The Right Thing (5 page)

“But how did you end up here again, in Jackson?” I ask. What I want to ask is, with the wide world to choose from, what possessed you to come back?

“Oh, Annie—that's a story for another time,” Starr says, waving dismissal. Squaring her shoulders, she gazes out the window at the gray day. “Right now, all I can say is I'm in a heap of trouble.” Her hand goes to her belly protectively.

“Bobby Shapley's a . . .” I begin, but cannot seem to get the words out. Like a dry worm, dislike catches in my throat. The sacred chains of Annie-be-nice restrain me from saying what I really think of Bobby Shapley, that mean, golden boy two classes ahead of me, Du's frat brother who cheated his way through college because he couldn't be bothered to study, the up-and-coming trial lawyer with a wild streak who never lets anything go—not a case, not a grudge, not even a hand of cards—not until he's done with it. Now he's done with Starr. Thinking about Bobby Shapley makes me really crave a cigarette because my hand is itching to slap the face right off his head.

“You're right,” I finally say. “He's trouble.”

Big trouble. Bobby could get her arrested for any piddly-ass thing he can dream up, make sure she has nowhere to live and no job to put food on the table. Even if Starr tries to take him to court in a paternity suit, she'll lose: the Judge will see to it. Not a lawyer in town will take her case for fear of Judge Otto Shapley, a retired widower with stone mountains of time and oceans of influence. The Judge won't let one of his son's ex-girlfriends drag the family name into the paper, not him, but make no mistake, the old man is a real dog, too. One memorable night at a country club banquet, the Judge followed me outside when I went onto the terrace to have a smoke and made the most startlingly graphic proposition I've ever been unlucky enough to receive. Since I couldn't slap him either, after he was done, I said, “No thanks.”

“You'll come around,” the old bastard said before he threw his cigar in the boxwoods and went back inside. No, Otto Shapley will crush Starr because she has the audacity to still be here in town, because she hasn't just given up and gone away.

But both those men are traveling Mormon boys compared to Bobby's wife, Julie Shapley, née Posey, who in kindergarten was already destined to become the girl with the widest, deepest streak of mean in my sorority pledge class. Freshman year, only once I'd made the mistake of telling her the truth—that her Laura Ashley outfit made her look like an ironing board wrapped in calico—and found myself sitting in the nose-bleed section of the Ole Miss–'Bama game with the geeks from the herpetology department instead of with the other Chi Omegas on the forty-yard line. To this day, when I can, I avoid working with her on the one Ladies' League committee they let me be on. I shudder to think of what Julie must plan on doing to Starr if she gets a chance.

“And now,” Starr says, “Bobby means to put me out of the condo by the end of the week.” She gives herself a little shake. With an air of bravado, she raises her cup to me, a question in her eyes. “I can make some more.”

“Sure,” I say. I don't want any more coffee, but it'll buy me time with Starr and I need this. I can't believe how badly I need this. “Where's the ladies' room?” I ask.

Down a long, white-carpeted hallway I find the powder room, another icebox, albeit one with guest soap and a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama of mirror tiles. They're even on the ceiling. As I'm washing my hands, I look at my reflections and wonder what I think I'm doing besides trying to commit social suicide, having coffee with Bobby Shapley's shack-job. Du's going to
kill
me if he finds out.

“Shut up,” I say to the reflections, but I'm really talking to the voice in my head, the one that won't quit about the rosebushes and their secret. Listen, I argue, Starr's
pregnant
and even Bobby Shapley couldn't make her have an abortion. I can be brave enough to have another cup of coffee with her, right? And looking into my own troubled eyes, I'm floored by the melancholy, bone-deep realization that Starr Dukes is truly the first and last best friend I ever had in my life. Hell, the
only
best friend I've ever had in my life. There've been other friends, but they weren't her. Get a grip, Annie, I tell myself and my eyes in the mirrors return the gaze with a dubious resolve.

In the kitchen, Starr's just finished with the espresso. “Mine's mostly milk,” she says. “I've got to think of the baby.” She pats her belly. “I made you a latte, too.”

