The Girls of August

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I went down the hall to Barbara’s room. Her door too was wide open. A half bottle of Cabernet sat uncorked on her dresser, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  Rachel’s door was closed. The drone of her hair dryer competed with the lashing of the rain. The knowledge that she was inside the house, safe, sheltered from the storm, gave me a sense of relief. I headed downstairs, keeping a tight grip on the rail, step by step.

  I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of water from the refrigerator pitcher and then went in search of Barbara. I called her name. Nothing. I looked in all the rooms, finally finding her in the sunroom, where she sat pondering the jigsaw puzzle.

  “Aha!” she said, pushing a piece into place.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Not at all.” She tried to fit a three-sided piece into the sky but it didn’t work. “What’s everybody else doing?”

  “Baby’s sound asleep and Rachel is drying her hair.”

  I found the piece that Barbara had been searching for and locked it in. “Bingo.”

  “Maddy?” She searched the loose puzzle bits, running her fingers over them.

  “What?”

  “Thanks for making me talk tonight.” She found three pieces that fit together and placed them inside the puzzle, underneath the sky. They looked like hair and a forehead. “I feel better.”

  I almost said something about the drinking, but decided against it. She was a big girl. And she was as smart as they come. I had no doubt she’d get through this without my pointing out something that might only make her feel worse. And, I noticed, liquor was nowhere in sight; she was drinking a Diet Coke. It’s a start, I thought, and a good one.

  I returned my focus to the puzzle. A three-tabbed blue piece with a flourish of white: I found its place, and a light-bulb went off in my mind. “Barbara, this isn’t all sky. See right here? That’s ocean.”

  Barbara leaned in, squinted at where I was pointing. “Huh! You’re right again, Maddy.”

  I still had no idea what the puzzle picture added up to, and I was tempted to try to find the box it had come in but decided that would be too much trouble. Knowing Baby, she’d probably burned it.

  We worked the puzzle in silence for a while, enveloped in the sound of the storm, which showed no signs of abating. As the puzzle’s elements began to fall together, we worked more quickly, our hands hovering over loose pieces, sometimes turning them over and over as we felt their crazy edges, sometimes holding them to the light as if by studying them more closely we could see their proper places.

  Someone came onto the porch. I turned around. Rachel was in her silk jammies, her deep-chestnut hair newly blow-dried and glamorous. It was difficult for me to believe that she was as sick as she had been told.

  “Wow! You look great,” I said.

  “A good soaking rain does wonders for the skin,” she said. She lifted a mug of hot chocolate to her lips and sipped; it smelled heavenly. Then she pulled up a chair, but before sitting down, she stared down at the puzzle.

  “Hmm! Well, I’ll be damned!”

  “What?” I glanced up at her.

  “Look!”

  “What are you talking about?” Barbara asked, trying to fit a piece with one straight side in the wrong place.

  “I think that’s us.”

  I looked at the puzzle, trying to see what Rachel saw.

  “That photo of you, Barbara, Melinda, and me—the one you keep on your fireplace mantel—that’s it.”

  “Oh my,” Barbara said. “I think you’re right. Look at this, Maddy. Right here. The chair.”

  Off to the left side, at about where the water began, was an incomplete image of a lavender Adirondack chair with the back shaped like a dolphin. There was only one place that had such a chair. The St. Teresa house. Our last August together. “Oh my God,” I said. “It is us. It’s Melinda! But how…”

  “Baby must have stolen the photo when she was at your house. And then she took it to one of those photo places that turn pictures into puzzles.”

  “Why would she do such a thing?”

  “Beats me,” Barbara said. “Despite her lip service on the subject, she gets testy every time the subject of Melinda comes up, as if she wishes the woman had never been born.”

  “What do you think, Rachel?”

  “I think she’s just plumb-assed crazy.”

  Knowing what the puzzle depicted, the three of us quickly went to work, a new confidence informing our choices. As Melinda’s face emerged, a lump formed in my throat. For a brief, somehow terrible moment, it felt as if we were resurrecting her.

