Tending to Virginia (19 page)

“I’m sorry,” Hannah whispered back and Madge was hoping that Hannah would offer for her mama to go and live with Emily which she didn’t.

“Hannah doesn’t think of anyone but herself,” Raymond told Madge. “Hannah and Ben are stingy. Poor people have to be I guess.”

“They are not poor,” Madge said, one of the few times that she ever spoke up to him.

“Well, lower class then, like you were before I rescued you.” He poured himself a shot of bourbon and drank it.

“It’s because Mama and Lena don’t get along,” Madge said. “I know that’s what Hannah’s thinking. Lena and Roy are retiring in Saxapaw and I know Hannah’s thinking that they’ll be at her mama’s most of the time.”

“Lena and Roy,” he said and drank another shot. “Rolling in money, but it doesn’t change their class. And you’re no better, Madge. You believe all those tall tales about how perfect their life is, a romance made in heaven, about Lena being a star on Broadway,
hah!” He carried the bottle and shot glass over to his chair and opened his book on Egypt, glossy pictures of tombs and mummies. Lena and Roy did seem to have a perfect romance, an almost famous one because Hannah had shown her the picture of Lena and Roy in a New York paper, and Madge had also seen the Broadway program that had Lena’s name listed as understudy to the star. Madge’s mama never liked Lena but Madge did; Madge thought she was beautiful way back and wished that Lena had just once given her the attention that went to Hannah.

“What about your family?” she asked and Raymond looked up from that book and glared at her in a way that made her blood feel like it was freezing.

“You will never know my family,” he said. “I have nothing to do with my family and haven’t for years.”

“I think the children have a right to know about their relatives,” she said. “Catherine and Cindy got a right to at least see some pictures.”

“No pictures,” he said. “They’re all dead.” That’s all Madge knows about the Sinclairs, no pictures, all dead, buried somewhere in Oklahoma.

“You don’t know nothing of his people,” Madge’s mama had said and lit her pipe. “I didn’t come from the best stock but I knew what to expect. As for your daddy; well, I knew Mrs. Virginia Pearson and I knew she was fine, Emily, too, so I had some hope in me.”

“But you can’t go by things like that,” Madge told her mother. “It’s not fair.”

“Things have a way of coming down the pipes,” she said. “All comes out in the wash.” And her mama turned on her almost like she did that day with the Mormon boys. “Is it fair Emily’s boy got killed in the war? A boy so fine? The world ain’t fair. God ain’t fair. You remember that.”

“But the work of God can’t be questioned,” Madge said, hoping to break through those tough old bones.

“That’s what Emily believes,” her mama said and shook her head. “But what kind of God takes a young man who’s got a whole good life ahead of him? What kind of God makes a woman live like me?”

“What do you mean?” Madge asked but her mama moved right off of that and back to Raymond Sinclair, back to how she didn’t like his big-talking ways. Madge didn’t want to hear any of it. For the first time in her life she was feeling like she really loved somebody, that somebody really loved her.

“Dear Hannah,” she starts again, takes a sip of that cold coffee. “Why has God punished me? I believe, but I wonder why God has given me this very life.” She marks through all the words now, a heavy dark line through all of those words.

“Hey Grandma,” Chuckie says and she balls up that paper and puts it in her purse. He is at the bottom of the stairs, already dressed in a tee shirt that says, “Miami Vice,” his face with red blotches where he’s been messing with it.

“Hey honey,” she says. “Don’t pick at your face so. It’ll leave scars.”

“Yeah,” he says and sits on the edge of a chair, his sandy colored hair cut close on the sides with some curly little bit in the front. She doesn’t say a word about that hairdo. Cindy let him get it cut that way; Cindy said, “don’t you say one word about his hair like you used to do me, STILL do me; he’s in style.” His legs are going back and forth, too long for the rest of him. “My dad has scars,” he says. “Mama said his face was messed up all the way through high school.”

“Well, I know,” Madge says, remembering how Charles looked the first time that Cindy ever brought him home. Madge thought he was so fine, nice parents and well-mannered and she was surprised at how well him and Cindy got along. Surprised that Charles put up with her breaking up and getting back together and surprised that Cindy would give somebody a chance with such a skin problem. “God, he’s ugly,” Raymond had said and Catherine agreed with him. “You can do better than that, Goldilocks.”

