And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you’ll write down in your notebook, the place where the atheist doctor hollers at a priest: All your certainties aren’t worth one strand of a woman’s hair.
Chapter Thirteen
KIDS IN DISTRESSED FAMILIES ARE GREAT repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told. Or to be told in sketchiest form—merely brushed by. It’s an irony that airing these dramas is often a family’s chief taboo. Yet the bristling agony secrecy causes can only be relieved by talk—hours and hours of unmuzzled talk, the recounting of stories. Who listens is almost beside the point, so long as the watching eyes remain lit, and the head tilts at the angle indicating attention and care.
Without such talk by the kids of these families, there’s usually a grave sense of personal fault, of failing to rescue those beloveds lost or doomed. That silence ticks out inside its bearer the constant small sting of indictment—what if, what if, what if; why didn’t I, why didn’t I, why didn’t I…
It’s the gravity of such silence that you detect in Meredith. At some point, she levels her sea green eyes on you and says: I can tell that you’ve suffered. Which observation takes your breath away in its simple nobility.
I have, you say, nodding in acknowledgment. I have suffered.
You’ve known real despair, she said. I can see that.
Me too, you say, I can see that about you too. Then you dare a question that airs your own ignorance: What is it about suffering that makes people like us so different?
And Meredith says, It teaches you about the human heart. Suffering and despair force you to plumb the depths of the human heart in a way normal life can’t. It makes us wise beyond our years. Most people just go along.
Just one cylinder firing upstairs, you say.
If that, she says. Unless you’ve suffered.
No one has placed any sword to your shoulder to appoint you to a legion of honor—Those Who’ve Suffered. Yet the notion lends you a new kind of dignity. It also permits you both to air family dramas abstractly, as evidence of the world’s inordinate suffering, without exactly betraying the tribal silence you’ve both forsworn.
The sources of Meredith’s own suffering never fully register on you as dire at the time because she reveals them so matter-of-factly, as if recounting episodes from a soap opera. She stays so cordoned off from showing the grief one might expect with her life’s events that you buy her act. Partly you credit her with massive courage (true enough); partly you’re grateful to ignore some of the awfulness of her past (which was a betrayal of epic proportions).
The obvious distress is the Brights’ being poorly off. Their house was the only rental you knew, a tiny shotgun structure—meaning if you fired a gun through the front door in the living room, the shot would fly clean through and out the back kitchen door. It was square and plain, painted the stark white of a boiled egg, and it rose on short stilts that made it seem ready to run—like a cartoon house—out of the oyster-shell drive it was doomed to perch in. (There was no real yard.) It never did run off, of course, just hunkered there, as sterile and ornament-free as a doctor’s office. Which, in fact, it used to be.
Dr. Boudreaux ran his old office there when you were a kid, and Meredith found this a pleasant coincidence, almost a foreshadowing of her arrival there and your taking up with her. You explained the house’s oddities—a massive hole in the bedroom wall plaster once held the x-ray machine. How at the kitchen table, your chair leg tended to edge into one of the four scooped-out places where the examining table had been bolted. (As a five-year-old facing a booster shot, you’d leapt from that examining table to that very linoleum floor and led three adults—the doctor, his nurse, your mother—on a chase beneath it and around it and eventually over the counters.) Because you were so often carried through that door wrapped in a quilt, your mind swimming with fever, the house kept an otherworldly air, spooky in its familiarity, yet wrong in detail—with doily-covered armchairs and polished upright piano where straight chairs and metal tables once stood.
Meredith never complained about the house or not having money, and she always insisted on paying her own way.
Nor did she talk about her dad running off except to mention it in passing, as if giving the formal précis of a novel. One Saturday shortly after they got to Leechfield, while her mom worked at the cleaners, he secretly cleaned out the bank account, loaded up their only car, and whisked away the house’s portable TV under a blanket. But in his hurry to get away, he accidentally slammed the car door on the extended antenna, so Meredith saw it sticking out and puzzled over its presence there as he backed from the drive.
