Destiny (41 page)

She paused, then started snipping again. "But there was a big protest over Maybury last week. Fightin'. Some colored boy got himself cut up real bad, I heard." She let a lock of hair fall. "You want to be careful now, Helene. It's gettin' so it's not safe to take a bus no more. . . ."

"It was fine. No trouble."

"How's your mama doin'?" Cassie obviously decided to change the subject. She paused, and her kind face clouded. "I miss her, you know, Helene. I mean, I knew she wasn't feelin' too good, but I never figured on her leavin', not like that."

Helene's eyes dropped. Her mother had left Cassie Wyatt's a month ago.

"She's fine," she answered in a small voice. "Okay—you know?"

"I sure hope so, honey." Cassie sighed. "Your mama and me, we go a long ways back. . . ."

Helene could hear the pity in her voice. She knew Cassie knew her mother didn't have another job; everyone in Orangeburg must know that. She tilted her chin.

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"We might go back to England soon," she said proudly. "When I finish school next year. My mother's busy—making plans. That sort of thing."

"Sure, honey."

Cassie's face took on a closed expression. She said no more. She shook out the towel around Helene's neck, and a cascade of honey-colored hair fell to the floor.

"Let's get that washed and set now. Then I'll put you under the dryer, okay?"

It took hours under the dryer. Helene thought. It was baking hot under the hood, and the metal rollers and pins Cassie had used got hotter and hotter by the minute. Helene flicked the pages of Redbook, glanced at a tattered copy of Time magazine. It was nearly two years out of date. She closed the magazine. There was a whole world out there, waiting: Hollywood, New York, England, Europe.

Ned Calvert had been to Europe—in the war first, but on vacations as well. He and Mrs. Calvert had been to London, Paris, and Rome. They stayed at the finest hotels, he said; they went to the theaters and museums and art galleries. In London they went to the races; in Paris they took a trip on a bateau-mouche down the Seine; in Rome, Mrs. Calvert said, the men had no manners.

She pushed the magazines aside. Across the salon Susie Marshall's mother was having her hair done. She had bright red hair, dyed and permed into a frizz; Cassie was touching up the roots. Helene caught Mrs. Marshall's eyes in the mirror, and Mrs. Marshall looked right through her.

Small-town blues. That was what Priscilla-Anne used to call it, afternoons when school was through, up behind the ball park. Feeling trapped. FeeUng mean. Feeling impatient.

Priscilla-Anne was engaged to Dale Garrett now, and the rumor was, she was pregnant. They were going to marry in the fall and move into a large house on a brand-new estate outside Montgomery, an estate Merv Peters was developing. Merv Peters was rising fast now; the house was their wedding present. Priscilla-Anne was jubilant. At least, that's what Helene had heard. Priscilla-Anne didn't talk to her anymore, not since the night at Howard Johnson's. She didn't sit next to her in class either, and the others had followed her example.

Helene Craig: social leper.

She set her Ups. She didn't care. Let them gossip; let the boys smirk. Did you get small-town blues in Montgomery too? She didn't know, but she hoped you did. She hoped Priscilla-Anne got them real bad. One thing for sure—it was not going to happen to her, to Helene.

She was leaving. Soon, one day soon, she was going to get out of Orangeburg for good and all, and take her mother with her. Then she'd go

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to England, and Europe, Paris maybe. And she'd become rich and famous, so famous they heard about her even back in Orangeburg. And then maybe one day she'd come back, come into town in a big Cadillac car, and a couture dress and jewels, and when she did that, she'd look right through them all, all the boys at Selma High, all Priscilla-Anne's friends, look through them like they were invisible. The way they looked at her now.

The hair dryer was giving her a headache. She shut her eyes and tried to hold on to the dream, which wasn't a dream, she told herself firmly: it was something that was going to happen. Something she was going to make happen. You could do that, she believed it, if you were certain enough, determined enough.

