CHAPTER FIVE
Taxonomy
The Thursday before the gala, Calhoun Hall holds what Dot calls the family supper and what I had privately called, for ten years, the dress rehearsal — because that is what it is.
Gala logistics are reviewed. Cars are assigned.
And by long unspoken custom, what everyone intends to wear is mentioned, described, or modeled, so that the Hall may go to Meridian House on Saturday as a coordinated fleet and not a regatta of individuals.
I wore the dress.
Understand: I had options. The navy was pressed.
I’d had two weeks of four-o’clock light to lose my nerve in, and I want it noted that I didn’t — I think because of the phone call I’d had that week from the school-board chair, who told me, in the voice of a woman placing a bet she liked, announcements at the toast hour, wear something worth standing up in.
I had something worth standing up in. It was hanging on the studio door like the flag of a small new country, and Thursday evening I took it down and put it on and drove my own car to the Hall, because Whit had gone ahead to help with the wine.
I will give the staircase its due. You come down into the Hall’s front room past the four painted wives, and I came down in harbor blue past a century of approved palettes — high collar, drop waist, New Look, wrap dress — and I swear the fifth patch of plaster watched me go by.
The room below was all Calhouns: the cousins, the great-aunt, Whit at the drinks table with the decanter in his hand, and he looked up and saw me and his whole face did the thing.
The auction thing. Ten years married and I could still get the unguarded laugh moving up through him like light through water —
“Well,” said Dot.
One syllable, and the room turned its head.
She was on the settee with her sherry, and she looked at me for a moment with what I need you to understand was real attention — Dot has a good eye; it’s the thing we always had in common, the thing that could have been a friendship in some other house — and then she delivered the appraisal, mildly, to the room, in exactly the tone you’d use for a centerpiece that had ambitions:
“Trying very hard, isn’t it, dear.”
And my husband laughed.
I have had a long time now to study that laugh, and I will be precise, because precision is what I have instead of screaming.
It was not a cruel laugh. It was not even at me, exactly — it was the sound a man makes when his mother says something in the family dialect and his body answers before any part of him votes.
Half a second. A social reflex, smoothed by ten thousand suppers.
The same throat that had just been filling with the auction laugh — that laugh interrupted, converted, spent on her line instead.
Half a second. You can live in half a second.
I stood on the second stair in four hundred and ten dollars of my own harbor and watched the only man I’ve ever loved laugh at his mother’s joke, and the joke was me, and he didn’t know it was a betrayal because it was so small, and I knew — the way you know a painting is finished, that fast, that physically — that there were ten years of these exact half-seconds filed in my body, and that I had been calling every one of them nothing. Filed under nothing at all.
“It’s the color,” Dot went on pleasantly, since no one had stopped her. “So much of it. For the gala, navy reads better in photographs, dear — the Whisper does love its photographs. We’ll all be glad of a quiet palette.”
“I like it,” said Bitsy, from the window, where she was eating olives off a cocktail napkin like a woman at someone else’s play. “It’s the first thing to come down those stairs in forty years that wasn’t apologizing.”
“You would,” said Dot, without heat. They exchanged their twice-yearly look, the draw renewing itself like a lease.
And Whit — my Whit, the easiest man in South Carolina to love — crossed the room with my glass of wine, kissed my temple, and said, low, warm, marital, fixing things: “You look incredible. You know that. Maybe the navy Saturday, though, hm? Keep the peace. It’s Mother’s big night — the committee announcements are her thing.
You can wear this one to Savannah for me. ”
Here is where I did something I had not done in ten years of Sundays. I made the ask. Out loud, in plain English, with no joke wrapped around it for ease of refusal. I put my hand flat on his chest, and I looked up at my husband, and I said:
“Stand next to me in this dress. Saturday. That’s the whole thing, Whit. Not the navy, not Savannah. This dress, your arm, one night. Pick me in the room where it counts.”
The room had gone on talking around us — the Hall absorbs scenes the way upholstery absorbs spills — so it was just for him, and I watched it land, I did.
He heard it. Somewhere very far down, at a depth he visits maybe twice a decade, my husband heard the actual question.
His eyes did something complicated. His mouth opened.
“The cars,” said Dot, from the settee, not loudly, “are at six and six-thirty. Whitman, you’re in the first with me — we receive at seven.”
“—Course,” he said. To her. Instantly, ahead of thought, the body voting first like it always voted, and then to me, with the smile that splits differences for a living: “We’ll figure it out, Pose. It’s one night. You know how Mother is about the gala.”
Two votes in one breath. I felt my face do what ten years had trained it to do — go sunny, go light, it’s fine, it’s nothing, I’m nothing at all — and it was while my own face was busy lying for me that Dot, folding her napkin, mentioned the other thing.
The thing I didn’t know yet. She did it the way she does everything: en route to a different subject, so that the wound arrives marked incidental.
“Oh — Posey, dear. Your name came up at the committee meeting Monday. The young-members list.” A small smile, kind as taxonomy.
“I told them what I’ll tell you: the timing isn’t right just yet.
You’ve your school, after all. Perhaps when things are settled.
” And then, to the room, brightly: “Now. Cars.”
The timing isn’t right. Four words, one seat, thirty years of holding it. There had been one thing in Charleston addressed to me — Hadley, not as an oversight — and it had been opened, read, and answered at a meeting I wasn’t in, by the woman whose son had just told me we’d figure it out.
I didn’t make a scene. You know by now that I wouldn’t; the Hall doesn’t allow scenes and I had stopped being able to tell the Hall’s allowances from my own skin.
I smiled. I drank the wine my husband had brought me.
I sat where the chart put me, eleven chairs deep into the decade, and passed whatever I was nearest to, and laughed at two jokes, one of them Dot’s.
But upstairs, afterward, alone in the guest room where I’d left my things, I stood in front of the long mirror for a while, in the blue, in the bad light the Hall keeps in that room — and I have to tell you what I saw, because it’s the hinge of everything: I looked wonderful.
Unfinished my whole decade, and there I was — somebody’s finished work, wearing her own money, in her own color, in a house with no wall for her.
He laughed. Half a second. Ten years of half-seconds, and I stood in front of that mirror with my hands at the zipper, fully prepared to take the dress off and hang the verdict in the closet with all the others.
That was the last time I ever considered it.