Her Last Words

by Jo Barney

  A soft bell signals Quiet Hours. Most of the sisters are already asleep in bunk beds on the sleeping porch above them. Jackie tosses his name out like a knuckle ball towards the whisperers huddled in the center of the room.

  “Who?”

  “Cute, red curly hair, kind of shy,” she answers.

  “Jackie! Poor guy, he doesn’t stand a chance. Is he tall enough for you?”

  “I don’t worry about tall.”

  Smirks, as Jackie expects, snuffle through the musty air. She loves the excitement of crushes, the chases, the captures. She lets most of her captives loose once she has them, or parts of them, in hand, though. She can’t stand the idea of being pinned to one guy forever or even for a semester.

  One by one, pajama’d bodies slip out of the solarium and up the stairs to their narrow cots. Madge and Joan head toward the kitchen, the only place they are allowed to type late at night. Only Lou and Jackie still sink into the pits of pillows at the ends of the couch, feet almost touching. Lou holds out her pack of cigs, her forehead more furled than usual. Jackie shakes her head. “What’s up?” she asks.

  Lou snorts a deep sigh, then, “Something’s wrong with me. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a woman. Look at me.” She pats her chest, hands flat against rib bones.

  “What does your Mom say?”

  “My mother is a Christian Scientist. She prays for me.”

  “God, Lou, you need to see a doctor. Have you ever seen a doctor?”

  “Once when I broke my arm playing wall ball at school and Mom couldn’t make the bone straighten out.” Lou shrugs, hugs herself. “I’m just weird. An asexual being, a human spore.”

  “Spore?”

  “You remember. Biology.”

  “I must have missed that class. An eight o’clock, right?”

  “I’m serious. No boobs, no monthly reminder of my precious womb, if I have one.” Lou sniffs a laugh. “Even worse, no date for the house dance.”

  Jackie raises herself and grabs the hand that still clutches bony ribs in a hopeless sort of way. This isn’t normal, being stuck at thirteen, or maybe twelve if she herself is an example. What a waste of seven years. “Tomorrow we go to the doctor. He’ll have a pill or something.” When Lou protests, Jackie adds, “I guarantee a boyfriend by Christmas. You’ll exude womanliness. I get really horny when I get the curse.”

  Lou pushes up from the sofa and heads for the door. “Okay, if you think. Thanks for…you know. I haven’t a clue.”

  “Right.” No, Lou doesn’t. That’s what Jackie likes about her. Even though Lou is really smart, an English lit major, she really doesn’t have a clue.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1955: Hinterland III

  Lou

  Ten minutes later, Lou, rolled up in the patchwork quilt her grandmother made, sorts out the night noises of the sleeping porch. Someone is weeping softly. A nose whistles. The girl in the bunk above her tosses with a dream that rocks the metal structure against the wall. Various gasps and purrs swim in the gentle wind that blows through open windows and across smooth unconscious foreheads. It isn’t just the absence of a monthly flow of blood. She isn’t sure a pill can cure what stirs inside her on sleepless nights like this one. She doesn’t have a name for it; perhaps it doesn’t have a name. Perhaps it is hers alone, this stirring.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1955: Hinterland IV

  Joan

  In the late spring, the rhododendrons banking the sorority house walls glow their blessing the evening Tim and Joan decide. Later in the solarium, Joan wonders if it seems like bragging to hold out her ringed hand, wait for fingers to reach out for hers, and to expect cries of excitement and envy, not shock.

  Her sisters shouldn’t be surprised. After all, she and Tim have spent the usual amount of evenings grappling amongst the bushes in front of the house, as well as in other campus cubbyholes. He is a year older and has been accepted to med school, although he’ll have to make up a couple of prerequisites before he can start next January. And she’ll be a senior in the fall, graduating a semester early.

