A Southern Exposure (17 page)

“I never said a thing that it was bad.” Dolly draws herself up, though she still smiles. “It never was real pretty. Not homey.”

“But maybe that was the way she wanted it, and she won’t like what I’ve done.” Carefully, Cynthia does not say, “we’ve done,” nor does she dare to mention Odessa.

Esther is briefly in town for a visit to Jimmy, and to her friends, and she has, according to Jimmy, expressed a desire to see their house, ostensibly just to pick up a few things that she left locked up in a downstairs closet. Cynthia of course has said that that was fine with her, perfectly fine—but as she has confided to Harry on the phone, she is scared. “It’s like an inspection at boarding school,” she told him, for no reason whispering into the phone. “Have a big stiff drink before she comes” is Harry’s advice. “Come on, she’s a very nice woman,” he reminds her.

“How’s Odessa doing?” Cynthia now dares to ask Dolly, knowing that this is a dangerous topic these days.

“Oh, uppity as ever. You know what Clifton Lee says is just sure to happen? All the Nigras in town will start working over to the defense plant, and then none of us will have any help at all, and they’ll all just get drunk with their money and have their Saturday night razor cuttings and beating up.”

“I can’t imagine Odessa—” Cynthia begins.

“Oh, can’t you now. Well, you just don’t know that woman the way I do. She’s got a temper—who-eee. And proud? That woman thinks she’s the queen of the jungle, in her mind. You know the truth is, it’s a good thing things didn’t work out with that Lord & Taylor of yours. I’ve got enough with Miz Odessa as it is.”

You sound as though you were talking about a daughter, is what Cynthia thinks, among other things, but manages
not to say. One of the lessons she has painfully learned in this Southern year has been do not interfere in or comment on their relationships with Negroes. And try to get used to the way they pronounce that word, their “Nigra.” They are trying to say Negro; she is sure (almost) that that is what they mean to say.

Still, Cynthia braces herself for further argument. “What I’ve been thinking,” she tells Dolly (and as she speaks she notes the Southern slowness in her own voice), “is that maybe we could have this sort of little shop. You know, downtown. We could drive out into the country and buy stuff. From women like Odessa who make things at home, and we could sell them and divide the money with those women. That way we could all come out ahead.”

“You mean things from colored women?” Dolly’s round black eyes sparkle, as though with mischief.

“Well, it wouldn’t be just colored women. More like just country women. Maybe some who don’t have a way to get into town.”

Dolly narrows her eyes, speculating; inner conflict is visible on her face. She is first of all dubious about any business arrangements involving “colored.” (Cynthia is sure she can see this.) But both Dolly’s intelligence, which is considerable, if often submerged in layers of bias and lazy habit, and her greed, also considerable, inform her that this is a good idea. It is something she ought to get in on.

At that moment there is the sound of a heavy car passing by on the road out in front, going fast, too fast, so that both women stare, and Dolly laughs. “We’re like two country women ourselves,” she says. “Watching cars and keeping track of who goes where.”

“I catch myself doing it all the time,” admits Cynthia, wondering if Dolly, too, recognized the passenger in Russ’s car.

As she might have known, Dolly tells her, “That was
that psychiatrist fellow, that Dr. Drake. With Russ. I declare, he’s around her all the time! I didn’t know those folks made house calls, did you?”

“Maybe he’s just visiting. I mean, visiting Russ as much as he is Brett, I mean SallyJane.”

Dolly gives her a long look that is full of meaning. “Well, maybe I’d best be getting along now. I’ll let you get on with your getting ready for Harry.”

Harry is coming home for two whole weeks, arriving that afternoon! Driving down all the way from Washington. Cynthia finds herself quite girlishly excited. As soon as Dolly is gone, she washes her hair in the sink, soaping and rinsing it several times with Drene, then towel-drying and putting it all up in pin curls, with her bobby pins (harder and harder to get these days). How Harry hates to see her like this, she smiles to reflect. She covers it all discreetly with a scarf, although it should be dry before Harry could possibly get there.

“I’m never going to do that to my hair!” says Abby, coming in from school with her books and an apple, which she is eating very loudly. “I’m going to wear it long in a braid, and when I get too old for that I’ll wrap the braid around my head.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve got that all figured out.”