The best part of the dream was that her mother would be happy then too. Helene would find her somewhere wonderful to live, and her mother would have all the clothes she wanted, and not have to worry about money ever again. And she would get well. She wasn't well now, Helene could see it. She seemed so tired all the time, dragging herself around the trailer as if she had no energy at all. She was very thin, and hardly ever ate anything; her skin was sallow and dull, like crepe. She was doing dressmaking since leaving Cassie's—sewing things, altering things, and that brought in a little, but it couldn't be enough, Helene knew.

Helene had wanted to leave school, and get a job, but when she'd suggested it, her mother had been terribly upset. Those two bright spots of color flared up in her cheeks, and she'd started to shake. Helene had to finish her education, she said. She must. You needed an education to get on in the world.

Helene didn't agree. She looked at the newspapers and magazines, and she listened to the radio, and she thought there were lots of ways you could get on in the world, education or no education. Sportsmen got on, and singers, and dancers and writers and movie stars and fashion models, and people like Merv Peters, who started off with a little business and built it into a big one. Beautiful women got on in the world. And she was beautiful. She knew that now, she'd finally realized it was true. She didn't see it so much when she looked in the mirror; she saw it in the boys' eyes, in men's eyes. She saw it in Billy's; she saw it in Ned's, that fixity, that intentness, that fascination. It made her feel powerful when she saw that response; it made her feel happy; it made her feel safe.

Because she knew, just knew, that no matter what happened, no matter if she flunked school, or had no talent, couldn't act, she still had that. The one certain weapon in her armory: her beauty. If all else failed, her beauty could be relied on. Her beauty was going to be her ticket out.

She gave Susie Marshall's mother a radiant smile as she left the beauty parlor. You old bitch, she thought. Some day I'll show you. . . .

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When she got back to the trailer, her mother was out, and Heldne was reheved. She didn't want her to see the shopping bags. She'd have to explain the dress somehow, and she was working on a story, but if her mother saw the bags, it would be harder.

She stood still in the hot Uttle bedroom, thinking. She hated to tell her mother Ues, and it seemed to her sometimes that the lies got bigger every day, until sometimes she felt as if she were drowning in them, and she got mixed-up and frightened, so she hardly knew what was hes and what was truth anymore. But she had to tell lies. The lies enabled her to meet Ned Calvert; they'd enabled her to meet him, more and more often, for nearly a year. It was the beginning of July now; the first time he'd taken her for a ride in the Cadillac it had been early September—so it was ten months. Ten months!

It didn't feel that long; it wasn't that long really, because two months of that time he'd been away, up in Philadelphia, visiting with Mrs. Calvert's family.

It was while he was away she had begun to think that maybe she was in love with him. She had missed him. Until they stopped, she hadn't realized how much she had come to look forward to those evenings, to the times when he took her for walks and drives, the times they talked. But when he was away, she felt lonely. There was nothing to look forward to anymore.

He had felt just the same way; he told her when he came back from Philadelphia. That was when he said that he couldn't go on like this anymore, that he had to tell her. They were friends, yes, of course they were friends; but she must know, she must have realized—he loved her. He was crazy for her. All the time in Philadelphia he thought about her and thought about her. It was driving him insane. . . .

Quickly Helene bent and hid the shopping bags under the bed. Then she heated some water on the stove, and carried a big pail of it into the bedroom. She wrenched shut the horrible faded Uttle curtains over the windows, and began to wash, soaping bits of her body at a time. She hated it, she thought, scrubbing viciously at her skin. Hated having to wash like this. Hated having no bathroom. Hated being poor. Someone Uke Ned couldn't understand that. He'd been bom rich. He took it all for granted.

She threw the washcloth into the water and sat back on her haunches, letting the air dry her skin.

When Ned wasn't there, she remembered only the good things about him, she thought. The lovely clean scent of his skin; the cologne he always wore; the soft fabrics of his beautiful clothes; his voice, with its rich edu-

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cated southern drawl; the strength when he put his arms around her; the comforting sense of his age, his experience, his knowledge. He had taste; she liked the fact that he knew about things Uke wine, and food, and houses and paintings and gardens and cars. He was rich, and his richness fascinated her, because it seemed to her to make him certain about everything, from the cut of a suit to a question of politics. He had influence—he was on first-name terms with all the famous politicians and leading businessmen in Alabama; when Ned Calvert heard the news, he didn't get it from a paper, he got it direct, from a friend, over dinner or lunch. He didn't boast about that; he took it for granted that the only watch was a Rolex, the only car a Cadillac or a Lincoln, that when you took a vacation, you went to Europe.

