Tending to Virginia (12 page)

“‘If you love me, you’ll pull that goddamned’ (and I quote of course), ‘you’ll pull that goddamned trigger.’ It wasn’t love that I was feeling right then. Sometimes I think I was feeling nothing at all. Sometimes I think I was feeling impatient and ready to get it all over with so that I wouldn’t have to be ready to put my hands to my ears all the time. He was so weak. It seemed that weakness had covered over or erased every feature on his face. He just wasn’t the same man that I fell in love with and met at the end of the River Baptist aisle. I was staring at him there, those eyes like they couldn’t focus right, his hand forcing my finger into that hole and up against that cool metal trigger. There was no recollection; I suddenly felt like I might be preparing to kill a bug or a mouse that had frightened me. I was frightened. My hands shook like jelly. ‘Do it, do it,’ he kept saying over and over. ‘Don’t be scared to do it.’ I did it and it seems to me when I look back that I didn’t even hear a noise. For eight years I’ve tried to make myself hear that noise so that I can know that’s how it happened and get on with what’s left of my life. Eight years and I’ve never figured out exactly what it was I was feeling at the time. I thought of my mama on that slanted table; I thought of that look that my daddy had when he popped those bottles and the glass sprayed; I thought of Cindy when she was first born and Raymond said, ‘She looks just like me,’ and she does, more and more; sometimes it scares me that she looks so much like him because it makes me think that if she’s got those body genes, that she may very well have his brain genes, too.

