Burnt Mountain

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I thought it unnatural, insane, almost revolting. But to my mother it was obviously the accepted norm for a maiden daughter. She inundated Lily with attention, questions, advice, unguents, powders, dresses; even when she was scolding Lily for some infraction or another… staying out too late, necking in the car in the driveway, hanging up rudely on an unlucky swain… my mother’s interest was obvious and all-consuming. It was territory that she knew, and she relished guiding her fledgling through it. I was thankful to the swaggering, neckless Goose that he waited almost until time for me to leave for Sherwood Forest this summer to snatch Lily up and whirl her away into eternal Goosehood. It spared me, I know, the eyes of dissatisfied motherhood turned on me in the useless determination to groom me as bride material. Once I overheard my mother say to my grandmother, “I could just kill Lily for throwing it all away on that… Cro-Magnon. Now I’ve got to start all over again with Thayer, and I might as well be trying to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.”

  “Oh.” Grandmother Caroline smiled her V-shaped smile. “I think you may be quite surprised at Thayer.”

  And when she found out, she was. Very surprised indeed. And outraged. Lily’s defection was absolutely nothing to the devastation of my eighteenth summer. It sundered our lives; it changed the maps of our territory forever. And yet if I had known how it would end when I first began to see Nick that summer I wouldn’t have changed anything I did. Anything we did. After my childhood Nick was the next thing for me. I could imagine nothing else. There could be no other.

  I said as much to my grandmother Caroline, shortly before she and my mother came up for Parents’ Day and met Nick. I had not talked of him at all with my mother. I knew that I would not. But I had to speak of him to someone. He spilled over and out of my heart and lips.

  “I told you I met this guy named Nick Abrams, didn’t I, Grand?” I said to her on one of my rare weekend visits home. Nick was in Atlanta with his father, firming up the trip to Europe. Camp felt so blasted and desolate without Nick that I simply went back to Lytton, taking a heart full of him with me.

  “Yes, you did.” She smiled. It was full summer and we were sitting on the screened porch. Outside, the garden burst with July. Wisteria tumbled over a live oak beside the house and cast a lavender shadow over my grandmother’s face. She sat still, not speaking, waiting.

  When I could not speak, could think of no way to give Nick over to her, she said, “He’s very important to you, isn’t he?”

  I nodded mutely. I felt my eyes fill with tears of frustration. How could I make anyone understand about him?

  She reached out and put her hand over mine. Hers was cool and white and soft; mine was brown and stubby and scabbed with scratches from oarlocks and rope burns. She picked it up and turned it over and kissed the callus on the inside that the weeks of handling reins had left there.

  “It’s a hardworking little hand,” she said, smiling as she laid it back down on my lap. “It’s a woman’s hand, a working woman’s. I’m proud of you, Thayer. You’re becoming just the young woman your father would have wanted you to be. I hope your Nick is worthy of you.”

  “Oh, Grand, he is!” I said, beginning to sob and not knowing why. “He’s worthy of a dozen mes, of anybody!”

  “Perhaps not just anybody, but he must be a fine young man for you to—”

  “Love him. I do love him. He loves me, too. It may sound silly and childish, and I know Mother would say exactly that, that nobody my age can really be in love. But I am. I do. I’ll never love anybody else like this again. I just can’t tell Mother. I don’t know if I could ever make her understand….”

  My grandmother reached up and pulled my head down to her shoulder, and I pressed it against her, feeling silk and smelling the Vetiver bath soap and powder that she used. A small, snotty sob exploded from me onto her peony-printed silk and I made as if to pull away, but she held me tighter.

  “I don’t think you should tell your mother,” she said, against my hair that was so like her own. “Not yet, anyway. Time for that later, when you’ve got everything worked out. I certainly believe that you’re old enough to be in love, and I can see that you are. Oh, my darling, it’s a glorious thing, to love, but it can bring you great pain, too. That’s all I want you to promise me. That you’ll remember about the pain. Otherwise, you have my deepest blessings, and I will try very hard to walk with you when the time comes that you must tell your mother. You must know that’s not going to be an easy thing, no matter who your Nick is.”