  “She’s with us,” I whispered. “I know it.”

  “No. No she’s not,” Barbara said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  Rachel did the final honors. She put the final jigsaw piece in place: a tendril of Melinda’s hair blowing wild in the breeze.

  “Wow,” I said. There we were, the girls of August, younger, largely untouched, without a real care in the world. Not yet, anyway.

  “We look happy.”

  “We sure do,” Barbara said.

  “Do you think she knew?” Rachel asked.

  “Knew what?” Barbara flattened out the puzzle’s left side, which had buckled.

  “That she was going to die.”

  “She had no idea,” I said.

  “No one really thinks they’re going to die,” Barbara said.

  Stone-faced, Rachel looked first at me, then at Barbara. “No, I suppose not.” She kissed her fingertips and touched Melinda’s face.

  I put my hand on her shoulder, but she jerked away. “Don’t, Maddy. Just…don’t.”

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  7

  Before sleep that night, I went on one of what Mac calls my dreamtime walkabouts. I’ve had these nocturnal odysseys often, two or three times a month, ever since I can remember. They aren’t dreams; they haven’t the luminous, shifting landscapes of dreams, nor their sheer Daliesque particularity. Mine all involve places I know or know of; the cast is always made up of people I know or have known, though once I had a long series of dreamtime escapades involving a black poodle we had never owned and so far have not acquired. I sighed and twisted comfortably into my accustomed sleep trough, and turned my head into the pillow so I could hear with one ear the lullaby of rain on the tin roof. What made it so utterly soothing? I could not remember having heard it often, and of course millions of children never did, and yet I was certain it had the lulling power of a mother’s voice, or the tinkle of a nursery tune.

  Under the rain I heard the voice of my cousin Jim Creighton when he was maybe eight or nine. Jim-Jim, as he was called, was adorably red-curled and copper-freckled, and a born menace. He had tortured his sister Francie and me since he could toddle…or scuttle, which was a more suitable term. He had frogged us, tripped us, shot us with his slingshot, decapitated our dolls, put gum in our hair, and once striped my white spitz dog with red paint. He denied all his mayhem, his blue eyes swimming with tears.

  “They did it,” he would quaver to our grandmother, at whose farm we spent great chunks of summer. Grammy thought, as Francie put it, that the sun rose and set in Jim-Jim’s ass, so she and I shared considerable punishment that should have been Jim-Jim’s.

  One day we couldn’t really bear it anymore. I forget what this particular injustice was, but I remember precisely the red rage I felt rise in my throat. It was quite a mature rage, heedless of retribution. I could tell by her outthrust chin and flaring nostrils that Francie felt it too.

  It did not take us long to decide. Jim-Jim’s red Flexible Flyer, which we were never allowed to touch, leaned against the back steps. My grandparents’ flock of Rhode Island Red and Dominecker chickens, who were shut in the henhouse at night, roamed free in the daytime, and left their splats of black-and-white manure everywhere. I wonder if any children of this time know the cool, slimy, dreadful feeling of chicken shit between their toes?

  Jim-Jim had gone into town
with our grandfather. We looked at each other. Neither of us spoke. She grabbed the wagon and I grabbed a shovel from the shed, and in a few moments the Flexible Flyer groaned and wobbled under a malodorous load. Jim-Jim alighted from the truck just in time to see us push it off down the winding dirt road that led to the calf pasture. By the time it hit a pine tree halfway down and shot chicken shit into the air like a fetid Old Faithful, his bellows were drowning out the 2:20 p.m. Atlanta and West Point freight that roared by every afternoon, delivering farm-fresh whatever to the city.

  Neither Francie nor I made a sound during our spanking. Instead we smiled secretly at each other. Jim-Jim wailed for two days and would never again use his wagon. He said it still smelled of chicken doo-doo. Grammy finally bought him another one, and threatened any girl-child who touched it with far worse than spanking…though neither of us could imagine what that might be. In my case it didn’t matter.

  Vengeance was ours.

