The Major's Wife

The Major’s Wife

pgallaher copyright@2018

            The road north of Wilmot is a treacherous two-lane that climbs and dips through miles of tree farms. I remember how it was before the tree farms, each season more flamboyant than the last. In summer the rhododendrons bloomed and it looked like the woods were festooned with huge pink bows. In fall the hills and valleys shimmered in the sunlight, ablaze with red and orange. That was before the paper company bought up the timberland, leveled the hardwoods, and planted fast-growing pines. Then construction started on the new highway. It all happened about the time the major and his wife came to Wilmot, winding down the two-lane in their blue Mustang.

            The road frames my memories of it all.

            I was a straight-B student and cheerleader, in love with Joel Rayburn. Joel’s brother left for Vietnam that spring. Joel and I still talked on the phone when he came in from spring practice, but he’d started cutting it short. “Walter Cronkite’s coming on,” he’d say. “I’ll have to call you later.” Sometimes he’d call later, more often not.

            Most high school graduates hung around Wilmot, found decent jobs, married and settled into grooves that resembled their parents’ lives. Our people were Baptists, my daddy a deacon, like his daddy. The Varners were all musical. Uncle Mitch was the song leader. Mama accompanied on the electric organ and I was the youngest choir member, a frequent soloist. I might have stayed, too, married Joel, sung in the church choir, if the major’s wife hadn’t come to Wilmot. I remember how she leaned against the Mustang outside the school, one of those afternoons when we’d finished chorus practice. I see her, drawing hard on her Winston. She exhales, squinting as the smoke curls around her. Wisps of dark red hair play against the sharp bones of her face. “There’s a whole world out there,” she tells me. “Don’t you dare settle for singing in the church choir.”

            She arrived at school on a blustery April morning. The principal met our French class first period and announced that Major Glenn Hathaway’s wife would be substituting. We already knew our French teacher was in the hospital. She’d had a wreck on the two-lane, lucky her pickup didn’t roll over the mountain side. Mr. Howell checked his watch. “The major’s wife should be here any minute.” He walked to the window, peered at the slate-colored sky, and gazed at the trees bending in the wind. “Looks like it could storm,” he said, leaving us to wonder if our substitute might not come out in the rain. He glanced at his watch again and headed to the hall, mumbling that he’d find out what was keeping her. “Y’all behave,” he warned us.

             A few minutes later, the major’s wife swept through the door, carrying a guitar case. She was tall and willowy, all windblown and breathless. “Bonjour, les étudiants,” she said. We’d never heard French spoken without a heavy Southern accent. She made no excuses for being late. “Looks like I’ll be your teacher for a few days,” she said. She was so young. Not the picture a major’s wife conjured up. She wore a flouncy skirt, a peasant blouse, and insubstantial black slippers that could have been ballet shoes. Her thick hair, caught up in a careless twist, was fastened with a tortoise shell clasp, with wild tendrils falling loose around her face. She had a smattering of freckles across her nose, visible only as she walked through the aisles, taking roll.

            When she called “Elizabeth Varner,” I raised my hand. “People call me Liz Beth,” I said.

            Arching her pretty eyebrows, she tilted her head and looked thoughtful. “I like it,” she said. She tossed the roll book onto the desk and announced, “You can call me Brette.” She took out her guitar and launched into a song: “Dites-moi pourquoi la vie est belle . . . .” We were as still as stones, hanging on each note. “I was a music major. I don’t remember much French,” she said with a strum, “but we can sing. You want to learn this song?”

            Heads all around bobbed with enthusiasm. I caught her eye and gave my best smile. The melody had taken hold in my head, and I was anxious to sing for her. Some of the boys had a dreamy look, like they were falling in love. Maybe the girls, too.

            The only French we learned were the words to Dites-Moi and Frere Jacques. The major’s wife brought in crepes one day and wore a white beret that set off the deep red hues of her hair. She ordered a film, in French. The bookmobile delivered it in time for her last day with us. After a year of studying the language, we heard how French-speaking people really sounded.

