The Last Girls

  Suddenly aware of her nightdress, Harriet goes back inside and lies down on her bed in the dark, air-conditioned stateroom. It’s actually chilly in here, completely different from the rich, sultry, river-smelling Mississippi air outside. Harriet pulls her covers up to her chin. If she could just sleep. If she could just relax and enjoy this trip as the others seem perfectly capable of doing in spite of the circumstances … But it’s amazing, really, how little they seem to remember or care about why they’re here. Why just yesterday, on the way to the captain’s reception, Anna turned to her and said, “Now Harriet, wasn’t Baby in love with some boy before she married this man who called us all up? I seem to recall something like that. Who was that boy anyway?”

  “It was Jefferson Carr.” After so long a time, it gave Harriet a shock to say his name.

  “And didn’t he go to some odd school? How did she meet him anyway?”

  “Oh, Anna, don’t you remember? She met him at that literary festival when Jim Francisco made the pass at you, sophomore year. And I introduced them.”

  THE LITERARY MAGAZINE, Redbud, had come out in late fall with five of Baby’s poems and two of Anna’s stories, one of them named “Ring around the Moon,” in which a boy and a girl are taking a bath together in a motel after having sex. During the workshop discussion, Suzanne St. John had been much more upset by the sleaziness of the motel than by the story’s graphic nature. “I just can’t believe a nice girl would go to a place like that,” she squealed. The story had created a little furor on campus, and all the copies of the literary magazine were snapped up immediately, a first. Harriet had had a poem in that issue, too, but nobody mentioned it. Probably it wouldn’t have been published, she thought later, if she hadn’t been a junior member of the Redbud staff. Or perhaps that was too harsh.

  It was in her official capacity that Harriet had been presiding over the registration table for the college’s annual Fall Literary Festival that year. Draped with a white sheet, the table sat under one of the oldest oaks on front quad. Its bright leaves fell all around, spangling Harriet’s snowy table and the lush green grass. Harriet was there to give out programs, answer any questions, and make sure everybody had a name tag. She had worn a name tag herself. Anna had been sitting with her for a while but had disappeared to wash her hair in preparation for picking up Big Jim Francisco, the visiting poet, at the airport. Jim Francisco had a terrible reputation, but it was felt that Anna, with her coalfield smarts, could “handle him.” Baby had a date that weekend with Kevin Cahill, a picturesque graduate student from UVA, a poet with long, curly reddish hair and nearly translucent skin and green freckles. (“They are not green!” Baby cried, giggling, but Harriet maintained that they were.) In any case, he adored Baby. He always dressed in army coveralls with poetry books and wine bottles sticking out of various pockets, and he kept his dog, John Donne, a black lab with a red bandanna around his neck, with him at all times. Baby was cutting chemistry lab that afternoon to go hiking up Morrow Mountain with Kevin Cahill and John Donne.

  Harriet sighed, sitting at her table among the falling leaves. Why hadn’t she been asked to pick up the visiting writer? Why wasn’t she on top of a mountain with a poet? Already she was beginning to suspect that she might be better suited for editing, or teaching, than writing. She had picked education as her minor, just in case. But she smiled politely as she checked off names and gave out name tags and directions to the visitors who did not even notice her, no more than if she’d been Marion Faw, the thousand-year-old English department secretary who had psoriasis all the time. In another forty years she might be Marion Faw, think of that.

  Hunky Mr. Gaines wandered by, an arm around his beautiful wife. “Hi, Harriet!” little Maeve cried, riding her Big Wheel along behind them. A bunch of bearded, booted graduate students from UNC registered, having driven up from Chapel Hill. Some nuns arrived from St. Mary’s, attracted by the reputation of C. E. Reed, whose small body of work was visionary even though he turned out not to be. A morose, egglike little man, he had disappeared into the campus guest house upon his arrival early this morning and had not yet emerged. His student hostess, Lauren Dupree, hovered in the garden, waiting to escort him to the upcoming events. A whole poetry group from the nearby community college signed in, along with their two teachers who did not look like writers at all, thought Harriet. They looked like ministers’ wives, with their shirtwaist dresses and perfectly even bangs and sensible shoes. Now their own Marilyn Auerbach—who looked like a poet, at least, with that cape (though it was too hot for the cape)—came roaring across the grass with her usual giant, furious strides, smoking her Luckys. Marilyn Auerbach never walked on the sidewalks.