He left no forwarding address, just vanished, fell off the earth. Years later he’d turn up in San Antonio, delivering pizzas while shacked up with a woman whom Meredith and her brother referred to as Ralph. Meredith recounts all this with enviable calm. You never remember her even saying she missed her dad, a fact that flummoxed you because when your parents split up back in fourth grade, you pitched a series of black-eyed fits (a seminal one involving a BB gun).
Sometimes Meredith might make a cavalier literary remark about her dad, like quoting The Glass Menagerie’s line about a lost father—“He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distance.”
Who could blame him for leaving this shithole, your mother always said.
In response to her husband’s flight, Mrs. Bright, a Mississippi lady who’d seem at home under a silk parasol, set out cheerfully to support her family (including Meredith and her brother Michael, just out of high school, her oldest brother Ray having stayed in Greenville), on the $120 per month she could rake in working for Aunt Willy and Uncle Jack, who owned the cleaners.
So picture this woman of about forty—Mrs. Bright—who’s blessed with good looks, a slightly genteel manner, and more than her fair share of IQ points (way more by local standards). Now picture her standing on her feet all day amid industrial irons and whole football fields of wrinkled, spilled-on fabric. Even visiting the cleaners depresses you no end, though you sometimes go to ask Mrs. Bright’s permission for something or other (a gratuitous visit, since the answer’s always yes).
On one such day, you’re greeted at the back door by her coworker Drusilla, a wizened old black woman about a thousand years old. When you sidle up, she’s sitting on a cinder-block perch smoking a hand-rolled stogie. Steam and cleaning solvents billowing from the door wrap her in a hazy cocoon. She stands saying hey and wiping tobacco crumbs off her skirt.
The cave-mouthed grin she breaks into is itself hard to take, since the loss of many untended teeth causes her cheeks to collapse inward. So it always seems to you that her very skull is edging forward through the flesh. She’s holding the screen open, asking are you girls being good? studying? getting educated so you won’t have to work like she and Francine (Mrs. Bright) in a sweat shop?
The noise inside the cleaners overpowers thought itself. Some unseen machine is banging out blind, inanimate blows in the gloom. Metal against metal. Ratchets struggle to catch after the effortful turning of interlocking cogs. And always there’s the hiss of steam you’d associate with a nest of vipers.
Meredith disappears to find her mother, heads off behind a rack of dresses draped in glistening plastic, and Drusilla takes your arm saying she’s got something to show you.
She often does this, and every time your initial urge is to wrest free, for her hand is like some sandpapery crow’s claw, and what few teeth she has are so loose in her head you can’t look her full in the face without fixing wide-eyed on that mouth’s odd mobility. But you go along. Her being black so absolutely trumps most other forms of suffering that you feel proud to be treated as an ally.
On this day, she beckons you deeper into the thumping bowels of the machinery. She reaches under the counter for an oxblood-colored
purse, leather peeling, from which comes a plastic accordion of school pictures.
You can never look at photos of little kids without wondering why they get their adult teeth so long before their faces grow to fit them. A girl with a blue bow on her short braids grins out at you.
Thas Elinor, Drusilla says, my youngest girl’s baby. She helps with the other grandbabies and gets straight A’s. She comes home every day with that dress clean as a whistle—never spills a drop from her thermos.
You ask automatically after the girl’s mother, but Drusilla shakes her head. She sorry, she says. Then as if in dismissal of that sorriness, she slides her thumbnail down to the next bend in the plastic, the next picture. Joe in an outsized Easter suit has a missing daddy who, according to Drusilla, isn’t worth killing, and each plastic window holds the shining countenance of some kid Drusilla’s charged with because of the inscrutable moral emptiness of one or both parents—sorry being the catch-all term, shorthand for failings that range between dull laziness and assault with an ax handle.
You bend over Drusilla’s accordion wallet, straining to disguise the knee-jerk piety that comes at such moments from being white, which affords so much unspoken social ease. Surely you’ll never be indentured to some packet of grandbabies staring out of yellowed plastic windows. Surely the world will land you in some more elegant circumstance, one that pays you extravagantly for your opinions and brilliant insights into the human condition. One of your favorite fantasies places you in the well of a plush theater during a rehearsal, while actors holding scripts you wrote await instruction.
