The Right Thing (15 page)

“Okay, big guy,” Ted says to Troy. “Let's get you fixed up.”

I lean against the dust-covered cinder block wall without a care for my black dress and try to catch my breath. My heart is pounding as though I just ran here all the way from Jackson. Whatever is wrong with me? Why am I so flushed? And I'm thirsty. Really, really thirsty—like I'd trade my BMW for a glass of water, and there's that
wave
again.

“Here you go.” Ted hands me a length of rough twine with Troy on the end of it. He bends down and ruffles the terrier's fur. “Good dog you've got there.”

“He's really a Treeby,” I say faintly, swaying on my feet. “But thanks anyway.”

“You're welcome,” Ted says, his voice grave. “My hay rope is your hay rope.” He sketches a bow, and before I realize what he's doing, he takes my hand, brushing his lips over my fingers. “It's not often I get the chance to do a lady a favor.”

“Could you please do me another one?” I blurt. The words stumble out of the desert that is my mouth. My fingers are burning where his lips just were. “I could really use something to drink.”

“A drink?” Ted says, looking uneasy. “Don't you think you've had enough?”

“What do you mean? I haven't had anything to drink tonight but coffee, and all I want is a glass of water!” I'm sincerely indignant, at least until he smiles that smile again.

“Water it is then, Miss Annie. Come with me.” Ted's saying I can have some water is a huge relief. I'm ready to deal with that damned wave beneath my feet now because everything's going to be okay, water's on the way and I'm with a nice man instead of all alone in a strange place.

Without thinking I stretch up on my tiptoes to give him a kiss on his stubble-covered jaw for being such a nice man, but at the same time Ted turns his face down to mine like he wants to ask me a question, and even though I don't intend for it to do that, my mouth folds into his mouth and oh Lord I think I'm going to pass out he feels so wonderful so amazing so bone-deep
right
that I drop the hay rope and my arms are around his neck and his hands are on my waist I breathe him he smells of leather and night and cologne I do not dare let go I will fall and all the while Troy Smoot that good dog sits at my feet patient as a saint with all the time in the world to wait for this kiss to end.

I
t was a week and a day before the Snow Ball and my debut. For better than forty years, Miss Pettie Gompert had made debutante dresses for girls all over Mississippi, from the Delta to Natchez, from Jackson to the Gulf Coast, and she was thoroughly out of patience with me this Friday afternoon in early December.

“If you don't hold still,” she gritted through the mouthful of straight pins held in her teeth, “I'll call Miz Isabelle.” That was a threat and a half: my grandmother might be castled in her house over on State Street this afternoon with an attack of the shingles, but that didn't mean she couldn't lay down the law in this cramped sewing room all the way across town in west Jackson. Grandmother Banks and Miss Pettie knew each other of old. The State Street mansion being one of the last houses in town where Miss Pettie still made house calls, she sewed all of my grandmother's clothes, including her foundation garments and underwear.

The sewing room was so crammed with debutante dresses it resembled a bakery where the icer had lost control of the frosting gun, spraying the low-ceilinged, dress-filled space with mounds and rosettes of sugar-leavened lard, spandrels and ribbons of white ganache. There were twenty-five of us debs that year, and Miss Pettie was swamped. I was tired and cranky myself, having just driven down from Oxford after taking a sociology final that morning that had left me with a pounding headache. The last thing I wanted was to be standing in my four-and-a-half-inch, high-heeled satin pumps under the brilliant lights of Miss Pettie's workroom, getting my deb dress hemmed. My feet hurt.

“Yoo-hoo?” The bell over the front door tinkled while a blast of frigid air set the white dresses to swaying on their racks. Julie Posey and her mother, Squeaky, had arrived for Julie's last fitting, too. “We brought the shoes.”

“Close up that pneumonia hole!” Miss Pettie commanded, jerking her tightly permed gray head from around the back of my skirt. Unless you wanted to drive all the way to New Orleans or Atlanta for fittings, Miss Pettie's was the only game in town for custom-made dresses, so she could say anything she pleased. “Hurry up and get changed, Julie Posey,” she snapped. “Your gown's on the rack next to the changing room. Miz Posey, you can sit down over there and wait.” Under her breath, Miss Pettie muttered, “Ninnies. Heat costs money.”

“Hey, Annie,” Julie sang out as she passed me on her way to the changing room. Mrs. Posey, a stout woman done up like always with thick foundation the color of cotton candy, collapsed onto one of the folding chairs arranged along the single free wall. Her feet must have hurt, too.

“Oooh,” Julie said. “I like your dress.” Her eyes told me she didn't, no matter what her mouth said.