  I smiled…I could feel the smile in my cheek muscles…and into the next slot came the living room of the big old house in Buckhead where I grew up, not far off Peachtree Road in Atlanta. My father was a partner in the law firm that his father had founded and though we were not rich, we were what my mother might have called substantial. That I attended an Atlanta public high school instead of St. Augusta’s, which largely served the female young of our zip code, was a testament more to my stubbornness than to our “unsuitability.” I was determined to play girls’ varsity softball. St. Gussie’s had no team.

  It was April of my senior year, a tender, undersea-green April. April was starred with white dogwood and wild honeysuckle on the wide, smooth green lawns of Buckhead. I’ve Apriled in quite a few places, but to me there is none lovelier than that four-square-mile paradise of real estate just off the lava flow of Peachtree Road.

  I stood in the middle of our living room in a drift of hoop-skirted green tulle while my father sipped his evening Cutty and smoked his pipe and my mother, on a step stool, fiddled with my hair and cried.

  I’d have cried too, except that it would have meant admitting that I had been wrong, and I would rather have been flayed alive. That afternoon, after a week-long running battle with my mother over cutting my hair, I had lopped it off myself and slicked it down with a virulent gel that smelled like the library paste of my childhood, the kind that we ate in spoonfuls. Instead of looking like Audrey Hepburn, I looked like Prince Charles just out of his royal shower.

  “You cannot go looking like that,” my mother said through clenched teeth. “What would Terry say?”

  She hit a nerve there. Terry Stabler was the biggest BMOC at Pace High. He was handsome. He was built like a young Adonis. It was rumored that he had dated half the girls in north Atlanta and slept with most of those. His grades were good enough to slide him into Princeton the following fall, and he was the best linebacker the Pace Panthers had ever had. In fact, he had almost single-handedly pulverized the mighty Burbage Tigers in an exhibition game the night before. I had not seen it, but the Atlanta sports pages had featured it, and him.

  No one, including me, was quite sure why he had asked me to the prom. But he had, and now I had ruined the whole thing with, as my mother snarled, pinking shears and a can of Crisco.

  “I know,” she cried suddenly, straightening up. “Where is your stole?”

  “On my bed. Nobody wears stoles anyway…”

  “Get it.”

  I did, and handed her the oblong of filmy green.

  “Bend down here.”

  I did. I could feel her wrapping the stole around my head. I started to protest.

  “Hush,” she said. “I’m giving you a snood. Look up now…”

  I did. I saw a pretty girl in green tulle with her hair wrapped in green like a loaf of bread.

  “Mother…”

  “Lean down here!”

  More scrabbling at my head.

  “Now look!”

  I did. She had pinned the stole so that it stood up around my head like a sort of miter. Under it my Adam’s apple bobbled furiously.

  “You look stunning!”

  “I look like a demented nun!”

  “No, you…”

  The doorbell rang. Silently my father got up and opened the door.

  “Well good evening, Terry,” he said cordially, as if two semi-hysterical women had not just been shrieking behind him. “You look mighty spiffy tonight.”

  Terry was splendid in his tuxedo. It was widely known that he owned his own.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said, and smiled.

  My mother made a small, mouselike sound in her throat. I simply stared.

  Terry’s two front teeth were missing.

  “Sorry about that.” He beamed around at us with the air of one who knows perfection cannot be damaged.

  “I can’t get an appointment till Monday. I’ve got one of ’em, but I think the other one is still stuck in the tight end’s fist.”

  Oh, yes, we went to the prom. And oh, yes, my mother insisted that my father take a picture before we left. I don’t remember the prom, but the picture has sat on Mac’s desk for years. He loves it.

  Still smiling there in the dark all those years later, I turned on my back and stared at the ceiling. Such spring-sweet, innocent times. So long ago. Long before now. Long before us.

  Long before the girls of August.

  Another April came now, this one much later. This one not yet lived. Soon, though, I thought, tears burning my eyes. An April to sear the heart, coming soon.

