A Southern Exposure (15 page)

It is very much like a hotel, this building she is in, but because a lot of people are there at the moment, SallyJane has a room on the ground floor, away from the others—who seem to be Northern, and rich, mostly. Rich Yankees, with red drinker faces and harsh, hoarse voices. The men wear knickers to play golf, and the women wear practical seersucker
dresses, or light flannel skirts and cotton shirts and little golfing caps.

Her room, SallyJane’s room, is fairly bleak and bare, and she didn’t think to bring anything from home to put in there, to cheer it up. “Don’t you want me to bring you anything?” Russ asks her on his visits, and she always says no, not wanting to be a bother, while all the time she would really like more clothes, some pretty new sweater sets and all her best jewelry, her pearls and things, though she might look a little silly, all dressed up just to see her psychiatrist; besides, there’s a rule against jewelry.

Lying in bed at night and trying to sleep, SallyJane also tries to think, although she knows that she should stop thinking and count sheep or something, maybe pigs, and then go to sleep. But instead she thinks, and sometimes she thinks very rationally. Or, fairly rationally: how can she tell?

She thinks that if she and Dr. Drake were friends she would be all right. Being his friend would be a proof that she is okay, since he would obviously not like a crazy person, not have one as a friend. And she wonders if this could not be possible: he and Russ would probably get along, both quiet men with sad blue eyes. And of course Dr. Drake is supposed to have this terrific wife, Miss Effington said so. But that could work out too; Russ might like the terrific wife, and she, SallyJane, would cook something wonderful for all of them, everyone getting along, all friends. And no one, certainly not the shining hostess, SallyJane Caldwell Byrd, no one crazy. Broken down. The Drakes would not have broken-down friends.

At darker, more sleepless times, SallyJane thinks, He must love me, he must come to me and take me in his arms. If he doesn’t love me, I will die, I know I will die, and I may die anyway.

Sometimes she can hear Dr. Drake late at night in his office, only just down the corridor from her room—being also on the first floor, naturally. Sometimes, she thinks, she hears patients weeping toward him—led by Miss Effington, she thinks.

If she were perfectly better, then she thinks that they could be friends. Or, if she were terribly worse, led weeping down the hall, then mightn’t he take her in his arms at last?—in love?

One night, quite certain that she hears unusual sounds (she is often not quite certain of what she hears), very bravely SallyJane gets out of bed, and she creeps to her door. With great caution she opens it, one tiny crack. And just down the hall, just outside his own door, which is open, there indeed is Dr. Drake. With someone in his arms. The light shining on them. Just as SallyJane has imagined, he is holding some weeping patient; some patient who is desperate for love, or warmth or simply sleep. SallyJane can’t stop looking, though, as she stands there, and in a minute she sees (or believes that she sees; later she is to be uncertain on that score) that it is not a patient; it is the nurse, Miss Effington, and he is not just comforting her but violently kissing, his hands moving fast up and down, all over her body.

In an instant, with no sound at all, SallyJane has closed her door and crept back into her bed, where her heart pounds wildly as she begins, already, to doubt what she just saw. Could that have been Miss Effington, actually?

Very likely not, she decides. It was probably some patient, and she, SallyJane, only thought that they were kissing.

Odessa lives a couple of miles out of town, down a winding white concrete highway that passes scattered small high wood-frame houses, next to eroded clay fields; now, in January, the broomstraw is frozen, the mud puddles frosted over. Cynthia, with directions from Dolly, goes past a narrow bridge that is high across the brown trickle of creek; she drives between more wet red clay banks, gray winter meadows, and stands of pine. Bare oaks, and peeling poplar trees.

She comes easily enough to the sharp left bend in the road, and the small lane that goes down and then out to the gray shack that must be Odessa’s.

This is Odessa’s day off; she gets every third Thursday to herself, and every second Sunday. (“It must be hard to
keep track of all that.” “No, we mark it down on the calendar, it’s fun,” says Dolly.)

There is no firm reason for Cynthia’s visit; she could have talked to Odessa at Dolly’s on Friday, the very next day, and besides, it was not as though she had remarkable news to report. Lord & Taylor had in effect said no, despite admiration. The truth is, as Cynthia is finally forced to admit to herself, she wanted to see what she had been unable to imagine: Odessa’s house.

