The Last Girls (25 page)

Cool pressed sheets

curtains drawn

Shutters down

Spirit lamp hissing

in the corner

Mama's special medicine

on my nightstand

Jack Daniels, sugar, and lemon juice

mixed in a china cup

with a silver spoon

Take as much as you want

you know what you need

Mama said

COMING OUT

Baby Ballou

how do you do

at your debut

Ricky Ballou

how do you do

pushing up pansies

two by two

VANITY

Mama's dressing table

with the rose silk skirt

held her sterling silver

comb and brush,

a million bottles, tubes, and vials,

little balls of cotton in a Chinese jar.

Cigarettes spill from the crumpled pack.

Ashes on the carpet,

ashes on the gold-and-velvet chair.

One high-heeled satin mule—

a pool of pink chiffon.

The oval mirror framed by lights

is glamorous

or clinical

depending upon her mood.

(but always theatrical)

Larger than life as they say

I stood at her elbow

as she made up her face

I mean
made it up

created it from scratch

and claw and slash and burn.

She covered it over

smoothed it out

rouged those cheekbones

painted on the pouting lips,

the arched surprise of brow.

Cobalt liner. Cat's eyes

were all the rage then.

Sweet, sweet powder

from a feather puff

Perfume:
Je Reviens

again and again.

Standing, smoothing, she

stoops to kiss my cheeks

before she leaves.

The air quivers,

charged with her beauty.

Now in the mirror

I, too, have cheekbones

To die for.

Mile 437.2
Vicksburg, Mississippi
Monday 5/10/99
0900 hours

C
OURTNEY HAS DECIDED
that it'll be okay for her to go ahead and smoke on this trip—after all, she's under such pressure, and she can quit the minute they steam into New Orleans. Or sooner—she'll quit the night before, so Gene won't even be able to smell it in her hair. She often has a cigarette or two when Hawk is out of town anyway—just a little boost, a little present, something for Courtney. So she might as well go ahead and buy herself a whole pack while they're docked here in Vicksburg. Wearing her walking shoes and her dark glasses, she heads up the long hill. This is a real workout. But what a seedy, wretched town Vicksburg is, in spite of all its history; don't they have any civic pride here at all?

Weeds grow up through cracks in the sidewalk. Many houses and businesses are advertised for sale; two very old brick buildings on her right are being demolished. Others stand vacant, their gaping windows like blind eyes gazing down the hill, brooding over the muddy river. A little wind has come up, blowing dust and bits of paper trash all along Grove Street, swirling them around Courtney's ankles. At the top of the hill sits a Shell station with a big sign on it that says
SMOKE SHOP
. Courtney buys a carton of Ultralights since they don't really count anyway, you hardly get any tobacco. Then she goes outside to the phone booth. The phone at Magnolia Court rings four times before she hears the click that means voice mail is picking up. But then a girl's high breathless voice says hello.

“Vangie?”

“Mama?”

It
is
Vangie, with a funny little note in her voice. Now Courtney remembers. Vangie's band was at the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill last night. How could she have forgotten? She even wrote it on the calendar in the kitchen at home, where Vangie is right now. Maybe Courtney is the one with Alzheimer's, not Hawk, only of course it's not Alzheimer's, he's too young.

“Mama? Hello, Mama, is that you?”

“Oh yes, hi honey. How are you? And Nate? How was the show?” Thank God Courtney wasn't at home in Raleigh, she'd have had to go over to Chapel Hill for it.

“Oh, it was okay,” Vangie says. “You know.” Vangie says “you know” and “like” all the time, it drives her mother wild. “Mama, when are you going to come home?”

“Monday,” Courtney says. “My schedule is right there, taped on the refrigerator. It tells you exactly where we are all the time. See it?” Courtney hears herself going on brightly about the
Belle of Natchez,
the food, the weather—

“Mama.”
Vangie interrupts. “Can't you come home sooner?”

“No, I can't,” Courtney says. “I absolutely cannot. You can't get off a cruise once you're on it,” which is not true at all, especially not this cruise, since it stops at so many towns. “Why?” she finally asks.

