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Mislaid
Nell Zink


‘Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.’ Jonathan FranzenVirginia, 1966. The motionless deeps of the lake outside Stillwater College are being ruffled. Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, is determinedly fondling Peggy, an ingénue freshman with literary pretensions, in his canoe. So begins a long affair but the two are mismatched from the start.The story that follows rocks the boat in every sense. Nell Zink’s hugely entertaining, totally unique Mislaid explodes the nuclear family and topples every foundation of identity – black and white, gay and straight, “normal” and very very strange…










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Copyright (#uc1e799b4-f6ed-592e-9113-16be357aa2eb)


Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

First published in the United States by Ecco in 2015

Text © Nell Zink 2015

Nell Zink asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

Cover photograph © The Image Bank/Getty Images

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Source ISBN: 9780008139605

Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780008157814

Version: 2016-03-22




Contents


Cover (#u28a6421a-0ab1-56d0-bbf7-402d733d2276)

Title Page (#ulink_d3a8ea83-dcbc-5fed-88b7-65c51431106c)

Copyright (#ulink_55c1c852-ddd2-5f36-be82-11c8fbc640e5)

Dedication (#ulink_e485eca8-0790-5621-80f9-5258fc4e6555)

Epigraph (#ulink_511b7d72-9760-553b-a50e-63387c330243)

One (#ulink_226ba597-4fc0-5761-9f27-bfc909ab6b87)

Two (#ulink_e6946fb6-692a-5643-b18e-b7fa501fbeca)

Three (#ulink_dbc40953-3d55-5a50-9f7d-44133931896c)

Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Nell Zink (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Dedication (#uc1e799b4-f6ed-592e-9113-16be357aa2eb)


My life would be harder

without the magnificent collective

Zeitenspiegel Reportagen,

to whose members and supporters

I gratefully dedicate this book




Epigraph (#uc1e799b4-f6ed-592e-9113-16be357aa2eb)


… among the rabble—men,

Lion ambition is chained down—

And crouches to a keeper’s hand—

Not so in deserts, where the grand—

The wild—the terrible, conspire

With their own breath to fan his fire.

—E. A. Poe, “Tamerlane”




One (#uc1e799b4-f6ed-592e-9113-16be357aa2eb)


Stillwater College sat on the fall line south of Petersburg. One half of the campus was elevated over the other half, and the waters above were separated from the waters below by a ledge with stone outcroppings. The waters below lay still, and the waters above flowed down. They seeped into the sandy ground before they had time to form a stream. And that’s why the house had been named Stillwater. It overlooked a lake that lay motionless as if it had been dug with shovels and hand-lined with clay. But the lake had been there as long as anyone could remember. It had no visible outlet, and no docks because a piling might puncture the layer of clay. Nobody swam in the lake because of the leeches in the mud. There was no fishing because girls don’t fish.

The house had been a plantation. After the War Between the States it was turned into a school for girls, and after that a teachers’ college, and in the 1930s a women’s college. In the 1960s it was a mecca for lesbians, with girls in shorts standing in the reeds to smoke, popping little black leeches with their fingers, risking expulsion for cigarettes and going in the lake.

The road from the main highway forked and branched like lightning. You had to know where Stillwater was to find it. Strangers drove to the town of Stillwater, parked their cars, and walked around. They thought a college ought to be impossible to miss in a town that small. But people in Stillwater didn’t think you had any business going to the college if you didn’t know where it was. It was a dry county, and so small anyway that most businesses didn’t have signs. If you wanted even a haircut, or especially a drink, you had to know where to find it. The biggest sign in the county was for the colored snack bar out on the highway, Bunny Burger. The sign for Stillwater College was nailed to the fence by the last turnoff, where you could already see the outbuildings.

The main house faced the lake. The academic buildings and the dorms were behind the main house around a courtyard. All the girls lived on campus. From the loop road, little dirt tracks took off in all directions, leading to the faculty housing where the station wagons sat crooked in potholes under big oak trees.

The reason strangers came looking for Stillwater was a famous poet. He had a job there as an English professor, and was so well respected that other famous poets came all the way to Stillwater to read to his classes. Tommy, the smartass owner of the white snack bar in town, called them “international faggotry” and always asked them if they wanted mayonnaise with their coffee.

Peggy Vaillaincourt was born in 1948 near Port Royal, north of Richmond, an only child. Her parents were well-off but lived modestly, devoting their lives to the community. Her father was an Episcopal priest and the chaplain of a girls’ boarding school. Her mother was his wife—a challenging full-time job. This was before psychologists and counseling, so if a girl lost her appetite or a woman felt guilty after a D&C, she would come to Mrs. Vaillaincourt, who felt important as a result. The Reverend Vaillaincourt felt important all the time, because he was descended from a family that had sheltered John Wilkes Booth.

The Vaillaincourts had a nice brick mansion on campus. Peggy went to the local white public school to avoid a conflict of interest. Her mother had gone to Bryn Mawr and regretted not sending Peggy to a better school. “Can’t you imagine a college that’s academically a little more intellectual?” she asked Peggy. “What about Wellesley?” But Peggy wanted to go to Stillwater.

It came about like this: Her PE teacher, Miss Miller, had said something about her gym suit, and Peggy had realized she was intended to be a man. Gym suits were blue and baggy, but as you got older, they were less baggy and sort of cut into your crotch in a way that was suggestive of something, she didn’t know what. Miss Miller had stood in front of her and yanked her gym suit into position by pulling down on the legs. She placed her big hands around Peggy’s waist and said something to the effect that her gym suit had never fit her right and never would.

She had felt close to Miss Miller since the day she fell down in third grade and knocked out a tooth. Miss Miller dragged her to the bathroom to wash the blood off her mouth, and the tooth went down the drain. “There goes a nickel from the tooth fairy,” Peggy had said. Miss Miller dug into her pocket and produced a quarter. No other adult had ever given her so much money all at one time. The scene was stuck indelibly in the child Peggy’s mind. Her allowance was nine cents—a nickel and five pennies, of which she was required to put one in the collection plate.

Realizing that her girlhood was a mistake didn’t change her life immediately. She could still ride, play tennis, go camping with the scouts, fish for crappie, and shoot turtles with a BB gun. Around age fourteen, it got more complicated. She informed her best friend, Debbie, that she intended to join the army out of high school. She knew Debbie from Girl Scout camp. Debbie was from Richmond, a large and diverse city. “You’re a thespian,” Peggy heard her say. “Get away from me.” Debbie picked up her blanket and moved to the other side of the room. Then Peggy’s life changed. Debbie had taught her to French kiss and dance shoeing the mule, knowledge that was supposed to arm them for a shared conquest of debutante balls. And now this. Betrayal. Debbie never spoke to her again. Peggy told her mother.

“A thespian,” her mother said, bemused. “Well, darling, everybody gets crushes.” Her mother was from the generation that thought a girl’s first love is always a tomboyish older girl. She gave Peggy Cress Delahanty to read. It was counterproductive. “You are not, absolutely not, going to join the army. Do you hear me? You are going to college. Get this out of your system. You’ll laugh at yourself someday.” Her mother suspected her of having a girlfriend already, and sent off for brochures about early admission to Radcliffe. She didn’t believe in coeducation, but her daughter’s plight called for desperate measures.

But Peggy didn’t have a girlfriend. Once she accepted an invitation from Miss Miller to a barbecue at the state park. There were only women there and no other girls. She recognized the woman everybody said was the maintenance man at the elementary school. It was indirectly her fault that Peggy thought of “man” as a job title. They were playing softball and taking it really seriously, hitting the ball so hard you could get hurt. Peggy left the party to play horseshoes with kids from the Baptist church instead and get a ride home on their bus.

She began paying more attention to the thespians at school. They were fat girls and nice boys with scarves around their necks under their shirts. She auditioned for a part in Our Town and didn’t get it. Afterward the drama club went to the drugstore for milkshakes, and the director, a senior, explained to her about lesbians. He chuckled and shook his head a lot. Everybody else laughed so loud that Peggy felt inconspicuous, despite the topic. His voice was almost a whisper. “You and your friend Miss Miller are bull dykes. You should go to dyke bars in Washington. Or Stillwater College.”

“Miss Miller is not my friend!”

After that, word got back to Peggy’s mother, and Miss Miller and the maintenance man were fired and moved away. Peggy insisted Miss Miller had never done anything untoward. Becoming a man and a thespian had been her idea. Her mother said, “You have chosen a very difficult life for yourself.” Then they shopped for patterns, because Peggy’s debut was coming up and, lesbian or no lesbian, you had to have a tea-length off-the-shoulder dress made of boiled cotton with a flower print and tulle underskirts. Cutoff overalls were fine for hunting turtles in the woods, but even Peggy wanted to be pretty for cotillion. In the end she was so pretty she stopped herself cold. She stood in front of the full-length mirror in the ladies’ dressing room at the Jefferson Hotel in her slip and silk stockings and felt an almost overwhelming need to masturbate. She adjudged herself the prettiest girl she’d ever seen. “I feel pretty, oh so pretty,” she sang instead, waltzing with her dress as though it were a girl. Pinocchia, granted her wish. Someone to love. Then she graduated and went off to Stillwater.

For freshman orientation she bobbed her hair and took up smoking cigarillos. She had bought some new outfits at an army surplus store. She did not question her childhood equation of liking girls with being a man, and in black khakis and a black crew-neck sweater, she found herself rough, tough, and intimidating. She looked darling. The short cut made her curly hair form a crown of soft ringlets. She regarded her narrow hips and flat chest as boyish, but in 1965 they were chic.

Also, as much as she wanted to be a man, she was revolted by hairiness, fat bellies, belching, vulgarity, etc. Her slim father wore ascots and got manicures. His face was soft and his shirts had monogrammed cuffs. She thought black penny loafers with white socks à la Gene Kelly was the epitome of working-class butch.

