Tending to Virginia (17 page)

“I’m back.” Hannah steps in the front door in a different outfit from when she left and a little overnight bag with her. It’s not a piece of Samsonite, either; Cindy can tell from one glance. “Is everything okay?”

“The patients are just fine,” Cindy says, ready to get the hell on
to Ramada. She has got ten minutes to get there and find a parking space, which isn’t always easy on a Friday night. “Ginny Sue, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I’ll tell you all about my date.” Cindy squeezes that damp puffy hand and pulls her bag up on her shoulder. “That’ll perk you up.”

“I’m sure it will,” Hannah says and laughs and Cindy can’t tell what kind of a laugh it is, if it’s laughing
with
or
at
her. “Thank you so much, Cindy.” Hannah follows her to the front door so she can put on a few hundred dead bolts. Those people are scared of their shadows.

Cindy hates that it’s daylight savings; she hates that she and Randy Skinner have to wait until practically nine o’clock for it to be dark enough that they can go and sit in her car. Tonight, she’s not going to wait. Tonight, she’s going to suggest that they go to her house and just order a pizza.

She pulls into Ramada and she has to drive around for five minutes at least looking for a place to park. She has to park at the far end of the lot near that lot of woods, which is fine. Randy Skinner will walk her to her car.

She goes in and there’s a woman who looks like she’s on MAO inhibitors playing the piano and singing. Cindy doesn’t know what MAO stands for; she just knows that shrink was wanting to give her some and telling how she couldn’t eat cheese with that drug, but that she wouldn’t be depressed. “Nobody says I am but you,” she told him. “How in the hell can you eat a nacho without cheese?” But that woman, with her veiny neck straining on every note looks like that’s what she’d be taking; she looks like she has the major side effects what with wearing a turquoise shirt with brown slacks. And she’s singing of all things, Blue Moon. That broad is depressed and Cindy is glad when she gets past that woman and can look for Randy Skinner. He is over in a far corner where it’s good and dark and he lifts his hand when he catches sight of her. But Lord God, Charles Snipes is sitting right there at a table that she’s got to walk past. She has never seen him here before and there he sits with a stiff-looking broad, her hair all neat and fixed, boring. She has teeny little flashes at her ears which must be minute earrings and nobody
wears little dainty earrings except people like her mama and on occasion Ginny Sue who has never really taken an interest in style.

She keeps walking with her eyes straight ahead, eyes on Randy Skinner. “Hello Cindy,” Charles says, halfway smiling, in that dull quiet way of his. “This is Nancy Price.”

“Hi,” Nancy Price says and smiles. Nancy Price is drinking a pina colada, a pink pina colada like she’s somebody she’s not. “I’ve heard so much about you,” Nancy Price says and Cindy can just hear it, just hear all that Charles Snipes has told of her. “Chuckie is a wonderful child.”

“Chuckie’s twelve,” she says and looks at Charles, the tips of those Prince Charles looking ears turning red. Prince Charles—imagine that she used to actually call him that. “Remember?”

“Of course I do,” Charles says but looks at Nancy Price when he says it and lowers those cow eyes of his.

“I hear matrimony is in the air,” she says and stares hard at Nancy Price who doesn’t wear much makeup and should.

“Yes.” Nancy Price says like she’s voting on something, picks at that pineapple sitting on top of that drink.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you first,” Charles says, those ears like they’re about to ignite and hemorrhage at the same time. “I wanted to be the one to tell Chuckie.” Fly to Disneyland, Dumbo!

“What? And not let us have the fun of hearing it through the grapevine?” She waves to Randy to let him know she’s coming just as soon as they’ll stop talking and let her. “I wish I could chat a little more,” she says and smiles. “But my date is so jealous. He has watched every move I’ve made since I passed that MOA-inhibitor-popping lard-ass over there who made Blue Moon sound like two dying alley cats screwing in a brush fire.”

“That’s my baby sister,” Nancy Price says.

“That’s the only reason we’re here,” Charles says, reaching his hand across the table to take hold of Nancy Price’s hand which has a diamond on it like he sure can’t afford, probably a zircon.

“Well,” Cindy says. “I hear those drugs will do wonders if you stay off the dairy stuff.”

“I don’t know what . . .” Nancy Price is saying when Cindy turns
her back and twists her fanny the way Charles used to think was so cute all the way over to the table.

“I ordered you two kamikazes for the price of one,” Randy Skinner says and she is so glad. She could drink a kamikaze for every one there ever was. “That woman sure is bad isn’t she?” he asks. “I’d rather have the piped-in stuff.”

