Nineteen
Trudy
Emily hooked her arm through Trudy’s elbow.
“Come on,” she said, and the two girls headed to the bedroom they used to share.
“I wanna hear all about teaching.” Trudy had interrupted something between Leta Pearl and Emily, something about Haskel changing his mind, but she let it go; knowing those two, it was probably gossip better missed anyway.
Emily plopped on her old twin bed, and Trudy sat on hers. “And when I say I wanna hear about teaching, what I mean is, which students have cute, single daddies?” Emily poked Trudy’s ribs. “ Rich ones.”
“It’s Bailey Springs, Em.” Trudy swiped Emily’s hands away. “You already know all their daddies. Likely in the Biblical sense.”
Emily’s mouth flew open. “How dare you.” She jumped on top of Trudy, held her down and tickled her. “Say you’re sorry.”
“I will NOT!” Trudy hollered.
The sisters squealed and giggled, wrestling and flinging bedding everywhere.
One thing Trudy loved about her sister: the way they always instantly became teenagers again when they got together, and how Emily never changed.
She couldn’t take any more jabs in the ribs, so Trudy, breathless, relented.
“Okay! Okay!” she squealed. “I take it back!”
Emily released her grip, both of them panting. “You need a perm,” she said.
Trudy glanced in the mirror. “Ugh. I know. My hair’s awful.” Her smile faded.
“It’s not awful . Just needs some curl.” She pulled clothes from her bag, started refolding them on the bed. “So how are things going with Haskel?”
Trudy didn’t mean to snap her head in surprise. “Oh. Haskel? He’s wonderful.” She also didn’t mean for her pitch to keep rising. Why did her sister’s question feel like an accusation?
Emily scowled.
“What? Haskel is great. Amazing, actually. The perfectly fantastic fiancé.”
Emily sat next to Trudy without saying anything.
Trudy grabbed a pillow and hugged it to her chest. “Haskel really is wonderful. Everything I should want. Everything I do want. For me. And for Pete.”
“But . . . ?” Emily said.
“But ... nothing.” Trudy shrugged, handed the pillow to Emily as she stood, and busied herself remaking the bed. “I’m marrying Haskel. That’s that.”
“Pants on fire!” Emily threw the pillow at Trudy which Trudy caught and threw back. “Is there somebody else?” Emily asked.
“What?” Trudy jerked her head in a guilty reflex. “No! What makes you think there’s . . . ? I mean . . . No !”
“I knew it!” Emily pointed a finger at Trudy, pranced over to the same side of the bed, and took hold of Trudy’s hands. They sat. “Tell it, Sister. I won’t tell Mama, I promise .”
Trudy could never hide anything from Emily’s magical big-sister sense.
She eyed Emily cautiously and then, reluctantly, held up her pinky.
“Zimple’s Dimples?” It was their take on pinky swearing, one that established absolute secrecy.
It had started over their shared infatuation with Ronald Zimple, who lived down the street when they were kids.
He was older than them, but they’d always sworn on his dimples that they’d not tell a soul the secret they shared.
Neither one of them had ever broken a Zimple’s Dimples pact in their lives.
A toothy grin flashed across Emily’s face as she hooked her pinky around Trudy’s. “Zimple’s Dimples.”
“Okay.” Trudy sucked in a breath and exhaled it slowly, bracing herself for what was about to come out of her own mouth. “The football coach—”
“Shug Meechum?” Emily squealed. “Oh, he was fine back in the day when he was the Sweetwater quarterback; he had every Bailey Springs girl cheering for the Jackets.”
“Let me finish.” Trudy held up her hand. “And before you make this into something it’s not, Shug Meechum is tiresome. Annoying. And arrogant. You should see him waltzing around like he owns the place. Always cutting up, making everybody laugh—”
“Laughing’s good .”
“—at jokes that aren’t funny. Everybody only laughs because of his big, stupid jock grin. He never takes anything seriously.”
“You mean unlike you? Who takes all things very seriously?”
“I have a son , Emily. I can’t just—”
“Enjoy your life? You’re a mom , Trudy, you’re not dead.” Emily shifted her legs on the bed and sat crisscross, so that she faced Trudy more head-on with her elbows on her knees.
“I am engaged . But he . . . sort of . . . asked me on a date?”
“What?” Emily squeezed Trudy’s hands harder.
“ Knowing that I’m already taken!” Trudy freed herself from Emily’s grip and stood with a sigh of disgust. “It’s disrespectful and poor-mannered.”
“And yet,” Emily said, smiling, “you’re feeling something.”
