News of the Spirit (5 page)

I don’t even remember falling asleep, but I was awakened by Dr. Pierce shaking my shoulder and saying my name.

Whatever can be said of Dr. Pierce, he was not a jerk. He told me firmly that our relationship was over, and just as firmly that I should not be going around New York City at night by myself, not in the shape I was in.

By the time his wife came home with groceries, I was lying on the studio bed, feeling a little better. He told her I was having a breakdown, which seemed suddenly true. Dr. Pierce and I looked at the news on TV while she made spaghetti. After dinner she lit a joint and handed it to me. It was the first time anybody had offered me marijuana. I shook my head. I thought I was crazy enough already. Dr. Pierce’s wife was nice, though. She was pale, with long, long blond hair, which she had worn in a braid on campus, or twisted on top of her head. Now it fell over her shoulders like water. She was not much—certainly not ten years—older than I was, and I wondered if she, too, had been his student. But I was exhausted. I fell asleep on the studio bed in front of a fan that drowned out the sound of their voices as they cleaned up from dinner.

I woke up very early the next morning. I wrote the Pierces a thank-you note on an index card I found in Dr. Pierce’s briefcase, and left it propped conspicuously against the toaster. The door to their bedroom was open, but I did not look in.

On the street, I was horrified to find that I had gotten a parking ticket and that my convertible top had been slashed—gratuitously, since there was nothing in the car to steal. This upset me more than anything else about my trip to New York, more than Dr. Pierce’s rejection, or his renunciation, as I preferred to consider it—which is how I did consider it, often, during that summer at home while I had the rest of my nervous breakdown.

My parents were very kind. They thought it all had to do with Don Fetterman, who was missing in action in Vietnam, and maybe it did, sort of. I was “nervous,” and cried a lot. Finally my aunt Dee got tired of me mooning around, as she called it. She frosted my hair and took me to Myrtle Beach, where it proved impossible to continue the nervous breakdown. The last night of the trip, Aunt Dee and I double-dated with some realtors she’d met by the pool.

Aunt Dee and I got back to McKenney just in time for me to pack and drive to school, where I was one of the seniors in charge of freshman orientation. Daddy had gotten the top fixed on my car; I was a blonde; and I’d lost twenty-five pounds.

T
HE CAMPUS SEEMED SMALLER TO ME AS
I D
ROVE
through the imposing gates. My footsteps echoed as I carried my bags up to the third floor of Old North, where Dixie and I would have the coveted “turret room.” I was the first one back in the dorm, but as I hauled things in from my car, other seniors began arriving. We hugged and squealed, following a script as old as the college. At least three girls stopped in mid-hug to push me back, scrutinize me carefully, and exclaim that they wouldn’t have recognized me. I didn’t know what they meant.

Sweaty and exhausted after carrying everything up to the room, I decided to shower before dinner. I was standing naked in our room, toweling my hair dry, when the dinner bell rang. Its somber tone sounded elegiac to me in that moment. On impulse, I started rummaging around in one of my boxes, until I found the mirror I was looking for. I went to stand at the window while the last of the lingering chimes died on the August air.

I held the mirror out at arm’s length and looked at myself. I had cheekbones. I had hipbones. I could see my ribs. My eyes were darker, larger in my face. My wild damp hair was as blond as Lily’s.

Clearly,
something had finally happened to me
.

That weekend, Dixie, Donnie, Lily, and I went out to
Donnie’s cabin to drink beer and catch up on the summer. We telephoned Melissa, now eight months pregnant, who claimed to be blissfully happy and said she was making curtains.

Lily snorted. She got up and put Simon and Garfunkel on the stereo, and got us each another beer. Donnie lit candles and switched off the overhead lamp. Dixie waved her hand, making her big diamond sparkle in the candlelight. Trey, now in law school at Vanderbilt, had given it to her in July. She was already planning her wedding. We would all be bridesmaids, of course. (That marriage would last for only a few years, and Dixie would divorce once more before she went to law school herself.) Donnie told us about her mother’s new boyfriend. We gossiped on as the hour grew late and bugs slammed suicidally into the porch light. The moon came up big and bright. I kept playing “The Sounds of Silence” over and over; it matched my mood, my new conception of myself. I also liked “I Am a Rock.”

