhaps because he’d quit drinking, or because conversation alone wasn’t worth the effort it took if nothing else (sex) might be forthcoming. He gave me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek and turned to go.
I was about to board the bus when somebody grabbed me, hard, from behind. I whirled around. It was Lily, red-cheeked and glassy-eyed, her blond hair springing out wildly above her blue sweater. Her hot-pink lipstick was smeared; her pretty, pointed face looked vivid and alive. A dark-haired boy stood close behind her, his arm around her waist.
“Listen,” Lily hissed at me. “Sign me in, will you?”
“What?” I had heard her, but I couldn’t believe it.
“Sign me in.” Lily squeezed my shoulder. I could smell her perfume. Then she was gone.
I sat in a rear seat by myself and cried all the way back to school.
I CAUGHT ON FAST THAT AS FAR AS COLLEGE BOYS WERE concerned, girls fell into either the Whore or the Saint category. Girls knew that if they gave in and did it, then boys wouldn’t respect them, and word would get around, and they would never get a husband. The whole point of college was to get a husband.
I had not known anything about this system before I arrived there. It put a serious obstacle in my path toward becoming a great writer.
Lily, who clearly had given up her burden long since, fell into the Whore category. But the odd thing about it was that she didn’t seem to mind, and she swore she didn’t want a husband, anyway. “Honey, a husband is the last thing on my list!” she’d say, giggling. Lily was the smartest one of us, even though she went to great lengths to hide this fact.
Later, in 1966, she and the head of the philosophy department, Dr. Wiener, would stage the only demonstration ever held on our campus, walking slowly around the blooming quadrangle carrying signs that read “Get out of Vietnam,” while the rest of us, well oiled and sunning on the rooftops, clutched our bikini tops and peered down curiously at the two of them.
If Lily was the smartest, Melissa was the dumbest, the nicest, and the least interested in school. Melissa came from Charleston, South Carolina, and spoke so slowly that I was always tempted to leap in and finish her sentences for her. All she wanted to do was marry her boyfriend, now at the University of South Carolina, and have babies. Donnie, Melissa’s roommate, was a big, freckled, friendly girl from Texas. We didn’t have any idea how rich she was until her mother flew up and bought a cabin at nearby Goshen Lake so “Donnie and her friends” would have a place to “relax.”
By spring, Dixie was the only one of us who was actually pinned. It seemed to me that she was not only pinned but almost married, in a funny way, with tons and tons of children—Trey, her boyfriend; and me; and the other girls in our suite; and the other Phi Gams, Trey’s fraternity brothers at Washington and Lee. Dixie had a notebook in which she made a list of things to do each day, and throughout the day she checked them off, one by one. She always got everything done. At the end of first semester, she had a 4.0 average; Trey had a 0.4. Dixie didn’t mind. Totally, inexplicably, she loved him.
By then, most of the freshman girls who weren’t going with somebody had several horror stories to tell about blind dates at UVA or W&L fraternities—about boys who “dropped trou,” or threw up in their dates’ purses. I had only one horror story, but I never told it, since the most horrible element in it was me.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED. IT WAS SPRING FLING AT THE Phi Gam house, and Trey had gotten me a date with a redheaded boy named Eddy Turner. I was getting desperate. I’d made a C in my first semester of creative writing, while Lily had made an A. Plus, I’d gained eight pounds. Both love and literature seemed to be slipping out of my sights. And I was drinking too much—we’d been drinking Yucca Flats, a horrible green punch made with grain alcohol in a washtub, all afternoon before I ended up in bed with Eddy Turner.
