Mother was concentrating on driving, which was new to her. There weren’t many things that Mother wasn’t good at, but driving was one of them. This new car had a backseat, which I thought was the height of luxury; right now Sam sat in front with Mother, and I was sprawled across the mohair seat in back. Sam sat tensely. He was a little afraid of how fast we went in cars.
That morning I’d gone through Mother’s handbag, looking for the little pot of perfume she kept there. I’d found a blank envelope, unsealed, and inside a check made out to George Atwell for the largest sum of money I’d ever seen. Father’s nearly illegible signature bit into the thin paper.
I dabbed perfume behind my ears, as Mother always did. Georgie would be George Atwell one day, lose his nickname, and what would he do then? Would I be his wife? I steadied myself on the counter. I didn’t think I wanted to be his wife. But I knew from books that that’s what you did, when you kissed.
There were no houses on the final stretch of our drive, as they would have been sucked down by the bog. It seemed so near on either side: if we stopped, the animals would emerge from the groves of cabbage palm and the thick stands of maiden cane. The bobcats hid—we almost never saw them—but the alligators often sunned themselves on the edge of the road when it was warm, their gnarly, muddy skin, almost black, their improbably white teeth that were visible when they lazily snapped their jaws, as—what else could it mean—a warning.
It was perhaps my imagination that Mother sped through this stretch, that the automobile shook violently, that she did not slow down as she normally did for dips in the road. Father loved this leg of the drive; he thought central Florida possessed the most beautiful landscape in the world: a little bit of swamp, a little bit of forest.
At Georgie’s, we stepped out and waited while Mother gathered her things—a book for Aunt Carrie, a big crate of food: beans, Idella’s bread, preserves. Surely Georgie’s family did not need our food? I touched the sack of beans, and looked at Mother curiously.
“Just some extra things we had,” she said. I walked toward the house: Was it my imagination, that it looked grim, in need of sprucing up? It was a matter of fact that paint flaked from the windowsills, that a gutter was hanging by a thread. But things could not fall apart so quickly.
“Georgie’s at a neighbor’s,” Aunt Carrie told us after she had shown us into the living room. “He’ll be back soon,” she said, when she saw my face, which I tried to make look happy again. But I felt devastated. I’d waited for weeks!
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said—Mother had coached me—and Aunt Carrie put her arm around my shoulders and pressed me to her. She felt sturdy, next to Mother, who was all angles.
“Both my parents are gone,” she said, her voice pitched as if she was asking me a question, and I realized she was close to tears.
“Carrie,” Mother said, and led my aunt to a chair, “it will be fine.”
“Will it, Elizabeth?” She offered my mother a thin smile. “You sound like our president.” This had all turned Aunt Carrie mean, I realized.
Mother laughed nervously, and Sam and I slipped away.
“Want to go out back?” he asked, but I did not. I did not want to observe the natural world today; I did not want to follow Sam around.
“I’m tired,” I said, even though I wasn’t. Sam looked at me for a second—I always went with him—and I didn’t meet his eye.
“All right,” he said, hurt. “I’ll go by myself.”
I was sorry, but not sorry enough to go with him. I went to my aunt and uncle’s bedroom, where I could think. Their bed was unmade. Beds were so rarely unmade in my world.
I pressed my forehead against the window and watched until Sam disappeared into the woods. Last night we’d stayed up far past our bedtimes and took turns reading to each other an Agatha Christie mystery we’d read a thousand times already. I spent nearly all my time with Sam—he should not be hurt now. I looked at my hands, my nails that I had carefully trimmed last night, painted with oil. They were not a child’s hands. I stood and gathered my hair into a knot. I’d worn it down, brushed it ten different ways, decided on a side part.
I fell asleep in Aunt Carrie and Uncle George’s bed; I opened my eyes and Georgie was there, and I felt as if I’d summoned my cousin through a dream.
I held out my hand. Sleep had calmed me. My fingers gleamed in the soft lamplight.
