Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  They stretched out afterward on a double bed in the cabin’s main room and watched an old movie on TV: Birdman of Alcatraz. Suddenly Rick lit up a cigarillo from a pack. “Where did you get those?”

  “At that store when you got the car fixed.” He insisted she have one.

  “I don’t think you ought to be smoking,” Laurel said. She knew damn well he shouldn’t be smoking; why didn’t she make him stop? “I shouldn’t either.”

  “I’ll quit when I go out west. Mom, I don’t want to go out there.”

  “I don’t want you to go either,” she said. She did not want to talk up against what William wanted.

  “I read a letter from Dad’s friend who owns the ski resort. Usually, he hires kids older than me to work on trails in the summer. He said if Dad was so insistent, he’d take me on.”

  To learn independence; she thought Rick was being taught it too fast, too soon, and felt deprived of him often. But she told herself William must know what was right for a boy, and she did not like to interfere. She did not want scenes. She had the feeling this year William was jealous of her time here alone with Rick. He had said the boy was too old to spend a month alone with his mother in a place like Mississippi, where there was nothing structured for him to do.

  “I just want to be here doing nothing, away from Dad’s regime.”

  Laurel considered smoke curling in front of the TV screen; she had no idea Rick considered William in that light, as she did. When they went to a marriage counselor, she told Dr. Silvers, “Living with William is like living with Hitler.” And both men laughed. Laughed! She had not said it to be funny; she wanted some change, but nothing happened. She went on in those sessions for a year feeling a strong sense of male bonding. She thought about Rick’s believing all those Thursday evenings that his parents went out to have dinner alone. She thought how William had begun flattering Dr. Silvers on his techniques of marriage counseling; they seemed quite unique to him. Wouldn’t the doctor like to write an article which he, William, would edit and place in one of the women’s magazines his company published? They’d be quite a team, seemed to be his implication; the doctor would be famous. Dr. Silvers preened, agreeing. Laurel, seeing through this scheme, didn’t understand why Dr. Silvers couldn’t figure it all out: otherwise, why was she paying him money? They stopped the sessions finally because they were costly; and the marriage seemed on its same keel, which was not particularly a bad one; sexless; but how many women in long marriages were in that same boat? But William gave her the impression he wanted Dr. Silvers to choose sides, as if they were in a courtroom and he must say, Mr. Perry is the good guy; she’s the bad one. Why did William wish to be so divisive? From the moment she suggested a marriage counselor, he said, “OK. If you pay half.” Laurel supposed she was still just that old Southern female who relied on men and had always been around the Southern kind who took it as an affront for women to pay. When they heard later Dr. Silvers got a divorce, those evenings seemed even more a travesty.

  “I don’t think I’m too old to spend a month riding cows, shooting frogs and snakes, and roaming around pastures.”

  “I don’t think so either,” she said. “I think it’s good for your soul.”

  “I think so too,” Rick said. “I feel sorry for Soundport kids. But Mom, you know I’m not going to spend summers like this forever.”

  “Of course not. Someday you’ll get married and your wife won’t let you.”

  “I mean seriously. Maybe not by next summer.”

  “I know. By next summer.”

  He sat up in front of the TV and looked at her quickly. “Are you crying?”

  “No, it’s this crazy smoke.”

  “I don’t mean I won’t ever come again.”

  “I know.” But these summers were over. She would not want to come to the cabin alone. Would she not see the South again, or for how long? Rick still stayed up close to her, peering into her face.

  “Look at the tube, kid,” she told him.

  When she was in bed in the second room, falling asleep, she returned to thinking about Hal MacDonald and how difficult it must be for him to be in prison but near his plantation and its different life. She thought back to the time she had had a glimpse of him, once in her life. It had been at one of the enormous dinner dances to which she and her sorority sisters were addicted as teenagers. This one was held on the rooftop of Delton’s finest hotel, on a level with the stars. If she and Hal had met then, would he have liked her? There was no sense turning the question around, because already she was enthralled by the society he represented, by the aura of the Mississippi plantation where he lived.

