By the time Mrs. Spencer arrives in Jackson, I’m exhausted. In five days I’ve given four readings in four different towns, appeared on a midmorning television program, and had many glasses of cheap red wine. I’ve signed hundreds of books. I’ve done my best to be charming, to smile and remember people’s names. For a person who’s terrified of public speaking and doesn’t like to be looked at, I think I’ve done pretty well—better than pretty well—but I’m tired and just want to listen to podcasts in my pajamas. Unfortunately, there’s no time for this because I have agreed to chaperone a ninety-two-year-old woman on her own book tour.
“Chaperone” is the wrong word. I could have used a chaperone, someone to water down my drinks and tell me it was time to go home, to tell me I had passed the point of friendliness and was just leading some poor guy on, a guy who is already texting me boring messages—Hi, how are you? What are you up to? What are you doing now??—Jesus H. Christ.
I am to be Mrs. Spencer’s driver. I’m to make sure she gets to her readings on time and see that she has everything she needs. More than anything, though this has not been verbalized, I am to keep her alive. I know how I’ve come by this gig—we have the same publisher, and because we’re both from Mississippi, our publisher thought that we might get along, and because this business is ultimately a business like any other, that I might write an insightful and moving essay about this journey through our home state and publish it someplace amazing like The New Yorker: a young female Southern writer learning the ropes from an older, established one.
Mrs. Spencer calls at 5:08 p.m. to ask where I am. She’s at the airport. She’s early. My mother is driving because we have dinner plans, more precisely we are going to the midwinter Lebanese convention at the Downtown Marriott, where she hopes I might find the Lebanese husband she didn’t. I’m wearing a blue dress and strappy three-inch heels, red lipstick. I have no intention of finding a husband at such an event, but this is something else I have agreed to months in advance and without forethought.
I’ve only been to one convention in the past, in Memphis, as an undergraduate in college. I left the seated dinner to play pool with the blond bartender and failed to return until the early morning hours, and my mother banned me from subsequent conventions for well over a decade.
When we arrive, I jump out and find Mrs. Spencer in a wheelchair, parked next to another elderly woman. Her suitcase is very small. Black and beat up, it appears to be the only thing she’s skimped on. She is thin and elegantly dressed, wearing wool slacks and a fur coat.
“Mrs. Spencer?” I ask, though she has already recognized me and is gripping the arms of her chair.
“I wasn’t sure you were coming.”
“Your flight was early.” An airport employee begins to push her out but she stands and walks with me. I don’t know whether to hold her hand or offer my arm.
“My mom is driving,” I say, as we make our way to my mother’s BMW.
“You’ve brought your family,” she says.
“Just my mom.” I open the passenger-side door and get her situated in the front seat. Then I go around to the other side so I won’t be talking to the back of her head.
After I introduce them, I ask about her flight. “I don’t like airplanes,” she says.
I tell her I don’t either. Who likes airplanes? I know people who like airports but I have never met a single person who likes airplanes. The air is stale and people pass gas and the bathrooms are so small you pee on yourself. I can always talk myself into a panic attack on an airplane.
“I had a layover in Charlotte. It’s just as bad as Atlanta.”
“Oh, Atlanta is terrible. Is Charlotte the one with all those rocking chairs?”
She responds, but I can’t hear what she says. I’m pretty sure Charlotte has the rocking chairs. I took a picture of myself in one a few years ago but it didn’t turn out—my face wasn’t photographing well that day. I don’t know where I was headed—Boston? New York? I was alone. I remember the light streaming in, how bright it was. I remember tying my shoelace, which is an odd thing to remember.
My mother gets us lost, has to stop and turn around. Mrs. Spencer wonders aloud if we’ll make it. My mother has glaucoma and shouldn’t be driving at night. I should be driving but I’d rather sit in the backseat and find all of this annoying—my mother getting old, the three-inch heels, Mrs. Spencer in my charge. I’m used to my mother being competent, relying on her, and I’m not ready to relinquish my role as her child. If I relinquish it now, it is gone forever.
I call her Mrs. Spencer two or three times before she says, “You’re going to have to stop calling me that. Call me Elizabeth.” She says this so sternly I feel like I’ve been slapped. I wonder if “ma’am” is okay. Can I say “ma’am”? I realize I am trying too hard, that my politeness has passed the point of politeness and is bordering on obsequiousness and condescension, and it’s clear she won’t put up with this. I will have to be accommodating but not overly so. I have also been talking too loudly, like I do with all old people.
“I’m reading your book,” she says.
“Oh, that’s nice.” I never know what to say to this. What do you think? Thank you for buying it? Only she didn’t buy it; our publisher sent it to her. She says nothing else about it.
My mother makes another wrong turn and I plug the address into the GPS on my phone, the computer lady telling us to “make a U-turn, make a U-turn.”