“Hey, Julie,” I said. “Thanks.” I couldn't very well tell her I liked her dress because I wasn't sure which one of the fabric ice floes was hers, and besides, since second grade, our mutual understanding had progressed to the point where we heartily hated each other and pretended we didn't. It was a social survival skill I was still struggling to master.

“Miss Pettie, it's too tight,” I complained, tugging at the fabric around my waist. “This dress is trying to strangle me.”

“Don't touch,” Miss Pettie ordered with a swat of her pincushion to my plucking fingers. “You'll smudge it. You've gained weight since your last fitting,” she said matter-of-factly. “It's that time of year—finals. All the girls do it. That's why I always leave an extra inch or two in everyone's waistlines so I can let 'em out.” Round-shouldered Miss Pettie sat back on her little house-slippered heels, looking discouraged. “I hate finals,” she said. “More work for me.”

“More French fries for Annie, you mean.” Julie's observation carried from behind the curtain. Her mother smirked but didn't look up from her magazine. “Most everyone loses their freshman ten by sophomore year, but not Annie,” Julie trilled. “But then, Annie's so little an extra ten pounds looks like fifty on her.” It took my last ounce of self-control not to retort that at least I had breasts, unlike
some
girls who threw up on a regular basis so they could resemble extension ladders in platform heels.

Unfortunately, though, my dress told the whole story. It was daringly different from all the others—a sleeveless sheath of plain and unadorned silk peau-de-soie with a short fishtail train—and I loved it. The dress glowed with a lambent, hammered sheen, and in the highest pair of heels I could find I'd imagined looking almost tall and elegant. Now I surreptitiously peeked in the floor-to-ceiling mirror, at my backside packed in straining peau-de-soie like Spam in a can, and wanted to cry. Well, I'd be damned if I let Julie know her barb had hit home. We were both Chi Omegas, which in theory should have made us friends, but Julie and I got on like hair and gum. Worse, my big sister in Chi O had appointed Julie my “Diet Buddy” to help keep me on track since my most recent weight gain and Julie never lost an opportunity to twist the knife.

Well, two could play that game. “Hey Julie,” I said, sounding perfectly innocent. “Who's your escort again?” This was going to be so satisfying, better than a big plate of salty French fries.

My Diet Buddy didn't answer right away. There were sounds of fabric rustling in the dressing room, but it appeared she was pretending not to have heard me. Squeaky Posey jumped right in, though, on her daughter's behalf.

“Julie's going with Laddie Buchanan,” she said, a definite frost overlaying her usual fan-belt squeal of a voice. She licked her index finger and turned the page of her magazine. “And you, Annie?” Mrs. Posey looked up then, accusation in her eyes.

“Oh, Du's my escort.” I was only just able to mask the triumph in my reply. Wide-shouldered, good-looking, six foot four and two hundred pounds of to-die-for muscle, Duane Sizemore was a starter for the Ole Miss Rebels' football team, a senior, my first real conquest and the ex-boyfriend of Julie Posey. Having had the misfortune of being broken up with exactly eight weeks ago and now without a new boyfriend lined up in time for the Snow Ball, Julie was reduced to going with that perennial loser Laddie Buchanan. Laddie might still have a weak chest, but he was in regular demand as the last-minute, all-players-on-the-field variety of escort.

And Du and I had been going together for exactly eight weeks, ever since Homecoming. Julie had made a legendary scene in a library carrel when he broke the news to her during their last study date. Du wouldn't talk about it. Word was, however, she stabbed him in the jaw with a pencil before she threw his books out in the hall, then lobbed herself on him like a grenade and sobbed into the blood trickling down his neck.

Anyway, that was a long time ago and by now Du and I were an established couple. My sorority sisters hadn't warmed up to the idea right away, though, and I suspected that they'd inflicted Julie on me as a punishment. It didn't matter. What mattered was that I had an escort to the Snow Ball who was universally recognized as a catch, and that fact gave me a shot of badly needed confidence. Standing up in public on display to a bunch of people I barely even knew and in the company of girls like Julie to boot—the prospect of making my debut was giving me regular fits of high anxiety and foreboding. If it hadn't been for the unlikely and historical alliance of my mother and Grandmother Banks ganging up on me, I'd have refused this honor in a flash. My weight gain hadn't helped either, but it seemed that the more anxious I became, the more I ate—and it showed.

“You're done, missy,” Miss Pettie said to me, finished pinning the hem of my dress. “Now go take that off and don't touch it!” Wondering how I was going to accomplish that, I stepped down from the dressmaker's stagelike drum. Julie emerged from behind the curtain in her dress, a classic antebellum battleship of silk chiffon, bugle beads, and looping alençon lace. Julie's thin, sallow face was waspish, her eyes a yellow jacket on the back of my neck. It was bound to be payback time for the Laddie question.

