Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (27 page)

After driving the Maxwells home, we find a bar near Tulane. Paul alone, dance floor dark and cool, the smell of beer and—what?—something sweet, damp gardenias, heartbreaker, that song, wherever you’re going, I’m going your way, two drifters, that’s what we wanted, just drift off, read Russian novels aloud to each other forever. Then kissing in the car, sliding down, rubbing our faces hard together. Good animals,
soul
, though. I want to say
I want
, so this is giving, giving. I never have. “I don’t know about you all.” Anne opens the car door. “But tonight I have to get to bed. These hours are getting ridiculous.”

Everyone’s asleep at the house and she tiptoes down the hall while we stand in the living room doorway. All quiet, except for the cool whir of the air conditioner. I almost can feel Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell’s breathing in their room just a wall away. “Wait here,” Paul whispers. He comes back with a bottle of wine. “I bought this in Portugal. I was planning to have it on my wedding night.” He opens the bottle and pours. Our eyes hold. Imagine such brown eyes; I’ve always liked green or blue. I take a sip and he kisses me, pressing his tongue into my mouth, and I give him the wine in mine. He drinks and I take his wine. We’re falling into the down sofa. Grace of dissolving time, boundaries, the bloodstream a brush fire started by children. I want to pull him so close that our bodies absorb each other. He lies on top of me and through our summer clothes I feel the entire velocity of his body on mine, feel our bright holy skin, a swarming fierce right. “Love,” I say. “Love.” We begin to laugh; he licks my face, throat. His hands, my blouse, over. “I always knew it,” he whispers. “I can love this way. I’m going to be the
one to teach you everything there is to know about passion. I’m going to make love to you for the rest of my life.”

The next day, three letters with big foreign stamps arrive from Italy, Austria. Anne, with particularly aulic posture, I think from my pillow, leaves for work without waking me to make a plan for later. Mrs. Maxwell is cordial but looks troubled. I call the Southern Crescent for the schedule to Georgia.

En route home, I stop in Atlanta. I have a sudden wild idea that I will not go home. I will not go to college. If he was going to marry what’s-her-name, I’ll just take off for … where? My sister Nancy picks me up at the Peachtree station. At her house, I look in the want ads and see that TWA is hiring stewardesses. I should fly like Paul. The next morning I go downtown to a hotel suite where a lot of girls wait in the hall. We’re all weighed and measured and some are dismissed. At five foot four, 108 pounds, I’m afraid I am fat but I pass. I think of Rome and the little house where Keats died, the Pyramids, Ireland, the blue waters of Greece; the interviewer talks about evacuation procedures, safety chutes, loss of cabin pressure—a training program somewhere in the Midwest, then six months of routes starting in Des Moines or Kansas. I see myself in slow motion, emptying trays in people’s laps. “Why do you want to fly?” “To see the world,” I answer, thinking of Paul in the navy. How soon can I start? The interviewer looks raw somehow, and his Adam’s
apple dips and rises. Planes taking off make me sick, especially if the pilot banks so steeply that I look sideways down at the receding red clay earth. I want to read Chaucer in Middle English. I don’t want to be a stewardess, even if I eventually can go to Europe that way. I want to go to Paris in black, with sandals, and big sunglasses, and write on a tiny iron table in the Tuileries while little boys with French maids sail toy boats. I flee.

In August, no one is reasonable, if anyone ever was. If it rains, it’s over too fast to cool anything down. The only thing that comes down is heat; heat descends in sheets. Always the rain begins as a trapezoid of gray lines slanting against the horizon. I watch it “walk” across the field, pushing cool air toward me, until surprisingly warm, it hits, a hard pelting. I lie in the grass and let it soak through me. In August, my skin feels permeable. The sky cracks, lightning darts down so close I instinctively draw back. Then more rain. Just as quickly, it stops and the sun makes an angry comeback, pulling clouds off the hot streets, wilting the dresses of ladies who have risen from their naps, blistering the glaring white sides of houses. The rain, for all I know, walks somewhere else, walks all over the South.

To get away, I drive out to Crystal Lake. Local legend says it’s the devil’s winter home.

As I lower myself into the water, I forget if I am hot or cold. My feet feel the sandy bottom until I find the cold springs, spurting pure as Easter water. I am so cold I was never hot before; I was always ice.

