In the Land of Dreamy Dreams Page 15

  “No one in Franklin believed I’d do it either,” I said. “I just got elected cheerleader and practically the whole football team came to the station to tell me goodbye. They didn’t believe I was leaving. Of course, they all know about Bob Aaron. That’s the college boy I love. He’s got cancer of the thyroid gland. My parents won’t let me go out with him because he’s Jewish. He’s already had about five operations. He’s having one right now in St. Louis. So I might as well be down here.”

  “Oh, LeLe, that’s terrible. It’s like my mother. I know just how you feel.”

  “Well, anyway, I’m here now and we can stick together,” I said, taking a deep breath of the Aphrodisia. “I love your perfume. It’s wonderful.”

  “It’s my signature,” she said. “I wear Aphrodisia in the summer and Tigress in the winter. There’s a bottle in my purse. You can put some on if you want to.”

  We walked over to the Oldsmobile and Baby Gwen got behind the wheel. She was so short she had to sit on straw pillows to see over the dash, but she turned out to be a superb driver. The sheriff’s son climbed into the back seat with my bags, and the three of us drove off down the streets of the town, past the gin and the post office and the Pontiac place, and on down the river road to a white frame house at the end of a street that dead-ended at the levee.

  So I arrived in Clarksville, chattering away to a spellbound audience, spraying my neck and arms with Aphrodisia perfume, happier than I had ever been in my life.

  After her mother’s funeral Baby Gwen had moved into the master bedroom as her father was too brokenhearted to ever enter that part of the house again.

  I was led up the stairs and into a large sunny room with bay windows and a pale blue chaise lounge. There was a dressing room with a private bath and walk-in closets. Everything was just as Big Gwen had left it.

  The closets were filled with unbelievable clothes. Navy blue and green and black silk dresses, gray and beige and brown gabardine suits, pastel evening dresses, house dresses, sun dresses, wool coats, skirts, jackets. There were twenty or thirty pairs of high-heeled shoes and a dozen hat-boxes. There were drawers full of handmade underwear. There was a fur stole and several negligees and a real Japanese kimono.

  It was all ours.

  “You can wear anything you want to,” Baby Gwen said. “Most of them are too long for me.”

  Best of all was the dressing table. It was three feet long with a padded stool and a large mirror surrounded by light bulbs.

  On its surface, in a sea of spilled powder, were dozens of bottles and jars. Every product ever manutactured by Charles of the Ritz must have been there. There was foundation cream, astringent, eye shadow, rouge, clarifier, moisturizer, cleanser, refining oil, facial mask, night cream, hand cream, wrinkle cream, eye cream, all pervaded by the unforgettable smell of Revenescence, Charles of the Ritz’s secret formula moisturizer.

  There were hairpins, hand mirrors, tweezers, eyelash curlers, combs, hair rollers, mascara wands, cuticle sticks, nail polish, emery boards. There were numerous bottles of perfume and cologne and a cut-glass bowl filled with lipsticks.

  I had never seen anything like it. I could hardly wait to sit down on the little padded stool and get started.

  “You want a Coca-Cola?” Baby Gwen asked, growing bored with my inspection of her riches. “Some boys I know are coming over later this afternoon to meet you.”

  “Can we smoke?” I asked, pulling my Pall Malls out of my purse.

  “We can do anything we want to do,” she said, picking a Ronson lighter off the dressing table and handing it to me. She was smiling the famous Barksdale slow smile.

  That night we lay awake until two or three in the morning telling each other our life stories. I told her about Bob Aaron’s lymph node cancer, and she told me about her cousin Maurice, who taught French and hated Clarksville and was married to an unpleasant woman who sang in the choir. Maurice was secretly in love with Baby Gwen. He couldn’t help himself. He had confessed his love at a spring wedding reception. Now they were waiting for Baby Gwen to grow up so they could run away together. In the meantime Baby Gwen was playing the field so no one would suspect.

  Finally, exhausted by our passions, we fell asleep in each other’s arms, with the night breezes blowing in the windows off the river, in our ironed sheets and our silk pajamas and our night cream, with the radio playing an all-night station from New Orleans. Oh, Bob, Bob, I whispered into Baby Gwen’s soft black hair. Oh, Maurice, Maurice, she sighed into my hair rollers.

