The Last Girls (19 page)

Diamond Lil sings “The Sounds of Silence,” one of Russell's favorites, he remembers when it was a hit back in the sixties, sung by, who was it? Simon and Garfunkel. It was on the juke box in the basement of the Beta house, Russell remembers punching A5 again and again, sinking back into that old leather couch while it played. There was something about it, it was so plaintive. “Hello darkness, my old friend.” The strangest feeling used to come over Russell then, it was indescribable, really, and yet here it is again, years later. Many years later.

“Really, I have to go to bed,” Anna is saying. “I can't believe I've stayed up this late.”

“We'll see you tomorrow,” says Courtney. “Are you going on the battlefield tour? Or just into Vicksburg?”

“Neither, I'm afraid.” Anna adjusts her layers. “I'm here to work, you know.”

No, Harriet does not say. No, don't you remember? Doesn't anybody remember anything but me? We're all here for Baby . . . For some reason Harriet remembers the way Baby used to sit on her bed with her legs flat out to the sides. She was double-jointed . . .

“Harriet, Harriet, listen, you've got to hear this!” Courtney is laughing, Anna is laughing, Russell is laughing, Catherine is poking her in the side. Up front at the piano, Diamond Lil has changed the words of “Can I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life?” She's singing, “Will I wear Depends for the rest of my life?”

“I'm not so sure this is funny,” Russell says.

“Look, look.” Courtney is hysterical. “They don't even get it.” And in truth they don't seem to, most of the older people in the bar nodding to the music with the same vague smiles they've worn all night. Two couples are waltzing. Diamond Lil finishes up with a flourish. “That's it! Good night, ladies and gentlemen!” Harriet stands up with the others, and Diamond Lil sings them all out the door with “Goodnight Irene.”

“Good night! Good night!” Russell and Catherine echo, slipping off. “See you in the morning.” Courtney disappears, but Anna pauses at the rail, even though she seemed to be in such a hurry to get to bed, so Harriet lingers, too. The air out here is thick and steamy.

“I was just thinking,” she says, “some of those old couples in there must have been married for more than fifty years. Why, even Courtney and Hawk have probably been married for thirty-five years. I just can't even imagine it.”

“You could imagine it,” Anna says, “if you'd ever run into the right man.”

“Did you ever do that, Anna? Run into the right man, I mean?” Darkness gives Harriet the courage to ask.

“Eventually,” Anna tells her, lighting up a cigar.

“But it wasn't that graduate student,” Harriet prompts, as a horn from another boat sounds across the dark water.

“Kenneth Trethaway?” Anna gives her snorting laugh. “No. Hardly.”

“We never really knew him, did we?” Harriet's trying to remember.

“You never really knew me either,” Anna says.

E
VEN HER CLOSEST FRIENDS
in college—these suitemates—didn't know her real name, Annie Stokes. Nor did they know that the plain woman who showed up sometimes at Mary Scott for Parents' Day was not actually her mother.

Ernest Stokes, Anna's father, was a freelance evangelist who'd moved from church to church all over West Virginia, hauling his family along. By the time she was thirteen, Anna had been to seven different schools, though she did not always go to school, as her mother was sickly, and often Anna had had to stay at home to take care of the little boys. This she'd never minded, for they were adorable, blond angels all three—David, Mark, and John—each a year apart. They had nearly killed her mother. Helen Stokes was frail anyway, a beautiful
girl with red-gold hair that fell to her waist who liked to sit by the kitchen door in the sunshine smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio which had to be turned off when Daddy came home, unless it was gospel, which Daddy approved of. Daddy did not approve of much. Anna was not allowed to dance, to take gym classes, or to try out for cheerleader at school. She could not wear jeans or sleeveless blouses or drink Coca-Colas either. But she had loved her daddy, who was handsome and sweet, tossing the little boys up in the air whenever he came back from a revival, ruffling her hair. He had a beautiful speaking voice, deep and resonant, like God. Anna could see why her mother had taken up with him when she was just a girl, not much older than Anna. He had come through her town and saved her, then baptized her in the river, then married her. Then they had been fruitful and multiplied. But Anna's mother started coughing blood. She went away to a hospital the year Anna was thirteen, and then Anna was in charge of everything, though people from the church were real nice, bringing food and hand-me-downs. When Mama came home, she was very thin, with red cheeks. She got Anna to put the radio on the table beside her bed so she could hear Randy's Record Shop out of Gallatin, Tennessee. She loved Patsy Cline. At first all Mama would eat was cream of mushroom soup, but then she wouldn't eat anything.

