Nora, Nora

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Why, he’s handsome, she thought in surprise. And Nana is beautiful. Why didn’t I see it before? And Chloe says I look like them. Does that mean that one day…?

  But Peyton knew that her own pale McKenzie features would never draw together into a face like theirs, knew that her own milky gray eyes would never flame or freeze.

  “That is enough, Augusta,” her father said, and Aunt Augusta dropped her eyes. Soon after, she gathered up her ubiquitous shopping bags and went home. Peyton felt exultation at her aunt’s virtual banishment and decided that she would visit her grandmother that afternoon and tell her about it. She said as much to Clothilde, who sighed.

  “What y’all talk about all that time?” she said. “Seem to me your grandmother don’t know no living folks anymore.”

  “No, but she tells me wonderful stories about our own people who have…gone on, and about the other great clans.…Did you know we’re proper clan members, with our own tartan and everything? All of them were heroes. They all died with honor and glory. And they’re not really dead, not to her. She says they’re with her a lot of times when we don’t see them. That’s who she’s talking to when we think she’s talking to herself. She says one day I’ll hear them, too, and maybe see them. She thinks I’m going to have the Sight when I’m older.”

  Chloe put down her iron and looked at her.

  “Maybe your aunt is right, Peyton,” she said. “Maybe you ought to spend some time with other people, folks your age. I ain’t afraid of your grandmother, I like her, and I believe it when she say she see and hear stuff. Some of my people did that, too. But it ain’t what you ought to be doing right now in your life. Look at you: you don’t talk about much but your mama and your brother and you don’t see many people but your grandmother and that Ernie and my own po’ little Boot…and y’all spend all afternoon in the cemetery. You just too young to spend your life with dead folks. Pretty soon you won’t know what’s real anymore.”

  “That’s just silly,” Peyton said, and she went upstairs and put on her blue jeans and climbed the dogwood tree at the side of the house to the tree house where she spent a great deal of her time, and she opened her book. She had just discovered The Catcher in the Rye and knew Holden Caulfield’s great otherness in her own bones and felt that somehow this book was going to change her life.

  But she did not read after all. Instead, Peyton sat in her tree eating an apple and thinking, for the first time, about her life with the vivid dead.

  2

  Peyton watched her movies again that night after supper, after her father went out to his office over the garage to polish up the Sunday-school lesson he would teach the next morning at the First Methodist Church of Lytton (if there had ever been a second one, Peyton knew nothing of it).

  She went into her room behind the cavernous downstairs bathroom and pulled the old projector out of her closet and hung a white sheet on the door. The nails had been there a long time; her father had never noticed them, and Clothilde never mentioned them. All Peyton had to do was pull out the sheet that she kept folded in her underwear drawer and hang it up. The sheet had had nail holes in it for as long as the nails had been up.

  She had volunteered to learn to use the old school projector when she was in the fourth grade, surprising everyone but herself. One or two near-invisible students who never did much else were the official projectionists each year; it gave them a sort of inverted cachet to know how to do something the iron-hard farm kids and the ace softball players and the budding cheerleaders did not. To be a volunteer projectionist at Lytton Grammar School was to be a pariah, but it was to be a visible one. None of the others in their short memories could remember Peyton McKenzie’s volunteering for anything.

  She proved to be deft and quick-handed with the wheezing old machine, and for the past three years had been the one excused from her classes to come and thread up and show the jackrabbitting films on the agriculture of the Urals and the Battle of Agincourt and, at Christmas, for everyone except the smallest children, A Christmas Carol. The only films she did not show were the coy ones entitled Personal Hygiene and Now You’re Growing Up, which the Fulton County Board of Education had recycled every year for the past twenty. Indeed, in that year of Our Lord 1961, a few native Lytton youngsters still attained puberty wondering what the blood and the hair and the nocturnal emissions had to do with flowers and butterflies and bees.

