by Lee Smith
“Dinner?” she asked. She had a low, raspy voice almost like a boy.
“We’ve had dinner,” Courtney said.
“Dessert, then?” the girl asked. “I recommend the dessert.”
“Sure,” Anna and Harriet said together, then looked at each other and laughed. The single lamp held them all in the soft yellow pool of its light. The warm chocolate melting on Harriet’s tongue was delicious. She took another piece, then another, then watched as the girl licked her fingers thoroughly, like a cat, looking at them one by one.
“Hey, y’all,” she said. “Thanks. I’m Baby Ballou.”
SO THE PATTERN WAS SET. From the very beginning, Baby had never gone by the rules, seeming almost to assume that they were meant for other people, and Harriet had always covered for her. Harriet hadn’t minded either. In a funny way, she loved it. She had always been so dependable, so drab, so good, so boring; her vicarious new life had the double advantage of being exciting, yet not dangerous. Often, it was almost glamorous—the gold dust on the butterfly’s wings touched Harriet as well. For Baby’s life was full of drama and intrigue. Only two weeks after school started, a disheveled boy in a black raincoat strode back and forth in the dewy grass outside Old South at 3 A.M. yelling, “God damn it, Ballou! I know you’re up there!” until every light in the dorm came on and all the windows were full of tousled heads. He bellowed until Baby ran lightly down the stairs wearing only the Harley-Davidson T-shirt she slept in; she hadn’t come back until the next day around noon. At dinnertime she joined the others in that lovely octagonal dining room where she ate three helpings of meatloaf and two helpings of scalloped potatoes, then pushed back her plate and lit a cigarette and smiled at them. “Don’t even ask,” she said.
At that moment Baby seemed entirely exotic to Harriet, another order of being. And yet they had a lot in common, too. Surprisingly, it turned out that all four suitemates had signed up for the yearlong Introduction to Creative Writing course. The first semester, Introduction to Poetry, was taught by Mr. Holland, a poet himself, a brilliant, slight, ashen-faced young man with a recent Ph.D. from Iowa. He was widely assumed to be homosexual.
For their first assignment, Mr. Holland had them read several chapters in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, then invent a constellation, then write a poem in the form of a myth explaining it.
“Cool,” Baby sang out in class.
“Does it have to rhyme?” Courtney raised her hand to ask.
Mr. Holland’s pale eyelashes fluttered contemptuously. “Of course not,” he said.
Baby had already told them all that she didn’t even want to come to college, this or any college—all she’d ever wanted to do was write, she said, but she’d made a deal with her daddy, and anyway a person has to be someplace, and Alabama will drive you fucking nuts. Harriet had never heard a girl use this word before; a thrill shot through her every time Baby said it.
Anna had announced her own intentions of becoming a writer, too. “Listen, I grew up in a holler surrounded by mountains you wouldn’t believe, it was like I lived in a trap. If I hadn’t been able to read, I would have died. I’m not kidding. I would have been a twelve-year-old suicide. Books were the only thing that got me out of there. And I’ll tell you, I’m not going back!”
“I don’t know if I can do this or not,” Courtney told Harriet as they sat around, procrastinating, the night before the first poems were due. “I just thought it would be a little fun thing to take, you know, an easy A. Now I’m getting real nervous about it. What about you? Do you really want to be a writer, too, like Baby and Anna?”
“Yes,” Harriet surprised herself by saying; suddenly it was true.
But Courtney seemed perfectly poised in class, where it turned out that each student had to read her poem aloud to the others, then receive their comments. Harriet would not have signed up for the course if she had realized that this would happen. Even worse, Mr. Holland had placed all their desks in a circle so everybody could see everybody else all the time.
Anna’s hand shot up immediately when he asked for volunteers. She cleared her throat and in her twangy plaintive voice proceeded to read one of the darkest poems Harriet had ever heard, about an unhappy young wife in the mountains who took a lover from over the ridge; when her jealous husband found them in bed together, “under his mama’s quilt,” he killed them both, then cut off her hands and “made banjo frets of her little finger bones.” He was never caught or punished for this crime. Instead, he became a legendary musician who “sang the dark heart of the world.” This poem’s title was “Little Finger Bones,” which was also the name of the constellation, and in a certain way, Harriet decided later, it set a standard for the class. Anna looked up and stared at them all when she had finished reading it, her hair a crazy red halo around her old-fashioned face. She could have been the mountain girl herself, the murdered wife. No one spoke. Even Mr. Holland seemed taken aback.