  “In December,“ she tells them, “in California. You’re all invited.” She herself does not quite believe it, but she and Tim decided they can’t hold out much longer, and because she is a Catholic now, who knows how soon they’ll get pregnant once they finally do it. Not that she’ll mind getting pregnant. Their babies will be tall, good-looking basketball players just like Tim. She hopes that at some point she’ll have a girl to keep her company in the kitchen. But if they can wait, she’ll have a little time before all that begins to be a teacher and save up some money for a house and a television and the other things they’ll need while Tim builds his practice.

  Joan, researching in her thorough way for her new life, has ordered Van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage from Book-of-the-Month and she agrees, when the others find out about it, to read aloud whenever she finds something interesting, which is pretty much every page. The smoking room percolates with midnight seminars.

  Lou has trouble accepting the clitoris and she uses her compact mirror to confirm its existence. Madge needs the part about other possible orifices read twice, as she closes her eyes and tries to imagine. Jackie nods at most everything and adds tidbits of information that she has picked up elsewhere, like how a friend of hers got pregnant through her underpants. Joan takes note of this comment, and she skims the index of the book in her lap looking for “heavy petting.”

  Once the new school year begins in the fall and her wedding is only months away, Joan realizes that she is leading her friends to their own womanhoods. They watch as she makes lists, listen as she argues with her mother long-distance about fruit punch or wine, and discusses the font for the invitations with her printer. They commiserate as she worries over the costs and are relieved when her mother produces a small cache of dollars. “The money for her funeral,” Joan tells them. “We’ll have plenty of time to pay her back.” They nod, narrow-eyed, as she raises her shoulders and deflects the usual solarium questions: “How is Tim? What are you guys doing this weekend?”

  Actually, it seems like a betrayal to Tim to talk about their relationship since she is experiencing a few problems with it. They’re spending a lot of time together looking for a place to live and working out the money part of being married, and that’s mostly what she shares with her sisters, but not the fact that Tim and she also spend a lot of time in a sweaty frenzies in the car that often involve begging on Tim’s part, followed by a couple of cooling beers and a resentful kiss at the Gamma Psi door.

  “Soon, honey, only a month or so,” she promises, as she pulls down the skirt lodged under her armpits or fastens at least one hook of her bra. Van de Velde has prepared her for several of Tim’s requests to which she eventually complies, in order to ease the tension between them. However, she isn’t happy with his handling of himself when he gets really frustrated, like the time he did it in front of her, drunk and unzipped. She’ll be glad when they are married and not having to worry any more.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1956: Hinterland V

  Madge

  The last month of their senior year, Madge misses Joan a lot. The solarium isn’t the same without her, especially since Jackie has been confined to the guest room with a cast on her leg after she leapt out of a second story window and limped her way to a clandestine beer party, where she passed out, not from the alcohol, but from pain.

  “Why do you suppose she did it?” Bleary-eyed from reading for an exam one late night, Madge and Lou are taking a break over cups of hours-old tar-coffee from the kitchen. “I just don’t get it. Let’s find out.” Stocking-footed, they sneak down the hall leading to Jackie’s isolation ward.

  “Quien sabe, amigas?” Jackie looks up from a Sports Illustrated magazine, grins and moves over to give them room on the bed. Other than her one phrase of Spanish, she offers no explanation for her breakout.

  Madge tries to do it for her. “You know, Jackie, you follow your own star o
r male, whichever comes first. A free spirit. When you set your mind on something, you do it. You ski like a maniac. It’s a wonder you haven’t broken every bone in your body.”

  “And,” Lou pats her thrust-out chest, “you just about saved my life when you dragged me to that doctor.” She turns to Madge. “Have you noticed? Still kind of small but growing, I think.”

  “Impressive.” Madge licks a finger, rubs a wisp of hair defying the hairspray helmet she had applied that morning in an effort to look like Audrey Hepburn. “I’m not a free spirit. I still have the same haircut I got last year, when I thought a shaved neckline would make me courageous.” She gives up, lets the escapee go its way, grins at Jackie. “I’d love to jump out of a window without thinking.”