  In the morning I woke early and wandered downstairs. I went into the kitchen, opened the freezer, found a carton of vanilla ice cream, and began to eat it with my fingers, standing with the freezer door open, letting the cool air blow on my face.

  After a while I heard the back door slam and Sirena came in. She was the middle-aged black woman who turned out to be the only person in charge of us in any way. Baby Gwen’s father disappeared before dawn to carry the mail and came home in the evenings and sank into his chair with his bourbon and his memories. Occasionally he would put in an appearance at the noon meal and ask us if we wanted anything.

  I barely managed to close the freezer door before Sirena caught me. “You want me to make you some breakfast?” she said.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I don’t eat in the daytime. I’m on a diet.”

  I have always believed Sirena found my fingerprints in that ice cream. One way or the other I wasn’t fooling her, she knew a Yankee when she saw one, even if I was Mr. Leland’s daughter.

  I wandered into the living room and read a Coronet for a while. Then I decided to go back upstairs and see if Baby Gwen was awake.

  I found her in the bathroom sitting upright in a tub of soapy water while Sirena knelt beside it slowly and intently bathing her. I had never seen a grown person being bathed before.

  Sirena was running her great black hand up and down Baby Gwen’s white leg, soaping her with a terry-cloth wash-rag. The artesian well water was the color of urine and smelled of sulphur and sandalwood soap, and Sirena’s dark hand was thick and strong moving along Baby Gwen’s flawless skin. I sat down on the toilet and began to make conversation.

  “You want to take a sunbath after a while,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll lose my tan.”

  “Sure,” she said. “We can do whatever you want to. Someone called a while ago and asked us to play bridge this afternoon. Do you like to play bridge?”

  “I love it,” I said. “That’s practically all we do in Indiana. We play all the time. My mother plays duplicate. She’s got about fifty silver ashtrays she won at tournaments.”

  “I bet you’re really good,” she said. She was squirming around while Sirena took her time finishing the other leg.

  I lit a cigarette, trying not to look at Baby Gwen’s black pubic hair. I had never seen anyone’s pubic hair but my own, which was red. It had not occurred to me that there were different colors. “Want a drag?” I asked, handing her the cigarette. She nodded, wiped her hand on her terry-cloth turban, took a long luxurious drag, and French inhaled.

  The smoke left her mouth in two little rivers, curled deliciously up over the dark hairs above her lips, and into her nostrils. She held it for a long moment, then exhaled slowly through her lips. The smoke mingled with the sunlight, and the steam coming from the bathwater rose in ragged circles and moved toward the open window.

  Baby Gwen rose from the water, her flat body festooned with blossoms of sandalwood soap, and Sirena began to dry her with a towel.

  So our life together took shape. In the mornings we sunbathed from 11:00 to 12:00. Thirty minutes on one side and thirty minutes on the other. There were two schools of thought concerning sunbathing. One, that it gave you wrinkles. The other, that it was worth it to look good while you were young.

  Baby Gwen and I subscribed to the second theory. Still, we were careful to keep our faces oiled so we wouldn’t ruin our complexions. There is no way you could believe how serious we were about su
ch matters. The impenetrable mystery of physical beauty held us like a spell.

  In the mornings we spread our blankets in the backyard where a patch of sunlight shone in through the high branches of the elm trees. We covered the blankets with white sheets and set out our supplies, bottles of baby oil, bottles of iodine, alarm clock, eye pads, sunglasses, magazines. We carefully mixed seven drops of iodine with seven ounces of baby oil, shook it for three minutes, then rubbed it on the uncovered parts of each other’s bodies. How I loved the feel of Baby Gwen’s rib cage under my fingers, the smoothness of her shaved legs. How I dreaded it when her fingers touched the baby fat on my own ribs.

