The Last Girls (27 page)

“Catherine doesn't even bother to keep house,” Mary Bernice confided in her friends, “and our psychiatric doesn't even care.” In fact, Steve loved to see Catherine out in the yard, surrounded by children—her own, the neighbors'—and plants. She built trellises and fences. She poured a concrete walkway. Steve encouraged her when
she made the first heart-shaped steppingstones, then the suns and moons and cat-shaped steppingstones that would become her trademark. By then they had four children. They bought a big old house on the outskirts of town. Here Catherine made a fountain out of tractor seats, a porch rail out of antique bed frames, tables from old wooden doors with wrought-iron legs and inset tiles. She bought a welding torch and a kiln. Steve was gone a lot. He had chosen the state mental hospital over more lucrative private practices. He liked the big stuff, he said. He specialized in schizophrenia. In fact he was very excited about the clinical trials he was running for the new drug clozapine, when he was shot and killed in a robbery at the 7-Eleven where he always stopped for coffee on his way home. Five hundred people, all kinds of people, showed up at his memorial service. Catherine didn't even know many of them. When it was over, she thought she would die, too. But she didn't. She had to take care of her children, and she did, in the haphazard way she did everything. They fixed their own breakfasts, filled out their own permission forms. They went to school. They grew up. Catherine was working. Men occurred, then disappeared. She was working. Eventually she started making those big concrete women with mosaic tile dresses and hats. People bought them for crazy prices. One day a lawyer named Russell Hurt came by to discuss a commission, three of her concrete women for the courtyard in his new building. Three weeks later, he moved in.

But Catherine's whole life, even her life with Russell, seems distant to her right now, not nearly as real as the days when she used to wander the woods and fields with Wesley when they were kids. It's all because of the river. If Catherine closes her eyes, she's there yet and it's morning, early morning, her sneakers are wet with dew. She smells the honeysuckle so strong as she climbs up the stile; she hears the pot-rack, pot-rack sound of the guineas back there in the foggy woods.

Catherine props herself up on one elbow against the pillows and
looks in the mirror which Russell took off the wall last night and set up on the chair at the end of the bed so they could watch themselves making love, which turns them both on. “I wish I had a movie of this.” How many times has Russell said this? How many times have they done it, over the past twelve years? Catherine can't even imagine. And wouldn't the children be shocked, really shocked, to know they still do it? Wouldn't it “gross them out,” as “the girls” themselves used to say? It would gross out Johnny, the youngest, for sure. But, maybe not Amanda, who is more sophisticated, having worked in France for a year before entering graduate school in comparative literature, whatever that is, and who would have ever dreamed it? But certainly Page, now with her own twins and a busy lawyer husband to take care of, and certainly Will, in real estate with his father. Like Howie, Will works all the time. Howie will never retire, he's a millionaire many times over by now.

Watching herself in the mirror, Catherine lifts one heavy breast to her mouth and licks the nipple, sucks it just for a minute to get that little twang—like a single note plucked on a banjo—between her legs. She never was as intellectual as Anna and Harriet, was she? Or as focused and organized as Courtney. Actually, she was more like Baby though she didn't know it at Mary Scott, she thought Baby was so wild then, never dreaming how wild she could be herself. She's a middle-aged wild woman now. Oh, Catherine
does
like being married to Russell who is still likely to put down his newspaper any morning and stare at her until she quits tidying up the kitchen and comes to him, or to just cancel his tennis game in the afternoon if he gets in the mood and Catherine is available. He will even cancel
doubles.
Catherine likes that. As she has liked having all the children, their many comings and goings and friends and dogs and muddy shoes and sweatshirts flung down in the hall, the phone always ringing, the TV on, the school lunch menu taped to the refrigerator, brownies to bake for the bake sale. Catherine loves her children, she loves her grandchildren,
she still loves to paper a bathroom herself or move the furniture around, to cook from scratch. Catherine loved those lists that she made out every day when the kids were all at home, so many many things to do, she loved to write things down on those lists and cross them off knowing that there were always more, more things on the list for any given day than she or anybody else could ever possibly do. She did not mind. She just did what she could every day and then drank a gin and tonic and fed the kids and sat down to help them with their homework while Steve worked late. Catherine was prodigal with her energy, generous with her days. There were plenty of days. Years flew by. The harder she worked, the happier she was. Messy, spontaneous and exuberant, Catherine was as unlike the cool and glamorous Mary Bernice or even Steve's mother, prissy little Claudia Rosenthal, as night from day.

