A Secret Rage (2 page)

Thoughtful silence.

‘Hmmm. Were you serious, in your last letter, about wanting to go back to finish college?’

‘I’ve thought about it,’ I admitted cautiously. ‘Why?’

‘Then why don’t you come live with me and finish school at Houghton?’

I pantomimed amazement for my own benefit, staring at the receiver and holding it away. Then I pressed it close to my ear again, lit a cigarette, and quit fooling. ‘Are you serious? You’re serious.’

‘I mean it,’ Mimi said. ‘I’m selling my house. I can’t stand to live in it anymore, after two bad marriages. I’m moving into Grandmother’s house, she left it to me. I had planned on selling it, but I just haven’t been able to bring myself to actually list it with a realtor. Then I thought yesterday, “Aha! I’ll just move into it myself!” I’ll be a lot closer to campus, and I’ve always loved that house.’

‘Me too,’ I said, and the memories began to crowd in. The high ceilings, the large rooms . . .

‘—but you know, it’s real big. We wouldn’t fall all over each other, and you could go to Houghton. I have furniture and you have furniture and we ought to be able to fill up the house between us.’

‘What happened to all Celeste’s furniture?’

‘Oh, she left different pieces to different people: the great-aunts, Cully, Mama, and Daddy. After all, I got the house. Can I have the top story? I’ve lived in a ranch style so long. I want to be up in the treetops and climb stairs.’

‘You can have whatever you want; it’s your house,’ I said unguardedly.

‘Yahoo!’

What had I done? I couldn’t possibly . . . I opened my mouth to retract, but then I snapped it shut. I pinched myself. I listened to Mimi’s beautiful southern voice running on and on. I ached to see her. I imagined hearing only that accent around me – no more squawking blue jays. I thought of the old woman dead on the sidewalk. I imagined walking down the street
unafraid
. I remembered my agent’s copper fingernail waving in my face. I thought of the heap of typing paper lying pristine in my top desk drawer, and I wondered if the discipline of study and the stimulation of reading other writers would give my writing a better chance of success. I thought of clean air, and space, and jonquils, and Mimi’s laughter. Knolls, Tennessee.

I’d been desperately homesick, and I hadn’t known it until this moment.

‘Do you really mean it?’ Mimi was asking anxiously.

‘Why not?’ I said, after one more second’s hesitation.

‘Oh, when? When?’ she asked jubilantly.

‘Let me get to work on it.’ I ripped the list of my assets off the pad; it had lost its interest. I began a new one: lease, movers, Con Ed, Bell, post office. The pad was filling up even as I spoke.

Over all those miles, Mimi said accusingly, ‘Nickie! Quit making one of your lists and give me a time estimate! I have to move my own stuff, too!’

‘I’ll call you back tomorrow,’ I promised. ‘Can I have that bedroom by the stairs?’

‘You can have any room in the house.’

When I hung up, I was tingling with excitement. Out of New York. A complete change. I took a moment of peace before the scurry began, to think of how I would arrange my furniture in my bedroom-to-be – the big one off the hall on the ground floor. It was difficult to visualize it empty.

When Mimi and I had spent the night with Grand-mother Celeste, we had always had that bedroom off the hall. We’d slept in a beautiful four-poster. Every night we’d crawled into that bed we’d felt like princesses; safe and beautiful and destined for everlasting fame. In the summer, we’d switch on the fan and watch it circle against the ceiling. In the winter, there was a beautiful old hand-stitched quilt that Celeste’s mother had made . . . Even as we grew older we still felt the same about that bed.

All those years and seasons.

We had met, Mimi and I, when we were fourteen – thrown together as terrified roommates at Miss Beacham’s Academy for Girls in Memphis. I was from a small town in northern Mississippi. As our yearbook put it, Mimi ‘hailed’ from Knolls, Tennessee, east of Memphis. Her christened name was Miriam Celeste Houghton, which I decided was beautiful and romantic. I disliked my own, Nichola Lynn Callahan; I thought it sounded like my parents had wanted a boy.

Mimi Houghton had Background. In Knolls, there was a Houghton Street, a Houghton Library, and of course, Houghton College. Fortunately, I didn’t know any of this until Mimi and I were already close friends.

Mimi had come to Miss Beacham’s because her mother, Elaine, had gone to school there. I had been sent by my father, to keep me away from my mother, who was becoming an alcoholic.

