A Southern Exposure Read online

  He will never write again, Russ thinks, at that black moment, still waiting for Deirdre. His poems are fully as trashy as his life is. Of course they are.

  He will go back to Hollywood. He will write bits of scripts about pigs.

  He stays at home, and won’t see anyone. Especially no local parties, or “gatherings,” as they are called. Once, at the post office, he runs into that little fool from Oklahoma, that Jimmy Hightower, whatever he calls himself. Who tells Russ (as though he cared) that some new people have moved to town whom he, Russ, would probably like. In fact, the lady, Mrs. Baird, knows considerable of his poetry by heart. She is in fact an unusual lady, this Cynthia Baird is (Russ detects a just-controlled leer on the face of Jimmy Hightower).

  Well, so much the worse for her, is what Russ would like to say. What he actually mumbles is “Well, maybe. One of these days.”

  He tells Brett not to bother him with the phone, and asks if she would mind going to the post office from now on.

  She wouldn’t mind.

  8

  Although Brett has been proclaimed “well” by her doctor, and has no more overt, identifiable symptoms, she does not quite feel herself to be well. She feels a pervasive sort of lassitude and a corresponding lowness in her spirits. And her heart, or something that is interior and important, seems out of control; she feels wild flutterings, plus occasional stabs of pain. Not enough to tell a doctor about, could she even find the words for whatever is wrong. She wonders about the Change; she is much too young for that, isn’t she? But—could the operation in San Francisco (Brett does not think, has never thought, the word “abortion”)—could that have brought it on early? Or done some other awful thing to her inside?

  Very likely because of the way she is herself, Russ seems strange to her. He seems to be acting oddly, although perhaps he is not, is the same old Russ. One night she dreams that Russ is having some big illicit love affair, and she thinks, in the dream, Well, that explains a lot. But in the morning she recalls that this is another symptom of the Change, crazy, groundless jealousy, and so she tries to put the dream out of her mind.

  The afternoon (now years ago, before Deirdre Yates went off to California and then came back), the time that she saw them, caught in that moment like pinned butterflies, although her heart jolts hard when she thinks of it, she tries to forget that too. It was nothing, she tells herself; people run into each other like that all the time in Pinehill. It was slightly odd that Russ didn’t say, “Guess who I ran into downtown today.” But not significant. A meaningless encounter. However, it has stayed all this time in Brett’s mind, it is vividly fixed there: those two faces, Deirdre’s and Russ’s, as they seemed to stare at each other.

  Russ does not like having dinner with his children. Nor, when Brett was a child (when she was SallyJane), did her parents have dinner with her; she was always fed by her mother’s succession of maids—Mrs. Caldwell “could not keep help,” as the local ladies whispered behind her back, an awful indictment. Brett thus feels that she is continuing a tradition, doing as her parents did, and doing right by Russ in feeding the children first; she forgets, when she thinks along those lines, the difference between feeding one child and dinner for five, and although it is true that she has help (unlike her mother, Brett keeps any help forever), still the effort involved in those six-o’clock children’s meals is large and often exhausting, increasingly so, for which Brett castigates herself, with no self-pity or even sympathy.

  After the children have been fed and bathed and are settled, more or less, in bed, Russ and Brett have a drink together, usually in the kitchen, while she makes the preparations for their private dinner. This drink together is often interrupted by calls of need from the children’s room: “I want a drink of water. A sandwich. I want you.”

  “Honey, you’re much too lenient with them. You make them worse. They’re getting spoiled,” Russ complains.

  But Brett is unable not to go in to them, at least for a minute, if only to say, “Now go to sleep, you’ve had your dinner, you don’t need a sandwich now.” Dimly she recalls childhood loneliness, old needs of her own, for which she never cried out. In a way she is pleased that her children ask for what they want, despite the inconvenience for grownups.

  Lately, though, since Kansas, Brett has been too tired, really, for either the children or for Russ. The only thing that gets her through is the drink, or drinks. She has come to count on that—that big slug of bourbon over ice, with a little sugar and bitters so it qualifies, really, as an old-fashioned. A civilized cocktail that anyone might drink. Sometimes, to help her through the children’s dinner, all that, she has a small private not-quite old-fashioned while she’s cooking for them. Frying the chicken, broiling the hamburgers or hot dogs, whatever. And the bourbon helps. It dims the children’s noise; it removes her somewhat from their passionate rages, their fights.

