The Last Girls by Lee Smith

Author:Lee Smith [Smith, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780345464958
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Mile 437.2

Vicksburg, Mississippi

Monday 5/10/99

1015 hours

CATHERINE HAS BEEN MARRIED for as long as she can remember, stretching out luxuriously in the big bed in their stateroom, this bed that goes on forever, it seems to her now. She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t married, or at least when she wasn’t with a man. But to be honest, she’s never thought much about it one way or the other. Men have simply occurred, like images, the way they’ll come to her at the most surprising times and places in the midst of life, when she’s doing something else completely, such as unloading the washing machine, and suddenly she’ll see a shape in her mind’s eye, a triangle, for instance, then a chair made out of triangles, and she’ll just have to leave the wash or whatever she’s doing, and go out to the shop and start making that chair. All her life, Catherine has been easily overtaken: by her husbands, by her children, by her images and ideas, by life itself.

On the original raft trip, for instance, she was overtaken by her engagement, or by the idea of her engagement, to be exact. She was much more interested in her romance with Howie than she was in the river, or the trip itself. She didn’t give a damn about Mark Twain, who reminded her of her uncle Walt anyway, a filibustering Alabama legislator she despised. She was working on her tan, with her upcoming engagement party at the Club, given by Howie’s parents, in mind. To this end, Catherine basted herself each day on the raft with her own special mixture of iodine and baby oil, roasting first on one side, then the other. She timed the whole process, keeping her eyes closed with damp cotton balls on them so she wouldn’t get those squinty little wrinkles in the corners, opening them only to check the time or to look at her brand-new square-cut diamond engagement ring as it winked in the sun all the way down the river.

She was a kind of a creation of herself. Her mother—the great belle, Mary Bernice—had instilled in Catherine and her younger sisters the idea that the whole point of college was to marry ASAP, and it was a vast relief to everybody that Catherine had already gotten this taken care of. In fact, that phrase “as soon as possible” seems to capture Catherine’s entire life. Everything has happened lickety-split with never a pause until now—menopause, actually, how ironic.

Catherine props herself up on one elbow to glance out the window which gives out on the long brown sweep of the river, then the faint line of green trees, then the blue sky. Three lines: brown, green, blue, going on and on forever out of the frame.

The horizon reminds her of those summers she used to spend down on the farm at China Hill with Wesley when they were kids, visiting Gran-Gran and Pops. Dorothy and Frances never went. They were too little. But Catherine loved it.

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