Outer Banks (5 page)

They
are
love, those rare, blinding early friendships. Not everyone has them, and almost no one gets more than one. The others, the later ones, are not the same. These first grow in a soil found only in the country of the young, and are possible only there, because their medium is unbroken time and proximity and discovery, and later there is not enough of any of those for the total, ongoing immersions that these friendships are. They are not sexual in nature, or at least most are not; though perhaps, as the Freudians claim, there is no deep relationship that isn't, at bottom. But I do not think mine with Cecie had that dark note in it. We were both, at that time, simply too afraid of physical love. It had, however, much else that an intense love affair has: it charmed us, soothed us, fed us, consumed us. We discovered in each other and ourselves worlds, galaxies, a universe. Discovery, I think, is the hallmark, the one constant. Sadly, most of us are done with that by the time we reach full adulthood. These friendships may continue past first youth, but I don't think they often do. Their primary strength is that fire of exploration and validation. The friend becomes a cicerone, to go with you down to the bottom of your deepest depths, and out to the farthest crannies of your being. All your senses are open, all your reservoirs fill up at a prodigious rate, all your motors hum. A friendship like that is like the start of life, when, they say, a child learns more in a few short months than he ever will again. It was like that with Cecie and me. We could not get enough of each other, and we could not get enough of life, even though it was a life that did not exist except in the bright circle of air in which we moved together.

From the start we were called Mutt and Jeff. It was inevitable, with my lanky height and her childlike slightness, and the air of otherness that hovered around us. We stank of the abyss; of course we did. Neither of us minded. Apart, we might have smarted under
the slight, stinging surf of talk that lapped around us; together we simply laughed. It is what I remember most of those three years, the laughter. We did not laugh at everything, of course, but we came near it. It was the laughter of perfect ease and utter delight; it was to us like deep drafts of air, after years of lungs constricted by too-narrow bodies. I don't remember too many days that did not begin with laughter at something, or end with it.

No matter how far apart we had been during the days, we touched base with each other automatically in the evenings. After classes, we ate together and studied together and visited up and down the hall together and went down for cokes or coffee together, and when we had somewhere to go, we went together. When we were apart during holidays and breaks, we wrote each other every day. Usually we played records and read in our room, reading aloud to each other and laughing, or, less often, sharing the passages that touched subterranean chords and wells in us, and brought the easy, ardent tears of untouched romantics to our eyes. We read all of Dorothy Parker, adoring and adopting that graceful, inch-deep cynicism: “ ‘Where's the man could ease a heart like a satin gown?' ” we would chant to each other. And, “ ‘The sun's gone dim and the moon's turned black, for I loved him and he didn't love back,' ” and “ ‘Scratch a lover, and find a foe,' ” and “ ‘Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.' ” No two young women have ever been so unjaded, or so eager to be.

We read other poetry, too, mostly Irish and English. All touched with the dark romanticism that flourished between the World Wars. I remember that when we first encountered the blood and snot and howling of the postwar poets, her nostrils whitened with disgust and I felt frightened and betrayed, as if I had been lured by Pan's pipes to the mouth of a snake pit. We turned then to Shakespeare or Dickens or Kipling, or each brought out for the other the early loves we had found in pages: I brought Maupassant and Conan Doyle and the Greek and Norse myths and laid them
in her lap; she led me to
The Waterbabies,
and
Wind in the Willows,
and Richard Halliburton's
Royal Road to Romance.

“ ‘There is nothing half so worthwhile as simply messing about in boats,' ” she would paraphrase Rat, talking of her childhood beside the shallow, blood-warm waters of Chesapeake Bay.

“ ‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll,' ” I would intone, telling her of the great, cold seas off Cape Cod.

And always, over and around and under it all, there was the music.