Mrs. Spencer says she’s hungry and asks if we’re going to dinner and I explain our plans, preplanned months ago, the midwinter Lebanese convention. I don’t know how to describe it and it makes me feel strange, foreign. My father is German, I want to tell her. I’m only a halfsie, third generation. Or is it fourth? It wouldn’t matter. I open the gold clutch I borrowed from my mother and finger two airplane bottles of vodka, my ID, lipstick, and a neatly folded twenty-dollar bill. All of the things in the same borrowed clutch I might have taken to a school dance twenty years ago.
We arrive at the Fairview Inn, where she’ll be staying, safely. I feel like maybe I can do this, maybe it won’t be so bad after all.
The check-in girl says she’ll be in the Strawberry Room.
We walk through two dining areas and down a hall, take the tiny single elevator to the lower floor.
The Strawberry Room is garish—pink and red and floral with too many throw pillows and lace curtains; there’s a smell I can’t place, unpleasant. I set her suitcase on the bed and ask if she’ll be okay.
“Of course I’ll be okay,” she says. “I have people.” She picks up the telephone and checks for a dial tone, sets the receiver down. I walk back the way I came: elevator, hall, two dining rooms, and out into the night, stumbling slightly.
“She’s had her face redone,” my mother says.
The following morning, as I leave my parents’ house to pick up Mrs. Spencer for our first day on the road, I’m in a good mood. I’m driving my mother’s car, which is much nicer than my fourteen-year-old Honda. I dance and sing along to the radio: Tom Petty and Journey and Bruce Springsteen. I think about the bankers and lawyers I met last night and how it didn’t matter how dull they were, at least for a little while, because I could be the interesting one. And I was—I was charming and funny and several of them asked for my number. My mother had been proud.
After we’re on the interstate, headed north, she says I seem like a very nice girl.
“Thank you.” I think I know where this is going. “You’re not married?”
“I’m divorced.” I give her the condensed version: married too young, shitty town, shitty jobs, few friends, left him after having squandered nearly all of my twenties. I always mention that I’m the one who left, that it was my decision.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asks. “No, not right now.”
She waits for me to explain, so I do. I loved someone and he didn’t love me back, or he loved me for a time and then decided against it or fell out of love. Who knows? I still think about this man every day even though he hasn’t been my boyfriend in ten months and I haven’t seen him in seven. I had to change the dedication of my book at the last minute. In the final email he sent me, he said he’d gotten married and I should never contact him again.
“How old were you when you got married?” I ask, though I know the answer. Last night I read her interview in the Paris Review along with a few others in case I needed conversation starters. In one interview, she is quoted as saying that The Light in the Piazza, her most famous work, “did not relate to my life in any way,” which I found shocking in its insincerity.
“I was in my thirties,” she says. She met her husband while living in Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship. She’s a woman from a conservative Protestant family in rural Mississippi who broke away from them to move to New York and then to Italy by herself in the early 1950s, so I can’t fathom why she’s questioning my choices, particularly after I’ve already told her that I left my husband to pursue a life beyond the confines of a town in which I was underemployed and unhappy. In a place where I spent my time wandering the mall and eating at country buffets, drinking with our one alcoholic friend, now dead.
Husband. My husband. Saying these words was the best thing about being married. I want to ask about her husband, why she hasn’t remarried, but her husband is dead and it seems impolite.
I expect this line of questioning from other people—my aunts, for example—who are praying to St. Jude and St. Philomena and St. Rita, all the ones who deal in hopeless causes. I didn’t expect this from Elizabeth Spencer though. I thought she would understand. I thought she would understand that there is nothing to understand. I was married and now I am divorced. I won’t marry again just to be married.
“Don’t you want children?” she asks.
“I never wanted children,” I say, hoping this will end the conversation.
She regrets not having them, she tells me. By the time she and her husband were settled in Canada, it was too late. I think of all the times I’ve asked young married couples when they were going to procreate, as if my childlessness, my single status, gave me permission. What an asshole I’ve been. What a meddlesome, intrusive asshole.
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
“I usually eat at one o’clock.”
“We can stop whenever you want. Just let me know.”
“Are you hungry?” she asks.
“I can eat whenever.”
“Well, you’re a very healthy girl,” she says.
I look over at her, hands on her knees, gazing out the window. Wow, I think, wow. So this is how it’s gonna be. And then we’re quiet. It is so quiet in this car. We pass the sign for Carrollton and she tells me about growing up in Carroll County, not even in Carrollton proper, but I’m too busy wondering what I’m going to feed her. We should have stopped in Canton, or eaten before we left Jackson.
Since it’s already one thirty, I know I need to get her something quick. Our choices are limited to fast food, a Waffle House, and a Huddle House. I pull into the Huddle House because I can’t picture her at a Waffle House, and without thinking, I park farther away than I should. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten at a Huddle House. Why haven’t I eaten at a Huddle House? Who eats at a Huddle House? How does this place sustain both a Waffle House and a Huddle House?