Then Lily announced that she was in love,
really in love
this time, with a young poet she’d met that summer on Cape Cod, where she’d been waitressing. We waited while she lit a cigarette. “We lived together for two months,” Lily said, “in his room at the inn, where we could look out and see the water.” We stared at her. None of us had ever lived with anybody, or known anyone who had. Lily looked around at us. “It was wonderful,” she said. “It was heaven. But it was
not what you might think,” she added enigmatically, “living with a man.”

I started crying.

There was a long silence, and the needle on the record started scratching. Donnie got up and cut it off. They were all looking at me.

“And what about you, Charlene?” Lily said softly. “What happened to you this summer, anyway?”

It was a moment I had rehearsed again and again in my mind. I would tell them about my affair with Dr. Pierce and how I had gone to New York to find him, and how he had renounced me because his wife was pregnant. I had just added this part. But I was crying too hard to speak. “It was awful,” I said finally, and Dixie came over and hugged me. “What was awful?” she said, but I couldn’t even speak, my mind filled suddenly, surprisingly, with Don Fetterman as he’d looked in high school, presiding over the Glee Club.

“Come on,” Dixie said, “tell us.”

The candles were guttering, the moon made a path across the lake. I took a deep breath.

“Bubba is dead,” I said.

“Oh, God! Oh, no!” A sort of pandemonium ensued, which I don’t remember much about, although I remember the details of my brother’s death vividly. Bubba drowned in a lake in Canada, attempting to save a friend’s child who had fallen overboard. The child died, too. Bubba was buried
there, on the wild shore of that northern lake, and his only funeral was what his friends said as they spoke around the grave one by one. His best friend had written to me, describing the whole thing.

“Charlene, Charlene, why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Donnie asked.

I just shook my head. “I couldn’t,” I said.

Later that fall, I finally wrote a good story—about my family, back in McKenney—and then another, and then another. I won a scholarship to graduate school at Columbia University in New York, where I still live, with my husband, on the West Side, freelancing for several magazines and writing fiction.

It was here, only a few weeks ago, that I last saw Lily, now a prominent feminist scholar. She was in town for the MLA convention. We went to a bistro near my apartment for lunch, lingering over wine far into the late-December afternoon while my husband babysat. Lily was in the middle of a divorce. “You know,” she said at one point, twirling her tulip wineglass, “I have often thought that the one great tragedy of my life was never getting to meet your brother. Somehow I always felt that he and I were just meant for each other.” We sat in the restaurant for a long time, at the window where we could see the passersby hurrying along the sidewalk in the dismal sleet outside, each one so preoccupied, so caught up in his own story. We sat there all afternoon.

Sarah can’t keep her mind on the spoons. So she starts over, counting right out loud, “One, two, three, four,” pursing her lips in that way she has, fitting each newly polished spoon carefully into its allotted space in the big mahogany silver chest. Thirty-six spoons, all accounted for. Normally this is the kind of job Sarah just loves, but today it’s so hot, hotter than the hinges of hell in here, and she is distracted because Gladiola Rolette, who’s polishing the spoons and handing them over to her one by one, will
not
shut up, not for a single minute. Gladiola beats all! She does not seem to understand that it’s her fault it’s so hot in here, that she should have called a repairman the instant the air conditioner went on the blink. Gladiola does
not even seem to understand that it’s her fault Sarah has to count the silver in the first place. But Gladiola just let it all go during the last six months of Daddy’s illness, forks and spoons jumbled up together, the butter knives scattered to the four winds. And furthermore, it is perfectly clear that Gladiola has been giving her trashy family the entire run of this house.

Sarah has seen the signs everywhere—unfiltered cigarette butts in the flower beds, a beer can stuck in a planter on the portico, a lipstick smudge on the drinking glass in the downstairs bathroom—why, even the furniture has been rearranged! Gladiola herself would never think of doing such a thing. But her daughters, both of them hussies,
would
. They’ve got ideas, Gladiola’s girls. Sarah has watched them grow up.