The campus was a complete universe. You never had to leave. There were visiting boyfriends and girlfriends from other schools, parties and mixers, intercollegiate sports, a mess hall and a commissary, even a soda fountain. As self-contained as an army base. But no basic training. No cleaning, no cooking. The work you had to do consisted of things like ponder Edna St. Vincent Millay. If you screwed it up, they didn’t criticize you. They invited you to their offices, offered you sherry, and asked you what was wrong.

I can’t believe it, Peggy thought. My parents are paying for me to do this for four years. If you majored in French, you could spend your third year at the Sorbonne. But the seniors who had been away came back looking lost. New cliques had formed without them, and their French friends never visited. Peggy took Spanish instead. She decided to major in creative writing. She wanted to write plays for her fellow thespians.

Peggy’s roommate was a girl from Newport News whose father was in Vietnam. This girl was used to a strict, confining regimen. She obeyed Peggy to the letter. If Peggy said “Your alarm clock goes off too early,” the girl would set it an hour later. If Peggy said “I like your pjs,” the girl would iron them and wear them all weekend. It didn’t make her terribly interesting. Peggy was attracted to a sophomore from Winchester who was boarding her horse at a stable up in the hills. This girl routinely wore fawn jodhpurs and ankle boots, and every day for breakfast she ate ice cream, which the cook kept for her in the freezer. Because her valuable horse needed to be ridden every afternoon, she was permitted to have a car. Seniors were allowed cars, but only if they were on the honor roll with no demerits. Since among seniors demerits were considered a badge of honor, the sophomore Emily was currently the only student allowed to drive. She was majoring in art history and planned to join her father’s import-export business.

Peggy stared at her and smiled until she was invited to sit in the passenger seat of her Chrysler New Yorker, parked behind the former dairy barn. Emily talked about her horse. After a while Peggy, turned toward Emily with her hands in her lap, struggling to concentrate and look fetching at the same time, felt her soul rebel. She thought she had never heard—or even heard of—anything so boring in her life, outside of church. Peggy tried mentioning a class they were in together. She mentioned the town she grew up in. She mentioned a movie she had seen recently and wondered if Emily had seen it. Eventually she said, “I didn’t really come out here to talk about horse shows.”

That was a mistake. Emily looked at the windshield and said, “Then you’re stupid, because you like me, and that’s what I want to talk about.”

Peggy got out of the car and walked into the trees. She heard the car door slam and saw Emily pull away around the corner of the barn. The beeches were starting to turn yellow and the Virginia creeper was already fire-engine red. Peggy consoled herself with their appearance, as she thought a more sensitive person might.

The famous poet at the college was named Lee Fleming. He was a young local man who had given his family a lot of trouble growing up. After boarding school they sent him to college far away in New York City. When they heard of his doings up there, they gave him an ultimatum: stop dragging the family name in the dirt, or be cut off without a cent.

Lee hadn’t been conscious up until then that he had anything to gain by being a Fleming. That is, he hadn’t realized he didn’t have money of his own.

His parents were wealthy. But he had expectations and an allowance, not money. His father suggested he move to a secluded place. Queer as a three-dollar bill doesn’t matter on posted property. Lee’s father was a pessimist. He imagined muscle-bound teaboys doing bad things to Lee, and he didn’t want passersby to hear the screaming. He offered him the house on the opposite side of Stillwater Lake from the college.

It was a wood-frame Victorian Lee’s grandfather got for nothing during the Depression. It had been disassembled where it stood and rebuilt on a brick foundation facing the lake. It was supposed to be a summer place. But it was inconvenient to get to, far from any city, swarming with deerflies, and instead of a boathouse, it had a thicket of bamboo. So nobody ever used the house. It just stood there on Fleming land, taking up space. Still, when it came time to clear-cut the trees and sell them for the war effort, Mr. Fleming couldn’t bring himself to do it. The house looked so nice with big maples and tulip poplars around it. The trail to the water led through suggestive shoots of old bamboo big around as juice cans.

Lee was not the man his family took him for. As a lover he was a faithful romantic, always getting his feelings hurt. But he was a top. He never could get it right. He could put on a broadcloth shirt and gray slacks and wingtips and look as much a man as an Episcopalian ever does, but then he would place himself squarely in front of total strangers, maintaining eye contact as he spoke to them of poetry. So everybody in the county was calling him a fairy inside of a month. But he was a Fleming, and a top. He was untouchable. The local Klan wizard worked at his father’s sawmill. The Pentecostal preacher lived in his father’s trailer park. The worshipful master of the Prince Hall Masonic lodge drove one of his father’s garbage trucks. The county seat was in a crossing called Fleming Courthouse, and the Amoco station was Fleming’s American. No one openly begrudged him a house in the woods by a lake with no fishing.

Lee was serious about poetry. He thought America was where all the most important work of the 1960s was being done. He really meant it, and could explain it. John Ashbery, Howard Nemerov, and his favorite, Robert Penn Warren. Then the Beats. He had met them all in New York, and they all had a weakness for handsome Southerners who owned counties.

At first Lee had nothing to do with the college. But then a poet friend remarked that a girls’ college in the middle of nowhere sounds like something from Fellini, and he got an idea. He asked the English department to pay for a visit from Gregory Corso.

Poets came all the way from Richmond to hear him. But the girls stayed cool and distant, even through “Marriage.” Corso went back to New York and told people Lee lived in a time capsule where Southern womanhood was not dead. Two publishers and a novelist transferred their daughters to Stillwater.

In short, the college helped Lee and Lee helped the college, and they signed him up to teach a poetry course. He didn’t ask for a salary at first. Instead he asked the college to pay for his literary magazine, to be called Stillwater Review.

Three years later, the Stillwater Review was selling thousands of copies and keeping ten students busy reading submissions, and Lee was teaching three courses a semester: English poetry in the fall or American poetry in the spring, criticism, and a writing workshop.

He commuted to work in a canoe, rain or shine. When he pulled it up in front of his house, it plugged the gap in the bamboo like a garden gate. No student had ever been invited to the house. There were stories. John Ashbery shooting a sleeping whitetail fawn from a distance of three yards. Howard Nemerov on mescaline putting peppermint extract in spaghetti sauce. To hear one of the stories, you had to know someone from somewhere else who knew someone who had been invited—a cousin at Sarah Lawrence whose boyfriend’s brother was queer. Stillwater Lake might as well have been the Berlin Wall.

Freshmen were not eligible for Lee Fleming’s writing workshop. You had to take his other courses first.

Peggy thought this a ridiculous barrier. “How am I supposed to understand poetry if I’ve never written any myself?” she said to Lee in the third week of her first semester in his cozy office in a garret of the main building.

“How do you expect to get into my workshop if you’ve never written a poem?”

“Aren’t you supposed to teach us?”

“You’ve already missed the first two meetings.”

“Can I audit?”

“It’s impossible to audit a workshop. You have to do the work.”

“So can I enroll?”

“Name me one poet you admire.”

“Anne Sexton.”

Lee leaned back. “Anne Sexton? Why?”

“She doesn’t sound so good, but she’s got something to say. I read Hopkins or Dylan Thomas and I think, These cats sound cool all right, but do they have something to say?”

“Maybe they’re saying something you don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand it.”

“That’s like saying, ‘Make me live.’ ”

“Then make me take your workshop.”

“No. You think poetry is supposed to be about you, and you don’t know how to read. If you can’t read Milton, you can’t read Dylan Thomas. Take my course in English poetry.”

“And read Milton? No, thanks.”

“Then you’ll never be my student.”

“I’m changing my major to French.”

“Don’t be childish.”

“Is it childish to know what you want?”

“I want you to take my course,” Lee began, then stopped, realizing he had said something unusual and slightly embarrassing.

Peggy stood glaring at him, and he glared back.

She offered him a cigarillo. She sat down on the edge of his desk to light it for him, leaning over gracefully with her hands cupped around the match, a smiling seventeen-year-old girl with curly hair like springs, and he realized he had a hard-on.

“Forget the whole thing,” Peggy was saying. “I can write plays without your help. I don’t even need Anne Sexton’s help. Screw her and Milton and the horse they rode in on.”

“Sounds like a natural-born writer to me,” he said. “I would very much appreciate your taking my course in English poetry.”

“I was serious. I don’t want in your workshop, even if it means I never see you again.”

He looked around as if to indicate their surroundings—the Stillwater campus, all eight acres of it—and laughed.

Peggy didn’t take his course. A week later she accepted his invitation to kneel in the front of his canoe while he pushed off from the marshy, leech-infested bank with a paddle. The first thing he said was “This is not a date.” Then he moved toward her in the darkness and pulled her hips toward his, sliding his hands down the sides of her butt, and kissed her, because to be honest with himself (as he became much later), he didn’t know any other mode of behavior in the canoe. The canoe tipped from side to side and Peggy was very still and solemn. It was so exciting he couldn’t figure it out. She was androgynous like the boys he liked, but she made him wonder if he liked boys or just had been meeting the wrong kind of girl. He thought about her genitalia and decided it didn’t make much difference. Her body was female, female, female. Everywhere he touched, it curved away from him, fleeing. He felt between her legs, and it vanished. The abyss.

Peggy felt she was being held in the palm of God’s hand. Not because he was a famous poet and the most respected teacher at her school, but because he was a man and powerful, physically. In all her fantasies she’d been the man, and had to please some pleading lover. But now a person had voluntarily dedicated himself to serving her desires. She had never expected that, ever. It violated her work ethic. She felt a wish to speak and opened her eyes, and the poet in the black mackintosh was staring down into them, rain beating down around them, and they were surrounded on every side by water. It was a good bit more sexy and romantic than she had dared to imagine anything.

Each was mystified, but for very different reasons. Peggy had thought she would die a virgin and had never given a moment’s thought to birth control. And now it looked as though she might be a virgin for maybe ten more minutes. “I’m a virgin,” she said.

“That can be taken care of,” Lee said.

“No, I mean it,” she said. “This is a big deal. You have to promise me.”

