We hope you enjoy this extract from our Great Read for January: The Last Girls, by Lee Smith (Hodder).
Look out for this, and other books bearing the ‘Great Read’ sticker in your local bookshop.
*Mile 736
Memphis, Tennessee
Friday 5/7/99
1645 hours*
Harriet thinks it was William Faulkner who said that Mississippi begins in the lobby of the Peabody hotel. Waiting to check in at the ornate desk, she can well believe it. Vast and exotic as another country, the hushed lobby stretches away forever with its giant chandeliers, its marble floors, its palms, Oriental rugs and central fountain, its islands of big comfortable furniture where gorgeous blond heiresses lean forward toward each other telling secrets Harriet will never know and could not even imagine. Oh she has no business being here in Memphis at all, no business in this exclusive lobby, no business going on this trip down the river again with these women she doesn’t even know any longer and has nothing in common with, nothing at all. As if she ever did. As if it were not all entirely a coincidence-proximity, timing, the luck of the draw, whatever. Harriet has read that they assign roommates now strictly by height, a system that works as well as any other. And in fact she and Baby were exactly the same height (five feet six inches) and exactly the same weight (125 pounds)-though Lord knows it was distributed differently-when they were paired as roommates at Mary Scott College in 1963. They could wear each other’s clothes perfectly. Harriet remembers pulling on that little gray cashmere sweater set the minute Baby took it off, Baby coming in drunk from an afternoon date as Harriet rushed out for the evening; she remembers how warm and soft the cashmere felt slipping down over her breasts which no boy had ever seen. That was freshman year.
Oh this is all a dreadful mistake, Harriet realizes now as her heart starts to pound and she tries to breathe slowly and deeply in the freezing fragrant air of the Peabody hotel. She anchors herself by looking up the nearest column, so massive, so polished, really she is quite insignificant here beside it. Insignificant, all her unseemly heaving and gasping and emotional display. Harriet gazes up and up and up the slick veined column stretching out of sight into the dark Southern air of the mezzanine at the top of the marble staircase that leads to all those rooms where even now, cotton deals and pork-belly futures are being determined and illicit lunchtime affairs are still in steamy progress. Oh, stop! What is wrong with her? Everything Harriet has worked so hard to get away from comes flooding back and she has to sit down on a pretty little bench upholstered in a flame stitch. She really can’t breathe. She’s still getting over her hysterectomy anyway. She gasps and looks around. The walls are deep rose, a color Harriet has always thought of as Italian, though she has never been to Italy. The lighting, too, is rosy and muted, as if to say, “Calm down, dear. Hush. Everything will be taken care of. Don’t worry your pretty little head . . .”
A black waiter appears before her with a silver tray and a big grin (Doesn’t he know how politically incorrect he is?) and asks if he can bring her anything and Harriet says, “Yes, please, some water,” and then he says, “My pleasure,” and disappears like magic to get it. The big corporation that runs this hotel now must have taught them all to say “My pleasure” like that, Harriet is sure of it. No normal black boy from Memphis would say “My pleasure” on his own.
But was it William Faulkner who said, “Mississippi begins in the lobby of the Peabody hotel”? Or did somebody else say it? Or did she, Harriet Holding, just make that up? At fifty-three, Harriet can’t remember anything, sometimes of course it’s a blessing. But for instance she can’t remember the names of her students five minutes after the term is over, and she can’t remember the names of her colleagues at the community college if she runs into them someplace unexpected such as the Pizza Hut or Home Depot, as opposed to the faculty lounge or the library where she has seen them daily for thirty years.
Yet suddenly, as if it were only yesterday, Harriet can remember Baby Ballou’s beautiful face when she married Charlie Mahan in the biggest wedding Harriet has ever seen, to this day, and they were all bridesmaids: Harriet and Anna and Courtney, suitemates forever, and now they’re all gathering again. Oh, it’s too much! Just because Harriet took care of Baby Ballou in college does not mean she has an obligation to do so for the rest of her life.
Harriet can’t remember why she ever consented to do this anyway, why she ever called Charlie Mahan back when he left that message on her voice mail, considering it was probably all his fault anyway. Yet Charlie Mahan is still charming, clearly, that deep throaty drawl that always reminds Harriet of driving down a gravel road, the way she and Baby used to do when she went down to Alabama visiting. Joyriding, Baby called it. Harriet has never been joyriding since. Just driving aimlessly out into the country in Baby’s convertible, down any road they felt like, past kudzu-covered barns and cotton fields and little kids who stood in the yard and silently watched them pass and would not wave. Just drinking beer and listening to Wilson Pickett on the radio while bugs died on the windshield and weeds reached in at them on either side, towering goldenrod and bee balm, joe-pye weed as tall as a man. Like everything else in the Deep South, those weeds were too big, too tangled, too jungly. They’d grow up all around you and strangle you in a heartbeat, Harriet felt. A Virginian, Harriet had always thought she was Southern herself until she went to Alabama with Baby Ballou. And now here she is again, poised on the lush dark verge of the Deep South one more time.
Harriet thinks of the present the bridemaids gave Baby the night before her wedding, sort of a joke present but not really, not really a joke at all, as things have turned out: a fancy evening bag, apricot watered silk, it had belonged to somebody’s grandmother. “Everything you need to live in the Delta,” they had printed on the accompanying card. Inside the purse was a black silk slip and a half-pint of gin. Harriet could use a drink of gin herself just thinking about Baby’s thin flushed face with those cheekbones like wings and her huge pale startled blue eyes and the long dark hair that fell into her face and how she kept pushing it back in the same obsessive way she bit her nails and smoked cigarettes and did everything else.
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