To See You Again (28 page)

Carlotta smiles. “But, darling, I am.” And then she says, “How kind of Señor Blumenthal. Our new rate.”

“Oh yes, that.” He frowns, just slightly embarrassed. And then he lowers his voice as he says to her, “The young couple next door, they were most kind, do you know? He went up to get Lisa, and to phone. They showed such concern, when they don’t even know us. Don’t you think—suppose we invite them for a drink?”

“Oh, darling, absolutely yes. We’ll speak to them after breakfast. Or I’ll write a note.”

But just then Carlotta, who has been looking out to the early morning sea, and the bright pale sky, when she has not been turned to Travis, leans suddenly forward: there on the yellow bush at the edge of their terrace is the largest, the loveliest white butterfly that she has ever seen. She gasps with pleasure. There is nothing in her mind but the butterfly, on its flower.

This morning, when I read in a gossip column that a man named Carstairs Jones had married a famous former movie star, I was startled, thunderstruck, for I knew that he must certainly be the person whom I knew as a child, one extraordinary spring, as “Car Jones.” He was a dangerous and disreputable boy, one of what were then called the “truck children,” with whom I had a most curious, brief and frightening connection. Still, I noted that in a way I was pleased at such good fortune; I was “happy for him,” so to speak, perhaps as a result of sheer distance, so many years. And before I could imagine Car as he might be now, Carstairs Jones, in Hollywood clothes, I suddenly saw, with the most terrific accuracy and bright sharpness of detail, the schoolyard of all those years ago, hard and bare, neglected. And I relived the fatal day, on the middle level of that schoolyard, when we were playing truth or consequences, and I said that I would rather kiss Car Jones than be eaten alive by ants.

Our school building then was three stories high, a formidable brick square. In front a lawn had been at
tempted, some years back; graveled walks led up to the broad, forbidding entranceway, and behind the school were the playing fields, the playground. This area was on three levels: on the upper level, nearest the school, were the huge polished steel frames for the creaking swings, the big green splintery wooden seesaws, the rickety slides—all for the youngest children. On the middle level older girls played hopscotch, various games, or jumped rope—or just talked and giggled. And out on the lowest level, the field, the boys practiced football, or baseball, in the spring.

To one side of the school was a parking space, usually filled with the bulging yellow trucks that brought children from out in the country in to town: truck children, country children. Sometimes they would go back to the trucks at lunchtime to eat their sandwiches, whatever; almost always there were several overgrown children, spilling out from the trucks. Or Car Jones, expelled from some class, for some new acts of rebelliousness. That area was always littered with trash, wrappings from sandwiches, orange peel, Coke bottles.

Beyond the parking space was an empty lot, overgrown with weeds, in the midst of which stood an abandoned trellis, perhaps once the support of wisteria; now wild honeysuckle almost covered it over.

The town was called Hilton, the seat of a distinguished university, in the middle South. My widowed mother, Charlotte Ames, had moved there the previous fall (with me, Emily, her only child). I am still not sure why she chose Hilton; she never much liked it there, nor did she really like the brother-in-law, a professor, into whose proximity the move had placed us.

An interesting thing about Hilton, at that time, was that there were three, and only three, distinct social classes.
(Negroes could possibly make four, but they were so separate, even from the poorest whites, as not to seem part of the social system at all; they were in effect invisible.) At the scale’s top were professors and their families. Next were the townspeople, storekeepers, bankers, doctors and dentists, none of whom had the prestige nor the money they were later to acquire. Country people were the bottom group, families living out on the farms that surrounded the town, people who sent their children in to school on the yellow trucks.

The professors’ children of course had a terrific advantage, academically, coming from houses full of books, from parental respect for learning; many of those kids read precociously and had large vocabularies. It was not so hard on most of the town children; many of their families shared qualities with the faculty people; they too had a lot of books around. But the truck children had a hard and very unfair time of it. Not only were many of their parents near-illiterates, but often the children were kept at home to help with chores, and sometimes, particularly during the coldest, wettest months of winter, weather prevented the trucks’ passage over the slithery red clay roads of that countryside, that era. A child could miss out on a whole new skill, like long division, and fail tests, and be kept back. Consequently many of the truck children were overage, oversized for the grades they were in.