  While she remembered, the cool swift scent of gardenias came back from the corsage she had worn that evening, though the cabin smelled of mosquito spray. A girl sitting next to her had whispered, “That’s Pris MacDonald’s brother,” her voice as awed as Laurel felt. He went by like a shy shadow, as if looking for someone. Even then she had wanted to meet him. And now she had to meet him because of the inner voice that spoke to her and because of the extraordinary compassion she had for a contemporary locked up. A man from his background, she thought. She would write and ask if she could see him. And what a chance to visit a prison. That night in high school when she saw him, his army uniform had rendered the high school boys in their white dinner jackets innocuous. She had been so impressed she never forgot that moment. On the bandstand Clyde McCoy had been playing “Sugar Blues,” and the saxophone wailed.

  4

  “I don’t want to cook blueberry pancakes,” Laurel complained midmorning, though mostly she was testing Rick and hoping he’d change his mind.

  “It’s almost my last day, Mom.”

  “You’ve been using that one ever since you got here.”

  She was probably ruining him for some poor dear girl in the future, but she got out the griddle. Someday, Laurel thought, he would be grown and gone. Her black portable typewriter from college days sat on a table nearly as dilapidated, and by a window overlooking the pasture, which was fatal, since staring out was much easier than making up stories to set down on paper. “Don’t disappear. You’ve got to think about packing.”

  “I only have to put some stuff in a sack.” Rick sat in the kitchen cleaning his gun; she watched a cloth go in and out of the barrel.

  “You’re not going out west with your clothes in a grocery sack, you hear?”

  “All right, already. Are you on the rag or what?”

  “Rick!” What did he know about that? She turned gratefully toward the sound of trace chains coming up the driveway. Mister Zack pulled his wagon to a halt outside the door.

  “Let’s get more peaches, Mom.”

  She opened the door, releasing them from the staleness of air-conditioning; even in bright heat, the sky had a tender look, the washed-out blue of babies’ blankets. Pine trees gave off a single aroma; their needles shone fiercely, like armor. Her hair was still wet from an early morning jog alongside them, to the road’s dead end where the federal dam began, with roiling muddy water that looked too thick to stir. An old man had stopped in a vintage car, saying, “Can I give you a lift?” When she answered, “No, thanks. I’m running for my health,” he looked perplexed and said, “Oh. I thought you was out of gas somewhere.” Now she stared into equally kind old eyes.

  “I found some pretty tomatoes on my doorstep this morning,” she said. Along about daylight, Mister Zack snuck up and left whatever was plentiful in his garden, melons and vegetables redolent of warm earth. In return, she bought his peaches. “Rick, will you run get me my purse?” He left off feeding sugar cubes to Mister Zack’s horses.

  Mister Zack grinned, holding up from the wagon’s bed a string of iridescent catfish. “Been to the dam fishing. Pretty peaceful there. No womenfolks chattering. They all gone to Nashtoba because of a price war ’tween the Piggly-Wiggly and the Jitney Jungle. Can that boy clean a mess of fish?”

  “Sure. He’s learned this summer and he’s got a new k
nife.” Where was Rick? At that moment she knew he was reading her unfinished letter to Hal MacDonald. It was on the desk by her purse.

  When he came back, Rick’s face had a look similar to William’s sometimes, angry about a decision made contrary to what he thought. She spoke cheerily, as if to avoid forever any mention of that letter. “Rick’s leaving soon so I can’t use many peaches. But I could take Allie some.”

  “Lord, got’cha. I forgot. Sugar, she bought some. And said tell you and the boy come over this evening, she’s turning a freezer of peach cream.” Mister Zack seemed petulant as a child, the way men do when something goes against their grain. “Womenfolks don’t want to make their own cream no more. They buy it, and that sto’-bought stuff makes me gassy.”

  “We’re filled with gas right now from turnip greens.”

  “Rick.”

  He pretended innocence. “Ardella talks about that in the post office,” he said.