She orders a BLT, no fries, and I order a veggie omelet. It comes with toast and hash browns, but I don’t touch the hash browns. I am conscious of being so healthy. I haven’t been overweight since my divorce, seven years ago, but I don’t weigh myself anymore, so I have to keep track of things by my clothes and most of my clothes stretch. Perhaps I’ve gained weight without realizing it. Perhaps, like one of my aunts, she is only trying to encourage me to be thinner; it is easier to find a man when you are very thin. I think about her stories and how much I like them and how she’s nothing like I thought the writer of these stories would be, and then I’m thinking about other writers I’ve met whose work I love and how they weren’t like I thought they would be either. They cried for no reason I could discern, lived in converted garages in near destitution, were ugly, acted humble to the point of humiliating everyone around them. We’re all just people, after all, and it’s disappointing. And yet I still want her to like me, and I want to like her. But then I mention a male friend and she says, “Is that your boyfriend?” so long after it’s been established that I am divorced and not seeing anyone that it seems cruel. My mother, where is she? I wish she were driving and I was only a passenger.
Back in the car, she reminisces about the towns we pass and the people she knew in them.
“I had a boyfriend from Water Valley,” she says. It’s the second town along our route that she has pointed out as a hometown of a boyfriend. “I liked him a great deal but he drank too much. Back then the roads weren’t paved.” She waves her hands around to indicate that it was all very dangerous.
“Water Valley. I like the sound of it. I’ve never met anyone from Water Valley.” I think about Nancy Lewis, the young narrator of “Ship Island,” which is my favorite story of Elizabeth’s, one of my favorite stories by anyone. Nancy Lewis’s father is in debt and the family is trying desperately to hold it all together. They’ve recently moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast from Little Rock because he’s lost his job again—”transferred” her mother calls it, as any good Southern mother would. That summer, Nancy is dating Rob Acklen, a wealthy, good-natured boy, and hanging out with Rob’s wealthy, good-natured friends. She imagines his parents talking about her late into the night, wondering if they should intervene or let him have his fling, let the summer pass. One night, when she’s out with Rob and his friends, she wanders away from the party and “runs off” to New Orleans—a place she has never been, but dreams of—with two men in a Cadillac, where she gets herself into some trouble that isn’t quite clear. Was it a car accident? Was she beaten and raped? When Rob asks why she did it, why the hell she did it, she says, “I guess it’s just the way I am.” I guess it’s just the way I am. It’s a sentence that’s stuck with me—if it’s just the way you are, then there’s nothing to be done about it, nothing to fix.
I want to ask Elizabeth what happened to Nancy Lewis, but I don’t want her to scold me, and it’s possible she doesn’t know, herself. It’s just a story. Perhaps she doesn’t remember writing it at all, it was so long ago.
When we arrive in Oxford, I call the bookstore owner, whose home we’ll be staying in for the night, to get the address. I met the Howorths last week at my own reading and they were nice but didn’t invite me to stay with them; my mother and I shared a motel room. Lisa says she’s at Kroger but the door is open and we should go on in and make ourselves at home—Elizabeth’s room is the first door on the left and I’m upstairs to the right.
It’s a thrill to walk into a house with no one in it, the house of someone you don’t know. I show Elizabeth to her room as if it’s my own home and set my bag on a chair while I look at the bookshelves. There are so many books by so many writers I love. I look at all of the Larry Browns, no doubt lovingly inscribed, and think about taking one off the shelf and slipping it into my bag. I would never do something like this and yet I like the idea that I could.
Larry Brown. He would have liked me.
Lisa comes in with groceries and I take them out of her hands, start unloading things onto the island.
“Did you get any Ensure?” Elizabeth asks. “I like to have an Ensure in the afternoon.” Since Lisa did not, in fact, get any Ensure, she goes back to Kroger while we wander around. I hear Elizabeth mumbling under her breath; it sounds like she’s praying. She socks me in the arm to show me the dogs, two of them, lounging by the fireplace.
“Do you like dogs?” I ask.
“I don’t mind them outside,” she says.
The dogs are completely uninterested in us. We could load up everything, including them, and they wouldn’t care.
Lisa returns with a six-pack of Ensure and hands one to Elizabeth.
“Thank you,” she says to Lisa. “I don’t like the chocolate kind,” she says to me, loud enough for Lisa to hear, and she carries it to her room and closes the door.
While we drink a glass of wine, I recount all of the offensive things Elizabeth has said to me in the past twenty-four hours and we laugh.
“I just hope she doesn’t die on us,” she says.
“Imagine how I feel. And I’m a terrible driver, like really bad. Someone should have considered that.”
“Did you mention it?”
“I think I did,” I say, and we laugh some more.
After a while, her husband, Richard, comes home and we talk about an old friend of mine who ran for mayor even though he’d never voted in his life. This old friend was never a real friend but someone I went to high school with; one time in Florida we all got into the pool topless and I let him piggyback me around.
