The Last Girls (11 page)

“Steve?”
Courtney and Harriet look at each other.

“Oh, well, of course I was married to Howie first—”

“For a little while,” Russell winks at them.

“I see we've got some catching up to do,” Courtney leans back in her chair.

“Steve was my second husband, a physician, who died. It was a . . . an accident.” Catherine swallows hard. “It was some years later that I met Russell. He came by the house, as he said. I've always worked out of my house. Of course I
liked
him, I liked him right away, but I never thought I'd marry him or anything like that. I wasn't looking for a husband. I'd had husbands. I thought he was just—I don't know—an interim man.”

“That's a great title.” Anna scribbles it down in a little notebook which she produces from somewhere within her person. “Can I have it?”

“Be my guest, I'll never use it. It's funny, how much I used to love to write in college. I mean, I know I wasn't ever particularly good at it”—Catherine waves her hand to override them—“no, I really wasn't. But I loved it. Or maybe I just loved going to that class and hanging out with y'all. I can still remember the way I always felt when we used to climb up that hill to Miss Auerbach's house on faculty row, or to Lucian Delgado's. That feeling like, well, like anything could happen. It was so exciting.”

“Oh, I felt that way, too,” Harriet says.
The crackle of leaves beneath your loafers in the fall, the crunch of hard frost under your boots in the wintertime, your bare feet sinking into the cool wet grass of spring.

Bells ring all over the steamboat. They file into the huge dining room, which takes up at least half of the Observation Deck. Red lips gleaming, a pretty girl in a hoop skirt directs them to their table.

“Hi, I'm Maurice, I'll be your server.” A black boy pulls out their chairs; he looks like a running back.

“Well, Maurice, you've got your job cut out for you on this trip,” Russell says. “Think you can help me take care of all these women?”

“No problem!” Maurice flashes a world-class grin, handing the menus around.

“My God, no wonder these people are all so fat!” Courtney takes in the five-course menu selections.

“But they were
already
fat,” Harriet points out. “Maybe they just picked this cruise because they know they'll get enough food.” Then she blushes, looking down—she forgot, momentarily, that Anna is clearly a very big woman underneath all that stuff.

“I'll bet everybody orders every course,” Courtney says. “To get their money's worth. That's what my father used to make us all do whenever we went on a trip and the food was included. We all had to be in the clean plate club.”

Prix fixe. Anna knows this term now, but suddenly she remembers all too well a time when she did
not,
when she knew nothing and said everything wrong because there were so many words she had only read, never heard pronounced, such as the time in American Lit when she said that Hester Prynne was not immoral, but rather had been simply misled, pronouncing the word to rhyme with “chiseled.” Everybody had sat in silence until they got it and then started laughing, one by one. Anna herself never found this incident amusing. The point was that she'd
read
all those words, but had never said them aloud before she went to college.

“I'm with your dad,” Russell is saying to his wife. “I still like to get my money's worth.” He orders artichoke bottoms with crabmeat, rack of lamb, and Black Forest cake. “Go, girl! This is the clean plate club,” he tells Catherine, who orders next. They seem like the perfect couple, which doesn't surprise her old friends. She's easy to get along with. She and Howie seemed like the perfect couple, too, which they were until she left him. And now, secretly, Catherine sometimes feels like leaving Russell who is driving her crazy with this midlife crisis of his which has been going on forever, it seems to her. “Just hush,” she wants to say. “Quit whining. Act like a man.” She knows she ought to be glad that Russell is so sensitive and verbal, but she's not. She's tired of it. She wishes he'd just shut up. Now, now. Be
nice, Catherine cautions herself. She read someplace that the three rules for a successful marriage are:
Be nice. Be nice. Be nice.
This ought to be simple, but every year it gets harder and harder to do. Catherine is older now. She gets tired, too. And this is her only life.

Courtney orders the consommé and two salads. There's scarcely a thing on the menu that she can eat if she expects to remain a size six by the time she gets to New Orleans.

“Look over there,” Harriet says suddenly. “It's Mark Twain.”