“Where is Sam?”
“Outside. Mother is showing Sam and your mother her first azaleas.” He paused. “We’ll hear when they come back in.”
He rubbed my hand, I watched him, he rubbed my hand gently with his thumb and I wanted to moan.
He traced my eyebrow with his finger, lightly. “So pretty.”
“Do you think Sam knows?”
He shook his head. “I’m almost certain he doesn’t.”
That was enough, in that moment. I looked out the window and was surprised to see that it had turned dark while I slept.
“You look so old,” I said, and he did, standing there with one hand in his trouser pocket, the other over mine, kneading slowly but insistently. I sat up and kissed him, he leaned down and opened his mouth, put his tongue into mine.
“Open your mouth, Thea, like this.”
I did what he said. He turned his head away and I didn’t know what he was doing, but then I saw he was taking his jacket off. The idea thrilled me: he was taking his clothes off, he was going to stay. He faced me again. I watched him for a moment. He was breathing heavily, his face was flushed. I knew that I was calm—calmer, certainly, than Georgie.
“Come here,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “yes, yes,” and he climbed on top of me, propped himself up with his elbows. I wanted him closer, I pressed my hands hard against his back and at first he resisted but then he relented and he was pushing into me, and I wanted it, he was pushing into me and I reached down between us and felt for the hard pressure of his penis. I knew it would be there. It felt not like I expected it would, it felt swollen and very soft. I reached—
“No, no,” he whispered, “not yet. Just feel me from the outside.” So I touched him like he wanted, gingerly at first, but he kept pushing himself into my hand, harder and harder, and so I touched him harder, ran my fingers firmly along the length of it, and Georgie moaned while he was kissing me, moaned and moaned.
I ached. I pressed him to where I ached, shifted so that it touched more, harder, and I pressed and pressed and when it happened it was different, it was quicker, and when I was finished Georgie was still moving on top of me, kissing me, kissing my neck, my chest.
“Oh.”
“What?” he asked.
I shook my head. He didn’t know what I had just done. Georgie stood up suddenly. His pants were tented at his crotch. I’d done that, too.
“We should go down,” he whispered, “they’ll wonder.”
I sat up and unknotted my hair.
“You’re so pretty,” he said, and knelt in front of me, put his head in my lap. I combed his hair with my fingers. We heard the screen door slam, and then footsteps. “What if they catch us?”
“I thought you weren’t worried?” I asked.
“I’m not,” he said, “not really.”
“I’m not either.” In that moment I was so certain that they wouldn’t. This was nothing they could conceive of, I felt. That we were in his parents’ bedroom seemed to prove the strength of our secret.
And it was true, neither of our mothers had seemed to notice anything when we went downstairs, Georgie first, me ten or so minutes later, counting the seconds aloud because Uncle George and Aunt Carrie’s clock wasn’t wound.
By the time I came down Mother was gathering her things. Sam looked bored. But I caught his eye and smiled, and he smiled back.
—
On the way home I pretended to sleep in
the backseat, so that I could think freely about my cousin.
“Are you all right, Sam?” my mother asked. So she could feel it also: Sam seemed too quiet.
“Sam?” Mother asked again. She turned to look at him, and the car swerved. “I hate this contraption,” Mother muttered, shaken. “Sam, why so quiet? If you don’t tell me I’ll have to look at you again.”
I smiled. When Sam spoke, I knew he was smiling, too, from his voice. “Georgie—”
I bit my lip, hard. He could tell Mother right now, and this would all be over. And in that instant, Mother and I both waiting, poised for Sam to speak again, I almost wanted him to tell her. “He ignored me, today.” His voice was plaintive. I felt relieved that his malaise had nothing to do with me; then guilty. Georgie and I had both ignored Sam today.
“Things are a little tense right now, in your cousin’s family,” Mother said, finally. I could tell she was thinking of how to frame it so that Sam would best understand.
“Why?”