  The only problem is that by the time that is all over and she has begun to drink in a serious way with Russ, and to fix his dinner, she is extremely tired—not drunk exactly, but just a little out of control. She burns things. She fears saying things that should not be said. Fears saying, “Do you love me?” Or saying, “Deirdre Yates?”

  But she does not say either of those forbidden things. She says very little. She sometimes in a mild way complains to Russ of headaches, but she is not quite sure that he notices.

  She continues to feel that he is somewhere else.

  9

  Abigail hates the local school. “I can’t understand anything anyone says, and I know it all anyway. We read those books last year. Some kids come in from the country on trucks, and they’re all much older than we are because in the winter the trucks can’t get into town and they have to stay home. Those kids seem dumb but I don’t think they are.”

  Abby is in fact fascinated by those large children from out in the country; they are called “truck children.” So large and mysterious—she cannot imagine their lives at home, where they live, but she thinks of large bare houses, babies crawling across cold linoleum, babies crying, and fathers in dirty overalls. The very size of some of these children is frightening. Seated at small tables, in the small chairs arranged for much younger children, their legs are thrust awkwardly aside. Some of the girls have breasts already; they cross their arms over their chests and duck their heads down shyly. They don’t know the answers when the teacher calls on them, and the teacher seems to know they will not.

  One of the largest, darkest, and by far the noisiest of the truck children (mostly they are quiet, shy) is a boy named Edward Jones. He teases Abby, seeming to regard her as someone alien, foreign, wrong. “Abby Talk-Funny,” he mutters, just out of the teacher’s hearing. “Say something in English, can’t ya?” He jumps out at her from behind the stack of garbage cans in back of the school. “Gabby Abby, big and flabby,” he chants. She is afraid of Edward Jones, with his black hair, his flashing black eyes, and his long, long legs.

  Abby does not become friends right away with any of the children she met at the Bigelows’ party.

  “I want to go to the Negro school,” she tells Cynthia and Harry. “Why can’t I? These kids are just dopey jerks, I like Negroes better. I could have friends there. Is there some law that I have to go to an all-white school? I thought public school meant Negroes too.”

  “There probably is some law,” her father tells her.

  “Would you like to go to a boarding school?” asks Cynthia.

  “I would if they had Negro children too.”

  Cynthia: “I can’t exactly write to a school and ask if they have Negro students. Or can I?”

  Harry: “I don’t see why not. What I don’t see is how we’d afford it.”

  “Well, there’s that. But the real point is, she’s too young to go away to school.”

  “True enough.”

  “But maybe one of those nice Quaker schools in Pennsylvania.”

  “Are Negroes ever Quakers?”

  “I don’t know. But you
don’t have to be a Quaker to go to those schools.” Cynthia pauses, musing. “I think I’ll write to one of them, just in case. Some girls I knew in Connecticut went to one.”

  “Cynthia, I tell you, we can’t afford it.”

  “Maybe a scholarship? She has terrific grades.”

  “Even with a scholarship.” Harry in his turn pauses. “We’re still thinking about a house sometime, aren’t we?”

  “Oh yes, of course we are.” Cynthia utters this semi-truth with enthusiasm. It is something she says quite a lot. “We’re still thinking about a house,” she and Harry say to each other earnestly, and “We’re more or less looking at houses,” they say to new friends, with equal conviction.

  The truth is that they like it where they are. Or, to put it more accurately, where they are suits them very well indeed, both their stated and their unstated, perhaps half-conscious purposes. They are comfortable in “the suite,” if just slightly crowded. But because of that very lack of ample space they are free of certain obligations that were strongly felt in Connecticut: new furniture, large parties. Also (this is the unspoken part), living as they do, as they are, allows both Harry and Cynthia a pleasant sense of privileged visiting; they do not really live in Pinehill, and are therefore subject to none of the local strictures or even customs. They could almost as well be living in Bermuda, or off on Capri.