“I promise you everything.” He kissed her. “Everything.”

He was mystified that he would say something like that to anyone—male, female, eunuch, hermaphrodite, sheep, tree. He looked her in the eyes and decided she wasn’t paying attention.

He landed the canoe and carried her into the house.

Peggy was young and her patience for sexual activity was just about infinite. Her sex drive was strong, plus pent up, since she’d been looking at girls and thinking about fucking them for five solid years. And Lee was no slouch either. Between his teaching only three courses and her willingness to skip class, they found a lot of time to inhabit his conversation pit as well as the bed that hung on brass chains from the ceiling and the Bengal tiger skin. Sometimes they talked, and sometimes he just sat and typed while she went through the bookshelves, reading Genet and Huysmans but mostly thinking about what she thought about all the time now: sex with Lee. She was feeling new feelings, emotional and physical, new pains and longings, and she couldn’t make notes—there was no point; there was no way you could work them into a play, and somebody might find them and read them—but she kept careful track of them, mentally.

Being a lesbian had given her practice keeping secrets. She walked to his house through the woods even when it took her two hours. Or she waited by the road for his car. Moonless nights in Stillwater were dark as the inside of a cow. When he didn’t have time to see her, she would sit on a bench overlooking the lake and stare at his bamboo.

Lee had promised Peggy everything, but he hadn’t thought to include a promise that she wouldn’t be kicked out of school for fraternization. Lee sleeping with a student was a scandal, and it had to be stopped. Lee was in loco parentis, but he was also indispensable. Thus Peggy was deemed to have found her calling. Girls quit coed schools to get married all the time. That’s what they go there for—to get their MRS degree. Stillwater was supposed to be different, but any school could let in the wrong girl. They asked her not to come back after Christmas vacation.

It was a difficult discussion with her mother. Peggy thought she was bringing good news. Not a lesbian. Shacking up with a famous poet. Quitting that third-rate college. Her life was back on track. Right?

Her mother shook her head with red-rimmed eyes. “I knew you would regret choosing to be a lesbian. But you are making the wrong choice, honey. I wanted you to get an education. Now you’re seventeen and there’s nothing I can do.”

Her father said, “You’re saving me a bundle, you know that? You’re Lee Fleming’s problem now, and I wish him luck.”

“How am I Lee’s problem? I’m going to transfer to another school! I applied to the New School for Social Research!”

Her father rolled his eyes. To him it was a cruel joke being played on him by his supervisor God. A social superior with an intellectual bent and a fortune in land: he had prayed many times for a husband like that for Peggy.

Peggy’s mother’s parting gift was a trip to the gynecologist. Peggy had never seen a gynecologist before and didn’t like it. He was supposed to fit her with a diaphragm. Instead he took one look at her cervix and said, “Miss Vaillaincourt, you are fixing to have a baby and I would say it’s not going to take so long that you shouldn’t get married at the earliest possible opportunity.” She said she didn’t want a baby, and he repeated the sentence word for word with the same exact identical intonation, like a machine.

Lee saw it coming. She came back from Christmas vacation looking bloated. He reflected that he had fucked her nearly every day since September. He asked, “Punky, don’t you ever get the curse?” She broke down and begged him for a Mexican abortion. “Why would you do that?” he said. “I’d give my child a name.” She stared in horror like he was a giant spider, then clasped her fists against her abdomen and moaned like a cow. “Are you feeling sick? That’s all right, it’s normal.”

He hadn’t anticipated having a wedding at all, ever, but he felt up to the task. Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens.

It was up to Peggy’s parents to pay for the wedding. Peggy got as far as asking them. Her mother called her Lee’s doxy and said the baby would be born deformed because Flemings marry their cousins. Her father gave her five hundred dollars and sighed.

Lee consulted his old friend Cary. They had grown up as neighbors. Cary was older and richer and fey, with a hobby of arranging flowers and a habit of getting into difficult situations with straight men. They made a date at a gay bar under a hardware store in Portsmouth.

“Urbanna is the place for a wedding,” Cary said. “Rent the beach and I’ll organize us some swan boats. They’ve got the whitest sand beach in Tidewater, and we’ll jam Christ Church full of magnolias until it goes pop.”

“Swan boats? What are you, drunk?”

Cary folded his arms and said, “Then get married in Battle Abbey with a reception in the yard. See if I care.”

“Swan boats would drift out to the river. They have wings like sails, and no keel.”

“You want the swan boats.” Cary pointed at him and announced the news to the empty bar. “Fleming wants the swan boats!”

“I want an honor guard from VMI, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get it. What I need is for three hundred people to know my beautiful bride is with child, and then clear out while we go on our honeymoon, and for that I need—what do I need, man? I’m asking you. You think I do this all the time?”

“Bruton Parish Church. Then those of us of the non-marrying persuasion retire to the Williamsburg Inn for mint ‘giblets,’ and you drive down to Hatteras with what’s-her-name.”

“Peggy.”

“Then you take the Peglet down to Nags Head and get her pregnant again.”

“She’s pregnant now. There’s no double pregnant.”

“Then you lay back and watch her get fatter.”

“It’s not fat. It’s a Fleming. And we’re going to Charleston.”

“In January?”

“Spring break.”

“She’s going to be fat as a tick by March. Big old body, little arms and legs.”

The door of the Cockpit flew open and four sailors came in, pushing and shoving their way down the narrow stairway. Lee immediately turned to face them and Cary tugged on his arm. “Whoa, Nelly. You’re a married man.”

“I got a right to a bachelor party, ain’t I?”

Lee wrote a poem with swan boats in it to get them out of his system, and addressed himself to the fact that he had gotten Peggy out of his system. The easy joy and the joyful ease of sex with men, their easy-access genitalia, their uncomplicated inner lives … He knew there were women who lived like that, even beautiful and very interesting women, but they didn’t appeal to him at all. He wanted the needy staring beforehand and the tears of worshipful gratitude afterward, as though every orgasm were a reprieve from a death sentence. He just didn’t want it all the time.

He had had as much sex with Peggy as a person can have, and that was enough. She was hanging around his house doing her best to keep out of his way, like she was afraid of him. She felt nauseated, existentially and otherwise. She didn’t want to get on his nerves. She felt dependent. And she was. She was depending on him to do an awful lot of things, like marry her, raise her child, send her to school in New York, and finance the rest of her existence until the day she died. She had a suspicion it might not work out that way.

He, too, knew he wouldn’t be sending her away to finish school. But he knew the real reason: The college paid him two thousand dollars a year, and that was the extent of his income. He didn’t have a trust fund, just the prospect of inheriting from a happy-go-lucky fifty-four-year-old father who was more likely to die skiing than get sick before he turned eighty. It was no coincidence that famous authors came to visit him and not the other way around, or that he served his guests spaghetti. But quand même. The best things in life are free. A round of billiards with sailors is more beautiful than Charleston in springtime, if they’re the right sailors.

Peggy began writing a play. She got as far as the names after “DRAMATIS PERSONAE.” She wanted to draw on Arthurian mythology, the Questing Beast and the Fisher King, and got stuck on Guinevere. She imagined Joan Baez, without the shrill voice and the guitar, arms out like the Virgin of Guadalupe, and there wasn’t much Arthurian about it. It was Mexican. She thought a lot about Mexico in those days. The freedom down there, the eternal springtime, women scampering across desert hillsides like roadrunners. February was so cold that Stillwater Lake froze solid and her former classmates began sliding over and peeking up at the house through the gap in the bamboo. Emily actually walked up on the back porch and opened the storm door and knocked hard, five times. But without taking off her skates, and she was gone like a shot. Then it thawed and Peggy was alone again.

For a lesbian, Lee’s house was cold turkey. You could go months without seeing a woman. Not that it mattered if your plan of being a pencil-thin seductress in black had unexpectedly given way to frying pancakes in a plaid bathrobe. She liked it best when there were visiting poets. They never minded if you sat near them and just listened to them talk. It was impossible to think of anything to say that might interest them, because they weren’t interested in conversations with topics. They went out of their way to generate non sequiturs, occasionally playing a game they called Exquisite Corpse where you string together stories not even knowing what they’re about. One of them brought along a Ouija board and let spirits write his poems. He would have let even Peggy write his poems if Lee hadn’t looked at her and frowned.

At first she wondered why they were all so rich. When one of them forgot his watch or left a cashmere sweater balled up in the corner of a sofa, he would never call to ask about it. Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire. She wanted to write plays that would blow people’s minds, but he didn’t want anything. His poems just were, and that’s what made them so good and her plays bad.

Peggy thought about the poets’ ability to fund their own publications and wasn’t so sure. Lee had a friend with a printing press—not Linotype or the new offset kind, but movable type made of lead—and with it he could make anything Lee wrote look valuable. And the Stillwater Review could turn anything into poetry just by publishing it, even forty-one reiterations of “c*nt” arranged in the shape of the Empire State Building. “Poets were not put here to put labels on the world,” he explained to her. “If that poem is about anything, it’s about the act of reading. To cite it for obscenity, you’d have to say what it means, which is why I can publish it.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “It turns cunts into a penis.”

“Cunts were made for penises. What you do with yours is your business, but those are the facts. Nothing else was ever made for penises. Never slowed me down. It’s a free country.” He lit up a Tareyton and blew a smoke ring that nearly crossed the room.

Peggy was inexperienced, but a feeling of unease told her things were not necessarily going to end well.

The spring was a little warmer than usual. By April you could drink and bullshit with poets around the fire all night. She had thought poets were different, but by then she knew they just bullshit like good old boys everywhere. You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour. They’d refuse, or maybe the ones who were closet homosexuals would say yes, but they all could have done it, and better than college girls, because college girls have inhibitions to get over. The people who talked revolution made out like if you just overcame whatever was holding you back inside, you’d be free. But you’d just be a wino in front of a drugstore, saying whatever came into your head in the most provocative way you could think of, repeating and refining it because how else were you going to kill a hundred and fifty thousand hours until your father died in a crash. The poets reminded her of barflies, in love with their own wisecracks, stiffing the bartender because they don’t know what work is. But freedom isn’t speaking your mind freely. Freedom is having the money to go to Mexico.