I don’t know if Father was right to send me away or not. My mother’s drinking began to increase after I left home, as if my presence had been holding her in check. But I guess she would have accelerated her drinking in time anyway. I try not to criticize Father in hindsight. He meant to protect me from ugliness. Then, too, the fights between Mother and me outweighed the pleasure he got from my company when I was home. He was a plain and straightforward man. He didn’t understand that the bitter scenes did not happen because I didn’t love my mother but because I did love her.

I suppose Mimi had explained my situation to her parents, Elaine and Don. They always made me welcome.

As my home gradually became a place to fear, a haunted house, I began to see my parents for only a couple of days each short vacation, maybe a couple of weeks during the long summer breaks. After my duty times at home, my father would drive me to Mimi’s. At first we were close on those drives; but as time passed, a silence fell between us. We couldn’t talk about the thing that most concerned us. He dreaded what he would find when he returned home. His hours at his law office lengthened and lengthened. He became well-to-do and far too busy. He probably suspected the condition of his heart, but he never mentioned it to me or my mother. Aside from making a will, he didn’t prepare for the cataclysm at all.

When I was a senior at Miss Beacham’s, my father died of a heart attack in his office. Six months later, my mother remarried. The tragedies were too close. I didn’t absorb either of them for years.

I went home once following my mother’s remarriage. I hoped she needed me despite her new husband, Jay Chalmers. The second day I was home, my mother left to attend some bridge-club function. Thank God the builder had installed sturdy doors with sturdy locks. I had to stay in the bathroom for two hours, until Jay passed out. (He drank, too.) It was mostly dirty talk, and a clumsy attempt to kiss me; but quite enough, from an older man, to terrify a seventeen-year-old. Though he hadn’t managed to lay a finger on me, I felt dirty and guilty; I was very young. That evening, I packed my bags and made Mother take me to the bus station. I trumped up a story about having forgotten some school committee meeting for which I had to return early. When Mimi came back from her own weekend at home, I told her what had happened. Then I threw up.

I’d always planned on going to Houghton College with Mimi. Since the college had been founded by her great-grandfather, naturally she had been enrolled from birth. But Mother and Jay were spending Mother’s portion of what my father had left as if there were no tomorrow; and since I wouldn’t inherit my share till I became twenty-one, I had no money of my own yet. His own shame and guilt having crystallized into hostility, Jay told me there just wasn’t enough for Houghton’s steep tuition. So I enrolled in an obscure, cheaper college, living carefully and earning a little extra from modeling for department stores and regional magazine ads, as I’d begun doing at Miss Beacham’s.

One of the store buyers casually remarked that I should go to New York and try my hand at professional modeling. The idea took hold. I needed a change, and at that point college meant very little to me. I was about to turn twenty-one; and I’d be receiving a small steady income from investments my father had made in my name, plus a moderate lump sum.

I vividly remember calling Mimi in her dorm room at Houghton to tell her about my resolution. She was stunned by my courage. I was, too. It was the bravado of sheer ignorance. Even now, it seems amazing to me that the city didn’t chew me up and spit me out.

For the first two months, my heart was constantly in my mouth. Where I came from, New York qualified as a synonym for hell. It had the glamour of hell, though. Inadequately armed with a little money and a short list of names, I scuttled through the streets of the Big City.

Luckily for me, two of those names on my list paid off. A former fraternity brother of my father’s helped me find a place to live, fed me some meals and some invaluable advice, and withdrew his hands when I shook my head. A connection of the buyer’s steered me to a reputable agency who liked my looks.

And I caught on. Within a year, I was able to move out of the hole I’d been sharing with three other women, into my own place. I slowly acquired the most beautiful furniture and rugs I could afford: that was very important to me. I bought books. I began to write a little myself. I imagine I was trying to refute the ‘beautiful but dumb’ image that clings to models.

That year was a golden year. I was given up utterly to the mirror.

Toward the end of that year, which had been a big one for Mimi too, I returned to Knolls for her first wedding. The groom was a down-home good ol’ boy she’d met at Houghton.

In a moment of absolute insanity, I picked an outrageous dress to wear to the rehearsal dinner. I was far too full of myself as a glamorous model. That dress was the most serious social mistake I had ever made.

