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  “It’s just like Little Dudley,” Momma cried. “First Little Dudley and now her. I think you do this, Dudley. I think you put them up to this.”

  On Saturday we flew to Atlanta and got into a taxi and went to a hotel and sat around the room waiting for Malcolm to arrive with his parents. The hotel had given us a suite with a balcony overlooking a parking lot and my mother had set up a table so we could have lunch when they arrived.

  “Just try to keep your mouth shut, Sister,” my father said. “Just let me do the talking.”

  “It’s my marriage, Daddy. It’s my husband that I married who’s coming here.”

  “Well, we have to get things arranged. We have to get this sorted out and decide where you’re going to live.”

  “We’re going to live in Atlanta and I’m going to get a job and support us. That’s what everybody does.”

  “You can’t support anybody,” my mother began. “You can’t quit school …”

  “Shut up, Ariane,” my father said. “Just let me handle this.”

  Finally the phone rang. It was the Martins. They were in the lobby. “Come on up,” my father said. “Come on up. Ariane’s got lunch waiting.” He hung up. “Call down there and have them bring the food,” he said. “Tell them to hurry up.” Then Malcolm and his mother and father came in the door and Daddy fixed drinks and everyone sat around and drank their drinks and Daddy told them what was going to happen.

  “He can go to school all year and I’ll get them a place to live and give them an allowance and when summer comes they can come and stay with us and he can work for me.” He refilled the drinks. He charmed Miss Rose. He charmed Mr. Percy. Mother charmed Malcolm, then she charmed Mr. Percy, then she charmed Miss Rose. I got up and went to stand in the bedroom. They had done it again. They had taken my life away from me.

  “Rhoda.” Malcolm had followed me into the room. I turned around and pulled him to a corner behind the door. I put my mouth on his mouth and began to touch his dick. If they stole my life, they could not steal this. This was mine. This belonged to me. I had found him and I had taken him and he was mine. “I want to fuck you so much I’m going crazy,” I said. “We have to get out of here. We have to go somewhere and do it.”

  “All right. There’s no one at the house. It’s vacation. We can go there, I think. Do you want to go and do it at the house?” He put his hand on top of mine. I had him. I had made him love me, want me, need me. It was okay. I wouldn’t be alone anymore. I had a husband and he wanted to do it with me.

  “I have the car keys,” he said. “We can take our car.”

  “Good. Yes. Let’s go.”

  We walked together out into the living room where our four parents sat on four chairs talking. Waiters were putting food on the table. Miss Rose still had her pocketbook in her hands. Mr. Percy had started smoking. Mother was dealing out the charm and Daddy had put on his patrician posture. They all knew what they were doing and I, Rhoda Katherine Manning Martin, knew what I was going to do. “We’re leaving,” I said. “We want to be alone. We’re going over to the campus to the KA house. You talk all you want to. We’re leaving.”

  “Lunch is ready,” Mother said. Horror overwhelmed her, horror lined her brow. I was leaving the room with a man. I was going off and do it. Right there with her watching and Daddy not doing a thing to stop me and two strangers for witnesses and the waiters laying silver beside the napkins. All the years she had bathed me four times a day and shuddered at the slightest hint of my sexuality and covered me up with clothes and underpants and stockings and brassieres and girdles were disappearing before her eyes. “Don’t you want to eat your lunch?”

  “Let them go, Ariane,” Daddy said. “They’re young. They want to be alone.”