“Jesus, Peggy. You can’t abort a seven-month baby. That’s infanticide. You need to get your daddy down here with a shotgun, because I keep on forgetting to marry you. And I do want to marry you.”

“So marry me now.” Peggy had heard of alimony. She wasn’t sure how much you get and if it’s enough to live on, but it had to be better than being an unwed teenage mother. She was barely eighteen and wouldn’t be grown up for three more years. They could have put her in a home for wayward girls.

“Dare me,” Lee said.

“I double-dare you with whipped cream and a cherry on top.”

He called a magistrate and arranged to be married the next afternoon for fifteen dollars.




Two (#uc1e799b4-f6ed-592e-9113-16be357aa2eb)


When she had the baby, she couldn’t believe how beautiful he was. Rhys! She picked the name out all by herself. Labor was easy, no worse than cramps, which always made her feel like she was giving birth to a calf, then five hours in the hospital and there he was. He lay on a little cart, wrapped up in blue blankets, while she drank juice. Lee’s mother picked him up and said, “Welcome to the world, little Harry!”

“What are you doing, Mrs. Fleming?” Peggy said. “Give me my baby.”

“You didn’t really want this baby, did you now. Not from what I hear.”

“Lee!” she yelled. “Lee!”

Lee came in from the hallway. “Yes, dear? Well, would you look at that. My lord. What a sweetheart. Just look at him. Aw. Cleans up real nice.”

“His name is Rhys,” Peggy said. “Rhys Byrd Fleming. Do you like it?”

“But we’re christening him Harry,” Lee’s mother said.

“Moms, drop it. This is my wife. I’m his father. This not y’all’s baby. This my baby! Yes, sir! Who’s my baby!” He took Rhys and kissed him on the cheek, then leaned down and kissed Peggy.

“Well, we’ll be happy to help take care of him, if you need any help,” Lee’s mother said.

“You know what,” Peggy said, “I think it’s time I tried feeding him. Could we have a little time alone?”

“Yes, could you weigh anchor, darling?” Lee said.

“I’ll go fix you some formula,” his mother said, looking around for supplies. “Don’t tell me you’re going to—no. I refuse to believe it.”

“It’s the natural way,” Peggy said. “It’s good for him.”

“You’ll be tied to that baby like a ball and chain. You can’t let him out of your sight and no one can help you with him. No self-respecting woman does that. It’s like turning yourself into an animal.”

“I got news for you, lady. Guess where he came from.”

“Don’t get all in a snit,” Lee said.

“But that’s exactly it,” his mother said. “You don’t know the chemical composition. There could be anything in there. It’s unscientific.”

“Science gave us the bomb and DDT,” Peggy said.

“Moms,” Lee said, pushing his mother toward the door, “please just let us handle this. It will be fine. It will be right as rain. Little Rhys Byrd here is a Fleming. If anybody can survive mother’s milk, he can. She’s just, I don’t know,” he said, turning to Peggy as he looked for a word, “anxious. It’s her first grandchild.”

“She sure acts like an expert.”

“Well, she raised me. That’s what makes me think anyone can do it.”

There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgment.

She settled in with baby Byrdie. She did all the housework. She did more laundry than had ever been done before at Lee’s house, and by September you could see exactly where on the front lawn the septic system was, traced out in darker bluegrass.

She couldn’t fit into the clothes she’d bought for school, so she wore Lee’s polo shirts. She seldom got around to washing her hair, and it seemed to be coming uncurled. Her breasts were heavy and sore. But she felt that the thing that was terribly wrong with her would soon be all right. The thing that was wrong with her was so right about Lee and Byrdie that she figured it didn’t matter. They were in perfect health and looked like they belonged in magazine advertisements for shirts and baby food, respectively. She looked like their maintenance man.

Lee had visitors who sat by the fire and bullshitted until long after Peggy fell asleep. She didn’t know what they did after she went to bed, but she didn’t care. She was as exhausted every night as if she’d played five hours of flag football. By the time Byrdie was eight months old, he was moving around so fast she was having to chase him. You couldn’t have gates and childproofing in a house like that. There were a million things he could have killed himself on. Landings with loose rugs, big glass vases done up as lamps. Peggy spent most of her time upstairs in the playroom, keeping him cleaned and fed. She was made to bring out the baby and accept praise for her work as if she were a being of a slightly lower social class—which she was. A woman. Even if they hadn’t all been gay men and thus more or less not interested in her at all, almost blind to her existence; even if they had been models of chivalry, rushing to pick up things she dropped and giving her flowers, instead of bullshitting parasites who thought they had invented crass vulgarity before inventing maudlin sentimentality as a foil (exposure to them was making Peggy at once articulate and sullen), a monosyllabic high school graduate in an oversized polo shirt with baby food on it was not going to get their attention. She couldn’t pose around in pedal pushers and offer them cigarillos and sangria. She had given up smoking and drinking, and she didn’t think she was obliged to wear party clothes any more than a bathing suit and goggles. Mothering was a different activity. Everything in its proper time and place. When Byrdie was three, she would put him in nursery school and drive to New York to get her degree. She was purposely vague with herself about the exact details of what kind of nursery school takes kids for a semester at a time, but she was sure it would work out.

By the time Byrdie was two, Peggy had begun to forget why she first came to Stillwater. She thought of it simply as “the college” where she was a faculty wife, a fine and worthy social position. Pushing him in a shopping cart through the aisles at the Safeway, she felt that the other housewives looked at her with respect. Her social position at Safeway was better than it was at home. Strangers called her “Mrs. Fleming,” as though she wore a name tag.

On one occasion when she was feeling edgy and exhausted and her cartilage ached the way it sometimes did, she stopped off at the memorial park on her way home. It was the biggest public open space in the county. She drove up and down the long rows of granite grave markers set flush to the grass singing, “If you are going to San Francisco,” thinking about smothering Byrdie and taking the car and just running away. Her life could start over as it was meant to start—but how was that, pray tell? As a lesbian? What about those two or three months of fixation on sleeping with Lee? Is that what lesbians do? She looked back at Byrdie asleep on the back bench seat and said, “Byrdie boy, I love you so much.”

On the next occasion when she was feeling down and nasty, she drove to the state beach and sat on the sand with Byrdie for almost an hour, digging in the grit by her feet with a little piece of crab shell. She walked him along the waterline to look for fossil shark teeth. They found tin can lids and a lucky penny. The sky was clouding up. She did some shopping, drove home, parked next to a strange car, and walked right into a scene she had not expected: Lee and Emily, using the hanging bed from India.

“Fuck, Lee!” she screamed. He laughed and didn’t allow himself to be distracted. The baby was still in the car—a baby, unlike milk, won’t spoil in the heat—so she walked right back out of the house, got in the car, and drove to the college, thinking she didn’t know what. She wanted to rat him out. It had to be against college policy, a professor making one student after marrying a different student! She drove the loop road, looking for a familiar face, and pulled up in front of her old dorm and cried.

For Peggy it was a life of work, mostly. Occasionally she got creative. She made cuttings of the lilacs and forsythia at the college, rooted them in water, and stuck them out in rows around the edge of the yard.

Sometimes Lee got invited to give readings. As he explained, he wouldn’t have any time at all to devote to her at these other colleges in strange cities. Poets and professors would want to have late dinners with him, after his readings, and then they would probably stay up drinking until all hours. The compatibility with Byrdie’s habits was nil. The plane tickets were only for Lee. He didn’t have the money. A reading is not a business trip. It’s nonstop socializing. She was his wife, not an appendage.

She went along once, to a literary festival half an hour away at VCU. It was as bleak as he said. Byrdie had no patience for up-and-coming writers. Poetry made him throw toys that clattered on the linoleum. Too big for a stroller, he couldn’t be rolled captive around the business district. She ended up watching him play in a dry fountain, longing for home.

Lee felt that vacations were a chance for her to see her family, and that it would be ridiculous to go on expensive trips when you live in a country place so pretty that famous poets leave New York and Boston to spend entire weeks there. So their first real excursion as a family took them up to Westmoreland County, where Lee’s brother, Trip, had a place on the Potomac. For such a rich man, it was an awfully rustic house, built as a hunting lodge when men used to rough it. The woods were full of snags that were still allowing huge grubs to mature and reproduce, so that if you left the light on in the outdoor shower, you would find things sitting on the bar of soap in the morning that looked like they were from the Precambrian. Luna moths thudded against the screen like birds, trying to get at the porch light. Hemlock groves towered over wild myrtles and rhododendrons. Every sunny spot had its snake, black or green or copperhead. It was beautiful, creepy, threatening.

You couldn’t swim in the river, because the jellyfish were swarming, so Trip took his houseguests to Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert E. Lee. First he showed them the house in Pevsner’s book on architecture and emphasized its beauty and significance. After lunching at the restaurant they toured the estate, Peggy’s sidelong glance catching Lee’s reverential look when presented with the cradle in which the infant Robert E. had been laid after his birth. Lee was only eight years older than her, but at times like that, she felt you could really tell.

The tour concluded with a visit to the kitchen, where the white tour guide took a plate of gingersnaps from a silent black woman who never raised her head. The tour guide passed them out, giving Byrdie four cookies while everyone else got one.

When the plate was empty the black woman, whose nappy hair was greased back awkwardly and who seemed somehow a cripple or a hunchback although she was neither and had a pretty, tender face, rose again from her stool in the corner and carried the empty plate into another room.

Byrdie stared. He had never seen anyone like her. She was not an adult. Or was she? She wore a uniform or costume—a calico dress. “Is the colored lady a slave?” he asked Lee.