In the seventh grade, when I was eleven, a year ahead of myself, having been tested for and skipped the sixth (attesting to the superiority of Northern schools, my mother thought, and probably she was right), dangerous Car Jones, in the same class, was fourteen, and taller than anyone.

There was some overlapping, or crossing, among those three social groups; there were hybrids, as it were. In fact, I was such a crossbreed myself: literally my mother and I were town people—my dead father had been a banker, but
since his brother was a professor we too were considered faculty people. Also my mother had a lot of money, making us further elite. To me, being known as rich was just embarrassing, more freakish than advantageous, and I made my mother stop ordering my clothes from Best’s; I wanted dresses from the local stores, like everyone else’s.

Car Jones too was a hybrid child, although his case was less visible than mine: his country family were distant cousins of the prominent and prosperous dean of the medical school, Dean Willoughby Jones. (They seem to have gone in for fancy names, in all the branches of that family.) I don’t think his cousins spoke to him.

In any case, being richer and younger than the others in my class made me socially very insecure, and I always approached the playground with a sort of excited dread: would I be asked to join in a game, and if it were dodge ball (the game I most hated) would I be the first person hit with the ball, and thus eliminated? Or, if the girls were just standing around and talking, would I get all the jokes, and know which boys they were talking about?

Then, one pale-blue balmy April day, some of the older girls asked me if I wanted to play truth or consequences with them. I wasn’t sure how the game went, but anything was better than dodge ball, and, as always, I was pleased at being asked.

“It’s easy,” said Jean, a popular leader, with curly red hair; her father was a dean of the law school. “You just answer the questions we ask you, or you take the consequences.”

I wasn’t at all sure what consequences were, but I didn’t like to ask.

They began with simple questions. How old are you? What’s your middle name?

This led to more complicated (and crueler) ones.

“How much money does your mother have?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t, of course, and I doubt that she did either, that poor vague lady, too young to be a widow, too old for motherhood. “I think maybe a thousand dollars,” I hazarded.

At this they all frowned, that group of older, wiser girls, whether in disbelief or disappointment, I couldn’t tell. They moved a little away from me and whispered together.

It was close to the end of recess. Down on the playing field below us one of the boys threw the baseball and someone batted it out in a long arc, out to the farthest grassy edges of the field, and several other boys ran to retrieve it. On the level above us, a rutted terrace up, the little children stood in line for turns on the slide, or pumped with furious small legs on the giant swings.

The girls came back to me. “Okay, Emily,” said Jean. “Just tell the truth. Would you rather be covered with honey and eaten alive by ants, in the hot Saraha Desert—or kiss Car Jones?”

Then, as now, I had a somewhat literal mind: I thought of honey, and ants, and hot sand, and quite simply I said I’d rather kiss Car Jones.

Well.
Pandemonium: Did you hear what she said? Emily would kiss Car Jones!
Car Jones.
The truth—Emily would like to kiss Car Jones! Oh, Emily, if your mother only knew! Emily and Car! Emily is going to kiss Car Jones! Emily said she would! Oh, Emily!

The boys, just then coming up from the baseball field, cast bored and pitying looks at the sources of so much noise; they had always known girls were silly. But Harry McGinnis, a glowing, golden boy, looked over at us and laughed aloud. I had been watching Harry timidly for months; that day I thought his laugh was friendly.

Recess being over, we all went back into the schoolroom,
and continued with the civics lesson. I caught a few ambiguous smiles in my direction, which left me both embarrassed and confused.

That afternoon, as I walked home from school, two of the girls who passed me on their bikes called back to me, “Car Jones!” and in an automatic but for me new way I squealed out, “Oh no!” They laughed, and repeated, from their distance, “Car Jones!”