And he didn't mind when she asked questions; he seemed to hke it, as if it amused him and flattered him to teach her. So a lot of the time when they met, especially to begin with, he used to talk, and Helene used to listen. He might be explaining how to tell the difference between claret and burgundy; he might be explaining why the civil rights movement would never get a hold in the South, because it was against the nature of things; either way, he talked on, in that slow, sure voice, and—since Helene had quickly discovered that only one thing irritated him, and that was the possibility that she thought differently—she learned to keep quiet, to question, but rarely to voice an opinion, and then only on something uncon-troversial.

He had begun to call her "little girl" quite early on, and to Helene's own surprise, she had discovered she responded to the term almost instinctively. At once a thousand tiny memories came back, of other women she had watched, Priscilla-Anne, trying to placate Dale Garrett, her mother even, trying to charm some man behind a store counter. Then, there it was, ready-made, the role. She could slip into it at once: innocent, kittenish, naive, trusting, nonargumentative, using her feminine wiles to get her way. Being coy, being teasing, being flattering—being hypocritical.

Yes, hypocritical. Hypocrisy was involved, if she admitted the truth. Because all the time he talked and she listened, there was one part of her mind that kept up its own cool independent commentary, which sifted what he said, weighed it, and, quite often, rejected it—though he never knew.

She didn't agree with what he said about colored people. She didn't agree with his comments on poor whites, like the Tanners. She didn't like the way he ostentatiously referred to blacks always as "nigras," never using the cruder term like other whites in Orangeburg, even though she could tell he felt the same way about them. She didn't like it the time he made jokes about Jews and liberals in Washington. She thought his ideas

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about women were wrong. A man liked to put a woman up on a pedestal, he said. He liked to care for her, and look up to her. It was important for a man to respect a woman, the way he respected her.

"And Mrs. Calvert?" she had said, unable to stifle the thought.

"Of course Mrs. Calvert," he had said solemnly, but she could see he was annoyed.

Women were made for marriage, he said another time. They were made for motherhood. There was nothing finer than the sight of a mother and her child. He couldn't understand all these working women. What did it do for them? What did it do for their husbands? What man wanted to think he couldn't provide for his wife and family, that what he brought home wasn't enough?

"Men have their pride, Helene," he said once. "They don't talk about it maybe, but it's there. It's a fierce thing, a fine thing. Like pride in your country, pride in being an American."

Don't women have pride? Helene wanted to ask, but she kept silent.

Sometimes she thought she must be some kind of a freak, thinking these things the way she did, knowing that cool voice was there all the time in her own mind, and it wouldn't go away.

Did the other girls at Selma High think like that too? Did Priscilla-Anne, when she was with that oaf. Dale Garrett?

Helene had no way of knowing. If they did, they never said so, even in the days when she still had friends in school, before they started ostracizing her. So, maybe she was a freak, maybe there was something wrong with her. Because all her life there it had been, that old refrain: love and marriage—a woman's true purpose in hfe, the source of her status, the source of her identity.

That was what all the girls at Selma High seemed to want, so why didn't she want it? Why, whenever she thought about it, did she start to feel trapped?

And guilty. She turned and looked at herself in the mirror.

Guilty, because she must love Ned Calvert. If she didn't love him, why did she go on seeing him, a married man? Why did she let him kiss her, and sometimes touch her, and why did she like it when he did that? Slowly, she ran her hand up over her naked body, feeling a shiver of excitement, of anticipation as she did so. It was quite clear, she thought. Everything the other girls had ever said, everything her mother had said, everything she had ever read, had been united on one point. Men and women were diiferent. Men could feel physical desire for a woman they did not love. But women felt it only when they loved a man: their emotions and their physical feelings went hand in hand. So, kissing was all right, petting was permissible, because they were privileges the woman offered up