  “We’ll be back pretty soon,” Malcolm began, but I grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him out the door. We went down the hall to the elevator and pressed the button a dozen times and when it came we got aboard and began to kiss as hard as we could kiss. When the elevator doors opened in the lobby we were still kissing and the desk clerk and a couple checking in got a whiff of twenty-year-old, not-fucked-up-yet desire and they smiled as though the sun had just come out after a rain. We found the car and drove out to the deserted Tech campus and went into the empty KA house and broke into the manager’s room and moved a dresser against the door and then we did it. We did it with him on top and with me on top and standing up and then we did it some more on our sides and then lying down some more. That was the day we discovered doing it on a chair. He would sit on the chair with his fabulous desire which was endless and terrible and painful and impossible to satisfy or conquer. He could not conquer it and I could not end or satisfy it. Then I would sit across his legs and we would laugh and talk while we drove each other crazier and crazier. We were so sheltered we did not even know what to say but we made things up. Anything we said seemed evil and sinful and made us crazier. That feels so good. Don’t do that. I can’t stand it. It hurts. I especially loved to say it hurts, although it didn’t hurt at all. Nothing hurt, we were tree and roots and earth and bird and song and music and water and divine young bodies in love with ourselves and maybe even each other. Oh, God, that’s so good. Over there. Over here, do it some more, make it last, make it last forever. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It may have been that day that I finally learned to come. It had happened before once or twice, but without warning. Now I began to understand that I could make it happen. Most wonderful of all, that I could think it up.

  “Will you go home with us?” I asked. “Will you go back to Dunleith and stay with me until school starts?”

  “I don’t know if I can. You stay with us. Go home with me. You’ve never even seen Martinsville. You’ve never seen where I live.”

  “You haven’t seen where I live either. I don’t have any clothes to go with you.”

  “I just have the things I’m wearing.”

  “I want you to go with me. I can’t leave you. All I do is leave you. All you do is go away.” I was starting to cry. I was crying so hard I could hardly talk. It was always the same thing. He always went away. He was always leaving. It was all so sad. All he did was leave. It was never long enough. The days went by too fast, the moments, hours, minutes.

  “We’ll be together all the time as soon as we find a place to live,” he said. “We’ll see each other every night. We’re married, Rhoda. What else do you want?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. Why is it so terrible? Why is everything so hard?”

  We got back to the hotel at five o’clock. We had left our parents without a car for five hours. We hadn’t even called to tell them where we were. But they weren’t mad at us. They had drunk a fifth of scotch whiskey and told each other their genealogies and decided they were good enough for each other and moved on to the problem of where we would live and how much they hoped I wasn’t going to get pregnant. “Oh, Rhoda,” Miss Rose said. “We love Ariane and Dudley so much.” “Oh, Malcolm,” my mother said. “We love Rose and Percy like they were our own. Now you’re our very own, our own little son-in-law.” “And Rhoda’s my daughter,” Miss Rose added. “Not my daughter-in-law, but my very own daughter. The daughter I dreamed of. The one I never had.”

  “Can Malcolm sleep here with me?” I asked. “Can he spend the night?”

  “Of course he can,” my father decreed.

  “How will he get home?” Mr. Percy put in.

  “You all spend the night,” Daddy said. “Tomorrow we’ll drive down and see this town your ancestors built. I want you to come to Aberdeen and see our town, Miss Rose. You’ll have to come in the fall when we have our Aberdeen stew parties. Or come up to the field trials. That’s the ticket. You need to see the field trials my daddy started.”

  “We can’t stay,” Miss Rose began. “We didn’t bring our things.” But Momma and Daddy persisted and Momma lent Rose a nightgown and Daddy lent Mr. Percy a razor and they called down and got another room and we all had dinner in
a Chinese restaurant and then Malcolm and I went to bed and did it until we fell asleep. Outside in the living room, Daddy and Miss Rose were at the genealogy again. They were back to the seventeenth century when the Mannings came across the North Sea to Scotland from Norway and when the Martins and Barretts were building their empire in the south of England. Mr. Percy had gone to sleep in a chair and Mother was in the bedroom creaming her face.

  Oh, the dear lost years when we were twenty. We woke up about three and did it a couple of times and then we didn’t do it any more until dawn.

  After breakfast we drove the sixty miles to Martinsville and took a tour of the antebellum homes the Martins’ ancestors had built. Then Rose and Percy had an impromptu cocktail party. The town’s doctors and lawyers and the mayor and the newspaper editor and several widowed cousins and a bachelor uncle came over and talked to Mother and Daddy about genealogy and Malcolm and I got drunk on Drambuie and walked around town in the dark and then sneaked back in and went upstairs and did it while the guests sat on the porch smoking and drinking bourbon and talking about the dances they used to have and how Miss Rose was the most popular girl in Georgia.

