The Last Girls (39 page)

And why hadn't she called? Or written—at least a postcard? As least to let them know when to expect her. Honestly, she was the most spoiled, most irritating, the most prima donna person Harriet had ever heard of. Harriet hadn't heard from Jeff either, but at least he had a good excuse. He'd been on maneuvers. She wondered when he'd be back, and what would happen next.

H
ARRIET HAD WAKED
abruptly that night at about 2
A.M
. from a sound sleep to see Baby silhouetted against the yellow rectangle of light from the hall door. She knew something was different, something had changed, just from the way Baby stood there, hip cocked, leg thrust out at an angle.

“Hey. Are you asleep? Harriet? Are you asleep?” Baby whispered fiercely, tiptoeing forward.

“No.” Harriet sat straight up. “I mean yes, I was, but I'm not now.” Then she did exactly what she had promised herself
not
to do. “Oh, Baby, why didn't you write me back? Or call me? Did I do something, say anything, to make you mad? I didn't know what to think.”

“Oh no, oh not at all, oh sweetie, I'm so sorry.” Baby dropped her bags on the floor and sat down on the edge of Harriet's bed. “I'm sorry, I
should
have called, but I wanted to see you, to tell you in person.”

“Tell me what?”

“Don't hate me,” Baby said in her little-girl voice. “You've got to promise you won't hate me.”

“Hate you! What are you talking about?”

Baby grabbed Harriet's shoulders, hugging her hard. “I broke up with Jeff.”

It was funny how Harriet was not surprised. What was it that her mama used to say? “Waiting for the other shoe to drop . . .” In a way, Harriet realized, that's what she'd been doing for some time. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. “When?”

“Last week. I called him when he got back to Richmond from his little war games. I knew before that, but I couldn't get in touch with him to tell him. I knew since the raft trip, actually.” She held Harriet tightly to her. “So don't hate me.”

“Oh, Baby,” Harriet whispered into her smoky hair. She felt that she would burst, literally explode with feeling, yet she couldn't tell, honestly, what emotion it was. Fury? Pain? Hope? A tiny piercing light started burning a hole in her brain. She struggled to get free from Baby, to stand up.

“Harriet—what's the matter?”

“Let me go.”

Baby sat back.

Harriet finally stood. “You bitch,” she said. “I can't believe you would do this to him.”

Baby stood up, too, her back still to the light; Harriet couldn't see her face. “I was no good for him, Harriet,” she said. “He thought I was—oh, I don't know—he made me feel so—he actually wanted me to
marry
him—can you imagine? I mean, can you imagine living on a military base in some godawful place like East Jesus, Georgia, or something?” Harriet could imagine this. But Baby went on. “Listen, he'll be better off, you know he will. He didn't have any business with somebody like me.”

“What does that mean, somebody like you? What do you mean when you say that?”

“Nothing. I don't know. I don't mean anything.”

“You think you're so special.” Harriet was surprised by her own voice.

“You hate me, don't you? You hate me, too.” Baby took a deep, ragged breath. “I don't blame you, any of you.”

“Oh, quit being so melodramatic! What is it, you met some other guy, is that it?”

“No, I told you, I just
decided,
that's all. This is the only good thing I've done in ages, and now you're trying to make me feel bad about it.”

“So who's the new boy?”

“There's not any new boy, I'm telling you. I mean, I
did
meet somebody, actually, but he's not a boy, he's this businessman from Memphis that knows Daddy. Anyway, I'm not going to marry him or anybody else. Jeff got too damn serious. I just want to have some fun, what's wrong with that?”

“But you're not—,” Harriet started.

“Not what?”

“Not having fun.”

“I am, too!” Baby stomped her foot. “I am so having fun. I always have fun. What do you know? You don't know anything about it.” She was breathing hard in the dark room. “Okay, so this guy is my kind, and Jeff was not my kind. But that doesn't have anything to do with me and Jeff. You know me better than anybody in the world, Harriet. You're my best friend. I don't know why you're being so mean.”

Harriet went over and sat at her desk, looking out at the dark campus, at the dark moving trees, at the light from the lamppost making its shiny path across the duck pond. It seemed—almost—no. For a second, Harriet thought she had seen something moving beneath the water. She turned back. “Look, what does Jeff have to say about all this?”

