In Polite Company Read online

  When she and Tito bought the house on South Battery, she instructed the movers to put her barre in the bedroom. Tito demanded she remove it. “A bedroom is for sleeping,” he told her. So Laudie moved it herself to the grand hallway and had a carpenter mount it to the wall. In that big hallway at the top of the grand staircase, there is ample light and space, though there isn’t any air conditioning. (Laudie and Tito use window units in their main rooms, but—characteristic of their thriftiness—leave the halls and storage rooms unair-conditioned.) If the heat bothers her, she never lets anyone know it.

  Most days, Laudie wears a boatneck shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves, a long skirt, and stockings. This way, she’s always two minutes away from time at the barre. She removes her day skirt, lays it on the bed, and ties a ballet wrap skirt around her waist. She swaps her Capezio heels for her performa canvas flats and exits her bedroom, closing her eyes as she settles into first position.

  In the winter, she exercises midday. In the summer, she divides her routine between the early morning, before breakfast, and the evening, after supper, when the dishes are put away and Tito is glued to the news.

  Of course, Laudie encouraged the three of us girls to be dancers. From childhood, Weezy preferred rough sports: basketball and soccer. Caroline danced beautifully through middle school but quit in high school when she was elected cheer captain. I simply wasn’t graceful.

  Laudie will turn eighty-seven this year. Three weeks ago, she felt her heart flutter—an arrhythmia. That night she stayed in the ICU. While I had noticed her normally square shoulders had started to curl inward and her arrow-straight spine had begun to bow, these diminutions grew more pronounced after that trip to the ICU and in the following days. She looks smaller now, as though Father Time himself is pressing on her from all sides, insistent on shrinking her completely until, poof, she vanishes.

  In this room, time slows. The clock ticks forward reluctantly. The space between conversations yawns wide. Laudie and Tito don’t seem to notice the static silence. Or they do notice and don’t care. It’s as if time freezes everything but me, as if I can observe my grandparents as elements in a still life. A painterly tableau. Man, woman, bowl of grapes, glass of water. They sit, paused at their meal, staring at nothing. For how long have they been so old?

  “I have something for you.” I slide a little white envelope across the kitchen table. On her left wrist, I see that she wears a removable cast. “What happened?”

  “Oh, it was nothing. A little bump.”

  “She was on that barre again.” Tito says. “I told her to stop it.”

  After her most recent trip to the hospital, the doctors said she should stick to chair yoga. I hate to admit it, but I think it might be a good idea.

  “Oh hush, I’m fine,” she says.

  “I keep telling her the auditions were over sixty-five years ago.”

  I start to protest, but Tito screens himself behind the back page of the Local section and all I see is a large ad for dentures. Laudie ignores him and removes two tickets from the envelope. She strains her eyes to read. “La Silly . . . La Silly—”

  “La Sylphide,” I interrupt, not wanting to hear her struggle to read, to observe insidious reminders that she’s slipping away from me a bit each day. “The ballet is coming to the Gaillard in August. Will you come with me?”

  Laudie brightens. “Yes, of course.”

  A horn blasts. Tito’s ride to Battery Hall is here right on time to take him to the weekly chess tournament he and his friends started when they retired. He stands and places his hand on the table in front of Laudie, between the two of us. “Claudia, you could fall and break the other hand. I forbid it.” He shuffles across the kitchen, gets his cane, and heads out the back door.

  I could follow him, loop a young arm through his skeletal one, guide him down the steps one at a time, but I stay put. Sometimes I imagine tripping him. I wouldn’t ever, of course, but the thought has crossed my mind.

  Laudie eventually extends a feathery arm, brushes a finger on my cheek. “How is Trip?” She fixes her wide-set eyes on mine. A lot of people say I take after her. “Do you miss him all the way up there in Columbia?”