  “Well, you are, sort of. Have you and Jerry set a date?”

  “Doesn’t feel like a leap, just a step over a curb into the road of life. He got the scholarship, you know. Graduate school. I’ll teach until he gets out.”

  “Then?” Lou has settled back against the footboard, her feet at Jackie’s shoulder.

  “The usual. Maybe I’ll try writing in between babies. Mr. Richards, my writing teacher, says I might have a knack for it. I’m not sure I should believe him since he also confessed to one hundred-and-twenty rejection letters this year. By the way, Joan thinks she’s pregnant.”

  Lou sits up abruptly, thumping a knee against Jackie’s cast. “They’ve only been married for four months. How did that happen?”

  Jackie rolls her eyes. “The usual way, probably.”

  “Damn! I’m so behind. Despite the ripening mammaries, I’ve had one date all this year, and I asked him to the house dance.”

  Madge tries to take it back. “Maybe not. Could be a false alarm.”

  Lou pulls her pack of Pall Malls out of her pajama pocket as she heads to the solarium. “Nope. Joan does not have false alarms. This will be our first child. Start knitting.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Saturday Evening: Eddy

  Lucius

  It isn’t that Lucius doesn’t like women. He does. He’s just a little suspicious of them, and he has to admit he’s been careless in his choices of the women he’s married. He lowers himself into the desk chair left him by the previous sheriff, which is okay once he fits a pillow at the small of his back, lays his cap on the corner of the desk, and fusses until he’s comfortable. These beach women fit right into this suspicious outlook he’s developed over the years.

  “What about the lady who disappeared?” Liz’s question yelled from the reception area disrupts the train of thought that has arrived on schedule this evening, like most evenings, during the quiet Greenspring hours between golf and going home to Clive Cussler.

  “Her friends seem a little agitated by her taking off. Can’t really do anything until tomorrow. Why don’t you go home? I’ll be here for a few minutes writing up my notes and then I’m out of here too.”

  Liz leans against the doorframe, her fleece jacket already zipped. “So no murder?”

  “Not until tomorrow. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “And my dad. Him and his buddies were about to get a posse organized.”

  “Your dad reads too many Westerns. Goodnight Liz.”

  The front door slams.

  * * *

  Those women in the beach house are hiding something. This intuition reminds him of other times he’s felt this way about a woman, three women, actually. He sinks back and waits for the train carrying his wives to pull in. As usual, first wife steps down and onto the platform. Lucius greets her with the pint of whiskey he uncovers from the wastebasket under his desk. Sarah. Pretty but very, very tidy. She produced a son in a tidy way who’s grown up in tidy haircuts and Sunday church suits. Sarah tried hard to tidy up Lucius too.

  Her efforts were unsuccessful because Lucius couldn’t be tidy in any way. Early on, he worked as a carpenter’s helper with a local builder. He didn’t shave on the weekends, despite the family’s attendance at Sunnyside Baptist; he wore paint-spattered pants to PTA meetings and pajamas all Saturday if he chose to. His sneakers and jackets roamed the house on their own; his newspapers flew about with abandon.

  After a few years of trying to change him, Sarah gave up the project, even after he went to school to become a policeman and began to clean up a few parts of his life. “I might have to be your angry housekeeper,” she declared, one night as she stuffed a wad of jockey shorts into the laundry bin, “but I’m not going to be your ever-willing bedmate anymore.”

  It was difficult for Lucius in those days to understand the connection between those two wifely roles.

  They divorced after he met Ruby. He has a glimmer of what Sarah was talking about now that he’s older, and he sometimes regrets Ruby. Sarah tried, at least, and his grandson has her green eyes.

