The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  Breathes there the man with soul so dead,

  Who never to himself hath said,

  “This is my own, my native land”?

  Miss Todd liked to tie back Anna’s hair with a black velvet ribbon and kiss her on the mouth, but that was all; and even later, in Anna’s mind, it was more than a fair exchange.

  Anna did not see her father and the boys again, as they moved next to Indiana. At school she took a role in the class play and won a poetry contest. She got a job at the local dimestore where she worked after school and on Saturdays. In her senior year she was valedictorian and had her pick of college scholarships. She chose Mary Scott on a whim because she liked the way the white chapel steeple cut into the blue sky on the day of her visit and the surrounding mountains made her feel comfortable and the girls were nice. Boys would have been too much to deal with right then, though she had managed to kiss one several times at the church camp where she was a counselor during the summer before college began.

  At orientation, she enrolled as Anna Todd, and kept the name even though Miss Todd was absorbed with another underprivileged girl, Anna’s successor, by Christmastime. Anna didn’t mind. In fact she felt curiously relieved, free to form her own friendships with other girls for the first time. She loved her suitemates.

  She loved her classes. At Mary Scott it was possible to admit her secret wish to be a writer, to actually say it out loud, which she had never done. Nobody laughed at her for it. Her teachers were encouraging. Though she intended to write nice poetic stories that would demonstrate her large vocabulary, the stories came out different from that, surprising her. Yet nobody flinched when she read them aloud in the workshop, those first short gritty stories set in West Virginia, all of them about people she had known or heard about. She wrote one story about two abandoned, starving children who set their house on fire to summon help and another about a church organist who was so fat she didn’t know she was pregnant until the labor pains began during Wednesday night prayer meeting while she was playing “Amazing Grace.” She wrote a story about a girl who killed her young husband by accident with a tractor, then left her children with her mother and disappeared. These stories were seriously discussed in the workshop and then published in the college literary magazine. It was easy. Anna was amazed. Everybody thought she was tough, like her stories, but she wasn’t. She didn’t understand where these stories were coming from but they poured out of her onto the page like milk from a pitcher. They scared her.

  On the strength of the first four chapters of the novel she was writing for her senior thesis, Anna was awarded a national Helen Levitas Creative Writing Fellowship which would pay her first year’s tuition in graduate school at Columbia University, where she had already been accepted. She opened the official letter in the old post office at Mary Scott early one Saturday morning in February and stared at the black typed letters on the page until they all slid together into words and the news sank in. Then she turned on her heel and ran across the front quad to Mr. Gaines’s office. It was a wet, foggy morning. Nobody was up yet. Mr. Gaines had been Anna’s lover for the past two years. Of course she had had boyfriends, too, starting with all the dates Baby had fixed them up with that first year, but in most cases Anna felt much older than the boys from the neighboring schools. She liked to tease them, though; sometimes she could wrap them around her little finger. In general Anna found that most boys could take her or leave her, but the ones that liked her, liked her a lot. Graduate students had proved more interesting, but were usually too poor to take you anyplace nice for dinner. By senior year, Anna had broken two hearts that she knew of, in spite of her longstanding relationship with Mr. Gaines.

  This relationship was a relief, in a way. It kept her from having to be in love. Mr. Gaines was a good husband, a good teacher, and a wonderful father to Maeve. Anna knew he would never leave Sheila. She didn’t want him to. Oddly, the knowledge that their affair had no future enabled Anna to enjoy it all the more. Until that Saturday morning in February, the day she received the letter announcing her fellowship.

  The English department was located in Bartlett Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus, and the door was always open. Anna ought to know—she’d spent enough time there during the past four years. Of course, Mr. Gaines wouldn’t be in his office now, he’d be at home where he belonged, with his family. Probably he was still fast asleep. But Anna could leave him a note. She couldn’t wait until Monday to let him know the good news. Monday was a whole weekend away! Anna pushed the door open and entered the wide, shadowy hall which was as familiar to her now as her own room. Here was Miss Auerbach’s office with Virginia Woolf’s picture on the door; Mr. Duff’s office with its incomprehensible quotation from Joyce; the crayon grave rubbing of William Faulkner’s tombstone hanging on Mr. Goldman’s door; Lucian Delgado’s office which he was so rarely in; and Mr. Gaines’s office with yellow light spilling out from under the door and falling from the transom in a golden rectangle on the heart pine floor.

