Sweetwater Creek (8 page)

“What did you tell my father?” Emily was dumbstruck. Change, too much change.

“Just that you were growing up now, and you needed somebody to sort of help you on the way, and be with you.”

“What did he say?”

“He looked like somebody had lifted a cotton bale off his shoulders, and said he’d pay me anything I asked if I’d do it.”

“He’s going to
pay
you?”

“Of course not. I don’t want money to be with you; you’re a treat. And this was my home first, after all. I grew up here, lived here even longer than you all have been here. I don’t need to be paid for coming home.”

“Will you miss your apartment?”

“Not for a minute. Who could miss that? I’ve missed this place a lot, though.”

She left to get Emily’s supper, and Emily went into the underwater bathroom and stared at her face in the greenish mirror. She looked just the same. How could that be?

Presently she lay in deep, hot water, Elvis beside the tub on the bathmat, and let herself think a little about the last three days. She thought that it would be all right to begin to do so now, with her aunt in the house. What she thought was that she could never again see her father and her aunt as she had seen them before. From now on, whenever she looked at her father, she would see, as if in pentimento, the wounded young man who had watched his wife walk away. And when she looked at her collected, efficient aunt, she would see the girl child playing in the sunlight all over the plantation, perhaps in the very places she and Elvis went. She would see her watching the dolphins slide at Sweetwater Creek, reading in the deep shade of a live oak off on a hummock, dangling her feet in the glittering water of the river from the dock, the tide creaming in.

She would see her leaving this house and moving into an apartment when her sister brought her new husband home to the house that had become hers alone.

Emily felt a new emotion that she knew she must now work into the fabric of her knowing. It was pity. It seemed impossible to do. She hated it. She would not do it. Change…

She scrubbed herself nearly raw and put on clean clothes, and went down the stairs to have the first of many suppers with her aunt.

And after all, it had worked well. Before long her aunt Jenny was as natural a part of life at Sweetwater as her father, the boys, the dogs, and the river. By the time a month or so had passed Emily found it hard to remember when she had not been there.

On the first night she ate supper with the whole family, her father had welcomed her back solemnly and formally, and said he hoped she was over the flu bug—Emily shot a grateful glance at her aunt—and that the new arrangement was just what the doctor ordered. Cleta would get some well-earned rest, Jenny was gracious enough to say that she would enjoy being here, and she, Emily, would learn how to be a real young lady. He seemed very pleased, almost hearty, and ate two helpings of the pasta puttanesca Jenny had made.

“Very tasty,” he said, rising.

“Good macaroni, Aunt Jenny,” the twins said, and melted away toward the TV room.

Walter stood there, and then drew a piece of folded paper from his pocket.

“I’ve made a list of things Emily ought to learn to do,” he said. “Of course she can’t do them all at once; she can take them one at a time. I believe you know how to do most of them, Jenny, but I’m sure you can find someone to teach her the things you don’t know. I’ve arranged them in order of priority. You can look them over after supper, and we can talk about them tomorrow night.”

And he, too, faded away toward the TV room, drawn there by flickering light and male pheromones like a moth.

Emily and her aunt looked at each other, and then took the list upstairs to Emily’s bedroom to peruse it. Her aunt read it first and then handed it to Emily, the corners of her mouth twitching. She said nothing, though. Emily read through it:

1. Learn to dress like a young lady. Skirts for school and special occasions. No makeup or high heels yet, and no more short shorts. I will set a suitable budget for her clothes, and I won’t need to okay them. I trust your taste, Jenny.
   
2. Learn to do some simple company cooking. Soufflés, little sandwiches, crab cakes, chafing dishes, shrimp and rice, desserts. Your benné seed biscuits would be good, Jenny.
   
3. Learn to carry on intelligent conversation with guests. No more hiding upstairs with the dog. No more running off to the kennels.
   
4. Learn to play an instrument. I always enjoyed ladies playing the piano after dinner. I will set a budget for this, too.
   