“Actually it looks more like Mr. Gaines, remember him? Whatever happened to him, anyway?” Catherine asks.

“No, that's the Riverlorian,” Courtney has been studying the daily
Steamboatin' News
. “He's the guy who lectures about the river. I think his lectures start tomorrow morning.”

“Mr. Gaines went to some college in Florida, I believe, when he didn't get tenure at Mary Scott, the year after we all left. And his marriage broke up after that,” Anna offers, and they suddenly remember that Anna had an academic husband herself, what was his name, that skinny pale guy . . . Kenneth. That's it. He was getting his doctorate at UNC. Whatever happened to Kenneth? “I believe Mr. Gaines was taking advantage of his students,” Anna adds primly. “Of Baby, for instance.” She hadn't meant to say it. She doesn't say,
of me.

“Now Anna, I'll bet you don't know that for sure.” Harriet looks like she might cry. She always loved Mr. Gaines. In fact, it's hard for Harriet to imagine that Mr. Gaines is not right there still, at Mary Scott, just as it's hard for her to imagine that all these other girls have run through whole marriages, whole lives.

The first course arrives in a flurry of little dishes deftly served by Maurice. Russell orders champagne. Courtney and Catherine compare pictures of their families. Between them, Catherine and Russell have six children, seven grandchildren. How can this be? Harriet wonders. The champagne arrives. Russell approves the bottle, looking over the rim of his reading glasses. Out on the parquet dance
floor, couples are moving with intricate steps and turns. Arthur Murray, Harriet thinks darkly. They've all been to Arthur Murray.

Courtney clears her throat. “I'd like to propose a toast,” she announces. “To Baby.”

“To Baby.”

“To Baby.”

“To Baby.”

They lift their glasses.

“She must have been a helluva girl.” Russell is the only one who didn't know her.

“Oh Lord! You can't even imagine!” Catherine says. “There was nobody like her. Thank you,” she says as Maurice arrives with her salmon.

“Nobody,” Harriet whispers, twisting her napkin.

“Well, no wonder,” Courtney says. “Don't you remember her
family?
I think Baby did pretty well, considering.”

“What was her family like?” Russell is the perfect straight man.

“They were just so rich,” Courtney says. “They'd been rich for generations. You should have seen her parents' house in Alabama—antebellum, of course. Ten columns across the front.”

“Twelve,” Harriet murmurs. “Miles and miles of land . . .”

Catherine puts down her fork and leans forward. “Okay. Here's the perfect anecdote, the anecdote that captures it all. You probably remember this, too—you were there.” She nods toward Harriet, who looks doubtful. “Anyway, I was in your room—we were working the Ouija board, you and me, Harriet.”

“Oh!” Harriet had forgotten all about the Ouija board.

“And the phone rang, and Baby picked it up. ‘What?' she said real loud, and then, ‘Well, are you okay?' and then, ‘I'm just so glad you're okay.' Then there came this long silence during which she was listening, and twisting her hair around her finger the way she did”—they all nod—“and then she said, ‘Well, all I can say, Troy, is that if
I
were
you,
I'd go right out and get him another one just like it before he gets back from his trip.'”

“Oh my God,” Harriet says. “I do remember that.”

“What was it about?” Russell asks. “Another what?”

“Another station wagon,” Catherine says. “See, she had these wild twin brothers, Troy and—”

“Boy,” Harriet says.

“Troy and Boy,” Catherine goes on. “Troy being named for her father, Troy Beauchamp Ballou, though I can't actually remember Boy's real name right now, but it was a long string of family names, very impressive. Anyway, they were about sixteen, I'd say, maybe seventeen, and they got drunk and went driving around the golf course in the middle of the night, of all things, and somehow they had managed to drive their father's station wagon straight into one of the water hazards, actually I think it was a lake, where it was completely submerged.”

“Good God,” Russell says.

“Did they manage to buy him a new one before he got home?” Courtney asks.

