The man raised his face to me, and there was such a look of desperation and entreaty on it, such utter helplessness in eyes of a color I had literally never seen in a human face before, that I ran down the shallow stone steps and reached for the wet, naked child before I even thought.
“If you don’t stop right this minute you’re going to turn to stone, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life naked in this backyard, and pigeons will crap all over you,” I said, pinning the slick, small arms firmly. The child stopped dancing and looked at me. The smaller child stopped bellowing and looked, too.
“Oh, God, are you married?” the man said. “If not, will you marry me in fifteen minutes?”
“So tell me about his eyes again,” Crisscross said the next day at lunch. She had pleaded cramps and missed the party. Crisscross did not go to parties where no recreational drugs were offered. It was a matter of policy with her; I knew she did not indulge. She had gone to Bennington, and regarded the social doings of old Atlanta society, or what passed for it, as she might the ponderous frolicking of dinosaurs. Once was interesting, more was grotesque.
“I never saw eyes that color,” I said. “Such an intense blue they could burn you—”
“What kind of blue? Be specific.”
“The blue of…of…the blue of those lights on the top of police cars,” I said.
“Jesus,” Crisscross said. “How utterly charming. Is his last name Mengele, by any chance?”
“No. It’s Fowler. Pomeroy Fowler. Dr. Pomeroy Fowler. Pom to his friends.”
“Of which you are now one.”
“I guess I am.”
“So. Two kids, both brats. Cop car-blue eyes, five o’clock shadow, slept-in clothes. Wife at Sea Island, or Brawner’s?”
I glared at her. Sea Island is where much of old Atlanta goes to re-create itself. The Brawner Clinic is where it goes for its breakups, breakdowns, and substance addictions. The latter, Crisscross maintained, ran primarily to booze and Coca-Cola. The sixties never quite got to Atlanta, she said, much less the seventies.
“Why should it be either one?” I said.
“Because no Nawthside Atlanta matron goes anywhere else and leaves her chirrun behind, don’chall know? Especially during the Little Season.”
Crisscross had not been in the South long. Her southern accent, even in parody, was execrable.
“As a matter of fact, she’s on Hilton Head,” I said. “She ran off with the architect down the street when he decided to go live on an island and free himself of conventional restraints. Pom got the children without even going to court.”
“I’d give a lot to know how you free yourself from conventional restraints on Hilton Head,” Crisscross grinned. “What do you do, join the Young Democrats? Violate the landscape code?”
“He wanted to build experimental low-cost housing for the Gullahs,” I said, grinning back at her. “But none of them would move into the prototype. The one family that finally did tacked tin over the cedar shake roof and painted the door blue. That’s to ward off evil spirits. You still see it on the Gullah shacks down there.”
Crisscross folded her arms over her stomach and bent over laughing. I began to laugh, too.
“Maybe they’ll find out it wards off Republicans, too,” I gasped. Despite our seeming lack of anything at all in common, Crisscross and I became instant friends when she joined the agency, and we spent much of our billable time laughing. Of all my old advertising crowd, she is the only one I still see with any regularity. She has her own agency now. We still laugh.
“So after you shut his kids up what happened?” she said on the day after the barbecue.
“I took both of them into the house and bathed them and got clean clothes on them and we left and went back to his house. He made supper for them and I put them to bed and we had a drink. We had several, in fact. And then we ordered in pizza because all he had in the house was hot dogs and stale potato chips and strawberry Jell-O, and the kitchen looked like an army had been camping in it for weeks. The whole house did, for that matter. It’s a nice Cape Cod in Garden Hills, but his baby-sitter doesn’t clean, and he doesn’t get home until late from the clinic most nights, and he thinks it’s more important to spend what time he has with the boys, instead of cleaning. I sort of straightened things up for him; it looked a lot better. I’m going to see if Totsy Freeman’s housekeeper has a free day or two. I think she said she did. It could really be a pretty house.”
Crisscross looked at me silently for a time. Then she said, “Oh, Merritt. Merritt Mason. You did it again. There is absolutely no hope for you; you’re a goner.”
“Did what?”
But I knew what she was going to say.
She said it.
“Saw somebody in need of something and loped right in to fix things. Spied a creature in distress. I know you. ‘Oh, Lord, there’s something over there moving and breathing and looking like it might need help. Let me at it!’ What did you get out of it this time? A chance to go back next week and clean his basement?”
“I got asked out for dinner this weekend and one hell of a goodnight kiss,” I snapped.
“I’m glad about the dinner,” she said. “I hope the kiss was worth all the fussing and nurturing you’re going to do. For that he could at least have screwed you.”
“The kiss was terrific,” I said, reddening. “The other comes next week. I can tell.”
“Thank you, Jesus,” she said, and folded her hands as in prayer, and rolled her wicked brown eyes heavenward. She looked back at me, waiting.