  When we were covered with oil we would lie back and continue our discussion of our romances. I talked of nothing but the ill-fated Bob Aaron, of the songs I would write and dedicate to his memory, of the trip I would take to his deathbed, of the night he drove me home from a football game and let me wear his gloves, of the child I would have by another man and name for him, Robert or Roberta, Bob or Bobbie.

  The other thing that fascinated me was the development of my “reputation.” I was intensely interested in what people thought of me, in what was being said about me. I set about to develop a reputation in Clarksville as a “madcap,” a “wild child,” a girl who would do anything. A summer visitor from Washington, D.C., said in my hearing that I reminded him of a young Zelda Fitzgerald and, although I didn’t know exactly who Zelda Fitzgerald was, I knew that she had married a writer and drank like a fish and once danced naked in a fountain in Rome. It seemed like a wonderful thing to have said about myself, and I resolved to try to live up to it.

  How wonderful it was to be “home,” where people knew “who I was,” where people thought I was “hilarious” and “crazy” and “just like Leland.” I did everything I could think of to feed my new image, becoming very outspoken, saying damn and hell at every opportunity, wearing dark glasses all the time, even to church. I must have been the first person of normal vision ever to attend the Clarksville Episcopal Church wearing dark glasses.

  Baby Gwen’s grandmother called every few days to see how we were getting along and once, in a burst of responsibility, came over bringing a dozen pairs of new cotton underpants she had bought for us at the Chinaman’s store.

  We never could figure out where she got the idea that we were in need of cotton underpants, unless Sirena had mentioned it to her. Perhaps Sirena had tired of hand washing the French lingerie we had taken to wearing every day.

  The grandmother had outlived both her daughters and existed in a sort of dreamy half-world with her servants and her religion.

  Mostly we kept her satisfied by glowing telephone reports of our popularity and by stopping by occasionally to sit on her porch and have a Coca-Cola.

  I fell in love nearly every day with one or the other of the seemingly endless supply of boys who came to call from Drew and Cleveland and Itta Bena and Tutweiler and Rosedale and Leland. Baby Gwen drew boys like honey, and there were always plenty left over to sit around the living room listening to my nonstop conversation.

  Boys came by in the evenings, boys called on the telephone, boys invaded our daily bridge games, boys showed up after church, boys took us swimming at the Clarksville Country Club, boys drove us around the cotton fields and down to the river and out to the bootlegger’s shack.

  The boy I liked best was a good-natured football player named Fielding Reid. Fielding had eyes so blue and hair so blonde and shoulders so wide and teased me so unmercifully about my accent that I completely forgot he was the steady boyfriend of Clarice Fitzhugh, who was off on a trip to Mexico with her family. Fielding had taken to hanging around Baby Gwen and me while he waited for Clarice’s return.

  He loved to kibitz on our bridge games, eating all the mints and pecans from the little dishes and leaning over my shoulder cheering me on. In the afternoons we played endless polite bridge games, so different from the bitter hard-fought bridge I had played in the forgotten state of Indiana.

  Although I was an erratic and unpredictable bidder, I was a sought-after partner for I held good cards and nearly always won.

  There was a girl from Drew named Sarah who came over several afternoons a week to play with us. She was Fielding’s cousin and she had a wooden arm painted the color of her skin. It was not a particularly well made arm, and the paint was peeling in several places on the hand. She was pleasant enough looking otherwise and had nice clothes with loose sleeves that hid the place where the false arm joined the real one.

  I made a great show of being nice to Sarah, lighting her cigarettes, asking her opinion about things, letting her be my bridge partner. She was delighted with the attention I gave her and was always telling someone how “wonderful” I was and how much it meant to her to have me in Clarksville.

  The wrist and fingers of Sarah’s false arm were hinged and she could move the joints with her good hand and lock them in place. She was in the habit of holding the wooden arm in front of her when she was seated at the bridge table. Then she would place her bridge hand in the wooden fingers and play out of it with her good hand.

  Of course, anyone sitting on either side of her could see her cards by the slightest movement of their eyes. It took a lot of pressure off me when she was my partner.

  Fielding thought I was “wonderful” too. He went around saying I was his “partner” and took me into his confidence, even telling me his fears that the absent Clarice Fitzhugh was being unfaithful to him in Mexico. That she might be “using” him.