Everybody turned to laugh at Byrdie. The memory branded itself on his brain: the gales of laughter, everyone offering him their cookies, the slave woman with her eyes on the floor.

The second time Lee rubbed Peggy’s nose in an infidelity, she drove the same route she had years before, inexorably drawn to the college where her life had first jumped the tracks. It was about four years after the visit to Stratford.

By that time Byrdie had a little sister: Mireille. Lee didn’t seek sex often enough for Peggy to think she needed birth control. Sex only happened when Lee was in a certain strange, dramatic mood, acting out something Peggy could not grasp.

Then there she was. Born into ambiguity and ambivalence, an incontrovertible baby. Mireille at three was a sallow blonde with downy hair so white it was almost invisible. She clung to Peggy like a baby monkey most of the time. When she said “Daddy,” it didn’t sound like a request for love. She said “Daddy!” as though unpleasantly surprised. Two clipped syllables that seemed to encapsulate all her mother’s resentment, as if it had been passed along in utero. He would fill her bowl with applesauce and she’d say “Daddy!” and he had to add applesauce until she had more than Byrdie. Then she’d eat just the extra piled on at the end and push the rest away. Lee disliked her, but he expected her to grow on him sooner or later. She would get old enough to be more than just a reproachful bundle of petty envy that had grown on Peggy like a tumor. She might turn out to be a pretty, playful tumor that moved about under its own power. There’s something appealing about a narrow-minded, scheming blonde who plays with boys like a cat, Lee thought.

One day Peggy came home from the Safeway and walked in on a wasteland. Arms full of groceries, she scanned a little forest of pottery figurines at her feet as she walked through the living room to the kitchen. There was more pottery next to the trash can. She had made these statues at the college art center and considered them emblematic of her frustration as a housewife. They were pinched pyramidal figures with tiny round heads, done in dull shades of blue. Their necks were very thin and easy to break. Most of the heads were gathered in a pie tin on the floor.

“Lee!” she yelled. There was no answer. She set the groceries down and walked out the back door. And there he was, in a net muscle shirt, getting in the canoe with a boy. Making his getaway as soon as he heard the car, right in the middle of letting some teenager help him turn her sewing room into a weight room because she didn’t have time to do any sewing.

It was a betrayal of just about everything—her privacy, her pottery that was a cry for help intended to be heard by no one, her struggle to be a good mother and sew little dresses for Mireille. The intimacy she and Lee still shared. The vestiges of heterosexuality she occasionally saw in him and cosseted like rare orchids. All of it gone. The more sacrifices she made for her family, the more he took his power for granted. He got all the love in the world, and she got none at all.

She drove to the college. She had a vague notion of storming into his office and breaking something.

As she rounded the main building, she spied the grassy slope under the tulip poplars going down to Stillwater Lake, and she followed a mad impulse.

She stopped the car and said, “Byrdie, could you take Mickey and stand over there by that tree?”

He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and toted his little sister and her blanket over to the tree, warning her with a gesture to stay put, came back to close the car door, and rejoined her in the shade.

The lake made Peggy angry. It ought to be bringing Lee to her, on his knees in the canoe, to offer her an explanation and an apology. But the lake was empty, because Lee was not alone and would never come to the college dressed as his true self. He was back at the house by now, sweeping up her art with no pants on.

“Don’t move, Byrdie,” Peggy said. “This’ll just take a second.” She put the car—more precisely, Lee’s irreplaceable VW Thing—in second gear and drove slowly and deliberately into the water. She watched the water pour in around her feet and kept going. She revved the Thing until the wheels were in mud up past the axles, even up past the lower edge of the doors.

As the engine died she heard a sucking sound. The car was still moving forward and tilting.

Peggy felt an anxiety she had not anticipated. She had expected it to be like driving down a boat ramp. She floundered to shore, up to her knees in mud that ripped her shoes right off her feet, and turned to watch the car settle into place nose down, rear bumper in the air. Around it, a maelstrom was forming. It didn’t look like it would be easy to get back out.

A security guard ran up behind her to ask if she was all right.

“Where’s my kids? Byrdie, Mickey, c’mere. Come on, honey. It’s all right. I love you, baby. I just didn’t like that car.”

“You’re crazy, Mom. I’m going to tell Dad.”

“Now, sweetie, ain’t nobody crazier than your dad. We’re all crazy!”

The campus security officer asked, “Mrs. Fleming, are you saying that was not an accident?”

“Nope. That was theater of cruelty.”

The officer sighed and said, “Mrs. Fleming, you’re a card,” and they went together into the administrative building to call Lee. That was one advantage of being a wife. It was Lee’s job to discipline her, not that campus security would have involved the police in anything short of murder.

A week later, they got the car out with a farm tractor and some oak planks. It was doable only because the water in the lake had fallen to the level of the car’s submerged front axle, leaving a wide and hideous beach of glutinous brown slime. Mrs. Fleming was firmly established as a legend on campus, and Lee was …

… livid? Was he livid? Are there words to describe how Lee was? Less privileged men sometimes fancy themselves egotistical sociopaths, but they don’t know the half of it. They don’t even know how it’s done. In most cases they’ve even apologized for something at some point in their lives.

Lee had never been hot-tempered. A lesser man might strike his wife. A man who trusts in the rule of law files a formal complaint. For example, “My wife is a danger to herself and others.” A hearing is conducted. Fees are paid. A judge issues an order. The order’s execution makes the wife kick and scream, undermining her credibility. Seeing the force necessary to crush an annoyance he merely wanted rid of, the complainant heaves a sigh of regret.

That was Lee’s reaction when faced with the desirability of having Peggy locked up for a while. As a wife and mother, she was impossible. The theatrics! Who attempts suicide in a convertible in a lake ten feet deep? She was in hell. He was in hell. Yet she refused to leave him. She couldn’t leave him. She hated both their families, and she knew no one else well enough to get invited to their house. Thinking about it made him melancholic. Lee found depressive feelings unpleasant. He saw that something needed to be done. He conveyed the reality to her many times, repeating it like he thought she was slow: “I’m going to call a doctor. You’re not well.”

With every repetition he could see her edging toward the door. That was where she belonged: the door. The closer she got to it, the more his heart brightened with clarity. He threatened her in a low, friendly voice, pitched so as not to alarm her.

In exchange for leaving, she would have more options than she’d ever had before. She would be free.

But behind his tone of concern, Peggy detected her true choices: find somebody to take you in, or spend an indeterminate amount of time behind bars enjoying tranquilizers and electroshock. She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care. She knew he would be able to get her committed with no trouble at all. Driving a motor vehicle into a lake in front of your kids is not against the law—on private property it’s not even littering—but it’s madness.

Lee’s feelings were more complex than he let on. When he met Peggy, he’d thought his homosexuality might be a great big cosmic typo. He told himself, Listen, it’s not like sex with men was your idea. He had been an exceptionally good-looking boy. He scored his first blow job for attending a show-jumping competition. Soon his penis was buying entire weeks on skis. An unbeatable deal, and habit-forming.

At heart he knew he was normal. No more conflicted than any other married man. He was a sexual being. He couldn’t give that up on account of a three-month fling with his wife ten years before. Like many a married man before him, he took the deal they had hammered out—you give me your life, in return you get my kids—and canceled both ends. He didn’t want to be privy to her martyrdom, and he didn’t like her influence on his kids.

Lee truly did adore his son. He would kill time in the evenings with a glass of rye whisky and romantic fantasies of dropping Byrdie off at boarding school in his own father’s matte gold Mercedes while vivid orange maple leaves swirled every which way. The other boys would be squirming, their elegant mothers adjusting their little tiger-striped ties, while Byrdie in fuck-you-Nantucket red pants would swagger up the brick walkway already a man, raised by a cool single father, the coolest boy at Woodberry, with the longest skis, most outré collection of French porn, best way with horses, etc.

He could allow himself these fantasies on his small salary because his parents were not averse to Byrdie. Genetic and other contributions made by Peggy to Byrdie’s makeup were beneath their notice. They weren’t conspicuous, anyhow. He had Lee’s face. It was only from the back, if one of them was out in the yard in the dusk, that he had trouble telling his son and his wife apart, though Byrdie was still a little smaller. Same narrow build, same style of dress, same curly brown hair. If Peggy ever cleared out she might haunt him for a while that way, but only until the resemblance faded.

Byrdie’s loyalty was tested in a remake of the dog scene from Henry Huggins: Peggy by the open driver’s-side door of the Fairlane, Mireille on her hip like a limpet, calling for Byrdie to come get in the car. And Lee on the porch saying, “Don’t you get in that car!”

Byrdie said, “You’re crazy, Mom,” and walked back to his father.

“You’re scaring Byrdie,” Lee said.

“Fear is part of life for all sentient beings,” Peggy said. “I’ll come back for you, Byrdie. Don’t be scared.”

“Like hell you will,” Lee said.

Mireille began to cry and Lee came down from the porch. “Come on, Mickey,” he said, using the name Peggy used for her. He held out his arms. “Come to Papa. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Shut your trap, asshole,” Peggy said. “I’ve heard just about enough of your bullshit.”

Mireille wailed and Byrdie said, “Mom!”

“I love you, Byrdie!” Peggy called out. “Don’t forget it! I love you so much!” At last she set Mireille down on the passenger seat. She did a five-point turn and drove slowly out the pale, sandy driveway while Lee, unprepared, thought hard about calling his father to say his daughter had been abducted.

Instead he challenged his son to a game of cribbage. Women will say they’re leaving and go to the grocery store, or drive into Richmond for a movie. If it wasn’t a minor event, it was one he needed to minimize, at least until after bedtime.

But she didn’t come back, and Byrdie lay down like a dog by the door to wait for her.

Peggy’s decision hadn’t been spontaneous. It bore few of the hallmarks of madness. It took days to plan.

She had a tank full of gas. The trunk was full of khakis and old polo shirts, blankets, an air mattress, food, water, spray primer in black, her portable typewriter and spare ribbons, onionskin thesis paper, and many other supplies. She wasn’t going to a motel, much less her parents, or even to the New School for Social Research.