            The major’s wife substituted in other classes, a day here and there, as school wound down. One afternoon after a cheerleader meeting, I saw her leaving the principal’s office. “Liz Beth!” she called, coming toward me, high heels clicking on the hardwood floor. She wore a fitted black dress that fell just below the knee, with a pink patent leather belt cinched tight around her waist.

            “You have a lovely voice, Liz Beth,” she said.

            “I sing in the church choir,” I said, as my face heated up. Cheerleading, acting a fool in front of a boisterous crowd, or singing in front of the Baptist congregation had not prepared me to receive her compliment.

            We walked through the big arched double doors at the front of the building. “I was talking to Mr. Howell about starting a school chorus in the fall,” she said. “He can’t pay a choral director, but I don’t care about the money.” She stopped to light a cigarette, holding it between her long fingers, pink nails cut short.

            “He says the kids around here are either working on their farms after school or busy with sports.”

            “That’s not true,” I said. “Some people don’t do anything after school but watch TV.”

            Her ice-blue eyes shined with hope.

            “Cheerleaders don’t practice on game day,” I said. “I’d be in your chorus if we met on Friday, right after school.”

            She squeezed my arm. “Would you?”

            “Sure,” I said.

            She pulled me against her, hugging hard. “Oh, Liz Beth, I knew I could count on you. I could just tell, the minute I heard you sing.”

            The smell of her shampoo, like oranges, lingered after she let go.

            She asked how I was getting home. “Walking,” I said.  

            “Come on. My car’s right over there.” She pointed to the blue Mustang.

           

            “Major Glenn Hathaway is a decorated war hero. Lost his leg in Vietnam,” my cousin Buster said at our big family Fourth of July picnic. Buster, Aunt Shirley’s boy, was the deputy on duty the night the blue Mustang sped around the square and whipped into the driveway at the Huggins place. Buster pulled the patrol cruiser behind the Mustang, made the siren go “Whoop!” and took his time walking to the car.

            “She was in the driver’s seat. Skirt hiked up to here.” Buster made a chopping motion way up on his thigh. “She didn’t pull it down, neither.”

            Our family always gathered at Aunt Shirley’s. She lived at the old home place. It was Joel’s first time with all the Varners. He found a corner and ate barbecue and coleslaw in silence. Our family could be overpowering. Everybody talked at once. Buster was the loudest that day, or maybe I heard him above the others because I was listening. “The major was in the passenger seat, smoking a cigarette, just staring out the window. Artificial leg laying by the console. I couldn’t write a ticket, not after seeing that leg.”

            The men who remembered Glenn Hathaway as a football legend at Wilmot and then at Tennessee Tech figured he was close to forty. “I was in grammar school when he graduated,” Buster said. “The wife’s driver’s license says she’s twenty-four. Way too young for him.”

            They all speculated on why the major wanted to come back to Wilmot when all his people had died or moved away. Somebody suggested maybe he wanted someplace quiet, to settle his nerves after what he’d been through.

            “Maybe he thought it would be easier in Wilmot to keep his pretty young wife in check,” another cousin said.

            “That ain’t gonna happen,” said Buster, through a mouthful of barbecue. His remark triggered a round of rowdy laughter.

            “She’s so pretty,” my cousin Rachel mused. “She comes in the drug store for the major’s medicine, always dressed like she stepped off the cover of a fashion magazine.”

            “She flits around in that car like a hussy,” said Leanne, the fat, ugly cousin, the only young person that would use an old people’s word like hussy.

            I said, “Shut up, Leanne. You don’t know anything about it.”

            She walked up to me as I started to dish out baked beans to Uncle Mitch. She flipped the ladle. Baked beans splattered my white blouse. I dropped the ladle and pushed her. She tripped over backwards, falling like a big splatter of dough. The family stepped in then, and next thing Joel was grabbing my arm, pulling me out of there. “What the hell, Liz Beth?” he hissed. “What’s got into you?” 