I looked away from her sharp, expectant little fox’s face. I was not a virgin when I met Pom, but I had slept with very few men. I had not even been out with many, and in the Atlanta of that time, with singles’ apartments sprouting like weeds and young men pouring in to catch the city’s soaring comet’s tail, that was downright difficult to accomplish. Every woman I knew dated all the time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attractive; I am not pretty, but I am tall and thin and wear clothes well, and I know that I have an appealing smile. One of my last boyfriends had told me, “You’re just a tall, skinny drink of water with exploding hair until you smile. Then there’s nobody else in the room.”
It was nice to hear, but it did not make me feel any more comfortable with the young man who said it, and gradually I stopped seeing him. It was what happened to most of my relationships. I had slept with one man at LSU, after a rock concert, where the pot smoke had drifted thick and sweet, and had lived in mute terror of pregnancy and other things until the next month. The next man I slept with, years later, was a rock-climbing, sports car-driving investment banker who told me flatly that there was absolutely nothing attractive about a twenty-eight-year-old virgin. By then I was on the pill, because you never knew when, et cetera, et cetera, but I might as well not have been, because I enjoyed the sex so little that after being shamed into bed by the investment banker I did not do it again, and he stopped calling. I was thirty when I met Pom. For the first time, I wanted, with no reservations, to go to bed with a man. I could hardly wait, in fact. If he did not initiate it on our next date, I was going to. When he had first kissed me my whole body ignited. When we finished it was near meltdown.
It was the first time in my life I had not heard, in my mind, my mother’s bled-out voice saying bitterly, “Go ahead and do it with the first boy that tries it, if you’re ready to die, because doing it will kill you. It will hurt you and hurt you, and then it will kill you.”
My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was thirteen and my sister Laura was three. She was terribly sick for a year before that. I used to pull the covers over my head at night so that I could not hear her crying. She died thinking that she had gotten the cancer from having sexual relations with my father, who, she said, wasn’t satisfied unless he was on her every night. By that time, he had moved into the downstairs guest room and they seldom spoke. Our maid, Felicia, took care of her and my sister during the daytime, and a succession of Felicia’s
relatives from the bayou came in and cooked. I took care of mother after school and at night. I didn’t miss much of the progress of the cancer as it chewed its way through her vitals. Later, when I got close enough to someone to want sex, or had necked in the back of a car until it seemed inevitable, I always stopped things abruptly. I knew with the top part of my mind that whatever else I got from the dirty deed, it wasn’t going to be cancer, but the bottom part of it didn’t know that. Whenever a hand touched my bare breast, or found the warm dark between my legs, I heard her voice: It will hurt you and hurt you, and then it will kill you. None of my relationships overrode that voice.
Pom silenced it with one kiss. Or perhaps the sheer need I saw in him overrode it. I knew, somehow, that I would not hear the voice again. I would sleep with him. I would marry him if he asked me. I would make him ask me. I would make such fine love with him that he would ask me; I would make such a good and orderly world for him and his children that he would ask me. I knew just how to do that.
After my mother died I took care of my sister and my father. It pleased him that I wanted to. It pleased me that it pleased him. He was a lawyer, a remote man who lived among paper and dust, or so I thought. Later I would learn that he lived most fully in the company of attractive women; my mother had been right about his sexual appetite. But he was discreet about it, and only remarried after I started college. Perhaps he was remote only to me and my sister; to Laura, especially. I knew she had not been a planned baby because I overheard the hushed, hissing quarrel over my mother’s pregnancy. Laura sensed it, long before Mother died. She cried inconsolably for much of her babyhood, and only I could seem to soothe her. By the time she was walking Mother was past caring for her. The only real approbation I remember seeing in my father’s eyes was when I had ministered particularly well to his second, changeling child.
I soon learned to care for him as well, acting as a grave, correct young hostess for him when he required it, seeing that his house was orderly and polished and quiet at all times. He would compliment me and I would feel my entire face light up, would grin from ear to ear despite myself. He was the first to tell me I had a wonderful smile. It earned him years of comfort. It earned me years of what amounted to servitude to my sister and father and our big house in Baton Rouge. I didn’t mind. I thought that it would keep him with me forever. When he remarried and moved into the perfectly run home of a rich seafaring lady who lived in Pascagoula, I was stunned, lost. But I still took care of Laura, because by that time it was what I knew best, was most comfortable doing. Caring for. Tending. I brought her to live with me in Atlanta when I came here after college to try my wings in advertising, and when I met Pom she was still living with me and attending sporadic classes in theater arts at Georgia State University downtown. Up until that time I could not imagine a world in which I did not care for Laura.
Fragile, lovely, hungry Laura. Edge-dancer, wing-walker, windmill-tilter, limits-pusher. From babyhood she could stand no boundaries, tolerated none. In the airless world of a small Louisiana city, even in the volatile sixties, boundaries swarmed thicker than June bugs. Her entire life was a starved scrabble after two things: freedom and love. Since the two are mutually exclusive, she achieved neither, except minimally, but she never abandoned her hectic quest. Freedom of a sort she might have had if she had been a less difficult child; Felicia was too old to keep up with her, and my father simply did not seem to see her. I was a nurturer, but no real threat as a disciplinarian. She might have soared like a small butterfly in an empty blue sky except that her need for love was visceral and unending and dragged her down out of the air, time after time, to dog the footsteps of those who could not seem to give it to her. Ravenous for love, she pursued it shrieking; repulsed, love fled her.
