A Southern Exposure (31 page)

As no one has quite remarked, this is the first time that they have all been in swimming together. More to the point, it is the first time that they have all seen each other in bathing suits, have been so nearly nakedly exposed to each other. And there are, of course, several surprises among all those bodies.

One is that Esther Hightower has an astonishingly good figure. In an old navy-blue wool tank suit that is just the slightest bit too small for her (it may be even older than she remembered), Esther is revealed to have high, full, and quite amazing breasts (“Rita Hayworth doesn’t have a thing on Esther. Lucky old Jim!” one less lucky husband whispered to another). Normally, Esther wears very expensive, very “good” clothes, but they tend to be about a size
too large. (Dolly has remarked on this to Cynthia, who has agreed. “I wonder why she does that?” “I don’t know, she’s just very modest, I guess.”) Of course no one can come right out and say to Esther that she has a terrific body; instead many people tell her how well she is looking, which is also true. “My, Esther, you are looking so, uh,
well.
”

Conversely, pretty Irene Lee, in her daisy-flowered cotton dressmaker suit, despite the modesty of her costume can be seen to have a very unfortunate little figure. Thick-waisted, flat-chested, and heavy of thigh. It is interesting that all this has been so successfully disguised in all her pretty dresses.

Dolly Bigelow, as everyone already knew, has shapely, small plump legs, now revealed beneath the tiny red polka-dotted skirt of her suit, but there is something odd about her chest, some curious lack of symmetry there. This of course is not remarked upon—not out loud. Cynthia is perhaps the first to work it out, though she does not say anything either, of course not. Except that much later, to Harry, in a tone of semi-triumph she brings out, “Dolly wears falsies! Can you believe it? One slipped, that’s how I knew!”

Cynthia herself is wearing her new red Lastex suit. She has never worn such clinging material before. Used to wool or cotton, she feels a little conspicuous, especially since Harry has said, “You look like a movie star!—only better, much more classy.”

Willard Bigelow is paunchier than his loose old tweeds and flannels have ever revealed. And Jimmy Hightower is trimmer and much more muscular than one would have suspected.

Russell Byrd. Cynthia manages barely to look at him, at that once-loved and familiar flesh. The shape of his naked legs, and his muscular, smooth back.

She looks instead at far more familiar Harry, and decides,
with perfect objectivity, that his is by far the best male body there.

Perhaps in part because of the heavy, unremitting heat, and because, too, people are slightly nervous at being so relatively naked with each other, everyone or almost everyone drinks a very great deal. Harry, tending bar at one end of the pool, where he has set up a table, observes the frequency with which people come back for refreshers, for what the locals call “a little sweetening.”

Odessa, coming out from the house with a tray of glasses, also notices how much the folks are drinking. Pouring it down.

She is not at all sure about moving in with the Bairds. Not because of the drinking—they don’t drink bad, especially. And in some ways it would be real nice. The warm dry hardwood floors in ugly weather, and the running water, hot and cold both, all the time. The electric stove, and the lights. The lights so easy, turning them on and off. She thinks of the lights and the good smooth floors on the days when she does think, Yes, I’ll take this job, I’ll take care of their house for them.

But then she thinks, Horace. What will I do all the times when Horace comes home, and I’ve got no place for him?

How come you let him right back in your door?
Miz Bigelow used to ask her that, like it was some of her business. And Miz Baird might ask the same. They is uppity, white ladies. Call colored uppity, it’s them. Asking any old questions comes to their minds. What you couldn’t answer even if you had a mind to. Like you was their child, and not real smart.

Yankee ladies not quite so uppity, though. Folks grew up around here think they can ask you any old thing got
into their heads. Think since you’re the colored they really know you. Almost they own you.

So like she told Miz Baird, she’ll think about it. She’s just studying what to do. What be best for her, and best for Horace, times he come home. Which he always will do, one time or another. He’s a wandering man, but he needs a home to come back to, like any other man. No way to explain. No call to either.

Deirdre does not want to name their daughter Ursula. If it’s a girl. Russ keeps saying how much he likes the name, and he likes that Kansas woman, the one with the pig who kept coming out to help when SallyJane was sick. But Ursula: that is surely an ugly, odd-sounding name, thinks Deirdre. Kids would tease a child with a name like that.

