Sweetwater Creek by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

the dog. No more running off to the kennels.
Learn to play an instrument. I always enjoyed ladies playing the piano after dinner. I will set a budget for this, too.
Learn a lady’s sport, and some social games of some sort. Tennis would be good, or golf. On second thought, golf is awfully expensive. Let’s make it tennis. Needless to say, I’ve budgeted for this also. And bridge, certainly. I believe you play, don’t you, Jenny? And, of course, dancing. I know there is a class the young women in Charleston take when they’re about thirteen. Please find out about this.
Get some catalogs from the private schools around Charleston and study them. I think Charlotte Hall would be suitable. I would like Emily to familiarize herself with this school by the time she is thirteen.
    And he signed it Walter L. Parmenter.
    Emily and her aunt looked at each other for a long moment, and then collapsed in laughter. They laughed so hard that they rolled onto Emily’s bed. Elvis joined them, frisking and barking joyfully.
    When they could speak, Emily said, “But we’re really not, are we? All that, I mean? Skirts at school, dancing classes…”
    “Oh, of course not,” her aunt snorted, still laughing. “It sounds like a blueprint for a south of Broad debutante. Of course, if you’d like to do that…”
    “I’d rather die.”
    “Me too. We’ll learn some things together, and it will be fun, and we can tell him you’re making good progress. As long as you wear a dress to dinner occasionally, and say three words to whoever is visiting, he’ll probably forget about the rest. But some of these things are fun, you know. Dancing is. Tennis is. And some new clothes carefully chosen by you and me will not be amiss, either. Starting, my dear, with a good bra. And cooking is a dirt-road cinch. We can do that together. We’ve got all weekends.”
    “He didn’t say I had to quit training the dogs.”
    “No,” her aunt said. “I think he knows what side his bread is buttered on.”
    “What do you mean?”
    But her aunt would say no more, and the days turned into weeks and time spun on. The changes Jenny Raiford made were gradual and pleasant, and did not feel at all like changes after a while. They felt as if the Parmenter family had always done them. They ate dinner together, at a leisurely pace. Jenny insisted that everyone share a little of his or her day, and soon they did, even though the words were mumbled and eyes rolled. Still, it was dinnertime conversation, and Walter Parmenter beamed to hear it.
    They watched TV together. Emily thought it was a gargantuan achievement.
    “It’s barbaric, the way you three sneak off down there and let that thing blare all over the house without a word to Emily or me,” Jenny said. “You might as well be living in a log cabin in the Yukon. What good does it do Emily to learn to be a young lady if she has to bring her friends home to that?”
    And soon they all gathered for an hour or so, and compromised on CNN, and then Emily and Jenny went up to their rooms—Jenny had Buddy’s—and chatted or maybe watched Emily’s little TV, and went to bed early. If her aunt was sad or homesick for her previous life, if she staggered under the burden of this new family, or wept for the one in this house that she had never had, Emily never heard it. The rooms were too far apart.
    The images of her mother, leaving, faded.
    The specter of change shrank back under the weight of the pleasant, nearly identical, altogether ordinary spring days. Emily floated on the sameness and ordinariness, and was soothed.
    On an early May Saturday afternoon she and her aunt sat on the old silver-gray wooden benches at the end of the long dock out over the Wadmalaw, sipping lemonade from a thermos and stretching their legs to the young sun. The marsh was almost totally green now, and alive with its teeming, gliding, scuttling, splashing denizens, and the smaller creeks cutting it ran full. It was nearly high tide.