“Hush up that yellin’, Laura. I ain’t studyin’ you,” Felicia would say over and over. “You looks like a little ol’ baby bird, with yo’ eyes squoze shut and yo’ mouth open a mile wide. Cain’t nobody fill you up. Go on and find yo’ sister and tell her what you want.”
“Laura, get down now and let Papa work,” I would hear my father say stiffly from his study. “You’re getting that jam all over my shirt. You’re far too big to sit in laps. You should see yourself; it’s really very unattractive. And don’t cry! You cry more than any little girl your age I ever saw. Your sister doesn’t cry. You should take a leaf from her book and try smiling every now and then. People would treat you a lot better, I can tell you. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Laura Louise! Merritt! Come in here and get your sister, will you please?”
And once again I would take my beautiful, fragmented little sister, dancing and sobbing her rage and hunger, up to her room and cuddle her and shush her and whisper silliness to her, and soon she would let me dry her tears and wash her face and brush out the tangled chestnut curls that were so like our mother’s, and in an hour she would be off again, flouting rules, testing limits, pushing, pushing, pushing.
“It’s not really fair to you,” my father said in the spring of my last year in high school, after I had come back downstairs to watch TV with him after settling a wailing Laura into bed. “You’re only seventeen. You don’t have much of a life of your own, do you? It’s mostly studying and Laura. But I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re the only one who can handle her. I admit she’s too much for me. I don’t know, maybe if her mother had lived…what in the world are we going to do next year when you go to school? Should I put her in boarding school?”
“Oh, Papa, she’ll only be eight then,” I said.
I was flattered at the adult tone of the conversation and felt mature and important to be consulted about the future of my little sister. I knew that for once I had his entire attention and that he would probably take my advice. I was the one, after all, who knew her best. I sensed suddenly what sort of relationship we might have had if I had been alone with him in the house, without the hovering, importunate Laura to define and absorb me and isolate him. I knew too that I could probably create that relationship if I told him to send her away.
But in my mind there was the white rush of wings beating at windowless walls and a thin silver wailing from an empty, dark place. I knew that boarding school would send Laura mad or kill her. My stomach literally turned over. My first taste of power frightened me badly.
“No, I don’t really think that would be good for her,” I said judiciously, hoping he could not hear the pounding of my heart. “Maybe we should get someone to come in and take care of her, a live-in housekeeper, or something. Somebody younger, closer to my age so she wouldn’t seem strange. Then Felicia and the others could go on and do their work. I could ask our guidance counselor at school about it. She knows about things like that. I could even interview people, if you wanted me to.”
“See? You always know just the right thing to do,” my father said in relief, and smiled at me, and I felt the tremor of my answering smile begin on my mouth. We turned back to John Chancellor with relief, like two old married people who had just settled, indulgently, the problem of a troublesome child.
I found a young black woman to come and stay with Laura after school and half-days on Saturday. Matilda was a lunch server at my high school cafeteria and had the same hours free that Laura did. She was only two years older than I, but she seemed far ahead of me, across a chasm of adulthood. She had cared for a half-dozen younger siblings and cousins, and she had a matter-of-fact, cheerful firmness about her that soothed me and seemed, for a while, to be just the anchor to earth that Laura needed. She stopped a good bit of the acting out at her elementary school and much of the needy fussing at home. During that time it was easy to love Laura; her awful emptiness seemingly filled, we saw more of her quicksilver charm and the vein of whimsy that lay deep inside her. Her imagination was lightning quick and her ability to mime and posture was funny and true. And, her face unbloated by tears and rage, she was beautiful enough to turn heads in crowds. She was all my mother, with pale, thick, magnolia-petal skin that she neve
r allowed the sun to stain, and Mother’s slanted sherry-colored eyes and rich spill of chestnut satin hair. Laura’s hair was glorious. She wore it tied in a high ponytail, cascading down her back, or let it fly free in shining curtains around her face. She never let anyone cut it past shoulder length, and even that was an occasion to be feared, fraught with tears and temper. The first time she had it bleached, when she was a sophomore at Westminster, I cried.
“It’s not you anymore,” I said.
“Au contraire,” she said, trying out her appalling first-year French. “It’s exactly who I am. The other was somebody else.”
But when I went away to LSU she changed again, back to the frantic, hungry small bird we had known, and began the trapped-bird battering at everyone and everything once more. We could get no sensible explanation from her for the change, except that she didn’t feel safe.
“I feel like I’m walking way up high with nothing to hold on to,” she would cry over and over. “I feel like I’m going to fall forever and ever.”
“What would it take to make you feel safe?” I said desperately. Matilda was threatening to quit if Laura did not stop shrieking and plucking at her and dogging her every step. My father had the boarding school brochures out again.
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