That evening, Elizabeth reads the first story in her collection. She is poised and articulate, her voice carrying throughout the room, which is crowded with people who want to see this woman who rarely makes public appearances. She didn’t want to have the book published, she told me, but her friend Allan Gurganus insisted. He sent out the manuscript and found a publisher. She told me she wrote the stories in Starting Over years ago and doesn’t write anymore. I imagine her walking around her house, looking out the window as if her backyard is a foreign land, drinking tea, keeping her lunch dates and doctor’s appointments in a book with paper and pen. I imagine her house feels too large and empty and she thinks about the children she might have had—she doesn’t want me to make the same mistake. I wonder if I’d want a child if I met the right man. My cousin, who tried for years to have children with her husband, also found they were too late. People mean well; they’re only trying to protect you from the mistakes they’ve made and the circumstances in which they have found themselves. And what if all of the time I’ve spent insisting I don’t want children has only been a form of protection against something I never thought I could have, or deserved? I suppose I won’t know for sure until the time has passed, until it is no longer an option.
After the reading, the Howorths take us to dinner at City Grocery. When we’re seated and drinking wine, John Grisham walks in with his daughter. The Howorths introduce me as the next writer in residence.
“You’re the first one that’s going to be living in my house,” John says. He has recently donated his home and eighty acres to the university. I have seen only the fence and the little yellow guardhouse from the road.
“I am,” I say, and can’t think of anything else to say. He’s so beautiful it’s like he’s not real. I want to touch his face.
Lisa runs over to the bookstore to get his latest novel, Sycamore Row, and he signs it “To Mary Miller, Welcome to Oxford. 3 February 2014.”
It’s strange to think I will live there, in the house where John Grisham raised his children, that this town will soon be my home, and these people my friends. But I can’t move into the house until August, which seems very far away. This will be my home, but it’s not now.
When we get back to the Howorths’, Elizabeth goes to sleep and I stay up with Lisa and Richard. We drink brandy and talk about the evening and once I’m having a good time, feeling normal and happy, they excuse themselves. I go upstairs to sleep in one of their daughters’ old bedrooms. There’s a four-poster bed decorated with Mardi Gras beads, and so many pictures and trophies and records, and everything seems like something I shouldn’t touch. I want to be the kind of person who does anyway, who piles the beads around her neck and tries on clothes from a stranger’s closet, who sleeps as soundly as if this was her own childhood and she’s come home.
The house is old, the wood floors squeaky. I tiptoe around, brush my teeth and wash my face. Then I shut the door to the bathroom and turn on the fan and smoke a cigarette, wondering what the hell I’m doing.
In the morning, I find Elizabeth in a silk nightie and socks, holding a mug with two hands as she stands in front of a painting in the hall.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning.” She doesn’t look at me.
Lisa pours me a cup of coffee and then I’m helping Richard carry boxes of books into the dining room for Elizabeth to sign.
“Do I have to sign all of these?” she asks. “Yep,” he says.
“It’s so many.”
It really is a lot, way more than I signed last week. We get to work. Richard opens the book to the correct page and passes it to her; she signs it and I box it back up. We’re an efficient little team. She stops and shakes her hand, looks at us, aggrieved. She is so old. What a trooper. I ask about the cover art to distract her, tell her I like it even though I find it immensely dull—gray and beige—a wheat field or a bunch of weeds with a lopsided shack in the background.
“It’s a William Hollingsworth,” she says.
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“You haven’t? He’s from your hometown.”
“I don’t know a lot about art.”
“I bought two of his pictures in the forties, one for twenty dollars and one for twenty-five. He killed himself young.”
“How young?”
“Young,” she says, pausing to examine me. Her hair, it’s so perfectly coiffed, which is a word people don’t use anymore. “He’s very famous.” She shakes her hand again and we sit there and wait as she continues shaking her hand and I check my phone because we have to get out of here soon. She has a reading at five in Jackson and it’ll take us two-and-a-half hours to get there plus I’ll have to make sure she’s fed on time and the weather is bad and on top of it all I’m hungover. I am so tired of being hungover, and yet when evening comes, I can’t imagine not having a drink, the day has been so long. I remind myself that these are trying times.
By one o’clock we’re on the interstate, the rain coming down like it only does when I’m driving. Rain so heavy I can hardly see even with the windshield wipers at full speed. I drive slowly, crouched over the wheel, recalling all of the times I’ve had to pull over at McDonald’s or a rest stop because the windshield wipers on my own car don’t work well and I don’t replace them because the only time it’s brought up is when I get an oil change and I say no to everything, as my father has taught me, believing that they are taking advantage of me because I’m a woman. But every few years someone gives me a compliment or is persistent enough and I say yes to it all, the whole shebang, and feel bad about myself for days.
The only sound is the rain. Even if the radio was on we wouldn’t be able to hear it. I look over at her, thoroughly content.
We stop at McAlister’s for lunch. I’ve hopped a curb and missed the exit twice, looping back around because the frontage road confuses me. I hate myself and want to give up even though it’s just driving and rain and everything is fine. It is her stoicism, her endurance, that I find so agitating.