  Peyton didn’t care about that, or about any of the other films she showed in the darkened classrooms. She cared about learning how to use the projector and how to thread the big spools of film, and what to do when the film inevitably snapped or frizzled or got caught in the guts of the machine. By now she could have set up and operated the equipment in her sleep, and in fact often did do so in the dark, when her father thought she was sleeping. His bedroom, the one he had shared with Peyton’s mother, was upstairs and in the front of the house, overlooking Green Street. He might have noticed the glow from Peyton’s bedside lamp reflected on the great oaks outside, but he could not have seen the silent snow of the film’s light.

  Peyton showed herself her movies on the average twice a week. She had found the projector and a screen and the cans of film one day when she was poking around in the spider room, a forbidden concrete-floored cubicle at the back of the garage where her father had once seen a black widow spider. She had asked him about them that night, and he had said that they were old home movies, so faded and brittle that no one could make head or tails of them now. He had, he said, forgotten they were there.

  “Movies of what?” Peyton asked.

  “Oh, you know. Things around town. This house. The Hendershots’ house back behind us. Mr. and Mrs. Hendershot’s mules, Cadillac and Hannah. I don’t know if you remember them; you were real small when the Hendershots sold them. The church, and Nana’s farm. Nana and Grandpa.”

  “And us? Are we there?”

  “Well…there are a few of your mother and your brother and me. A dog we used to have, a beagle named Nosy. Some birthdays and Christmases and things.…”

  “And me? Are there any of me?” Peyton asked. The question was like running a tongue over a sore tooth. She knew the answer.

  “Well, you weren’t born yet. About that time I moved my office out to the garage and the movie stuff got put away and I just forgot about it. I didn’t even remember where it was until you found it today. What were you doing in the spider room, anyway?”

  “Just looking,” Peyton mumbled. There was warm salt stinging her eyes and nose. She knew that the reason her father had never made movies of her was that the pale little life that had taken that larger, singing one was nothing to be recorded. But after that the movies drew her like a magnet, and it was the next week that she volunteered for projectionist at school. After two or three weeks of practice, she went out to the garage while Frazier was in Atlanta at the Fulton County Court-house doing a title search, and she moved the projector and the film into her room. She kept the projector behind her long winter coat and raincoat in the closet, and the round, flat cans of film under her bed. Twice a week Peyton lay in the dark and watched a world without her whir and flicker against her wall.

  She always thought of these showings as a journey with only one direction in which she could travel. There were no alternate routes and no shortcuts. First she would put on the footage of Lytton and study the flickering images of her hometown as though she would, this time, find something new there, something that would fit her neatly into its small context. She did not know who had made the town films. Her mother or father, probably. They were fairly steady and had a logical progression to them, as if, watching them, you were actually traveling through Lytton coming in from the north on the old Roosevelt Highway from Atlanta. First the Ford tractor dealership, and then Mr. Cornelius Chatteron’s filling station, then the town’s one prized traffic light and the first railroad underpass off to the left, where the Atlanta and West Point trains crossed through and out of Lytton, their scornful whistle
s trailing behind. Then the post office and the dry cleaners’—hissing clouds of steam and smelling powerfully of benzine—and then the rest of the small businesses and services that made up Lytton’s Main Street, all ranged along one side of the street because the railroad tracks and depots occupied the other, along with a small, ill-kept park featuring a dingy, phalluslike monument to the town’s World War I dead. There were a tiny grocery, a hardware store, a barbershop, a butcher shop with its floor thickly felted with sawdust smelling of chilled blood, a lunchroom with a poolroom in back, and a drugstore with a black marble soda fountain and wire racks of comic books where children could and did sit on the floor, hidden from the view of the weary clerk, and read everything new that came in. There were a ten-cent store, the Lytton Banking Company, a seldom-visited insurance office, the town municipal offices, and the solitary wooden movie theater that when Peyton was small had showed movies from Thursday evening through Saturday, with an afternoon cowboy matinee. The less seemly but still essential business of Lytton was conducted down small side streets, some barely paved. The yellow brick jail was there, with its stinking component of three cells that had harbored Lytton’s drunk and disorderly and its out-of-season hunters for nearly a century. And the funeral home, a big, peeling white house that had been someone’s home in the last century and still, to Peyton, looked like a place where people lived instead of died. The South Fulton County Public Health Department, where inoculations and not much else were dispensed. The old icehouse, where, also in Peyton’s childhood, families could rent storage space and hang whole sides of beef and skinned hog carcasses until they were needed.