  “It’s not exactly what Dad would consider polite conversation.”

  “Greens’ll do it to you too,” Mister Zack agreed.

  She and Rick smiled as the specter of William passed between them. “See you at Allie’s.” Raising his reins, Mister Zack set his trace chains jingling. As the sound diminished, Rick said, “What’s with writing some joker in prison?”

  “He’s not a joker.”

  “What’s this bad period you’re going through in your life?”

  “Oh, you know. The usual. How to write about the South when I live in the East.”

  “That’s not it. Dad’s not going to like this.”

  “Not like my writing to a man locked up behind bars? Don’t be silly.”

  “What’s with you and Dad anyhow? What were you on the rag with Gran about him before we left? Saying Will-yum”; again, he aped, “Will-yum.”

  Had she sounded that bad? “I dont’ know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.” Before she understood what was happening, Rick raised the twenty-two and shot—spling!—through the other two rooms of the house. She watched holes splatter the far walls, thinking in the midst of fear and fury that she would have to have those repaired. Her feet seemed to be dancing as if she were keeping them out of the way of the sound as he shot again, and she went on crying, “Stop!”—though he shot first her tennis hat sitting on a table, and she watched it jump, jumping like a frog. “Why did you do that?”

  He went out the door not saying anything. She started after him, but stopped. “I hope puberty is not going to be as bad as they tell me it is,” she called.

  In his raggedy T-shirt, Rick’s shoulders shook with laughter; Laurel saw the tall, slim-waisted man he would become. It was frightening to think of things that could happen between them.

  She signed her name to the letter.

  July 17

  Dear Hal:

  I was glad to hear from you, and a number of things went through my mind. It was a surprise to receive that printed stationery with instructions on the back. There was nothing on the list of things people can send you I could imagine you lacked—socks, checks, handkerchiefs? I’ll have to send you moral support or books to break up the monotony.

  Do they really only let you have family as visitors? Today is a third Sunday and I wonder if you are having a picnic under your mimosa. This is a rather bad period in my life too, and I wish I could sit there and talk to you.

  My thirteen-year-old son is here with me but is soon going west. He adores Mississippi. But I’m afraid this may be the last summer he’s going to come where there is so little to do of a sophisticated nature; he spends time now trying to ride cows, shooting snakes, dissecting frogs, blowing up things with firecrackers, which he can’t have in the East, and just roaming around in general with a BB gun which he can’t have at home either; he’s acquired a twenty-two but can only shoot it at targets in the pasture. I tell him there are places in Mississippi, like the Delta, where more is going on than old men sitting on store porches playing checkers, but he’s yet to see anything else. Once he’s gone, I’ll spend most of my time alone in a somewhat remote rundown cabin. Sometimes I feel a bit scared, though I have a little mutt who’s a tough watchdog, and I get a bit lonely. However, I decided this is what I want to do so can’t complain. I think solitude’s good for a writer’s soul.

  Is it possible for me to come there? I have a list of books I’d send, but I don’t know if you like to read.

  I thought, at first, that was a rosebud printed on the stationery and I wondered, How incongruous can they get? But I’ve decided it’s a cotton boll. I’ll be here till shortly after Labor Day and hope to hear from you again.

  Laurel

  Women went on vacations, but housework followed. She complained about the piddling things she had to do. There was a nice feeling, though, when the griddle was clean and the warped floors swept. Even as the toilet bowl came clean, she gave a nod of approval. She took down Rick’s clothes from a clothesline outdoors. Their clean scent seemed a compliment. She did not mind crinkled, reddened hands. Maybe she should only have been a housewife; she did not knock the profession. She watched the cabin’s owner, Clarence Lee, out in the pasture castrating bulls in his homemade stockade. She hated the single sharp, surprised bellow. Why did he have to do this so often? Maybe Mabel cut off his balls at home. He often made a fire and suggested Laurel join him for “prairie oysters,” a delicacy served down at Neiman-Marcus, he said; she declined. She inverted Rick’s socks into one another after finding them mates. I was trained to do nothing in this world after Miss Poindexter’s School for Girls and a liberal arts college education, she thought.