“They might lose their house, Sam.”
My eyes flew open. I wanted so badly to speak, but I did not want to enter this conversation. To do so would feel like a betrayal, of Georgie.
“They won’t,” my mother continued, “because this family is generous, and we’re glad to help. It’s what family does. But it’s hard for your uncle to accept charity. And it’s hard for Georgie to know all of this. He shouldn’t ignore you, but put yourself in his shoes. It must be hard for him, to see you.” It made sense, suddenly, why we hadn’t seen them in almost a month.
For as long as I could remember, we’d had more than my cousin’s family. We were two children; one child, in those days, was noticeable. My father was brighter. And my mother won, in every contest, when put next to my aunt. My mother was from a wealthy family, with connections. And she was beautiful; my aunt was plain. I felt all this, but I didn’t think much of it. And I did not have a girl cousin to compete with. I did not have to be prettier, or more graceful, or brighter.
But of course I knew my mother was wrong: Georgie had ignored Sam not because he was embarrassed or petty but because he only wanted me.
“Yeah, well,” Sam said. “He didn’t ignore Thea.”
And I smiled: Sam was right. But then Mother spoke.
“Thea’s a girl,” Mother said.
For an instant I thought she meant that I was too pretty for a boy like Georgie to ignore. But then she spoke again.
“She doesn’t matter like you do.”
I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. My heart beat so loudly I was sure Mother would hear it. But I calmed myself: I knew how to do that, because of Sasi. Horses could smell fear.
The shacks we had passed on the way up were lit by firelight, now. I tried to find some sign of poverty, but I didn’t know what to look for. I was angry, suddenly, that my parents had kept me away from everything real.
Mother was wrong. I mattered, I thought, and tried to let the sound of the wind against the car lull me to sleep. I mattered. My name was Theodora Atwell, and I mattered to Georgie Atwell.
{15}
The news came through an old house mistress, who lived in Dallas and was friends with Henny. Leona’s family had lost everything. Her father’s oil was sour, we kept hearing, though no one knew what it meant. It was now worth less than drinking water. We knew what this meant. Everything, Henny said, but even she seemed to take no pleasure in this gossip.
“Where will they live?” I asked Sissy, on our way to the bathhouse, both of us swaddled in our winter robes.
She looked sideways at me. “They’ll still have their house, Thea. Just not their lives.”
When we arrived at the bathhouse, I scanned the room for Leona, whom I sometimes saw around this time, but saw only a gaggle of first-years, Molly among them. We were required to bathe every other day during the summer, but only every third day during the winter. Mrs. Holmes’s standard of hygiene was high.
As I waited for Docey to draw my bath, I wondered what sort of life Leona was left with. Leona had done nothing wrong, nothing unforgivable. She would leave this place. She would give up horses, or at least horses like King, who had cost a small fortune. She would not go to a ladies’ college, perhaps.
Docey motioned that the bath was ready and took my robe as I stepped in. I’d completely discarded any remnants of modesty after the first few weeks here. Docey’s hand was red, from testing the water so many times. Leona’s life might be limited, now, in a way that it hadn’t been before, but she would not be a maid, like Docey. She would never go hungry. There was surely a rich relative who would help.
Victoria, Leona, all the girls who had been sent home—their lives would change in subtler ways. Rich suitors would not abound. They would have to choose more carefully. All the Ladies’ Home Journals mothers sent us were now full of articles about little jobs women could take in to support the household: laundry, sewing. I’d almost laughed. As if Leona’s mother could save the family fortune. As if Aunt Carrie could have doubled the size of her garden and paid back the bank. That wives could earn even a fraction of what their husbands had lost was a fantasy.
I understood that our teachers, whom we had previously pitied, for they had none of our advantages, were lucky. Miss Brooks had a salary, and room and board; she talked about books all day instead of worrying about keeping her family afloat. It must feel like a relief, not to be saddled with a family right now.