5. Learn a lady’s sport, and some social games of some sort.
   Tennis would be good, or golf. On second thought, golf is awfully expensive. Let’s make it tennis. Needless to say, I’ve budgeted for this also. And bridge, certainly. I believe you play, don’t you, Jenny? And, of course, dancing. I know there is a class the young women in Charleston take when they’re about thirteen. Please find out about this.
   
6. Get some catalogs from the private schools around Charleston and study them. I think Charlotte Hall would be suitable. I would like Emily to familiarize herself with this school by the time she is thirteen.
   

And he signed it Walter L. Parmenter.

Emily and her aunt looked at each other for a long moment, and then collapsed in laughter. They laughed so hard that they rolled onto Emily’s bed. Elvis joined them, frisking and barking joyfully.

When they could speak, Emily said, “But we’re really not, are we? All that, I mean? Skirts at school, dancing classes…”

“Oh, of course not,” her aunt snorted, still laughing. “It sounds like a blueprint for a south of Broad debutante. Of course, if you’d like to do that…”

“I’d rather die.”

“Me too. We’ll learn some things together, and it will be fun, and we can tell him you’re making good progress. As long as you wear a dress to dinner occasionally, and say three words to whoever is visiting, he’ll probably forget about the rest. But some of these things are fun, you know. Dancing is. Tennis is. And some new clothes carefully chosen by you and me will not be amiss, either. Starting, my dear, with a good bra. And cooking is a dirt-road cinch. We can do that together. We’ve got all weekends.”

“He didn’t say I had to quit training the dogs.”

“No,” her aunt said. “I think he knows what side his bread is buttered on.”

“What do you mean?”

But her aunt would say no more, and the days turned into weeks and time spun on. The changes Jenny Raiford made were gradual and pleasant, and did not feel at all like changes after a while. They felt as if the Parmenter family had always done them. They ate dinner together, at a leisurely pace. Jenny insisted that everyone share a little of his or her day, and soon they did, even though the words were mumbled and eyes rolled. Still, it was dinnertime conversation, and Walter Parmenter beamed to hear it.

They watched TV together. Emily thought it was a gargantuan achievement.

“It’s barbaric, the way you three sneak off down there and let that thing blare all over the house without a word to Emily or me,” Jenny said. “You might as well be living in a log cabin in the Yukon. What good does it do Emily to learn to be a young lady if she has to bring her friends home to that?”

And soon they all gathered for an hour or so, and compromised on CNN, and then Emily and Jenny went up to their rooms—Jenny had Buddy’s—and chatted or maybe watched Emily’s little TV, and went to bed early. If her aunt was sad or homesick for her previous life, if she staggered under the burden of this new family, or wept for the one in this house that she had never had, Emily never heard it. The rooms were too far apart.

The images of her mother, leaving, faded.

The specter of change shrank back under the weight of the pleasant, nearly identical, altogether ordinary spring days. Emily floated on the sameness and ordinariness, and was soothed.

On an early May Saturday afternoon she and her aunt sat on the old silver-gray wooden benches at the end of the long dock out over the Wadmalaw, sipping lemonade from a thermos and stretching their legs to the young sun. The marsh was almost totally green now, and alive with its teeming, gliding, scuttling, splashing denizens, and the smaller creeks cutting it ran full. It was nearly high tide. Behind Emily’s closed eyelids the sun made red whorls and pinwheels, and was tender on her face.

Jenny took a deep breath and exhaled.

“Smell that?” she murmured sleepily. “Wisteria and honeysuckle. Summer’s coming. You can smell the change.”

But what came, on the new wings of summer, was Lulu Foxworth, as glistening and beautiful and vulnerable as a beached Portuguese man-o-war, and just as dangerous. And for everyone at Sweetwater everything changed, and nothing ever went back to the way it was before.

PEOPLE WHO LIVE
beside moving water have been given the gift of living light, and even if they never come to recognize it as such, any other light, no matter how clear or brilliant, is pale and static to them, leaving them with a sense of loss, of vulnerability, as if they have suddenly found themselves without clothes.