“She is going to be my ex-husband’s sister-in-law,” Cindy says and bites into a pretzel.

“I’m sure glad she’s not my sister-in-law,” he says. “My sister-in-law may be fat but she can sing.” Cindy stops midchew and looks at the three empty glasses in front of Randy Skinner. He must have meant ex-sister-in-law; Cindy knows that he’s an only child.

“How fat is your ex-sister-in-law,” Cindy says. “Could be a thyroid.”

“Oh,” he says and just stares into that bowl of pretzels. “I guess I had to tell you sooner or later,” he says. “I mean you strike me as somebody real open, you know?”

Cindy watches Charles and Nancy Price go over and hug that girl by the piano. And when the three of them are safely outside of the lounge, she turns to Randy Skinner and takes a big swallow of her kamikaze. “Separated?” she asks and he hangs his head and shakes it no.

“Gonna be separated?”

“I might,” he says and takes her hand. “Whenever I’m with you, I really start thinking that I might.” He is staring at Cindy’s boobs and then slowly back up to her face.

“Well, let me know when you do.” She finishes that first kamikaze and takes a big gulp of the second before she pulls her bag out from under the table. She starts to tell him what she had planned for the night just so he’d get all erect and couldn’t follow her out to the parking lot, but she doesn’t. She’d rather get to the parking lot in time to see Charles and that Nancy Price and Nancy Price’s sister getting into that new Toyota Camry that he just recently bought with what the God Jesus holy ghost only knows.

“Oh Cindy, Cindy,” Randy Skinner says and rubs his hand over that beard like he might be a man that studies the comets and the
stars. “Just stay until dark, you know, dark when we can go to your car. One last time to remember.”

“Suffer, baby,” she says just like in that old joke where that mosquito is trying to screw a elephant. “Just suffer yourself unto me,” she says, relying on what she has always known to work. If you quote a little scripture it will usually shut somebody right up. A little scripture will go a long way, and with that she walks right out of the Ramada Inn and into the lobby where Charles and Nancy Price and Nancy Price’s sister are waiting while the man behind the counter writes out a check and gives it to that sister. Two cents is what she was worth, if that much.

“Good-bye, Cindy,” Charles says, the three of them standing there like they might be posing for Olan Mills. Snap Snap.

“Have a hematoma of a wedding,” she says and walks as fast as she can so that she doesn’t start to cry and make her makeup run. She is not going to go and get Chuckie; God no, ‘cause she can’t take him and his bump mashing and her mama’s card shuffling tonight. She drives straight home and calls Constance Ann on the phone. “I’m right in the middle of a show,” Constance Ann whines, her mouth full of something like potato chips it sounds like.

“If you are my friend, you’ll come over here, and you’ll come ready to spend the night if I feel I can’t make it through the night,” Cindy says. It’s not the nicest thing in the world to make a person feel guilty but it works. “Even my best friend has turned against me—a woman I completely trusted; how often we ate together. Psalms 41:9”

“Okay, I’m coming,” Constance Ann says, though Cindy knows she’ll watch that show till it’s over. Cindy unplugs the TV and binds the end of that cord in electrical tape; she’ll tell Constance Ann it has a short. Constance Ann will pout and threaten to go home to watch “Dallas,” but Cindy can handle that. “Be ye not selfish.” If she’s feeling better by nine, she’ll pull off the tape and plug the set in. You can’t tell what will happen. Randy Skinner might leave his wife; he might sit at Ramada, drink about four more drinks and have a head-on collision. You just can’t ever know for sure what will happen, from Friday to Friday, from man to man.

* * *

Virginia wakes to the absence of the window where the streetlight shines through; she turns to feel for Mark and instead there is a wall, hollow-feeling plasterboard.

“Ginny Sue?” A lamp goes on and she squints to see her mother standing by Gram’s dining room table, her nylon gown a filmy pink shimmer. “Honey, you’re to lie quietly.”

She watches her mother cross the room, quietly, ghostlike, and sit on the floor where she has made a pallet of quilts and blankets. Gram used to make pallets like that when Virginia pretended to be camping out; she would hide there with the stuffed clown that Gram had made. She could close her eyes tightly and see all the colors on her eyelids; she could think of a picture and it would form like a movie: Lena and Roy in New York City, Gramps walking home from work. Now, she is on the daybed, her legs lifted with a mass of pillows, a trashcan on the floor right beside her head. “You have been so sick,” her mama says. “There’s the trashcan and you call if you need me. Don’t try to get up.” Her mother looks so young sitting there in that short gown, her hair in loose curls pushed back from her face, just a few shimmering strands of gray.