“Don't forget, Annie,” she remarked, stepping up onto Miss Pettie's drum. “You're supposed to lose ten pounds by next Saturday.”

“She better not,” Miss Pettie announced, sounding dire. “That dress is
done
. No last-minute alterations.”

Only the thought of my mother kept me from remarking that even if Julie
gained
ten pounds, her chest would still be flat as a popped balloon. I left Miss Pettie's as soon as I got out of my dress and wrestled into my jeans, burning with the humiliation of it all.

Home for the holidays. My mother had a wreath on the door, but she wouldn't be putting the tree up until a few days before Christmas. All her formidable powers of concentration were currently fixed upon my debut, undoubtedly fueled by Grandmother Banks's telling anyone who would listen that my mother was certain to prove to be unequal to the task of launching me into society since she had no background herself whatsoever.

Sitting in my car outside on the driveway, I fished in my purse for the pack of cigarettes and the lighter I'd bought on the way home. “Here goes,” I said to myself as I lit up. With only a little over a week before the Snow Ball, I'd made up my mind: nothing was going to stop me from losing those ten pounds so I could wipe out my Diet Buddy's reason for living. And, remembering the way the white silk had pulled across my behind, I'd lose them just so my beautiful dress wouldn't be ashamed to be seen on me.

The Marlboro Light tasted flat and hot. Determined, I took another deep drag and coughed up a gray cloud. I'd never really smoked before. Oh, I'd had a token cigarette at frat parties, but mostly I'd waved it around without inhaling. However, one of my sorority sisters, Libby Suggs, had told me that she'd lost fifteen pounds in two weeks last year by smoking a couple of Virginia Slims before she was supposed to eat.

“It flat kills your appetite, Annie,” she'd confided. We'd been sitting on the front porch of the Chi O house, waiting for the rest of the girls going to the Kappa Sig mixer to finish their eternal primping and come on downstairs. Libby was having a cigarette, and I was drinking a Diet Coke. I liked Libby a lot. An upperclassman, she drank with a sophistication, style, and dedication that I found inspiring and wished to emulate. No throwing up in the shrubbery for Libby, no waking up horrified and naked in the wrong bed like some girls. If she said smoking was the way to lose weight, I could take that to the bank.

It was getting cold inside the car. I stubbed my cigarette out in the ashtray. Sure enough, I felt queasy. Food was the last thing I wanted, and a good thing, too, because every principle Methyl Ivory stood for demanded huge pots of fattening stuff simmering on the stove inside the kitchen,just lying in wait to assault my hips.

That evening at the table, I pushed my meal around on my plate and drank water.

“Annie,” my mother asked, “are you feeling all right? You've hardly touched a thing.” It had been a real Southern dinner of gargantuan proportions to welcome me home: smoked ham, buttered sweet potatoes, collard greens swimming in an oil-sheened lagoon of bacon drippings, Parker House rolls, and Methyl Ivory's justly famous red velvet cake for dessert.

Expecting this shot across my bow, though, prior to dinner I'd had a couple of cigarettes out in the backyard, down by the Allens' fence in the dark. The smoke rising in a wreath around my head, I looked across their tended lawn to the rental house where Starr used to live. The lights were on. I wondered who lived there now, and for a moment, I curled my fingers in the wire mesh, remembering the afternoon I'd tried to break in through Starr's window, looking for clues. Sometimes I'd thought about it: if I'd succeeded in getting into her house, would I have been able to find her?

If only. In all the years since that terrible day I learned she was gone, I'd never had another friend like Starr. Oh, I'd learned how to get along with the other girls and pretend that we were close, but deep down where it counted I'd always kept them at a distance. Their frothy chatter about hair, makeup, and boys and all the other things that matter so much to teenagers were like cartoon thought balloons in Japanese to me, disconnected and beside the point to the life I was living inside. My social survival skills, rudimentary and unreliable as they were, had somehow become a wall, an invisible perimeter defense that kept everyone out of Annie Land. My sorority sisters, those madly self-involved butterflies, probably never suspected a thing. Why should they? Likely the time for that kind of profound attachment had passed for us all. We were too assured of our exalted place in the grand order of the world; we all knew the rules by now. Like migratory birds, we flocked without our wings touching, each traveling the instinctive routes and flyways of our kind. The other Chi O's tolerated my peculiarities and gaffes because I was a Banks from Jackson, never noticing the high-wire act I performed so that I could pass as one of them.