A Place at the Table (39 page)

Ruthie was scared to be behind the wheel, to be controlling Julia’s Saab, but also, she was thrilled.

“Sweetie, you are going to get pulled over for going this slow,” said Julia. “You’ve got to speed up.”

Ruthie pressed hard on the accelerator and the car leapt forward.

“Jesus,” murmured Julia. Ruthie smiled. In a weird way, she was enjoying herself.

“Do you know where your turn signal is?” asked Julia.

Ruthie nodded.

“Okay, slow down—no, not like that. Don’t slam on the brake. Be gentle. Gently press on the brake. Okay, good. We are going to come to a complete stop. Now put on your turn signal. We’re going left.”

Ruthie did as she was told.

“Look both ways. Do you see any cars coming? In either direction? Okay, repeat after me: S-T-O-P-one-two-three. That’s what my driver’s ed teacher said to say every time you reach a stop sign.”

“S-T-O-P-one-two-three,” said Ruthie.

“Now you can turn.”

She turned, driving slowly down Peachtree Battle Avenue, passing gracious homes and old trees, women in shiny warm-up outfits walking speedily along the sidewalk, their arms curling weights while they moved.

“There’s a car behind you, Ruthie, and he’s not driving like a ninety-year-old lady, so you are going to have to either pull over or speed up.”

Ruthie pressed on the gas and the needle on the speedometer climbed to 40. She was driving, really driving, on a real road, not in the parking lot of the Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church.

“They’re going to make me live with Dad and Peggy,” said Julia. “In Virden. And Aunt Mimi is going to take you with her to San Francisco. At least that’s what Mimi thinks is in the will. She says we’ll know for sure tomorrow, once the lawyer comes to read it.”

Ruthie felt dizzy, nauseated. She was breathing fast little breaths, like she still did every time she was on a plane that hit turbulence. She lifted her foot from the accelerator, let the car coast on its own, losing speed. A driver behind her laid on the horn, honking for her to accelerate, but she did not. Without Julia even instructing Ruthie to do so, she put on her right blinker, steered the car over to the side of the road, and pressed hard on the brake.

“Put it in park,” said Julia, her voice calm, soothing.

Ruthie obeyed.

The two girls sat in the car, not saying anything.

•  •  •

They switched seats so Julia could drive. First she drove them to the BP on Peachtree so Ruthie could get a Sprite and then back up Peachtree Battle until they reached Memorial Park, which occupied several acres of land. Sometimes she and Julia would run along the park’s perimeter, Ruthie always tiring out before her sister. Deep in the park itself was an area with swings and a slide, wood chips on the ground. It was empty. Julia and Ruthie walked to it, sat on the swings.

“Remember how you used to tell me not to swing too high or I’d flip over the bar?” Ruthie asked.

“That once happened to me,” said Julia, smiling. “I had red marks from gripping the chains so tightly when I flipped. Otherwise I would have come slamming to the ground.”

“You are so full of it,” said Ruthie.

Julia smiled.

“The moon didn’t follow you, either,” said Ruthie. “What are you talking about?”

“At night, when we were in the back of the car while Dad was driving us back from dinner or something, you used to tell me that you cast a spell on the moon to make it follow you wherever you went. Then you’d point the moon out to me through the window, and the whole drive home I would watch it follow us.”

“Face it,” said Julia. “I’m full of magic.”

“Ha,” said Ruthie. “You couldn’t really cough up money, either.”

Julia used to amaze Ruthie with that trick. She would cough, hold her hand to her mouth, and pull away a ten-dollar bill.

“You forget I’m part Mattaponi,” said Julia. “On my dad’s side. It gives me mystical powers.”

“Okay, so if being, like, one-sixteenth Indian gives you mystical powers, use them to tell me where Mom and Dad are right now.”

Julia sighed, and Ruthie thought she might not answer, that Ruthie had annoyed her by bringing up the subject they were trying to avoid. Ruthie pushed against the ground with her feet and started swinging in earnest.

“Honestly,” said Julia. “I think they’re gone. I mean, maybe some of their ash floated into the atmosphere, and in a billion years will become a part of a star. But other than that . . .”

Julia shrugged her shoulders, defeated.