            The summer dragged on, cheerleader practice and church and Joel on Saturday nights. I wanted to ask Joel, “What’s got into you?” He’d turned so quiet. Maybe he was worried about his brother or worried that he’d be drafted too. Maybe he was just tired. He had a job hauling rocks for the new road, and he helped his daddy on their farm. I could feel Joel slipping away from me, and it didn’t matter as much as it should have.

            I thought school would never start.

            Then one sultry day I answered the phone and heard, “Liz Beth - hello! It’s Brette.”

            My skin turned all goose-pimply, like the first time Joel called, wanting to drive me home from the game. He chose me. I wished I could keep that feeling about Joel.

            The major’s wife invited me to her house. “I sent for my music, and a whole big bundle just came in the mail,” she said. “I want to go over some pieces for the chorus, see what you think.”

            My nerves jangled that much more. She chose me, somebody like her.

            She came for me in the Mustang. We zipped through town and swerved into her driveway, reminding me of what Buster said about the night she arrived in Wilmot.         “Buster, the deputy, is my cousin,” I said.

            Her laugh was full of delight. The car lurched to a stop. “Twice he’s let me off the hook for speeding. Last time he shook his finger at me and said, ‘Third time’s the charm.’” She laughed again, a rich sound as musical as her singing.

            I followed her up the wide front steps. In its time, the Huggins house must have been a nice place. It had a high-pitched roof and a front porch with a swing, mostly hidden by overgrown holly bushes. “We rented this house because it was furnished. I never expected a piano,” she said, throwing open the front door. Against the living room wall, next to the entrance to the dining room, sat an upright with ivories the color of tobacco-stained teeth. She made a dramatic gesture. “Voila! I got it tuned, and you won’t believe how it sounds.” She went to the keyboard and ran her fingers up the scale and down. “Isn’t it a wonderful sound for an old darling like this?”

            In spite of the scorching sun outside, the house was cool, full of shadows. The major’s wife switched on a floor lamp beside the piano. The dining room table was covered with music books and sheet music. She flipped through the pages with the kind of glee a child might show at Christmas. She chose some pieces and went to the piano. “Do you know this one? Dona Nobis Pacem?”

            I shook my head. “What’s that?”

            “Latin for ‘Give us peace.’” Her eyes were earnest. As if she really believed I might know a song in Latin. I sang hymns and gospel, Top 40 from the radio. I could sound like Diana Ross when I really turned it on. But no Latin.

            “We’ll do this one for Christmas.” She played and sang a line - “Do-na, no-bis, pacem pacem.” She patted the piano bench beside her. “Here. Sit. Sing with me.”

            A couple of times through and I had the first verse. She said I was a natural. The melody of the next verse changed but the words were the same. She explained it was a three-part round. “You start, and I’ll come in here. I’ll play the third part on the piano so you’ll hear how it sounds all together.” I couldn’t imagine singing one melody and playing another on the piano, but I wasn’t the major’s wife. “You keep going till I cut you off,” she said. The lamp cast a gold light on her long fingers. I did not falter. Our voices blended, and it was most beautiful song I had ever sung.

            The major walked with a cane but it was not obvious that he had an artificial leg. Some afternoons when we sang, there in the living room, he sat on the couch, smoking, nursing a drink, like he was in a café being entertained. Whenever he passed by us, going to refill his glass, his smell was ripe, too much drinking and not enough bathing, and I was surprised that it was not a bad odor. He never acted drunk, not like the boys at dances who kept ducking out, going behind the gym, and returning, silly and unsteady. Sometimes the major drifted off to sleep as we sang. Once he spilled his drink. Another time his cigarette burned a hole in his pants and he woke yelling, “Shit!”

            People said everybody knew everybody else’s business in Wilmot. Everybody knew the major was on heavy pain medication. I wondered if they knew he washed down his pills with Jack Daniels.

