Read A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell for Free Online Page B

the bedspins?" I asked.
    " The whirlies." I had thought maybe she had
an exotic name from her own generation. She reached over and felt my
forehead then, as if to say she had not meant to sound sarcastic if
she had. I lay there spinning, thinking: She maybe thinks I know
things, and maybe knows I don't.

         S o
that is how I find myself sitting at this wire-mesh table in the
mornings, taking hangover notes, reflex motions of a would-have-been
scientist. Since that first day three weeks ago we've not had
anything so spectacular as the drop-in. Hoop and Virginia's visit
established several data points:
    1. Sam, or Stump, is presumably dead, and that is the
extent of my privileged knowledge.
    2. He may have had something to do with Florida,
where it is, as if in obeisance to Hoop's outbursts, somehow tacitly
assumed we may go, so long as it--the going--does not obtain an
urgency. There is a sense in which we are packing our things
psychologically, and when the moment is right, but not demanding or
in any way special, we will take off and simply be there as
unprepared and innocent as we were that night in the Car Wash.
    3. The no-bio rule is a
constant of this universe. You follow it if you want to operate. What
I know of Stump and Mary is largely known, and she is indifferent, as
she says, to any bio song and dance out of me.
    * * *
    Mary is moving through rich banks of azalea, her head
alone above the creamy reds, nickel arc of cold water lobbing heavily
all around her. I have begun reading her old acting scripts. They
turn up everywhere--in Stump's clothes, under table legs--and they
all seem to have been handled roughly. I have not found one yet with
its cover intact.
    I don't know plays beyond the forced college stuff,
and I've never seen anything like these things. In every one there is
a role made for Mary. I found this in a script under Virginia's
daybed--cover gone, as usual--and was stupid enough to ask Mary the
title. "I forgot," she said.
    JASMINE: Mother, John took me up to Black River and
we went swimming.
    MRS. TAYLOR: Are we getting a bit too familiar ,
Jasmine Ranelle?
    JASMINE: Oh, Mother! It was nice. You know, the water
is so dark, and when we jumped in, the splashes were white and foamy,
like--like the head on an A&W!
    MRS. TAYLOR: Like the head on an A&W!
    JASMINE : Yes!
    MRS. TAYLOR: Jesus my beads.
    Mr. Taylor had been shot in a hunting accident and
Mrs. Taylor could not be too careful of her daughter and only child.
They went round and round over gentlemen callers, with Mrs. Taylor
becoming gradually more mannish and violent in her protection of
Jasmine Ranelle. Mrs. Taylor could even swing an ax handle!
    Mary, I imagine, played a grand Mrs. Taylor. Late in
the second act she cracks a suitor over the head while he's kissing
Jasmine--with the flat side of a butcher knife. The audience sees her
creep up on them through a scrim, the knife is shadowed hugely behind
them, and Mrs. Taylor shrieks into the parlor and slaps the caller
with the knife. Suitor flees stage.
    JASMINE: You ruin everything, Mother.
    MRS. TAYLOR: I used the back
side of it, honey.
    JASMINE: That's what you always say.
    I had notions of Mary surprising me with versions of
her characters--say, the knife trick sometime, but she never did, of
course, and was generally not in favor of my associating her with her
roles, as our introduction on the lawn had suggested. She was not in
favor of anyone mistaking her for a play character.
    I had a role to consider myself. Guy, young guy,
stops by, moves in, shoots pool, and drinks gin wearing widow's
husband's pastel golf outfits.
    MRS. TAYLOR:: You don't know a thing about a one of
those young men.
    JASMINE: That's the point ,
Mother. I'm getting to
know them.
    MRS. TAYLOR: You're getting nowhere!
    JASMINE: And you're seeing to it!
[Runs,
crying, to her room]
    Mary has trundled by with a wheelbarrow blocked from
sight by a bank of azalea. When she slides into view, I see the
straining tendons