I order a club sandwich and she orders a salad. I pay, as is our custom. There is an agreement that I wasn’t aware of and it is that I should pay for everything and ask our publisher for reimbursement. My heart beats fast as we sit across from each other in a booth with our big waters. When the enormous salad is placed before her, she looks at it as though it offends her, as if she’s never seen anything like it in her life.
“It’s so large,” she says.
“It is,” I agree. “But it’s mostly lettuce.”
“There’s so much of it.”
Welcome to Mississippi, I want to say, where the portions are enormous and people know how to clean their plates. Lots of healthy people down here! She hasn’t lived in Mississippi in a very long time. She can still claim it, but three-fourths (or four-fifths? or five-sixths?) of her life has been spent elsewhere. Also, I’m pretty sure North Carolina has its share of fat people. She eats a cube of ham and a few leaves of lettuce, leaving a portion so large and undisturbed it could be served to someone else. I eat everything unapologetically, including the pickle and the potato salad, and ask if she needs to use the bathroom.
“I took care of all that before we left,” she says, as if one only needs to use the bathroom first thing in the morning and right before bed. As I pee, I think about all of my bodily functions—if I could live on less, if I could need less and want less.
I emerge from the bathroom smiling and offer her my arm, which she takes.
I’m driving to pick up Elizabeth less than an hour after I’ve dropped her off. I’m clean, at least, and wearing a dress that makes me feel pretty—my go-to dress, I have it in three different colors like a man. Tonight I wear blue. The car is nearly out of gas. I am so incredibly tired and am unused to doing things I don’t want to do. I try to remind myself that this is adulthood, that every day people do things they don’t want to do, but this has not been my experience.
In the car, she’s so chatty and friendly it feels antagonistic. She tells me about a beauty-parlor game people used to play when she was growing up—they would name characters in a book and try to guess who the character was based on. Then she tells me she’s cousins with John McCain but he’s stopped answering her letters. This interests me but I don’t question her about it. Was it because you asked him for things he didn’t want to give, or is it because people don’t write letters anymore except for funeral condolences and to acknowledge wedding gifts? I imagine it is the latter. I should explain this to her but I don’t. I picture her seated at a desk in front of a window—the birds outside, a cup of hot tea, perhaps a single cookie on a dish—composing thoughtful letters to people who will never respond.
Once we’re at the bookstore, someone ferries her away and I stand at the entrance with the owner. My mother calls him Johnny, which seems too personal, so I don’t know what to call him. I’d like to call him Johnny. I haven’t called anyone Johnny since high school.
“She’s a very attractive woman,” he says. “I might ask her out.”
“You should do it. I hear she’s available.”
He introduces me to a guy perched on a stool. “Y’all have the same publisher,” he says.
“Oh?” I know his book; it’s one I would never read. “Where all have you been reading?”
“Anywhere that’ll have me,” he says, and I wonder if the publisher is still funding his tour, nearly a year after the book’s publication, or if he’s paying out of his own pocket. I should be doing more. I should be driving around the country and sleeping on couches, shaking hands. Promoting myself on Facebook and Instagram, trying to think up witty tweets. One witty tweet could gain me hundreds of followers. I smile and tell him that’s awesome. Then I go over to the counter to buy a beer but the girl recognizes me from last week and won’t take my money.
I sit in a chair toward the back of the room, watching Elizabeth talk to her fans.
She says she’s going to read from the longest story, that it’s too long to read in its entirety, so she’ll just stop when she gets tired. But she doesn’t stop. I try to black out but I’m still here, sandwiched between two middle-aged women who chuckle and clutch their purses on their laps. I finish my beer and place the can between my feet and wait for it to end.
She reads the entire thing, every word.
When it’s finally over, Elizabeth tells me she’s having dinner with Willie Morris’s widow and some other ladies and I’m free to go. I check my phone: ten minutes past six o’clock. Now I feel like I want to do something but there’s nothing to do so I drive to my parents’ house and sit with my mother and father. My father falls asleep in his chair. My mother gambles with fake money on her iPad—she’s got it up to $80 million.
“Give it to me,” I say.
“Don’t lose my money,” she says. I usually lose her money because I’m too lazy to press the button over and over. I just put it on auto-bet and let it play itself.
I pour myself a vodka tonic and take it upstairs to my childhood room, lie in my childhood bed. I listen on repeat to the song the man I love wrote for me. I bet he has to play this song a lot because it’s his best. He has to play it and think of me. Or he doesn’t think of me but my name is in the title so how could he not? He loved me when he wrote it. He loved me so much then, and that time has passed and now he is married to another woman. It seems impossible, all of it.
In the morning, I get back in my mother’s car and turn on the radio. I try to sing along to “Jack & Diane” but it feels forced so I turn it off. I’m wearing my fat jeans, which are too big, and a shirt I found in the closet that must have belonged to one of my brothers, my hair piled in a bun.