  Harriet sighed, fiddling with her pencil. She knew she did not look like a poet.

  “Harriet?” he said.

  She looked up. The clear air went iridescent. “Jeff?”

  “Harriet Holding,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

  Later she would not be able to figure out how he had walked across that big expanse of leaf-studded grass toward her, as he must have done, without her seeing him. How he had simply appeared. Yet it seemed inevitable, as if something missing had suddenly slipped into place. She stood up behind her table. Jefferson Carr smiled the same big open smile he had had as a boy. He walked around the table and hugged her, picking her right up off the ground. He spun her around and around until the blue sky and yellow leaves and old pink brick buildings began to blur and she felt like a girl in a kaleidoscope. She was dizzy when he set her down.

  “I guess we’ve got some catching up to do,” he said. His brown hair was cut in some kind of a buzz cut; she had an immediate urge to touch it.

  “Just a minute.” Harriet grabbed a legal pad from the registration table and wrote, SIGN YOURSELF IN AND GET A NAME TAG in a shaky hand. Then she simply walked off with Jefferson Carr, leaving her sign propped up against a filing box on the table. She knew this was irresponsible, yet she felt proud of herself for doing it. “Let’s go down to the snack bar and get a Coke,” she said. Jefferson Carr had grown tall and broad-shouldered. He didn’t look anything like his father. His mother was dead now, too, he told her: suddenly, a virus, last winter. Just about when Jill died, as it turned out. “I’m sorry,” they both said at the same time, and then laughed. They kicked through the thick leaves side by side.

  “How is your mother?” he asked. “I always loved your mother.”

  “Just the same,” Harriet said. “Well, maybe more so.”

  “A couple of times I started to drive down there and see you all. Once I even made it all the way to Staunton, but I couldn’t get out of the car somehow. I just drove around. I saw the shop, and some women going in and out, and so I thought, ‘Fine, they’re fine,’ and then I drove back to Richmond. I should have come in,” he said.

  “No,” Harriet said. “Maybe it’s better not to. Not to go back, I mean. I don’t know.” I don’t know because I really never left, she did not say. In any case, it would not have been good, she felt, for Jefferson Carr to run into Dr. Piccolo who was still in residence these days, Dr. Piccolo who cut his pointed beard with the kitchen shears and left the coarse black bristles in the sink, a practice which Harriet hated so much that she and Baby had made up a name for her reaction: cillaphobia, fear of hair.

  Jeff was at Shenandoah Military Institute in Lexington, it turned out, surprisingly. After years up north, he’d been ready to come back to Virginia for college. But he loved military school, he’d gotten good at it after all those years. In fact, he was the head prefect of his class right now, at SMI. Then Harriet understood why his khaki pants were so neatly creased, his loafers shined to a high gloss, his blue oxford cloth shirt so perfectly ironed. The Washington and Lee boys were sloppier and took pride in it, their rumpled shirts straight out of the dryer, their shoes held together with electrical tape. If sports jackets hadn’t been required, they’d never have worn them; as it was, they wore the oldest, tattiest jackets they could find. Jeff C
arr’s blue blazer was immaculate.

  “Your father would be so proud of you,” Harriet said suddenly, without knowing she was going to say it. She knew it was true. Dabney Carr had been such a decent and honorable man.

  “I hope so.” Jeff cleared his throat. “You know, you probably spent more time with him than I did.” His dark eyes filled up with tears. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry.” Harriet covered his hands on the table with hers and held them. Jeff’s hands were square, strong, and totally functional. He caught the waitress’s eye and ordered two more Cokes.

  “I didn’t know you could, you know, get away like this from SMI,” Harriet said.

