I have a Southern accent myself, of course, but it’s not the twangy kind you hear from the mountain people. It’s no longer quite the genteel kind, either, like my mother had, the Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche DuBois kind, which is good for talking about the heat and ordering mint juleps and saying, “Oh, my.” In my years in Nashville my accent faded, so that now it’s down to cadence and those long Southern vowels. At least that’s what I think. One of my grandnieces, who lives in (of all places) Delaware, tells me I have “the cutest” accent. I dislike this, which may explain why I dislike her. I like the other one, her sister, who says my cap of white hair makes me look “cool.” It seems strange that I should care, at this late date, about “cool.” But there you have it. I wear my hair cut tight to my head. My glasses are turquoise and I have a bright red coat. I am a cool old lady.
My face—what can you say about that? It no longer looks exactly like my face. And my ears have grown enormous. If I live much longer I’ll be able to use them to fly.
And what of Jennifer Young? I wager her ears are still normal sized. Beyond that I can’t hazard a guess as to what she looks like, except to say she’s a white woman with blondish hair. I wonder how old she is. I wonder what she’s done with her life. I wonder what she’s doing with it here. There are only so many reasons to live in this place, in the woods, in the tiny towns. The Mountain birthed its longtime people, who seem to have no choice but to stay. The university brings the students and the professors, and the quaint old cottages in the Assembly and the big built-to-order houses in Clifftops bring the vacationers and retirees, those of us who flee up the Mountain into silence and cooler air and frequent sightings of woodpeckers and fawns. I myself moved here twenty years ago, one of the elderly evacuees of the working world. Those are my people—the no-longers, the once-weres. Jennifer Young is too young to be one of us. Perhaps she’s a professor of something or other, and her being here is easily explained.
But nothing is ever easily explained, is it? Nothing is ever easily explained.
Noise
Is the woman still there? Yes, she is. Today, like each of the last several, she’s there every time Jennifer glances out the glass doors to the deck. A white-haired figure on the other side of the pond, sitting and sitting and sitting. It’s early spring and the light is beautiful—perhaps the woman just enjoys the outdoors. But Jennifer had never noticed her until the morning she waved, and now there she always is. As if she’s watching. As if she’s waiting for her.
She forces herself to slide the door open. To step with confident purpose onto the deck will vanquish her paranoia. She strides to the railing and waves, because if the woman is watching her, maybe this will embarrass her inside, but the woman doesn’t wave back and now Jennifer can see, squinting, that she has her head bowed. She appears to be reading. She’s an old lady who likes to sit outside and read, that’s all, and yet Jennifer wishes fervently that she would go away. Behind her inside the house Milo bangs cars together on the floor of the dining room, that little-boy cacophony, but out here on the deck it’s utterly quiet. It’s a humming silent sound.
She chose this place, this mountain, this rental house, because of a conversation she had more than twenty years ago, at a party on a rooftop, during her brief sojourn in New York, when she was still trying to be a dancer. A girl from her dance class, a girl whose name and face she can no longer recall, told her about Sewanee, where she’d gone to college. “It’s like Brigadoon,” the girl said, and when Jennifer looked puzzled, she explained, “From an old movie, about this village that appears every hundred years. Whenever I go back, it’s like no time has passed. Everything’s exactly the same. And in the winter, when there’s fog on the Mountain, it feels like you pass through clouds to get there, and on the other side the rest of the world is just gone.”
“Did you like it?” Jennifer asked.
The girl shrugged. “There’s two kinds of people who graduate from Sewanee,” she said. “The ones who can’t wait to leave and the ones who spend the rest of their lives trying to get back.” It had the ring of a practiced remark. The girl wanted to claim the first category, and yet her wistful tone persuaded Jennifer she belonged to the second. This was why the conversation had stayed with her: the girl’s divisive longing, called forth by something she both loved and wanted to leave. Jennifer recognized it.
At any rate, the girl was right. Up here there is no rest of the world.
She thinks about shouting, “Hey!” across the pond. Nothing else, just “Hey!” Probably the word would echo, from the water, from the trees: hey, hey, hey. Does she want the woman to look at her or go away? She leaves her to her book, slides her glass door emphatically shut. Back inside she clambers onto her knees beside Milo and leans over him to pick up a car. “What do we do?” she asks, revving the car in the air. “Vroom, vroom?”