Elizabeth is waiting outside even though I’m on time, one minute early according to the clock. I’m the most punctual person I know and yet she makes me feel as though I’m shirking my duties. Perhaps in the long-ago past, before cell phones or any phones at all, people arrived fifteen minutes before they were supposed to be anywhere. As a child, I loved to call the time lady, a computer voice that gave you the time and date and temperature. I’d do this when the power went out and our clocks got messed up. Sometimes I did it simply because I wanted to dial a number and hear a voice on the other end.
The drive to Greenwood is less than two hours and we wouldn’t have had to leave so early but she has an interview.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Very well,” she says. She tells me about her dinner and the pleasant company.
We see a dog dragging something large across the road and I hit the brakes. It has a long tail, maybe a raccoon?
“Was that a creature?” she asks.
“I think it was a creature,” I say. “It was definitely a creature.” I wish she would say it again and I could record it.
I turn on the radio. She’ll listen to the news—she likes to keep up. Unfortunately, Tim Gunn is talking about his asexuality on NPR and it makes me uncomfortable. I have no idea how she feels about homosexuals or asexuals and don’t want to discuss it with her. Otherwise, there’s only religious talk. I turn it off.
“Tell me about your family,” I say. “You said you had a brother?”
“Yes,” she says, “one brother who was seven years older, so I grew up feeling like an only child.” She tells me she was close with her parents until her first book came out and then she wasn’t close with them because they didn’t accept it, didn’t think she should be writing such things, and it was never the same after that. This makes me sad for her. My parents have always been supportive even when I know they must have been disappointed. They would never admit to disappointment, not even when I moved into their house after my divorce with no job and no plans and hardly left my room for months. They’ve had to continuously reimagine the life that they’d hoped for me. In her Paris Review interview, Elizabeth said, “The family assigns unfair roles, and never forgives the one who does not fulfill them.” She said she couldn’t be straightjacketed.
“Do you regret writing things they disapproved of?”
“No,” she says. “You just write what you’re going to write and deal with the fallout later.”
“That’s really brave.”
She shrugs. “You must do it too.”
“I mostly write about people who are no longer in my life or people who don’t read. Almost no one reads.” I wait for her to say more on the subject but she doesn’t. I want to ask about particular instances, situations, and how she dealt with them, how many people she had to let go. I wish I were braver. If I were braver, we might like each other. We might be friends. But it’s like she’s been sent here—only a few weeks after the publication of my debut novel, when things are supposed to be exciting and fun—specifically to torture me.
In Greenwood, I pull up to the Delta Bistro: front-door parking.
“This is a nice place,” I say. “You’ll like it.” My mother and I ate here after my reading, along with the boring-text guy and the only people who’d shown up to my reading: four recent college graduates from up North who are down here with Teach for America. I insisted on paying, said I would write it off.
She takes a sip of water. I look at the walls. There’s a long piece of artwork on a chalkboard, divided into seven days: create and divide light; separate waters; land sea and all vegetation; sun moon and stars; sea creatures and birds; animals and mankind; rest. Below that: and then there was evening and then there was morning. And then there was evening and then there was morning. Yes, I think, it is always like that. And in the morning you pay for what you did in the evening.
“How long has it been since you’ve been back?” I ask. Her family owns land in the Delta. She used to come to Greenwood to have lunch and shop, to see movies.
“It’s been a while. The last time I was in Mississippi I didn’t come here. I went to Laurel, where they gave me a lifetime achievement award.”
“Oh, that’s cool. What does it look like?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I just put it on a shelf with the others.”
It is astounding—a lifetime achievement award!—and yet I already know how she feels. It is something for a short time and then it is nothing again. I think of all the goals I’ve set for myself over the years—publication in certain magazines and journals, a fellowship at the Michener Center for Writers, my book reviewed in the New York Times—and how I have achieved them. How it seemed as though each one of them would offer me a new and better life.
At the Alluvian, Elizabeth asks if I can carry both bags.
“It’s no problem.”
“Well, you’re very husky,” she says.
Husky! I think. What a word. I’m a husky girl who refuses to marry, or who can’t get anyone to marry her. At this point in the trip, I find her comment humorous, or nearly so. I want to write it down with all of the others. I am very healthy and husky and what else? What else did she call me?
She takes over the bathroom, fixing her hair and reapplying makeup. Her things spread out everywhere—just like my sister or one of my prettier friends. Beautiful women think nothing of taking over the bathroom, hoarding the mirror. I’m annoyed and yet there is something extraordinarily brave about a ninety-two-year-old widow putting on makeup so far from home, preparing her face for TV. If I were ninety-two, I’d be in bed listening to podcasts. I won’t live to be ninety-two. I haven’t lived nearly well enough to see ninety-two.
I tell her it’s time and she emerges from the bathroom looking exactly as she did before. She really is an attractive woman.
