Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

Before she comes out, before I have the limes sliced — I am putting up corned beef and saltines and sardines and maraschino cherries and Ovaltine and cheese and Wheat Thins: it’s like Christmas going through the groceries, no Turtle Creek here —a sound comes from my bedroom.

The kind of disappointment this could suggest is large. I dread that it is a beau, as she likes to call them. The situation is complex and long and tedious; suffice it to say, here, that it could be a beau, that I do not want it to be, I do not want to share any of this good load of groceries with a boyfriend of my mother. That’s not all there is to it, but that’s enough.

I poke my head in the room, and on the bed, reclined with feet crossed, arms behind head, is a woman, about a thirty-year-old-looking woman that I feel I should recognize. It’s a rather smart-looking woman, trim, tasteful, sturdy. I find it difficult to leave, standing against the doorjamb with a knife and a lime.

“Hi,” she says, eyes open.

“Hi.”

“Remember me?”

“Yes.”

“There wasn’t really a snake. I wanted you to save me.”

“Did I save you?”

“No.”

My mother is emerged. “You’ve found your cousin,” she says from across the way.

“Yes, I have.”

“She turned out well, didn’t she?”

My cousin, on the bed yet, looks directly at me with, I swear, a caricature of sultriness in her expression.

“She did,” I call to my mother over my shoulder.

“You did,” I say to this woman they are calling my cousin.

“I know I did,” she says, still in the charade of allure, I think.

But I cannot be sure it is charade. I may well be looking at a cousin of mine in an inviting pose on my own bed who does think she turned out well. The fact is, she has turned out well, very very well, so well that at least two people in a house of three think the strange woman on my bed has turned out well, and the woman on the bed seems inclined to go along, if only in farce. A woman who turned out well on my bed! My mother for chaperone! Don’t have to share the sardines with an oaf who paws my mother! What a day!

I go down to the car to get the ham. I shall carve the ham, and the ladies and I shall eat the ham. There’s enough lust and food and liquor and good weather and sea breeze and iodine on that breeze and good-looking women on hand to think life a perfect piece of cake there for the eating. Life, suddenly, is an I can’t wait proposition.

When she was twelve years old, my turned-out-well cousin — tonight sitting opposite me on the sofa with my mother and with her legs out in an elegant scissoring cross, not folded up under her as my mother’s are — my turned-out-well cousin, whom I want badly and see is possible to be had, given judicious application of charm and feigned indifference, and given her just detectable suggested recent history of some not-working-out with a man, some kind of failed fling that she is working hard not to allow to be major, to reduce to misdemeanor, an annoyance, something laughable as she sits in the good ocean air with her entertaining low-country aunt, thinking, maybe, Aren’t these two a pair, and Simons, how bitter and cute he turned out … ah, the beach, he’s really rather … well, grown-up, to be just out of college. And I am wondering what Aunt he-had-a-peter-this-big Sasa’s position would be if … I mean, we all know the historical low-country position on the matter of cousins marrying, but that is historical, not now, and marriage isn’t what I am inclined to consider: I need a vacation, is what I need. My cousin, when she was twelve years old, admits to heavy false terror, terror struck in her by a snake she claimed to have seen that she claimed was at least seven feet long, frantically exiting the water — an upcountry lake — clutching her neck and screaming and coming to me hysterical with the news. Which news I apparently smartly dismissed as herpetologically impossible and went about my way, missing thereby the opportunity to console my then budding-breast cousin. Perhaps some private tenderness would have been in order, she says tonight, laughing. I have forgotten the incident entirely except for the image of her holding her neck, which gesture at the time I ascribed to choking on lake water before she spoke of the mythic snake.

But some fifteen years later the prospect of private tenderness in the way of consolation is not to be dismissed. There is again an hysteria obtaining in this woman, my cousin, quieter but also more real, and hysteria is a gold mine of opportunity in my limited experience — perhaps the sublimest atmosphere for negotiations on matters sexual between consenting adults. With at least one party hysterical, things go smoothly, smoothly.

Without saying a word, my mother is managing to contribute favorably and seriously to my cause. She sits there, twinkling of eye above her glass when she drinks, saying, Of course you claimed to have seen a seven-foot monster in order to attract my son, and — she keeps just twinkling, and the story itself does not merit it— of course you are telling us the story tonight. My mother is virtually winking at me, and then winking at my cousin: I understand, she says to her; you go right ahead.

What has arranged the presence of my cousin now does not get broached, which is what prompts me to suspect some kind of trouble that the league of women has agreed to keep to itself. Namely, in this case, from me, which is a boon to operations. I am free to be fresh. The shadow of palled relations with men has not been penumbrated unto me. I am in the sunshine. More correctly, I am in the sea breeze and the moonshine, and I am carving the ham. I take a good long look at my long-lost cousin Patricia, and I deduce that her good long legs have got that way riding horses. We have a Piedmont horse girl at large in the house, her genealogy preapproved, wanting to dash some small misery to pieces while down here. And I am the dashing man. To prove it, I fix them fresh drinks before they ask, and neglect my own, the better to watch women on firewater. If there is anything more interesting to watch than women on firewater, I do not know what it is.

There is talk of relatives I know not too well — too many of them to know them any better from listening to the rundown. A whole section of the family tree is pruned and primped and assessed as I politely sit there. Overall, I detect that the tree is fine: its leaves gently turning in the breeze of life. We have no scandal blight, no limb-wrenching storms of fate, no bad apples. I wonder what it is like when the Kennedys sit around for a disk check like this. You know they can always start at the good stuff and never move far from it. We are not the Kennedys, it would seem. We are the Manigaults. Well, two hundred years ago we had more rice than the Kennedys have votes. Buckra not on top today, is all. The Wawer. The Kennedys need them a Wawer, and I guess they’ve been having one all along.

There is a lull, and I am caught looking at Patricia. There is no profit in looking away. She looks steadily and directly and tellingly back, and she throws in some of that cartoonish voluptuousness and smiles a little in recognition of it, to tell me it is camp. I am most encouraged, delighted by her wit. The wit to say things, to render things easy, to preclude blunder. To be acting this way is, in my view, worthy of my affection as well as my lust. I begin to love this Patricia. This Patricia plays by some fair rules. This Patricia plays. This Patricia.

I busy myself in the kitchen, wrapping the ham, which tomorrow goes in the bathtub. We can’t eat these nitrites for a whole ham.

“What firm in Atlanta do you have an in with?” my mother wants to know.