A Southern Exposure (30 page)

Walker thinks they were probably doing it in the car, going all the way. “Grownups don’t stop once they start,” he says. “Why should they?”

“But in a car?” Abby does not see how this could be done.

“College kids do it all the time. What’d you think they were parked out on Crest Road for, just plain old necking?”

“I don’t see how you know that.” Abby is finding this conversation very disturbing. She frowns uncomfortably, not looking at Walker.

“Well, Miss Smarty Pants, I am sure. Archer and me, we found these things on the ground. Near where the cars are parked. Lots of times. These rubbers. Ick! I’d never touch one.”

Abby does not know exactly what he is talking about (
rubbers
?) except in a very vague way. Certainly she knows enough to know that she does not want Walker to explain any further. She suddenly hates Walker. She would never kiss Walker Byrd.

The kids down in Pinehill whom Abby knows, her group, are all about a year younger than those in her class in Washington, and for that reason (partly) they are nowhere near as fast; there is much less sex in the Pinehill atmosphere. In Washington there’s so much sex everywhere that it’s scary, if you’re not used to it. Boys and girls holding hands as they walk down long brown dusty corridors, couples dancing in the gym at lunchtime, very closely, glued to each other. Girls in the washroom crying because of some boy. And items in the school paper about big love affairs at the school. Jokes told that Abby almost but does not quite understand, but that she finds vaguely exciting. Disquieting.

At the beginning she found everything about that school disturbing; she was deeply uncomfortable. In Pinehill the girls were not wearing lipstick yet, but here in Washington they are, and very, very dark red. Dark red nail polish too, a lot of them. The first afternoon after school, last September, Abby went out to the Georgetown drug-store right after she got home and bought a lipstick, and
the next day she wore it to school. But she still had those dumb long braids and straight bangs.

“I want my hair cut! I can’t stand looking like a Dutch twin, or some
child
.”

“But, darling, you look marvelous, and not like anyone else—”

“I want short hair!”

They compromise, Abby and her mother, on hair for Abby that was fairly long but curled, and never braided again. The wedding was the first time that Abby had worn her hair like that in Pinehill, so that some people looked at her twice, seeming for a minute not to know her.

Her parents stayed in the suite at the Inn for Deirdre’s wedding, but Abby got to stay with Betsy Lee, whose mother was still very lonely, they all said, and who liked to have company. “It just does me so much good to hear those little girls whispering all night,” she confided to Cynthia. Who later confided to Harry, “Well, it does us good not to hear them, doesn’t it, darling Harry?”

Betsy’s bedroom is all white ruffles and bows, and watercolors of flowers. The twin beds there are separated by a glass-topped, chintz-flounced dressing table, with a fold-out three-way mirror and two lamps with fluted parchment shades. A silver framed photograph of Clifton Lee, Betsy’s poor father. In the balmy, cloud-veiled June night, the night after the wedding, the two girls lie there, in their two beds, and they exchange what information they have, so far, about love and sex.

“I have this amazing secret to tell you,” says Betsy Lee, to Abby. “Cross your heart never to tell anyone, ever. But I went for this walk in the woods with Walker Byrd, and I let him kiss me! Oh, I feel terrible!”

“But did you like it?”

“Uh, what do you mean?”

“When he kissed you, did it feel good? Did you just want to go on kissing?”

“I don’t know! I guess I liked it all right, but it was so quick. And then I was afraid he’d want to do it again, and he did want to, but I wouldn’t let him, of course. And then he said that he loved me, he always had, since the first of the year, and I wouldn’t dare tell him but I think I love him too! Walker Byrd! I think I love Walker Byrd!”

“Well, that’s wonderful. Next year you-all can get married. Drive to South Carolina.”

“Oh, Abby, you’re terrible.”

The two girls begin to giggle, lying there helplessly; the giggles are contagious, out of control, like small fires. As Abby is thinking, What on earth are we laughing about? This isn’t even funny. Walker Byrd: I can’t stand him, what’s so funny about getting married? But she goes on laughing, she can’t stop laughing. “And you know what married people do!” she gasps out.

“Abby Baird, you’re the most terrible girl!”