Ruthie felt an ache in her chest. “You don’t believe in heaven?” she asked, remembering afterwards one of her father’s favorite lawyer sayings: “Never ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer.”

“No,” said Julia. “I’m sorry, but I kind of think this is it.”

Ruthie wondered why, given her sister’s capacity for storytelling, Julia couldn’t believe—or even just pretend to believe—that their parents were more than dusty, weightless things.

Ruthie felt so strange swinging back and forth with her sister. Swinging made her realize, in a way that she had not before, how thoroughly the laws of physics had been changed. Before the accident, before the funeral, before Julia told her that she was to go to Virden and Ruthie to San Francisco, she had been anchored so securely to the world. What a terrible thing to now be loosed.

Turn the page for

BOUND SOUTH

Now available from Touchstone

P
robably it is for the best that Caroline has chosen to go to play practice rather than to attend Sandy’s funeral with Nanny Rose and me. Still, Nanny Rose will give me hell when she realizes that neither Caroline nor John Henry is coming. (Nor Charles for that matter, who is only eleven and too young for this.) Sandy worked for Nanny Rose for the last thirty-three years. The last eleven of those years she worked for us too. That was Nanny Rose’s gift to us after I had Charles; she sent Sandy over to our house once a week. Of course she waited until I had a boy to offer help, even though it turned out Charles was an easy baby while Caroline nearly drove me to the loony bin.

Sandy was there the day I brought Charles home from Piedmont Hospital. And a year later, when we moved from our Peachtree Hills starter house to our current home in Ansley Park, Sandy held the baby while I directed the movers with the furniture. Poor Sandy. When she walked out the door of our little house carrying Charles, our dog Cleo up and bit her on the leg. Cleo had never been a biter; the only explanation was that Cleo thought Sandy was taking away the baby same as the movers were taking away all the furniture. Most of the movers were African American, as is—was, I should say—Sandy.

After that I kept Cleo in the fenced side yard every Monday when Sandy would come. Sandy loved Baby Charles. Once he was old enough to chew, she’d bring him a candy bar every week. I would have to drive to the gas station on Peachtree and buy Caroline one too or else suffer through her tantrum. Of course I would have preferred it if Sandy had brought both children a treat, but I didn’t feel that I could ask her to do so, knowing that she didn’t have any extra money.

She spoiled Charles, as did I, and he seemed none the worse for it. Our spoiling just made him sweeter. Really. He was just as pudgy and smiley as a baby could be. How John Henry and I created such a sweet boy—such an open and loving little person—from the same genes that formed Caroline the Terror, I will never know.

•  •  •

I
NEVER NOTICE
how messy my car is until it is time for either John Henry or Nanny Rose to ride in it. John Henry is fond of saying that I use my car as a giant handbag, stashing all sorts of stuff in it. Well, I’m sorry. My house and my person are always tidy. There has to be one place where I can allow things to get a little cluttered. I pick the empty Diet Coke cans off the car floor and throw them into the Herbie Curbie. If Caroline were with me she would insist that I recycle them, but the recycle box is inside the house and I simply do not have time to go back in there. I honk good-bye to Charles and Faye (my other cleaning lady, who comes on Thursdays, although now I suppose I’ll have to see if she can come on Mondays as well) and pull out of the driveway heading down Peachtree Circle toward Peachtree Street. Nanny Rose lives a few miles north, in Buckhead. The funeral is on the south side of the city, so it is out of the way to pick her up, but Nanny Rose is seventy-seven and both John Henry and I try to make sure she drives as little as possible. John Henry jokes that in her dotage she “speeds more and sees less.”

•  •  •

E
VEN THOUGH
I was born in Ansley Park, and John Henry and I have lived here for over ten years, it still gives me a little thrill to drive through my neighborhood. I just love the tall old trees, the fine architecture, the sense that even though the skyscrapers of Midtown frame the neighborhood, when you are in Ansley Park you are
in
the South. So many of the old houses here remind me of the houses that line Franklin Street as you drive into Chapel Hill, where John Henry and I met, or rather, where we began our relationship, as we had met once or twice before we went to college. Our families, both from Atlanta, ran in similar, though not entirely overlapping circles. (Frankly, John Henry’s family was “older” than mine.) Before college John Henry and I hardly knew each other. The fact that we went to rival high schools had a lot to do with that. He attended Coventry while I went to Birch.