            I liked him. He called me Miss Varner, saying it with a witty smile that gave me a glimpse of the man he might have been before his war injury. The major’s wife told me she left college to marry him, knowing he was heading to Vietnam. “Those few weeks before he left have carried me through everything,” she said. I tried to imagine the younger version of the major, much the same as this one, his broad shoulders bulging in a white t-shirt, his hair cropped military style – but standing tall on two strong legs. I imagined he was a catch, with flirty green eyes. Mostly now, his eyes had a vacant look, like a sleepwalker.

            Toward the end of the summer, the major’s wife asked me to go along with them to Nashville. The major had an appointment at the VA Hospital.

            “There’s just one thing. You’ve got to start calling me Brette,” she said.

            While the major saw the doctors, Brette and I shopped downtown at the big department stores. She left Cain-Sloan with two pairs of strappy shoes, a black lacy bra, and two bottles of Chanel No. 5. My mother had given me five crisp ten-dollar bills to buy school clothes, but after watching Brette shop, I couldn’t think about boring pleated skirts and loafers.

            “Just enough time,” she said, checking her watch, and we dashed into a music store. “I want to buy a music book for you.”

            “I have money,” I said.

            “Let me do this little thing for you, Liz Beth.” She pulled a thick spiral-bound music book from the rack. Love Songs for Young Lovers. She flipped through it and came to an old Platters song. “You-oo-oo’ve got that ma-gic touch,” she trilled. Customers glanced our way. After that, they watched her like they’d run into a movie star.

            “Come on. Choose a book,” Brette said.

            I reached for the one in her hands. “If you say so.”

            “It will give me great pleasure,” she said, and winked.

            Outside Nashville, the major mumbled something to Brette.

            “We don’t need to stop,” she said. “I’ll go to the county line.”

            Crammed in that little back seat, so close to them, I rustled the pages of my music book, pretending I didn’t hear the low-pitched, hard-edged words that followed before Brette whipped the Mustang into a parking lot. The major hobbled into a liquor store.

            Brette lit a cigarette. “You can just forget about this little stop,” she said.

            “I won’t tell anybody,” I said.

            She offered me a Winston. “As long as I’m corrupting you,” she said.

            I told her, “It’s not my first cigarette, Brette.”

            A pimply-faced boy came out with the major and put a cardboard box in the trunk. The major groaned as he slid into his seat. He glanced back at me. “Well, look at you, Miss Varner. Aren’t you afraid you’ll ruin that pretty voice of yours?”

            “I won’t,” I said. “Brette hasn’t ruined hers.”

            “You should’ve heard her before she took up smoking,” he said.

            “Don’t get the habit,” Brette said, on a sharp note that might not have been meant for me. “You can almost never break a bad habit.”

            She switched on the radio. The major twisted off the top of a pint of Jack Daniels and turned it up to his lips, like some of the football boys did in the dark stairwells of the gym during school dances. He made the same raspy sound, a sigh of pleasure, and a minute later, he turned up the bottle again. Nobody spoke for miles and miles, until we reached the two-lane north of Wilmot.  

            The hum of the car engine had almost lulled me to sleep, when the major yelled, “For God’s sake, Brette! Slow down!”

            She hit the brakes. The car lurched. “Shit!” the major said.

            Brette’s lips curled in an odd little smile.

            School started, finally.

            Brette said we needed twenty for the chorus. But the first Friday, when nine girls and four boys showed up after school, she said, “Perfect!”

            The principal had recruited his wife to play the piano. Mrs. Howell reminded me of a fat bird, round and colorful and cheery. She played with gusto, hands bouncing up and down, landing on most of the right notes, most of the time. “Bravo, Mrs. Howell!” Brette said, after we made it through The Happy Wanderer, and she led us in thunderous applause for our pianist.

            Next time through, she motioned to me, and I sang the descant we’d practiced at her house: “Val-de-ri-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, val-de-ra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” Brette didn’t have to ask for applause. The skinny boy behind me with a voice like Johnny Cash said, “Hot damn!” Girls I used to play with in grammar school, no longer part of my crowd, came up to me later and said, “How’d you learn to sing like that, Liz Beth?”