  “Swear you’ll go home with me tomorrow,” I said. I was holding on to his back. “Swear you’ll go. I can’t leave you. How can I keep on leaving you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “We have to find an apartment. You have to go back to Atlanta with me and find us a place to live.”

  The next morning Malcolm and Mother and Daddy and I drove back to Atlanta and rented a garage apartment and then the four of us got on a Southern Airlines prop plane and flew back home to Dunleith. As soon as we got home, I took Malcolm up to my bedroom and lay down with him on my very own little cherry four-poster bed. “We will sleep in this bed forever,” I said. “We will always sleep in this bed.”

  “It’s not very big,” he said. “It’s too high off the floor.”

  “We’ll take it with us to Atlanta and put it in our apartment. I want us to always sleep in this bed.”

  “It won’t fit in that bedroom. We need to get a springs and mattress and put them on the floor.”

  Chapter

  18

  My maternal birth control lecture took place in a blue Oldsmobile in front of Momma’s brown mansion on a brilliant sunny afternoon. Momma and Aunt Celeste were in the front seat of the car. I was in the backseat. Across the street Aunt Celeste’s daughters were playing badminton on her lawn. Even from the car I could see how perfectly their shoes were polished. Aunt Celeste was a perfectionist who could even put my mother to shame. The three of us had been to the beauty parlor to have our hair turned into football helmets. Aunt Celeste’s dark hair was sprayed and shining. Mother’s platinum blonde hair was backcombed into a beehive. My red hair was cut into a bob that made me look as if I were twelve years old. Our nails were freshly polished. Momma’s were Windsor Pink. Aunt Celeste’s were Pink On Pink and mine were Fire Engine Red to match my lipstick. I had been married for ten weeks. I was not pregnant yet. This was some sort of miracle of which I was not aware. I was still laboring under the misapprehension that I couldn’t get pregnant unless I wanted to.

  “Momma,” I said, as she turned off the ignition key and rolled down the car windows to let the air conditioning out and the heat of August in. “Momma, I need to do something about birth control. What should I do?”

  “I told you to get some rubbers and some Lysol suppositories,” she said. “I told you in Atlanta what to do.”

  “You need to use the suppositories,” Aunt Celeste added. “The rubbers don’t do any good without them.”

  “We don’t like to use rubbers,” I said. I sat back against the backseat, watching Momma’s face contort into a terrorized mask. It was torture to make her realize I was doing it in my bedroom with my husband.

  “I’ll talk about it to you later,” she said. “Celeste, let us help you carry in those groceries. Here, I’ll open the trunk.” She jumped out and hurried around to the back of the car to open the trunk. “You have to use the rubbers,” Aunt Celeste said. “Whether he likes it or not. There isn’t any other way, Rhoda. It has to be that way.”

  “Celeste,” Momma called. “Come here and show me which bags are yours. Violet, Charlotte, Aimee, come over here and help your mother.” Then my teenage cousins came flying across the street in their polished shoes and began to lift the grocery bags from the trunk of the car. Overhead the huge branches of the live oak trees shaded us with their leaves, poured down oxygen and golden pollen upon our hair. The sun shone down between the leaves and spotted the arms of my cousins and made a mosaic of Wheeler Street. I looked toward the house and saw Malcolm coming out the door to look for me. His wide shoulders, his worried smile, his long skinny legs, his great big lips and crew cut and green eyes. He wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t what I had intended to marry, but he would do. At least I was finally getting to do it and at least I wasn’t going to be an old maid.

  He left a few days later to get ready for the fall semester. The first of September I moved to Atlanta to join him. I hadn’t seen Charles William or Irise all summer. They had been gone to Taliesin West where Charles William had an apprenticeship with the Wright foundation. I had postcards from them and a letter saying they were glad we would all be together in Atlanta in the fall. Malcolm was still in Dunleith when the letter came. “I hope we won’t have to see much of them,” he said. “I hope we won’t be hanging around with them all the time.”

