Rock of Ages (3 page)

By 8:00, she had managed to rouse herself enough to entertain the thought of doing at least one positive thing before the day was lost forever. So she went to the bedroom and started looking for her exercise clothes, thinking about the Stairmaster down at the YMCA, or maybe a swim.

But by the time she had packed her gym bag, it was 8:30, and she couldn't remember whether the Y closed at 9 o'clock or 10, and she was feeling a little light-headed, so she said to herself, screw it.

But then, half-dressed, she thought of something she had done years ago, during her first marriage. One Halloween, she had surprised Jeff Bowman by slipping out of her clothes and into a raincoat, then going out the back door and around the house to ring the front doorbell. When he had answered, she flung open the raincoat and said “Trick or treat, mister.” They made love three times that night.

Maybe it was the memory, or maybe it was just a wild hair. Georgia took off the gym shorts, panties, tee-shirt, and sports bra and walked over to the window. She peeked out through the closed blinds. It was dark, and Georgia was known, among her friends, to get a wild hair now and then.

She put her running shoes back on, no socks, and picked up the house key off the dining room table, just in case she locked herself out. Just one lap around the house, she told herself, for old times' sake. To prove I'm still alive.

She went out the back door and almost turned around, but she'd had enough false starts. She ran across the yard, wearing only the shoes, then turned and sprinted through the area between her home and the Wyndhams' next door, ducking under a dogwood limb, dodging the rose bushes, the cool early fall breeze tickling her bare skin, her heart thumping. She could hear a television and the drone of porch voices. She made the turn into the front yard.

She didn't even think about the motion detector until it came on. She froze like a deer in some car's headlights for an instant, and then she heard the voices stop.

The light, bright as the sun, stayed on, and would not go out. She had just recovered enough to start running again, with her hand shielding her eyes, when she heard Sally Wyndham call across the side yard, timidly, “Georgia? Are you all right?” Bob had to be out there, too, sitting and rocking on their front porch, a country quirk in a neighborhood where everyone else retreated to the back.

“Fine,” she called over her shoulder as she sprinted away from them. “I'm fine. Really.” She reached the darkness on the far side of the house and finally, mercifully, the door from which she left. So much, she thought to herself, for spontaneity. There was a time when she would have evoked a little excitement among the neighborhood husbands if she had been caught naked in her front yard, a naughty scamp who might do anything, who wasn't afraid of anything. Who, though, wanted to see a 51-year-old English professor's tits and ass? She could imagine the whispering, the head-shaking, the pity. Poor Georgia. She ought to get some help.

She didn't think her body was that bad, although she could hardly bear to look at what gravity and age had done to it when she was safely inside again, and she didn't really think she was having a breakdown, no matter what anybody said. But people would
think
she was a pathetic, addled, menopausal hag, and that threw her.

She sat up late, listening to some old rock ‘n' roll now, dipping into the bourbon, not answering the phone. She was still there at half past midnight when she finally figured that she had to go, that she could not let every bit of the past leave her without some kind of illogical, nostalgic gesture.

Do something, as Phil would have said, even if it's wrong.

Part of it, she thought later, was the realization that nothing, not one damn thing really, kept her in Montclair except ennui and fear. She had a little money, she was relatively fit (though not young enough, she conceded, to live on raw hot dogs, corn chips, chive dip, marijuana, bourbon, and Almond Joys, certainly not young enough to be caught buck naked in her yard). She could travel to Nepal, or join the Peace Corps like Justin, or take off and see America, the whole country, and take months. Hell, she could live in the back of Phil's suburban assault vehicle.

She could do all of that. Maybe East Geddie would be a start at least.

She did worry a little about herself. Justin, before he left, could not get her out of the house except for a handful of safe, familiar places, all in Montclair itself.

Today, a trip around the house buck naked, she thought. Tomorrow, a drive down to North Carolina. The next day, who knows? Before losing Phil, she had long enjoyed describing herself as counterphobic. She had always tried to attack, to embrace that which scared her.