In fact, Claudia could scarcely stand to visit, once flying into a little fit after Thanksgiving dinner upon observing, from her perch on the living room sofa, that the dining room tablecloth was uneven. “Do you think you could fix it, dear?” she'd asked Catherine, who was busy putting rain boots on the children. “Don't you think you could just pull it down there on the left, dear?” with a high shrill note of hysteria creeping into her voice until finally Catherine went over and gave it a yank, who cared?

But Claudia's most telling moment came when she insisted on coming to “help” when Johnny, the last child, was born. Catherine woke in the night to nurse the baby, trying to figure out why she heard water running in the bathroom at that hour. Finally when she'd fed the baby and burped him and put him back down, she made her way into the bathroom blinking against the light to find Claudia in her threadbare white gown scrubbing the tiles with a toothbrush. “Hi,” she said sweetly, looking up. “You need to buy some Tilex.”

“Oh Lord!” Catherine had stumbled back to bed. Better a belle
than a cleaning lady, she thought later, comparing her mother to Steve's, though there were times when she had felt differently.

Something about herself in the mirror reminds Catherine of Mary Bernice and she leans forward, breasts swinging, to peer at herself more closely. It is her mother's face this morning for sure, like that time years ago when she was so mad at Will and she heard her mother's voice coming out of her own mouth saying those words she and Wesley hated most when they were kids: “You
know
you don't think that!” Wesley used to run around in little circles, he'd get so mad at Mama. Catherine smiles, remembering. It's a shame that Johnny never even met Wes, that her other kids scarcely remember him. She wonders if she's the only person in the world who remembers his birthday: November 1. Scorpio. But she
does
look more like her mother than she used to, especially around the eyes. Catherine is determined never to drift off into euphemism the way Mary Bernice did at the end, denying everything, remembering nothing, refusing even to meet Wesley's lover who came all the way from San Francisco after his death. Wearing all her makeup and that ratty yellow silk dressing gown, Mary Bernice looked ridiculous, like a character actress in a movie, at the end. At least Daddy had had the good sense to keel over dead on the golf course.

Catherine read someplace that you never love your parents as much as you love your children, which is true. But isn't it strange how you can carry on arguments with them for years and years after their death? And you can
never
win.

Catherine steps into the tiny bathroom and turns on the shower which is nice and hot and has plenty of force, thank God. She shampoos her hair and then closes her eyes and leans back to let the water run all over her, down over her breasts and between her legs. She soaps herself good, pausing suddenly on her left breast—
what is that?
What the hell is that? She takes a deep breath and arches her back and lifts her breast so she can feel underneath it and all along her left side
near the armpit. It's perfectly obvious. She can't believe she has never felt it before. It's because of Russell, she thinks, the constant presence of Russell, he's so loud, he's so distracting. But she can't believe that Russell hasn't felt it himself, and oh God, what if she has to have a mastectomy? Breasts are really important to Russell. What if she dies? Two of her friends have died from breast cancer already. The question is not
why me?
she realizes suddenly. The question is
why not me?
Well, shit. Shit, shit, shit. Catherine puts creme rinse on her hair anyway, you might as well look good even if you're dying. Might as well put on body lotion, too, life goes on even if you're dying. And even after you're dead. Oh,
stop it.
Maybe she's more like Mama than she thought. Histrionic. But this lump is
really big,
actually, almost as big as a golf ball. Anybody with smaller breasts would have noticed it ages ago. And Russell will be gone all day long on that stupid tour. Catherine dresses as fast as she can, avoiding the mirror. It's time to meet Harriet anyway, they're supposed to walk into town together. Maybe she'll tell Harriet. Catherine walks quickly through the hall on the flowered carpet past all these pictures of people who are dead, dead dead.