The lane off the highway is deeply rutted, almost impassable. Clearly no one ever comes out here in a car—of course not: very few Negroes have cars at all, and the school bus would just stop on the highway, assuming the bus for colored schools even comes out here.

A very large, spreading oak stands just next to Odessa’s house; in the spring and summer its leaves would provide cool and shelter, but now, in the dead of winter, its bare twigs and bare black limbs all contribute to the barren poverty of the scene: the leaning, weathered gray shack, the hard frozen earth of the yard around it.

Pulling up, and stopping the car, Cynthia begins to understand what she has done. (“Absolutely mad to go out there,” as she later puts it to Harry. “What did I think she would do, ask me in for coffee?”) She has no idea what to do next: to knock on the door, to wait for Odessa to see that someone is outside in a car, or (this is the strongest impulse of all) to start up again and drive off, drive anywhere. Away.

It is Odessa who decides, however, by opening her own door and then walking deliberately to the car, as though Cynthia were an expected person. (“God, she behaved so much better than I did,” Cynthia said to Dolly, later that afternoon.)

Cynthia gets out of the car, and begins to chatter. “Oh,
Odessa, I just wanted to see you, I got this letter from Lord & Taylor—you know, the store in New York where I sent some samples of your material? Anyway they love what you do, they especially mentioned the lovely colors, I knew they would, but they just wondered how much you could produce. I mean, if they wanted any at all, they’d needs yards and yards of it, you see? Mass production, I mean, everything they do is for lots and lots of people.”

“That so” is Odessa’s neutral comment. In the strong winter light her skin is especially, markedly fine, opaque dark brown silk.

“Mmm. Do you have any idea how many yards you do in a day, say, when you and your sister have the time to work?”

“Don’t do in yards,” Odessa attempts to explain. “Miz Dolly, she measure out with a tape what she want, and then us try. But it’s Miz Dolly do the measuring and the cutting.”

Behind Odessa the door to the shack stands ajar, but Cynthia can hardly see into its darkness. Is it possible that the floor is bare? Is only hard dirt? She decides that it is, and decides too that her errand is insane, as was the early impulse that led her to try to connect Odessa with Lord & Taylor. And no use in telling herself that she meant well; everyone usually does, Cynthia believes. But she has absolutely no imagination, she decides. No true sensitivity.

Odessa is wearing one of her regular old flowered cotton dresses, and over it she has put on a man’s old tattered cardigan sweater, dark gray wool, out at the elbows. Now, obviously cold, she clutches her arms around herself; she looks at Cynthia with an expression that Cynthia can only read as hostile. Why did you come out here bothering me, you rich white lady? Odessa is mutely asking this quite reasonable question. To which there is no answer.

And so Cynthia responds, “I’m really sorry to have bothered you about this. But I wanted to say—and I thought I’d said—”

“Ain’t no bother,” Odessa mutters politely, but her eyes are no less angry.

“Well, I’ll go along then, and I’ll see you soon, and we’ll talk …” Cynthia says all this as she heads back around her car, her voice rising on the final, meaningless note. She leans out to wave as she backs up and heads toward the highway, but Odessa has turned her back and is walking fast into the house.

The gray winter landscape through which Cynthia now drives windingly up the hill and back to town looks infinitely sad, all frozen and barren. Hopeless. Cynthia has no idea how long the winter lasts down here. Forever, she could at the moment believe, thinking of Odessa back in that shack, with its leaning walls and the cold hard bare floor. No spring ever, no green vines and delicate buds and soft warm winds. No shielding leaves on Odessa’s oak tree.

“I feel as though I’d made a bad situation much worse,” Cynthia says to Harry, on the phone. “I mean the whole situation—all these Negroes down here whom no one knows and no one cares about, really. Oh I know, of course I didn’t really make it worse, not the whole thing, but you know what I mean. Oh, Harry, I do miss you.”

Cynthia to Dolly: “I know I had no business going out there, Dolly, I know. But listen, I’ve been thinking about it, and I may have come up with a good idea.… Yes, I do miss Harry. And what it’s doing to our phone bill!”

•  •  •

Jimmy Hightower is a frequent visitor. Cynthia gathers that their period of courtship, of flirtation or whatever it was is over; Jimmy is seriously lonely now and he wants to be friends. It occurs to Cynthia that he may be interested in someone else, maybe even having a real affair, but if so, who? Irene Lee? That is almost too obvious; if they were having an affair, they’d make more of a secret of it—or so Cynthia believes.