That night, she thought that maybe what scared her was the world itself.

It took her two days to get everything more or less in order, and on the third day she left. Cathy Rayner was still waving, a little sadly she thought, as she turned a corner.

Now, eight days later, Georgia lies defeated on her marshmallow mattress.

She is thinking about Jenny, about Justin and Leeza, about how anyone could possibly want to buy this old house, about yard sales and the strange noise the gas heater is making and Forsythia Crumpler and then back to Jenny.

She finally gets up in the dark and turns off the artificial rainfall. She sits in a chair and reads by the bedside lamp for another hour, listening to the old house's arthritic creaking, then rises to shower and make her breakfast.

She is in the refurbished kitchen, which will always be too small, but at least it has bright counter tops and late 20
^th
-century appliances, even a dishwasher. By the time Justin comes in, she has made some coffee and is slicing a grocery-store bagel.

He mumbles a good morning and leans against the counter. He is a handsome boy, except Georgia has to stop thinking of him as a boy. He's 27 years old, and has lived in what she thinks of as the wild for two years. But with his hair uncombed and the sleep still on him, he might be the fifth-grader she always had to call at least twice before he would rise for school. He has her eyes, bright and full of life, her cheekbones, and her tan, aided by the Guatemalan sun. His hair, unfashionably long, flips up at its ends the way hers does.

“Still can't sleep?” he asks her.

“Not always. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I can nap.”

“What that old lady said …” he begins.

Georgia pours her son a cup of coffee. “She was right. Hell, I should have done more. I should have nagged you to go see her. I just didn't know how bad off she was.”

She looks out the kitchen window. It's barely dawn now, and individual trees cast long shadows in the golden light. It's as lovely as East Geddie gets. A rabbit hops—safe for now from Kenny's beagles—across the back yard. It disappears in the tall grass behind the old shed where clothes once were washed with lye soap.

“What was she like?” Justin asks. “I don't really remember her very well.”

“Cousin Jenny? Well, she was quiet, kind of country-seeming, I guess. Her husband Harold was kind of a mean redneck, although I don't think he ever hit her or anything. I just remember him using the N-word a lot and being kind of a bully.”

Actually, Georgia admits to herself, she never really cared that much for Jenny, despite (or maybe because of) all that Jenny did for her over the years. She was her first cousin, but she was 27 years older, more like an aunt. She sent Georgia birthday money, no more than five dollars ever, until she was well into her 20s, and Georgia would feel obligated to write her a thank-you note.

Once, Jenny asked her to please not mention the birthday money to Harold, who was known to be close with a dollar.

What it came down to, Georgia knows, is that Jenny reminded her of everything she always wanted to leave behind. Jenny had looked after her mother after her father died, forcing the tight-fisted Harold to build a room for her on the back of their house, connected by a walkway. When Century died, Jenny was at her bedside
not driving away from East Geddie as fast as she could, damn glad to be out of there
.

On Georgia's visits to East Geddie before her own father's death, old neighbors and friends would come by to visit, or—on rarer occasions—Georgia would visit them. Jenny was one of their few common points of reference.

That Jenny McLaurin, everyone agreed, was a good woman.

Georgia would nod her head, knowing that the very things that made Jenny good made
her
bad. Jenny stayed. Georgia left. Jenny looked after her parents. Georgia deserted hers to move up north (Virginia being for all intents and purposes Yankee country from the East Geddie perspective). Jenny endured with a quiet smile, never saying more than was absolutely necessary. Georgia found, especially on visits back home, that she couldn't shut up, that she always somehow hoped she could give old acquaintances enough amazing detail about her life to make them understand why she didn't stay.

Nobody ever asked her why she couldn't be like Jenny. They didn't have to.

Jenny, she wanted to tell them, didn't have a chance to do what I did. If she'd had the chance, she might have done the same things, might have loved it, like I did, might've never wanted to come back and spend the rest of her life among bedpans and Wednesday night prayer meetings and neighbors who know every time you go out for groceries.