The bed was his, on the second floor of the Phi Gam house—not the most private setting for romance. I could scarcely see Eddy by the light from the street lamp coming in through the single high window. Faintly, below, I could hear music, and the house shook slightly with the dancing. I thought of Hemingway’s famous description of sex from For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I’d typed out neatly on an index card: “The earth moved under the sleeping bag.” The whole Phi Gam house was moving under me. After wrestling with my panty girdle for what seemed like hours, Eddy tossed it in the corner and got on top of me. Drunk as I was, I wanted him to. I wanted him to do it. But I didn’t think it would hurt so much, and suddenly I wished he would kiss me or say something. He didn’t. He was done and lying on his back beside me when the door to the room burst open and the light came on. I sat up, grasping for the sheet that I couldn’t find. My breasts are large, and they had always embarrassed me. Until that night, Don Fetterman was the only boy who had seen them. It was a whole group of Phi Gams, roaming from room to room. Luckily I was blinded by the light, so I couldn’t tell exactly who they were.
“Smile!” they yelled. “You’re on Candid Camera!” They laughed hysterically, slammed the door, and were gone, leaving us in darkness once again. I sobbed into Eddy’s pillow, because what they said reminded me of Sam, whose face would not leave my mind then for hours while I cried and cried and cried and sobered up. I didn’t tell Eddy what I was crying about, nor did he ask. He sat in a chair and smoked cigarettes while he waited for me to stop crying. Finally I did. Eddy and I didn’t date after that, but we were buddies in the way I was buddies with the whole Phi Gam house due to my status as Dixie’s roommate. I was like a sister, giving advice to the lovelorn, administering Cokes and aspirin on Sunday mornings, typing papers.
It was not the role I’d had in mind, but it was better than nothing, affording me at least a certain status among the girls at school; and the Phi Gams saw to it that I attended all the big parties, usually with somebody whose girlfriend couldn’t make it. Often, when the weekend was winding down, I could be found in the Phi Gam basement alone, playing “Tragedy,” my favorite song, over and over on the jukebox.
Blown by the wind,
Kissed by the snow,
All that’s left
Is the dark below.
Gone from me,
Oh, oh,
Trag-e-dy.
It always brought me to the edge of tears, because I had never known any tragedy myself, or love, or drama. Wouldn’t anything ever happen to me?
Meanwhile, my friends’ lives were like soap opera—Lily’s period was two weeks late, which scared us all, and then Dixie went on the pill. Melissa and her boyfriend split up (she lost seven pounds, he slammed his hand into a wall) and then made up again.
Melissa was telling us about it, in her maddeningly slow way, one day when we were out at Donnie’s lake cabin, sunning. “It’s not the same, though,” she said. “He just gets too mad. I don’t know what it is—he scares me.”
“Dump him,” Lily said, applying baby oil with iodine in it, our suntan lotion of choice.
“But I love him,” Melissa wailed. Lily snorted.
“Well…” Dixie began diplomatically, but suddenly I sat up.
“Maybe he’s got a wild streak,” I said. “Maybe he just can’t control himself. That’s always been Bubba’s problem.” The little lake before us took on a de
eper, more intense hue. I noticed the rotting pier, the old fisherman up at the point, Lily’s painted toenails. I noticed everything.
“Who’s Bubba?” Donnie asked.
Dixie eyed me expectantly, thinking I meant one of the Phi Gams, since several of them had that nickname.
“My brother,” I said. I took a deep breath.
“What? You never said you had a brother!” Dixie’s pretty face looked really puzzled now.
Everybody sat up and stared at me.
“Well, I do,” I said. “He’s two years older than me, and he stayed with my father when my parents split up. So I’ve never lived with him. In fact, I don’t know him real well at all. This is very painful for me to talk about. We were inseparable when we were little,” I added, hearing my song in the back of my mind. Oh, oh…trag-e-dy!
“Oh, Charlene, I’m so sorry! I had no idea!” Dixie was hugging me, slick hot skin and all.
I started crying. “He was a real problem child,” I said, “and now he’s just so wild. I don’t know what’s going to become of him.”
“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” Melissa asked.
“About two years,” I said. “Our parents won’t have anything at all to do with each other. They hate each other, especially since Mama remarried. They won’t let us get together, not even for a day. It’s just awful.”