In any case, Jimmy calls and asks if he can bring some barbecue over for supper, or sometimes he just drops by.

Cynthia has observed that he talks a great deal about Russ.

Ursula from Kansas has gone, Jimmy says; he met her several times before she left. A very nice, good woman, according to Jimmy. “Just crazy about old Russ, of course. No, I don’t think he returns the favor. She’s a little bit on the heavy side, and after all she’s quite a bit older than Russ.” And that is all that Cynthia is to hear of Kansas Ursula for quite a while.

One night, having dropped by fairly late with a bottle of brandy, Jimmy announces good news. “Brett”—SallyJane is well, and is coming home. “That fellow Drake is driving her up tomorrow. Russ said he’d gladly make the trip, of course he would, but Drake more or less insisted, said it was right on his way to somewhere he had to go for some meetings.”

Catching something in his voice, Cynthia agrees. “It does sound a little odd, the psychiatrist bringing her home, but maybe not.”

“I’ve been reading some of Dr. Freud,” allows Jimmy. “Interesting fellow. Makes a lot of sense to me. Poor man, I understand he’s mortally ill in London, though at least he got out of that Austria. But I gather he doesn’t approve of doctors having any truck with their patients. Of any nature. However, one time when Russ and I went down to
see, uh, SallyJane, I brought up Dr. Freud and Dr. Drake didn’t seem to think too highly of him. So there we are, I guess. A different school of thought.”

“Well, the main thing is if SallyJane feels better.” But Cynthia too is uneasy. All along she has had some sense, some vague suspicion, in regard to Dr. Drake. Possibly because the first thing she hears about him was how handsome he was, but surely that is unfair? It’s really all right for men to be handsome too? However, isn’t he married, and if so, how come he’s driving SallyJane home alone, assuming that to be the case? She is unable not to ask Jimmy, “His wife’s coming too?”

Jimmy hesitates. “I don’t rightly know. Seems like she’s not around very much. We all know he has a wife, but she’s not much there. I think she plays a lot of golf. I got the idea from somewhere that she’s the really rich one.”

“Poor SallyJane,” says Cynthia reflectively, and then, mainly out of a feeling of fondness for Jimmy, and because it has been so very much on her mind, she begins to tell him about her meeting with Odessa. Going out to her house.

“I don’t know what I was thinking of,” says Cynthia. “I’ve never felt like such an intruder. And that’s how she felt about it, I know. She really resented my coming. Of course she was perfectly polite, but I could see in her eyes, she was furious, and sort of afraid of me too. Afraid I’d march right past her and into her house. Which of course was what I really wanted to do.”

“It’s very hard,” Jimmy agrees. “Of course all the folks around here think they have some handle on it. According to them, they’re all great with ‘our colored friends’—some of them even say that. And they think we just don’t understand.”

“They think you’re a Yankee too?” That was hard to believe, with Jimmy’s Oklahoma twang, which was Southern to Cynthia’s ears.

“Sure. Oklahoma’s more west than south to them, and oil is not a Southern occupation. They don’t think Texas is Southern at all.”

They both laugh.

“It’s much more a Southern than a college town, isn’t it?” Cynthia comments. “I wasn’t exactly ready for that. I guess I didn’t think about it much.”

“Same mistake I made, in a way,” Jimmy tells her. “To me it was purely a writers’ town. Russ Byrd’s town, is the truth of it.” After a somewhat heavy pause he adds, “It can’t be easy for SallyJane, being married to such a complicated fellow.”

“Marriage is always complicated, I think,” says Cynthia, who had never thought of this before. What she is really thinking is that she is very lonely, she wishes Jimmy would stay with her. Not necessarily for sex; if he would just stay and hold her in his arms all night, as Harry sometimes does. “I really miss Harry a lot,” she says, and she hopes that Jimmy could not have read her mind. “Don’t you? Miss Esther?”

“Well, Russ and I’ve been so goddam busy, I haven’t had much time for missing anyone. And I think Esther’s really happy. That’s the main thing,” he piously adds.

Cynthia asks, “Oh really? Busy how?”

Jimmy leans back, a satisfied expression on his face, which Cynthia now recognizes as having been there for weeks. “It’s supposed to be a secret,” he says. “But I know you’re a very discreet gal. Russ’s helping me along with my novel. It’s wonderful, it’s the most wonderful thing ever happened to me.”