Net of Jewels by Ellen Gilchrist

Author:Ellen Gilchrist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Diversion Books

Chapter

15

So I went to Atlanta for the summer. I enrolled in summer school at Emory University and moved into a dorm overlooking the medical school. It had been reasonably tricky talking my parents into the plan but I persevered and they were so caught up in their new life in Dunleith with their seven hundred admiring friends coming over to get drunk on the porch every night that they weren’t as wary as they had been in the small world of Franklin, Kentucky. Also, they were sick of my sarcasm and tired of my refusal to be polite to their endless stream of visitors. They were probably relieved to think I would be somewhere in summer school. They could say to their relatives, Oh, yes, Rhoda’s in summer school at Emory. She’s such a bookworm, yes, she’s a mess but what can we do. A mess, that’s the word my north Alabama relatives used to describe me. They had had other messes to contend with, my fox-hunting grandfather being one and Tallulah Bank-head another, but in my generation I was the main mess. So I got to do what I wanted that summer, while my daddy made money and my momma spent it and my brother Dudley and his wife, Annie, tried to make a marriage out of a real mess and my little brothers threw basketballs through the hoop and shot at each other with B-B guns and chased goats through the woods at Finley Island and the porch filled up at night with whiskey drinkers. When I read the Odyssey I thought of Dunleith. How the suitors filled our porches and drank our wine and ate our meat.

I had hardly been in Atlanta a week when I started wanting to get married. It was too hard to do it if we weren’t married. It was impossible to do it in the car. It just wasn’t big enough. And it was hard to do it in Malcolm’s room in the KA house because people kept slamming in and out the front door and scaring me to death and because half the time we had to sneak out the kitchen door when we got through. Don’t get me wrong. Doing it was worth it. Doing it was divine. The more we did it, the more I wanted to do it and the more he wanted to do it. All we wanted to do was do it. It was what we had in common and it was plenty.

“Don’t you want to get married?” I asked him finally. We were parked outside the Echo Hot Dog Stand, The World’s Largest Drive-in. The place was a great favorite with Tech boys and their dates. On any given night we would see two or three couples we knew. Couples coupling in their cars, couples eating hot dogs and drinking Cokes, couples in varying stages of emotional excitement and disarray. I’ll say one thing for Malcolm and me, we were up to the task. We didn’t have enough guilt or depression between us to fill an ashtray.

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