Instead of heading for the highway or the interstate, she turned onto a little county road. It went to dirt with a sign, end state maintenance, and she kept going. “Look at that, Mickey, blue butterflies,” she said. They were flying almost as fast as the car. She didn’t want to raise a cloud of dust. They came out on a gravel road that was part of a forgotten battlefield monument and passed a cairn raised to the memory of the Confederate dead. “Look at that, Mickey, a pyramid,” she said, curving off to the right into the trees again and following a dirt track that paralleled a river. Up ahead she saw the towers of a nuclear plant, flashing for a moment through a gap in the trees. An old crossways, with a sign as though it were still a town, two wooden stores falling down, pokeweed up to the rafters. Then a floodplain, a desert of stubble and sand. Topsoil had filled the river below, flattening it until it turned its own banks to mud flats, making the farmers poor and stealing their land until they just up and left, leaving their houses and barns behind.

She turned away from the river again. They zigzagged. Peggy was looking for something specific: an open barn, an abandoned house.

It was into such a barn that she drove the Fairlane, and into such a house that she took Mireille. A tall, drafty house, swaying with the trees around it. They stayed overnight.

When they crossed south again, headed for tobacco country, the gleaming red Fairlane was a dull dark gray.

Finding an abandoned place in southeastern Virginia wasn’t going to be as easy. Without the big rivers as highways, things had developed on a smaller scale. There were no palatial plantation houses anchoring medieval market towns. The houses were small, and they generally had people living in them. The economy revolved around the tobacco cartel. It meant a man could make a living forever off his inherited right to harvest—or at least launder—a set amount of tobacco. Tobacco made the difference between staying on the land and giving up.

Wherever it wasn’t tobacco, it was cotton. Sometimes corn and soybeans with hogs attached. When the soil announced it couldn’t take any more and gave up the ghost, the subsidies came for doing nothing. With the result of pines. Endless tracts of pines growing on naked grit, allowed to get maybe twenty feet tall before somebody came along and harvested them with a nipper, right off the stumps, thwap. Deafening.

Where there were no pines, there were swamps full of game. Boom, bang, squeal. More deafening. Hound dogs starving by the roads every fall and winter, thinking every truck that passed was the hunter who’d brought them, running for its doors. Death by trust.

People generally were hard-hearted and hard of hearing and possibly not eager to understand you when you talked. They were independent people. Tobacco was not their only cash crop. Peggy and Mickey passed a billboard that in 1967 had said buy a flag! fly it high! In 1970 someone adjusted it to read buy a bag! fly high! No one fixed it, and in 1975 it was rotting in place. Its symbolism was timeless.

They drove flat, lonely roads until Peggy spied a solitary cabin with flaking green paint. It stood under trees in a shallow pool of water. She pulled in and honked the horn. She got out of the car and yelled, “Hey!” She kept yelling as she splashed up to the door. But the house was empty.

There was a thick layer of dust on two liquor bottles and an empty baked bean can, and a newspaper from 1951 in use as shelf paper in the pantry. There was no furniture, but the windows had glass. No footprints. Stiff toile curtains.

Wading around outside the house, she saw that previous tenants had built up the ground in the crawl space. The house stood on dry pillars. And the water wasn’t seepage from below, just a big puddle from the last rain. It was the kind of land you can’t build on anymore, marl where the soil doesn’t “perc.” The cesspool had no cover, but it was deep and black and smelled of earth. She fetched naval jelly from the car and smeared it on the joint of the pump handle. The water rushed out cold and clear. It was a deep well, drawing water from under the clay.

“We’re going to put down stakes right here,” she said to Mireille.

That night Mireille slept.

She was used to a house where people made noises at all hours. Her father getting drinks for guests, her brother staring at them over the banister and getting reprimanded, her mother puttering in the laundry room, opening the door to check on her, the top-heavy house creaking as the inhabitants shifted their weight. Here her mother lay down when it got dark and clasped her hard to her side. There was nothing that could move in that wind-struck shack. It had done all its settling long ago. There were floorboards that creaked, but nobody to step on them. The only sound was the rushing of pine needles on the trees filtering the dusty air. The pollen was so thick the car was dusted canary yellow the next morning. The humidity, when the temperature got up in the afternoon, was an invisible weight bearing a person to the ground. Mireille slept again.

By the second morning, she was no longer an irritable child. She peeled herself off Peggy and looked around for something to play with.

Peggy did not pay visits to her parents of her own accord, but this was a special case. In general they alternated holidays so as not to miss any relatives: Easter here, Fourth of July there, and so forth. Invariably they ate with Peggy’s parents on Thanksgiving because Lee’s mother didn’t cook. Then everybody came to Lee’s parents’ for Christmas. They had maids making eggnog on rotation and a two-story tree in the front hall with a Lionel train around it, and the kids idolized them. Peggy’s parents, on the other hand, thought she spoiled the kids beyond belief. Her mother had knelt on the rug next to Byrdie, holding his new NERF ball behind her back, and said, “Now, I know you’re not used to hearing the word ‘no,’ but I don’t want to play ball right now. I want us to play Go Fish with your sister. Can you do that one little thing for someone else?” Family get-togethers involving the Vaillaincourts were tense, stubborn confrontations about child-rearing practices, seething under a facade of ritualized gentility and studiously avoided by everyone.

Thus Peggy believed that while Lee might set the wheels of justice turning, he would hesitate for days before calling her parents. Yet it was summer vacation, and they would be calling Stillwater to see when she was bringing the kids to swim in the pool. She decided to drive up and preempt them.

She knew where the key was hidden, but she rang the doorbell. “My, my!” her mother said. “Aren’t you tan!” She let her in, looking her up and down. “You’ve been playing tennis again!”

Peggy laughed. “No, Mom, I’ve been gardening.”

“I would know if you’d been gardening,” her mother said. “The back of your neck would be red and wrinkled as a turkey. No, you’ve been playing tennis. At your age you should be riding or playing golf. Something you can wear a hat and gloves at.”

“Well, isn’t this a surprise,” Peggy’s father said. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”

“Let me get Mickey,” she said, turning back toward the car. “I didn’t know if you were home.”

“Where’s Byrdie?”

“School,” Peggy said. “What a great kid.”

“He’s a little spoiled, but he’s a fine boy,” her father agreed.

“How’s Lee?” her mother asked.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Lee’s not—as a matter of fact Lee and I are not getting along. We separated.”

“You’re not living with Lee?” Her mother drew back in dismay.

“I’ve got my own place. Be honest, Mom. Lee Fleming! How long was that going to work?”

Her father chortled.

“Well, is he fine with it?”

Peggy sighed. “Sure. He has a new girlfriend.”

Her father guffawed.

“Are you getting a divorce?” her mother asked.

“Not so far.”

“Do you have a lawyer?”

“I’m not getting a divorce, so why would I need a lawyer?”

“Lee’s out there right now, deceiving you with some two-bit hustler,” her mother said earnestly. “I don’t remember you signing any premarital agreement. He’s going to have to settle something on you. We’ll force him.”

“You and what army? I’m telling you, I cut out of there with no forwarding address. If I go to a judge, Lee will get custody of Mickey, too, not just Byrdie. I couldn’t make Byrdie come along. He didn’t want to, not with a choice between me and the Playboy of the Western World. Now name me a judge Lee’s not related to. I wouldn’t touch a court of law with a ten-foot pole. Screw me over, fuck you. Screw me twice—”

“Watch your language, young lady!” her father interrupted.

“Anyhow, he’s broke. He won’t have a cent until his mom buys the farm, and that’s going to take forty years. If she dies first, his dad marries some deb and we never see a cent.”

Peggy’s mother took Mickey by the hand and stood in the archway to the dining room, making as though to take her someplace else to play, but not wanting to miss anything. “Let’s play boats,” Mickey said.

“I don’t have boats. I guess you don’t have boats anymore either, now that you don’t live on Stillwater Lake.”

“Mommy made the lake fall down. Now we play boats in the yard.”

“Where are you living, honey?”

“We got a pyramid, and blue butterflies!”

“Where do you live?” Peggy’s father said, addressing himself to Peggy.

“Rented house,” Peggy said. “Nothing special.”

“Where?”

“I’d rather not say. I don’t want Lee serving me with papers.”

“I’m concerned about you, honey.”

“I can make my own decisions.”

Her father laughed. “I noticed! Do you have a phone, where we can call you?”

“Not in the house. There’s a party line at a bait shop.”

“You should get a phone for safety. Just list it under a fake name.”

Peggy stopped off at her dad’s churchyard to let Mickey play. The church was one of the oldest in the country, nearly square, with gated pews shining pale green and the Ten Commandments in loopy gold script on alabaster tablets at the front. Austere, creaky, ancient. She picked up a bench and let it fall. The echo ricocheted off the walls and made Mickey jump. They walked around the outside, stroking the soft salmon brickwork with its tracery of lime and the dark pottery of the glazed headers. In the graveyard a solitary angel kept watch over a boxwood. Broken columns—the oldest graves. The next era, bas-relief willows and skulls. Then cast-iron crosses. Then the newest graves, granite monoliths. The names were always the same. Except for one. The cemetery had apparently been integrated. A cluster of mauve plastic roses poked up from the foot of a tiny mound. At the head was a temporary marker, a cross made of unfinished pine, already weathered, reading karen brown 1970–73.

Peggy remembered the Browns. A nice black family who lived on the school property like her parents. Not neighbors exactly, but close by. And here they had lost a child like Mickey. A child who ought to be older than Mickey, but would always be younger. How sad. She looked at her daughter, and then she did something terrible. She drove to the courthouse, to the county registrar, whom she knew, and said, “Morning, Lester!”

“Miss Peggy! How do you do?”