  I wish I missed him, but I don’t. And it’s the one thing I haven’t been able to tell Laudie. In all the conversations we’d had over the years, I’ve never held back. She would make me a glass of her sugar-free instant iced tea and clip the day’s coupons from the Post and Courier while I’d tell her every detail of my teenage life, and later, in my twenties, my romance with Trip. When Tito was in the kitchen, we’d wander up the stairs so she could exercise at the barre. I went to Laudie whenever I felt ostracized—as a fifth grader pocked with whiteheads, crowned with greasy hair, my eyes spaced so far apart my classmates called me “praying mantis.” I sought her out when I was mortified, like the time I borrowed a skirt from the most popular girl in the class, only to stain it with menstrual blood. Maybe it was because of her wisdom or her age or both; she always had a way of making sense of my world.

  Perhaps because she recalls things from the past like butter and gasoline shortages, Laudie is grateful for all she has. She might live in a mansion, but she shops at Harris Teeter only on Thursdays because of the 5 percent senior discount. She saves gift wrap and string, cuts the spoiled parts off overripe fruit, and shops the sales, especially the clearance tables. And although she may have been a rebellious free spirit once, that was more than six decades ago. She’s been married to Tito for sixty-five years. How could she make sense of my doubting heart?

  Trip is a good guy. He’s handsome. He loves me. He’s kind and ambitious in exactly the way my parents like. But as each new day brings me closer to marching down the aisle, a voice from inside me screams to run the other way, to run hard and fast and not look back. I can’t tell her. She’s so excited about the wedding, which will be sometime next May, or maybe June. There’s so much to celebrate in our family, with Caroline’s debut later this year and Weezy’s second baby on the way.

  Still, I know she keeps a secret from me; if only I could decode it from the way she wears her hair, her choice of shoes, the tight smile her mouth forms during Tito’s nitpicking. And I know it has something to do with Atlanta, her dancing, and maybe a lover. I asked her about it constantly after our road trip to Beaufort and pestered her all through my college breaks. Mostly she laughed and changed the subject. A couple of times I saw her take a quick breath, like she was ready to talk, but then she’d pull her neck in and scrunch her nose, as though the idea smelled bad.

  It was around my senior year, the year I met Trip, that I stopped asking at all. An aspiring lawyer, he told me once that some things are best left unsaid. Maybe that’s how she felt.

  “He’s great, Laudie.” I squeeze her bony hand. “I’ve got to get to work.”

  “Hmm.” She narrows her eyes.

  “What?” I instinctively fold my arms over my chest, feeling a bit like an aphid on her zinnias.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this.” She starts to stand. “Before you leave, I have something for you.” Her body sways a bit, like she’s had too many martinis. If she were to fall, she’d snap in half. If I were to help her, to guide her through the kitchen maze with my hand against her skin—thin and white as film from boiled milk—I’d be telling her that I don’t trust her body, the temple that she toned, trained, and disciplined for the better part of a century. I remain seated, telling myself that she got herself downstairs to the kitchen table on her own, and she can probably still throw her leg up on the barre in the great hall upstairs.

  Hands grazing the green countertops, she teeters toward the corner of the kitchen. I spin the porcelain saltshaker and pretend not to follow her every step, ready at any moment for a mad dash around Tito’s chair and a leap over the linoleum to dive beneath my collapsing grandmother.

  She lifts a gold watch from the counter and extends it toward me. “I want to give this to you.”

  I cross the room to
get a better look. The slender watch has hash marks running throughout its surface, giving the band the look of golden snakeskin. “Laudie, that’s your watch. You still use it.” In the last year, she’s had the habit of giving away her finer things: a vase to me, silver platters to Mom and Weezy. I wish she’d stop. She isn’t dead yet.

  “I can’t wear it with this thing on my hand. It won’t fit. I was going to give it to you anyway, so you might as well have it now.”

  “Yeah, but your wrist will get better and you can wear it again. Let me put it on your right arm.”

  “You’re stubborn.”

  “You’re stubborn!”

  She laughs. “Oh, all right.” She extends her arm, like a prima ballerina executing a classic port de bras. “Mother gave it to me when I left for Atlanta so that I’d call her every Sunday at exactly three o’clock.” She hasn’t mentioned Atlanta in years. Laudie’s eyes drift. She speaks as though in a trance. “I want you to have it later, as a reminder.”

