Finally, we stopped the car and got out and stood along the highway watching it. Many years later, I saw a film about flying saucers and the people in the movie did exactly as we did. Got out of their cars and stood along the side of a road, in little groups of two and three, watching the apparition in the sky.
Perhaps we were holding hands, the tacky topaz ring he had given me upon my finger, a ring so big it would have cut into his hand if he had squeezed it. Later I gave it to a maid or lost it or threw it away. It disappeared within a year. We stood there watching the apparition, wrapped up in the lies he told me, the thing he had done to me in Chicago when he left me alone in the room and went to the banquet without me.
Soon after that I left him. Closed up the apartment, gave the furniture away, took a series of lovers, then married the wealthy Jewish lawyer, who should have known better, and moved away.
I was burned out for a while. When I recovered it was work that saved me. The work I had abandoned when the fire that made my sons consumed me.
What will you write? my mother asked me, terrified. The truth, I answered. Stories, poems, plays.
Going to Join the Poets
R
HODA LEFT THE HOUSE on Webster Street early in the morning on a November day. Teddy may have already left to go to school. Maybe the school bus had picked him up to take him to Metairie Park Country Day School and maybe it had not. She didn't mother him anymore. Eric mothered him. He was all that Eric had because she was almost never there. It was a marriage that had failed. She wouldn't have a child for Eric and he wouldn't fuck her anymore. Not that sex between them had ever made either of them happy. It had always been a tortured, patched-up affair. Because they didn't love each other. She loved his money and he loved her cousins getting them into the tennis club. He loved Faulkner. Had written his paper on Faulkner in undergraduate school. Now he was living Faulkner. He was in the middle of a Grecian Faulkner tragedy.
After Rhoda drove off in the new green car, the green Mercedes she had bought with the bonds her father gave her, Eric got Teddy up and made breakfast for him and walked with him to where he caught the bus.
“Your mother's going to be gone awhile,” he said. “Let's have some fun while she's gone. Let's go out on the boat. Invite some of your friends.”
“Sure.” Teddy turned to his stepfather. Trying to decide how to make him feel better. Teddy felt responsible for Eric. “She'll be back, Eric. She always comes back.”
“Yeah, I know. Look, there's Robert Skelton hanging out the window looking at you.” Eric patted Teddy on the arm. They were the same height now. Every month Teddy grew another inch. He was fifteen years old. Had grown so tall, so sweet, such a sweet young man, such big brown eyes. Eric's heart melted when he looked into those eyes.
Teddy climbed aboard the bus and joined his friends. They waved to Eric. They all loved Eric. He was the best of the best. The best parent any of them had.
The bus drove off down Webster Street in a cloud of black exhaust. Eric walked back to the house to get the dogs and take them for a walk. Three Old English sheepdogs, an outrageous collection of dogs, an unbelievable problem on a fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lot in uptown New Orleans.
The day was cool and fresh. The dogs went crazy when they got outside the fence. They ran everywhere, jumping and turning, making their low muffled sheepdog barks. They overwhelmed Eric, licking him and jumping up beside him. They trembled, waiting to run to the park, in the cool of the morning, waiting to jump into the lagoon and swim out through the lily pads, chasing the geese and ducks.
Aboard the bus Teddy went to the back where the dealing was being done. Robert had a bottle of pills he had stolen from his physician father. David Altmont had a small amount of marijuana. Crazy Eddy had a bottle of whiskey in his lunch box. He was too crazy. He was going to get them all in trouble. Teddy had the sheet of Windowpane he had bought the day before at Benjamin Franklin. “I tried it last night. I want to save most of it for the weekend, but I'll sell ten hits. For cash. I'm not giving this stuff away and I'm not trading.”
In the front of the bus the kids who weren't into dope yet looked straight ahead. They pretended not to notice what was going on behind them. “You kids sit down back there,” the bus driver yelled. “Sit down and behave yourselves.” Teddy took a seat next to his best friend, Robert. “We can go out on the boat this weekend if you want to,” he said. “Eric's going to take me. Momma's gone.”