“Fine, thanks. It’s beautiful out! My dad asked me to come down here. He’s doing Leon Brown’s back taxes and now the IRS says they need a birth certificate for their little daughter that died. Because of the deduction. He didn’t want to ask Leon for it.”

“Ain’t that a shame.”

“Her name was Karen.”

He fired up the Xerox machine and dug around for his notary stamp, then pulled out a hanging file tabbed with a B.

In the car on the way home, Peggy glanced at Mireille repeatedly and said, “Karen. Karen? Karen. Karen.”

“Who’s Karen?”

She poked her in the side. “You are Karen! You can’t go to school with a boy’s name like Mickey! You have to have a girl’s name, and your girl’s name is Karen. Karen Brown. My girl’s name is Meg. Meg Brown. Meg and Karen Brown.”

“We’re girls,” Mickey said.

“You bet your sweet rear end we’re girls!”




Three (#uc1e799b4-f6ed-592e-9113-16be357aa2eb)


Where the yard ended, the pines started. Among them were old ruined houses, just humps left of their two brick chimneys, and little burial grounds. They were popular destinations. Along with thin slabs of marble, some still standing, they had beer bottles, mattresses, and old car seats. The nearby ponds had their banks trampled down from fishing.

Every time they came back from a voyage of discovery, Peggy would examine her house carefully from the deep cover of the underbrush on the edge of the yard. But there was never any sign that anyone had dropped by. No tire tracks in the mud.

Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant. Her plan was to be a successful playwright. With her earnings from royalties she would one day have a comfortable home again, worthy of Mickey and Byrdie. Though she had her doubts about whether Byrdie would visit, or even want to talk to her, and how all that would make her feel.

First she had other things to attend to. She had saved housekeeping money for years in a sock and had enough to spare to buy provisions. They were not big eaters. They would need a kerosene heater and lamps, but not until the fall. First renovations were in order. She nailed down linoleum to keep from falling through rotten places in the floor. There was a fair-sized gap in a corner of the kitchen, under a dead boiler that sat flaking rust. She discovered the hole when a possum crawled out and startled bumbling around like a fool. Luckily she had a broom and could herd it back down into the crawl space.

The lawn never needed mowing because of the standing water. The bug situation was correspondingly dire, but no worse than the Mekong Delta, as some poets called Stillwater Lake. Still, she fixed the screen doors before she covered the cesspool. That was the obvious order of priority. She acquired a camp stove to heat water. It was easy to sell Mickey on the virtues of simple foods that require no cooking or dishwashing, such as potato chips and cocktail wieners.

She set up her portable typewriter on the table. She would write under a pseudonym as did the Brontës. Anne, Emily, Charlotte, and Branwell. Also known as Acton Bell, Ellis, Currer, and—did the boy Brontë even write? Or just drink himself to death?

She couldn’t remember. She had no place to look it up. She had snagged some books of plays on her way out the door: Shaw, Hart, Synge. She hadn’t thought to take the one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia.

It didn’t matter to her plan. She could still copy the basic principle. Publish under a fake name while dwelling in the lonely fastnesses of the moors. She wasn’t clear on what moors were, but the Brontës made them sound every bit as damp as Tidewater. As well as freezing and tubercular, but that wasn’t her problem. She would be the Brontë of warm, malarial moors, the dramatist of the Great Dismal Swamp.

After the big money started coming in, she would move to New York. From her picture window above Astor Place, Mickey and Byrdie at her side, she would laugh at Lee’s creaky house, his stagnant lake, his noblesse oblige pseudo-income.

Lee had distractions, what with his work at the college and keeping track of where Byrdie was at any given time (students were lined up to babysit and passed him like a baton), but he got a judge to issue a warrant. The charges: kidnapping, reckless endangerment, vandalism, and something about the welfare of a child.

The judiciary was happy to help. The police were not so responsive. Lee called them several times a day, wondering where they were. He wanted them to take copies of Peggy’s fingerprints. She hadn’t stolen any money when she left. Ergo, he surmised, she would soon embark on a life of crime, endangering Mireille’s safety in a criminally insane manner.

But the sheriff and all his deputies seemed to regard Peggy as a grown woman with a right to run away. And who would have expected her to abandon a little daughter? It troubled them more that she hadn’t taken the son.

As they fantasized (a primary investigative tool of law enforcement) freely and at length about her motives, alone or over drinks with friends, the sheriff and his deputies consistently came to feel that getting her son away from Lee ought to have been her first priority.

After they finally came and went, Lee dragged himself around the house to eradicate all traces of her. Clothes she hadn’t worn in ten years. Light reading for ladies such as the Foxfire books and Virginia Ghosts. Her Mirro omelet pan, open admission of her inability to make an omelet. Cher records. They all went into the trunk of a beat-up Volvo and from there into a Dumpster at a wayside. Except the Cher records, which he abandoned on the shoulder of a deeply shaded back road, to make sure no one would suspect he had anything to do with them.

“You’re suffering from female trouble,” Cary told Lee over lunch at the Bunny Burger. “It’s time you sought professional help.”

“A shrink only helps when you don’t know what you want. I feel I’m in touch with my desires, thank you.”

“I meant a psychic. Your aura is navy blue.”

“Cary.” He used the tone his daughter used to say “Daddy.”

“I took a course at Edgar Cayce,” Cary protested. “My ESP is very strong!”

“And when did you get the diagnosis? In the poetry workshop business, we always wait until the check clears.”

“I have a heightened sensitivity to feelings. Some people only know what you’re feeling when you’re looking at them, but us psychics can feel it over hundreds of miles. We’re tapped into the web of life.”

“And what do you call people who know what you’re feeling and don’t give a shit?”

“That’s why they call it female trouble.”

“My wife is masculine as a mailed fist,” Lee said, paraphrasing a necktie ad from a magazine. “Did you get it on under the pyramid yet?” The Edgar Cayce Center in Virginia Beach was famous for its rooftop pyramid, modeled on the geometric eternity machines of the Egyptians, under which lunch meat would not spoil and orgasms were exceptionally rapturous.

“You want my help finding them or not? You got anything on you now that belongs to one of them? Something related to them, a picture or something.”

“Peggy gave me these gray hairs,” Lee said. “And she might have bought me this shirt.”

“Let me touch it.”

Lee held out his arm. “And? What’s she feeling?”

Cary closed his eyes and stroked Lee’s cuff. “Oh, yes. It’s almost there. Her emotions are coming into focus. I can read you now, baby. It’s so strong. She thinks you need to lose twelve pounds.”

Lee turned his dispassionate gaze on his sandwich. “With friends like you, who needs marriage?” he said, taking a large bite. He thought of Montaigne and Étienne, and felt something was missing from his life.

Lee’s parents hired a private investigator, who drove to Caroline County to see whether she was at her parents’ house. Just because they said she wasn’t there didn’t mean she wasn’t there. He reported back that the Vaillaincourts’ apathy made his blood run cold, as a hardened professional. Peggy’s mother had referred him to her husband, as though the search were a business matter, and Mr. Vaillaincourt had told him, “She knows where to find us!” He claimed to be expecting a call any day. If it never came, well, that was Peggy’s problem.

The Flemings understood the Vaillaincourts better than the detective did. A ruling class is made up entirely of hardened professionals, insofar as it does not sire sissies. Where more sentimental men might remark of their daughters’ marriages, “I’m not losing a daughter, I’m gaining a son,” Peggy’s father had been heard to say no such thing. When two females vanish from a patriarchy, both of them attached to a homosexual, the ripples can be truly minimal.

Soon the detective, a working-class townsman, sympathized with Peggy. If a woman ran away from people like that, might she not have reasons? He didn’t have to know Lee was gay to dislike him. He had other reasons to feel distaste for the Flemings, such as the way they confined him to their front hall, never asking him to come in or sit down.

With his assistance, they placed a newspaper ad featuring Peggy’s senior portrait from high school. The picture showed a big-eyed, arrogant girl in an off-the-shoulder drape. Her long hair, straightened on curlers under a dryer hood for the occasion, was pinned up into a chignon. The likeness was not good. Lee had neglected, in ten years of marriage, to take a close-up picture of Peggy. All his snapshots were from a distance, his wife holding a child or underexposed in the light of a campfire.

The ad appeared many times in newspapers all over the state. missing person, it announced, with a generous reward.

Thousands of people saw it, but no calls came in. Simple, truthful, educated people, the kind who could read and believe a newspaper, sipped their coffee and felt sorry for the parents whose daughter had run away. Not patronizing the haunts of runaways—heroin shooting galleries and red-light districts and whatnot—themselves, the upstanding citizens had no cause to examine their consciences for signs of Peggy.

Nor would they have found anything anyway. The runaway was keeping a very, very low profile.

She couldn’t help herself. Life with Lee had been so drab that running away had a bounden duty to be exciting. She felt she had a right to ask that much. That was why the dramatic flight, the abandoned houses, the new identity.

She hoped he would hunt her with all his might so she could spite him and laugh. Yet she was not in a hurry to deal with stress. Her game was to be invisible. She knew Lee well, and by heading southeast, she had hidden in the folds of his own cerebral cortex. She knew he felt contempt for her. He would imagine her growing old in food service somewhere along Route 1, at Allman’s or the Dixie Pig, dreaming of New York City, never getting the money together to get past DC. He would never imagine her fleeing a rural backwater for its murkier depths.

She was right on all counts.

Lee’s first stop, Transient City: Fredericksburg, an hour south of Washington, DC, on Route 1. Home ownership rate 5 percent. The local gentry had surrendered to solvent government employees and Beltway bandits. Sold every stitch of land, skedaddled to Stafford County or points west. The city was a half-empty ghetto with foreign immigrants. The place you would fetch up if you were trying to get over the Mason-Dixon Line and failing, in Lee’s opinion.

He had lunch at Woolworth’s without seeing his wife. He sat down on a bench in front of a gift shop (the new suburbanites still came into town when they needed kitsch) to wait for her.