“He doesn't get it either, not yet. But he will. You know I'm right.” Baby put two cigarettes in her mouth and lit them and gave one to Harriet. Her face flared up for a minute in the light from the match.

Harriet inhaled deeply. It made her a little dizzy. It helped.

“Hey,” Baby said after a while. “I forgot to tell you, I've got this cute new little car, wait till you see it. It's a red convertible.”

Of course it is, Harriet thought.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
Baby talked Anna and Harriet into shooting some pool down at the Cabin on Route 86, where she was a favorite with the locals. “Hi, Freddie,” she called to the proprietor, big and grinning, who brought them three beers on the house and then stood there moving his mouth.

“H-how are my g-g-g-girrls?” he finally said.

“Great.” Baby had a glint in her eye as she broke the balls, pounding her cue stick on the floor when the four ball went into the corner pocket. Harriet was sure Baby knew that those two old truckers were standing behind her, watching her shoot, sure that was why she paused for so long with her ass stuck up in the air. “Two,” Baby said, and made it, and made the five ball and the six ball, too. She ran five balls before she missed. “Not bad for the first day back at Freddie's,” she said, lifting her beer to him before she drained it.

“You drink too fast,” Anna said, chalking her cue.

“I drink as fast as I drink.” Baby sat back down at the table with Harriet and they shot pool all afternoon, and Baby did not mention Jeff then or later, not once during the whole next week, so Harriet didn't either, though she thought about him all the time, wondering how he was taking it, wondering what he was doing, how he felt. She thought about the time he cried for his father and how he looked in his uniform. She thought about the little vertical line that appeared between his eyebrows when he was worried or when he was figuring something out. Harriet found herself making excuses to stay in the room, by the phone, but he didn't call. Of course, he would never show up in the middle of the night yelling for Baby outside the window like that boy had done freshman year, that was not Jeff's style, but Harriet had thought at least he'd call. At least he'd call
her
. But he never did. Two weeks passed. Harriet thought about calling him, just to see how he was doing, but she couldn't, somehow. Another week went by.

“Tell me again where you're going,” she said to Baby, who was in a turmoil of packing on a Friday afternoon.

“I told you.” Baby slammed her suitcase shut. “It's a hotel named the Homestead, in Virginia. A resort, actually. It's very famous.”

“I never heard of it.”

“Well, so what? You wouldn't have, necessarily.” Baby was brushing her hair. She made a face at herself in the mirror. “He likes makeup,” she said, “Look, he bought me some.” She showed Harriet the silver bag full of little silver tubes and pots, then poured it out on the top of her dresser. Baby outlined her eyes in black, followed by mascara. “Well, what do you think?” She batted her eyelashes at Harriet in the mirror. “Come on, try some of it. He got it in New York. It's very expensive.”

“I'll bet.” Harriet went to stand beside her, then chose the green eyeliner and drew it across her eyelids.

“Oh, wow,” Baby said, looking at her. “Here.”

Harriet put on the mascara.

“Now look at yourself,” Baby said. “Don't you look pretty?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on. Of course you do! And now for some lipstick. He likes red.” Baby's mouth turned into a bright slash. She giggled at herself in the mirror. “Oh God, I look like a whore. Don't I look just like a whore?”

“Yes,” Harriet said. Then she said, “Just kidding,” when Baby threw a tube of lipstick at her.

“I was just wondering,” Baby said in a carefully offhand voice as she pulled the black sweaterdress down over her head, “if you've heard anything from Jeff.” Her face was covered up by the dress when she said his name.

“No, why?” Harriet tried to sound as casual as Baby.

“Oh—I—I just wondered. Sometimes I really miss him,” she said, smoothing the dress down over her hips.

“You need to wear stockings with that dress,” Harriet said. Anna stuck her head in the door.

Baby made a face. “Oh, y'all know I can't stand them,” she said. “Not even to go to the Homestead. Okay!” She put on her leather jacket and grabbed her bag. “See you Sunday.” She looked really glamorous, like a girl in a magazine.

“Baby, this is stupid,” Harriet said. “Don't you know how dangerous those little planes are?” The man from Memphis was picking her up at the airport in his private plane.