  “Why not? Why don’t you like them?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” We were in the yard. My little brothers were shooting basketballs at the hoop over the garage. My brother Dudley’s little girl, Ariane, was playing in the sandpile beneath a tree. I reached for Malcolm but he shook me off.

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Rhoda. Just forget it. But don’t think we’re going to go around with Charles William all the time when we get to Atlanta, because we aren’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s queer. He tried to do something to me one night. We’re married now, Rhoda. We have to settle down.” He was turned away from me. When he got mad the veins stood out in bas relief on his forehead. I couldn’t bear it when I made him mad. I couldn’t bear for him to frown at me. “Okay,” I said. “We won’t see them. I promise we won’t. If you’ll stop being mad. If you just stop being mad at me.”

  “I can’t help it, Rhoda. Charles William is too much. He goes too far.”

  “Okay. You’re right. We won’t see them. Come here. Let’s go up to my room. Please go up there with me.” Then he agreed to fuck me and we went up to my room and I used my fabulous imagination to make myself come and gave him credit for it. The bonding energy had kicked in and I was growing more and more in love with this cold unloving Georgia boy. I had to have him love me. This poor little twenty-year-old boy with his burning ambition and terrible fear of failure, with his overbearing mother and his gentle weak father was going to be called upon to love me twenty-four hours a day, morning, night, and noon. If he so much as frowned at me, I was going to have to blame someone, wasn’t I? For a while I would blame myself, but sooner or later I was going to figure out how much more pleasant and easier it was to put the blame on him. At first, however, I was going to be good and try to please him.

  It was easy when I first got to Atlanta. I was enthralled by our garage apartment and stayed busy trying to “fix it up.” I covered lampshades with burlap and painted wastebaskets and shoved cheap unpainted furniture around from wall to wall trying to find a satisfactory arrangement. Also, I had gotten a job selling clothes in the French Room of J. P. Allen’s and that used up my days. Every morning Malcolm dropped me off on his way to school and in the evenings he picked me up. Charles William called several times but I was cool to him. Then one day, a bright clear day in early October, Charles William came downtown and found me.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why are you working in a store
?”

  “I’m putting him through school. It’s fun. You get to see all the new clothes come in.”

  “You aren’t going back to school?”

  “No. What for? It’s boring. I hate to go to school.”

  “Oh, Dee.”

  “Oh, Dee, what? Look, do you want to go to lunch? I can leave in a few minutes. You want to wait for me?”

  “Sure. Sure I do.” He went over and took a seat on the upholstered sofas where husbands sat while their wives tried on clothes. I tallied up my morning’s sales and turned in my sales pad and then I collected Charles William and we rode down the elevator and walked out onto Peachtree Street. It was a beautiful fall day, cool and clear. Dressed up men and women hurried up and down the crowded streets. I had meant it when I said I loved to work. I had never lived in a city. It was wonderful to me to be downtown all day with city life going on around me. We found a small restaurant on a side street and went inside and sat down at a table.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Charles William said. “Are you happy? Do you like it?” He giggled, trying to establish our old repartee, but I would not go into it with him. The things Malcolm had been saying about him frightened me. Still, I could not resist him. He was so funny, so honest, so intelligent, insightful, imaginative, clever, so much fun.

  “Oh, Charles William. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “He doesn’t like me anymore, does he?”

  “No. He told me not to see you. He won’t let me ask you over.”

  His face fell. He was quiet for a moment. It was the only secret we ever had between us and it wasn’t a secret really. It was just something that stayed unspoken. I loved him too much to talk of it, to take a chance on hurting his feelings.

  “You could come see us. We have a marvelous place. It’s below Putty’s apartment, in the basement. We’ve made a grotto, with sconces everywhere. It’s divine really. You must come and see it. Can’t you slip away? Doesn’t he ever go anywhere?”