He was like a man buying the first lottery ticket of his life. He reads the notice on the back warning him that the odds against him are twelve million to one, and he concludes that he has a chance of winning.

Lee looked up and down the street, watching for slight women with brown hair. He watched for women with blond children. He watched for anyone at all. It was a quiet afternoon, paced by the rhythm of traffic lights. He stood up and walked, thinking he might ask after her, if he happened to see her kind of store. He walked the length of town and as far as the railroad tracks. Ice cream, real estate, musical instruments. Porcelain figurines and teacups. He shook his head at his own dumbness, got back in the car, and sat.

He imagined doing the same thing in Fairfax, Manassas, Reston, Falls Church—all the sprawling towns where he and Peggy knew no one. Where she was driving around in a candy-apple-red ’66 Fairlane. Why was he looking for her, when he could be looking for that car?

He drove to AAA in Richmond. He acquired maps of the state that showed every gas station. He needed a map because without zoning, businesses could crop up anywhere. Almost at random, you might see a barber pole or a green sign with yellow block script announcing the Department of Motor Vehicles. A one-and-a-half-lane highway would round a blind curve and there you were—already past it—the town you were looking for with its post office, gas pump, and population of four.

He returned to northern Virginia, where gas stations grew thick on the ground. But the second day of searching brought no sign of Peggy. Neither did the third.

From being mired in lottery-style thinking, Lee drifted toward magical thinking. He no longer demanded that divine providence reveal Peggy and Mireille in an instant. He was certain if he tortured himself long enough, quizzing gas station attendants on whether they’d seen a conspicuous car containing a woman and a little girl, his persistence would be rewarded. The car was black now, and the woman was routinely addressed as “sir” because she’d given herself an inept crew cut, but he didn’t know that.

His task would have been easier if he’d ever granted her a credit card beyond the one for his father’s Amoco station. It had his own name on it. He discovered it in his wallet, transferred there from hers. It was her way of telling him she had gone through his wallet and taken nothing. She didn’t even have a bank account. Financially, she existed as a tax deduction. A deduction Lee would go on taking whether she lived with him or not. It was only fair. She was much more expensive after she left than before.

Stillwater Lake retreated far from the bamboo grove. It stood in yellowish-gray mud streaked with reddish brown that looked to Lee like diarrhea. The shore went out for forty yards and down six feet before the first puddles appeared. The standing water was almost white, writhing solid with mosquito larvae like maggots in a corpse.

The college could not be relied upon to fix the lake. What it had lost in aesthetics, it had gained in acreage. The lakeshore was the property line. The administration planned to build a spacious campus center on land that used to be underwater. Lee’s parents told him to wait a couple of years for grass to grow and he wouldn’t know the difference.

But the level kept dropping. The college hired a civil engineering bureau to produce a hydrogeological report.

Stillwater Lake, the engineers said, was unnatural, built using a method commonly used to create cattle watering holes in areas without streams. But on the much, much larger scale made possible by slave labor. The Great Pyramid of puddles, concocted from a limestone depression by a forgotten megalomaniac. The lake bed was thousands of tons of clay, dug from riverbanks farther east, plastering an enormous hole.

Occasionally the lake would burp. A bubble of methane would rise from some unseen cavity and a circular wave would race toward the gloppy shores. Lee had not seen it happen because he was unable to look directly at the lake. It pained his retinas. He expected it to heave and drain completely any day now.

He could identify the culprit. He would have known her anywhere, kneecapped her with a high-powered rifle at four hundred yards. He knew everything about her. Except where she was.

The next year, Karen was four years old going on five and still blond. Nonetheless, registering her for first grade as a black six-year-old was easy as pie.

Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter, and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the NAACP. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: if one of your ancestors was black—ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham—so were you.

Meg felt very clever as she handed over the birth certificate. The races of the child’s parents were marked right on it: colored and colored.

When the clerk saw on the slip of paper that that Mrs. Brown was colored, she glanced up in surprise. But a close look revealed that it was true. Meg’s coarse curls and knobby heel bones were dead giveaways to the connoisseur. The daughter was one of those pallid, yellow-haired black kids you sometimes see. Frog-belly white, no trace of pink, curly tendrils all around her hairline. Probably anemic and undernourished—a lot of rural black kids had worms—but very close to passing. “Was she premature?” the clerk inquired. “She’s so little.”

“She’s small, but she can read,” Meg said.

“I can spell ‘astronaut,’ ” Karen volunteered.

“That’s a third-grade word,” the clerk said. “You’re very smart for such a tiny little thing. You sure you don’t want to have her be white?”

“We’re black and proud,” Meg said.

“I’m blond,” Karen objected.

“There’s no blond race,” the clerk corrected her. “But it don’t matter. All God’s children attend the very same school. We like to know who’s black so we can help them out with affirmative action and a free hot lunch.”

The first day of first grade did not go as Meg had hoped. In the early afternoon, Karen descended from the raucous and chaotic school bus sniveling. White girls, she said, had called her “nigger,” while black girls had called her “half-white” and sung a song, “crybaby, crybaby.”

“Crybaby what?” Meg asked ominously.

“Suck yo’ mommy titty.”

“Did you slug them? You’ve got to slug kids who are mean to you. Like this.” Meg demonstrated. “You take and hold their shirt collar and punch them right in the nose.”

“I grab their collar and punch them in the nose,” Karen repeated solemnly.

“Never call them ‘nigger’ back. It’s a bad word. Just grab on tight to their shirt and hit their nose hard. Then let go and run away fast. Never hit anybody bigger than you, or anybody retarded. Only first graders.”

“Okay.”

“And never cry, or say mean things. Insults just aggravate them. If you want to cry, laugh. It sounds the same. They can’t tell the difference.”

The next day Karen came home early, in her teacher’s car. Her knees were skinned and she had a split lip. The teacher wanted to see where the ethereal yet scrappy representative of the sadly nonexistent blond race, whom she had freed from beneath a heap of children shrieking racist taunts, lived and with whom.

She was impressed with the simplicity and poverty of Meg’s life. There was something monastic and almost elegant in the neatly scrubbed cabin standing in four inches of water in a settlement that had been given up decades before. Meg offered her a choice between water from the pump and warm Fresca. As she drank the Fresca, she wondered silently to herself about the Lord’s mysterious ways, choosing an anemic black child with arms like twigs to demonstrate the ironies of nonviolent resistance. (She assumed Karen’s tactic was nonviolence, possibly because Karen pulled her punches to the extent that mosquitoes she swatted flew away stunned.) She told Meg that Karen was very special. They prayed together.

When she had gone, Meg said, “You should stop telling people you’re blond. There are a lot of mean jokes about blondes. It’s nothing to be proud of.”

Karen became the special concern of every adult at the school. Children instinctively hated her for being different, and adults identified with her for the exact same reason. To be perfect (adorably wee and blond) yet marked for failure (black and dressed in rags)—don’t we all know that feeling? The principal, who had voted for George Wallace for president, couldn’t watch her bounce away across the schoolyard without musing that a petite female with a white body and a black soul might in ten or twelve years’ time be a sort of dream come true, assuming she moved away to the city and pursued a career in show business, broadly defined.

He spoke about her at a teachers’ conference, and it was resolved that she would be groomed for export despite her handicap. It was decided to skip her over second grade, since she knew the names of the months and all nine planets. Skipping her would catch her up to the other smart black kid and save them from creating an extra independent study group later on. Her promotion would have the added virtue of raising black enrollment in the all-white “academic” track to two and acquitting the school of lingering charges of tokenism.

Karen’s sole black classmate was a boy named Temple Moody. They sat together at lunch the day they met—the first day of third grade—and every school day after that.

To look at, Temple was about as black as a person could get, as though the school were hoping to pack as much blackness as possible into each “token black” seat in each of his successive integrated classrooms. Initially he was chosen for his mannerly comportment and tidy clothes and resented only for making it impossible for his classmates to win at Eraser Walk. The eraser nestled in his hair like an egg in a nest. He could have hopped to the blackboard on one foot. The class voted never to play Eraser Walk again. One by one, his superior achievements were acknowledged with surrender. He called it “raising the white flag.”

By week five of third grade, Karen had forgotten what it was like to be bullied. Temple was not about to let competing children distract her.

It was soon a done deal among the children that they would marry. There was no question of a white boy’s teasing her or kissing her. No girls of either race played with her hair.

Meg bought a packet of thirty Valentines, enough for the entire class. Karen labeled and distributed them all, but she brought home only three: one from the teacher, one from Temple, and one from a Catholic girl whose exotic last name—Schmidt—regularly made the class dissolve in laughter. Birthdays were a nonstarter, since Meg couldn’t have kids over to that house. Plus the date and the year were false, so it seemed like tempting fate to make a big deal out of Karen’s birthday. Christmas depressed Meg, and she did her best to ignore it. Amber “Shit” Schmidt was not a big party-thrower either.

So for several years in a row, the high point of Karen’s year was Temple Moody’s birthday. Possibly it more than made up for the Neapolitan ice cream and Pin the Tail on the Donkey she missed by not being white. Temple’s birthday involved adults and older children—approximately fifty in all—along with hard liquor, catfish, chicken, trifle, and a piñata.

He lived in a sprawling compound on a creek bank, hundreds of years old, with a four-seater outhouse and a shed full of broken farm implements from before the trees grew. The woods leading to it were dense with greenbrier through which deer had beaten paths like a hedge maze. There was only one party game: Run Wild. The adults would settle in, on and around the porch, while the children ran wild. Eventually one of Temple’s older brothers would throw a rope over a high oak bough and haul up the piñata.

The Moodys regarded piñatas as a neglected Native American tradition. They assumed partial descent from Indians. Temple’s mother had a fond uncle in Reno, Nevada, at the end of the Trail of Tears, and he mailed her authentic Indian crafts every year for Christmas: Navajo sand paintings, Pomo baskets, Hopi dolls. And for Temple’s birthday, a piñata.




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