“What time is Daddy coming? Do I have to be here?”

“I’m not quite sure; he said he’d try to make it by dinnertime. And you should be here, you know that.” She hesitates. “Where were you going?”

“Oh, down to the Byrds’. Some of the kids are doing some stuff down there.” Abby scowls. “That doctor’s around there again.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I think Mrs. Byrd must have some kind of a crush on
that man.” This entirely out-of-character remark comes accompanied by a similarly uncharacteristic giggle, a combination quite shocking to Cynthia. It is as though Abby had added several years to her age all at once.

She wonders: Did Abby think of all that herself, or did someone, some older person, say it to her? She asks her daughter, “Wherever did you get such a silly idea? Or was it your own idea?”

“I just thought of it,” says Abby, looking both confused and dishonest. So that Cynthia thinks: Deirdre, I’ll bet Deirdre said that to Abby. But what a curious remark for Deirdre to make.

“I have to tell you, I love it. I just really love it,” says Esther Hightower, who is at the moment a guest in her own living room.

Esther, as everyone has told her, looks wonderful. She has had her hair cut short and fashionably permanent-waved (Cynthia takes note: How easy and convenient that would be, she thinks). She has also lost weight. She looks very thin and intense. Dedicated.
Young.
In a smart black suit with the new long clinging skirt length. She looks very New York. A career woman.

“These colors are wonderful,” she says. “Jimmy wrote me, but I couldn’t quite see it in my mind. In my living room, I mean.” She laughs. “And actually I love your suite at the Inn.”

“Musical houses.” Harry laughs, so trim and handsome in his spanking-new Navy uniform. Everyone says this, and Cynthia agrees. He adds, “Maybe people should do it all the time. Or at least more often. We could trade next with the Byrds, don’t you think so, Cynthia, love?”

“Oh. No.” This came out more vehemently than she had meant it to. “I mean I’m sure it’s very nice, but it’s
more of a house than I could handle. I don’t know how SallyJane manages.”

“You’ve never been there?” Esther is curious.

“Well, actually not. You know, Brett—SallyJane—has been sick so much. And I don’t think Russ actually likes, uh, much social life.”

“You’re absolutely right there,” Jimmy, the recent Russ Byrd expert, chimes in. “The man really hates it. Interferes with his work, I mostly think. But he seems to pretty much like going round to other folks’ houses. I guess then he can leave when he’s a mind to.”

Jimmy’s speech has become noticeably more country, more rural Southern, Cynthia notes, then thinks, Of course, he’s imitating Russ. And she thinks again with a stab of what she has to recognize as the purest jealousy of Russ and Jimmy working together on Jimmy’s novel—and then she reminds herself, as she has before, that she does not have a novel or even a plan of one that Russ could help her with. She does not have a secret stack of poetry to show him.

What she does have, and what they have all been discussing earlier, is this plan for a country women’s store. Which has run up against what has been to Cynthia the most amazing resistance. Which went like this:

It turned out that Dolly had a cousin who lived way far out in the country, a true country cousin, who made “the most beautiful doilies and cocktail napkins you’d ever want to see.” Dolly had mentioned the proposed store to this cousin, and had also mentioned Odessa and her work. “You mean a store for colored and white together?” the cousin had demanded.

“Well, not the people together, of course not. Just these things that they make.”

“Well now, Dolly, I just don’t know. Lem wouldn’t like the sound of that, not one bit.”

•  •  •

“But that’s really crazy,” Cynthia had argued. “What does she think, her doilies will be contaminated by possible contact with Odessa’s pillows?”

“Now don’t you start getting huff-puffy like that, Miss Yankee,” Dolly countered. “It’s just not the way we do things down here. As I’m sure Willard or Clifton Lee would be the first to tell you. Or Russ Byrd, for that matter. Any of the men around here. It’s just not our way of doing things.”

And Cynthia was forced for the moment to leave it at that, to leave it exactly nowhere. And to wonder, among other things, just why Willard Bigelow and Clifton Lee or even Russ Byrd were such experts, such judges of “what’s right,” as Dolly herself might put it.

“Southerners are—well, extremely complicated,” Esther tells her. “And absolutely nuts on the subject of colored people, as they call them. It’s a little different in Oklahoma, don’t you think so, Jimmy? And of course my family is Jewish.”