“Why didn't anybody tell me Daddy was sick?” Suddenly Vangie sounds very young and very angry, like she used to as a teenager.

“Well, honey, he's
not
sick, he's just having some tests this week,
that's all, it's no big deal. We didn't see any reason to bother you while you are on tour. It's just an evaluation, basically.”

“But Daddy
is
sick,” Vangie says slowly. Each word sinks like a stone into Courtney's consciousness. She thinks of those boys she saw on the bank earlier this morning, throwing rocks into the river; each stone made a widening circle on the water. Courtney leans against the warm metal side of the phone booth. “It's all these lists,” Vangie says.

“Oh, you know your father, he's always made lots of little lists.” Courtney's voice sounds hollow to her own ears. “He's a very organized man.”

“But he's
not,
” Vangie wails. “He's making too many lists. It's like, his bedside table is covered with lists, I saw them when I went in there to get some aspirin. There's something the matter with him, Mama. And we've got to leave for Philadelphia.”

“Now?”

“Yeah, we'll drive all day. Or, like, Van will drive. We'll be asleep, you know. In the back. Then wow, presto, we're there.”

Presto, indeed, Courtney thinks. Kids are supposed to grow up and leave and go everywhere and do everything. But
we're
supposed to stay home, frozen in time exactly the way we were, and they don't like it if we leave. Or if we change. Not one bit. It's getting so hot in this phone booth. Right in front of her, a fat man drives a long blue Buick up to the curb and gets out, mopping his face with the biggest handkerchief Courtney has ever seen. He's waiting. He wants to use the phone.

“I wish you'd come home,” Vangie says. “Just fly home from the next city, what is it?”

“Natchez.”

“Fly home from Natchez, then.” Vangie is the voice of responsibility, certainly a bizarre turnaround considering all those nights when nobody even knew where she was. Why, one summer she was gone for three weeks, Courtney was just beside herself with anxiety, but did
Vangie care? Heavens, no. Finally she called from Austin asking for money, which Courtney wired to her. Then she came waltzing back home with buzz-cut hair, dyed maroon. Friends of the Library, indeed! But Courtney was so glad to see her that she bought her a new electric guitar and never told Hawk.

“Dad looks different, too,” Vangie says unexpectedly.

“What do you mean, different?”

“It's like, he's like, looking out of his face. It's hard to describe. It's not all the time, either. Like right now, this morning, he's just fine. He's being the nicest he's ever been to Nate, for instance. Nate never even really spent any time with Dad before, he's always been sort of like, well, scared of him. You know. But it was yesterday I'm talking about, when we came in and there he was, just sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper only he wasn't really reading it, you know, he was just like sitting there looking out of his face and when I said ‘Hi, Dad, surprise!' he came back.”

“Came back?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, Vangie, what's your dad doing right now?” Courtney asks. “I'd like to talk to him, too.”

“He and Nate went out to pick up some doughnuts. Mary Bell was determined to make a big deal and set the table and cook up this huge breakfast, but we don't have time. So right now Mary Bell is upstairs lying down or pouting or something, God knows, she's so weird, Nate can't even believe how Gothic this whole thing is, but anyway, Daddy got, like, all excited about this new Krispy Kreme place over on Glenwood, so that's where they went. I guess Dad seems like he's pretty happy to see us. He put the top down on his car.”

“See? Everything's going to be just fine.”

Vangie sounds tired. “Mama, you have spent your whole life saying that. But this time, I'm telling you, it won't work.”

Courtney feels the sides of the phone booth closing in, a vise around her heart. The fat man is walking up and down on the sidewalk; he catches her eye and points to his watch. “Listen, honey, I've got to go. It's so hot in this phone booth, I feel like I'm going to faint. You have a great show, and give Nate and your daddy big hugs from me. I'll be back on Monday night.”

“Whatever,” Vangie says. The line goes dead.