If John Henry had his way we would probably live in Buck-head or even Sandy Springs. He complains that the houses in Ansley Park are too close together and that there are too many cars parked on the streets, especially during the weekends, when people from other neighborhoods drive over here, park, and walk to Piedmont Park. And good Lord don’t even get him started on Freaknik, when students from all of the black colleges around the South meet up at Piedmont Park for a party, but not before blocking the traffic in our neighborhood for hours with all of their jumping in and out of each other’s cars and dancing in the streets.

What really bothers John Henry about the neighborhood is that he’s in the minority being a Republican over here. Not that Ansley Park is a hotbed of radicalism. (Lord no. Daddy, whose political views often put
him
in the neighborhood minority, still counted many from Ansley Park as his friends and allies.) Still, to John Henry’s chagrin, most of our neighbors are progressive in their politics. They are usually tasteful about it, of course. Most people from Ansley Park would rather write a big check than make a big scene.

Another thing John Henry is not thrilled about is Ansley’s close proximity to Midtown. Not the office buildings, but the little strip of shops on Piedmont and Tenth Street that cater to a gay clientele. Midtown, after all, has become the gay capital of the South, and John Henry is not, as my colorist, Chevre, says, “gay friendly.”

But I love our neighborhood. I love the tall modern buildings peeping over the gracious old homes. Living in Ansley Park, you never forget that Atlanta actually is a city. Most people who say they live in Atlanta do not live in the city at all. Most of our four million residents live OTP—outside the perimeter. But Ansley Park is in the center of things, and consequently I never have to drive more than fifteen minutes to get anywhere I need to be. The farthest I drive is to Coventry, where Charles and Caroline are in school, and that’s only about five miles away. It’s like my best friend Tiny always says: “The only time I go OTP is when I’m on an airplane.”

Caroline says that the whole city is one big strip mall. I say it’s made up of neighborhoods, that the old homes are really its attraction. True, there isn’t one spot in Atlanta where you stop and think, “
Now
I’m in the heart of the city.” Atlanta isn’t like a New York or a San Francisco. There’s no equivalent to Greenwich Village or North Beach here.

Virginia Highlands, with its boutiques and restaurants, tries to be that, I suppose, but it doesn’t have the diversity, the push and pull, the tumult. To be honest, Oakland Cemetery, over there off Memorial Drive, is where I feel most
in
the city. The cemetery is wide, hilly, and shaded with oaks. The two smokestacks of the old mill in Cabbagetown border it on one side; the modern Atlanta skyline on the other. Inside the actual cemetery are crumbling brick paths, stone gravestones, and mausoleums bearing the names of important Atlanta families. Also, there are thousands of unmarked Confederate soldiers’ graves and a section where large tombstones bearing Stars of David and Jewish names are all smushed together (the cemetery was originally segregated and the Jews were only given a small plot). Bobby Jones is buried at Oakland. So is Margaret Mitchell.

I wonder where Sandy will be buried. I don’t even know how you go about getting buried nowadays if your family hasn’t already bought a plot of land for you. Maybe Sandy will be cremated, though I doubt it. I have a feeling that as a Baptist, she’d rather be laid in the ground so that her body will be around for the Resurrection.

•  •  •

I
TURN RIGHT
on Peachtree Street and head toward Nanny Rose’s white brick house on Peachtree Battle Avenue, the same house John Henry grew up in. Nanny Rose has not redecorated since she moved in over fifty years ago. She once told me that “good taste never goes out of style,” which, frankly, assumes a lot. John Henry’s old room is painted egg yellow, same as it was when he slept there as a boy, and it still has two metal-framed twin beds in it, one for John Henry and one for Wallace, John Henry’s twin brother, who shot himself in the head his senior year at the University of Georgia.

•  •  •

I
T
’
S ONE THIRTY
on the dot when I arrive at Nanny Rose’s house, but even so, she is waiting outside in the ninety-degree heat. (I’ve lived in Atlanta my entire life except for when I was at college, yet
every
year I forget that early September is often just as hot as August.)