Outer Banks (24 page)

And she smirked.

I went back into our room, thinking she would be lucky indeed if he didn't. I was tired and edgy and lonely for Paul, for Cecie. But one was in the lab and the other the library. Presently I crawled into bed and put out the light. It was much later when I finally heard Cecie come in.

She was carrying a double course load that quarter, trying to make up for the classes she had lost when she was sick in the summer, and it was soon clear to me, if not her, that she was not going to be able to sustain the pace. She looked as bad to me by the middle of November as she had when I had finally taken her to the infirmary, thin and white and glittering with fever, and soaked often with sweat that matted and darkened the copper curls. There was a pinched look at the base of her nose, and I knew that her throat hurt her, because she stopped going to meals and began living on soup and colas and tea and things that would slip
down easily, and lost even more weight. She would not even talk about going back to the infirmary.

“I've just got four more weeks and I'll be caught up and I can go home and crash over Christmas,” she said hoarsely. “Don't touch me or drink after me and you ought to be okay. I scald out the sink after I wash. And don't nag me, Kate; I can't afford to lose any more time. I'm going to start going to bed earlier and sleeping later. That will help.”

And she did, and after that, the most I saw of Cecie Hart was the diminished mound of her little body, as still as death under the covers, or the tip of her nose, or the lustreless tangle of her hair. It was like, I told her once, when I found her awake, living with the dead man in Yossarian's tent, in
Catch 22.
She laughed, but it was not her old, full laugh.

I did not go home to Kenmore for Thanksgiving. When I called my mother to say that I'd like to bring a friend home to meet her, she said, fretfully, that Mr. Jessup, the deacon, had asked her to share the holiday with him and his married daughter and her family in Selma, and she didn't like to impose two extra people on them.

She sounded like someone I had never even met, determinedly middle class and deliberately banal, and I knew that she had, in her inimitable way, assumed the coloration of the world in which she found herself. My mother became a Methodist deacon's wife before the deacon ever got around to asking her; just as she had been a Virginia belle long before my father plucked her out of her waitress's uniform to bring her South. I thought that she could probably survive so on Saturn.

“Well, maybe we'll come the Friday after, then,” I said. “I want you to meet Paul. You'll have to, sooner or later. I'm probably going to marry him, mother.”

There was a silence.

“Paul who?” she said finally.

“Sibley,” I said. “From Miami.”

“We never knew anybody from Miami,” my mother said suspiciously. “Who are his people?”

I thought of her own provenance, in the blasted little roadside store in rural Mississippi. Anger leaped bright and clean in my chest.

“A Seminole Indian princess and a Negro preacher from the Everglades,” I said sweetly. “Boy, when he speaks in tongues, he speaks in
tongues.
He's so full of the Spirit you can't even understand him. Of course, you never know if it's the Holy Spirit or the Great Spirit.”

“If you can't speak nicely to me, don't bother to come at all,” my mother said righteously.

“I guess I won't, then,” I said. “Because I probably can't speak any nicer than that.”

And so we did not go, and I found to my surprise that I did not at all regret it. I suspected that Paul might simply never meet my mother at all; that did not bother me, either. She seemed no part of me; she had not, for a long time. We stayed at his apartment for the long weekend, while his landlady was visiting her son in Texas, and made love and listened to music and worked on our boards and ate the roast duck à l'orange that he made, and drank a great deal of wine. And made more love. And drank more wine.

“Do you care if you don't meet her?” I said once.

“Only if you do,” he said. “I can meet her now or later; it isn't going to change anything. I hate to think you've fallen out with your mother over me, though.”

“I think I must have separated from her a long time ago, and just not realized it,” I said. “Probably when my father died. It was like that line in that Frost poem, ‘The Hill Wife': ‘Sudden and swift and light as that,…the ties gave.' I didn't feel anything when I talked to her and I don't now. I think the main connection for me was always my father, as sad as that was.”

“Well, then, that's two of us,” he said. “Travel light and travel fast. And far. Right now let's travel over there to that bed.”

And we did.