“Well, ah, Miss Todd,” he said finally, “I admire the way you have taken the traditional material of the mountain ballad and adapted it into this atonal free verse, a comment perhaps on the darkness underlying our stereotypical image of folk culture.”
“Thank you,” Anna said simply.
Harriet didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Her own poem, finally written in desperation at the last minute, seemed ridiculous to her now, nothing more than a little ditty inspired by a stuffed animal she’d brought from home, a big cat-shaped pillow Alice had made for her years before. She’d made up a little story about the cat, but it was trivial by comparison with everybody else’s, obviously.
Courtney read next, however, a singsong poem which made Harriet feel a little better because even she could tell it was sappy, all about an old maid in a small town whose only sweetheart was killed in a wreck on the way to pick her up for a dance. She wore a heart-shaped corsage he’d sent her until it turned to brittle stems, then dust, “as do we all.” Upon her death, the corsage took its heart-shaped place “above,” which rhymed with “love.”
“It is very hard to write about certain loaded themes, such as, ah, romance and death, without falling into, ah, trite language,” Mr. Holland opined judiciously, swaying back and forth on his feet with his eyes closed. You could knock him over with a feather, Harriet thought.
“Is that bad?” Courtney wrinkled up her pretty face at him.
“Ah, no, of course not, but what we want to do whenever we can is to understate, especially in cases of extreme emotion, ah . . . any other comments here?”
Suzanne St. John raised her hand. “They don’t make heart-shaped corsages in New Orleans,” she said, and everybody laughed. But Suzanne was serious. Then she read her own poem which got by without much comment, followed by Lauren Dupree and Catherine Wilson. Harriet was fascinated by Catherine Wilson, who never seemed to care what she looked like or what she said, or what anybody else thought about it, either. Usually she wore jeans—nobody else wore jeans then—and a T-shirt, streaked with paint. She was invariably late to creative writing, coming straight from the theater. “Sorry,” she’d say sweetly in her scatterbrained way, sliding into a seat at the back of the room. But it was clear that she wasn’t really sorry at all. Catherine moved through the world with no pretense and a practical ease that Harriet found enviable. Her poem was about a dog whose master died in the Civil War yet he was still searching for him, eternally, all across the sky. This poem was named “Prince,” for the dog. It almost made Harriet cry. During the readings, Baby alternately scowled out the window, fiddling with her pen, or sketched everybody in the class with amazing accuracy. Harriet had had no idea that Baby had any artistic talent at all. It didn’t seem fair. But Harriet was growing hopeful. The allotted hour and a half was almost up.
“Margaret?” Mr. Holland asked.
Baby shuffled the papers on her desk, then read her poem straight through in a husky monotone without once looking up. The poem was all about abortions, which somehow t
urned into “starbabies of the night sky, waving their shiny hands.”
“Well, I think that’s just gross,” Suzanne said into the silence that followed.
Baby said something under her breath, looking down at her desk.
“That is a wonderful poem,” Anna announced precisely, definitively.
“So it’s good to be gross?” Courtney was distressed. “I thought poems were supposed to be pretty.”
“Those are greeting cards,” Baby said.
Mr. Holland seemed on the verge of wafting clean away. “Ah, no,” he said. “That is to say . . . but a poem need not be pretty. Ah, no. Pretty will not be our aim here.”
This was news to Harriet, whose time had nevertheless come. Mr. Holland opened his whitish eyes and aimed them in her direction. “Miss, ah, Holding,” he said.
Harriet took a deep breath which lasted two-thirds of the way through her poem, then gasped again, finishing at breakneck speed.
“Could you read that again, Miss Holding? Somewhat more slowly, please?” Mr. Holland requested of the ceiling, leaning back, rocking.