  Also, their life is much, much cheaper in that low-rent suite.

  And it is rather sexy, hotel living.

  • • •

  Abigail feels this too, this lofty impermanence, but, unlike her parents, she both dislikes it and is able to articulate her discontent. “We live in a hotel,” she accurately states. “We’re not like a real family.”

  Exactly, thinks Cynthia. This is not a settled, domestic life that we’re leading. I’m not exactly defined by being a wife and mother down here, and so—so whatever I do is okay.

  What she is doing, at the moment, on a great many afternoons, is “looking for houses” with Jimmy Hightower. Very satisfactory. He is crazy about her, that is clear. He is so impressed, he never met anyone like her. Eventually, Cynthia supposes, some sort of payment will come due. He will make some pass, will want to kiss her, even to have an affair. And when that happens—well, she will or she won’t, she can’t tell yet. In the meantime he doesn’t so much as touch her hands, except for the barest, tiniest, but sort of sexy instants, lighting her cigarettes. He is not, though, in the least attractive. Too short, and puffy. Red-faced, almost bald. Though God knows he is nice.

  But he has not, has never introduced her to Russell Byrd. Cynthia has not, of course, come right out and said, “I’m dying to meet Russell Byrd.” And is she? And if so, just what does she expect of this longed-for meeting? But Jimmy must have got the idea, at least, that she is interested in Russell Byrd. She knows a lot of his poetry; lines of it come into her head all the time down here. It must be the landscape, she thinks.

  Sometimes, fairly often, Jimmy drives her out by Russell’s house, as though that were available, a house to look at. Amazingly, for a family with five children, no one ever seems to be there. Or the famous big car, the Hollywood Cadillac, is there, but no people. Once, they caught a distant view of a woman—“Brett?”—off in the garden, a large woman with a hat and gardening shears who could, Jimmy said, be Brett. Or maybe not. But never Russ. No sign that he lived there. That he came and went on ordinary human errands—and perhaps he did not.

  Cynthia on these Byrd excursions senses an excitement in Jimmy that is almost equal to her own. He’s like a kid, she thinks, with a sort of crush on an older boy. Only Jimmy is older, isn’t he?

  “How old is Russell Byrd, would you say?” she asks Jimmy.

  “Oh, maybe thirty-nine, forty.” Actually, Jimmy knows the precise year and date of Russell’s birth, but he chooses to make this information vague.

  “Oh, that’s older than I thought.” And Jimmy must be a good deal older than forty, thinks Cynthia, who feels very young indeed at thirty-two.

  “Don’t you know any Byrd kids at school? I think there’re five of them,” says Cynthia to her daughter.

  “Oh, yeah. Those dopey kids. Some dumb girl named Melanctha, and four dumb boys.”

  “What’s dopey about them?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, nothing special. All the kids in the school are dopey, it looks like to me.”

  “Oh, Abby, now really.”

  “The Byrd kids come to school on a truck, but they’re not really truck children. It has something to do with where they live.”

  Abigail’s own major obsession, this golden Southern fall, has been Benny, Benny and the mixed-up substances in the chem. lab, and the teacher, Mr. Martindale. What happened? Any explosion? Anyone dead?

  Every morning, at first with dread, her stomach tightening, breath short, she has scanned the local paper, half expecting the headline EXPLOSION IN CONNECTICUT SCHOOL. On Sundays she reads The New York Times, which is carried by the local drugstore; Harry by now has one reserved. Abigail even reads the “Week in Review” section. It might be there.

  But no, it never is. Just all this other stuff about countries arming, troops marching.

  After a few weeks of such anxiety she decides that it is over; nothing worth putting in the paper happened, no cops or anyone will come down there after her, and Benny is not in any reform school. Probably.

  She is not especially relieved by this realization. What she rather feels is a vast and terrible disappointment. She wanted to know what happened—and she badly wanted something to happen.

  One afternoon, when both parents are out somewhere, the perfect solution comes to her: call Benny. Long distance. How simple, how perfect. How could she not have thought of it before?

