A Southern Exposure (16 page)

“Oh, that
is
wonderful!” exclaims Cynthia as her whole heart sinks. “How marvelous for both of you—I mean so kind of Russ, and it must be such a help to you.”

“Oh, it is! Just the greatest! Russ is a wonderful teacher.”

•  •  •

Later, lying in bed and fighting sleeplessness, Cynthia is aware that she overdid the enthusiasm with Jimmy; she babbled, she knows she did, but at the moment she could not help herself. For all the time he was talking she was inwardly crying out, Why? Why Jimmy? Russ and I could be involved in that way, I could be writing something and we could be talking about it, he could be teaching me.

And the terrible answering voice, the sleep-preventing voice, which is always right, responds: You read a lot, and you think about writing, but you never do it. Jimmy does. You just want time alone with Russ. Romantically.

And now SallyJane is coming back.

And Harry might fall in love with someone in Washington, and never come back.

And you may never sleep, not again in your life.

SallyJane, formerly Brett, is perfectly happy just now. Perfectly. On this day, which is the day before she is to drive up to Pinehill with Dr. Drake. With “Clyde”? Does she call him Clyde now that he is coming to her house, more or less as a friend?

The drive will take about four hours, which seems to SallyJane infinite, an infinite gift of time. So much can be said in those four hours. “Unless we hit bad weather,” he (“Clyde”) has warned. “Then, of course, it could take a little longer.”

And so SallyJane prays for rain. But she dreams of snow. A heavy fall of snow, maybe beginning just as they leave the sanatorium, beginning with light innocuous-seeming flakes, nothing to deter them, and then gradually
increasing, slowly turning into heavy, blinding snow; they are gradually forced off the road, perhaps into a small sheltering grove of pines, the boughs becoming laden. Bent down and huge, enclosing.

She imagines their conversation, in the closed-in car, in the snow.

“Are you warm enough?”

“Well—”

“I have this brandy, just in case.”

“But I’m not supposed to drink, remember?”

“Well, as of right now you’re not a patient, you’re just a good friend, and may I say a lovely woman? Whom I’m lucky enough to have along on this trip.”

That last surely has the sound of Dr. Drake, SallyJane notes; she feels that she is good at this.

And she wonders if this is what Russ does. Does he think of someone and then just listen to the words that come out of that mouth? She doubts that that is how it works with Russ, for how could he think of large dark fat silent Ursula, from Kansas, and hear poetry?

After the conversation, in the car, she imagines a lot of kissing with Dr. Drake—with Clyde, and she hopes she has not had enough brandy to make her sick; sometimes that is not a good combination, sex and booze, she knows that from some of the parties in California, when she was so nervous that she drank a lot, and then, surprisingly, Russ, in bed, would want to do it.

But Clyde is a doctor; she could tell him how she feels. Although she never would, of course not. Especially when she is with him as not-a-patient.

In the meantime, in the real world, like a young girl she washes and brushes her hair; she does her nails and rubs heavy cold cream into her face and neck. Her fair skin
tends to be dry, especially in winter, and like everything else this condition gets worse with age.

She is getting more boring too, with age, SallyJane believes. She does not know how Dr. Drake bears it, listening to her for those couple of hours a week. She talks sometimes about her parents (because she has read that she is supposed to). She talks about growing up over there in Hilton, a long time ago. The president’s daughter, and always such a disgrace to him, as she now seems disgraceful to Russ, she supposes. Such a rude, aggressive, assertive little girl. Never “sweet” like all the other little girls her parents often saw, the daughters of their friends. “We saw little Ruthie last night, the sweetest prettiest little thing, so adorable, so polite.” Privately, SallyJane has concluded that this is not good for children, these constant and invariably unfavorable comparisons—she would never do such a thing with Melanctha, nor with the boys. But she has not mentioned these child-rearing ideas of hers to Dr. Drake; he would probably agree with everyone else that her parents were only acting for the best. And look at her kids: they’re not exactly models of wonderful behavior either, and no one would ever call Melanctha “sweet.”