The day she died, the boys were playing ball up the road and Anna's daddy was preaching a funeral someplace else. Anna was folding the wash. Her mama had been asleep but all of a sudden she woke up strangling. “Oh my God!” she said, looking at Anna. Then she fell back against her pillow, then she died. Her fingers had curled up like ferns. Spit came out of her open mouth and ran down her neck into her nightgown.

The day after the funeral, Daddy yelled bloody murder and broke up the kitchen furniture with the ax while Anna sat huddled in bed with the little boys, hugging them.

Three weeks after that, Daddy married Mrs. Loretta Goudge, a widow in their church, twelve years older than he was. Everybody except Anna thought this was fine. “A man has to have help taking care of younguns,” they said, nodding. “A preacher has to have him a wife.”

But though Mrs. Goudge was nice enough, Anna shriveled in her presence. At school, her grades went down. Her teacher sent her over to see Miss Todd, the old missionary health nurse. “Don't tell your daddy,” the teacher said. Miss Todd was not from around there. “Child, child,” Miss Todd said, stroking Anna's hair.

When her daddy and Mrs. Goudge left town for a new church in Ohio, taking the boys, Anna had stayed on with Miss Todd to finish high school. Miss Todd had a leather-bound set of the classics in her living room; Anna went right through them. Under Miss Todd's tutelage, she learned Latin and table manners and geography and memorized a poem a week which she recited to Miss Todd every Sunday morning before church, Miss Todd's church, which was Presbyterian and not emotional. Anna declaimed from the stair landing to Miss Todd who sat below, sipping her tea:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

“This is my own, my native land”?

Miss Todd liked to tie back Anna's hair with a black velvet ribbon and kiss her on the mouth, but that was all; and even later, in Anna's mind, it was more than a fair exchange.

Anna did not see her father and the boys again, as they moved next to Indiana. At school she took a role in the class play and won a poetry contest. She got a job at the local dimestore where she worked after school and on Saturdays. In her senior year she was valedictorian and had her pick of college scholarships. She chose Mary Scott on a
whim because she liked the way the white chapel steeple cut into the blue sky on the day of her visit and the surrounding mountains made her feel comfortable and the girls were nice. Boys would have been too much to deal with right then, though she had managed to kiss one several times at the church camp where she was a counselor during the summer before college began.

At orientation, she enrolled as Anna Todd, and kept the name even though Miss Todd was absorbed with another underprivileged girl, Anna's successor, by Christmastime. Anna didn't mind. In fact she felt curiously relieved, free to form her own friendships with other girls for the first time. She loved her suitemates.

She loved her classes. At Mary Scott it was possible to admit her secret wish to
be a writer,
to actually say it out loud, which she had never done. Nobody laughed at her for it. Her teachers were encouraging. Though she intended to write nice poetic stories that would demonstrate her large vocabulary, the stories came out different from that, surprising her. Yet nobody flinched when she read them aloud in the workshop, those first short gritty stories set in West Virginia, all of them about people she had known or heard about. She wrote one story about two abandoned, starving children who set their house on fire to summon help and another about a church organist who was so fat she didn't know she was pregnant until the labor pains began during Wednesday night prayer meeting while she was playing “Amazing Grace.” She wrote a story about a girl who killed her young husband by accident with a tractor, then left her children with her mother and disappeared. These stories were seriously discussed in the workshop and then published in the college literary magazine. It was easy. Anna was amazed. Everybody thought she was tough, like her stories, but she wasn't. She didn't understand where these stories were coming from but they poured out of her onto the page like milk from a pitcher. They scared her.