It was that viscid no-man's-land that followed the prowling sexual exuberance of the Fifties' black rhythm and blues. “Junglebunny stuff,” I could hear my father saying. The soprano
weltschmerz
of the teen
ang
sters ruled. Connie Francis whined about everybody being somebody's fool and told us that all we had to do to be happy was to go where the boys were. Brenda Lee was sorry. The Everly Brothers groveled about being Cathy's clown. The Shirelles wondered cloyingly if someone would love them tomorrow. The hard-grooving Motown sound had not yet caught on, at least not in the Deep South. The lightlessly relevant folk rockers and the acid-drowned San Francisco sound and the cheeky, preening British had not yet come to town. At Randolph, the flipped and brush-cut young twisted and hully-gullied and jitterbugged and dirty-bopped and slow-danced to Dion and the Belmonts, and the Four Seasons and the Drifters and the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly. Cecie and I could and did twist and bop as well as the next, but neither of us liked the music. To me it remained a kind of body noise, the ceaseless, subterranean pulse of my generation, forerunner to the white noise of the Seventies. Our music, Cecie's and mine, was music to be listened to and talked or even wept over, music with a dark thread in it, or else the soaring wings of Romance with a capital R. The first thing we did when we walked into our room, after tossing our books on our beds and shucking out of our clothes and into dusters or Bermudas, was to thumb through the stained pile of LPs in the window seat and
select a groaning stack and plunk them onto my old gray Webcor portable. From then on until we finally went to bed, whatever we did was done to music.

One song, a treacly ballad called “While We're Young,” was our unofficial anthem. “Songs were made to sing while we're young,” we warbled and trilled in our faltering sopranos. “Every day is spring, while we're young…”

It wasn't the “young” of the later Sixties that we meant, that megamovement lurking only a few years ahead, that youthquake that wrenched an entire culture apart and spewed up flower children, Woodstock, psychedelics and drugs and love beads and bare feet and fire-blooming hawks and equally savage doves. It was a generic kind of youngness, a lift and swing of heart, a leap of pulse, a thrill of flesh, a cup-brimming brew of joy and yearning and silliness and tenderness and tears and laughter and prickling skin and pure sensation…we named it Impulse. Or sometimes, Romance. But it was, purely and simply, the being of young in a time of timelessness. And our music flowed through it like spilled May wine on morning grass.

We would…we did…go on to other kinds of music, other voices in other rooms, and the music of those brief years seemed, in retrospect, shallow and thin to us, perhaps even trivial. At least it did to me. With a few exceptions, I did not ever choose to play those old albums again. But still, even now, when I hear a snatch of “On the Street Where You Live,” or a spilled splash of Tchaikovsky, or a sweet surge of Percy Faith, I am back with Cecie Hart, sitting on our twin beds on the top floor of the Tri Omega house in Randolph, Alabama, late into a May night, with moonlight and the heartbreaking scent of mimosa flooding into our window, talking, talking. Or I hear a sorrowing, searching curl of Mendelssohn's violins, and there we are, same place, same hour of night, but in thick quilted robes now, with sleet ticking against the black, frosted windows and the radiator hissing, sipping cups of thin, vile
coffee made from powdered Maxwell House and hot tap water.

“Ugh,” Cecie always said, shaking herself all over like a wet dog. “Coffee always smells like it should be thick and wonderful, like hot chocolate, and it always tastes…like this. Like pony piss.”

And she would fish a dime out of her purse and go padding down to the basement and get a bottle of Coca Cola and a Baby Ruth from the machine, and bring me back a package of barbecued chips, and we would talk some more.

Always, always, like the music, the talking.

We talked about the things that young girls in dormitories and sorority houses all over the country did, in that time: about who was dating who and who wasn't dating at all and who had just broken up and who looked like a sure thing for a pin before the quarter was out. We talked about who we liked and who we loved and who we didn't like and who we hated and about a few who were simply beyond dislike and beneath contempt. Because there were very few things that we could not say to each other, we were able to admit that a few of our Tri O sisters fell into the latter categories.

“You'd think she was proud of that water buffalo ass, the way she prances around here naked. All she needs is a cowbird on her head,” Cecie would snort. She was modest in the extreme, no doubt a stigma of the convent. I cannot ever remember seeing her completely naked.