“No.” Trudy paced. “I don’t know. It’s less that I feel something for Shug and more that, ever since he came around, I notice what I’m not feeling with Haskel.
Something that should be there just ..
. isn’t. And even if I was interested in Shug Meechum, which I am not , I’ve been burned by a jock before. ”
“Oh, Trudy, honey,” Emily held Trudy’s wrist and guided her to sit on the bed again. “That was completely different.”
“Was it? Because sometimes I feel things around Coach Meechum that are exactly the way I felt with Jimmie at first.”
“But Jimmie was unwell and broken.”
“Not at first,” Trudy said. “Not before he got hurt and Bear Bryant cut him from the team.” Trudy looked at the floor and then to Emily. “Remember? We all loved Jimmie before that.”
Trudy and Emily used to meet friends at the Falconhead Country Club all the time.
Trudy and Caroline Beaumont would lie by the pool, order Dr. Peppers with a splash of grenadine and pretend not to notice the boys when they came in from golfing, even though the boys would do cannonballs and splash them until the lifeguard made them quit it.
Caroline’s cousin Jimmie Beaumont would be there too, but he wasn’t a club member, and he certainly wasn’t one of those boys playing golf and doing cannonballs.
He’d moved from Tupelo to live with Barbara and Jerry Don after Jerry Don’s brother (Jimmie’s daddy) went to prison.
Caroline kept her distance from her cousin and always complained about having Jimmie in the house, how all her cousins from Tupelo were white trash.
Trudy, by extension, also avoided Jimmie.
Jerry Don had told Jimmie there were no free rides, so he made him work at Falconhead, cleaning the pool and keeping the grounds.
One night at a sleepover, Trudy accidentally bumped into Jimmie wearing only boxer shorts, both of them stumbling and sleepy on their way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
“Sorry,” she’d whispered. But that had been their only face-to-face interaction until the night of the 1975 Starlets Gala.
It was Trudy’s senior year cotillion. Eric Rickard, Pamela and Edward’s son, was her escort.
Leta Pearl was so excited because she had just declared her candidacy for Celestial Ladies president and had been working hard to get Pamela’s endorsement as the fundraising committee chair.
And even though Caroline Beaumont had had a crush on Eric Rickard since third grade, Leta Pearl told Trudy the only way she was getting a new dress for the gala was if Eric Rickard escorted her.
Caroline Beaumont burned with jealousy, and not just about Eric. Trudy had also beat her out of the head cheerleader election by one measly vote and had just been selected homecoming queen to boot.
Trudy couldn’t be sure—Caroline had sworn up and down it was an accident—but as the Starlets and their tuxedoed escorts were lined up outside by the swimming pool, waiting to walk through the big French doors into the Founders Ballroom, Caroline “tripped” over a lounge chair and “fell” into Trudy, knocking her into the deep end, headfirst. Water filled Trudy’s ears and muddled the excited shouts around the pool.
Trudy remembered treading water, coughing up the taste of chlorine, her updo becoming a downdo.
One taffeta heel, dyed mint-green to match her dress, sank below her while her bouquet of white and pink flowers floated next to her like remnants of the Titanic .
Before she knew it, there was Jimmie, floating with her to the edge; she hadn’t noticed his arm around her, holding her up.
He told her to grab onto the ladder, he’d be right back.
He took a deep breath and then dove all the way down, his kicking legs and swimming arms distorted as if in funhouse mirrors.
He popped back up and took a breath, shaking water off his head.
He held her mint-green shoe next to his jade-green eyes, his lashes wet and dark with big droplets of water hanging on them.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“I got your shoe.”
“Thanks.” One hand gripped the ladder rail, the other gripped Jimmie’s arm, the only two stable objects she could find.
“You gotta let go,” he said.
“Let go?” Water gurgled, rolling around inside her ears.
“So you can climb. Don’t worry I’ve got you,” he said. “But you gotta let go.”
He made sure her feet landed on each step of the ladder, his solid hands gripping her ankles guiding her feet.
He escorted her through the back door into the office marked Private , where she thanked him again.
He wiped her cheeks with the corner of a pool towel before wrapping it around her shoulders and, since she was still only wearing one heel, she stumbled into his embrace.
His face was so close she could see the little hair follicles of a shaven blond beard, their wet noses almost touched and before she knew it, she’d pressed her lips to his.
“What happened to Jimmie is not going to happen to Shug Meechum,” Emily said, shaking Trudy’s daydream loose. “Jimmie grew up with a horrible past. What he did to Pete, to you, isn’t your fault and won’t happen again.”