“What about SallyJane?” she asked Russ. She was serious, she liked that name a whole lot.

“Deirdre!—really. Lord God, what an idea!”

“But it’s the others’ mother’s name. Don’t you think they’d like it?”

“No! Lord God,” he said again, not looking at her.

Derek. Deirdre is secretly hoping for a boy, whom she would like to call Derek. Once, just for a year, a boy with that name was in her class at school, a boy from somewhere else—Vermont, she thinks. He was tall and very fair, with hair the color of broomstraw, and he was handsome. Then, after that one year, he was gone, and no one had ever really got to know him, but Deirdre never forgot how he looked, with his narrow blue eyes and big shoulders. And he was very smart; he got all A’s that year, and played basketball too. She would like to have a boy like Derek, with that name.

She stretches in the sun, which through her thin cotton dress feels really good. On her poor big stomach. She
smiles at Russ, who is drinking too much. What she would really like best, thinks Deirdre, is for this moment to go on and on forever. She would like to be pregnant forever, and never deliver. To stay here in the Bairds’ back yard, by their swimming pool, and drink this nice sweet lemonade that Odessa made for her. With all the smells of flowers and someone’s perfume in the air. And never go home to take care of anyone.

I could really write a book about this town, thinks Jimmy Hightower, who is also drinking Odessa’s lemonade—without gin, and thus noticing a lot. He thinks of the Russ-Deirdre story, with Graham—the Pearl of their scarlet letter. And the brief appearances of Clyde and Norris Drake, the two devils, who killed off SallyJane and almost ruined Russ. (Fucking that woman was horrible for Russ; don’t ask Jimmy how he knows—he just does.) And Cynthia-and-Russ, that story.

And then there’s the me-and-Russ story, thinks Jimmy. I have to admit it: I had this real old schoolboy crush on Russ, who for years would not give me the time of day. And then he did; he got interested in my book (that was just after the trauma of Norris Drake) and turned it into a goddam best-seller. And then turned back into not giving me the time of day again.

Who or what could be next in line for Russ? he wonders. And then, glancing over at Esther, who has never looked better than she does today (Jimmy first met Esther at a swimming party, come to think of it—back in Tulsa, almost twenty years ago), he thinks, If Russ should take a shine to Esther, I’d kill him dead. But of course that isn’t Russ’s way, not at all. It’s other people who take a big shine to him. They come after him. And he just lets them. Sometimes.

•  •  •

Dolly Bigelow is sitting there in the lovely sunshine, among all the wonderful flowers and all her dearest friends, looking just as cute as pie in her red polka-dotted suit (trust Cynthia to wear a red suit too, and such a tight, show-off one), and she thinks: It does not matter one damn without Clifton. She misses Clifton Lee in just the worst way; sometimes she thinks she can’t stand her life without him. She needs him for flirting at all the parties, and then, just sometimes, not often—the kissing, off in cars. It was wonderful, that kissing, and wonderful Clifton never, never tried to push it any further. To do anything that would cause her to have to stop him. And oh! that terrible night when he died, just up and
died
, right there in the car, in her arms!—made this funny noise in his throat, and then a sort of shudder, and then he was gone. She knew right away he was dead. No person in that body anymore. She had watched her daddy die—same thing. All heavy and limp. In her arms.

But Cynthia looks so tacky in that little old red bathing suit of hers, like some teenager, just the tackiest thing. Trust a Yankee! (Clifton never took to Cynthia at all. “That bottle-blonde can’t hold a candle to you, honey-babe,” he used to say.) And Esther Hightower, just busting out of her suit all over the place. Hasn’t anyone told her she’s too big now for that suit? And Russ, you can see his—well, some of him is hanging out just a little below his suit.

Oh, Clifton, why did you have to
die
?

After the war things will be a great deal worse, is what Russ thinks, sitting there dejectedly in the sun. Thinking: I do not want to get into that goddam lukewarm copper-sulfated water. And also thinking: What an inferior, lowly
bunch of so-called humanity gathered here, in this stinking garden. Not a first-rate mind in a carload of these folk. Or a beautiful woman either. Deirdre’s so pregnant, and besides he is married to her. There’s Cynthia—well, there is Cynthia. He does not want to think about Cynthia today. Looking up, he sees not Cynthia but Esther Hightower. A brand-new person. A goddess, the most beautiful woman he ever saw. A Jewish queen. Biblical, splendid. How come he never saw her before? Oh, how
come
!