“I have to be near the water,” they will say. “I can’t live away from the ocean”…or the river or the creek, or whatever water throws back to them the sun, or the boiling storm clouds, or the pearl of moving fog, or the wash of sunset.

But what most of them are really saying, without knowing it, is, “I can’t live without that light that dances with me. I wear it like a living skin. Without it I am incomplete.”

This epidermis of light is what keeps the waterman, the shrimper, the lobsterman at his work long after his home waters are fished out, dead. You see them sometimes, sunburnt old men sitting on benches at the end of docks, indigent now, but unable to leave and go inland because it would be to live without skin.

Emily felt the absence of waterlight deeply and miserably when she was away from the river. Once, on a school trip to Washington, she lost herself from her group and stayed behind beside the fast-moving Potomac while her class went on to the Air and Space Museum. She could never explain why. And the only time she was sent to camp in the North Carolina mountains, when she was seven, the deep, still, opaque lake that threw her back no connecting spark haunted her days and nights until she wept inconsolably and had to be brought home five days early. Her father thought she was homesick, and was impatient with such childishness. Emily knew her grief was not homesickness, but she did not know what it was, so she was silent on the trip home.

But when she got to Sweetwater, the Wadmalaw, running deep in full tide, wrapped her in trembling waterlight, and she felt full and healed. For a long time after that, she refused to leave the river except for such routine trips as school and doctors and dentists, and even then she knew in her heart the number of miles and minutes it took to get back.

When she was older, she told Buddy about that panicky feeling of grief and loss she had had when she left the river for camp, and he had said, “You don’t have to be afraid of leaving people and places. You take them with you somewhere inside you.”

“You mean, like in your heart?”

“Or your liver or your spleen, or your medulla oblongata. Who knows? Everybody has a different place inside he stuffs things he needs to keep.”

Emily thought perhaps her own place was in the pit of her stomach. Everything that hurt or frightened her settled there indelibly, and often she first felt joy there, too.

“My stomach leaps with joy,” she said to Elvis. “It could be worse, though. What if I had to say, ‘My colon leaps with joy?’”

On a Saturday morning in early June the dancing stipple of light off the river woke her, and she lay looking at it play on the ceiling and walls of her room, and stretched her arms and legs as far as they would go, and smelled, through her open window, perhaps the very last of the cool, sweet, fresh mornings of early summer. Wet punishing heat hung like a fog bank in the distance, waiting to stun the Lowcountry into somnolence. It would soon be here. Everything would be full, ripe. What you would smell for the rest of the summer through your window would be rich, fecund marsh and the amniotic sweat of the summer river.

She was usually up with the light, not for chores, just to be in the world. But on a few mornings like this, she lingered half-asleep in bed, stroking Elvis and thinking dreamy, abstracted thoughts that never occurred to her any other time or place.

“If you’ve been with somebody for a long time and then they leave, are you the same person alone as you were with them?”

“Does the furniture freeze in the Antarctic? Do sofas freeze?”

“Has anybody ever stopped growing up just because they wanted to bad enough?”

“Is it all right to pray if you don’t believe in God?”

She had asked Buddy this once. He had considered it, and said, yes, he thought it was both all right and a good thing. People might not believe in their heads, but their hearts knew there simply had to be something bigger and more powerful than they were, otherwise, everybody would be scared to death all the time, and it was
that
that they talked to in prayer. Or whatever you wanted to call it.

“Then, do dogs pray to us?”

“Could be. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

The dapple of light on her ceiling had moved to the wall. She stretched again. This day had promise. Her father and the twins had probably already left for North Charleston, where a regional Boykin Spaniel Council was meeting in yet another of the endless attempts to get the high-nosed American Kennel Club to recognize Boykins as a breed. Since the South Carolina Boykin breeders and owners stubbornly refused to accept any of the AKC’s tenets and restrictions (“No goddamned New Yorker is going to tell me how to raise my spaniels, by God”), Boykin recognition seemed about as attainable as Saturn. The need to fight the marauding Yankees never quite died in the Lowcountry. But the meetings went on.