On the strength of the first four chapters of the novel she was writing
for her senior thesis, Anna was awarded a national Helen Levitas Creative Writing Fellowship which would pay her first year's tuition in graduate school at Columbia University, where she had already been accepted. She opened the official letter in the old post office at Mary Scott early one Saturday morning in February and stared at the black typed letters on the page until they all slid together into words and the news sank in. Then she turned on her heel and ran across the front quad to Mr. Gaines's office. It was a wet, foggy morning. Nobody was up yet. Mr. Gaines had been Anna's lover for the past two years. Of course she had had boyfriends, too, starting with all the dates Baby had fixed them up with that first year, but in most cases Anna felt much older than the boys from the neighboring schools. She liked to tease them, though; sometimes she could wrap them around her little finger. In general Anna found that most boys could take her or leave her, but the ones that liked her, liked her a
lot
. Graduate students had proved more interesting, but were usually too poor to take you anyplace nice for dinner. By senior year, Anna had broken two hearts that she knew of, in spite of her longstanding relationship with Mr. Gaines.

This relationship was a
relief,
in a way. It kept her from having to be in love. Mr. Gaines was a good husband, a good teacher, and a wonderful father to Maeve. Anna knew he would never leave Sheila. She didn't want him to. Oddly, the knowledge that their affair had no future enabled Anna to enjoy it all the more. Until that Saturday morning in February, the day she received the letter announcing her fellowship.

The English department was located in Bartlett Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus, and the door was always open. Anna ought to know—she'd spent enough time there during the past four years. Of course, Mr. Gaines wouldn't be in his office now, he'd be at home where he belonged, with his family. Probably he was still fast asleep. But Anna could leave him a note. She couldn't wait until
Monday to let him know the good news. Monday was a whole weekend away! Anna pushed the door open and entered the wide, shadowy hall which was as familiar to her now as her own room. Here was Miss Auerbach's office with Virginia Woolf's picture on the door; Mr. Duff's office with its incomprehensible quotation from Joyce; the crayon grave rubbing of William Faulkner's tombstone hanging on Mr. Goldman's door; Lucian Delgado's office which he was so rarely in; and Mr. Gaines's office with yellow light spilling out from under the door and falling from the transom in a golden rectangle on the heart pine floor.

Anna stopped dead. The fine hair rose on her arms. She heard Baby's unmistakable giggle. And then Mr. Gaines's low voice saying something she couldn't quite hear and then Baby giggling again. But Baby was engaged to Charlie Mahan; the wedding was set for June 10. Anna would be a bridesmaid. Surely Mr. Gaines was just helping Baby with a paper. Anna crept closer. She knelt and pressed herself against the door. She stayed there for almost an hour, unable to leave even when she knew she should, unable to leave until the big front door swung open and old Mr. Hash came in and turned on the hanging overhead lights and threw that brown grainy stuff on the wooden floor and started sweeping it up. Anna stood up then. She had no wish to see Baby. “'Lo, Mr. Hash,” Anna said to him, leaving.

So she went ahead and fell in love with Kenneth Trethaway, a graduate student from the University of North Carolina who had been pursuing her in a hopeless, reckless, relentless way for some time, and married him in the summer after Baby's wedding, when she realized she was pregnant. Normally morose, Kenneth had exhibited more delight than Anna had thought possible when she told him the news. His parents, too, both postal workers in Raleigh, seemed pleased and bought the newlyweds an enormous Naugahyde couch for the little house across from the police station in Chapel Hill where they would live for the next four years while Kenneth finished his Ph.D. Kenneth's
parents were simple people, astonished by their moody, brilliant son. They hoped the marriage would settle him down.

Anna and Kenneth made fun of the couch, wondering aloud how many naugas had died to produce it. Anna even did a pencil drawing of the nauga, a strange little mythological creature which looked to be half bird and half armadillo. They made love on the couch, on the floor, on a mattress they pulled out into their tiny backyard to look at a meteor shower which was gorgeous in spite of the sirens wailing from the police station. Kenneth and his friends smoked dope all the time, but Anna did not after she got pregnant. Kenneth and his friends called her “the Madonna.” Kenneth adored her then. He wept wildly when she lost the baby at five months, having already used her Helen Levitas fellowship to buy a washer and dryer and pay off Kenneth's car loan.