“So how did you see him two years ago?” Lily asked. They had all drawn closer, clustering around me.
“He ran away from school,” I said, “and came to my high school, and got me right out of class. I remember it was biology lab,” I said. “I was dissecting a frog.”
“Then what?”
“We spent the day together,” I said. “We got some food and went out to this quarry and ate, and just drove around. We talked and talked,” I said. “And you know what? I felt just as close to him then as I did when we were babies. Just like all those years had never passed at all. It was great,” I said.
“Then he went back to school? Or what?”
“No.” I choked back a sob. “It was almost dark, and he was taking me back to my house, and then he was planning to head on down to Florida, he said, when all of a sudden these blue lights came up behind us, and it was the police.”
“The police?” Dixie was getting very nervous. She was such a good girl.
“Well, it was a stolen car, of course,” I explained. “They nailed him. If he hadn’t stopped in to see me, he might have gotten away with it,” I said, “if he’d just headed straight to Florida. But he came to see me. Mama and Daddy wouldn’t even bail him out. They let him go straight to prison.”
“Oh, Charlene, no wonder you never talk about your family!” Dixie was in tears now.
“But he was a model prisoner,” I went on. I felt exhilarated. “They gave all the prisoners this test, and he scored the highest that anybody in the whole history of the prison had ever scored, so they let him take these special classes, and he did so well that he got out a whole year early, and now he’s in college.”
“Where?”
I thought fast. “Dartmouth,” I said wildly. I knew it had to be a northern school, since Dixie and Melissa seemed to know everybody in the South. But neither of them, as far as I could recall, had ever mentioned Dartmouth.
“He’s got a full scholarship,” I added. “But he’s so bad, I don’t know if he’ll be able to keep it or not.” Donnie got up and went in and came back with cold Cokes for us all, and we stayed out at Goshen Lake until the sun set, and I told them about Bubba.
He was a KA, the wildest KA of them all. Last winter, I said, he got drunk and passed out in the snow on the way back to his fraternity house; by the time a janitor found him the following morning, his cheek was frozen solid to the road. It took two guys from maintenance, with torches, to melt the snow around Bubba’s face and get him loose. And now the whole fraternity was on probation because of this really gross thing he’d made the pledges do. “What really gross thing?” they asked. “Oh, you don’t want to know,” I said. “You really don’t.”
“I really do.” Lily pushed her sunburned face into mine. “Come on. After Trey, nothing could be that bad.” Even Dixie grinned.
“Okay,” I said, launching into a hazing episode that required the KA pledges to run up three flights of stairs, holding alum in their mouths. On each landing, they had to dodge past these two big football players. If they swallowed the alum during the struggle, well, alum makes you vomit immediately, so you can imagine…. They could imagine. But the worst part was that when one pledge wouldn’t go past the second landing, the football players threw him down the stairs, and he broke his back.
“That’s just disgusting,” Donnie drawled. “Nobody would ever do that in Texas.”
But on the other hand, I said quickly, Bubba was the most talented poet in the school, having won the Iris Nutley Leach Award for Poetry two years in a row. I pulled the name Iris Nutley Leach right out of the darkening air. I astonished myself. And girls were just crazy about Bubba, I added. In fact, this girl from Washington tried to kill herself after they broke up, and then she had to be institutionalized at Sheppard Pratt in Baltimore. I knew all about Sheppard Pratt because my mother had gone there.
“But he doesn’t have a girlfriend right now,” I said. Everybody sighed, and a warm breeze came up over the pines and ruffled our little lake. By then, Bubba was as real to me as the Peanuts towel I sat on, as real as the warm gritty dirt between my toes.
During the next year or so, Bubba would knock up a girl and then nobly help her get an abortion (Donnie offered to contribute); he would make Phi Beta Kappa; he would be arrested for assault; he would wreck his MGB; he would start writing folk songs. My creativity knew no bounds when it came to Bubba, but I was a dismal failure in my first writing class, where my teacher, Mr. Lefcowicz, kept giving me B’s and C’s and telling me, “Write what you know.”