  Lucius looks at the half-empty bottle and takes another swig, this one dedicated to the second woman at the train door, the remedy to Sarah. Ruby was attracted to him because by then he was a policeman and his uniform made him seem in control, not that being in control was a priority of hers. She herself was often out of control and willing to get even wilder when it came to sex, so they should have been a good match, and they were for a few years, scuffling through their apartment looking for his shoes or the TV remote or her purse or the car keys usually hiding under the unmade bed. His steady salary as a cop and his odd hours suited her just fine too.

  He discovered the maxed-out Visa, with its shopping network purchases, and the naked FedEx driver who delivered them, on the same day. Ruby was partial to uniforms, it turned out. Later, in the lawyer’s office, she tried to explain. Mainly, she didn’t like the fact that he never listened to her, ever, not even when she was miserable with the cramps that sent her to the sofa for three days every month. Of course, she turned to QVC and its driver for solace. Who wouldn’t?

  “What the hell,” Lucius fumbles for the glass he’s hidden in his bottom drawer. He pours out the last of the bourbon and waits for the next passenger arriving on this train to nowhere. Elaine alights slowly, hesitantly, looks around until she sees him. She’s wearing the green coat he likes so much. Her skin glows. Her black hair is tied back into a ponytail at her neck; her red lips grin at him.

  She’s so young. Too young. Too young to stay interested in a fifty-year-old, pot-bellied, shaved-headed officer of the law. Especially when meth entered the picture. After a few months of stomach-turning suspicion, then eyeball-to-eyeball, hands-clutching-shoulders pleading, Lucius turned into the cop he was. She screamed that he had also become her father, always telling her what to do. Made her sick. Made her crazy. Then one day she just disappeared. Lucius, when he thinks about Elaine, like now, can still feel the young soft fingers on his face, the young wiry body under him.

  He has a right to be suspicious of women, especially women who want something from him. Lou, Jackie, and especially that arm-fondling Joan, definitely want something.

  With a couple of drinks under his belt, he puts that thought aside and goes back to considering how much he had to do with the ways his marriages turned out. The quiet of this little town with its raging cows and Saturday night rumbles has given him plenty of time to wonder about that.

  Enough. Lucius stands, picks up his cap and pulls it onto his head, gets his keys out to lock up as he walks out. Clive Cussler is waiting at home.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sunday Morning: Tide Pool

  Lou

  The beach house deck faces the ocean, and the yellow early-morning sky is reflected on the slack waters, orange lazy wavelets, green glowing depths. It’s chilly outside and will be until the sun makes its way to it, but the afghan helps. Lou’s nose is cold, and she wipes it on her pajama sleeve. She doesn’t bother being sneaky about it; the other two are still asleep and will be until she starts a pot of coffee. She has held off in order to be quiet for a moment, to think about the situation. She wants to call Susan, ask her advice, but she knows what her friend will
say. “You’ve been buddies for almost fifty years, sweetie. You can’t back out now.”

  It isn’t that she wants to back out. Well, she would like to not even know about it, of course, to be in her garden on the mountain, mulching and whistling at the birds in the firs above her head. But she owes Madge. When everyone else thought Lou was crazy to walk out of a thirty-year marriage, Madge told her that she was brave. “It’s chance to find out, finally, who you are.” Lou had used those words as an antidote in the guilt-sick months after she had abandoned her old life. When she needed to talk, Madge listened and cheered her on, and Lou had begun to discover pieces of herself, hidden, waiting.

  Lou stirs, opens the blanket and steps to the wooden rail in front of her. She inhales the misty cold, fills her chest. “Probably about time everyone else found me, too,” she whispers and wonders how she’ll tell them.

  “Thought you’d have the coffee on by now.” Jackie is pouring coffee grounds willy-nilly into the paper filter. “I need a barrel of it after last night. Was I bad? I don’t remember saying anything I shouldn’t have. All three of us seemed a little unhinged, probably still are. For good reason, damn.” As she waits for the coffee, she reaches for a book on the counter. “Madge’s? I haven’t read this one. Old Ladies’ Home. What’s it about?”