To swim, as a child again. Like one of the brown and violet fish, the deepwater gars that look as if they oozed up from prehistory. I let myself be the fish. The soul is a swimming animal. Let it scrape the bottom; let it grow gills. The soul, flagrant and fishy. Let the cool mud settle. For there is no great dog in the heavens, only an abstract constellation, and who will connect the fiery dots? Let the soul somersault in clean water. Let me be still, a long amphora under water since the seventh century BC; let me be buoyant. Let me swim a psalm.

I climb out in my cleanest skin, burning with cold, and taste the sun all over.

The summer I was ten, I asked Willie Bell what “dog days” meant. “It means dogs go mad from the heat and run us up and down the street, foaming at the mouth.” But that was in childhood on the sweltering back porch where the lattice cut the sun to bits. “This time of year, you better watch out.” I was keeping Willie Bell company while she shelled butterbeans into a brown bag, keeping quiet while Mother and her friends played bridge in the dining room. We could hear the shuffling of cards and the click of ice in their tea glasses. Mother’s friend Marion was back home from Asheville where she went for shock treatments almost every August when the year got to be just too much. “Bulldogs are the worst. They sink their teeth in your leg and they won’t let go till it thunders. Just like snappin’ turtles.”

Marion never forgot a card, could bid baby slams and make them all the time; Mother said her forgetting had nothing to do
with diamonds and hearts. The treatments just erased life’s unpleasant moments. Unless they singed you with too many volts, then everything went haywire; you could lose the whole Spanish language, if you ever knew it. When Willie Bell and I took in the chilled plates of frozen fruit salad, I saw Marion looking at little rolls of paper she took out of her purse. Willie Bell told me she saw
Amy, Harper
, the names of Marion’s children, and
4469
, her own telephone number, her address, and where she was born. Mother said that was all there was to it. She said the treatments were like reshuffling the cards after the hand. Our dog Tish lay near the cool brick foundation all day, tongue dripping. Dog days; Willie Bell said if one bites you, you’ll foam at the mouth, too.

Cicadas, the deep end of summer, this is how night sounds when it breathes. Looked at one way, there is much madness. The chthonic spirits have it in for my family. Or do they, like the Greek gods, create mischief to entertain themselves? I want this part of my life to be over. Enough.

Out of the absolute fullness of nothing to do, on Wednesday nights I go to the country club with Frankye and Daddy Jack. Michael Wright, the only boy my age whose parents are members, always turns up there, too. “Well, Mayes, you’re gracing us with your presence. How about giving me a little sugar?” He pushes out his cheek, and I give him a big pink-pursed-lips kiss, which he wipes off with a handkerchief. Michael is polite to all the adults, each of whom he hits with a mocking remark
as soon as he or she walks away. “Notice how Ellen had her sweater turned over her arm so we could see the J. P. Allen label?” I’d noticed. She tells us how beautiful, how handsome we are, asks about college, how we are enjoying the summer, and Michael says we are both going insane and she says how nice and drifts on.

He and I have known each other since we were born. At thirteen, his parents sent him away to a boys’ school in north Georgia, the only person in memory to escape so early. This made his old friends uneasy. He must be a sissy; something must be wrong. David was his best friend, and Michael’s high school girlfriend was my best friend. Our old loves probably are at the drive-in with dates right now, struggling around on sweaty vinyl seats. Over the years of our parents’ friendship and our double dating, we have a habit of saying absolutely anything to each other.

We load our plates with ham, corn, potato salad, and hard rolls at the buffet and take our plates and iced tea out by the pool. No one else leaves the air-conditioned dining room. I hike up my dress and sit with my feet on the first step under water. Hot piney air and a great moon, which must radiate heat, too. Only the wet calls of the pond frogs cool the air. Both of us still half-think we’ll marry our old loves. We’ve been to college in other states but, even so, the idea that we can actually leave Fitzgerald forever, simply invent a new life, doesn’t have a firm hold. We’re rooted down to the tap here, both of us. He has the powerful pull of his grandfather’s, father’s building supply business. I have Daddy Jack constantly telling me these are the best days of my life and I’m in for a rude awakening. I have Frankye,
too. She’s a fox gnawing through her own limbs but won’t get free. She keeps to her own vatic litany, “This is the end of the earth. There’s one road in and one road out. We are at the end of the earth.” I’m sure Michael will stay; I’m sure I won’t.