Abby is experiencing just then the most tremendous happy excitement. She loves Pinehill so much, the softness of everything, the particular feel of the dark blue and gently clouded night. And the vague white blur that is Betsy’s frilly room. She even likes Betsy better than any girl in Washington, she thinks; Betsy is sweet and funny, and if she isn’t terribly smart, doesn’t read a lot, so what? Does everyone have to be so intelligent? Her mother thinks they do; she always complains, “But they’re so stupid, really!” Cynthia especially says that since she’s been back in school, and feeling smarter than anyone.

Abby is tempted to tell Betsy about Jack Cutter, and the kissing in Rock Creek Park, but she decides not to.

And then she thinks, Could I tell Betsy about Benny? Benny and
Harvard
? No. No. The integration paper was bad enough.

Instead she says, “What to you think Russ and Deirdre are doing, right this minute?”

They both begin to shriek with stifled laughs.

For the first couple of years that Abby and her parents were in Pinehill and Benny was still up there in Connecticut, Abby and Benny wrote to each other very occasionally: cards, postcards, and cards at Christmas. The only phone call was the one about the chemistry caper, the trick on poor Mr. Martindale. But then during the next year, which was Abby’s first in Washington and Benny’s first at Exeter, for no reason that either of them could have stated, they began to write more often, so that the letters came and went between them each week, at least. Strangeness in new places, some loneliness on both their parts may to a degree have accounted for this acceleration, but also they were a little older now. And this increase in age may have accounted for the slight shift in their tone with each other.

For one thing, they exchanged pictures. Benny first; with a modest, semi-apologetic note he enclosed a news photo of himself in his football uniform, all helmeted and padded, but recognizably Benny. And so large; he must be over six feet by now. Abby thought maybe that was why he had sent the picture? Sort of saying, Look at me, I’m a football hero now. After that he sent more clippings, accounts of Exeter games in which he always seemed to star. But usually he included some jokey remark: how silly the whole thing was, how boring. Then he sounded like the old mild funny Benny.

Abby in her turn sent him a yearbook picture that she had had to have taken in her new school. It embarrassed
her a little, this picture; with her long curled-at-the-ends blond hair and her dark, dark lipstick, she looked like some movie star—or worse, someone trying to look like a movie star. Like she thinks she’s eighteen or so and really glamorous. Sexy. Lana Turner. Betty Grable. Ick!

Benny teased her about the picture a little; he sort of had to. But he sounded more pleased than teasing, actually. “Some glamor girl you’ve turned into,” he wrote. “Don’t think I haven’t got you pinned up like a pin-up where everyone can see. Of course some baboon from Mississippi made some crack about ‘black and blonde’ but a couple of friends of mine really told him off. There’s a fair amount of that stuff around here, but not as much as I expected. Not as much as my folks told me to expect. Anyway you look very sexy, for such a young little girl.”

Most recently Benny has written to say that “some guys from Harvard, some sort of scouts” are really interested in him. For the year after next. “Of course I’d have to play ball there too, it’s really a football scholarship they’re talking about, but they say I could do that and pre-med too. I hope!”

Harvard! Benny at Harvard.

What would kissing Benny be like? In a slow, secret, and excited way Abby begins to wonder. He said she looked sexy in her picture: was that just kidding, teasing, or does it mean that he really wants to kiss her? She thinks of this a lot. Benny looks so tall now; would she have to stand on tiptoe for them to kiss? Unless they were in the backseat (the rumble seat!) of a car. Or sitting down on a couch. Maybe in his room at Harvard, if they let girls go into boys’ rooms.

That Benny is a Negro—is “colored,” as people down in Pinehill say—does not figure very largely in Abby’s fantasies.
She is so used to Benny; in a way she has always known him. Other facts to her are more salient, and more exciting: a boy who goes to Exeter. Who is going (probably) to Harvard. To be a doctor. Someone tall and male.

Half-consciously, though, she does keep her Benny fantasies quite separate from Pinehill fantasies. She does not, so far, think of Benny coming to Pinehill for a visit.

Not yet.

She does not mention Benny to Pinehill friends. Not to Betsy or Melanctha, and certainly not to those boys.

By September, which in Pinehill is still full summer, or almost, the lives of the Bairds have been quite radically changed by two events.