The next day I continued to be teased. Somehow the boys had got wind of what I had said, and they joined in with remarks about Yankee girls being fast, how you couldn’t tell about quiet girls, that sort of wit. Some of the teasing sounded mean; I felt that Jean, for example, was really out to discomfit me, but most of it was high-spirited friendliness. I was suddenly discovered, as though hitherto I had been invisible. And I continued to respond with that exaggerated, phony squeal of embarrassment that seemed to go over so well. Harry McGinnis addressed me as Emily Jones, and the others took that up. (I wonder if Harry had ever seen me before.)

Curiously, in all this new excitement, the person I thought of least was the source of it all: Car Jones. Or, rather, when I saw the actual Car, hulking over the water fountain or lounging near the steps of a truck, I did not consciously connect him with what felt like social success, new popularity. (I didn’t know about consequences.)

Therefore, when the first note from Car appeared on my desk, it felt like blackmail, although the message was innocent, was even kind. “You mustn’t mind that they tease you. You are the prettiest one of the girls. C. Jones.” I easily recognized his handwriting, those recklessly forward-slanting strokes, from the day when he had had to write on the blackboard,
“I will not disturb the other children during Music.” Twenty-five times. The note was real, all right.

Helplessly I turned around to stare at the back of the room, where the tallest boys sprawled in their too small desks. Truck children, all of them, bored and uncomfortable. There was Car, the tallest of all, the most bored, the least contained. Our eyes met, and even at that distance I saw that his were not black, as I had thought, but a dark slate blue; stormy eyes, even when, as he rarely did, Car smiled. I turned away quickly, and I managed to forget him for a while.

Having never witnessed a Southern spring before, I was astounded by its bursting opulence, that soft fullness of petal and bloom, everywhere the profusion of flowering shrubs and trees, the riotous flower beds. Walking home from school, I was enchanted with the yards of the stately houses (homes of professors) that I passed, the lush lawns, the rows of brilliant iris, the flowering quince and dogwood trees, crepe myrtle, wisteria vines. I would squint my eyes to see the tiniest pale-green leaves against the sky.

My mother didn’t like the spring. It gave her hay fever, and she spent most of her time languidly indoors, behind heavily lined, drawn draperies. “I’m simply too old for such exuberance,” she said.

“Happy” is perhaps not the word to describe my own state of mind, but I was tremendously excited, continuously. The season seemed to me so extraordinary in itself, the colors, the enchanting smells, and it coincided with my own altered awareness of myself: I could command attention, I was pretty (Car Jones was the first person ever to say that I was, after my mother’s long-ago murmurings to a late-arriving baby).

Now everyone knew my name, and called it out as I walked onto the playground. Last fall, as an envious, unknown new girl, I had heard other names, other greetings and teasing-insulting nicknames. “Hey, Red,” Harry McGinnis used to shout, in the direction of popular Jean.

The next note from Car Jones said, “I’ll bet you hate it down here. This is a cruddy town, but don’t let it bother you. Your hair is beautiful. I hope you never cut it. C. Jones.”

This scared me a little: the night before I had been arguing with my mother on just that point, my hair, which was long and straight. Why couldn’t I cut and curl it, like the other girls? How had Car Jones known what I wanted to do? I forced myself not to look at him; I pretended that there was no Car Jones; it was just a name that certain people had made up.

I felt—I was sure—that Car Jones was an “abnormal” person. (I’m afraid “different” would have been the word I used, back then.) He represented forces that were dark and strange, whereas I myself had just come out into the light. I had joined the world of the normal. (My “normality” later included three marriages to increasingly “rich and prominent” men; my current husband is a surgeon. Three children, and as many abortions. I hate the symmetry, but there you are. I haven’t counted lovers. It comes to a normal life, for a woman of my age.) For years, at the time of our coming to Hilton, I had felt a little strange, isolated by my father’s death, my older-than-most-parents mother, by money. By being younger than other children, and new in town. I could clearly afford nothing to do with Car, and at the same time my literal mind acknowledged a certain obligation.

Therefore, when a note came from Car telling me to meet him on a Saturday morning in the vacant lot next to the
school, it didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have to go. I made excuses to my mother, and to some of the girls who were getting together for Cokes at someone’s house. I’d be a little late, I told the girls. I had to do an errand for my mother.