“Where'd she go?” Robert liked Teddy's mother. She was always nice to him and talked to him about his father.
“To Arkansas. She's gone up there to find an apartment. She's going to be gone all winter.”
“Where will you stay?”
“With Eric and grandmother.”
“So where'd you get the Windowpane?”
“They made a batch at Benjamin Franklin last week. It's good. I had a good time last night.” He pushed up the window of the bus and stuck his arm out to shoot the peace sign to some kids in a car. He was in a good mood. Nobody was going to bother him this week. The coach was letting him suit up for the game on Saturday morning. Ellie Marcus was going to let him see her Friday night. It was okay. If only he could stay away from his grandmother, he'd be all right.
Rhoda pulled out onto the Bonnet Carré Spillway and speeded up. Hammond, then Brookhaven, then Jackson, then Vicksburg, and Raine would be waiting to drive her up to Arkansas. Well, I'm not in love with him, she was thinking. I just want him to show me how to get there. Arkansas. My God! I don't even know where it is. And I won't feel guilty. It's Eric's fault, goddammit. He shouldn't have stopped fucking me. I can't have a baby. It would kill the children if I did that. It would kill me. She shuddered, thinking of it.
It didn't matter. It didn't matter
. She had loved them with all her heart and they were breaking her heart. Especially the oldest, Malcolm, who was so beautiful it seemed the sun came out when he walked into a room. Now he was gone, God knows where. Walking like a god among the hippies. Her golden son, the one who was going to swim the channel for her. She tightened her mouth, speeded up, took a curve doing ninety. It didn't matter. To hell with them. She'd do it herself, would be a poet, would have her name everywhere. Fools' names and fools' faces, always seen in public places. But it wouldn't be like that. It would be like Anne Sexton. Women would weep when they read her poems, would be fused together and save themselves because of it. She slowed down. Tears were welling up in her eyes, the tears she shed every time she thought about the day she started writing. It had happened because of a poem she read. She had gone on her bike to the Tulane track to run. Then she had changed her mind and gone to the Maple Street Bookstore instead and bought a book of Anne Sexton's poems. A posthumous book.
45 Mercy Street
. She had ridden over to the track and sat down upon a bench and started reading. “I am torn in two, but I will conquer myself. I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me.” Then she started crying.
She came around the last curve of the Bonnet Carré Spillway and out onto the long flat bridge across the marshes. Up ahead was the high span of the bridge at Pass Manchac, then the farmlands would begin, then Mississippi, her home. Then Vicksburg, and Raine would be waiting for her, her lover, her one and only love, the one who never stopped loving her no matter how long it was or what she did. Because she was as bad as he was. Because someday she would be as strong. Someday she would overpower him, but she did not know that yet. All she knew now was that he owed her favors and she was going to collect one.
She went to the motel where she had arranged to meet him and got a room and called him and sat down upon the bed to wait. Then he was there, with his exotic smell so terrible and real, so far away from the Chi Omega sorority and anything to do with modern poetry. It was a smell for Homer and the Greeks, for Odysseus, Julius Caesar, the Kha Khan. “How've you been?” she asked him.
“I've been great, baby. How about you?”
Then she took off her clothes and lay down upon the bed with him and tried to remember how to be his baby. Yes, she thought, I do not love him anymore but I will fuck him before I use him as a chauffeur.
Later she cried, because he could always make her cry. Maybe she really wanted to kill him. After they made love they went into the motel dining room and had dinner and then he left her and went back to his house and slept with his wife.
In the morning he came and got her and drove her up to Arkansas, to his state, past the small town where he had been a hero, past towns where he had fucked every other cheerleader, past plantations that belonged to men who paid to shake his hand, past Little Rock, where his sister had died in a dirty hospital, and on up to the northwest Arkansas hills, which did not belong to him or anyone, which were going to belong to Rhoda now, because that was what she wanted.