“I like him, though,” Cindy said and leaned over and spit a mouthful of milk onto Catherine’s plate. Dinner was always that way.

“Take what you want then,” Raymond said and winked at her. And Cindy never said a word back to him, only apologized for Charles’s skin troubles.

“There’s more that can be done about the skin these days,” Madge says. She’d like to get Chuckie in braces too, to correct that overbite, but she is not even going to mention that. “I told your mama that I’d like to do that for you.”

“I’m gonna be this way all through high school,” he says and goes to the kitchen and stands there with the refrigerator door wide open. He gets that from Cindy. “But Mom said that if Dad could get her with his face that way, that I can get girlfriends, too. Mom says I just got to live with it.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to try to do something about it,” Madge says, feeling herself about to cry, wishing she could take all of his worries and heap them right onto her long list of debts to pay; she’s got so much that what difference would it make. “I’m gonna do that for you Chuckie,” she says and smiles. “Because I love you.” The words are hard getting out but she does and he rolls his eyes and drinks straight from the milk carton. He got that from Cindy, too. She wishes so bad that he’d say it back to her but you can’t expect much from children. It has been years since she said those words to Cindy or to Catherine and she can’t remember that Cindy has ever said the words to her. Cindy would call out “I love you, Daddy,” after Raymond would tuck her in and walk back to their room.

“And me?” Madge would call out in the darkness.

“Yes.” That’s all Cindy had said, yes, and by then Raymond never said anything close to those words. “You’re too big to be a woman,” he’d say. “You should have been a man,” and he’d yank those covers to his side of the bed, leaving her big bones halfway covered and her feeling like the Amazon women like what he showed her in
National Geographic.

* * *

Virginia wakes, startled to see Mark, too startled to ask him what he’s doing here, in Gram’s house. He doesn’t belong here; he is out of place, sitting in a straight-back chair with a stack of law books beside him, his hand writing busily on a legal pad. “Awake?” he asks now and his cool hand moves over her hot forehead and then back around her neck.

“Where is everybody?” she asks when she opens her eyes and
sees the Lazy Boy empty, the sofa, no sounds in the kitchen, no sound other than the ticking of Gram’s clock muffled like a faint heartbeat beneath the rumbling of the air-conditioner. It is late afternoon; she can tell by the dry white light out the window, bright and heavy at a slant showing every particle of dust, void of the screen of smoke that would hit the light and spread like paint on a flat surface were Lena here. “What time is it?”

“It’s four o’clock,” he whispers, quietly, emotionless, unlike the students when it’s two-thirty. “It’s two-thirty!” they scream and run and push and fall like a band of demons, no thoughts of what they were doing at noon and no thoughts of what they’ll be doing at nine. Two-thirty, that’s all. That’s all they need to know. Why didn’t they tell her Mark was coming? Why didn’t he call on the phone?

“Your grandmother is in bed,” he continues, which isn’t like Gram. She likes to watch TV in the afternoons, always has, and Virginia knows that if Mark weren’t here that’s what Gram would be doing. He has overstepped his boundaries, invaded her territory, changed everything. “Your mom will be back soon. She and your dad went to an estate auction.”

“Whose?” she asks and he shakes his head, holds a glass of water to her lips—good, so good against her rough, dry throat. She is sure that she would at least recognize the name—the front doors of a home swung open for strangers to pick and choose, sift through books and sheet music, the secret passions of someone dead; take the paintings off the walls leaving a clean-painted image like a shadow of what had been there, and you would never know that the wall has, over the years, gotten so dirty if the picture were left in place. Take the tiny silver spoons from the rack, the colander from the kitchen; take the door knocker if your initial is the same. It has been this way in this place for years but take it, its life, the scents of a family, a home; the scents that it will carry with it across town to another house to start all over. Where are the family members? Where are the people who know the scent that is there, the scent that is home, and how can they let it be split and divided and separated? Lena’s big two-story house is just as it was, wide spacious rooms, formal Queen Anne, tea set, Roy’s stack of
Architectural Digest
that
continued to come months after he died and her mom went and carried in the mail, placed the magazines on his large mahogany desk as if he could enter from the dusk and sit there at night with the lamp turned low. And he would say, “Lena? Lena?” and she would shuffle into the room, her lifeless eyes once again filled, her gray hair darkening to auburn, and she would sling her arms around his neck, her cheeks so wet, and say, “Roy, oh God, Roy, I thought I had lost you.”

