Autobiography of Us (6 page)

“If it were up to you, Walter, I swear,” she sighed. “She’d go off for the year without so much as a toothbrush.”

He looked at me fondly. “She’s going to be just fine. Aren’t you, Queenie?”

“I certainly hope so.”

My mother pushed her napkin across the table at my father. “Crumbs,” she said, gesturing at her chin. “Honestly, Walter. You wouldn’t send a soldier off into battle without the proper ammunition, would you?”

My father wiped his chin slowly and folded his napkin back under his plate; he was such a careful man, your grandfather, his every movement methodical. “We could certainly manage another sweater.”

I said I thought I’d be alright without the sweater. My mother poured out the orange juice for everyone and reminded me to call the moment I arrived. “The
minute,
” she said. “Or else we’ll start to worry, do you hear? It’s not every day your only daughter goes off to college all on her own. Never mind me—” She produced a handkerchief from the pocket of her housecoat and dabbed at her eyes. I nodded and said I was looking forward to it, though the truth was that my hands had begun to shake in that way they had at the dentist’s or one of the schoolwide spelling bees Windridge held every fall. I pressed the tumbler of juice to my forehead: The cool glass felt marvelous. To my father’s offer of a piece of toast, I said, no, thank you. Too jittery to eat, I said.

“Look,” I said, holding up my hands, and the three of us watched my fingers tremble.

* * *

I must have blamed my fatigue for how newly strange Alex appeared to me when she pulled up outside my house a little before noon. She wore her hair curled at the ends so it flipped up around her shoulders, her cheeks pink across the tops as though she’d been sitting in the sun.

“Look at you,” she said. She was grinning as she reached over the gearshift to throw her arms around me, and I thought for a moment in a great rush of relief that everything would be fine. “Look at us, the dashing coeds.”

“You look terrific.”

“This?” She touched her hair. “I figured it was time for a change.” She watched me lift my suitcase into the backseat. “Don’t tell me that’s all you’re bringing. For Pete’s sake, Beau had to go by the dorm earlier and drop off my trunk and about a million books—he was livid, I tell you. Absolutely livid.”

I slid into the passenger seat. “I’m leaving my sweaters and things at home until it cools off a bit,” I lied.

She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Together, we turned and waved to my mother where she stood in the doorway, watching. “Goodbye!” we called. “Goodbye!”

She stood up on her toes to wave. “Goodbye,” she called.
“Bon voyage!”

I caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror as we pulled away from the curb, her arm still raised, the blue of her housecoat cheerful. We’d made plans to have my father pick me up that Sunday and bring me home for dinner. The university campus was just a few miles from our house, and of course I could spend the night in my own room whenever I liked. Still, it was one of those moments that gives weight to the smallest particulars. I have never, as you know, been a great fan of change, and everything seemed fraught with my leaving: the scent of our neighbor’s clematis through the open windows, the sun heating the car door under my arm to near unbearable, a dragonfly that veered drunkenly through my window and out the other side as we turned the far corner onto Rio Grande, the sound of my mother’s
bon voyage!
ringing in my ears long after she’d disappeared from sight. It came as a shock to realize I had never spent more than a night away from my parents before. Strange to think they would not be just down the hall that night when I went to bed, that my father would not be at the table when I came down in the morning, reading the paper and cutting his toast into neat triangles, that my mother would not be there when I came home every day, sitting in the living room with her sewing or standing bent over the banister, oiling it until it gleamed
,
her hands cool as she brushed the hair back from my face, offering lemonade, a glass of iced tea, a bowl of fruit.

I don’t believe Alex noticed a thing. She was in high spirits as we drove: The program had been a scream, she announced. Really
,
if I could have seen the theater they got to perform in, I would have flipped, she said. Absolutely flat-out flipped. Some of the other actors hadn’t been half bad, but the real excitement had been that they’d had an entire cast and crew for the stage machinery and a separate crew for lighting, not to mention a few girls for costumes and another few for makeup.
Very
official, she said. And did I want to know the best part? An agent had approached her after one of the last performances and given her his card.

