Free Save Me the Waltz: A Novel by Zelda Fitzgerald Page B

gin.”
    Alabama snatched at the bottle in David’s hand. “Give me that bottle.” As he fended her off, she slid against the door. To save the noise of a crash in the hall, she precipitated her body heavily into the jamb. The swinging door caught her full in the face. Her nose bled jubilantly as a newly discovered oil well down the front of her dress.
    “I’ll see if there’s a beefsteak in the icebox,” proffered David. “Stick it under the sink, Alabama. How long can you hold your breath?”
    By the time the kitchen was in some kind of order, the Connecticut dawn drenched the countryside like a firehose. The two men staggered off to sleep at the inn. Alabama and David surveyed her black eyes disconsolately.
    “They’ll think I did it,” he said.
    “Of course—it won’t make any difference what I say.”
    “When they see us together you’d think they’d believe.”
    “People always believe the best story.”
    The Judge and Miss Millie were down early to breakfast. They waited amidst the soggy mountains of damp bloated cigarette butts while Tanka burnt the bacon in his expectation of trouble. There was hardly a place to sit without sticking to dried rings of gin and orange juice.
    Alabama’s head felt as if somebody had been making popcorn in her cranium. She tried to conceal her bruised eyes with heavy coatings of face powder. Her face felt peeled under the mask.
    “Good morning,” she said brightly.
    The Judge blinked ferociously.
    “Alabama,” he said, “about that telephone call to Joan—your motherand I felt that we’d better make it today. She will be needing help with the baby.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Alabama had known this would be their attitude, but she couldn’t prevent a cataclysmic chute of her insides. She had known that no individual can force other people forever to sustain their own versions of that individual’s character—that sooner or later they will stumble across the person’s own conception of themselves.
    “Well!” she said defiantly to herself, “families have no right to hold you accountable for what they inculcate before you attain the age of protestation!”
    “And since,” the Judge continued, “you and your sister do not seem to be on the best of terms, we thought we would join her alone tomorrow morning.”
    Alabama sat silently inspecting the debris of the night.
    “I suppose Joan will stuff them with moralities and tales about how hard it is to get along,” she said to herself bitterly, “and neatly polish us off in contrast to herself. We’re sure to come out of this picture black demons, any way you look at it.”
    “Understand,” the Judge was saying, “that I am not passing a moral judgment on your personal conduct. You are a grown woman and that is your own affair.”
    “I understand,” she said. “You just disapprove, so you’re not going to stand it. If I don’t accept your way of thinking, you’ll leave me to myself. Well, I suppose I have no right to ask you to stay.”
    “People who do not subscribe,” answered the Judge, “have no rights.”
    The train that carried the Judge and Miss Millie to the city was lumbered with milk cans and the pleasant paraphernalia of summer in transit. Their attitude was one of reluctant disavowal as they said good-bye. They were going south in a few days. They couldn’t come back to the country again. David would be away seeing to his frescoes, and they thought Alabama would be better off at home during his absence. They were glad of David’s success and popularity.
    “Don’t be so desolate,” said David. “We’ll see them again.”
    “But it will never be the same,” wailed Alabama. “Our rôle will always be discounting the character they think we are from now on.”
    “Hasn’t it always been?”
    “Yes—but David, it’s very difficult to be two simple people at once, one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and