In the days that followed, everyone watched Leona, for signs that she had faltered, would falter. But she acted no differently. And, gradually, the girls, as girls are wont to do, lost interest. If anything, she acted more imperiously. Watching her guide King over jumps as if they were playthings, clear the course beautifully, perfectly, then pass us on her way out of the ring without so much as a nod—well, it made us wonder if it was really true at all. But still she reminded us of our own precarious balance in the net of fate. If Leona’s father could lose everything, what of our own fathers? What of us? The question floated above us, now, a cloud.
—
In Augusta House one night Eva switched off the lights and lit candles, brought out a Ouija board, which she had borrowed from a first-year cabin. The first-year girls were consumed by them. We had been trapped indoors almost all day, unable to ride because of the rain. It almost felt like hurricane weather.
“Those,” Gates said, as soon as she saw it, “are forbidden. And foolish, besides.” But even so, she joined our circle, placed the tips of her fingers very lightly on the heart-shaped piece of wood. We sat on the faded Oriental rug that lay in the center of the cabin. I absently combed its fringed edges. They covered the floors of all our cabins; I knew how expensive they were. Mr. Holmes should sell all these, I thought, and pay a girl’s tuition.
“My father says those are demonic,” Mary Abbott said, from her bed. “You shouldn’t.”
“Oh, Mary Abbott,” Eva said. “Don’t be so grim. It’s just fun.”
“Who are we contacting?” Sissy asked.
“My grandmother,” Eva suggested, “but she was so boring in real life. I can’t imagine death has made her more interesting.”
“Eva!” Gates said. Eva raised her eyebrows, lazily, and smiled. I stifled a laugh.
“How about you, Thea?” Sissy asked. “Is there anyone you’d like to contact? Do you know anyone dead?”
The question rang out like a bell, sounding clearly in my mind. Was Georgie dead? Tears came to my eyes, that old, familiar wetness. But no: Mother had said in her last letter he was fine.
“No,” I said, and smiled, weakly, “no one I can think of.”
Sissy tried to meet my eye. “How about an old Yonahlossee girl?” I asked, to interrupt the stillness.
“Which one?” Gates asked. She sat primly, her legs folded beneath her, the way we had been taught to sit in etiquette class if we ever
found ourselves without a chair.
“Lettie Sims,” Eva said. “She’s why we can’t swim in the lake anymore. Drowned,” she added.
“When?” I asked.
“In the 1800s,” Sissy said. “A long time ago.” She smiled reassuringly. “A very long time ago.”
I smiled back, to show her I was fine. But Sissy did look a little otherworldly in the candlelight; all of us did. I was not so fragile that a drowned girl from the previous century could alarm me.
We all touched the wooden heart, lightly. Mary Abbott turned off the electric lights, so all we had were candles. “Spirit of the occult,” Eva began, and Sissy giggled. “Spirit of the occult,” she began again, “please let us speak to Miss Lettie Sims, who we know the girls called Simsy. We want to ask her a question. Respectfully.”
The heart moved, of course it did, one of us pushed it. I watched the faces of these softly glowing girls and wondered what I would ask if I could ask anything at all and know the answer would be true.
“A-S-K-O-N-E-Q-U-E-S-T-I-O-N-I-F-Y-O-U-M-U-S-T-B-U-T-O-N-L-Y-O-N-E.”
Gates’s freckled fingers, I thought; she wanted to get this done with.
Mary Abbott whimpered, from her bed, “I’m scared.”
“Shh,” Eva whispered. “She doesn’t want to hurt us.”
Sissy’s hands were shaking. Did the girls really believe this? We had read an essay about the occult with Father, how it was simply a way not to believe all the soldiers from the Great War were dead. I tried to meet Gates’s eye, but she was watching the board.
“This is foolish,” I said. “It’s one of us moving it.” I started to take my hands away, but Sissy shook her head.
“Please, Thea,” she whispered. “Wait.”
“Hurry, then. Ask a question.”
The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls Page 20