  “God, Abby, it was just the greatest thing that ever happened. Oh, if you’d been there! If I’d been there—I got all this poop from Muffy Montgomery, you remember her?—when I was over helping my dad last week. Anyway, she told me that old Martindale made his little speech, you know the one, the magic of chemistry. Our chemistry is going to defeat Hitler’s chemistry because it’s better. All that bull, you remember, only this year he got a lot fancier, according to Muffy. With the gestures, the cute smiles. And then, nothing worked. It was so great. Nothing happened like he said it was going to. No smells, no explosions. I guess we’re sort of lucky that way, right? But it would have been fun if something had really gone bang, or if there’d been some great big stink he didn’t plan.”

  “What did he say?” Abby asked him. Talking to Benny is so familiar an activity to Abby that she can hardly believe she is doing it.

  “Oh, you know how he is. He thinks it’s okay if you smile all the time, then no one will know that you’re starting an ulcer. He smiled and smiled, Muffy said, and he said he reckoned the summer heat wasn’t beneficial, that’s what he said, not beneficial for chemical compounds. What a pill he is. What a fake.”

  “God, I wish I’d been there.” I wish I were there with you. I would wish you were here, except it’s an awful place and I wouldn’t wish it on a friend, especially if the friend is a Negro. Abby says none of this to Benny; she has begun to think of her father finding this call on his phone bill. “I guess I’d better go,” she tells Benny. “This is long distance, and you know my dad.”

  “Thank you for calling me. I’ll call you sometime when I get some dough. Say, I forgot to tell you, I’m applying for a scholarship to this school in New Hampshire. Exeter? The coach says they’re really interested in good ballplayers.”

  “Do they take girls?”

  “I doubt it. I don’t know.”

  “Okay. Well, good luck if you want to go there. Any school would be better than the one I’m going to.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It sure is. Well, bye.”

  Abby hangs up feeling mildly depressed. What was all that about Muffy, anyway? Whom of course Abigail remembers, this really icky black-haired girl, with all these curls. And dum
b. Benny couldn’t possibly like her. Much. And she is just a little depressed about Exeter, where she can’t go. Her mother wants her to go to Vassar after high school, because Cynthia got married instead of going to college at all. But she’s pretty sure Vassar does not take either boys or Negroes.

  Abby’s reference to Harry’s supposed stinginess is somewhat unfair; he will only be surprised by a phone call to Connecticut not made by himself and not explained by Cynthia. With Abby he is a generous father, giving her a quarter a week, which is more allowance than most kids her age get, in Pinehill, that year.

  Thus Abby, on her new bike from Sears, is able each afternoon to get a small sundae at the Darby Dairy Products, otherwise known as the ice-cream parlor. Other kids go there too, with their nickels and dimes; the place is really crowded with kids that Abby halfway knows, from school. To whom she pays no attention whatsoever. Looking at no one except the counter boy, she pays and takes her Dixie cup of ice cream and chocolate sauce outside, to eat quickly before getting back on her bike and continuing her ride around the outskirts of the town—of which she hates almost every inch.

  10

  Unlike her daughter, Cynthia “adores” this new landscape, this climate. “I think I was born to be Southern,” she tells Harry.

  “Maybe in some other life you were.”

  “I really think so. Why not? Can’t you see me in a hoopskirt, on a wide veranda, fanning away?”

  “All too easily, my love.”

  “Harry, you know you’re really mean. All this light irony—well, you add it all up and it’s heavy. A great boulder of irony, really crushing. You make me feel terrible—”

  “Cynthia, for God’s sake. Just the tiniest teasing.”

  Cynthia smiles. She is sitting at her dresser, getting ready for a party, to which they are already late. Now, instead of answering Harry, she applies a great pouf of powder to her nose, indicating that she attaches no importance whatsoever to this semi-conversation. Which she does not. But this is how, customarily, they communicate. They simply say things to each other, mostly for the sound; they like the atmosphere of conversation thus created. And each grasps some shred of meaning, at least, from the tone, the sound of the other. Harry has understood that Cynthia is impatient with him; she wants just to get on to the party. But from watching her, and her more-than-usually anxious glances at the mirror, he understands how especially anxious she is to please. To be pleasing, and especially pretty for this party at the Hightowers’. “Sometimes I think October is my favorite month,” she tells him.