Interesting Women Read online

  I didn’t—

  (Except perhaps being called white.)

  I didn’t mean—

  (It was the most presumptuous thing you could have done. They’re old. They’ve survived, defining themselves in a certain way. We children and grandchildren can call ourselves Afro-American or African-American or black or whatever the week’s fashion happens to be.)

  You—

  (And of course you knew this. We all grew up knowing it. You’re a very smart woman, and the question is why you allowed yourself to be so careless. So breezy and destructive. Maybe to make sure you couldn’t go back there.)

  I say: That’s enough. Stop it.

  And my cousin, for a minute, does stop. I never noticed before how much he looks like Uncle Pershing. The same mountainous brow and reprobative eyes of a biblical patriarch that look out of framed photographs in Aunt Noah’s living room. A memory reawakens of being similarly thundered at, in the course of that childhood summer, when I lied about borrowing Uncle Pershing’s pocketknife.

  We sit staring at each other across this little cluttered table in Greenwich Village. I am letting him tell me off as I would never allow my brother or my husband—especially my husband. But the buried link between my cousin and me makes the fact that I actually sit and take it inevitable. As I do, it occurs to me that fifty years ago, in the moribund world we are arguing about, it would have been an obvious choice for the two of us to get married. As Ball County cousins always did. And how far we have flown from it all, as if we were genuine emigrants, energetically forgetful of some small, dire old-world country plagued by dictators, drought, locusts, and pogroms. Years ago yet another of our cousins, a dentist in Atlanta, was approached by Aunt Noah about moving his family back to Ball County and taking over her house and land. I remember him grimacing with incredulity about it as we sat over drinks once in an airport bar. Why did the family select him for this honor? he asked, with a strained laugh. The last place anyone would ever want to be, he said.

  I don’t know what else to do but stumble on with my story.

  * * *

  Aunt Noah was having a good time showing me off. On one of the last days of my visit, she drove me clear across the county to the house where she grew up. I’d never been there, though I knew that was where it had all begun. It was on this land, in the seventeen forties, before North Carolina statutes about slavery and mixing of races had grown hard and fast, that a Scotch-Irish settler—a debtor or petty thief deported to the pitch-pine wilderness of the penal colony—allowed his handsome half-African, half-Indian bond servant to marry his only daughter. The handsomeness of the bond servant is part of the tradition, as is the pregnancy of the daughter. Their descendants took the land and joined the group of farmers and artisans who managed to carve out an independent station between the white planters and the black slaves until after the Civil War. Dissertations and books have been written about them. The name some scholars chose for them has a certain lyricism: Tidewater Free Negroes.

  My daddy grew tobacco and was the best blacksmith in the county, Aunt Noah told me. There wasn’t a man, black or white, who didn’t respect him.

  We had turned onto a dirt road that led through fields of tobacco and corn farmed by the two tenant families who divided the old house. It was a nineteenth-century farmhouse, white and green with a rambling porch and fretwork around the eaves. I saw with a pang that the paint was peeling and that the whole structure had achieved the undulating organic shape that signals imminent collapse.

  I can’t keep it up, and, honey, the tenants just do enough to keep the roof from falling in, she said. Good morning, Hattie, she called out, stopping the car and waving to a woman with corn-rowed hair and skin the color of dark plums, who came out of the front door.

  Good morning, Miss Nora, said Hattie.

  Mama’s flower garden was over there, Aunt Noah told me. You never saw such peonies. We had a fishpond and a greenhouse and an icehouse. Didn’t have to buy anything except sugar and coffee and flour. And over there was a paddock for trotting horses. You know there was a fair every year where Papa and other of our kind of folks used to race their sulkies. Our own county fair.

  She collected the rent, and we drove away. On the road, she stopped and showed me her mother’s family graveyard, a mound covered with Amiel and Hopper tombstones rising in the middle of a tobacco field. She told me she paid a boy to clean off the brush.