  Anna stopped dead. The fine hair rose on her arms. She heard Baby’s unmistakable giggle. And then Mr. Gaines’s low voice saying something she couldn’t quite hear and then Baby giggling again. But Baby was engaged to Charlie Mahan; the wedding was set for June 10. Anna would be a bridesmaid. Surely Mr. Gaines was just helping Baby with a paper. Anna crept closer. She knelt and pressed herself against the door. She stayed there for almost an hour, unable to leave even when she knew she should, unable to leave until the big front door swung open and old Mr. Hash came in and turned on the hanging overhead lights and threw that brown grainy stuff on the wooden floor and started sweeping it up. Anna stood up then. She had no wish to see Baby. “’Lo, Mr. Hash,” Anna said to him, leaving.

  So she went ahead and fell in love with Kenneth Trethaway, a graduate student from the University of North Carolina who had been pursuing her in a hopeless, reckless, relentless way for some time, and married him in the summer after Baby’s wedding, when she realized she was pregnant. Normally morose, Kenneth had exhibited more delight than Anna had thought possible when she told him the news. His parents, too, both postal workers in Raleigh, seemed pleased and bought the newlyweds an enormous Naugahyde couch for the little house across from the police station in Chapel Hill where they would live for the next four years while Kenneth finished his Ph.D. Kenneth’s parents were simple people, astonished by their moody, brilliant son. They hoped the marriage would settle him down.

  Anna and Kenneth made fun of the couch, wondering aloud how many naugas had died to produce it. Anna even did a pencil drawing of the nauga, a strange little mythological creature which looked to be half bird and half armadillo. They made love on the couch, on the floor, on a mattress they pulled out into their tiny backyard to look at a meteor shower which was gorgeous in spite of the sirens wailing from the police station. Kenneth and his friends smoked dope all the time, but Anna did not after she got pregnant. Kenneth and his friends called her “the Madonna.” Kenneth adored her then. He wept wildly when she lost the baby at five months, having already used her Helen Levitas fellowship to buy a washer and dryer and pay off Kenneth’s car loan.

  She didn’t need to go to graduate school anyway in order to finish her novel. Kenneth was the scholar, not she. She could keep her job and write on the side. She could write in the early morning and at night and on holidays. Actually, she ended up writing at work sometimes, too, behind the shelves in the big hospital basement where she filed patients’ charts all day long; and because of this, she did not get angry when she’d come home on the bus well after five o’clock—sometimes it was actually dark, in the wintertime—to find Kenneth and his friends still smoking dope and listening to jazz and talking about literature in a frenzy (as if anybody cared) with no thought of supper. She’d have to go out and get supper, if they were to have any, sometimes just hamburgers from McDonald’s, or macaroni and cheese out of a box from the 7-Eleven. Sometimes she’d get high, too, and then fuck him when his friends finally lef
t.

  Anna and Kenneth were thin, poor, and generally wrecked in those years. But she loved this heightened life unaccountably, as she loved Kenneth. What was it about him? For starters, he was a genius—everybody said so. Anna didn’t even understand his field of study; “deconstruction,” it was called. He was the hot new thing. Anna couldn’t read a word he wrote.

  At six feet six inches, with poor eyesight, Kenneth was so tall he was always tripping and stumbling over things or bumping into other things with his head. He had bleeding scabs. He was the most physically awkward man Anna had ever known, except in bed, where he was wonderful. He had pale gray eyes like Anna herself, but so huge and defenseless behind his thick glasses that to look into them made her weak with love. He called her “Anna,” with a broad A. He read Proust aloud to her every night they weren’t stoned.

  At the university, he won a teaching award, then a graduate fellowship, then published a paper on postcolonialism. He presented it at the MLA in San Francisco. At the hospital, Anna received a promotion, with supervisory duties and more money, only it didn’t seem like much of a promotion since it was so demanding that she couldn’t write on the job anymore.