  “I know. I know it won’t. All she’d have to do is meet him. If it was anybody but Mother, I know that’s all it would take. But I… How can she take me seriously when I haven’t ever had a boyfriend? And now I’m in love with somebody and I’m going to marry him—”

  “Well, not for a while, I hope. You both need college, no matter whether you think you do or not. I gather you’ve both made college plans?”

  “Of course not until after college, Grand.” I hiccupped. The knots in my chest that had coiled there medusa-like were loosening. Talking to Grandmother Caroline always did that for me.

  “He was going to Yale architecture school, but he’s transferring to Georgia Tech, and the fall quarter starts right after he gets home from Europe. I know Mother thinks I’m going to Georgia State this fall, but I’m going to try to talk her into Agnes Scott. That way we can see each other almost every day. I’m not going to live at home. I’m just not.”

  “You shouldn’t, anyway,” Grand said. “It’s time you got out from under our wings. Not that we don’t love you, but we need to start letting you go. I’ll talk to Crystal about it. I’m sure if I pay your tuition there’s not a lot she can say about it.”

  “Grand, you don’t have to—”

  “Shhhh. Yes, I do. This is one thing I have always wanted to do. This is one thing in my life I will do. I’d have loved to see you at Smith or Wellesley, but Agnes Scott will do nicely. I was never going to let you go to Georgia State.”

  I rested against her, breathing quietly, smelling wisteria and Vetiver.

  “I wish you’d been my mother,” I said.

  I felt rather than heard her laugh.

  “And you’d have just had to find somebody else to run to when things got… puzzling. It’s almost never your mother, darling. Almost never. Mothers are givers of roots, seldom wings.”

  And when my mother came home from her hairdresser’s I was able to hug her and smile and say, “Yes, I just had a free weekend and wanted to see y’all…. Yes, I’m really enjoying it. I got a counselor’s medal in campfire and riding.”

  “Yes, and just look at your hands,” my mother said, pulling one of them close to her face. She needed glasses, I knew, but only wore them when she was alone. “They look like a field hand’s. Run up to my bedroom and get me some of that Dior lotion; it’s in the pink bottle….”

  Later, lying in bed lotioned and pin-curled, I stared into the milky darkness over the tree line where soon the moon would pour through. I smiled in the dark. It would work out. It was going to work out. Grand said it would.

  Grand knew.

  On our last day together at Sherwood Forest, Nick and I sat together on the steps of the big red boathouse, where all the Sherwood Forest canoes and kayaks and small sailboats were kept. He wore tan chinos and a white oxford-cloth shirt and had a dark blue summer-weight blazer slung over his arm. I had never seen him in anything but Silverlake shorts and shirts… or, on a few occasions, nothing. His thick copper-brown hair was slicked back and showed wet comb tracks, and he was clean shaven, as he said, to baby-butt pinkness. Usually he was stubbled by the time I saw him. He was grown-up that day, a young man I did not know. I kept cutting my eyes at him to see if this was the same Nick who laughed and danced with me and teased me and kissed me and in the dark arms of the top bunk of the empty cabin did other things to me, things that I had not known existed, that could ignite flesh to near fire, stop breath, explode deep inside me with stabbing sweetn
ess. I could never really believe we did those things. I? I who never even had held a man’s hand except my father’s? When Nick had kissed me for the first time, the night after the day we met, I had pulled my head away a little uncertainly, and he had let me go and said, “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to rush things,” and I said, “No, it’s just that I’ve never known where you put your noses. I could never figure out what people did with them.”

  “I’ll show you,” he said, laughing, and I saw at once.

  After the kisses there was no question of what would follow. It was I who urged it, pulling him so hard against me that I could feel his body heat through my shirt, whimpering, tugging at his clothes. I, who had felt scalded and a little sick when anyone spoke of “going all the way,” was the one who pulled him down onto me, wriggling my hips snakelike until my shorts and panties were off, thrusting myself up to receive him.