  Don’t worry, I assured him. Clarice was a great girl. She wouldn’t use anyone. He must trust her and not listen to idle gossip. Everything would be fine when she got home, and so forth. Part of my new reputation was that “LeLe never says a bad word about anyone,” “LeLe always looks on the bright side,” “everyone feels like they’ve known LeLe all their lives,” “you can tell LeLe anything.”

  I was beginning to believe my own publicity, that I was someone very special, that there might be some special destiny in store for me.

  Several times that summer I was filled with an elation so powerful and overwhelming that it felt as though my body were leaving the earth. This always happened at night, when I was alone in the yard, caught in the shadow of the Nandina bushes which covered the side of the house like bright dark clouds. I remember standing in the starlight filled with some inexpressible joy. It would become very intense, like music. I was terribly excited by these feelings and could not bring myself to speak of them, even to Baby Gwen.

  Often that summer I was given to seizures of abrupt excitement while I was dressing. I would catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and burst into laughter, or, deciding for a moment that I was pretty, begin to tremble and jump up and go dancing around the room.

  I had a recurrent dream that summer. I dreamed that I was walking through our old house in Indiana and I would notice that the dining room opened up into rooms and rooms I had not known existed, strange and oddly shaped rooms full of heavy furniture, expensive dusty dressers with drawers full of treasures, old gowns and sweaters and capes, jewels and letters and old documents, wills and deeds and diaries. These rooms opened onto patios and sun porches and solariums, and I saw that we were wealthy people. I wanted to run back and find my parents and tell them what I had found, but my curiosity drove me forward. I had to keep opening doors until I knew the extent of our riches, so I kept on moving through the strange rooms until I woke.

  One morning Fielding came by unexpectedly and asked me to go with him to see about some repairs for his car. We left it with a mechanic at the filling station and walked to the Mayflower Café, a place on the square where farmers and merchants gathered in the mornings for coffee and gossip. I had never been alone in a restaurant with a boy, and I was excited and began talking very fast to cover my excitement. I ordered doughnuts and began turning my turquoise ring around on my finger so the waitress would think it was a wedding band.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to y
ou alone,” Fielding said.

  “Sure,” I said, choking on a powdered doughnut. It was all too wonderful, sitting in a booth so early in the morning with a really good-looking boy.

  “LeLe,” he said, smiling at me and reaching across the table to hold my hand. There was his garnet class ring, blazing at me from the tabletop. At any moment it might be mine. I could scarcely breathe. “LeLe,” he repeated, “I don’t want you to get me wrong when I say this. I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, but, well, I really want to tell you something.” He squeezed my hand tighter. “LeLe, you would be a really beautiful girl if you lost ten pounds, do you know that? Because you have a beautiful face. I’m only saying this because we’ve gotten to be such good friends and I thought I ought…”

  I was stunned. But I recovered. “I’m not really this fat,” I said. “At home I’m a cheerleader and I’m on the swimming team and I’m very thin. But last year the boy I love got cancer and I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my thyroid since then. The doctors think there may be something wrong with my thyroid or my metabolism. I may have to have an operation pretty soon.”

  “Oh, LeLe,” he said. “I didn’t know it was anything like that. I thought maybe you ate too much or something.” He reached out and took my other hand. I was still holding part of a doughnut.

  “Don’t worry about it, Fielding. How could you know. You didn’t hurt my feelings. Besides, I don’t mind. The operation may not be so bad. It isn’t like having polio or something they can’t fix. At least I have something they can fix.”

  “Oh, LeLe.”

  “Don’t worry about it. And don’t tell anyone about it, even Baby Gwen. I don’t want people feeling sorry for me. So it’s a secret.”

  “Don’t worry, LeLe. I’ll never tell anyone. Are you sure it’ll be all right? About the operation I mean?”

  “Oh, sure. I might not even have to have it. My thyroid might get better all by itself.”

  After that Fielding and I were closer than ever. I began to halfway believe the part about the thyroid trouble. My mother was always talking about her thyroid and taking some sort of little white pill for it.