  “Oh, sure. In fact, I actually rent an apartment in Lexington with some other guys. We get to use it a fair amount of time for R&R. After all, SMI is not a prison.” Jeff flashed her another big white smile. He was drop-dead handsome in spite of that military haircut, anybody would have to say so. Several girls Harriet knew had come into the snack bar and were staring at her and Jeff. They think it’s a date, she realized, and then she thought, Well, why not? She straightened her shoulders. This would look very much, no, exactly like a date, to anybody who walked into this snack bar right now.

  But actually Jeff was majoring in English at SMI, he was telling her, he figured it would be his last chance to spend any time on something like that. He’d go into the military right after graduation, of course, and then he’d probably go into the family business with his brother-in-law. There were no sonnets in his future. He had come down today on a whim, with a couple of buddies, but the buddies could take care of themselves. “Now. What about you?” he asked.

  Harriet took a deep breath and it all came tumbling out pell-mell, as if she’d upended her pocketbook: all about school, her suitemates, her job on the Redbud, the writing class she was taking then with Marilyn Auerbach, the one she would take with the famous Lucian Delgado in the spring. “But I’m not really very good,” she said.

  Jeff started laughing. “You haven’t changed a bit,” he said. “Little Miss Nobody, remember that book Jill had? I used to read it out loud to her and then we’d kid you about it.”

  “Little Miss Nobody lived up the stair—” Harriet chanted.

  “And when she went out, she went nowhere,” Jeff said. His square hands had square nails and little tufts of dark hair on the knuckles. Jill’s skin was so white, Harriet had sometimes thought she could see through it to Jill’s small blue veins, her delicate, pulsing heart.

  “Well, looky here. Party time.” Baby and Kevin Cahill stood in the doorway, blocking the slanting sun. Somehow it had turned into late afternoon. Baby wore a boy’s white shirt and blue jeans with beggar’slice all over the legs; her hair hung down in her face. Kevin stood behind her with his arm around her waist.

  “Oh, Baby!” Harriet half stood, thinking how wonderful it was for the people she loved the most in the world to know each other. “I want you to meet my old friend Jefferson Carr.”

  Baby sat down. Kevin Cahill turned a chair around backward and sat down, too, straddling it. Baby ran her hands through her hair. She pushed it back. She shook her head in that way she had, like a dog coming up out of the water, settling her hair around her shoulders. She smiled at Jeff. “So, are you from Staunton?” she asked.

  “Richmond,” he said. “But I haven’t really lived there for years. I went away to school. So I probably won’t know anybody if you’re going to ask me.” He smiled at her.

  Baby was looking at him. “How did you meet Harriet, then?” she asked. “To hear her tell it, you’d think she grew up under a rock.”

  Jeff leaned forward into the same serious, straight-ahead way of talking he had had as a child. “Haven’t you met Harriet’s mother yet?” he asked. “Alice is great. Our parents were friends, so we used to play together when we were kids.”

  With a single sentence, he had normalized Harriet’s whole weird childhood. “Excuse me,” she said, or thought she had said, but maybe she didn’t because by then Kevin was asking Jeff where he went to school, and nobody seemed to notice when she slipped off to the bathroom to cry, hard, for about ten minutes. When she came back, Kevin was saying, “You’re kidding, you mean you’re going into the army voluntarily?” in a loud voice, and Jeff was smiling back at him, frank and confident.

  “Sure,” Jeff said. “It’s not for two more years, remember. A lot can happen over there in two years. Anyway, I want to.”

  “Man, I can’t believe this shit,” Kevin said.

  Baby looked back and forth between them, her eyes that intense light blue. She was no longer smiling.

  Jeff checked his watch. It was a serious watch with lots of extra dials on it. “Well, since I drove all the way over here to go to this thing,” he said, “let’s do it.” He stood up. “Harriet?” he said. He held out his arm like an old-fashioned boy in a play.

  “Oh, fuck,” Kevin said. He put a cigarette in his mouth and offered one to Baby.