We wait for the elevator. And wait. She takes the opportunity to focus on me. “You wear your hair up like that so it’s easy,” she says—not a question but a statement. “You’re lucky. I can’t wear my hair like that. It wouldn’t look good.” Her hair is long for an older woman, shoulder length, blond.
“Thank you,” I say. The elevator arrives and up we go.
There’s a lot of activity on the fourth floor, lights and cameras, people who have come here to interview Elizabeth for the Mississippi Tourism Division. I say hello to a girl I know. I ask after her family, her husband.
“Hey,” she says, “do you want to be on TV too? You could talk about driving Mrs. Spencer around or your book or whatever you want.”
“Thank you, but no.”
Back in the room, I unzip my bag and take out a sweater. Elizabeth will be staying at a cousin’s house and this room is mine; I have a proprietary feeling as I look at her makeup brushes and powders, various toiletry bags. I open one carefully to see if I can find any toothpaste. How come I never bring toothpaste? I always rely on someone else to bring it. I close the bag without touching anything and open another but don’t find any. Maybe she travels without toothpaste too. I turn the magnified mirror off and try to do something with my hair. I should have washed it.
Forty-five minutes later, I go back up to fetch her. “How was it?” I ask.
She was bored by their questions, the same questions she has been asked now for half a century. I can’t even imagine. Sweet good heavens, to have to answer the same questions over and over again from people who mostly have no idea who you are.
We sit in the double beds with our clothes on, legs extended. I think it would make a good picture. I imagine it in the New Yorker alongside the essay I can no longer write because what would I say? Elizabeth thinks I should remarry ASAP before I get too husky, and pop out a few children. She hasn’t written in years and doesn’t want me to end up like her, alone in a house in a state that is no longer home. I have moved enough already to know that home doesn’t exist in a place, in a particular location.
The room is spacious and bright, overlooking a street where no one walks and few cars pass. It is such a quiet town. The bookstore closes at six o’clock. Viking, the largest employer, has pulled out.
Elizabeth gets out of bed and stands in front of the TV changing channels, comments on the weather. I open my laptop and start making notes.
“I think it may rain forever,” she says. “Who are you texting over there?”
“I’m typing. I’m writing.”
“You’re doing that in the room with me? Ooh, I’ve known people who said they could do that but I’ve never actually seen anybody.”
I’m writing a story about you, I want to say. I’m writing what you’re saying right now. Say something.
“That girl who interviewed me—what was her name?”
“Anne Catherine.”
“Yes, Anne Catherine. She’s a very pretty girl.”
“She’s nice,” I say, “a very nice girl.” Anne Catherine is perfectly attractive but she’s no great beauty, and so it seems Elizabeth is commenting upon me again. I just can’t figure out what she’s trying to say—that I should wear makeup and fix my hair? That I could do so much more with what I have? As an undergraduate in college, I joined a sorority because my mother worried I wouldn’t make friends otherwise. My sorority sisters would take me into the bathroom and apply mascara to my lashes and blush to my cheeks, offer to curl my hair, lend me their clothes. I dropped out after a couple of years, after getting into as much trouble as I could, much to my mother’s embarrassment and shame.
Ten minutes later, Elizabeth says, “I bet you’ve finished a whole story.”
That evening, she reads a different story from the collection: three different towns, three different stories. I’m impressed. I’ve read the same excerpt every time.
The people in her stories are assholes, like the people in mine, like the people in so many of the stories I love. They say inappropriate things and offend people and this works in fiction—it’s amusing and witty, keeps the tension high—but it doesn’t translate well to real life. I think about Nancy Lewis again, wonder how much Nancy Lewis and nineteen-year-old Elizabeth had in common. I can’t imagine she ever felt she wasn’t good enough for some boy.
During the Q and A, a woman asks who her favorite writer is and she gives the answer I always give, that she has many favorites and her favorites change. “Who’s yours?” she counters.
“Faulkner,” the woman says.
“Well, that’s the right Mississippi answer,” she says. She has recently reread Absalom, Absalom. She tells us about the two times she met Faulkner: once he was standing in the corner of a party with a drink in his hand, not talking to anyone, and another time he was at a dinner party, not talking to anyone. It’s too easy, how one person can turn another into a taciturn figure based on such a narrow and limited assessment, and still I find myself believing it. I can see him standing in a dark corner with his drink, avoiding everyone, and I can see a much younger Elizabeth wondering what all the fuss is about. Why they aren’t looking at her.
Someone else asks if her characters are based on people she knew growing up and she says the people in her fiction aren’t real, that they are entirely contrived, and then moves on to the next question. Having read her work and spoken with her about her life, I know it’s not the case. Why not admit it? Perhaps it’s simply something she has insisted for so long that she can’t stop insisting it now, or perhaps it’s just an aggravating question that doesn’t deserve an answer.
After the reading, Elizabeth gets in a car with a disheveled-looking man in overalls, his beater at least thirty years old. She doesn’t fit with this man or his vehicle and I have the urge to pull her out and tell her to stay with me, but he’s her cousin and there is some small pleasure in seeing her with him.