            My senior year was a blurry, jumpy, black-and-white movie like the ones our health teacher showed on an old 16-millimeter projector. Only a few moments come back now as still shots. Brette in high black boots, leaning against the hood of her car, smoking a cigarette after chorus. “You can get a music scholarship,” she said, through the curling smoke. “There’s a whole world out there, Liz Beth.” And another moment frozen in time, the last night Joel and I were together, parked in the restricted construction area behind a piece of heavy equipment. Bright moon beaming down. Radio tuned to WLS Chicago. “You’ve changed, Liz Beth,” he said, and I said, “You’ve changed, too.” And the cleansing of a good cry, the new dawn of possibilities.

            “I’ve been to lots of auditions,” Brette said. “Most singers come in with high-energy show tunes and Top 40 hits. We need to find something different for you.” The weeks ticked off toward graduation. The letter arrived, admitting me to Middle Tennessee State College, sixty miles north, but my parents couldn’t afford college. The letter meant nothing unless I could get a music scholarship. Brette and I looked at old bluesy pieces and settled on Someone to Watch Over Me. She said it was the kind of song that would give me a chance to show my gifts. We worked every afternoon through the spring. With cheerleading behind me forever and Joel dating a sophomore now, singing was everything to me.

            Brette announced to the chorus that we’d be performing at graduation, and she passed out the music to Climb Every Mountain. First time through, we sang as if we’d practiced it all our lives. Mrs. Howell clapped for us at the end and cried, “Bravo! Bravo!” Brette pressed her palms together and held them, prayer-like, at her mouth for a long moment. She dismissed us early.

            I set my sheet music on the piano and began to sing, “There’s a somebody I’m longing to see . . . .”

            “I need to make a trip across the county line,” Brette said. “Come with me.”

            One more drive on the winding two-lane. The new road would open in a few weeks. The purple sky looked bruised and tender as we snaked through the hills and valleys, smoking Winstons, with the windows down, the scented air rushing on our faces.    “Liz Beth -” Brette flung her cigarette out the window. “I’m leaving when school’s out.”

            My lips shaped an “Oh” but no sound came. Brette went on in a gush. “I haven’t told him. I had to hear myself say it out loud first.”

            I still had no words. If I said anything, I might start bawling.

“All he wants is to be left alone with his gloom. He doesn’t want me anymore. It’s a terrible thing to be roommates that don’t like each other very much.”

Her foot pressed harder on the accelerator, and I thought of the day we’d been driving back from the VA Hospital, and I wondered if I’d ever be happy like that again.

“I can’t stay in Wilmot. I’m the major’s wife. If I’m not the major’s wife, I’m nobody,” she said.

            “I’m sorry,” I said at last, flashing back to some of the cracks in their marriage that I’d seen. I didn’t want to know any more than she’d told me.

            “Well, don’t be too sorry,” she said, and a wry little smile began to form on her lips. “I’ll be seeing you this fall.” She was going to finish college. She’d been admitted to MTSC, had even registered for summer classes. All these plans she’d kept secret.

            We reached the liquor store just across the county line, and Brette came out with a large sack. She set it in the little back seat and the bottles rattled. “I won’t be doing this for him much longer,” she said. “I thought it might be a good thing to stock up, since I have some news to break.”  

            On our way back to Wilmot, she’d turned almost giddy. She talked about getting an apartment near the campus. I could move in with her in the fall, she said. Think of all the money I’d save on rent, and we’d have such a big time.

            In front of my house, she laid her hand against my cheek. “Think about it, OK?”

            So much swirled in my mind, I almost forgot to ask, “Can we practice Monday?”

            “We’d better,” she said. “Saturday afternoon is your audition.”