Emily was going to love this day. She could work unhampered with the starters and begin training a beautiful new Boykin bitch puppy someone had brought to be polished, and there was a new litter of milky-sweet, mewling babies in Gloria’s box in the kennels. Later she was going to show her aunt the dolphin slide over at Sweetwater Creek, and then they were going to pack a picnic lunch and take the whaler far down the Wadmalaw, almost to Bears Bluff, and see if it was warm enough to swim. Probably not; in early June the deepest rivers were warm and seductive on their surfaces, but an electric chill like frozen ginger ale lurked just below. It didn’t matter. It would be a sweet day.

It was near ten when she emerged to sit on the front steps with a cup of milky coffee and a doughnut, simply looking at the morning. Aunt Jenny came and sat beside her, shelling new peas, and Elvis lolled at her feet.

“Don’t you need to get going?” Jenny said. “You’ll spend at least two hours with those dogs, and by the time we get down river we’ll be starving to death.”

“Yeah,” Emily said, not moving.

They sat in another small silence.

Beside her, Elvis lifted his head and swung it sharply toward the door behind them. A second later they heard Walter Parmenter’s brisk steps and the twang-thud of the screen door, and he was with them on the steps, military-crisp in pressed khakis and a blue oxford cloth shirt, his face shining from its close shave and his thick hair still showing damp comb tracks.

“Morning,” Jenny said. “I thought you’d be halfway through your meeting by now.”

“Morning, Daddy,” Emily mumbled.

“Ladies,” her father said. “We’re in for a real treat this morning. And a real shot at the brass ring. Rhett Foxworth called last night after you’d both gone to bed and said he was looking to buy a Boykin, and Towny Chappelle told him ours were the best in South Carolina. I guess something good came of that Thanksgiving business after all. Foxworth is coming out about noon to look at the pups and see some of the older dogs work. He’s bringing his wife and daughter with him, and I want us all to make a good impression. Jenny, maybe you could make some mint iced tea. Emily, I’m going to let you work the dogs this morning, but not in shorts and a shirt like that. A dress or skirt, please, and Elvis goes to your room.”

“Who is Rhett Foxworth?” Emily muttered, already disliking the man and all his family, past and future.

“Rhett Foxworth
is
Charleston,” her father said. “One of the oldest families, most money, biggest plantation south of Hobcaw, house in town on the National Register. If the word gets out he’s bought dogs from us, we’ll be in solid with the Hunt Club crowd, and there’s no other place I’d rather be. Emily, after you’ve done the dogs, I want you to take his daughter and show her around, get to know her. I happen to know her mother’s on the board of Charlotte Hall.”

“Whoop-de-do,” Emily said under her breath.

“How old is this daughter?” she said aloud. “I’m not very good at baby-sitting.”

“She’s older than that,” her father replied. “I think her mother said she was out of school for the summer. Who knows, you might make a new friend. Now, run and change.”

“Daddy,” Emily began desperately, but her aunt cut in.

“Not a skirt on a June morning in the country, Walter. Maybe some nice pants and a matching shirt.”

“Whatever,” her father said, moving down the steps toward the kennels. “Just not those ragged blue jeans. And
not
that shirt. Oh, and comb your hair.”

Emily looked down at her chest. Her T-shirt had G
OD
I
S
D
OG
S
PELLED
B
ACKWARD
written on it. It was obviously too tight.

“I’ll take the bone out of my nose, too,” she said resentfully as she stood up to go into the house.

“Go easy on him, Emily,” her aunt said. “This is a big deal for him. And he’s just now learning to think of you as a young woman. He’s not exactly the quickest study, you know. But he wants you to show the dogs, and that’s his way of saying he knows you’re better at it than he is.”

“He could just come right out and say it.”

“No,” her aunt said, “I don’t think he could. Not yet.”

The stipple of light was gone from her room when Emily came into it to change her clothes. Out the window the river shimmered, crumpled foil. “Glitter water,” Emily had called it when she was small. It had stuck.