“Thank you,” she says, gazing up at me from the passenger seat. The car is so low to the ground.
“You’re very welcome.”
And with that, my driving duties are done.
I leave the store with a guy I met last week, the boring-text guy, a real sweetheart. If only I could be happy with someone like him. He’s from up North and doesn’t know how he found himself in such a place. He teaches at Mississippi Valley State and is up for tenure, works at the bookstore as a way to dispose of the rest of the hours in his day.
We walk over to the hotel to have a few drinks. Since the five stools at the bar are occupied, we take our beers into the darkened lounge area, which is large and empty.
“It’s like The Shining,” I say.
“It’s always like this. I’ll probably be stuck in this town until I die.”
“There are worse things,” I say, though I’m not sure there are, at least not for a single man from up North. In a town like this, even if he were good-looking, he’d be suspect. Perhaps if he were good-looking and rich he’d be welcomed into the community with open arms but probably not. Not even then.
“I suppose I like having a job,” he says.
“And you can walk down the middle of the street if you want. I always like that.”
“I rent a twelve-hundred-square-foot loft for five hundred dollars a month. You should see it.”
“I should,” I say. I fold my legs beneath me and try to get comfortable. “My aunt’s family used to own this hotel. My uncle’s wife,” I clarify, which is odd because she’s been my aunt since before I was born. The money’s on the wrong side, I might have said. I won’t inherit this hotel or the money from its sale.
He listens to everything I say with interest, asks questions. I feel pretty around him and it’s nice—it’s also strange to feel so different from the person I felt like only a few hours before. I am pretty, and thin enough. I can touch my collarbones and feel the hollowed-out spaces, my rib bones and hipbones. Eleanor Roosevelt said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, but it just seems like another way to make women feel bad about themselves.
At nine o’clock there’s not a night clerk behind the desk or a bartender behind the bar. There’s not a car on the road. We might as well be the last people on earth.
It is Super Bowl Sunday. I haven’t seen Elizabeth since I left her in Greenwood on Wednesday, but she’s still in Mississippi because she has people to see. I’m still here because the drive to Austin is nine hours and every day I find some other reason not to make it. There’s the rain and my exhaustion and my father fixing drinks in the evening and the way my childhood bedroom and all of the things I have accumulated over the years take up an increasing amount of space in my head. The longer I sleep in this room, the more space the stuff wants. I open a closet and there is my wedding dress, my wedding album. My husband, as I still refer to him, so handsome. If I only ever have one, he will forever be my husband. I open a book to find my five-year-old handwriting and the backward a that plagued me for years. My mother recently presented me with my Girl Scout uniform, troop number 240 on a patch down one shoulder. I don’t remember being a Girl Scout. Did I sell cookies? Go on a camping trip? I must not have done it for very long. It seems I was a dropout from a very early age.
But the main reason I’m still here is that there is little to return to. I graduated from the Michener Center nearly a year ago and most of my friends have moved away, gone on to fellowships and jobs or the hustle of New York City. The man I love is married to another woman, a much younger woman he lives with in the house we talked about living in together. I can’t move to Oxford until August. I am in between places, once again. Waiting for one life to end and another to begin.
Elizabeth has called a few times and I haven’t answered or called her back. I don’t want to drive her anywhere or meet any of her people. I think about her small beat-up suitcase and how all of her lovely clothes, fully pressed, somehow fit inside it.
It’s raining again, a steady drizzle that’s been coming down for hours. She calls at ten thirty and I answer but she isn’t there, or she can’t hear me. I hang up and call her back and hear her pressing buttons. I say hello every few seconds until she responds.
“Did you call me?” she asks.
“I did. How are you?”
“My cousin hasn’t come to get me for lunch yet. What time is it?”
“Ten thirty.”
“It’s not eleven thirty?” she asks. “I’m on Eastern Time.”
“No, it’s only ten thirty.”
I tell her to let me know if he doesn’t come and I’ll run over there and pick her up. She calls back an hour later to say he’s arrived, along with a few other relatives, and she’ll be busy for the rest of the day.
A week later, I receive an email from her: Dear Mary, I called you from Jackson but failed to connect. You were a wonderful chauffeur and I so much appreciate all your attention. I finished your book and think you are off to a good start. Perhaps we will cross paths again.
Well, okay, I’m off to a good start. I guess I’ll take that even though I have been writing for years and feel like I’m past a start, but I didn’t expect more from her at this point. She gives what she has to give, as we all do, and it is usually too little. I write her back and don’t mention that we did connect, that I offered to take her to lunch. I even wrote it down, she just didn’t remember. 
Mary Miller is the author of two collections of short stories, Big World and Always Happy Hour, as well as the novels Biloxi and The Last Days of California. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Oxford American, Norton’s Seagull Book of Stories (4th ed.), McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, and others. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss.