“I doubt it.” Catherine smiles. “But the very idea of suggesting it, the possibility that anybody could even think of doing such a thing, was just staggering to me at the time.”

“I guess so.” Russell stands, holding out a hand to Catherine. “Honey?”

“You'll be the youngest on the floor, in this crowd,” Harriet calls after them as they make their way through the tables toward the tiny dance floor. The band is named the Steamboat Syncopators. “I really didn't understand there'd be so many old people on this trip, did you?” She turns to the others.

“No,” Anna says, and Courtney shakes her head. “No.”

“But we're old, too.” Harriet goes on as though she doesn't quite believe it herself. “How old do you think
that
woman is, for instance?”
She indicates a white-haired couple dressed almost alike in madras plaid. “I'll bet she's not a day older than we are.”

Anna squirms uncomfortably. “Please,” she says, refusing to place herself for even a minute among these aging hoi polloi—not a bad title, either:
Among the Hoi Polloi,
a class that Anna has risen above, she hopes, forever. “I never have old people in my books. Never. We'll all get there sooner or later anyway. There's no sense rubbing our noses in it.”

“I disagree,” Harriet surprises herself by saying stubbornly, waving away Maurice who keeps trying to refill her coffee cup. “I teach these community workshops at my school, in the COMEBACK! program?” Her voice rises at the end of each sentence when she gets flustered. “It's mostly women? And they write their own life stories?”

For the first time, Anna removes the big glasses, to stare at Harriet. “Whatever for?” she asks. “Who would want to read about people like
that?
” Anna has dark violet smudges, like bruises, beneath her eyes.

Harriet swallows. “Well, Anna, nobody's going to read them, really,” she explains. “Except me, of course. The idea is that it's good for them to think about their lives and write down anything at all, it's a way of gaining understanding—and maybe, I hope, control. It's empowering.”

“Shit,” Anna says.

Courtney jumps.

“What?” Harriet has to lean forward to hear, as a little ripple of applause runs through the dining room. Catherine and Russell sit back down at the table.

“It is
not
good for them!” Anna snaps.

“Well, I've been working with these women for years, and I disagree.” Harriet won't let it go. “I mean, these may not be stories in the way
you
think of a story, I realize, with a strong plot and all, of course. These stories are more like the one Catherine told about Baby's brothers and the station wagon, an anecdote, maybe, that captures
a whole life, or just a few sentences about something they feel strongly about.”

“A story
must
have a plot,” Anna announces in the tone of a decree.

“But sometimes it just doesn't,” Harriet says.

“That's ridiculous!” Anna stands up, swishing her layers, adjusting herself. “You are quite wrong. I'm in this business, remember. You're not. I ought to know.”

“How about a stroll around the Observation Deck?” Russell comes back to address them all, with Catherine at his side.

“But isn't there something going on right now in the Grand Saloon? Just a minute, I'll see—” Courtney consults her
Steamboatin' News
schedule.

“No doubt. There's
always
something going on in the Grand Saloon.” Harriet, relieved by the change of subject, watches the Riverlorian out of the corner of her eye as he works the crowd, moving from table to table. Surely Anna can't be right about Mr. Gaines.

“Tonight's show is called ‘Showboat Jubilee,'” Courtney reads aloud.

“I think we'll have to skip that one,” Russell says.

“I believe I will turn in now, actually,” Anna announces somewhat grandly, rising. “I was up before five in order to get to the airport—it has been a very long day.” But then she smiles at them all, not her professional book-tour smile but a real smile, flooded with that Paducah feeling she seems unable to control today. These women were the only friends of her life, actually. She's worked so hard ever since, she's never had time to make any more. Oh Lord! This trip might be too much for Anna after all. She told herself it'd be useful, allowing her to do some research for the Louisiana book, but now she wonders if this is even true. She researched all the other states in the encyclopedia. Anna grasps the edge of the table to support herself. Why did she come? And damn Robert. Why didn't he come? Now she can't even remember. It is an effort for Anna to assume her regal bearing. “Good night, all. Don't look for me until afternoon.”