“I don’t think so,” Harriet whispered.
“Hell, I’ll read it then.” Baby got up and grabbed it, smoothing the wrinkled paper out on her desk. “Supercat,” she announced. This time it sounded much better, even to Harriet.
“Thank you, Miss Ballou,” said Mr. Holland. “Now girls, what do you make of this?”
“Obviously Supercat is a God figure,” said Alexis Hill, who would make Phi Beta Kappa in their junior year.
What? Harriet would have spoken if she could.
But Mr. Holland nodded, eyes closed. “Ah, yes. Yes. Or some sort of celestial superego, perhaps related to the parent, watching over the speaker in absentia.”
“Listen,” Harriet finally said. “This poem is actually about a stuffed animal. A pillow.”
“Hush, Harriet,” Baby said.
“That’s right,” Mr. Holland agreed. “The fact is that it doesn’t really matter what your intentions were in writing this poem, Miss Holding. Now the poem exists as an entity in the world quite apart from you, as it must, subject to our interpretation. You, the writer, cannot dictate that interpretation to us. You cannot protect this poem. In fact, Miss Holding, you have no further control over this poem at all.”
That’s ridiculous, Harriet did not say, but then thank heavens the bell rang anyway and they all scattered into the September sun and big old trees of actual afternoon in the real world, what a relief.
FROM THE MINUTE she started living with Baby Ballou, Harriet’s whole life had become more intense, more interesting and colorful, than it had ever been. Sometimes it was too intense and colorful, and confusing—like being caught inside a kaleidoscope. Just when Harriet thought she knew what was going on, everything would get scrambled into a completely different configuration.
One bright September afternoon when Baby was in biology lab, Harriet got up from typing a humanities paper to answer a hesitant knock at the door. There stood a pale, plump young woman with large nostrils and kind of a pig face, squinting as if she might be nearsighted. Harriet knew she didn’t go to Mary Scott College and also that there was something wrong with her.
“Hey. Is—” The girl peered past Harriet into the room.
“Baby’s in lab right now,” Harriet said, “but she ought to be back in about fifteen minutes. Why don’t you come on in and wait for her? You can sit right over there, that’s her desk.”
The girl plodded through the piles of Baby’s junk on the floor to sit at the desk where she did nothing, absolutely nothing. She did not read or look at anything on the desk. Instead she sat hunched over staring vacantly at the wall, breathing through her mouth.
Harriet cleared her throat. “Are you from Alabama, too?” She was trying to put the girl at her ease. “Are you a friend of Baby’s from home?”
“Well, I knew her in the hospital,” the girl said, and that was all she said. It was the longest fifteen minutes in the world before Baby came back and Harriet could escape to the snack bar.
“Who was that?” she couldn’t wait to ask Baby later, but Baby just shook her head, eyes hidden behind the screen of her long dark hair. “Nobody,” she’d said. Her checkbook lay open on her desk and for a minute Harriet got the wild idea that Baby might have written the girl a check—impossible to tell, of course, since Baby never filled in her check stubs or kept her bank balance. Apparently she didn’t have to: her account seemed to be replenished miraculously, like a magic well. The girl did not return.
AND THEN THERE WAS the matter of the blouses. Baby had started out with a lot of blouses. But as the first weeks wore on, the pile of dirty blouses on the floor grew, while more and more empty hangers gathered in Baby’s closet. Twice she went shopping at the Little Shoppe across the street, coming back with still more blouses in their cellophane wrappings.
Finally Harriet couldn’t stand it. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Lord knows, you don’t need any more blouses. Why don’t you just wash the ones you’ve got?” And get them off our floor, she did not say.
Baby turned to look at her. “You want me to make up something or tell you the truth?”
“Tell me the truth,” said Harriet.
“I don’t know how.” Baby grinned. “I know that’s pathetic, but I don’t.”
“Well,” Harriet said, “I’m just the girl to teach you. Come on.”
Harriet marched Baby down three flights of stairs to the bowels of Old South, where she professed amazement at the gleaming white rows of washers and dryers, the soap dispensers, all the choices for hot and cold and load size.