I didn’t want to write what I knew. I had no intention of writing a word about my own family, or those peanut fields. Who would want to read about that? I had wanted to write in order to get away from my own life. I couldn’t give up that tormented woman on the cliff in the south of France. I intended to write about glamorous heroines with exciting lives. One of my first—and worst—stories involved a stewardess in Hawaii. I had never been to Hawaii, of course. At that time, I had never even been on a plane. The plot, which was very complicated, had something to do with international espionage. I remember how kindly my young teacher smiled at me when he handed my story back. He asked me to stay for a minute after class. “Charlene,” he said, “I want you to write something true next time.”
Instead, I decided to give up on plot and concentrate on theme, intending to pull some heartstrings. It was nearly Christmas, and this time we had to read our stories aloud to the whole group. But right before that class, Mr. Lefcowicz, who had already read our stories, pulled me aside and told me that I didn’t have to read mine out loud if I didn’t want to.
“Of course I want to,” I said.
We took our seats.
My story took place in a large, unnamed city on Christmas Eve. In this story, a whole happy family was trimming the Christmas tree, singing carols, and drinking hot chocolate while it snowed outside. I think I had “softly falling flakes.” Each person in the family was allowed to open one present—selected from the huge pile of gifts beneath the glittering tree—before bed. Then everyone went to sleep, and a “pregnant silence” descended. At three o’clock a fire broke out, and the whole house burned to the ground, and they all burned up, dying horrible deaths, which I described individually—conscious, as I read aloud, of some movement and sound among my listeners. But I didn’t dare look up as I approached the story’s ironic end: “When the fire trucks arrived, the only sign of life to be found was a blackened music box in the smoking ashes, softly playing ‘Silent Night.’”
By the end of my story, one girl had put her head down on her desk; another was having a cou
ghing fit. Mr. Lefcowicz was staring intently out the window at the wintry day, his back to us. Then he made a great show of looking at his watch. “Whoops! Class dismissed!” he cried, grabbing his bookbag. He rushed from the room like the White Rabbit, already late.
But I was not that stupid.
As I walked across the cold, wet quadrangle toward my dormitory, I understood perfectly well that my story was terrible, laughable. I wanted to die. The gray sky, the dripping, leafless trees, fit my mood perfectly, and I remembered Mr. Lefcowicz saying, in an earlier class, that we must never manipulate nature to express our characters’ emotions. “Ha!” I muttered scornfully to the heavy sky.
The very next day, I joined the staff of the campus newspaper. I became its editor in the middle of my sophomore year—a job nobody else wanted, a job I really enjoyed. I had found a niche, a role, and although it was not what I had envisioned for myself, it was okay. Thus I became the following things: editor of the newspaper; member of Athena, the secret honor society; roommate of Dixie, the May Queen; friend of Phi Gams; and—especially—sister of Bubba, whose legend loomed ever larger. But I avoided both dates and creative writing classes for the next two years, finding Mr. Lefcowicz’s stale advice, “Write what you know,” more impossible with each visit home.
THE SUMMER BETWEEN MY SOPHOMORE AND JUNIOR years was the hardest. The first night I was home, I realized that something was wrong with Mama when I woke up to hear water splashing in the downstairs bathroom. I went to investigate. There she was, wearing a lacy pink peignoir and her old gardening shoes, scrubbing the green tub.
“Oh, hi, Charlene!” she said brightly, and went on scrubbing, humming tunelessly to herself. A mop and bucket stood in the corner. I said good night and went back to my bedroom, where I looked at the clock; it was three-thirty a.m.
The next day, Mama burst into tears when Sam spilled a glass of iced tea, and the day after that, Daddy took her over to Petersburg and put her in the hospital. Memaw came in to stay with Sam during the day while I worked at Snow’s in South Hill, my old job.