“If she kisses me goodnight one more time to see if I've been drinking I'm going to throw up on her,” I would say. Or, “She'd never on earth have passed that sociology exam if she hadn't been a k-ing that old fool all quarter. She was over there typing for him every afternoon last week. That brown stain on her chin ain't nicotine, friends.”

We would look at each other, and burst into simultaneous song: “There is a brown ring…around her nose…and every day it grows and grows…”

And collapse into a heap, with weak, eye-watering laughter, laughter that I sometimes sought to keep going for the sheer pleasure of hearing Cecie laugh. It was a chiming, crystal thing, that laugh, that spiraled up and up until it teetered on the edge of affectation, and then it plunged suddenly into a rich, froggy guttiness, and took off upward again. People always laughed along with Cecie, even when they did not know what the joke was, and one of her prolonged late-night spells brought sisters to our door, knuckling their eyes from sleep, mouths twitching with answering laughter, to see what on earth was so funny. It was not often that we could tell them.

We talked of ourselves. Within months of her moving in with me, the dam of stony reticence that had kept the full spate of reality away from my consciousness cracked, and I told Cecie things I had not told a living soul, and would not, again, until much later. I never let the dam crumble entirely; the abyss yawned too blackly, the cold black sea of actuality pounded too savagely. But I did not move to mend the crack, either, and I am sure Cecie extrapolated almost the entire truth about me from the trickle I let through. I think she always saw me much plainer than I did myself, and vice versa. The trust we invested in each other was far more enormous…but fragile…than we realized.

“I'm not a Virginia Lee,” I said abruptly one night, apropos of nothing. “I'm not a Virginian at all. And I don't have any money to speak of. The whole thing was my father's idea.”

I could not look at her, and my heart was near to leaping out of my chest. The breath of the abyss blasted furiously up around me.

“Well, I knew that about the Lees,” Cecie said mildly, not looking at me, either. “And I didn't much think you were a Virginian. My aunts know every Lee in the Old Dominion, quick or dead. They couldn't place your family. I hope it's not going to bother you that you told me. Lord knows, money is the very least
important thing up home, and I don't care about your father. He sounds like an interesting man.”

“Was,” I said. “He's dead. But you're right, he really was an interesting man.”

She did look at me then, briefly and delicately. I could feel the weight of it on my cheek and neck.

“I'm sorry about that,” she said. “It's hard not to have parents. No matter how kind everybody else is, it's still hard.”

She had never spoken of her own feelings about the loss of her family; that lay behind the door deep within her, that she did not open for me or anyone else. I was able to look at her then. Something welled up, warm and tremulous, inside me. It was not pity, but a stronger, purer thing altogether. Love, probably, though I was so unaccustomed to it that I did not know it then.

“My father shot himself,” I said. “He did it last year, when he lost his money. It's why I'm here. The stuff about Randolph having a better interior design school was crap.”

It was a gift to her, to thank her for accepting and containing the proffered truth of me, for giving me a glimpse of her own. And it was a kind of insurance. I sensed rather than knew that to hand someone the secrets of your heart is to bind them to you. I was right about that with Cecie; I did not learn until later that it is not always true. Not even usually.

“I want you to know two things,” she said in the same voice that she might say good morning, or remark on the weather. “And then we won't talk about this anymore, because we don't need to. The first is, I will never tell anybody what you've told me. And the second is, I've never really been sorry that my parents and brother died. I've sort of liked it. I don't remember them, and I've gotten attention and love and things that I never would have had if they'd lived; people have always gone out of their way to please me because they've felt sorry for me. I'd never have made it to college if Bobby had lived; there wasn't enough money, and with the Harts it's always the sons who go. Not the daughters. So.
Enough. Let's go out to Dairyland and get a limeade. My treat.”

We shared, in so far as we could, our provenance. She told me about the strange, lost, primordial water-world of the Tidewater and the great Bay, about the seasons and the tides and the shining, writhing blue crabs that she pulled from the water on the dock in front of her grandmother's house, and the waterfowl and vast, loose Vs of geese that passed over each spring and fall on their way north and south. Once she had been on her way to mass and had stopped to watch the wild geese pass overhead and never made mass at all.