“I can't remember the last time I had coffee that wasn't black,” I say. The steamed milk is so comforting my taste buds are delirious with the richness of it. This is truly a day for kicking over the traces.

“You're too thin.” One eyebrow raised, Starr looks me up and down like I'm a starving cat hanging around the back door. “Hold on.” She opens a cupboard and gets a package of Pepperidge Farm cookies down from the shelf. “Have a couple of these.”

My mouth waters at the sight of the white paper bag, but I shake my head. “No thanks,” I say. I've got to draw the line at cookies. She shrugs and takes one.

“I love these,” Starr says. “ 'Sides Dr Pepper, they were the only thing I could keep down most mornings, not until about a month ago.”

“When are you due?” The Chessmen cookies are calling my name. I imagine I can smell them from here, buttery sweet with that tantalizing hint of vanilla.

“April sometime. She's going to be a little Aries.” Starr, finished with one cookie, takes another. “I know she's a girl,” she says with her mouth full, “ 'cause I had a dream about it. Sure you don't want one?”

I do. Oh, Lord, I do and I'm going to have one and damn the calories. She holds the bag out to me, and I'm careful not to let myself grab it out of her hand. After ages of serial dieting, I'm going to have my first cookie in what I think is about fifteen years.

And I don't have just one. By the time I've finished my latte, I have three. Starr takes another, and we're at that point of no return with Pepperidge Farm cookies, the part where you're through one layer and meet the frilled paper cup between the six you just ate and the six waiting for you underneath it.

“Go on ahead, have another one,” Starr says. “You're company. You want the grand tour?”

Taking the cookies with us, we wander down the pristine hallway, past some more mostly white paintings and statuary, and end up in the bedroom that's an answer to a decorator's heartfelt prayer for getting rid of the pieces she can't move because they're too obnoxious for a normal house's sense of what's right and what's just wrong. If the living room is a snowed-in spaceport, then the master bedroom is a big-game safari. Under a billowing cumulus of mosquito netting, the mammoth posts on the king-sized bed are faux-ivory elephant tusks, the bedside lamps ostrich eggs sporting stitched ostrich-skin shades. There's a leopard-print velvet chaise longue, a giant clay urn of peacock feathers, and a fur coverlet on the bed that looks an awful lot like bear. The rest of the furniture is pretty much Zimbabwe rustic with zebra-skin rugs and stuffed animal heads—a gnu, an ibex, a Cape buffalo, and about five trophy bucks—gazing down at us with dusty, glassy-eyed indifference.

“Takes a whole lot of dead animals to make Bobby Shapley feel like a man, I guess.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. It's the kind of thing I always think but most of the time can keep to myself. Mortified, I turn to Starr, an abject apology ready on my tongue, and I realize she's laughing.

“Annie Banks, I knew that was you behind that Ladies' League bullshit!” she says with a delighted smile. “Of course it's all clear as can be
now,
but when Bobby talked me into coming back here, I was so in love with his lying self the dead animals didn't bother me enough to think on them much. Now I tell everyone good night and promise we'll all get even one day.” She holds out her hand for a cookie. “Laughing makes me hungry,” she says. “It's good to be hungry.”

I reach into the bag and realize it's the last Chessman. “Here,” I say, handing it to Starr. She breaks it in two, hands me half.

“Seems like I've been hungry forever,” I say around the mouthful of cookie. “It's nothing to get wound up over.”

“That's because you grew up on Fairmont Street.” Starr's tone is matter-of-fact. “When you're trash, growing up in the back seat of an old DeSoto, hungry means you're still alive.”

N
ot Allowed was a terrible thing. It had been over two weeks since I'd talked to Starr, it was a Friday afternoon, and I was skulking past Grandmother Banks's tall iron-spiked fence by myself with all the stealth of a soldier behind enemy lines. I'd had a trying day at school, and I particularly wanted to avoid my grandmother's notice. She had the habit of hanging around the front yard in her wheelchair, pretending to supervise Wash, her manservant, waiting for the very moment I would have to pass the front gate. As soon as she caught sight of me and my book bag, she was sure to beckon one palsied, be-ringed finger in an unavoidable summons. This Friday was no different.