            The music building was impressive, with big columns in front and marble hallways. Brette and I waited in the teachers’ lounge with the others who were auditioning. A few brought their accompanists. Brette chatted with everybody and found out that most students counted on a faculty member to play for their audition. “Bad idea,” she told me. “I’m just a so-so pianist, but I know where to hold back and let you show what you can do with a note.”

            Every fifteen minutes, a girl with glasses came to the door and called a name. My palms sweated. “I’m afraid I’m getting hoarse,” I said. Brette shook her head, as if such a thing were impossible. “I need some water,” I said.

            When I returned from the water fountain, Brette whispered, “What did I tell you?” and ticked off on her fingers, “Oklahoma, Cabaret, Tonight, and two that I know of are singing These Boots Are Made for Walking.”

            “Did you tell them what I was singing?”

            “Certainly not, but what could they do but kick themselves for not thinking of it?”

            I heard my name.

            “Do it the way you always do it,” Brette said, just before she went to the piano and I walked to the middle of the stage. Her bluesy intro led me into it. “There’s a somebody I’m longing to see. . . .” My jitters washed away when the first note broke into the air. I sang like the music came from my soul, with all the love and pain I’d ever known or imagined. I sang to the judges, willing each one to fall in love.

            Their faces said everything.  

            Outside the music building, we exploded into laughter and Brette hugged the breath out of me. She told me I had never sounded like that, and I might never, ever sound like that again, but I’d never forget the feeling. The minute I was in the car, I began to sob, my shoulders shaking, releasing all the tension that had built up not just that day, but for weeks. Brette held me close for a minute, murmuring, “I know, baby, I know.”

            Then we were on our way, laughing again and singing, and Brette kept telling me it was a sure thing. They’d have to give me the scholarship. I remembered my mother’s philosophy - don’t count your chickens before they hatch - but I had to believe Brette was right, because I felt it, too.

            On the two-lane, I asked Brette to slow down, the first time I’d ever had the nerve to say anything like that to her, and she eased off the accelerator. She said, “Wouldn’t it be awful if we crashed, and then the letter came: ‘Congratulations, you won the music scholarship’?”

            “Wouldn’t it be awful to crash anyway?” I said.

            She scowled. “You’re way too serious, Liz Beth. You know what you need? You need a drink.”

            Twenty minutes later we were sitting in the swing on her front porch, sipping white wine from frosted iced tea glasses, just in case anybody could see us, which was unlikely because of the holly bushes. Brette kicked off her red pumps. The sun had gone down, taking the warmth out of the air, but it wasn’t dark. Brette said the major was already asleep and would sleep till two or three a.m. “He keeps odd hours,” she said. “He likes the early morning, the early early morning. He stares out the window and waits for the first light.”

            I caught a note in her voice that touched on sadness, and I said, “I’m sorry, Brette. Sorry for both of you.”

            She drained her glass and poured herself more wine. “Need a refill?” she asked.

            I thought about my mother, waiting at home to hear all about the audition. Good thing I kept Juicy Fruit in my purse. If my mother knew we were drinking, she’d ground me, and I didn’t want to think about what she might do to ruin Brette.

            “We’re Baptists,” I said.

            “What?” Brette giggled, and I giggled, too. A sweet, woozy feeling came over me. The squeak of the porch swing was hypnotic, coupled with a chorus of crickets. I toyed with the empty glass in my hands.

            “Here, let me take that.” Brette set my glass on the low wall next to the holly bushes. “That’s one of my pretty glasses.”

            “I’m so tired all of a sudden,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

            “It’s the letdown,” she said.

            “But I’m still on cloud nine.”

            “Sure you are.” Her voice was whispery. The night was turning softer, darkness falling fast. My mother would be waiting. I thought I should call her, but this was the end of something I wanted to stretch out as long as I could.

            Brette sipped her wine, as the velvety dark wrapped around us. We relived the audition one more time.

            “You have a gift, Liz Beth. You do.”

            “If I get a scholarship, it’s all because of you,” I said.

