News of the Spirit by Lee Smith

that. Everett Sharp soon leaves. It’s so hot. Gladiola leaves. It’s so hot. Sarah takes a notion to look forher father’s vodka, which she finally finds in the filing cabinet in his study. She pours some into her iced tea and goes out on the porch, hoping for a breeze. She sits in the old glider and stares into the shady backyard, planning her outfit for tonight. Certainly not the beige linen suit she’s worn practically ever since she got here. Maybe the blue sheath with the bolero jacket, maybe the floral two-piece with the scoop neck and the flared skirt. Yes! And those red pumps she bought on sale at Montaldo’s last month and hasn’t even worn yet, it’s a good thing she just happened to throw them into her traveling bag. This strikes her as fortuitous, an omen. She sips her drink. The glider trembles on the edge of the afternoon.
    Then Sarah remembers something that happened years ago, she couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Oddly enough, she was sitting right here on this glider, watching her parents, who sat out on the curly wrought-iron chairs beneath the big tree drinking cocktails, as they did every evening. Sarah was the kind of little girl who sat quietly, and noticed things. Actually she spied on people. Her mama and her daddy were leaning forward, all dressed up.
    Mama’s dress is white. It glows in the dark. Lightning bugs rise from the grass all around, katydids sing, frogs croak down by the creek. Sally has already had her supper. She wants to go back inside to play paper dolls, but something holds her there on the porch, still watching Mama and Daddy as they start to argue (jerky, scary movements, voices raised),and then as they stand, and then as Daddy kicks over the table, moving toward Mama to kiss her long and hard in the humming dark. Daddy puts his hands on Mama’s dress.
    The force of this memory sends Sarah back inside for another iced tea and vodka, and then she decides to count the napkins and place mats, and then she has another iced tea and vodka, and then she realizes it’s time to get ready for her dinner date, but before she’s through dressing she realizes she’d better go through the whole upstairs linen closet just to see what’s in there, so she’s not ready, not at all, not by a long shot, when Everett Sharp calls for her at seven, as he said.
    He rings the front doorbell, then waits. He rings again. He doesn’t know!—he couldn’t even
imagine!
—that Sarah is right on the other side of the heavy door, not even a foot away from him, where she now sits propped up against it like a rag doll, her satin slip shining in the gloom of the dark hallway, with her fingers pressed over her mouth so she won’t laugh out loud to think how she’s fooled him, or start crying to think—as she will, again and again and again—how Sean must have felt when his very bones cracked and the red blood poured down the side of his face, or how
she
must have felt, hitting him.

L IVE B OTTOMLESS

     

    In 1958, when my father had his famous affair with Carroll Byrd, I knew it before anybody. I don’t know how long he’d been having the affair before I found out about it—or, to be exact, before I realized it. Before it came over me. One day I was riding my bike all over town the way I always did, and the next day I was riding my bike all over town
knowing it
, and this knowledge gave an extra depth, a heightened dimension and color, to everything. Before, I’d been just any old thirteen-year-old girl on a bike. Now, I was a
girl whose father was having an affair
—a tragic girl, a dramatic girl. A girl with a burning secret. Everything was different.
    All my conversations, especially my conversations withmy mother, became almost electrical, charged with hidden import: “pregnant with meaning,” in the lingo of the love magazines and movie magazines she was constantly reading. Well, okay,
we
were constantly reading. For my mother loved the lives of the stars above all else.