“Mercy Anne!”

My grandmother Isabelle Gooch Banks was an imperious creature given to edicts, fiats, and death sentences from the rolling throne of her wheelchair. Served faithfully in all things by her two lifelong servants—Easter Mae, who kept the house and did the cooking, and Wash, who drove the Packard, worked in the yard, and toted my grandmother up the stairs whenever the geriatric elevator went on the fritz—she ruled her empire with a vein-corded fist and a single telephone.

After being released from the day's enforced idleness, also known as second grade, I had to walk past Grandmother Banks's State Street house on the way home. The old Banks mansion was something of a local landmark, a moldering three-storied Greek Revival pile complete with formal gardens and a grand porte cochere,
garçonnière,
servants' wing, and dank, leak-sprung carp pond. Wash had his work cut out for him, as did Easter Mae, since the house and grounds were designed for Staff, and the Banks family fortunes had dwindled somewhat since the Crash. If my father hadn't become a pediatrician and had instead followed the family business—doing nothing with style, essentially—my parents would've been reduced to living with my grandmother. Our own house, a smaller, much less grand version of the one on State Street, was burden enough. Being a child, I never noticed the constant repairs and economies that afforded my parents their Fairmont address.

“Mercy Anne
Banks!
Do you hear me?” It was a screech that would've shamed a macaw. With a sigh, I swung open the rusted iron gate and trudged up the walk to meet my grandmother, dragging my book bag behind me. Her wheelchair was parked under the shade of an ancient Japanese magnolia, its leaves yellowing and curl-edged after the long, hot summer. The cool spell had dissipated in the last week, just in time for school to start. I was sweating in my red plaid dress, my starched petticoats wilted and white ankle socks bedraggled. My shiny patent leather Mary Janes were covered in dust from the playground.

“I hear tell,” Grandma said with a lifted eyebrow, “that you punched Laddie Buchanan in the stomach yesterday. I know you're aware that he suffered rheumatic fever when he was an infant and that his heart is weak.” She folded her hands in her lap, eyes sharp in her wrinkled pudding face. “I can't imagine why you'd do such a terrible thing.”

I scuffed my shoe in the grass, unwilling to look at her. “Laddie's mean.”

“Mean?” Her voice was deceptively mild. “Why, I've known his people all my life. Laddie's a nice child. Give me an explanation this minute, young lady,” she commanded. Grandmother Banks settled back into her wheelchair for what was bound to be her favorite part of the day: the inquisition. It would be pointless to dissemble in any way because she had a nose for lies. I'd learned that the hard way when I'd tried to blame a broken mandarin figurine on Pumpernickel, her dachshund.

“Laddie's not
nice,
” I insisted. “He smells funny, like an old raincoat. Laddie said Starr was trash, right to her face. She's my friend, and I know it hurt her feelings.” I stuck out my chin. “If that's not mean, I don't care what is.”

“It's truthful, is what it is,” my grandmother said acidly. “That preacher's child is nothing but trash. Those kind of people move into a neighborhood, and before you know it, nice children are turning up with hookworms and pellagra. Your father says there's
mumps
going around on the other side of State Street. Besides, you'll pick up bad habits. Sassing your elders, eating paste. Your mother”—and here my grandmother sniffed—“did right for a change, forbidding you that little guttersnipe.”

I glared at the ground, stricken silent with the injustice of it all. I didn't know what pellagra was, much less a guttersnipe, but neither Starr nor I ate paste. Laddie was the paste eater.

“So.” Grandma cocked her head like a malevolent pigeon wearing gold ear bobs. “If you need someone to play with, I'll speak to Lollie Treeby this very afternoon. You'll go to their house tomorrow and spend your Saturday with little Lisa.” And with that, I was dismissed.

Wash jerked his white-haired head up from the bed of spider lilies he was tending when I slammed the rusted iron gate on my way out. “Don't you go shutting the gate like that, Miss Annie,” he reproached me. I kept walking as if I hadn't heard him, teeth clenched on words unsaid. “That old gate so po',” Wash advised my retreating back, “I can't fix it, you go breaking them hinges.”