The second week in December I had my thesis hearing, and after waiting an interminable afternoon, head ringing and heart pounding, while Paul left his lab all those precious hours and sat in Harry's with me, went to the McCandless bulletin board where the grades were posted and found that I had made an A.

My thesis adviser, a rangy, immensely talented young designer with the look and manner of an Alabama farm boy, kissed me on the cheek and said if I ever got tired of New York and the big time and Paul, I could come and teach at Randolph.

“Hell, I'll marry you and you can design
my
white house by the Randolph water works,” he said.

He hugged me again and shook Paul's hand, and I cried, and Paul went back to his lab, and I went back over to Harry's and sat and drank more coffee and got my bearings. Fall graduation was three days away; until this morning there had been the great, glittering iceberg of the thesis between it and me, but now that was gone, melted into the swirl of Randolph that was vanishing as rapidly as water down a drain, and I was face to face with it. I was suddenly terrified, as frightened as I have ever been in my life, immobile and weak with panic. I sat still in the booth, trying to breathe normally, trying not to look as though I were going to die in a spasm of terror, and gradually the vise loosened. I was limp and wet with sweat and very, very tired. I got up and got into the MG and drove back to the Tri Omega house. I had done nothing; everything remained to be sorted, packed, loaded, stowed away. It would take me the entire three days to arrange my erasure from this room and this house and this campus. Instead, I lay down on my bed and went to sleep. Cecie, as usual, was not there. This time I did not hear her come in.

The night before graduation Ginger sneaked three iced bottles of Mumm's into our room and locked the doors and had a farewell party for me. Driven by the stinging cloud of endings hanging like furies in the air about us, we drank down the first
bottle as if it had been cola, and by the time we started on the second the constraint and prickling strangeness of my leaving were gone, and we laughed and sang and riffled through all the memories we had forged in those two dark little rooms and that one dingy bath, and we all cried except Cecie.

“I'll do my crying after you're gone, Kate,” she said, swigging champagne. “I don't want you to remember me weeping like a willow.
Toujours gai,
by God, is what I say!” And she waved the bottle aloft.

“Toujours gai,”
we all shouted. Fig burst into howls of wet woe and launched herself at me.

“I can't stand for you to leave, Effie,” she sobbed. “I just know I'm never going to see you again!”

“You're going to see me in March, at Nag's Head,” I said, disentangling myself from her short, solid arms. “And lots of times after that. Don't make me start crying now, Fig. And don't say goodbye, just get up in the morning and go on home and pretend it's between quarters. You're really going to undo me if you carry on like this.”

And so we drank the rest of the champagne and I went back to their room with them and hugged and kissed them, and Fig cried some more, and Ginger sniffled, and I did, and I came back through the bathroom to take a shower. When I went back into our room, Cecie was asleep, covers over her head. I was obscurely glad. I knew that we would have to say goodbye at some point, and I did not want to do it yet.

She was still asleep the next morning when I left the room to go and get my things from McCandless Hall, and when I got back that night, there was a note on my bed that said she had felt so ill that Trish had run her over to the infirmary for some penicillin and that she'd see me at graduation the next day. Fig and Ginger were gone, their room neater than I had ever seen it, and as empty of them as if there had been two deaths. I could not believe I would not see them again for three months. I knew that
when I did, everything would have changed for good and all. I had, in effect, said goodbye to them forever last night. A great emptiness settled over me. I packed my bags and signed out for the last time, unable, suddenly, to bear the room where Cecie was not, and drove over to Paul's apartment and stole softly up the stairs. I rapped on his door and presently he let me in.

“I want to be with you,” I said. “I don't want to be by myself anymore.”

We made love many times that night; it seemed to me that we did not sleep at all. Sometimes I wept, and once I thought that he did. But mostly he was silent; it was hard, urgent, voiceless, scouring love, and all through the last time he kept whispering, until he was almost shouting it aloud into my ear: “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”

We finished in an explosion of breath and heat and tears, and when I awoke the next morning, my graduation day…a soft one, and gray…the tracks of my tears were still damp on my face. He was sitting by the window in the Eames chair, in pants and a tee shirt, drinking coffee and staring out at the thick morning.