  The individual professional offices were upstairs above the businesses on Main Street: old Dr. Carither’s office; another attorney’s office to take care of whatever scant litigiousness arose in Lytton; and a dark-paneled dentist’s office that somehow always smelled of hot, just-drilled dentin and was universally feared and loathed among the young of Lytton. There was a beauty shop up there, too, to which the ladies of Lytton climbed on dark stairs, their heads wrapped in kerchiefs, only to come down again hours later with heads sporting tight, fried Medusa locks, smelling of rotten eggs. Peyton had always heard that there was a pawnshop up there somewhere, but she had never seen it.

  She could not have said when the movies of the town were made. They had no human figures in them. It was as if someone had made a tour of the town for posterity and somehow edited out all life; it might have been an architectural travelogue, except that there was little architecture in Lytton to study or celebrate. She rather thought her father had done the filming; it became, in her mind, a kind of loving ritual he had performed early in the life of his family, to record a world for the rest of them so that when they came into the films they would know where they were and be easy with the knowing. Because very little in Lytton had changed appreciably since the middle thirties, aside from the addition of some businesses and another traffic light, the Lytton of Peyton’s time was the Lytton of her family’s time, too, and that soothed her obscurely. In her mind, when she thought about Lytton, Georgia, it was a town of erratic sepia images bathed in silence, sometimes so vivid that the present-day town surprised her in its eye-jarring garishness and mundanity. Peyton’s reel world was also her real one.

  When she had reassured herself that the town in the films was still as it had been the last time she looked, she let herself follow the camera down the side streets, where people actually lived; these sequences she knew that her father had taken, from some unremembered automobile, because people on the sidewalks and front porches waved and called out, and she could see, rather than hear, the shape of his name on their mouths: “Frazier McKenzie, put that thing away.” “Aren’t you a little old to be playing with movies, Frazier?”

  He was greeted with familiarity on the shaded street where her parents lived, by children on bicycles in the streets around, by the iceman in his truck, by the paperboy, Cooper Freeman, by several trudging black men on their way downtown to buy groceries, and, finally, from the doorway of Peyton’s house itself, looking almost precisely as it did now except for the striped awnings over the front porch that had been there then and now were not, by her mother. Her mother, Lila Lee Peyton McKenzie, waving from the front door and laughing silently and doing a pantomime of a movie star being photographed. As always, when she reached this spot in the film, Peyton felt something loosen in her chest, something open, so that a relief that was so profound it almost brought her to tears flooded her. Once again she had traveled the road home, through the town, up and down the streets, passing by the people who had been the furniture of her parents’ and brother’s world but not of hers, and had come safely to this place where her mother smiled and held out her arms in welcome. It did not in the least matter to Peyton that the welcome was not for her. In the films and in her mind, it was always a sweet sepia summer, and time stopped itself on the walkway to her house, and she was home.