Just thinking of her own parents, even now, fills SallyJane, literally
fills
her, with a heavy, familiar, hard-to-name, and quite intolerable emotion. “Terror” and “guilt” are the words that come closest, although she has never really tried to describe what she feels. Certainly not to Dr. Drake, and never to Russ. She thinks of her mother’s tears, her wild, wild sobs, and her streaked red hating face, of her mother’s ugly sagging dark aging body—and of her father’s remote sad elegance. How terribly unhappy she made them both.

Curiously, it does not occur to SallyJane that her parents made her even unhappier than they themselves were—and that they were the stronger, powerful ones.

Talking about her parents does not seem to get her far with Dr. Drake, even when she tries to.

And talking about Russ is not a great deal better, although at least she can tell that Drake is interested. He seems curious, and he asks a lot of questions, some of which SallyJane is unable to answer. How many poems does Russ usually write each month? How much does he usually get paid for a Hollywood script? And so at last SallyJane tells him, “I just don’t know too much about Russ’s work. But you could ask him if you wanted to. I know he’d love to talk to you.” She does not know this at all, but she believes that her saying it had something to do with Dr. Drake’s decision to drive her up to Pinehill.

She does not talk much about her delusion-suspicion about Russ and Deirdre Yates, and that boy looking so much like Russ. She does not want to appear a jealous wife. Delusional. It is all she can do to admit unhappiness. And she does not do that very well. She does not, cannot make it interesting. Russ. Five children. A too large house. Cooking. The weather. Does all that make a normal person unhappy? She is quite sure that it does not. Would not.

Of course the next day it does not snow, how could it? It is a beautiful clear sunny day. All over Southern Pines the sand is bright white, and all the pine needles glistening green.

The first thing that Dr. Drake says to SallyJane (never Brett, not anymore) is about her hair. “Your hair in the sunlight,” he says. “It’s so—so bright. Spun gold.”

So pleased that she is unable to respond (how lucky she washed her hair!), SallyJane smiles, and she gets into his car with him, as, smiling, he nods and opens the door for her. “This is great,” he says. “You know, I feel like a boy on a date. Or maybe a kid just let out of school.”

A good start! (Too good?) But, riding along, SallyJane is almost instantly queasy. Dear God, she may throw up. Carsick, as she was as a child, so often. And how angry they were about that, all her family. As Dr. Drake will be, she knows, if she manages to spoil his day; that was what her mother always said, or sometimes her father, about her spoiling their days. Always about “managing,” as though she had intended to be sick.

SallyJane puts her head close to the window, breathes deeply of fresh air.

“You’re not going to be carsick, are you?” Dr. Drake laughs, as though this were impossible, such a childish thing: grownups don’t get carsick. But he adds, “I can’t have you spoiling my day.” Incredible: the very words. He must have read them in her mind.

Happily he then points out the rolling green golf course where he plays, some men in white knickers, a couple of women in sweaters and skirts and socks and little hats. He asks her, “You ever try golf?”

“No, I never did. There’s no course in Pinehill, and back in Hilton—”

“How about your husband? He much of a sport?”

“No, Russ walks a lot, in fact he’s always walking. These very long walks. He likes to walk at night—”

“Walks at night, oh, does he?”

Is he saying, You goddam fool, don’t you know your husband must be off with some beautiful young woman? What a fool you are!

“I think he composes poetry as he walks,” SallyJane tells the doctor, as though to compound her stupidity. She imagines him thinking: Lord, this woman will believe anything. No wonder she’s gone crazy.

“Poets sure are a different type of folk,” remarks Dr. Drake.

It occurs to SallyJane that Russ would find that sentence
really funny, but she’s not at all sure she should save it for telling Russ; it might make him think Dr. Drake was sort of silly, not worth his money.

Dr. Drake grew up in a really small town just north of Hilton, he now tells SallyJane. He says the name and she remembers that once a shabby-looking football team from there came down to play Hilton’s slightly better equipped team. He talks a lot that day about his town, his folks, as he puts it, “two of the nicest old people you’d ever want to meet. Can’t figure out how I came out so crazy, one more living disproof of the theories of Dr. Freud.”