  Even so, one thing she could never have done was return to Delton as an unwed mother. She could never have told her parents she was pregnant. What would have happened back in Greenwich Village if William had not stood by her? William did not have his usual humor when he brought up the night he assumed she got pregnant. The night she let the douche bag slip off the shower rod and fall on her head, he said. She might have been amused, but William held grudges. He’d never forget, he had said, with his look later thunderous, how she came crying out of the bathroom with her hair sopping wet.

  She did not chastise William for the time back in that same Village apartment when he almost made her electrocute herself. She told him by phone the light in her closet was out and she did not know whether the current was on or off. “Well, stand in a bucket of water,” he had said. Later, she told him it had been too much trouble to borrow a bucket and fill it, so she just changed the bulb. “Jesus Christ,” William had said.

  Before knowing William, she had begun sitting in her Village apartment occasionally cradling an imaginary infant in her arms, completely taken by surprise by her longing for a baby. Married to William, at her first dinner party at his mother’s when Laurel was passed a dish, she had asked, “What’s this?” A startled look crossed Mrs. Perry’s face before she answered, “Chutney.” It did not matter much that Mrs. Perry showed obvious surprise at her daughter-in-law’s ignorance. When she needed Mrs. Perry, her mother-in-law had proved herself a champion. She wrote to apologize about the embarrassment of the baby coming too soon, and Mrs. Perry replied by special delivery she’d personally punch in the snout anyone who mentioned the date of that child’s birth. Her own mother wrote that Laurel always had been selfish and had taken away any joy in her being a grandmother for the first time.

  Laurel watched Rick come along with a snake draped over the barrel of his gun. She was grateful for his different past. As a toddler he knew already the fork and spoon at the top of his plate were for dessert, a practice she had learned in Boston. But when she realized her mother had brought herself up out of this countryside, Laurel had more compassion.

  She recalled a formal dinner party in Delton when she was of college age, when a white-coated black man presented the entrée on a silver platter. She had served herself and felt him stand behind her rearranging the serving utensils she had replaced incorrectly.
But she had felt everyone else at that table was watching. The party had been held at the home of someone kin to Hal MacDonald, one of those wide-ranging tangled Southern relationships, because she remembered the host’s first name was MacDonald.

  As they drove along the Mississippi roads to Allie’s ice cream party, Laurel considered that most of her life she had felt herself heading upstream, alone. Often, she wondered that people she dealt with in publishing did not see down to her true, ignorant, inner depth. So long had she lived, when she was young, in an environment without culture that there was no way she could catch up. She remembered, though, when she and William married and he started his job at Events-Empire, he’d stood with his briefcase, saying, “I’m going somewhere in this world, and you can come along or not.” She had looked at him in silence, thinking she’d arrived somewhere already and did not see why he might think she’d lag behind. However, it did not seem a wifely comment.

  She and Rick stopped on the way for Miss Mamie’s famous mousetrap cheese, but also because a van was parked near the store saying county dogs could be vaccinated there. An elderly gray-haired black man came out, holding a big dog on a rope with a collar saying King. “We gone to the dawgs today,” he called out. Inside, Miss Mamie was disappointed about cutting her cheese; it kept crumbling. “It hasn’t been out of the box long enough. And honey, I wanted it to look so nice for you.” Laurel and Rick enjoyed her handmade signs: for sale she had Hair Gromer and Congeled Salad. “A long way from Soundport,” he said, coming outside. They drove on eating crumbly cheese Miss Mamie wouldn’t take money for, enjoying it, as Buff did. Rabbits made crazy running patterns all down the roads, between ditches laden with kudzu. When they went up to Allie’s, widows of Laurel’s uncles were sitting under oak trees; they had never seemed anything but blood kin. Sitting on the ground, Laurel suddenly asked what her mother had been like as a girl here.