She shucked off the jeans and T-shirt and, without looking at herself in the mirror, pulled on the cropped pink cotton pants and peasant blouse her aunt had bought her. She had never worn them; they did not seem to fit anywhere in her small arena. But they’d probably be right at home in the Foxworths’. She slid her feet into white sandals and combed her unruly red-gold hair straight back, and tied it with a shoelace. She thrust her face close to the watery mirror in the bathroom and winced. This girl would be far more at home shopping on King Street than working spaniels.

“You know you’ll have to stay here for a little while,” she said to Elvis. “Daddy’s doing the big dog breeder thing for some rich guy. I’ll let you out the minute they’re gone. It shouldn’t be long.”

At the door she turned and looked at him. He was already settled resignedly on the quilt at the foot of her bed.

“You won’t cry or bark, will you?”

He sighed and put his head down on his crossed front paws. She knew that he wouldn’t.

The family was assembled at the front door by a quarter to twelve. Aunt Jenny had changed into a long flowered skirt and sleeveless blue T-shirt; she looked young and pretty. Walt and Carter were echoes of their father in clean khakis and polo shirts.

“Ten-SHUN!” Emily whispered to her aunt, and Jenny grinned.

At noon exactly a mud-spattered Land Rover crunched up on the circular drive and stopped.

“If he’s that rich, why can’t he get his car washed?” Emily said under her breath to Jenny.

“I think it’s called shabby-chic,” her aunt whispered back.

Walter went down the steps to meet the Foxworths, who were getting out of the Rover.

“Welcome to Sweetwater,” he said jovially. “It’s good to have you here.”

“Thank you,” said a huge, sunburnt man with thinning black hair and a boy’s smooth pug face. “Walter Parmenter, isn’t it? Rhett Foxworth. Call me Rhett.”

He gestured at the two women standing behind him. “This is my wife Maybelle, and my daughter, Lulu. We’ve forgotten her real name.”

Everyone laughed and moved together and shook hands and bobbed heads and murmured greetings. Emily hung back and looked at the fabulous Foxworths, who
were
Charleston.

Maybelle Foxworth came forward with her hands outstretched to Walter Parmenter, smiling brilliantly with large Chiclet teeth and teetering just a bit on the rolling gravel of the driveway. Her yellow glacé flats, Emily thought, would last about two minutes in the dog ring. Maybelle was short and voluptuous and tanned to an impossible, silky cappuccino tan. Her silvery blond hair was held off her round face with a black velvet headband, and her flowered wrap skirt and yellow blouse matched the shoes and showed a trim waist and startling cleavage. Her blue eyes had smile and sun crinkles fanning out from their corners, and except for a certain crepey skin on her chest and neck, she might have been a much younger woman, far too young to have a grown daughter. Later, Jenny told Emily, with just a hint of laughter in her voice, that some women simply got stuck in the best time of their youth, and would do whatever it took to remain there. Maybelle Foxworth’s was obviously the Lilly Pulitzer era. Emily thought she had done a good job, all told.

“I have heard
so
much about you,” she trilled to Walter Parmenter. “Towny talks about nothing but your beautiful dogs, and said that your house was a fine specimen of the earliest river plantations, the modest, plain ones that had fine lines and almost always beautiful river views. I can see he was right!”

Walter took her outstretched hands in his own, and looked fleetingly and with puzzlement at his fine-lined modest plantation house, and almost stammered. Maybelle Foxworth often had that effect on people. Meeting her for the first time was rather like meeting a beautiful creature from a Disney theme park: vividly colored, animated, displacing too much air.

“We’re glad you could come,” Emily’s father said. “Towny Chappelle talked a lot about you.”

He hadn’t, Emily would have been willing to bet, but she was quiet, studying, absorbing. So this was how it was done.

“Nothing bad, I hope,” Maybelle Foxworth giggled. “Towny is so
naughty
! I’m going to have to get after him one of these days.”

“Oh, all good,” Walter said, nodding his head vigorously.

“Well, meet my daughter,” Maybelle said, and stepped aside so that they could see the young woman who had stood perfectly still and silent while her mother trilled and her father grinned his fierce baby’s grin.