  * * *

  We buried Rachel in the spring, in fact, that next April. The dogwoods were blooming, turning the world into a snowfall of white petals. The soft breeze was fragrant with confederate jasmine, rose, wisteria, magnolia. If we had to do it, I thought as I watched Mac, Hugh, Teddy, and Rachel’s brother lower her casket into the damp red earth, I was glad that it was in the spring, when life pulsed sweet and green.

  By the grave, as mourners began to drop small lumps of earth on my friend’s casket, the world blurred behind a haze of tears. I couldn’t have told you who had been at the memorial service. I couldn’t say with any clarity who was dropping earth. My mind was frozen in grief and loss. Mac caught me by the arm.

  “Are you OK, baby?”

  I could not speak.

  “Let’s get you out of here.” He steered me beyond the gravesite to our car. Once we were in it, he held me tight and kissed my face.

  My heart sank deep, broken in half under the weight of love.

  In the close dark of Tiger’s Eye I shook my head fiercely. No. No. The graveside slid away and Melinda came.

  My dream was thronged with images of Melinda. Melinda on her wedding day, wearing a column of ivory silk. Melinda throwing Teddy a surprise birthday party. Melinda jogging down the beach, her mane swaying with each stride. Melinda putting her feet up on a patio table, winking at me, saying the girls of August owned the world.

  Melinda’s face gone still and white on an icy Kentucky night.

  “I have to stop now,” I said aloud, crying. “I want this to be over. I want to go to sleep.”

  Then Mac’s face came, filling me completely.

  “Honey, we’re going to have a baby,” I told him. His smile lit the world.

  “It’s about time,” he said.

  And then I did sleep.

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  8

  Even in sleep, I knew that the storm was growing stronger. I could see against my closed lids the white swords of the lightning, hear the ghostly sizzle that it made just before stabbing the earth, hear the great war cries of thunder, closer and closer, until the whole cosmos seemed to battle at our very windows. I heard the lashing of the trees and the banshee keening of the ocean wind and the echoing booms of the surf that had been so sweet and gentle in our ears just hours earlier.

  A particularly loud and prolonged clap of thunder shook the house, waking me fully. Barbara, in the sleep-stunned voice of a child
, called out in the dark, “It won’t get us, will it?”

  “No,” I whispered, not at all sure. “We’ve got a tin roof and a lightning rod,” I called, loud enough for her to hear.

  “Go back to sleep, y’all,” Rachel growled. “It’s been a long damn day.”

  From Baby’s bed I heard nothing but little burbling, smacking noises.

  I crossed my arms against my stomach and whispered to the baby I prayed I was carrying, “Don’t be afraid. It’s just a storm. I’m going to take care of you, little one.”

  Lying in the wild dark, I ran my hands across my pelvis. No bump. Not yet. I felt only my own hipbones. Oh, my God, Mac, I thought. We did it. We really did it. If I’m dreaming this, I’m going to cut my throat.

  Eventually sleep took us all again. I don’t know how long we slept, but it was still dark when a deep and prolonged rumble roared through the house, shaking the very timbers. And then came the great white crash.

  We screamed and scrambled out of bed. We spilled into the hallway, frightened and confused. Cold, whipping water poured straight down on us. At first I thought I was in the grip of yet another nightmare, but when Barbara grabbed my arm and shouted, “We’ve got to find cover!” I knew that this was all too real.

  I looked up. The roof was gone. I mean gone. Angry coiled clouds roiled above us, and blinding sabers of lightning struck all around as if intent on skewering us the same way we had skewered those marshmallows. Under the force of the wind, the house groaned, and I felt the floor begin to heave.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” I yelled.

  Panic-stricken, we descended the stairs, and upon entering the living room, saw an even more frightening sight. Flames bloomed in the darkness behind us. The kitchen was on fire.

  “We’ve got to put it out,” I cried, breaking from the group.

  “No!” Baby yelled. “No, no, no!”

  Barbara grabbed my arm. “Keep going or we’re all going to die. Now!”

  We followed her through the living room, which was filling with smoke, pushed open the porch door despite the gale wind battering it, and finally, dazed, tumbled onto the cold, pocked beach.