“Heard you had a little fling in New Orleans,” he begins. “Is there a deflowering scene?”

“Oh, sure. Would that there were. Just some inspired groping.” I keep chewing the salty, undercured ham and lower my eyelashes mysteriously. Like a creek spilling its banks, a memory surge flashes. Paul breathing on my face, my arms wrapped around him, the word “love” brimming over me.

“Is he rich? I’m sure Daddy Jack’s first question was what his old man does, right?”

I tell him I haven’t heard from Paul since I came home, except for one note I memorized: “When I think how I’d like to spend my life, it is with you. Great sunset clouds at evening, rose, pink, and for Frances blue. A sky clean with light over the river. Thoughts of you, always beautiful. My love, Paul.”

“Pretty juicy, Mayes.”

“Michael, how do you see yourself in five years?”

“In cords from Abercrombie’s, hitting the links,” he says in falsetto voice. “You’re serious? Christ-ola, I don’t know, not in this godforsaken place. Oh, I don’t know, what if you’d … Hey, they’re shaking up the corn for bingo. Big night at the Fitz CC.” There, he hasn’t quite said it again. We each wish, in a fleeting way, that we’d fall in love. Wouldn’t our parents be thrilled? We’ve sat in his mama’s black Cadillac a few times and kissed arduously, but neither of us ever felt inspired.

Through the glass wall we see our families and their friends
laughing and settling down with their cards. Harmon Griffin calls out, “Under the O, seventy-five.” Everyone pays; the winner takes the proceeds. That’s not the only kind of gambling. In the bar, which has no windows, illegal slot machines line the walls. Daddy Jack buys a stack of silver dollars. No one minds that Michael and I sit in the bar. Mother wanders in from bingo after a while; she can take only so much. Late, the bar gets smoky and loud. I’m long past ready to go. Michael’s sensible parents leave early and I’m left to wait for Daddy Jack and Mother to exhaust whatever it is that drives them. By the time we go, almost everyone has long since abandoned the place. Mother and I stop at the ladies’, then follow Daddy Jack through the pines to his green Oldsmobile. He sways like an Easter Island stone on wheels. Too many stingers. We see him take out the keys then open the back door and get in. “Look at the old fool,” my mother says. Tipsy herself, she grabs my arm. We watch him groping, then poking the back of the seat, searching for the ignition. “Where does he think the steering wheel is?” I shout. We start laughing and can’t stop. We’re shrieking, doubled over. We knock on his window. “You’re in the backseat! The backseat!”

“God damn it, why don’t they put some lights out here?” He harrumphs to the front and careens out the drive onto 129. Three miles of utterly straight road home. This time he keeps it between the ditches.

At home, all silent, I take my lotion out of the refrigerator and soothe my whole body with the chilly jasmine fragrance. Where will I be? The icy voice of a night bird spumes out of the pecan trees. I play Ravel, galloping an Andalusian pony
through the music, my cape flying, across dusky heath toward Barcelona. Do they have heaths in Spain? Why do the cicadas sing together? I am twelve but I am twenty. Writing in my blank book, I am but I am not. I copy:

I write letters, placing a lined sheet beneath the thin blue paper to keep my writing from slanting upward like a nine-year-old’s. I am waiting for the fiancée to return so Paul will tell her. I am waiting to hear that Paul will marry at Christmas. I write a sonnet entitled “Preface” about rain in the Quarter, drumming the iambs on my knee. I read about eternal return in a philosophy book. Everything, philosophers have thought since the Greeks, will come back again, exactly as it is. And what is happening has already happened hundreds of times. A fated plot. My time, the Holocaust raging as I was born, the Fitzgerald Purple Hurricane football team’s number thirty-five standing out on the field under the misty lights, gigantic bombs on the Japs, my mother’s camellias in winter, our street islands a dogwood fairyland in spring. Each blossom and blast coming around again in ten thousand years? My mother, a star losing
her heat. How slowly the dead subside. My father, igneous still—Such a rainy night in Georgia …

What, in all this, is
will
? I know I have that, I feel the force of it in my chest humming like an electrical tower in a cotton field.
Will
, yes, but
to power
?
Yes. It’s raining all over the world
.