“It was my Desdemona that did it.
Alas the heavy day!
Et cetera. The director had me do the whole thing a touch treacly for my taste, but he called it brilliant. The agent, I mean.” She flicked her sunglasses to the top of her head and eyed me. “
Brilliant
. Imagine!”

“Imagine,” I echoed.

“Not to mention,” she went on, “Eleanor laid down her arms when I told her, if you can believe it. I think it was the agent thing that did the trick. She said if I was that dead set on acting, I might as well go ahead and give it my all. Everything worth anything deserves a little dedication, she said. So now I’ve got her blessing, more or less. As long as it doesn’t interfere with my so-called duties
.”
She held up her left hand and waggled her ring finger. “Ding-dong, in other words.
Try not to embarrass us, Alexandra
, she says. As if her droning on about Beau’s handicap or the latest goddamn polo pony she’s thinking of snapping up isn’t embarrassing. I swear, if I have to sit there through one more lecture about the importance of proper seating etiquette or whatever, I think I’ll—”

“Sounds like you were busy.”

“I just said.”

“It must have been hard to find time for much of anything else.”

She glanced at me, then back at the road. “You’re angry I didn’t write more.”

“No—”

“Look, it wasn’t my fault. Something went funny with the mail there toward the end, and by the time I had all your letters, it was time to go. You have to believe me.” She frowned at the road. “You’re not actually mad, are you?”

“Not especially.”

“Promise?”

“Scout’s honor.” I held up my hand, fingers crossed.

“God, don’t even start with that. I was a Brownie back in Houston and I’m still recovering.” Her face had relaxed but her forehead held the suggestion of a frown, a faint tracing of parallel lines. “I couldn’t stand you being mad at me, you know,” she said intently. “I don’t think I could stand it one second.”

“I’m not mad.”

“So you’re happy for me.”

“Sure I am.”

She was quiet a moment or two. “I’m finally going to make something of myself, Pen.”

“Forget I said anything.”

“Can’t. I’m not the forgetting type. I do, however, forgive.” She grabbed my arm and squeezed. “But I won’t forgive you even an inch until you tell me you’re happy for me. And you have to sound like you mean it.”

“I am,” I said, laughing a little. We’d stopped at a light and she was turned sideways in her seat to face me, her expression pleading; she was my best friend. We were driving to our first day at the U and there was no one I could talk to about it except her. “I couldn’t be happier.”

“Things are going to be different from now on.” She was still clutching me; her fingers dug in around my wrist. “Freddy says—”

“Who?”

“The
agent
,” she said impatiently. “He’s got connections at MGM. Fluff,
I
know, but he says I have to start somewhere. I can’t just go straight to the stage, he says. Not in this day and age.” She clicked her tongue. “It all starts with the pictures now.”

“Sounds thrilling,” I began. “Sounds like—”

“Problem is, I need practice. Stage time. Freddy said I’ve got to start gunning for New York, effective immediately. Of course, I’ll have to work like a horse. It’ll be tough as hell while I’m still going to school and trying to keep Eleanor happy. But
Broadway
, for God’s sake.”

“It really does sound—”

“Let me guess,” she said, shooting me a look. “Thrilling.”

“Well, it does,” I said. And then, because I didn’t know what else to say, “it really does.” We turned off the main road into a narrow drive lined with hydrangeas, the lawns on either side lush and green, impeccably trimmed. The university campus was much larger than Windridge, but our dormitory was tucked into one of the far corners in a quadrangle with the other girls’ dorms; when the college went coed, they must have grouped the girls’ dorms away from the main campus intentionally, though at the time I worried only that we were farther from the library than I would have liked. I caught a glimpse through the hydrangeas of a few girls walking here and there along the path: They looked glamorous in their neat blouses and narrow skirts, many of them wearing their hair cropped short in an angled cut I hadn’t seen before. Sophisticated, I thought, as Alex pulled the car into the lot. My mind went immediately to the clothes Mother and I had packed the day before—the cotton blouses she’d sewn from patterns we’d picked out together months earlier, the skirts that had at the time seemed the height of fashion, the dresses from Bullock’s—all of it, I knew, wrong. “So this is college,” I said, trying to make my voice light.