“Yes,” Baby said.

“Don't we get to meet him?” Anna asked.

“No,”
Baby said. “Honestly, you wouldn't want to,” and then she was gone. Anna went to the library.

Harriet sat on her bed and stared at the phone until it rang, startling her. It was as if she had willed it. “Hello?” she said, picking it up. “Hello?” No answer. Harriet hung up. Wrong number. Or . . . her heart started pounding and everything around her went into sharp relief. It was up to her. She should go over there and tell him what Baby had said. Then they'd get back together. She stood up, trying to breathe. She went over to Baby's dresser and looked at herself in the mirror and put on some lipstick, a dusty pink, and some blush. There now. “Okey-dokey,” as Jill used to say. Then she walked straight over to Miss Auerbach's house and asked to borrow her car which turned out to be an ancient humpbacked Vauxhall, a kind of car Harriet had never heard of. Miss Auerbach called the car “Jane Austen.”

Jane Austen slowed down to forty miles per hour on the uphill grades of Route 81, which was okay, since Harriet needed to slow down anyway, to fix this day forever in her mind. Luckily it was beautiful. There were times when the Blue Ridge really looked
blue,
and this was one of them, the huge blue mountains spiking the horizon, then closer, grassy hills rolling out like waves, dotted with farms and cows and fields and dark-green patches of standing trees. In a week it would be autumn. But for now it was summer still, the noon sun
spread out thick and golden as butter over everything, the sky a vast dome which reminded Harriet of some cathedral from art history, Della Robbia blue.

But it was a football weekend in Lexington, with home games at both SMI and W&L. The hilly little streets were jammed with cars, and guys and dates with their arms entwined, jaywalking haphazardly. “'Lo Harriet!” yelled Frannie Kernodle from the
Redbud
staff, while one of the W&L Dekes that Harriet knew slapped the Vauxhall's puke-green flank in greeting, as if it were a horse. Harriet had been hoping she would not run into anybody she knew, especially not Trent Ogilvie, a Phi Delt, who had asked her up this weekend. Trent was a nice enough guy, no sense in hurting his feelings. Harriet drove past the infamous Liquid Lunch, where things were already hopping, and turned left down Washington Street to the big old brick house on the corner where Jeff and a couple of other cadets had rented the basement apartment, dirt cheap. The house, owned by the historical society, was due for renovation next year. In the meantime, wasn't it nice to have these upstanding young cadets as part-time caretakers? Harriet could imagine how the initial interview had gone, the wonderful impression Jeff had made.
She
would have rented it to them, that's for sure, and closed her eyes to the girls who showed up on the weekends and the occasional beer cans, always picked up later, in the overgrown formal garden. Harriet loved this garden with its old stone walls and its mossy green fountain, a boy holding a fish which dribbled water down the boy's chubby tummy. She parked on the street and entered the garden through the heavy wooden gate. She didn't really expect anybody to be there—after all, it
was
a big weekend. Shenandoah Military Institute was playing Virginia Polytechnic Institute from Blacksburg, down the road, a traditional rivalry and a very big deal. Harriet didn't really expect to see Jeff. He'd be over on campus. Maybe he even had a date. She could just leave him a note.

But first Harriet sat down on the big warm rock at the top of the
garden in the sun, feeling curiously drowsy. Bees buzzed. Sunflowers nodded by the wall. As she sat on the rock, surrounded by bees and mint, Harriet's head felt as heavy as a sunflower. She might have slept for a little while. In any case she woke up filled with energy, heart in her throat, pulse pounding just behind her temple. She could hear a band playing somewhere. Down the hill, the garden lay gold and dreamy in the sun. The blue hydrangea bush by the back door was dusty, droopy; a scarlet leaf came spiraling down through the crystal air to land like an arrow, pointed at Harriet's foot. She stood, looking down at it. I'm going to remember this, she thought, for the rest of my life.

She walked down the hill and pushed the door open. “Hello?” she called. “It's me.” Somehow she knew he was there. She made her way through the pizza boxes, beer cans, and Coke cans which littered the kitchen floor. Flies buzzed around an overflowing trash can; the sink was full of dishes. An open copy of
Steppenwolf
lay on the kitchen counter. She kept going.