  “Are you sure? Are you?” he whispered against my face.

  “Oh, God, yes!” I cried.

  When it was over and I lay in his arms shaking like an ague victim, he said, “I would never do this if I wasn’t going to marry you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I sobbed. “I know.” And I did know, from that first night down to this last day.

  I did not say this now. I had said it last night, over and over again lying in his arms on the rough camp blanket on the top bunk, said it fiercely as he had kissed my face and neck softly and repeatedly, cried it out as he rocked me softly, faster and faster, until we could not speak at all, only cry out. After that, I simply lay in his arms and cried. He did not try to stop me. I think he cried a little, too.

  “The last time,” I sobbed, finally.

  “Only for here. The next time and the next and the next after that and so on will be even better. I’ll have been to Paree, where they know about these things. I’ll show you things you never dreamed of. Probably that I didn’t, either.”

  He laughed softly and rolled off me, and stood up and walked into the darkness behind the bunk. I could not see him; the near full moon had crested the lake, but not this hill, and he walked in darkness. I knew he had gotten up to dispose of the used condom. I felt a small surge of revulsion; I hated this side of sex. Practical, mechanical, messy, pedestrian. None of the things I associated with Nick. But he had been adamant from the beginning.

  “You think I like ‘em? No guy likes ‘em. They make the whole thing… something else. But I’ll never make love to you without one. I know guys who do it all the time, and it’s the most selfish thing they could possibly do. It puts the whole thing on the girl. I’ll stop using the damned things the night we decide to get pregnant, and not before.”

  I had my head on my knees today. I could see him, but only a little. We were waiting at the boathouse for the big tom-tom over at Silverlake to boom out over the water, his friend Charlie’s sign that Nick’s father had arrived to pick him up. They would drive down to Atlanta tonight and stay over at an airport hotel and leave very early for London and their voyage of discovery. Nick was packed up and signed out. He was leaving a week early; Charlie would take his place for the remaining week. I would not go until camp ended, another eight days for me. I did not know how I would stand them.

  “I wish we had one more night in the top bunk,” I said into the hair that hung over my face.

  “You wish! I wish we could do it right now, right here on this step, with both camps lined up on each side cheering us. Do it until the sun set and everybody had to go in to supper—”

  “Oh, stop! I can’t stand this,” I whispered.

  “It’s just a month, babycakes. One little month, and then I’ll come find you at Agnes Scott and you can sign out for a chamber concert at the auditorium and I can take you to Piedmont Park or somewhere….”

  I began to cry in earnest.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Wait a minute.”

  He stood up and fished something out of his pocket. He sat back down and said, “Stick out your feet.”

  “My feet?”

  “Just stick ‘em out.”

  I did, both feet, clad in white lace-up sneakers with rubber toes.

  He picked them up, one after another, and with the red felt-tip pen he had had in his pocket wrote Just on my left shoe and wait on the right.

  “You can explain it or not.” He grinned. “I wouldn’t. Drive your mother crazy. Probably lock you in the barn.”

  I sat up and he pulled me against him and rested his chin on my hair. I thought he could feel my heart pounding, but if he did, he did not mention it. We sat so for perhaps two or three minutes, rocking slightly to the slap of the water inside the boathouse, feeling the sun slide away from our faces and down toward the west. I wished that my life could end just then, just like that.

  Across the lake the big tom-tom spoke. It seemed to roll across to us on its own thunder. Then it boomed again.

  Nick kissed me on the top of my head, then lifted my face in his hand and kissed me again, long and soft and searchingly, on my mouth. I could feel it tremble and distort under his.

  “Don’t,” he whispered into my mouth. “Don’t, or I can’t do this.”

  “I’m okay,” I said, trying for perkiness. “As long as you don’t go doing this to those French girls…”

  “Fat chance,” he said, scrambling to his feet.

  We stood on the step, looking at each other, saying nothing. Then he kissed me swiftly on the cheek and ran down the steps to the red kayak beached on the sand. He was in it and had pushed off strongly before he looked back at me. I stood watching him, my hand lifted, not waving, just standing. Watching.