“I turned off the light because I didn’t want to see and I went to the bedroom and I called the police and an ambulance. I watched out the window waiting for them to get there and I didn’t even remember calling you and Ben but you beat the ambulance and next thing I knew you had your arms around me and had me out of that house on the front porch all wrapped up in a blanket and then in the front seat of the car where you had left the heater running and the radio playing. The moon was full and clearly we were in for
some frost and I kept thinking about my bed of asters and how I hoped they would make it. Ben asked, ‘Why Madge, why did he do it?’ and I couldn’t say a word. Ben said, ‘HOW did he do it’ and I knew he was trying to picture Raymond with those weak sometimes paralyzed arms holding a shotgun on himself. I have nightmares now. His arms weren’t really deadened like he told people. He’d grab me hard by the arms and he’d say, ‘I never wanted you. Just the smell of you sickens me.’ I never said a word, all that time covering for him the best I could. Everybody remembered the time he was caught up on the roof of Kinglee Hardware with his eyes all made up like a woman, blue shadow and long black eyeliner tails. ‘Like Tut,’ he said. ‘Like Cindy,’ I said. I know you’ve noticed all that cheap makeup when I didn’t raise her that way; Ginny Sue never did that to her face. ‘Don’t you see what you’re doing to the girls? To me?’ I asked and I told everybody how he was dressed that way to try out a campaign for Chevrolet knowing full well that nobody would believe it because what does King Tut have to do with cars? But that was the only big thing prior to the funeral. All the other stuff happened there at home where only I knew. I tried to get Cindy to see but she never did and to this day won’t hear it; she blames me for Raymond’s illness, she says that Raymond was a ‘artist of the mind.’ Now you know and I know that in his good years Raymond was a whippersnapper of a salesman and dressed good, too, but he was never a artist of the mind. I know people saw things at the funeral; I know they couldn’t help but notice that brand new color widescreen TV when everybody knows that what I’m still looking at is that small black and white that I bought when Jack Paar was still on the ‘Tonight Show.’ It doesn’t pick up doodle squat these days and people tell me I’d enjoy these carry over shows that come on at night now though the Lord Jesus knows there’s enough pain in this world without watching make-believe. If people have said things, it’s never been told to me. I was sorry on the day of his funeral that I hadn’t confessed all of this to you. Don’t you see I was scared? Scared that I’d be put in prison. I was scared that I’d lose the only people I’ve got left, you and Ben and your children, your mama, and my girls. I don’t know that Catherine and especially
Cindy could ever understand or forgive me and I just couldn’t face that. I can’t bear the thought that I could lose what little bit’s left, can’t bear the thought of prison. I just couldn’t face living my life that way though God knows it hasn’t been much better. I wanted so bad to tell you but everybody wanted me to bounce back and went out of their way so to help me. There isn’t really a nice widower over in Clemmonsville that I eat out with. I go to Clemmonsville and I go to the movies at City Square Mall, eat at Morrison’s and then spend the night at Catherine’s where I’m told that Cindy needs to grow up and then I come home and Cindy tells me that Catherine, and I quote, is a ‘slutbucket’ who needed to have more tied up than her tubes, like her mouth. Cindy says that to hear Catherine tell it her tubes were macraméd. Sometimes I think what Cindy says is funny but I don’t laugh, not ever; I don’t want to encourage her. I should have been here at home with that child instead of studying to be a hygienist at Saxon Tech, but Hannah, there was nothing to do when Raymond got that way but to take up a profession. We didn’t really have a lot of money back then like Raymond told everybody; we did all right but I’m still paying for this house and I just finished paying for all that Raymond bought to take with him and that cemetery plot big enough to bury every Pearson that ever walked. We would have had money if Raymond hadn’t always taken it in his head that he had to buy the biggest and the best. ‘Buy the large box of Tide,’ he would say, you know that size that’ll barely fit in the grocery cart, ‘and stop buying Crisco. Oil, vegetable oil and get the biggest size,’ and ‘have them grind the hamburger for you, watch them grind it, tell them to wear gloves. Go ahead and get twenty pounds, never less than twenty pounds. It should be brown, Madge, not hot pink like when they inject the poisons.’ Now, Hannah, who doesn’t buy Crisco in the can? Who doesn’t do that so that they have the nice can to put their grease in and store it? Raymond wouldn’t let me save grease, not even bacon drippings. I bet Ben has never told you what you could and could not buy at the grocery. You don’t know how I envied women in that check-out line; I envied the old and young, coloreds and whites alike with their Pop Tarts and normal-size detergents and pretty decorator
toilet paper. I had to buy white, only white. ‘If something strange is leaking from my body, I want to see it,’ he said. He made me buy the largest box of Kotex and now you know that’s something you don’t want everybody seeing in your cart, those young boys having to bag it up. And God, I envied those women their cans of Crisco. You and your mama both have always used Crisco, Loretta Lynn, too, and look at her; she’s done as good as a body could do. We might could have had money way back but that wouldn’t have eased my heart. ‘I’m freezing vegetables,’ I used to tell those women at the check-out when I unloaded box after box of baggies. That’s not why I bought all those baggies. I bet you always wondered why I bought all those baggies if you ever looked in my pantry and saw them. Well, now I can tell you. It was for his underclothing and socks, anything that directly touched his privates or feet. Every piece had to be put in a airtight baggie and I wasn’t supposed to use the same baggie twice. I did, though, a few times I did like when Cindy had come down with the mumps and I couldn’t get to the store to buy some. Thank God he didn’t notice or he would’ve killed me. He had more socks than everybody in Saxon County could wear in a year, black, gray, navy and dark brown—‘Never tan, Madge, brown, brown, as close to black as you can get and still be brown.’ I’ve listened time and again to you telling of how you were in J.C. Penney’s buying Ben some socks when your water broke with Ginny Sue and you don’t know how I’ve envied that. Raymond wouldn’t have put his foot in a sock from Penney’s, Ivey’s or Belk’s. He ordered most of his socks from the North up in New York, underwear too. He wore Gucci socks, fancy little briefs, and Gucci shoes which had to be kept in large broil in the bag baggies. I had to wash his socks by hand so that they didn’t get mismatched, pair by pair, then briefs and tee shirts, take them straight from the dryer and put them in a baggie. ‘
You
should care about losing
your
mate,’ I always wanted to tell him but I didn’t. I’ve seen Ben when his socks didn’t match; I’ve seen him standing right there in your kitchen just as barefooted as a yard dog and I’d think to myself, ‘Hannah sure is lucky not to have a man so taken with his own feet.’ I’ve always thought of you as a sister and I used to wish that we
were; I used to wish that Emily was my mama and I used to hate going home those nights when I had spent the day playing at your house. I’ve tried to find the right time when I could tell you all of this, tried to think of when I could be with you all by myself. I think of us just packing up and driving down to Myrtle Beach. I picture us sitting on the beach, watching the ocean and sipping a little wine like we used to do and I’d start at the first. I’d start with that night when Raymond asked me to soak in a cool bath and then lay real still on the bed, so that by the time I got to clothing and Crisco and mama’s embalming that I could look at you and say, ‘Hannah, I killed Raymond,’ and that you would say that you were happy for me, that I had never deserved any of that, that you didn’t know how I had lived through it all. I’d like to think that’s what you’d say; I’d like to think you’d say there’s no court of law that would take my life after all that, that there wasn’t even reason that anyone should ever know. That’s what I want to think because I did love Raymond, my Raymond, the one I married with you standing right there beside me. I love you like a sister, Hannah, and I hope you can go right on loving me after knowing all this.”