  Ignoring him, she stood up and came around the table. “Take me, too,” she said.

  “Gladly.” Jeff held out his other arm to Baby, who threw back her hair and took it, and like that he walked them both out into the brilliant blue afternoon and all the way across campus through the skittering leaves to Kenan Hall, all of them talking and talking, though Harriet could never remember, later, anything they said. They got the last seats in the house, with Harriet in the middle. Jim Francisco was everything the Redbud committee had expected, big and haggard, wearing a black cowboy hat which was even more than they had hoped for. He read about deserts and dogs and bleached white bones and once he stopped in the middle of a poem to look up from the page straight out at the audience and say, “Damn! Ain’t that good?” He was greeted by thunderous applause. He was full of shit but there was something more than that, something huge and real which didn’t have any place here on this tidy campus among these students and academics who could only study him, Harriet realized. They could never be him.

  “He’s an asshole,” Anna glided up afterward to whisper, as they stood caught in the crowd leaving the auditorium. “He’s already trying to get me to spend the night with him, can you believe it?”

  “Oh no,” Harriet whispered back. But she could believe it.

  “He’s staying at the Hitching Post Motel, which is funny anyway, considering he’s from Montana, but he keeps calling it the Whipping Post. He keeps saying stuff like, ‘Hey, baby, I’ve got something big to show you later at the Whipping Post.’”

  “Maybe he’s kidding. What did you tell him?”

  “Well, nothing. I mean, not yet. I don’t want to piss him off before Miss Auerbach’s party. I’ll think of something,” Anna said. “There’s plenty of time.”

  “Anna, I want you to meet my friend Jefferson Carr,” Harriet said over a sudden crush of people. “Jeff, this is one of my other suitemates, Anna.” Her heart felt like it would burst as Anna and Jeff shook hands.

  “Wow, where’d you find him?” Anna whispered before she disappeared into the throng.

  Harriet felt the steady pressure of Jeff’s hand on the small of her back as they finally began to move slowly onto the portico.

  Baby arched her back, stretching. She leaned back against one of the massive columns. “I need a drink,” she said.

  “There’s your boyfriend.” Jeff pointed down the hill at one of the big oaks where Kevin lay in the grass, reading ostentatiously, John Donne sleeping by his side. Kevin did not look up from his book as they all came out.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Baby said.

  “No?” Jeff asked.

  Baby shook her head vehemently. “God no,” she said. “Listen, I’ll see you all at the party later, okay?” She walked down the steps and across the grass to Kevin. They stood on the steps and watched her go. Harriet had forgotten she was barefoot. Baby leaned down and spoke to Kevin, or maybe she kissed him; her hair fell across his face.

  Jeff cleared hi
s throat. “I need to find the guys I came with,” he said, “and then we’ll buy you some dinner.”

  “It comes with the price of your registration.” Immediately Harriet could have killed herself, missing the chance to go to a restaurant with a bunch of guys. “It’s kind of a box supper, out by the duck pond.”

  “Sounds good.” Military school had turned Jeff into the kind of boy who said “sounds good” and “roger” a lot. It developed that the other cadets, Tom and Price, had struck up an acquaintance with two seniors, serious longhaired girls Harriet liked but didn’t really know, so the six of them sat together on the bank of the duck pond and ate their boxed suppers from the dining room, fried chicken and potato salad and brownies, while the night fell fast around them and a chill came over the water. It was, after all, October. Price, the big cadet with the black-rimmed glasses, was very funny talking about how weird it was to try to edit a literary magazine at a military school. “All the poems have perfect cadence,” he said. “Everything rhymes. But the magazine gets very few submissions.”

  “Why not?” asked Harriet.

  “Oh, we’re too busy polishing our boots all the time.” Jeff winked to show her that he wasn’t entirely serious. “We have to march a lot. Not much time for poetry. Hey, you going to eat that?” He indicated the chicken breast which Harriet had scarcely nibbled, and when she shook her head, he said, “You mind?” and she shook her head again and he picked it up and ate the rest of it.