Before you leave, Drusilla issues a dire warning about the evils of fornication with men, all of whom, she says, are dogs. She lowers the great metal plate to the presser fitted with a man’s gray dress slacks so steam engulfs her small flowered form. She then peels the pants off and carries them smoking to where you stand, to show you how white men leave “love juice” stains around their flies.
At the back door, Meredith seems to puzzle over a sheaf of papers in her hand while her mom squints over her shoulder. Mrs. Bright is saying, I’m going slab dab out of my mind what with this percent of that and who’s a deduction. Your daddy used to handle that—
Meredith uh-huhs. Mrs. Bright has the skin of a cover girl and keeps her hair coiffed just so even without beauty shop. She asks, Do you think you can help me out with it? I don’t want to take away from your schoolwork,…
Meredith says, I’ll look at it before you get home. That’s all I can do.
You note how blank Meredith’s face is becoming, just yielding up every line of animate expression. But slowly. It’s like watching a flower close.
Mrs. Bright looks back and forth from the papers to Meredith, finally saying, Does it make any sense at all to you?
It’s not very straightforward, she says. I mean. They could make it easier. Meredith’s still unreadable as stone. But you catch a glimmer of Mrs. Bright’s burdens—their gravity. Tiny worry lines are growing around her eyes, yet she also seems to cringe while asking Meredith’s help on these minuscule chores. Can she set the hamburger out to thaw? Then maybe check and see if the bread’s got spots on it, and if it does, call back so Mrs. Bright can walk to the store after work for another loaf. She might need to come home and take the bottles back for money before she can manage it. She’ll have to check her change purse.
You’re already edging toward the street when she calls out, Little Mary, do you have to help your mother this way? And you say, Oh, yes ma’am. Which is a flat-footed lie. Really you’re dimly annoyed that Meredith has to worry with these nit-size tasks. They always interfere with your program of unalloyed indolence. In truth, you can’t face these small frets from Mrs. Bright, for they thinly mask a circumstance too bleak for you to absorb, one that might send the average woman screaming down the street.
Is it that day or some other that you excuse yourself, leave Meredith with her mother? You race off to Hanson’s Jewelry to stand for a long time, just letting your eye rove over the ordered display—cases of cool diamonds and sapphires, the occasional square-cut emerald, the gumdrop-colored birthstone rings and necklaces. You’ll later wonder why this instant stays with you so long—your warped face reflected in the filigree of a silver serving tray.
Chapter Fourteen
YOU CAN’T EVOKE THE FIRST JOINT you took a hit of. Or the second or third, for that matter. Nor even the first tab of acid. (Old hippie dictum: if you remember Woodstock, you weren’t there.) Other equally key moments have likewise dispersed into the ether. Which isn’t necessarily the fault of those chemicals. (“Coincidence does not imply causality,” you wrote in a journal back then, not bothering to note the source.) You could as easily blame your lack of recall on the sexual wonder that left you stunned and staring.
Still, the three things came almost at once—the vagueness of mind, the boys, the drugs. Which one prompted the other you’ll never quite discern. It’s as if that sweet smoke you inhaled blew from your lungs in a burgeoning vapor that ultimately draped over the world’s objects like so much cotton batting. So one minute, you were toking on a joint, the next you woke bare-legged between sheets with some guy staring at you all google-eyed.
Actually, you never much liked pot, never smoked scads of it. You found the wordless, laconic stupor it left you in so disorienting that smoking it was (at first anyway) mere social formality. Grown-ups always imagine that denizens of the underworld lure naifs like you down into drugged squalor, but you went out looking for a ritual of transformation—anything to spirit you from the doldrums into those airy districts traveled by smart boys who study Nietzsche and practice Japanese calligraphy on rice paper. Pharmaceutical and libidinal relief turned out to be all anybody was selling.
Some boys from that time stand out. You fall in love with one met in 1970, spring of your sophomore year. High school’s first annum. What the poet Dylan Thomas might have called your fourteenth-fifteenth year to heaven. At some forgotten occasion, you smoke your first joint with him.