The fat man heads for the phone booth as Courtney comes out. Sidling much too close to her, he catches her eye and winks, licking his bottom lip. His sweat smells like beer. Courtney turns on her heel and runs, all the way down Grove Street onto the dock and back to the boat.

Mile 437.2
Vicksburg, Mississippi
Monday 5/10/99
1015 hours

C
ATHERINE HAS BEEN MARRIED
for as long as she can remember, stretching out luxuriously in the big bed in their stateroom, this bed that goes on forever, it seems to her now. She can't remember a time when she wasn't married, or at least when she wasn't with a man. But to be honest, she's never thought much about it one way or the other. Men have simply occurred, like images, the way they'll come to her at the most surprising times and places in the midst of life, when she's doing something else completely, such as unloading the washing machine, and suddenly she'll see a shape in her mind's eye, a triangle, for instance, then a chair made out of triangles, and she'll just have to leave the wash or whatever she's doing, and go out to the shop and start making that chair. All her life, Catherine has been easily overtaken: by her husbands, by her children, by her images and ideas, by life itself.

On the original raft trip, for instance, she was overtaken by her engagement, or by the
idea
of her engagement, to be exact. She was much more interested in her romance with Howie than she was in the river, or the trip itself. She didn't give a damn about Mark Twain, who
reminded her of her uncle Walt anyway, a filibustering Alabama legislator she despised. She was working on her tan, with her upcoming engagement party at the Club, given by Howie's parents, in mind. To this end, Catherine basted herself each day on the raft with her own special mixture of iodine and baby oil, roasting first on one side, then the other. She timed the whole process, keeping her eyes closed with damp cotton balls on them so she wouldn't get those squinty little wrinkles in the corners, opening them only to check the time or to look at her brand-new square-cut diamond engagement ring as it winked in the sun all the way down the river.

She was a kind of a creation of herself. Her mother—the great belle, Mary Bernice—had instilled in Catherine and her younger sisters the idea that the whole point of college was to marry ASAP, and it was a vast relief to everybody that Catherine had already gotten this taken care of. In fact, that phrase “as soon as possible” seems to capture Catherine's entire life. Everything has happened lickety-split with never a pause until now—menopause, actually, how ironic.

Catherine props herself up on one elbow to glance out the window which gives out on the long brown sweep of the river, then the faint line of green trees, then the blue sky. Three lines: brown, green, blue, going on and on forever out of the frame.

The horizon reminds her of those summers she used to spend down on the farm at China Hill with Wesley when they were kids, visiting Gran-Gran and Pops. Dorothy and Frances never went. They were too little. But Catherine loved it. Things were different there. Slower, as if you were living in an earlier time. Gran-Gran never dressed until noon, for instance, and it took Pops ten minutes to light his pipe, and Sunshine cooked dinner all day long in the big old kitchen with its heartpine floor. Dinner was at three o'clock. Then you had to lie down in front of a fan, in summer, or on a pallet before the hearth in the wintertime.

Catherine sees her China Hill self as a little girl in an old sepiatinted
photograph in somebody's album in the bottom of somebody's chifforobe in the attic of an old, old house. In this photograph she and Wesley are pictured from behind, holding hands, walking into the woods, like children in a fairy-tale book. They are very small and the trees are huge, arching over them. They wear identical overalls and straw hats and carry trot lines all rigged up by Pops, though you can't see the trot lines in the photograph nor can you see the Coosa River beyond the trees. They have been told to “go outside” which is what they are told every morning, with no suggestion as to what they should do there, unlike Birmingham where there are piano lessons and math tutoring and social dancing and homework. Down at the farm, they can do whatever they want as long as they come back when Sunshine rings the bell. Sometimes they ride the mules. Sometimes they walk all the way out to Dodson's Crossroads for a Nehi orange drink and free penny candy from Sis Puckett, who chews tobacco like a man and don't take no shit, she says, from nobody. Sometimes they walk the other way, down the river on the Dark Path to the railroad trestle bridge and climb up the steep bank into its web of steel arching over the river where they hang on for dear life, teeth chattering, while the Dixie Special roars overhead.