  You know it’s hard to see the old place like that, she said. But I don’t see any use in holding on to things just for the sake of holding on. You children are all off in the North, marrying your niggers or your white trash—honey, I’m just fooling, you know how I talk—and pretty soon we ugly old folks are going to go. Then there will just be some bones out in the fields and some money in the bank.

  That was the night that my husband called from New York with the news we had hoped for: his assignment in Europe was for Rome.

  (You really pissed them off, you know, says my cousin, continuing where he left off. You were already in Italy when the article was published, and your mother never told you, but it was quite an item for the rest of the family. There was that neighbor of Aunt Noah’s, Dan Mills, who was threatening to sue. They said he was ranting: I’m not African-American like they printed there! I’m not black!)

  Well, God knows I’m sorry about it now. But really—what could I have called them? The quaint colored folk of the Carolina lowlands? Mulattos and octoroons, like something out of Mandingo?

  (You could have thought more about it, he says, his voice softening. You could have considered things before plunging into the quilts and the superstitions.)

  You know, I tell him, I did talk to Aunt Noah just after the article came out. She said: Oh, honey, some of the folks around here got worked up about what you wrote, but they calmed right down when the TV truck came around and put them on the evening news.

  My cousin drums his fingers thoughtfully on the table as I look on with a certain muted glee. I can tell that he isn’t familiar with this twist in the story.

  (Well—he says.) Rising to brew us another pot of coffee. Public scourging finished; case closed. By degrees he changes the subject to a much-discussed new book on W. E. B. Du Bois in Germany. Have I read about that sojourn in the early nineteen thirties? Dubois’s weirdly prescient musings on American segregation and the National Socialist racial laws?

  We talk about this and about his ex-wife and his upcoming trip to Celebes and the recent flood of Nigerian Kok statues on the London art market. Then, irresistibly, we turn again to Ball County. I surprise my cousin by telling him that if I can get back to the States this fall, I may go down there for Thanksgiving. With my husband. Aunt Noah invited us. That’s when they kill the pigs, and I want to taste some of that fall barbecue. Why don’t you come too? I say.

  (Me? I’m not a barbecue fan, he says. Having the grace to flush slightly on the ears. Aren’t you afraid that they’re going to burn a cross in front of your window? he adds with a smile.)

  I’ll never write about that place again, I say. Just one thing, though—

  (What?)

  What would you have called them?

  He takes his time lighting up another Kretek Jakarta. His eyes, through the foreign smoke, grow as remote as Aunt Noah’s, receding in the distance like a highway in a rearview mirror. And I have a moment of false nostalgia. A quick glimpse of an image that never was: a boy racing me down a long corridor of July corn, his big flat feet churning up the dirt where we’d peed to mark our territory like two young dogs, his skinny figure tearing along ahead of me, both of us breaking our necks to get to the vanishing point where the green rows come together and geometry begins. Gone.

  His cigarette lit, my cousin shakes his head and gives a short exasperated laugh. (In the end, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, does it? he says.)

  Un Petit d’un Petit

  I’m swatting fallen leaves with a hockey stick in front of the Victorian castle where I
dream through school hours with other captive heroines, when a car pulls up. The car is a station wagon, green as the Philadelphia suburbs around us. And the girl behind the wheel is wearing green as well, a pleated tunic that means she goes to Chew Academy, our rival down the road. She rolls down the window and leans out with the air of a baroness addressing a roadside peasant. “Have you seen Dogface?” she asks.

  I don’t know her, but from the car and the nickname—an elegant sibling appellation for my best friend, Edie—I know she has to be Edie’s older sister Gus, whose beauty is a tribulation to the rest of the family. “Big eyes and big tits” is the capsule description I’ve heard of Gus, but what strikes me is the phenomenal whiteness of her skin as she sits there in all that green, a pallor like candle wax that culminates in an incandescent burst of red-blond hair. She has bound up this hair with a silk scarf in a topknot that makes her look like a fifties movie star, and the impatient majesty with which she sits behind the wheel discounts any idea I might have that she is just a schoolgirl like me. All in all, an unsettling apparition to face beside a hockey field on a bleak fall afternoon. As I stand transfixed in my sweaty gym clothes and graceless fourteen years, she looks me over with amused contempt. I direct her to Edie down at the Old Gym and continue on my way, only now with the feeling of stepping along on invisible stilts, my head high above the thinning treetops. It’s the same feeling I get every September when I fall in love with that year’s English teacher.