Let’s call him Phil. He’s tall with a great bushy head of ash blond hair, and he projects a seriousness you always think of as French. He’s three years older (in Lecia’s graduating class) and from another town, but a small role you capture in the spring play brings you near enough for him to acquire you—a task no harder than plucking fruit from a tree, for you’d been looking for him. Within a few weeks his senior ring on a thin chain around your neck thumps your clavicle any time you hit a volley ball.
Phil that year was undergoing his own stark transmutation. Not long before, he’d spoken at tent revivals as a child evangelist. In a Holy Roller church he’d thundered out the scorching rhetoric you’d later associate with the Puritan Jonathan Edwards—sinners thrown like spiders into the coals by the hands of an angry God. But somehow he had, in his mother’s words, strayed. He’d begun smoking pot and protesting the war and generally pissing off his parents and the school authorities, who nonetheless had to let him get his picture taken with all the smart kids of Lecia’s graduating class because he’d discovered a new way to calculate something. (Plus everybody knew he had a big scholarship to a fancy-schmancy school, and you couldn’t exactly blow him off because he started acting pissy. Christ, look at his GPA.)
In the spring play, Phil stars as God, and it’s Meredith who points out that he never once laughs at the casting. This complaint partly estranges you from her for the better part of that spring and summer. Till Phil takes off for college come fall, there’s just suddenly less Meredith. You can recall no quarrel. She still holds best-friend rank (who else would have you), and if Phil’s busy at lunch, you share chips from the same bag. But some tacit vote was taken, and with Phil’s arrival she drifts away.
The drama is Archibald MacLeish’s JB, a takeoff on the Book of Job—the blasphemous irony of which escapes the audience, who might otherwise have tarred and feathered Miss Lanson—your adorable new drama teacher who’s the blessed antidote to Miss Baird.
&n
bsp; After rehearsal, you often drive in Phil’s two-tone Ford to the home of his friend Hal, who’d somehow been voted ruler of the student council just before his big brothers returned from Mexico, their duffel bags stuffed with enough pot to transform their baby brother—who has an official-looking gavel for chairing council meetings—into the school’s first and foremost head (translation circa 1970: ingester of illegal substances, point man for the counterculture).
It’s the bohemian company of which fifteen-year-olds’ dreams are made. Hal’s bedroom is painted black, its ceiling abillow with parachute silk, and its walls hold a sound system that blares “Yellow Submarine” (about acid) or “Crystal Ship” (about heroin) or “Let It Bleed” (about whipping it out) at volumes that desiccate talk. Pot’s a hallucinogen that can also flatten you (not unlike a ballpeen hammer to the cortex), and this effect suits your vapid silence, for you feel dwarfed by the boys’ seniority and still untried enough in your new self to know what to say. The two of them lie in bed exhaling vast volumes of pot smoke while you sit cross-legged on the floor by the Lava Lamp, surveying their thin, stoned bodies as a wolverine might a pair of pork chops.
You’re transfixed partly by the urges their nearness ignites, by the head-numbing buzz of secondhand marijuana smoke, but also by your crush on Phil.
Phil’s more or less steady role in your life solves so much that it’s hard to take your eyes from him. Lecia finds the whole romance nauseating. Your mother’s tickled by it, while your daddy says of him he seems like a nice enough little boy, but isn’t his hair awful bushy. But Phil has dimmed the power of their opinions, somehow reduced them, which bolsters your fledgling sense of independence. He also has a car—a fact made no less thrilling because there’s nowhere to go. Even a nonparental ride to what your daddy still calls the picture show has a heady feel.
Beyond this, he provides escort, his gaze on you certifying your romantic and sexual worth (the only value girls seem to have in that time and place) as surely as the blue USDA stamp proves a T-bone’s tender. It seems most girls don’t wander far unescorted. They stay home alone, or in twos and threes, waiting for boys to fetch them and jump-start some adventure. Showing up alone at certain places can make you look either desperate or like you’re asking for it. (Rules for this seem delicate as clockworks, and you may well have read them wrong, for Lord knows misreading signs will—with chemical help—become your métier.)