“It’s the baby isn’t it?” Virginia asks, suddenly remembering Felicia’s friend gripping her wrist, looking at her watch. “Sky high,” the woman said when she took her blood pressure.

“You’re going to be fine,” her mama says. “You’ve just got to stay in bed awhile, at least a week, maybe longer.”

“Here?” Virginia asks and she feels a second of relief, relief to be home, a reason to stay without telling the truth.

“Yes. They said I can take you to our house later in the week if you’re feeling better.” Her mother stretches her legs out and leans back on her elbows. “Mark was so upset when I called him.”

“What did he say?” Virginia asks, trying to picture his expression, upset, the phone cord twisted around his hand with those long legs swung up on the coffee table. His face is white, guilty, under those bright overhead lights, the glaring freak-show lights that he always switches on instead of a lamp where the light is soft,
filtered by a shade. His face is white, tennis shoe going back and forth like a windshield wiper.

“He said he was afraid something like this was going to happen. He said that you’ve been feeling awful lately.” Her mother stares at her now, eyebrows lifted and waiting for the confession.

“He wasn’t,” she mumbles. “He feels guilty is all.”

“For?” Again the eyebrows, but Virginia doesn’t answer, just shakes her head. If she didn’t feel so sleepy, so fuzzy, she’d tell everything.

“You’ve just been sick,” her mama says. “Your hormones can do all kinds of things to you.”

“Hormones,” Virginia repeats; her mother has always relied on hormones, irritability, sudden tears, lack of energy, full of energy.

“Well, it’s true,” her mother says. “Mine are doing strange things right now, hot, cold, and hot, cold. They talked about PMS on Donahue the other morning and I knew just what those women meant; I believe in PMS.” Virginia wants to smile, to nod, I believe in PMS, but she pictures Mark standing in front of her Animal Kingdom. If she died right now, that’s what he’d have to remember her, snarls and death and a fat pregnant monkey; and if Sheila had wanted that baby, if Sheila had wanted things to work, then Mark would already be living in some city, some condo-miniblinds-art deco-thank you for not using that lucite ashtray-living room. And he would be snuggled under some satiny comforter-covered waterbed with the long and lithe Sheila stretched out beside him, her long blonde hair falling in sparkly webs onto a satin pillowcase, and Sheila’s long slender fingers would squeeze his thigh and he would say all of the things to Sheila that he has said to her. She feels herself sinking slowly onto that waterbed, ghostlike, while he lies there with Sheila.

“I’m going to turn the light out now,” her mama whispers. “I don’t want Mama to get back up. She was so confused when she went to bed; Lena always gets her confused.” She hears the lamp click off and her mama tiptoeing through the darkness back to the pallet. “Of course, Lena confuses me,” she whispers and laughs. Virginia wants to say “me too” but the words will not come, only Sheila with her blonde hair on his pillow, his mouth moving down
Sheila’s sleek ivory throat. “If I’m ever that way,” her mother whispers. “You and Robert don’t worry about it. I hope I never am.”

“You won’t,” Virginia tries to say, hoping her mother will not talk about all of that again, wills and funerals, and how she likes Lena’s idea of being buried in pajamas, plant a dogwood. Her mother has always talked about these things as easily as she would say how she wanted her hair fixed. “I think it’s nature’s way of helping people to let go.” Her mother’s voice is low and whispery now, far away like a whippoorwill song. “Don’t let go, Ginny Sue,” Gram says. “Hold tight now.”

“God has his way,” her mother whispers. That could be Gram saying those words, the thunder and lightning, death and illness all figuring into the grand scheme of things. “God has taken my child and my husband,” Gram said. “And I am not to question why.” And Virginia had stood at the kitchen window and watched while the ambulance took Gramps away, her mama and Gram clutching one another and sobbing like children. “Think about it,” her mama whispers, her voice getting slower and slower. “If you hadn’t come home today, I’d be worried sick over you flat on your back and alone in that house. Mark’s got his studies and those big tests coming up. It’s a blessing that you came today.” The thought of being alone in that house, in any house, sends a chill over her scalp and she pulls Gram’s quilt up close around her face and breathes in the heavy old smell. “You know who is with you always?” Gram had asked that night that Uncle Raymond took her to Gram’s house to spend the night. “God is always there with you, no reason to be afraid.”