“I would not entirely exonerate Oklahoma from racial foolishness,” Jimmy tells her, “but mostly you’re right. Although it does seem to me I’ve heard a certain amount of ugly stuff about what they call ‘Indian blood.’ Who has it and who doesn’t, and who just might.” Cynthia notes that he is no longer sounding like Russ.

“If any of them had any idea what’s going on in Germany.” Esther sighs, with a gesture of hopelessness.

“Your work is good, though?” Cynthia asks.

“It’s so exciting, and so frustrating.” Esther explains, “We do get a lot of people out of Germany, with sponsors and incomes, places to live and all that. But there’s a sort of
elitist cast to our operation that’s beginning to bother me a lot. We’re mostly saving rich people with ‘connections.’ What about all the others?”

Though she mentions discouragement and frustration, Esther’s face is still radiant, and intense. How Cynthia envies that sense of mission. All she has is an idea for a silly store that will probably never work.

Harry seems at least to have been thinking about her problem. “Tell you what,” he says, with one of his more charming grins. “Why don’t you and Dolly open up two stores, one for colored and one for white? Isn’t that the Southern solution?”

Everyone laughs, if a little edgily, especially Cynthia, who then says, “And I’ll be the one to run the colored store, and no doubt get run out of town for my trouble.”

“I’ll run it with you,” Esther tells her. “They can’t run us both out of town.”

The visit with Harry at home has been more than a little disappointing to Cynthia, no doubt at least in part because she so built it up in her mind, a fantasized romantic reunion. Whereas in fact it has been simply nice, or perhaps not so simply; there are certain complexities. But they have been a nice small family all together again.

Abby has been more present than was usual for her in the past year or so.

She has seemed most to want Harry to go for walks with her; she takes him to places that she has especially liked: to a waterfall, a secret meadow, down to the creek and across the bridge to its further bank. They come back from these trips often a little muddy but happy, enthusiastic over wildflowers and new streams. Cynthia notices that Abby is closely observing her father’s face as they talk, and she thinks, a little sadly, Oh dear, she really wants him to
like it here. She wants us to be an ordinary family in a house, in a settled place. And she thinks, Oh, my dear Abby, you have probably chosen the wrong set of parents for that.

Cynthia herself is experiencing a time of some loneliness. Nothing has improved in her negotiations with Dolly and their projected store; the last word from Dolly was that, according to Willard, a bank would never finance such a project. “He’s probably right,” was Harry’s opinion, when told of this.

Cynthia felt lonely and isolated, even with Harry there. And much worse when he left.

No one will give a shit for his pig-shit play, thinks Russ, barely managing a smile at his thought. He is limping into the second act; he is sitting at his desk, empty-headed. He is dreaming of everything in the world but the play that he is, in theory, writing. He is staring out the window, watching the squirrels chase each other along a pine bough. He is listening to his houseguest, Dr. Clyde Drake, who is making a lot of phone calls in the next room. He is wondering if Brett—if SallyJane will get up before the kids come home from school. He is wondering if Deirdre is pregnant. Again.

Once he could write no matter what. That was the only thing that never failed him, his work. Once, although out of his mind in love, so crazily wanting Deirdre, and worried
and dying of guilt toward Brett and his children, plagued with bills, not to mention some painful problems with his teeth—he still could write. In those days he wrote some of his best poems, and
Restless Omens
, the play that sent him out to Hollywood, to all that money.

But now his mind is hollowed out, his imagination dead. The words that parade through his brain seem to be in another language—or, more precisely, could be the words of someone new to English. A refugee from Europe, or maybe a very small child, just getting the hang of sentences.

“Now, darlin’,” he hears dimly, Drake’s voice from the room next door. “You very well know …” And then the voice is lowered, so that Russ can hear no more, does not know whatever the other person very well knows.

And what, he wonders, does anyone very well know? He thinks of the three of them under this roof at this moment, himself and Clyde Drake and Brett SallyJane Caldwell Byrd, and of what any of them must know. If he, for example, could entirely know what either of those other two know, he could write forever, could fill volumes, and stages full of actors. He could write the most endless poetry, from one day, even one hour, inside the consciousness of his SallyJane.