That goddam Jimmy, Russ thinks; now he has everything. Success and fame and the most gorgeous living woman, who is probably intelligent too. Intending nothing, Russ smiles in Esther’s direction, but his gaze is somehow intercepted by that of Jimmy himself, who is scowling directly at him. And for what? Now what has got into that silly Oklahoma oil-king bugger?

Is it possible that the sun is getting even hotter, this late in the day? Russ feels that it is, or maybe it’s all the booze he has drunk. Too much gin, he knows it, and he’s got no head for liquor at all. But today it’s not making him drunk, just hot. Looking out at the pool, at all that cool blue lapping water into which no one, so far, has ventured—just Abigail Baird, sitting there on the side with her feet in, kicking up little waves—Russ thinks he really should go in swimming, he really should. And, thinking that, he begins to laugh, just quietly, to himself. The joke being that he does not know how to swim. As a kid, afraid of water, he never learned, and now, still afraid, he is much too old to learn.

Dangling her feet in the water, which is really not so cool, Abby thinks of Benny. “Sweltering,” he says, in a shipyard job his Uncle Max got for him. Tough work, but he’s making
good money, and it may keep him out of the draft. He and a friend plan a little vacation trip before fall and back-to-school.

How great if they came down here! thinks Abby, at first, and then she thinks, Would it really be so great? What about—what about his being “colored,” as they say down here? Abby can just hear that silly Dolly Bigelow, her mother’s friend: “Well, I just never thought I’d live to see the day, that snippy little old Abby Baird has got this
colored
friend, and he’s come to stay with them in their
house
, and he’s even going into their
swimming pool.
” She is not even sure that her own friend Betsy Lee would be so swell about it. Melanctha—well, you can never tell how Melanctha will be about anything. The boys would all be just awful, she knows that. She hates all the boys around here.

Abby recently read an article, though, about Negroes in the armed services. According to this writer, it’s been a big success. And so maybe after the war things will be a lot better. Abby is almost sure that they will. This Southern stuff about “colored” is just too dumb, it can’t go on forever. So maybe, if not this fall, some other fall soon Benny will come down to visit. When he’s at Harvard, maybe. A football star. She smiles with secret delight at this thought, and she kicks her feet harder, sending blue ripples all across the pool.

Watching her feet, and the water, she is not quite aware at first that Deirdre Yates (Byrd) has got up from where she was sitting and is making her way toward Abby, coming to the edge of the pool where Abby sits.

“Come on, take your shoes off. It’ll cool you,” Abby tells her friend; she feels full of affection for poor heavily pregnant Deirdre, whom she has not seen or talked to for a while.

Awkwardly, slowly, Deirdre lowers herself to the edge
of the pool, her body so cumbersome now. Everything she does is slow and awkward. “Lord, that feels good!” she says at last, her shoes slipped off, feet cooling in the water. “I’m hot enough for two people.” She laughs. “I guess I am two people.”

Abby is unable to imagine being pregnant. Carrying a baby in your stomach. She supposes that someday she will, but for the moment she would rather not even think about it. Instead she says, “Deirdre, I’ve been reading all this stuff lately, and do you think it’s true that things will be a lot better for Negro people after the war?”

Deirdre stares at Abby for a moment, then seems to adjust to this shift in tone. “I reckon they will,” she says. “Stands to reason, with all the colored in the service.” She adds, “I surely hope so. The way things are now is just so wrong. Unfair. Not Christian.”

This opinion comes as a surprise to Abby. They have never before touched on “race” as a topic, and Deirdre after all is as Southern as anyone around. Pleased, Abby tells her, “Deirdre, I’m so glad you feel like that. Me too. And you see, I have this friend—”

No one, still, has really gone in swimming. Everyone seems content simply to contemplate the cooling water.

Hearing what she believes is the ringing of their phone, and momentarily forgetting that Odessa is there at the house and presumably in the kitchen where the phone is, Cynthia gets to her feet. But as she approaches the back door she hears not rings but Odessa’s voice, speaking rather loudly.