Does he really think he’s crazy? SallyJane is almost reeling from this as she concentrates, still, on not being sick. She decides that he does not at all mean “crazy” in the way that she does when she feels crazy; he means a sort of amiable eccentricity. He likes himself quite well.

The land they are passing now is less flat, less sandy than that around Southern Pines. The narrow white highway surmounts small hills; it cuts through low eroded red clay embankments. It crosses small creeks, brown and swollen with winter rains.

And Clyde Drake goes on talking.

SallyJane manages not to be actively sick. Manages not to spoil his day.

But when she thinks of her fantasies, how she imagined this trip would be—Lord, even imagining snow!—she is so acutely embarrassed, humiliated, that she is sure he must be aware of her feelings. Aren’t psychiatrists supposed to be able to do that, to read minds, or almost? However, today for Dr. Drake seems a holiday from psychiatry.

As he talks on, SallyJane finds her own mind wandering from the car, her thoughts straying out to the fields and the small clapboard houses that they pass, little square boxes up on stilts—she supposes to keep them from the mud and rain in wintertime. Poor colored people mostly live around
here; little children and a few stray skinny chickens, a yellow dog, a striped scrawny cat, emerge from the yards—and SallyJane considers the terrible accidents of birth. Born colored and poor, in one of these little houses, what earthly chance do you have? Whereas she, SallyJane Caldwell Byrd, born tall and blonde and passably smart (though she has never been sure of that, despite all those IQ tests and the way the teachers at school talked to her parents), she has messed up everything, her marriage and all her children, she believes. Certainly she has messed herself up, so that she has to go down to a very expensive resort, to a sanatorium for rich alcoholics, where it soon turns out that she is not even alcoholic. Just “undisciplined,” and unhappy.

And what is her unhappiness, compared to that of the woman who is sitting on that porch, say, as they pass? A skinny old woman with enormous dark sunken eyes, with little children all around her, and probably a husband off somewhere looking for work. Unfair beyond words, or thoughts. It makes SallyJane feel crazy, just trying to comprehend this unfairness. And how very crazy anyone else would think she was if she should try to explain these thoughts.

“Well, Russ Byrd, what a really great place you have here! All the feel of an old country house, but so comfortable!”

Standing there in the parking area with her husband and her doctor, the very familiarity of it all is so intense that SallyJane could faint: the sounds of pine boughs, smells of pine and clay, the sunlight on the dark brown shingles of her house.

It has been explained to her—Russ explained—that the children are all off playing somewhere. But as he said this SallyJane suddenly realized how clearly she had expected
them to be there. How much she had purely wanted to see them, especially—oh, especially all five of them! Her children. Hurt, without them she feels that she has no function with these two men, and in a listless way she follows Russ, who is carrying her bags into the house.

“…  like to lie down for a while—put your feet up?” Russ is asking her hopefully.

And although this is the very last thing she would like, to be alone in her own room for a while, with her own thoughts but without her husband and children, or her doctor, SallyJane says, “Sure, I’ll just go put my feet up for a while.”

She lies rigidly on her bed, listening to the men downstairs, who talk, and talk. Whatever about? Not about her, she is quite sure of that; they are not all that interested in her. But what is the point of this visit, after all? Why is she at home? She was much more comfortable at the sanatorium, SallyJane now thinks. That had become more like home.

So tensely she is waiting, so unrestfully lying there, it is almost as though she were afraid to see her children.

She is tensely braced against whatever will happen next.

“Esther will love her house the way you all have it fixed up,” Dolly Bigelow reassures Cynthia.

Cynthia, very distressed, has just confided the fact that Esther is coming over for a visit. “Not to inspect, of course, but it feels like an inspection, you know?”

“It’ll cheer her up,” Dolly insists. “She can’t help but love all this color.” Rather ambiguously she adds, “Of course, Esther never did have what you might call taste.”

“Oh come on, Dolly, the house wasn’t all that bad.”

Cynthia and Dolly have progressed in friendly intimacy sufficiently for Cynthia to feel that small corrections, little disagreements are all right. However, she has noticed that they are never quite all right with Dolly. And she thinks,
for the thousandth time, that “Southern” is a language that she cannot possibly ever learn.