“ ‘This is the way the world ends,' ” I said from the bed. “ ‘Not with a bang, but a whimper.' ”

“This is the way it begins,” he said, getting up and coming over to kiss me. “Not with a whimper, but a bang.”

I do not remember much of my graduation. It was a small one in the ballroom of the Student Union, not nearly so large and festive as the big one, in spring. Most people had left for the Christmas holidays, and the applause for the seniors who rose and went up to receive their diplomas and shake hands with the president and pass their tassels to the other side of their mortarboards was sparse. I graduated with the Magna Cums, but there was little applause for me: my mother had not come, and Ginger and Fig had left early the morning before. I looked for Cecie's red head in the audience, but did not see it. It did not matter; in my
heart I was, at last, gone from there. I had done that sometime in the December darkness, before dawn.

Back at the Tri O house, Paul came up to our room with me to carry my bags down to the MG while I said goodbye to Cecie. We found the bags stacked in the hall and the door closed. Pain seared me, and tears started once more in my eyes. Did she mean, then, simply not to see me again at all?

“Come on,” Paul said softly. “Some people just can't say goodbye; I can't. You'll see her in March when we're in Nag's Head. Give both of you a break.”

I started to pick up a bag and follow him down the stairs, and then I went back and opened the door, softly, and looked into the room. It was darkened, and Cecie lay asleep as I had seen her so often the past two quarters, very still, head under the covers, back to me. For a sudden, awful moment I thought she was not breathing, and then saw that she was, lightly. I started to go across and wake her, and then I did not. I closed the door and picked up my train case and went down the stairs. Paul was right. Time enough at Nag's Head.

Outside the train station, we sat in the MG not looking at each other. He would keep it while I was in New York; it would save me garaging fees and endless trouble. We had agreed earlier not to try to spend Christmas together; Carl Seaborn had asked me to spend Christmas Day with him and his family out in Bridgehampton, at the end of Long Island, and Ginger's mother had written and asked if Paul would like to come and have Christmas dinner with them at their home in Fowler. He did not think he would go.

“I wish you would,” I said. “I hate to think of you here by yourself while I'm scarfing up whatever they scarf up in the Hamptons on Christmas Day.”

“Lox and bagels, most likely,” he said. “Well, I might. It would be sort of fun to see the birthplace of the famous Fig
Newton while I'm at it. Unless you think she sprang full blown from the head of Zeus.”

Down the track we could see the Crescent Limited—New Orleans to New York by way of Montgomery and Atlanta and Washington, with stops in between—crawl into view like a weary mastodon. I felt a sob start in my throat, and swallowed hard. Paul closed his eyes.

“Oh, Kate,” he said, and pulled me to him. He did not kiss me; he held me against him, hard, and put his hands on my breasts, and ran them up under my sweater and over my shoulders and back, as it to memorize my flesh.

“Go on now, and don't say anything,” he whispered against my hair. “Go on and hurry back to Nag's Head. I love you. Call me when you get in.”

“Paul…”

“Go,” he said. His voice was thick and rough. I got out of the car and ran up the steps and into the station where my luggage waited to be put aboard. I handed some money to the porter, blindly, and when I turned back to look, the MG was gone. I could hear it, burring away like a toy auto, its engine muffled in the raw silver fog that was beginning to settle over Randolph. The train was moving out slowly when I found my seat and sank into it. Tears scalded my throat and nose, but we were almost to the Georgia-Alabama state line before I began to cry.

 

From the minute I set foot on its mica-speckled sidewalks, New York embraced me. The fatigue of the overnight trip, the misery of leaving Paul, the pain of Cecie…all of it evaporated into the raw evening air of 43rd Street when I came up out of the pandemonium of Grand Central. My heart gave a great, unexpected swoop of joy. I had expected to be lonely and afraid, at least at first, but I had told myself over and over that I had had, by that time, sufficient practice in bluffing my way into new worlds so that at least the clumsiness and self-consciousness of the newcomer
would not show. But from the beginning I was good at being a New Yorker. As my heart had found its home by the sea, so my mind and body found their counterpart in the bruising, smart-ass, exhilarating maw of Manhattan.