“This is just too hard!” Baby had wailed.
“No, it’s not,” Harriet said. “It’s really not. I’ve been doing the laundry at my house since I was about seven. If I could do it when I was seven, you can do it now.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I’m not. I figured, since Mama made all my clothes, the least I could do was wash them.”
Baby turned from the open washer to stare at her. “Wait a minute. Your mother made your clothes?”
Harriet laughed. “Everything. All of them. She still does. She made this dress I’ve got on, for instance. That’s what she does for a living, Baby. She’s done it all her life.”
“She made that dress? I thought that dress was a Villager.”
“That’s the idea. We rode over in the car as soon as I knew I was coming here, me and Mama and Jill, so we could see what everybody was wearing. So I would have the right clothes.” Harriet was starting to get nervous, the way Baby was staring at her. Baby had an unnerving way of paying very close attention, total attention, to what you were saying. “What does your mama do anyway?” Harriet asked. “Doesn’t she sew, even a little bit? I thought all mothers had to sew, I thought it was the law.”
Baby started stuffing all her clothes haphazardly into the washer. “My mother is dead,” she said without turning around.
Then who keeps writing you all those little monogrammed notes and signing them “Mom”? And asking for you on the phone in that amazing drawl, with all of Alabama in her voice? But Harriet already understood that part of being Baby’s friend was to bite your lip, bide your time. And sure enough, on Parents’ Weekend in November, here came Baby’s parents all the way from Alabama in a long yellow Cadillac: her stepmother as round and blond and luscious as a peach, wearing tons of makeup and diamonds, her father as huge and handsome as a movie star. “Oh God, aren’t they awful?” Baby asked sincerely, watching them get out of the big car in back of the dorm. “Daddy is going to find a way to put how much money he’s got into every conversation, just wait. And she’s got a brain the size of a pea. Thank God, at least they didn’t bring the twins.” Baby had two fifteen-year-old brothers who were “holy terrors,” she said. But Harriet thought Baby’s parents were great, bending over backward to be nice to Harriet and Anna and Courtney and their parents, too, taking everybody out to
a private club called the Shenandoah which they had apparently joined just so they’d have a place to entertain Baby’s friends while she went to Virginia for college.
Harriet rode back from dinner at the Shenandoah Club in Alice’s new green station wagon, paid for by Mr. Carr’s will. Alice wrinkled up her nose and put a light hand on Harriet’s arm just before she let her out of the car at Old South. “I want to ask you something,” she said. “Your roommate . . . Baby . . . is she okay?”
“Well, sure.” Harriet was taken aback. “I mean why are you asking me this?”
“I don’t know,” Alice said. “Something . . .”
“They’re just nice, Mama,” Harriet said irritably. “They’re very, very nice and very, very rich, that’s all.” But Harriet knew what Alice meant, though it wasn’t until later that she’d learn what made Baby’s parents so solicitous.
IT WAS JANUARY. Harriet had been to Winter Frolics at the KA house at Washington and Lee with Thomas Lee, a prelaw student from Tennessee. Back home, he apparently rode horses and hunted a lot; after law school, he’d go into practice with his father. His whole life was mapped out; all he had to do was live it. Harriet had met him through Baby, of course, or some friend of Baby’s at the KA house. Somehow Baby had arrived in Virginia already knowing about half of all the boys in the neighboring men’s colleges, so she was always fixing the rest of them up. Harriet had gone from having no social life at all in high school to having more social life than she could handle. Her grades dropped from A’s to B’s, though her scholarship depended on them. Yet Harriet loved going out, she loved seeing herself as a social butterfly. She loved calling home and telling her mother where she’d been, and Alice loved hearing it—she always wanted every detail.
Harriet couldn’t figure out what Thomas Lee saw in her; she suspected he liked her just because she was Baby Ballou’s roommate. Nevertheless, after the party when he drove her back to the chaperone’s house where Mary Scott girls were supposed to stay, Thomas Lee fell heavily across her in the front seat, trying for her breasts, which were luckily unattainable since both their coats and the gear -shift were in the way.