Madge tears up the letter in teeny shreds and washes it piece by piece down the garbage disposal, closing her eyes the whole while that disposal is groaning and gurgling like it is trying to breathe, like it is choking on every word.

“Are you coming or not? Call me at the crack of dawn and then not even ready.” Cindy lets the back door slam and Madge jumps and clutches one last little scrap of paper that she missed. “I been waiting and tooting and it’s hot as pure hell; my hair will be flat as a pancake before I even get to my VDT.” Cindy flops down at the kitchen table and jingles her keys back and forth impatiently. Madge can’t tell which jingles the loudest, the keys or all those chains wrapped around Cindy’s neck and falling where she’s about to show her bosoms with that dress cut like one you’d wear to a beach party and not to work where decent people of this town come and go and know that Cindy is Madge’s daughter. Cindy’s hair is pulled straight up in the front like something just scared her.

“Don’t stare at my jewelry!” Cindy snaps. “It’s Napier, gold-filled.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No, but you thought it. I don’t know why you don’t say something because you usually do. I got these at the Thalhimers in Clemmonsville; they’re Anne Klein and Napier. Good jewelry, not like those old out of style cheap chains you wear.”

“I only wear one at a time.” Madge gets her purse off the table and goes to the door. “I just think that they are pretty and that’s why I say that they’d show up prettier if you’d just wear one at the time.”

“Randy Skinner loves them. Randy Skinner says he’d like to see me wrapped in gold.” That sounds like something Raymond would have said and it sends a chill down Madge’s spine. She just nods; all those men’s names come and go out of Cindy’s mouth like a faucet turned on and off. “Randy is a pharmaceutical salesman who I meet on Friday nights, like tonight while you keep Chuckie.” Madge walks outside and gets in the car; Cindy had left it running, the air full blast, radio full blast, and a cigarette just burning away in that ashtray, making Madge’s eyes water. “But of course you could care less about who I meet at the Ramada Inn.”

“I care, Cindy.”

“Just say if you don’t want Chuckie in your house. Just say ‘cause I know that’s what’s on your mind.” Cindy backs down the driveway and out into the street without even looking to see if anything’s coming.

“Nothing’s on my mind.” Madge leans back in her seat so that the line of sunlight shines right in her eyes. “I guess I’m just tired.”

“Tell me about it!” Cindy says and pulls right up to a red light without even slowing and slams on brakes. “I’ve got so much on my mind that it makes me tired just thinking about having to think about it. Of course, you don’t want to know what’s on my mind, you never do, so I’ll just keep it to myself. You don’t even ask where I got this dress that I’m wearing and I got it from Miss Ginny Sue so know that and think about it before you mention my titties about to show and think that Ginny Sue must’ve shown her little bit whenever she wore it.”

“It’s a nice dress, Cindy,” Madge says. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well,” Cindy turns off the radio and stares at Madge all the while driving down Main Street which makes Madge nervous as a cat. “I’ve heard that Charles Snipes is remarrying.”

“Well? You remarried,” Madge says and is glad to see that they are almost at the office building.

“That’s not why I’m pissed.”

“Please don’t use that word.”

“Please don’t use that word,” Cindy mimics and slams on brakes right in front of the dental office, the whole car rocking back and forth. “He could’ve told me first. Chuckie has a right to be the first to know. Chuckie is his son, flesh and blood and sperm.”

“Hush,” Madge says, not about to open that car door for the world to hear what Cindy has to say.

“I could just kill Charles Snipes. Randy Skinner would never be so thoughtless. I could kill him deader than dead.”

“Hmm,” Madge says and gets out before she has to hear one more word. “The service station said they’d bring the car to me.”

“Thank you, Cindy.” Cindy says and messes with her eyelashes in front of the rearview. “Thank you for being the one daughter who can do something for me other than have her tubes woven into a miniature egg basket, thank you prodigal son’s brother, thank you child of God and child of Raymond Sinclair whose tubes are not tied and who caters to her mother’s needs.”