  “Laudie, I’ll never forget you.”

  “Simons.” She beckons me closer, her milky eyes hardening to a bright crystal blue. “It’s not a reminder of me; it’s a reminder to be brave.”

  2.

  Toxins

  I line the little batch of zinnias on my countertop to determine a precise stem length for my arrangement. I trim the ends and pull off the fuzzy leaves, then drop the zinnias into the porcelain vase Laudie gave me. The bouquet looks lopsided. I extract the largest flower, a peach one, and tuck it back into the center. Better.

  After leaning over to place the flowers on my coffee table, I straighten to a dizzying cosmos of stars blinking and fading in my periphery. The main events of last night come into focus. I let a man buy me drinks. I gave him my phone number. I shake out a couple of ibuprofen, chase them down with a giant glass of water, and try not to remember any more.

  My apartment sits on the second floor of what’s called a Charleston single house. This style of house is long but narrow, just one room wide when viewed from the street. Like all Charleston singles, its porches run the length of the house. When the landowners chopped the home up into three units, they boarded up the first-floor porch to make more room for storage and the staircase that brings me to my second-floor apartment. Fortunately, there’s a small second-story porch on the east side of the house, accessible only from my living room. I don’t consider myself a traditionalist, but it does seem sacrilegious to live in this city and not have a piazza.

  Mom says it has “character,” which is her euphemism for “shabby.” My walls are pale gray with eggshell trim. The paint is peeling. The windows are warped, and there’s visible wood rot. It’s one of the few remaining dwellings that has not been updated to house the thousands of affluent people moving here from New York and the Midwest, which means I can afford it, barely.

  The apartment’s best feature is the fireplace. Although the chimney was sealed up years ago, it’s still beautiful. Two carved cherubs, one at each end, hold up the mantelpiece. They lean wistfully toward each other, clutching the ends of a carved laurel swag. A poster by local artist Jonathan Green hangs above the mantel. It depicts a Gullah woman, a descendant of enslaved Africans who live along the coast, wearing a billowing white dress against a backdrop of blue Lowcountry skies and cottony clouds. She holds a laundry basket in one hand and presses her sun hat to her head with the other. A warm breeze rips through the open air, sending the white sheets flapping behind her.

  My first major purchase for the apartment was a mid-century couch, which I positioned to face the window that overlooks the porch. The window frames the upper stories of the nearby houses, some piazzas, a bit of red roof, a tangle of telephone wires.

  It’s quiet today. I have grown accustomed to the noises of Coming Street—techno blaring from a College of Charleston dorm room or the rev of a Jeep speeding down the street—but graduation was last weekend and the students are gone. Charleston has returned to its sleepy self. I miss the commotion. Martha doesn’t. She welcomes the city’s annual purge of “zits, tits, and Schlitz.”

  Buzz. Buzz. Another text from Trip. He expects me to answer immediately. I used to. Shouldn’t I want to?

  I leave my phone and go in the kitchen to put a little more distance between us. Everything in here is a bit wonky: the floor slants so much that I had to stack coasters under the oven’s front legs, and the cupboards are tacked up to the walls like afterthoughts. The faucet on the right is for the hot water; the one on the left is for the cold. The only window is strangely off-center. Once in a while, a roach crawls to the center of my kitchen floor and dies legs-up. They’re as big as hushpuppies, darker than dirt, and impossible to keep out during the warmer months. Despite these shortcomings, I love my apartment. I have it all to myself until about a year from now, when I will be married to Trip and living in Columbia.

  Columbia is South Carolina’s capital city, about a two-hour drive from Charleston. No beach, no mountains; it’s just sprawling suburbia smack-dab in the middle of the state. Trip tells me that when I give it a chance, I’ll see why people like it there. Though, of course, Columbia will not always be our home.

  Trip and I met at a party our junior year at UNC–Chapel Hill. He seemed so normal, which was a relief. Finally, I thought, here’s someone I can introduce to my parents. He’s the corner puzzle piece—the one who can help me fit into the family jigsaw.