I brazened it out, though I almost began screaming the fifth time I heard Mimi’s mother murmur, ‘Well, you know, she
is
a New York model.’ (Elaine was defending Mimi, not me.) I realized that for years I would be ‘that friend of Mimi’s who wore that dress to Mimi’s rehearsal dinner.’ I knew my home ground.

I drank too much that night, rare for me with Mother’s example before my eyes. And I alternated sulking with self-reproach all the way back to New York.

At Mimi’s second wedding – the good ol’ boy had lasted eight months, Mimi’s mother talked the marriage to death – I wore a completely proper, even severe, outfit. Even after the passage of two years, I wasn’t
about
to forget my lesson. It did help a lot; I read that in the approving smiles and extra pats on the shoulder, the little nods the ladies gave each other. But my redemption had less exposure than my damnation, since this was a much smaller wedding, of course. It was ‘solemnized’ in the living room of Celeste’s big house.

Since Mimi was coming down the stairs alone, having vetoed attendants altogether, I sat with Celeste. We skirted our fears for Mimi (we didn’t like Richard, we had decided after a little conference) by laying bets on how long the marriage would last. Celeste bet on Richard’s doing something unforgivable in the first two years. I laid my money on Mimi’s pride and gave it three.

The marriage dragged on for almost four years; and when Richard decamped to Albuquerque, Celeste post-humously owed me five dollars.

AS A CHILD
, I’d always imagined that the Memphis airport looked like champagne glasses cast in concrete. I still thought of it that way, though I was now far more familiar with champagne glasses.

It was a pleasure to be in it again, a delight to see Mimi waiting for me as I emerged from the gate. We held each other tight with a pure joy I had almost forgotten.

When I stepped out of the terminal, I knew I was home. There’d been tinges of fall in New York. It was hot as hell, full summer, in Memphis. I began sweating as we loaded my bags into the trunk of Mimi’s Chevrolet. The sweat became the signal of homecoming. I took a deep lungful of the heavy humid air that clings to the skin like a soggy body stocking.

After the initial shrieking and hugging and inquiries about my trip, Mimi and I were a little shy with each other. To get past the inevitable period of adjustment to each other’s physical presence, Mimi told me about the changes in Memphis. The Peabody Hotel had been reopened. The population had grown. The crime rate was up. Elvis Presley’s death had gradually made Whitehaven, suburban site of Gracelands, a traffic nightmare and a tourist trap. But Memphis would always be dear to us from our years at Miss Beacham’s.

‘And Knolls?’ I asked. ‘How many Seven-Elevens now?’

‘One bona fide and two imitations. Quickie Snackie Pickies, or Stomp ’n Grabs, or some such abominations,’ Mimi said sadly. ‘And a Burger King, and a Hardee’s, and two McDonald’s – I guess because of the college. But they can’t come close to the campus,’ she said in clear triumph. ‘It’s all residential for blocks. Zoned, by God! Signed, sealed, and delivered!’

Getting Knolls zoned had been Mimi’s latest battle. No one had ever seen the need before.

‘Maybe a little inconvenient for students without a car,’ I suggested, pokerfaced.

‘Tough luck,’ said Mimi callously, scanning her entrance to the expressway with care. And quite rightly: Memphis drivers tend to have very individual styles.

She expanded on the zoning battle when we were safely heading east. The whole brouhaha had been set off – the gauntlet flung down – when Mimi had discovered a restaurant owner was trying to buy one of the very few rundown houses close to Houghton College, with the vile purpose of converting it into a so-called student hangout.

‘With an
amusement arcade
,’ Mimi told me grimly.

When I laughed, she stared at me indignantly before she began laughing too. At that moment, I felt we’d never been apart.

Mimi is a sort of hybrid, like a lot of young southern women. Like me. She is part carefully bred elitist, though she tries very hard not to be, and she is also a partisan who believes fervently that women are equal to (or better than) men in most ways. The clash and combination of these two parts of Mimi have produced an unpredictable woman. I never knew which half would win out in any given internal argument between the two parts of my friend. I only knew that the partisan side had an awful habit of vanishing when Mimi cared for a man. Mimi was always the most traditional bride and wife imaginable. Blushes, deference, hot suppers every night. In one of my stupider moments, between husbands one and two, I had – gently, I thought – pointed this out to Mimi. It took her three weeks to forgive me.