  * * *

  For some time after that, worshiping Gus is a private luxury like a certain kind of candy I hoard in my locker: a shell-shaped bitter chocolate with an Italian name. It goes on outside of my friendship with Edie, which is another story altogether: a normal adolescent catalog of lachrymose confessions, gut-wrenching fits of mirth, and shared musing on future lives of art and turpitude. And it has nothing to do with the broth of intimacy and rivalry that simmers around Edie and Gus. It’s an undemanding crush in which I simply allow myself to relax into bedazzlement whenever she flashes by. My encounters with her at Edie’s house and in other places take on an intensity that encloses the details in a magnified wall of sensation so that in my memory they line up gleaming like a row of crystal balls.

  * * *

  At a New Year’s Eve party, I watch her clowning with her guitar, surrounded by clusters of infatuated boys. In a wailing, cornball voice, she sings “Dona Dona”:

  On a wagon bound for market

  There’s a calf with a mournful eye…

  It is Gus’s party, which Edie and I have been allowed to attend on sufferance because a freak blizzard has thinned the ranks of her friends, students from prep schools and colleges up and down the East Coast. Snow dervishes spin against the windows and make the fire sputter in the sitting room of the bland suburban house filled with Boston and Philadelphia antiques. The prettiest girls wear jewel-colored Indian dresses, and the most desirable boys are dressed like ranch hands or factory workers. It’s not a costume party, just the seventies. They all keep moseying out into the storm to ingest various chemicals, though at the time I’m aware only that some Olympian mischief is going on. Mousy and prim in a wool A-line skirt and matching sweater, I sit sipping a digestive liqueur made by monks, a drink I chose because it was in the least intimidating bottle. No one talks to me, and I have spent most of the evening feigning absorption in a coffee-table book of nursery rhymes rendered wittily in nonsensical French. Un petit d’un petit s’étonne aux Halles—Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall. Edie, prettier and bolder, has just abandoned me to chat up a Haverford sophomore when Gus crosses the room and stops in front of me.

  “You! What have you got on your legs?” she asks, in the loud, flippant tones of a social triumphator, who knows that whatever she says or does will add hugely to the general jollification. A numbness comes over me, as I observe the firelight gleaming on her bright hair and slightly prominent white teeth: it is the swift anesthesia that is nature’s gift to bird or beast in the talons of the raptor. Dreamily, I am aware that her friends have paused in their talk to observe us. She is peering at my tights, a glistening silver pair on which I have spent my allowance in hope that, as I read in a teen glamour magazine, they will add the all-important touch of holiday sophistication.

  “It’s sort of a style called the wet look,” I say, trying to fold up my poor silly legs and stick them out of sight.

  Gus laughs with dreadful clarity, flashing her carnivore’s overbite, setting off ripples of laughter around us. “Wet!” she exclaims to her audience. “Looks more like slime!” It is a moment of debacle that strikes my idolatrous heart with a complicated mixture of pleasure and pain. And it leaves me strangely without bitterness—in memory merely becoming a static, faintly allegorical scene, like an engraving in an old pornographic book.

  * * *

  A few months afterward, I watch Gus in a movie that must still exist in some school archive. Shot by Edie for an art project, it’s a five-minute eight millimeter that shows Gus with a boyfriend, a cousin. There is a beach of egg-sized granite pebbles; the Maine sea crumpling like gray taffeta beyond; two improbably beautiful teenagers (who seem mature and sophisticated to me) in foul-weather jackets, mugging for the camera with the energy of a pair of healthy young setters. The whites of their eyes are as clear as skim milk. He feeds her a stone, she dumps seaweed on his head; even through the amateurish focus comes a sense of the aimless reciprocity of perfect happiness. Like any spectator I anticipate with relish the doom of that happiness, doom Edie tells me has existed from the start in the big shingled summer houses barely visible in the background of the film, houses full of aunts and uncles who play New England Montagues and Capulets. Edie’s film doesn’t show, but somehow implies, the endless family councils on inbreeding and the real-life medieval finish, in which Gus is packed off to college in France. The film earns Edie an A in art. I make her show it to me three times.