            I felt her arm go around me, drawing me toward her. Then my head was leaning against her, and the swing was squeaking, and the crickets were chirping. Time was fuzzy. I closed my eyes. Her cool fingers were on my cheek, turning my face up to hers. I felt her lips touch mine.

            A moment passed – maybe a few seconds, maybe much longer. A kiss that wasn’t anything like kissing Joel. It was much deeper, much sweeter. When I wiggled away and sat up straight, she said, “Liz Beth? What’s wrong?”

I pushed out of the swing. What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Didn’t she know?

            “I’ve got to go home.” I tried not to sound pouty, but I couldn’t look at her.

            “You’re already late. What’s a little bit longer?” she said.

            I shook my head.

            I saw her slipping into her red shoes. I could look at her feet, but not her face. I stumbled to the edge of the porch, and held onto the railing to steady myself.

            “Well then,” she said, “I’ll take you home.”  

           

            At graduation, Brette hugged me, as she did each member of the chorus. Several girls wiped tears, smearing their mascara.

“I just know you’ll get the scholarship,” Brette told me.

I didn’t see her again. She took the Mustang when she left. Word had it the major called the Ford dealer, asked him to find another blue Mustang, and wrote a check for it.

The new highway opened up, four wide lanes, ironed-out curves and guardrails above the deep drop-offs. By summer, the only vehicles on the two-lane were the paper company’s trucks piled high with logs, a few old people driving sad old cars and young people in jacked-up pick-ups, coming from the farms that dotted the hollows. The new highway took over.

             On Saturday afternoon before the Fourth of July, six miles out of Wilmot on the two-lane, Brette’s Mustang flew off the ridge and plummeted into the dark hollow. Buster gave his account at Aunt Shirley’s on the Fourth. He’d gone with the sheriff to notify the major. “Poor man cried like a baby,” Buster said. “She’d come back to the house to get the rest of her things. The major said she seemed all right for a while, and then she just drove off like a bat outa hell.” People said everybody knew everybody else’s business in Wilmot, but it was not always so. Nobody knew why Brette was on the two-lane.            

 “Liz Beth, it’s Brette!” she’d said when she called that afternoon, sounding so much like her old self that my throat pinched.

She was chatty. Loved the music courses, her apartment, her music-major friends.

“That’s nice,” I said.

She wanted to see me.

I said, “I can’t.”

“Please, let me explain about that night,” she said.

            “Forget that night.” Could she even imagine how hard I had tried to forget? “Just leave me alone.” My words came out with a bitter edge that surprised me.

            She sounded surprised, too. “I’m not asking you to do anything. It’s not like you think, Liz Beth. Oh, you are so innocent. That’s one of the things I love about you.” She laughed, that all-too-familiar musical trill.  

            “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, unable to hang up. I needed her to be the one to say goodbye.

            The laughter went out of her voice. “It was always about the music, Liz Beth. The music was what we had. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

            “I got the scholarship, but I don’t want it.” It was the most hurtful thing I could think to say.

            She said, “Then you’re a little fool.”

            I told her goodbye.

            “Wait, Liz Beth. Please. Let’s go for a ride on the two-lane, for old time’s sake. Would you do that? We don’t have anything to be ashamed of. It was always the music.” She was pleading now, and I didn’t want to remember her like that. I wanted to slam the phone in her ear, but I couldn’t pull away. Her voice held me, like a magnet.

“I can’t bear it that you hate me, Liz Beth,” she said.

All the things I could have said, but I heard myself tell her, “Don’t ever call me again.”

            And a moment later, her answer: “Well then, I won’t.”

            She didn’t say good-bye. The phone made a click, and then there was only a whisper of air, an empty sound.

            Like any good Wilmot girl, I have continued to see my parents during these forty years. My visits are brief, colored with nostalgia and regret. Five hundred miles from Wilmot, I have carved out a good life with my husband, my children and their families, and my music students at the high school. I think it is the life Brette imagined for me. It has been so long. I shouldn’t think about it as much as I do.

Published in Zone 3

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