Now, watching the rabbit reappear and continue its rounds, stopping dead still suddenly at the sound of some perceived, faraway danger, Georgia shakes her head.

“You know, Justin, you have to live with some guilt sometimes, or it will drive you nuts. You can't do everything. You can't sacrifice your life for other people's happiness all the time, or it'll just make you crazy.”

Justin laughs, and she turns sharply toward him.

“What?”

“Well,” he says, “that sounds like what I said when I told you Leeza and I weren't going to get married just yet and you got so upset.”

“I wasn't upset.”
Liar
. “I just thought it would be better, you know, for the baby and all. I just didn't want my grandchild to be illegitimate.”

“Mom, I don't think they even use that word any more.”

She lets it drop. She knows she is talking to someone who has spent two years living with the poorest people of a poor country, for not much more than room and board. He's a good person, she tells herself. Get over it.

Besides, she thinks, I can live with a little guilt. I've done it this long. Hit me with your best shot, Forsythia Crumpler.

She stands there with her son, trying to digest the bagel, saying nothing else, watching the day come in.

CHAPTER THREE

October 19

The funeral is well-attended, although the only blood relatives present are Georgia and Justin. A handful of cousins from the Atlanta suburbs send their condolences and regrets.

Georgia isn't really sure what comes next.

She has no real interest in dealing with another sad old home no one seems likely to want; she doesn't think she has the energy.

Her own father's property is proving to be a hard enough sell. No real estate agents are calling to ask if the house's residents can disappear for an hour so prospective buyers can have an undisturbed look at what the multiple-listings book calls “a real charmer, a testament to country living. Be the master of your own estate less than 10 minutes from downtown offices.”

As if, Georgia thinks, there were many offices left in downtown Port Campbell—only the police and fire departments and social services, which were not allowed to follow the stores to the suburbs.

Jenny's house might bring someone some money, but Georgia doesn't really need money. She isn't rich, but what her father unexpectedly left her, plus her own savings, invested well, should be enough. Plus, she inherited a respectable sum and a nearly-paid-for house from Phil. And she has a good pension. She can see herself living a life, 20 years in the future, that includes a tidy, low-maintenance condominium near the campus, a good meal in a good restaurant once or twice a week and a trip to Europe every year. She won't be rich, but who would be fool enough to expect that, after a life teaching English literature?

The congregation of Geddie Presbyterian Church has grown older and smaller. In Georgia's youth, the church boasted more than 250 members. Now, there are 61, most of them far beyond retirement age.

“The Presbyterians just don't seem like they want to go out and recruit,” Jenny herself had told Georgia once, years ago.

Most of them seem to be present at Jenny's funeral, along with many from Shady Green Baptist Church on Ammon Road, where much of the rest of East Geddie's white population worships. A handful of mourners come from the AME Zion congregation, including Blue Geddie, his wife Sherita and his mother, Annabelle.

Georgia noticed that everyone at the homecoming two days before was white. The churches around East Geddie are as segregated as they ever were.

Georgia was amazed at how short a space it took to chronicle Jenny McLaurin's life in the paid obituary the
Port Campbell Post
ran Monday and Tuesday mornings. “Lifelong member of Geddie Presbyterian. Sunday School teacher. Church historian for 35 years. Preceded by loving husband, Harold, and son, Wallace.” No other mention of the little boy who, with his friends, liked to see how close he could get to the Campbell and Cool Spring freight train that came through twice a day, whose closed-casket funeral in 1958 Georgia was allowed to forgo.

Georgia, on the front row, thinks her own funeral probably will draw a larger crowd—the rare past student whom she actually helped, her peers making what for many will be an obligatory appearance, neighbors and a handful of real friends, maybe a couple of ex-husbands.

She wonders, though, if there will be the sense of loss, the true mourning, that she feels and sees here.