“I
REMEMBER
V
ICKSBURG
as being bigger than this, don't you?” Harriet stops to catch her breath and look back down the long hill toward the river where the
Belle of Natchez
is docked right next to Harrah's Casino, a juxtaposition that must mean something, though she can't think what.

“Yes. No. I mean, I really can't remember Vicksburg very well at all.” Catherine stops too, crossing her arms so that she can touch her breast.

“Ruth blew the bugle when we docked,” Harriet says.

“Oh yes. That damn bugle!” Catherine kneads her breast. Now the lump feels huge, held up by her bra.

“And the mayor came, don't you remember, and gave us those little
charms and Civil War minié balls, I've still got mine at home. Then they took us out to a restaurant and fed us hushpuppies and fried catfish which I remember especially well because we didn't have to cook that night. And Ruth had never eaten catfish,” Harriet adds. “Then those people from the Mississippi River Commission took us to see that big model of the river the next day, before we left, and gave us sandwiches. We didn't have to fix lunch that day either.”

“The reason you can remember so well is because you've never had children. I've blown out whole lobes of my brain,” Catherine says. Her breast feels separate from her already. She has a sudden image of it rolling down the hill and then it's as if she's losing her whole body bit by bit, as if pieces are falling off and tumbling down the bluff to disappear into the river forever, and she can't stop them.

“Oh, but you have such a nice family,” Harriet says. “I'm envious.”

“Don't be. There are times when I wish I had no one at all.”

Harriet stops and turns, shading her eyes, to stare curiously at Catherine. “You mean that, don't you?”

Catherine nods, still clutching her breast as they continue up the hill toward the austere old courthouse, now a museum, which sits on the highest point of the bluff, its columned porticos facing in every direction. Despite its grandeur, the courthouse is as seedy as the rest of Vicksburg. Run down. Grass straggles up between the marble slabs of the portico floor; the columns are streaked with dirt. But it's really quite a view from here, like a lookout. No wonder Vicksburg was considered so strategic in the war. “The Wa-wa,” Catherine's Gran-Gran used to say. Pops called it the “Silver War.” Catherine and Harriet gaze out at the whole town running away down the bluff to the river before them. A wind comes up. Clouds skid across the patchy blue sky. Being up here is like being in the sky itself. Catherine feels nervous, exposed. “We'd better go in before it rains,” she says.

The inside of the courthouse is as stern as the exterior, damp and dim, with cast-iron stairs leading up to the courtroom on the second
floor. Harriet and Catherine climb them and move forward to join a little group gathered around an ornate iron dais where the judge must have presided. “This siege was the story of moving forward inch by inch,” an ancient lady in a hoop skirt is saying in a whispery, cultured voice. They strain forward to hear her. “At the start, they were five football fields apart. By the end, they were so close they could speak to each other. The siege lasted forty-seven terrible days.” Her small voice shakes.

“Oh, honestly!” one of the younger women from the
Belle of Natchez
says to her friend. This woman wears shorts with a matching sequined T-shirt and visor and that kind of fashionable mushroom haircut which looks just awful. “I swear, I don't see why they all go on and on and on about the damn Civil War so much. I mean, I'm from the South myself—Knoxville's the South, isn't it?—but nobody in
my
family ever carried on about it like this. I just don't get it.” Her nasal voice holds all of east Tennessee in it: hard times. And a recent, lucky marriage.

“Listen!” Suddenly the little old guide lady is on her like an insect. “My father ate
rats
at the siege of Vicksburg! Rats!” Her filmy eyes and yellow teeth are right in the younger woman's face.

“Damn, lady!” The girl breaks free, straightens her visor, and runs from the room with her friend following right behind her. They clatter down the iron staircase.

“Rosalie, come along now.” Another old lady in costume leads her away. “Rats!” Rosalie spits back at them out of her puckered, furious face.
“Rats!”