  Once she was safe, it was easy for Peyton to watch the other films, the ones she thought of as the Us Films. Most of them were, she knew, made by her father because they were of her mother, so young and light-struck and beautiful that she seemed to shimmer with color even though there was none on the film. Her mother, small and slender with a rounded bosom and delicate hands and feet, her blond hair a nimbus around her little cat’s face, her chin tipped back and her soft mouth wide open around her laughter. Her mother dancing to unheard music on the porch, her mother vamping for the camera in the backyard, where a barbecue was going on; her mother in a long velvet matron-of-honor’s dress at her Cousin Bootsie’s wedding in Gadsden, Alabama, eclipsing the entire wedding party, bride and all; her mother standing at the net at the little Lytton Country Club holding a tennis racket and smiling up at a tall, trim young man in tennis whites who had raised both hands and clasped them over his head in victory. He was dark and, Peyton thought, brooding and romantic-looking, as she imagined Heathcliff must have looked, and the one time she had asked her father about the scene, when he had showed it for her brother when he was home on his first furlough, he had said the young man was the tennis pro at the club, and had been teaching her mother tennis, and she was such a natural that soon they had played together in tournaments. Her father thought that in the film they had just won the all-club tournament. No, he didn’t remember much about the young pro, certainly not what had become of him after he moved on. The boy’s name, he thought, might have been Alvin. Peyton, who had fallen instantly in love with the young man and built an entire world around him, hoped not. Alvin was a drip’s name, a movie projectionist’s name. In her mind she called the young man Gregory.

  Soon her brother appeared, fat and blond and toddling stolidly around the big, flower-bordered backyard. Peyton knew that her mother had made these films, because in every one of them Buddy was attached in some way to his smiling father. Frazier McKenzie had been an attractive young man, Peyton thought, a little dour, maybe, with his long Scot’s nose and sharp chin, and the peat-dark hair falling over his gray eyes, but when he laughed—and in the films he was almost always laughing—his face lit up with something powerfully magnetic, and he had a loose-limbed, long-armed grace that made him seem a teenager. He almost was: Frazier McKenzie had married Lila Lee Peyton when he was twenty-two and she just eighteen, and he was still only twenty-four when Buddy was born. Peyton studied her father as closely as she did her mother, to try to find something in him that was hers alone, that had not first belonged to her mother or brother. She found nothing, ever, except a physical resemblance that would have better served her brother, who was the low, fair, square image of his mother. Her father’s looks had nothing at all to do with her essential Peytonness. On her, his long, thin arms and legs, the sharp, grave face, the light eyes and flyaway, smoky dark hair added up to nothing but plainness. Plainness, irredeemable and immutable.

  After an hour of Christmases and birthdays, in which Buddy grew to brick-solid prepuberty and stopped toddling and began thro
wing footballs and hitting baseballs a country mile, stopped being the heavy-bottomed cherub with his diaper down around his ankles, crowing in the flaccid surf on St. Simon’s Island, and became the heavy-jawed, frowning young nimrod, squinting into the distance with his first shotgun broken across his arm—here, Peyton always took a deep breath, stopped the film for a moment, and then set it in forward again.

  And there she was, in a Christmas group portrait posed before the big tree that always stood in the high-ceilinged foyer of the Green Street house, along with her father and her brother, all of them older and somehow softened, and a dog she would never know, a setter, looking, even then, faded and arthritic. There she was, in the middle of the tinsel and wrapping paper and the laughter and the soft Christmas morning light: a round melon, a hard knot of darkness in her mother’s stomach, the cancer that would soon end the movies for good and all.

  In the morning she got up and cut her hair. She did it swiftly and ruthlessly before the bathroom mirror, not meeting her own eyes, grasping each long braid and sawing it clumsily with the kitchen shears. She stood for a long moment, staring at the peat-brown ropes that had bound her to childhood, now lying on the worn linoleum, and then she lifted her head to the mirror.

  An apparition looked back. Peyton was breathing hard with the enormity of what she had done, and her mouth made an oval in her pale face, and her eyes looked blind and white like those of an archaic statue. Her hair hung in tattered hanks around her face, stopping a few inches below her ears, and somehow her thin neck stretched out like a Modigliani woman’s.

  Medusa, she thought suddenly. That’s who I look like. Medusa. Well, then, OK. If they try to get all over me I’ll turn them to stone.

  She grinned savagely into the mirror and nearly vomited with the sheer hideousness of her face and neck. How could the loss of two skinny pigtails have made this insane, malevolent difference in her?