It was late in the afternoon when they found the campus of the University of Arkansas and parked outside the tall building that housed the English Department. She had been reading the poems to him. Reading some of them two or three times. They were in a blue loose-leaf notebook, more than a hundred of them. A hundred poems she had written that summer in a hundred days. “You stay here,” she said, getting out of the car. “I won't be long. I just want to say hello and tell them that I'm here.” She stood holding the door of the Lincoln. She was dressed in a black wool suit with a fur collar and black silk hose and high-heeled shoes. “I hate to leave you here.”
“It's okay. I'll read the poems.”
“Oh, good.” She smiled. For a moment she stopped being scared.
She's scared to death, Raine thought. Poor baby, this is her big chance and she doesn't want to blow it. It's just a bunch of underpaid college professors but she doesn't know it. She thinks these guys can teach her something.
He smiled the smile he used for his Little League team. “Go knock 'em dead, baby. I'll be right here.” She walked across the street and into the double glass doors of the building. It was growing dark. The swift dark that falls in November. Raine took a
Sporting News
out of the glove compartment and started reading it. Then he put it down and began to leaf through the poems. He liked the one about him. The one she had written years ago at Millsaps. “Pernicious sidewinder, coiled and waiting. Cold and free.” She could do it. She was a winner. Well, he was pulling for her. He was on her side.
He had been a champion. He would never have to wait on jealousy, would never have to begrudge a moment's glory to another soul. He bowed his head. Raine paid obeisance to the gods of any place. He was a decent man. Most of the time he played fair and told the truth. He looked off into the west, between two buildings. What was left of the light was spreading out into the low blue clouds on the horizon. It was pretty country, no doubt about that. If she stayed up here it might be good for her.
“Raine.” He looked back toward the building. She was hurrying his way with a big man beside her. “Come meet Randolph,” she was saying. “He adores you. He had a fit when he found out you were with me.”
Raine got out and shook the man's hand. “I'm honored,” the man said. “I saw you play when I was a kid. I couldn't believe it when she told me you were sitting outside in the car.”
Later, they all went over to the big man's house and the man's wife cooked dinner. Then they sat around the living room and some young people who were trying to learn to be writers came in and met them. Raine and Randolph talked about football. Rhoda and the young people talked about poetry. She acted as if she was happy. She thinks she knows what she is doing, Raine decided. She thinks this is going to save her.
The next day they drove around and found her an apartment to rent and gave a man a deposit on it and arranged for the heat and electricity to be turned on in her name the first of January. Then they went to the big man's office and told him good-bye and then they started driving home.
They stopped in Gould, Arkansas, and bought cheese and crackers and ate them in the car as they drove. It was the first thing she had eaten in days. “I'm glad to see you eat something, baby. You don't eat enough.”
“Do you think they liked me? Did Randolph say anything to you?”
“They like you, baby. Hell, compared to those women that we met, I think that skinny blonde one is a lesbian. I'd watch out for her if I was you.”
“She was strange, wasn't she? They said she was a good poet but I can't believe it. She's so ugly. I don't believe in ugly poets.” She scooted over closer to him and let him put his arm around her. She dropped cracker crumbs on his pants, then brushed them off. She closed her eyes and lay her head down into the crook of his shoulder. It was over. It was done. She was going to join the poets. It was okay. On the second of January she would come up here to live. Nothing else mattered. Not Eric or Teddy or Malcolm or Jimmy. Nothing mattered but the poems. The poems she would write to make women cry and break them open. To have her name in lights, to be famous, lauded and beloved. She would make it happen. It had started. Nothing could stop her now.
II
The skinny blonde girl did turn out to be a part-time lesbian. She would be whatever her ambition needed her to be. She dug her nails into poetry and held on for dear life. Poison pen, Rhoda thought of her, and it would turn out to be true.
There was also a real poet, a sweet soft girl who was married to a carpenter. The Ally, Rhoda decided. The one I can trust. The night they met they had gotten drunk on gin and laughed until two in the morning.
There was a gorgeous preppie from New England. He recognized a blanket on her bed as coming from a store in Boston. My husband went to Harvard, Rhoda told him. So they formed a bond. He's the one I'll fuck, Rhoda thought. If I can get him.