My grandmother was lightning on the telephone and true to her word. By the time I got home, Methyl Ivory was waiting for me in the kitchen. Wiping her dark, capable hands on a dish towel, she said, “You grammaw called. You going to the Treebys' tomorrow to play.” From the apparatus assembled on the kitchen table and the bowl of blood-colored batter, it was apparent Methyl Ivory was in the middle of baking a red velvet cake. I dropped my book bag in a despicable heap of homework just inside the back door and flung myself into a kitchen chair.

“I hate her,” I said dismally. The day had seemed like to kill my spirit for good with a whole ream of math pages first thing in the morning; then having to sit next to the acknowledged baron of booger mining, Roger Fleck, at lunch in the cafeteria; plus the agony of no talking to Starr and now a whole Saturday ruined. I propped my chin in my hands, my elbows on the table.

“Who you hate?” Methyl Ivory trolled the eggbeater through the cake batter. “Not that big ol' Treeby gal—she don't got three words to say to nobody.”

I stuck my finger in the batter bowl. Methyl Ivory smacked my hand. “No, not Lisa,” I said. “She's just . . .
boring
. I hate Grandmother Banks. She said Starr would give me pellagra, that I'd start eating paste and get into trouble. That's why I have to go to stupid Lisa's house tomorrow.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Pouring the batter into two greased cake pans, Methyl Ivory gave me a look from under her eyebrows. “Seem to me you don't need to borrow trouble on you own account. Trouble seem to find you just fine. Here.” She pushed the scraped bowl toward me. “Have that.”

 

The next morning my mother unceremoniously hauled me out of bed.

“Wake up, Annie Banks.” She jerked the curtains open to a gray morning. “I'm walking you down to the Treebys' in half an hour.” My mother tossed some clothes onto the bed. “Put these on.”

I yawned and scratched, eyes at half-mast and hair frowsy, looking with distaste at the inoffensive yellow shorts and blouse. I took as long as I dared getting dressed. Later, in the bathroom, the black and white tiles were cool under my bare feet, the old-fashioned toilet dripping while I stared at my reflection in the wavy mirror over the pedestal sink. As I brushed my teeth, it came to me with a dawning horror that my eyes were the very same color as my awful grandmother's—the deep blue of autumn thunderclouds—and though hers were silver and mine were blond, I had her eyebrows, too. In a fascinated kind of dread, I was examining my nose, my chin, my toothpaste-whitened mouth for further resemblance when my mother burst into the bathroom.

“What are you doing up here?” she demanded crossly. Rough in her haste, she wiped my face with a damp washcloth and ran a brush over my hair. “Come downstairs this minute and eat your breakfast. We'll be late.”

And if I'd had my way, we'd have been very late indeed. My mother's heels sounded a brisk, martial rat-tat on the sidewalk ahead of me. I lagged behind, feeling as though I were headed to an appointment with a firing squad. Overnight the weather had turned cooler, and I was uncomfortably aware of my bare arms and legs in the misty air. A vermilion crape myrtle leaf fluttered to the damp sidewalk, and I stopped, bending over to examine it, my hair falling around my face. In the tree overhead a crow jeered raucous advice.
Run away, run away!

“Annie!”

“Coming.”

And so, fifteen minutes after eleven o'clock, I was deposited in the Treebys' gloomy, tiled entryway with only an assortment of umbrellas packed in a purple elephant majolica stand for company. Lisa didn't count. I'd commenced ignoring her while our mothers said good-bye at the door.

“Just send Annie home before five,” my mother was saying. “Wade and I are going to the Ole Miss game, but the maid will be there.” Everybody who was anybody would be at the Ole Miss–Alabama game. We'd passed the Bledsoe house on the way over, Mrs. Bledsoe decked out in an intense red-and-blue ensemble of shattering school-spiritedness, Mr. Bledsoe toting a bulging picnic basket to their station wagon. Mrs. Bledsoe had ignored my mother, even though it would've been impossible for her to have missed us. After that petty humiliation, my mother's color was up, but she carried her head high.