“Virginia?” Mark asks. “Are you feeling okay?” But her mind is on Lena as she left behind that house and furniture, carrying the scent in her Samsonite bag and pasteboard box, never to see it all again. “I think it’s best not to take her back,” Virginia’s mama said. “I think it would be cruel to do that if she can’t stay. And she can’t. Nursing care. Eventually we’ll have to sell it, sell the furniture.” And that’s why her mother has started going to estate sales, how is it all done? How do you sell a life? “Maybe you and Mark can buy most of the furniture?” her mother asked, hope in her voice.

“I want to buy Lena and Roy’s house,” she murmurs now. “I want to live there.” And she imagines walking through that Victorian house, sitting in the gazebo.

“Oh.” That’s all he says, the smooth rubbing of his hand stopping suddenly, dead weight pressing on her forehead. “Look, maybe we won’t move so soon,” he says, a forced falseness in his voice, a forced everything-will-be-okay optimism. “Maybe Richmond’s not the place. We can talk about it. What’s important right now is the baby, you getting well.”

What’s important if I lose it, she thinks. Nothing, nothing at all. His hand is on her arm when she tries to sit up.

“You’re not supposed to move,” he says.

“I have to use the bathroom, though,” and she realizes that she sounds just like Lena, an independent adult suddenly reduced to a child’s mother may I? May I pee, please? Yes you may. Take one giant step, one baby step, one june bug twirl around.

“I’ll carry you,” he says and she is amazed at how easily he can lift and carry her, cradling, her long legs swinging lifelessly as if they don’t even belong to her, rubbery, when he places her feet in front
of the toilet and holds her up, the oozy dots that come and go when she looks at herself in the mirror. Someone at a pajama party once told her that if you close your eyes tightly and say in your head “I believe in Mary Weather, I believe in Mary Weather” fifty times and then open your eyes real fast, that you will see the old woman, see Mary Weather in the mirror where your own face should be.

“Well, what happened to privacy?” she asks now and Mark kisses her lightly on the forehead.

“I believe I’ve seen it all before,” he says and carefully lifts that potato sack dress, slowly pulls down her underwear and helps her to sit, places her hands on the bars that were put there for Gram. She blinks, eyelids so heavy, I believe in Mary Weather, and he looks so much older that way.

“Turn on the faucet ‘cause I can’t seem to go,” she mumbles. He does and she waits, the simplest of all activities becoming an event that she will tell Gram and her mama about when they are the only ones here.

He carries her back but when he places her down, she feels her fingers intertwine, lock behind his neck and hold him there. She stares at him, the slow way his head bends closer, his lips lightly brushing hers, Dentyne, her own mouth like dust, while he kisses her nose, forehead. She is Sheila, long and lithe with her long silky blonde hair fanned on the waterbed, a sparkly net made golden by the slats of light from the miniblinds. “I love you,” he whispers. “I was so afraid you had run away from home or something.” He kneels beside the day bed, tries to loosen her grip on his neck but she doesn’t let him.

“I have run away from home and I am never coming back,” Robert had told her once, his young face so adultlike. “You may visit but this is my permanent home,” and he had pointed behind the ligustrums in the side yard where he had his canteen and sleeping bag and she had asked him what “permanent” meant and he had to think a minute before he said, “forever.” She had packed her own bag once, stopped on the corner and stood on the manhole cover, trying not to cry when the street looked so long and it was getting
dark. She would have to walk all the way to the end, cut behind the shopping center and then walk another long road to the end, turn at the big warehouse near the hardware store and go all the way, following the railroad track to Carver Street where Gram would take her in. “Don’t ride with strangers,” her mama called out to her, her mama in jeans and sneakers and a flannel shirt as she edged around the sidewalk. “Write me a letter some time. We will miss you Ginny Sue, but I guess you know what’s best.”

“It’s just been a rough week,” Mark whispers, his voice this time with sincere optimism, the same way her dad says at the beginning of each summer that he’s going to grow a giant squash, the same way her mama had stopped midway to the trash pile with weeds in her arms and said, “I knew you’d come home. We all missed you terribly.”