  “Take it—it’ll only be until graduation,” Kenneth promised.

  But after receiving the Ph.D. with highest honors, Kenneth was kept on by the department for another year, and then another. When Anna finally finished her novel, she didn’t know what to do with it, so she wrote to Mr. Gaines asking for advice, but she never heard back from him. Miss Auerbach recommended an agent who took the book. The agent called Anna at the hospital to say that she loved it, that it was “fabulous.” Anna wondered if the agent had read the same book she had written which was, she knew, depressing, like a lot of her stories rolled into one. Or like a landslide, like the slag heap which slid down the mountain and covered nine houses in the mining town in the book.

  She bought champagne on the way home.

  “Great.” Kenneth, usually so intense, exhibited a notable lack of fervor. “To you.” He raised his glass.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. What do you mean? Down the hatch!” Kenneth had never said “down the hatch” before.

  Anna eyed him suspiciously. “Honey . . .” she said.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Congratulations. Only . . .”

  “Only what?”

  “What name are you going to publish under?”

  “Well, I hadn’t thought . . . Anna Trethaway, I guess. I mean, that’s my name.”

  “I should think you’d want to keep your own name.”

  “Anna Todd? What’s wrong with Anna Trethaway? Are you ashamed of this book or something? You haven’t even read the last chapter or that revised middle section.”

  “No, it’s just . . . I just . . . well, surely you understand, Anna, it’s a little embarrassing for you to publish a book before I do. Why don’t you use your own name?”

  “But people would know anyway. I mean, our friends would know . . .”

  “Not necessarily,” Kenneth said.

  “Of course they would! There’d be reviews, and interviews . . . and we’d tell them, too, wouldn’t we? Kenneth—”

  “Fuck it. Of course. Just fuck it. I’m sorry.” Kenneth put his glass down on the telephone table so hard that it tipped over, spilling several phonebooks and the Rolodex address file onto the floor. And then he was gone, leaving the door wide open. Wintry wind rushed all around Anna as she tried to gather up the cards from the Rolodex. Sirens wailed from the police station. Finally Anna stood up and slammed the door. Then she sat down on the couch—that same tacky couch Kenneth’s parents had given them years before—and took a drink of champagne straight from the bottle. She thought she ought to call somebody with her good news. She looked through the cards in her hands, almost all of them Kenneth’s friends. She should call up Baby, everybody had thought Baby was so goddamn talented. And she ought to call up Harriet and Courtney, too.

  But she won’t. She’ll finish this champagne and then she’ll drink some vodka from the freezer where Kenneth puts it now to keep it cold for the martinis which he has taken to drinking lately, ever since he got his Ph.D., and then she’ll drink some more vodka, and then she’ll throw up and be sound asleep when Kenneth gets home.

  The next day she will throw up again, and the following day. But even when she is sure she is pregnant, even after trying to get pregnant again for so long, she won’t tell Kenneth. Nor will she show him the letters from the publishers, which say “too raw” and “not commercial” and even “Since Miss Todd is undeniably talented, perhaps she should consider writing about a better class of people.” Anna will work on at her hospital job, typing theses and dissertations at night for extra money. Kenneth has to have a new suit and a root canal. She’s waiting for him to apologize, which he never does. Instead, he buys the suit and flies all over the country, interviewing for jobs. He does not take her with him. He does not fuck her when he comes home; he says he is too depressed. The whole process of applying for jobs is so demeaning.

  The night he came back from Chicago, she was sitting in the dark in their tiny living room, watching for him out the window.

  “Hi,” she said when he opened the door. She had on his soft old wine-colored flannel shirt which smelled like him, kind of peppery somehow.

  “Anna! I thought you’d be asleep.” He looked flustered, exhausted, wearing the new suit and a bottle-green trench coat she’d never seen before. The streetlight came in the window on his anguished face.

  “Nice coat,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “So, did you get the job?”

  “I don’t know yet. You know that. I told you how it works.”

  “Kenneth, I’m not going, am I? You’re going, but I’m not.”