  “Just wait!” he called from far out, his hands cupped around his mouth. “Just wait!”

  I watched him until he was a red dot and then nothing at all, and then I looked down at my Magic Markered toes and sat down on crossed legs to wait.

  CHAPTER 7

  During my last week at Camp Sherwood Forest a murderous wave of heat coiled up from the south and buried everything in its path in a gagging miasma. Our mountain valley had seldom felt anything like it. Grass burnt brown; leaves wilted and curled; the surrounding evergreens were not stirred by so much as a breath of fresh air; the sky was lost in a dirty white, shimmering haze. It was hardly possible to continue outdoor activities; the horses foundered and the campers threw up after softball and hiking. Even swimming and sailing were like bathing in tepid bathwater. Some of the campers ended up in the infirmary, lying white and still under wet cloths on their foreheads, and many of the younger ones were taken home early. We suspended campfires for the time being; even after dark the heat sucked the life from us. The small television in the dining hall said that the area had reached 108 degrees and there was no sign of abatement. The directors decided to close camp a few days early and called parents to come and get their prostrate offspring before Sherwood Forest could be sued…. For what I could not imagine. A heat wave?

  Even I felt it, sunk as I was in the misery of Nick’s absence. The same nausea that dogged most of us pooled at the bottom of my tongue, making eating, even drinking water unpleasant, as the ice machines had given up. The cooks in the dining hall set out cold salads and sandwiches for meals. Attendance was down by at least a half by the time the first parents rolled in to collect their stricken young. I heard several of them remark that it was no cooler at home. This was usually followed by a sigh that I thought might have been translated “but at least we’ll all die together.”

  My grandmother sent Detritus up for me in the Mercedes, but she did not accompany him. She and my mother, I knew, were down at Grand’s house at Sea Island.

  “You stretch out there in the back and I turn up the air,” Detritus said sternly when I slumped into the car. “You don’t look so pert to me. Yo’ grandmother comin’ back on the train tonight, but yo’ mama gon’ stay on for a little. She say for you to stay in the house and don’t go runnin’ around town till she get back. Yo’ grandmother got one of them window a
ir conditioners for every bedroom, and it feel real good. I ain’t never seen no heat like this in all my born days.”

  I nodded and closed my eyes and let the blast of stale, chilled car air wash over me. It felt like pure heaven. After a while I pulled the old tartan car rug up over me and drifted off to sleep, the tires droning in my ears. It was a sound I could remember from childhood; I associated it with my father and the driving trips we took. I slept, not stirring, until the motor noise stopped abruptly and I heard the thunk of the emergency brake being pulled up.

  “Are we here?”

  “Yassum, we home. You go on in the house. Your grandmother say Juanita gon’ give you some supper and stay with you till she get home. I gon’ pick her up at Brookwood Station about ten.”

  It was still hot in the big white house, but not so suffocating with all the fans on. I almost tiptoed through the empty, darkened rooms. It felt utterly alien to come into this house with no one in evidence, with all the rooms dark and breath held, with no sound at all. I crept down the center hall into the kitchen, where I had seen a light under the door, but heard nothing. When I opened it, Juanita sat at the kitchen table, a fan trained on her, reading a movie magazine. Her hair was pinned up on her head and she wore one of Lily’s old flowered sundresses. She looked, I thought, ten times better than I did.

  “I got you some cold chicken and salad in the refrigerator,” she said. Juanita was not much on hellos or good-byes. “You go on up and I’ll bring it to you. I got you in Miss Lily’s room. The air conditioner is on.”

  “What’s wrong with my room?”

  “Your mama got some stuff piled up in there. We was gon’ to take it out before you came home, but you come so early…”

  Her tone rang with the grievance of my early homecoming. Still faintly sick and feeling as if I had done Juanita a discourtesy, I crept up the stairs and went into my sister’s room and crawled straight into the bed without turning on the lights. In a minute, I thought. In a minute I’ll get up and unpack and all that stuff….