  * * *

  At about the same time I wear one of Gus’s old dresses to the May dance at school. As if by chance, not even admitting anything to myself, I’ve chosen it over an array of my own dresses, out of a mass of things from a closet at Edie’s house. The dress is apple green satin with silver buttons, too large for me in the bust and in every way so extremely unbecoming that it seems like a statement of some kind. There is a snapshot of me wearing it, standing in my garden before the dance, and my expression is both dreamy and stubborn.

  * * *

  Four years pass, and I attend a wedding in Rhode Island, in a small brown Episcopalian church with a view of Narragansett Bay. A cool clear July day, sunlight on the pearls of the Philadelphia and Providence aunts crowding the church, Gus in old lace and wildflowers in front of the altar. She has cropped her hair to an inch long and looks disturbingly fey, like a garlanded Peter Pan. The mascara on her lashes stands out against blanched cheeks. She wears a slightly demented look of joy. Beside her is a Frenchman, who exactly fits the image I carry in my brain under the heading “Frenchman”: dark, brachycephalic, handsome; with a short man’s swagger and a brilliant smile that makes a sudden white rift in a face tanned the color of walnuts. The intelligence circulating like a breeze through the groves of the aunts is that this is a choice far more imprudent than marrying a cousin. This ravishing niece from the poor end of the family might have recouped many things with a judicious marriage. But instead of being the kind of Frenchman she could well aspire to—a baron with rolling vineyards, a vulgar but fetchingly solvent property developer with half of the Côte d’Azur in his pocket—the man is a travel agent and tour leader, who first wooed Gus over the Atlantic, with champagne swiped from First Class. An accomplished charmer trailing an untidy string of ex-wives and girlfriends, he knows enough to disarm the aunts with boasts of his peasant roots. He is from the Vercors, the high plateau where the French resistance fighters hid in limestone caves.

  Edie and I are photographing the wedding, and we have dressed like men, in white linen trousers and jackets and bow ties. We
want to look original and decadent and hope to upstage the bride. I am in college now, my virginity long gone, sure of my looks and puffed up with the importance of my own romantic dramas. My schoolgirl crush seems as distant as chicken pox. This is confirmed after the cake and the toasts, when people are getting seriously drunk on a lawn that runs down to a private dock, and the bridegroom comes up to me. “That outfit doesn’t work,” he says in French. “You should show off your body.”

  He looks me over with the matter-of-fact brazenness of a man who feels entitled to any woman at any time. And suddenly—the novelty of this feeling is breathtaking—I am afraid for Gus. The newlyweds sail off in a Herreshoff sloop that, like the sweeping lawns and the long gabled house sprawled above, seems to be part of Gus’s dowry but in reality belongs to yet another distant relative. Before leaving they stand on the dock, the groom’s arm tightly around her, swapping jokes in French with the crowd. Tipsy uncles are hollering colloquialisms. “He never calls me darling,” Gus complains gigglingly to her audience. “Il m’appelle sa boudin: he calls me his blood sausage.”

  * * *

  Now this tale skips years and continents and alights in the middle of a wet autumn in a working-class suburb of Paris near Orly Airport. Jets take off overhead, so close that you can see the wheels retracting into their bellies, drowning out sounds of life in the narrow streets where sycamore trees are cropped into knobs like arthritic hands, and small houses with pointed tile roofs stand behind meager fences in gardens the width of hallway carpets. Gus’s wrought-iron gate is enameled a flaking tan, and has an annoying long French key that must turn four times before the gate opens with a metallic groan. She has given me the key because I am staying with her since I walked out on my Parisian boyfriend after a summer of love and literature at the Sorbonne.