  He sank to the floor by her feet, face in her lap, sobbing. “I’m sorry,” he said over and over again. “I’m just so sorry.”

  Anna twisted her fingers in his wiry dark hair and looked out the window where sure enough, another siren went off before long and a cop car shot away from the curb, tires squealing. Danger was everywhere. But the thing was, she really loved him. It was like her love was something independent of herself that had taken on a life of its own and grown larger and larger with time, like the baby which she was carrying. It didn’t matter if Kenneth was worthy of this love, nor if he loved her. Her love was beyond all that. For Anna knew, even in that moment, that she was privileged to be such a lover, that she was stronger and greater than he.

  Kenneth knew it, too. He packed his clothes the next day and moved in with the other girl. After a week or so, Anna realized that all those friends in the Rolodex really were Kenneth’s. She had been too busy putting him through school to make any, except for the girls in her filing unit at the hospital, of course, who were gratifyingly furious, hatching wild revenge plots.

  “I know where we can get some E. coli,” little Barbara volunteered. “I’m not kidding, either. All you have to do is put it in his yogurt.”

  But Kaye held out for arson, which would kill her, too.

  Anna had to laugh, shaking her head. She wasn’t even attractive. Anna had already driven over there and parked in front of the apartment. She was tall and thin and black-haired, like Olive Oyl, and looked even more depressed than Kenneth. Her field was eighteenth century.

  Somehow it seemed inevitable to Anna when the agent wrote saying that much to her regret, she was unable to place this novel which was finally, she felt, “too disturbing,” but she would be willing to see any future efforts from Miss Todd.

  “Kiss my ass,” little Barbara said.

  “But you know,” Cindy spoke up timidly, “maybe you ought to listen to her, Anna, and try something different, something romantic, something people really want to read, especially since you’re going to have to support yourself entirely for a while”—and she didn’t even know about the baby—“unless you want to work here for the rest of
your life.”

  All the girls groaned.

  “Like what?” Anna felt wild and strong, open to anything. She knew she would have a girl.

  “Like this.” Cindy handed her a paperback named Mortal Passions, featuring a bosomy girl on the cover, running through a graveyard with a castle in the background. “No, it’s good,” Cindy insisted over the general laughter. “I’m not kidding, just read it, you’ll see, it’ll make you feel so much better . . .”

  These words echoed in Anna’s head all the way to South Carolina where she planned to live on one of the barrier islands while she waited to have her baby. She’d chosen this location on a whim, having read about the area in a travel article. She read Mortal Passions in a motel room in Cheraw, South Carolina. She was not worried about being followed; she knew that Kenneth would feel too guilty to see her again. She had enough money for a while. She’d cashed in their joint bank account and taken their car and one small print she’d always liked, of the Blue Ridge Mountains around Linville Gorge where they’d camped on their honeymoon. On her next honeymoon, Anna vowed, there would be no camping.

  Mile 437.2

  Vicksburg, Mississippi

  Monday 5/10/99

  0500 hours

  HARRIET SITS OUT on the little balcony in her nightgown watching the river stream past, dark at first, then that pale ghostly luminescence as dawn comes near, so you can just barely tell the water from the tree line from the sky. She’s all wrought up. She feels like she never even slept, though that can’t be right, can it? A person has to sleep. She has read that a lot of times you’re actually asleep, lightly, even when you think you’re not. She hopes that’s true. She remembers how Baby used to stay up for days on end sometimes. Harriet’s dreams—or memories or thoughts or whatever they were, depending on whether she was actually asleep or not—were full of Baby, and now she should be exhausted, but she’s not. She feels more alive than she has felt for years, a terrifying, exalted feeling. Her nerves are like wires in the wind. She leans forward to look at the river. Mist—or fog, which is it?—floats in patches on the surface. Birds swoop low then rise on flapping wings. The sky is pearl. The water lightens. Now Harriet can pick out buildings and docks along the shore. She hears men’s voices. Peering down over the railing, she sees them all out on the deck below, waiting with giant coils of rope. The engine grinds into a lower register. The boat slows down. Vicksburg.