“Thank you again for having Annie over,” she said.

Tall Mrs. Treeby, wide as a boxcar in the hip region, smiled her big, square-toothed smile. “It's so nice, having Annie to play. Lisa gets quite lonely, you know.” With a wave, she shut the door as my mother tap-tap-tapped her way down the sidewalk in her scarlet heels, on her way to a football game where no one would speak to her.

“Be quiet now, girls,” Mrs. Treeby said to us, her voice and expression vague. “And play nicely together. I've got one of my headaches.” She promptly vanished somewhere upstairs, her hand to her forehead. Lisa's mother got bad headaches, a lot of them. I'd overheard my mother's friends—back when she still had friends—gossiping about how that skinflint Jerome Treeby wouldn't allow poor Lollie a maid, how he was such a tyrant around the house, and wasn't that just a scandal?

Lisa and I stood in the entryway looking at each other with not much to say.

“Want to play in my playhouse?” Lisa finally asked. She was a husky, adenoidal girl, tall for her age, with an oversized head round as a bushel basket.

Now, I knew from previous visits that the Kenmore playhouse in the Treebys' basement was about it as far as entertainment went over there. Lisa's allergies made playing outside impossible since weeds, leaves, and dust made her moon face swell to alarming proportions and then she couldn't breathe. We weren't allowed to play upstairs either because Mr. Treeby, an accountant, worked at home and any child-related racket resulted in a fearsome display of temper. Poor Mrs. Treeby would flutter and wring her hands when he ranted like a wrathful Old Testament patriarch and then tearfully beg him to calm down. No, it was the playhouse or nothing, so down to the basement we went.

Kenmore playhouses were never made to withstand the combined assaults of mildew, damp basements, and kids who'd grown bigger than they used to be. Each was made of middleweight cardboard fastened together with tabs and plastic snaps into a top-heavy box roughly the size of a kitchen stove—Sears sold a ton of them. Lisa's playhouse had been threatening to collapse for as long as I'd known it and was pieced together with masking tape. There wasn't room for both of us to be inside the playhouse at the same time.

“You want to go first?” Lisa was a polite child with the kind of manners parents universally applauded. As a consequence, the other kids didn't like her very much.

“No, you go ahead,” I said. “I need to use the bathroom, though.” I didn't really, but I was already bored to death with the basement.

“Okay,” Lisa said. She squeezed through the door opening. Hunkering down inside the playhouse, she turned around like a dog in a too-small crate while the playhouse threatened to tip over. Lisa tried to look out the window, but her head wouldn't fit. She stuck her arm through the opening instead and wagged a finger of caution at me. “Watch out—don't bother my daddy.”

I didn't know my way around the Treebys' house very well, but I knew where the powder room was. Upstairs in the dark hallway, the door to the half-bath was shut. The door across the hall was cracked open, though, and a strange, low hooting was going on inside the room behind it. The noise sounded like a morose beagle. I knew the Treebys didn't have a dog, thanks to Lisa's allergies.

Curious, I tiptoed across the hall to peek through the long strip of light between the door and the frame. The rhythmic moaning grew louder as I sneaked the solid oak door open an inch wider, then another inch. I peered into the dim room. Long olive-colored curtains were drawn over the window, the bright banker's lamp on the big mahogany desk the only illumination. To the right, just inside the door, was a Chesterfield sofa with a large photograph book balanced on the end of its rolled leather arm. The moaning had turned to gasping and ran rough and fast now. Cautiously, I stuck my nose inside the door for a better look.

Planted on top of the tufted cushions of the Chesterfield were two oxblood leather men's shoes and a pair of gray serge pants bunched loosely around a pair of skinny white shins holstered in gartered socks. Wide-eyed, I slid the door open another inch and saw naked hairy thighs spread wide, an astonishing thatch of wolverine-like fur, and in the middle of the fur was a hand gripping something wrapped in a large white handkerchief.

“Gah!” It was Mr. Treeby's voice, explosive as a burst gas main. His bare hips bucked in a furious spasm. “Gah!”