Alex tipped her head back against the seat and slid her sunglasses down, her timing—as always—impeccable. “Rah-rah,” she said.

* * *

It didn’t take long—a week? Maybe two?—before she disappeared. She joined the student theater company and started staying out till God knows when, somehow coaxing Mrs. Perkins, our house mother, into giving her an extended curfew. In those days, girls—
coeds
—were still required to be inside by nine. The boys, of course, were free to come and go as they pleased. “Extraordinary circumstances,” Alex called it, in any case. She was rarely home, often returning to her room only to sleep. Mornings she arrived at breakfast—if she came at all—with just enough time to grab something and
run
. She seemed to operate in a state of perpetual distraction, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, her gaze in those brief moments I caught her in the hallway focused on some distant, unseen point.

There were other changes, subtle but perceptible. I noticed first that her beautiful eyes were often reddened around the rims, tearing slightly as though from cold; she let her hair grow long again and took to wearing it knotted carelessly on top of her head, secured with a pencil; she wore a new shade of lipstick I privately thought much too bright; she grew thinner, her face taking on the translucent quality of bone china; at some point during that winter, she took to wearing a pair of oversize tortoise-rimmed glasses, which she had a habit of pushing up the bridge of her nose in a gesture of wearied tolerance. She seemed never to be without a cigarette. She was always in a rush: She had rehearsal, or a meeting, something she called a
read-through
. “Another goddamn read-through with the director,” she’d complain in mock exasperation. “I’m late,” she’d declare, a plume of smoke rising from her hand. “Not now, darling. Later? Would you mind terribly?”

Cullers Hall. That was the name of our dormitory—the house, we called it, and it had in fact been the university president’s home for a number of years, converted not long before we lived there, when the college accepted its first class of girls. 1956, I believe that was. We each had our own room across a hallway we shared with ten other girls, three from our class at Windridge—Robin Pringle, engaged to Benji Spaulding by the end of our sophomore year, red-haired Lindsey Patterson, and Betsy Bromwell. I believe it was Betsy who first knocked on my door to ask if I might like to come to dinner with her and the others; she had a kind face, kind eyes. We called her Dove because of that, and she smiled and said she liked it just fine.

In the wake of Alex’s new absence, we became friends, those girls and I. Ordinary friends, the kind I’d managed to make it through my years at Windridge more or less without. I sat with them at meals and visited them in their rooms; we all took to sitting out on our stoop before curfew, Lindsey smoking one of the skinny cigarettes she claimed were all the rage, Betsy and Robin and I keeping busy with our needlework or just sitting. From time to time Alex joined us on her way in or out; she might lean up against the brick wall beside the stoop as we chatted and close her eyes, as though she were one of those lizards from my mother’s garden absorbing the warmth of the stone through her skin. More often than not, however, on those rare occasions she wasn’t at the theater building or in rehearsal, she shut herself up in her room, stretched out on her bed with her cigarette and a collection of coffee cups balanced precariously on her quilt, a script spread in front of her in apparent disarray.

“I’m working,” she’d say with a trace of irritation if I knocked on the door. “No, hang on: So long as you’re here, you don’t happen to know the Latin root for
canker
, do you?
Cancerous? Cancerum?
No clue? Gosh, no, no dinner, thanks. I couldn’t eat a thing.” One hand reaching for her cigarette. “Freddy says it’s best at my height that I go for a Hepburn thing.
Roman Holiday
.
You
know.”

“I really am sorry
,
” she might say sincerely whenever a boy called for her on the hallway phone—and, believe me, they called—those glasses balanced all the way down at the tip of her nose or used, as they were from time to time, to scratch delicately at something above her ear. “I’m afraid I’m terribly tied up at the moment.” Or: “I’d love to, honest, but it’s the most atrocious timing
,
” or sometimes, when she was tired or something had tipped her mood to dangerous, a curt “can’t.”
Cruel
, Lindsey called it, Alex reminding her that she could do as she pleased. “Last time I checked,” Alex snapped before vanishing back into her room, “it was still a free country
.
”