  Before Trip, I fell for the misfit, truant boys—the ones who had skateboards and bad habits. From the start of high school, I chose to hang with the kids who smoked pot and hated their parents. I liked my parents and found that pot just made me feel confused. But that crowd—the boys with chain wallets and the girls with moody glares—was the one that accepted me. They intrigued me.

  My sisters sat at lunch with the popular girls, always pretty in their pastel summer dresses and sun-kissed skin. And though I was asked to join that clique in my grade, I never felt comfortable. Those girls were always so confident, so sure of their place in the world. The closer I sat to them, the more amplified our differences became.

  I stood out from my nuclear family as well. My older sister, Weezy, has curly brown hair like Dad. Caroline, the youngest, has thick, wavy blond hair like Mom. Mine alone is ashy brown, still as fine as a baby’s. In family photos, because I’m the shortest, I always get shoved to the front, looking gangly and bewildered between the natural family pairs. In fourth grade, I discovered a rogue hash brown in my four-piece chicken nugget Happy Meal; I bit into it thinking, that’s me.

  But more than looks, my interests were different. Weezy was sporty, and that connected her to Dad. He drove her all over the state to compete in basketball and soccer tournaments. When they got home for dinner, Dad would place her trophies in the center of the table, regaling us with details of her three-pointers and chip shots. And then Weezy married a nice boy at twenty-six and had her first baby at twenty-eight—right on time.

  Caroline and Mom are a team, too. Even through high school, Caroline would tag along with Mom on her errands, dropping off dry-cleaning, picking up a prescription. In curlers, they read People magazine and munched on carrots and wore matching pajamas to watch the Oscars.

  Without a family partner or after-school activities, I mostly hung around my room alone and bored. I would make faces in the bathroom mirror and practice French kissing on my arm. I stared out the window, hoping to catch a burglar in action or see our neighbors having sex. Nothing ever happened.

  Eventually I left my room, sniffing for something productive to do around the house. After the Bug Squad arrived in hazmat suits, I hosted a family meeting in the living room to make a case for slapping the occasional mosquito instead of carpet-bombing our garden with toxins. I experimented with vegetarianism, tacking gory PETA pamphlets to the refrigerator and mooing like a dying cow on hamburger night. The summer after middle school, right before we cut into Mom’s birthday cake, I suggested we forgo birthday presents because there’s already too m
uch stuff in the world.

  “Right now I’d say there are too many opinions,” my mother had said. “You need a hobby.”

  The most radical hobby I could think of at the time was surfing. I bought a used board and Mom didn’t mind driving back and forth to the beach because I had finally picked up an interest that didn’t involve attempts to change her lifestyle.

  Shortly after I found my hobby, I found my kindred spirit: Martha. We met the first week of high school in the girls’ bathroom. She wore Doc Martens and midnight purple fingernail polish. She noticed the buttons I had pinned to my bookbag. On one, a grumpy fish said, “SCHOOLS SUCK.” On another was a picture of an angry baby in a bib. The text read, “GIVE PEAS A CHANCE.”

  Weezy had bought me a simple pinback-button-making machine for my birthday (conveniently at a time when my stance on presents had softened). It was a metal contraption with two large discs on a swivel; it had a heavy-duty red handle for ramming all the parts into place. I spent many nights that summer, just before sleep, writing slogans over sketches and popping my little pieces of artwork onto the spring pins.

  I gave Martha one of my favorites: a garbage can with long legs in fishnets that said, “DON’T BE TRASHY. RECYCLE.”

  “Can you make me one that says, ‘I’d rather be smoking’?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, and one that says ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’”

  “Ha. Yeah, okay. Just don’t tell anyone who made it.”

  “Deal.”

  We skipped assembly so she could show me how to put on eyeliner. She painted the inside corners of my eyes, drawing them closer together with black arcs. The trick made me look more daring, less naive. The makeup helped to quickly identify me as one of Crescent’s alternative crowd, a collection of prep-school wannabe punks who wore Weedwacker haircuts, carefully chosen thrift-store shirts, and scowls.