The first is that the pool, as was more or less expected, is completed—but sooner than anyone thought, and more successfully. It is somehow both longer and deeper than they imagined. Harry and Cynthia and Abby smile at each other as they talk about their pool: such a good idea, such fun for everyone, for themselves and for all the friends who warned that it would take forever and not be done right at all (you know how colored help is). But there it is, a long cement oval, shallow at one end, for small children, and much deeper at the other, for grownup swimmers and even for diving.

And the plantings—or, rather, transplantings—that surround the oval are large and healthy; soon they will be very beautiful. Everyone says so. “My, those shrubs and flowers are going to be just beautiful.” Dolly especially says, “Never in all my born days did I see such great big bushes dug up and replanted like that, and living to tell the tale. That Horace, he is just a plain old miracle man with plants, with anything that grows. You-all are just so lucky!”

Horace, the once-errant husband of Odessa (apparently this is his pattern; from time to time he simply shows up, neither asked nor answering any questions), has turned out to be, indeed, a genius with plants. He has transplanted some good-sized boxwood and some privet, a couple of nice young dogwood trees, and some Japanese quince (“It’ll be lovely in the spring, but Willard says these days to call it ‘japonica,’ not Japanese,” says Dolly, with her laugh). All those plants that are supposedly somewhere between difficult and impossible to transfer. But Horace has done it all, and he came around every day all summer to see how the plants were doing. (Dolly: “He just loves those flowers, pity he doesn’t love Odessa a little more like that.”) For Horace has gone again, just disappeared.

Cynthia has a secret plan for Odessa: she wants Odessa to move into their house. There’s a whole separate private apartment above the garage, and Odessa could live there; she could be a sort of caretaker of their house. Since her children are all grown up and away somewhere and Horace is usually gone, Odessa would be better off in town, Cynthia reasons—she loves the idea of Odessa being there.

The second and most unexpected event is that Cynthia was accepted by the law school at Georgetown. She is much more pleased by this than she can allow anyone to know; even with Harry her tone is offhand, dismissive. “Who’d
have thought I’d grow up to be a lawyer? I’ll have to get a whole bunch of new hats. Serious black ones.” She clutches her own pleasure and her pride to herself, a secret and deeply exciting present. She imagines power and influence, accomplishment. Once she starts to work as a lawyer, all her energies will be focused, directed. How strong she will be! It is almost frightening.

More realistically, she thinks too of the effort required: going to law school, trying to remember all those cases. Taking exams. Writing papers on the law. It is somewhat daunting to consider, but on the whole she feels confident. She has done very well in all her course work so far, and they would not have accepted her in the law school if they were not sure she could do the work, she reasons. And by the time she finishes law school the war will be over, surely, and everyone can get back to better lives. To a better world.

The Bairds decide to have a party in early September, as both an official opening of the pool and a celebration of Cynthia’s new life.

“I’m not sure anyone else will think it’s so great, though,” she tells Harry. “My going back to school.”

“I think it’s great,” he tells her loyally. “I’ve always said you’re a lot smarter than you think you are.”

“Well—”

“
I
think it’s great,” Abby tells her mother. “No one else’s mother is a lawyer, not even in Washington. You could get to be on the Supreme Court someday.” (There have been recent jokes: FDR might appoint Eleanor to the Court. Well, he already appointed “that Jewish person Frankfurter”—so who knows? A woman might be next.)

“Come on, you two,” says Cynthia. “First I have to get through law school.”

But she is pleased by what she feels as family support, and agrees to the party.

That September day, even by Pinehill standards, is incredibly hot. Very early in the morning, at dawn, it is already hot. The air seems both heavy and tired. The hours drag along until noon, which everyone imagines will be a turning point. “It can’t stay this hot much longer.” But by the afternoon it is even hotter—and those who are friends of the Bairds have begun to think, How wonderful, to have a swimming party to go to. Doubts about whether or not to bother undressing and actually going in are easily resolved: no one wants to get dressed up. Bathing costumes are brought out and inspected. Since it is much too hot to drive to Durham to shop, and none of the local stores carry bathing suits, most people decide to make do. Except for Cynthia, who already has a new suit, and for poor Deirdre Yates Byrd, who is far too pregnant for her own or any other bathing suit; also, swimming is looked upon askance for pregnant women, at that time.