Tending to Virginia (2 page)

“But what if I wasn’t pregnant?” she asked, suddenly ready to prove her point. “What if I wasn’t, and men kept walking up to me and rubbing and patting my abdomen, women, too. What if everywhere we went, somebody wanted to feel my stomach, would that make you mad?”

“It’s different,” he said calmly.

“No it isn’t, it’s still
my
stomach. It’s like renting an apartment, I still own the building.”

“Let’s not argue,” he said and reached his open palm across the front seat. “Please.”

“I just don’t like him at all,” she said, a fact stated, calmness coming to her voice as she took Mark’s hand, loosely cupping her own around it. “It’s something about the way that his head is so flat and wide. I bet his mama had a hell of a time with that head.” She lifted up the bottom of her yellow sack dress and angled the air conditioning vent so that it would blow up her body and maybe cool her off.

“Let’s not argue.” It seems that Mark has said that a lot these days and she hates that yellow dress. She loathes it and there it is right now hanging on the door, waiting for her to get in it again, transforming her from the Great Pumpkin into a giant squash like one she saw in her hometown paper once—a squash just about as big as its grower who was a farmer in a neighboring county. She was a teenager then, a thin, lean teenager who never questioned that she had ribs and hip bones, and everyone in the county, including her father, had spent the summers since tending their squash in hopes that one morning there would be one the size of a Volkswagen.

“I’m going to shred this dress into dust cloths,” she had told Mark when they got home from the tennis court. He just nodded and stretched his legs out on the coffee table, one foot going back and forth like a windshield wiper.
You sit in that chair and be still.
“It’ll make good ones, cheerful bright dust cloths,” he said and she went out in the yard and pulled up every weed she could find; she even pulled a few out of her neighbor’s yard, the ones that looked like they would poke through the fence if they didn’t cut their grass soon.

“We got a boy coming to cut it today,” Mrs. Short’s voice startled her and she pulled her hand back through the wire and stood up. “Can’t keep it cut often enough,” she said and swatted at a gnat with her hand. “Grow like weeds, that’s what people say about children, grow like weeds. One of mine’s a wild weed for sure.”

Virginia let the weed in her hand slip to her own rented grass that came with the rented house, temporary, temporary, a temporary life; pregnancy is temporary. Breast-feeding, kindergarten, junior high, college, all temporary. Birth defects, reform schools, jail sentences, could be permanent. She knew Mrs. Short’s wild weed all right; he drives an old souped up Corvette and spends every weekend washing and waxing it, all kinds of things hanging on the rearview mirror, and then he goes off and does who knows what with his tee shirt cut up to show his navel and black spike arm bands. Virginia moved slowly to her flower bed and began weeding there, all temporary flowers, one shot. She won’t be here next spring; she won’t be here in three months. She will be in Richmond in another temporary place with a temporary job and temporary day care.

“Gonna have yourself your own weed pretty soon,” Mrs. Short said. “Hope it turns out all right.” She screamed something into the kitchen and Virginia caught herself staring at Mrs. Short, her full breasts under a polyester tank top, the disbelief that there was a time when that boy with his spikey hair and greasy hands had curled there. “You just tend to your own weeds now, I’ll get mine cut directly,” she snapped and went into the house. Virginia stood there, hands pressed into her back, dirt on the front of that yellow dress, first feeling her cheeks flame with the reprimand and then feeling so angry that she wanted to dump all of the weeds she had pulled over the fence. “You tend to yours,” she murmured, bending to pick up the one she had dropped.

“If we had to stay here forever, I’d build an eight-foot fence,” she told Mark, who had not moved the entire time that she had been outside working like a dog. “When we move to Richmond, I want to live somewhere where I can come and go and never see another person.”

“Don’t count on it,” he said solemnly, the same voice, same tone as when he said “let’s not argue.”

And she won’t count on it, can’t count on anything except what she already knows, the future so unknown, looming like a big dead-end billboard, temporarily blank white with no clue of the end
result. And what she does know—the quiet coolness of her grandmother’s old house, Lena’s laughter, the rhythmic whirr of her mother’s sewing machine—makes her so homesick. Hell, she’d settle for riding around with Cindy with the radio going full blast, and Cindy lighting one cigarette after another while she told with soap opera drama about her latest fling. Virginia wishes she had kept working; she bets her sixth grade art students have ruined their projects over the past two weeks. She bets that substitute knows nothing about putting papier-mâché on a balloon to make a puppet head. Well, that’s all right. Let them screw up their puppets. Another week and they’ll be singing “Put Away Your Books and Papers” and dashing from that cafeteria like a band of dwarfed devils on the verge of acne, to have bike wrecks and bust their heads on diving boards, and she can’t help that.

She rubs her hand over her stomach and feels so detached from it all, this house, this room, that man that eats, sleeps, reads, and showers here. She has to think of things familiar, things that keep her busy, things that can put it all in perspective. She has stripped down to bare oak four chairs that once belonged to her Great Aunt Lena and is working now on the table where Lena and Roy Carter ate every day for thirty-five years. The table had been a permanent part of Lena’s life; it lived with her and Roy in New York, Florida, Detroit, right back to Saxapaw. It had always been in the kitchen when she got up. It never made Lena cry or feel sick.

She has read a crock of Spock and every
Southern Living
she can get her hands on just so she can salivate when she sees what people do to walls that they own and do not rent.
Glamour
is too depressing at this stage with her dark frizzy hair still frizzier. And she has this dark patch, a dark patch just above the cheek. And, she hates yellow. She wishes there was absolutely nothing yellow in the entire world. “Yellow is perfect for a nursery because it can go either way—boy or girl, yellow,” the tennis guy’s wife had said. Screw her, impregnate her, paint her life yellow. But, hadn’t Virginia said thank you? Yellow, a good idea. And she had gotten permission from the landlord to paint that small spare room yellow, and the woman had arrived with rollers and cans and the two of them, Virginia and this
friendly stranger, had painted and laughed and talked about how exciting it all was.

Virginia’s own nursery had been half of her brother’s room, pale blue walls and white curtains with blue ball fringe. Her crib was in one corner, Little Bo Peep and Jack and Jill cutouts on the wall beside her. There are pictures of her sitting there, propped up and baldheaded, while Robert reached his arms inside the bars to touch her. The rest of the room was cluttered with cars and trucks, his kindergarten paintings decorating the walls of his half. He had his “big boy” bed with the blue and white striped spread that their mother had made, George, the big stuffed monkey that sat on the bed while Robert wasn’t there. Though Virginia’s mother is not the kind to hold onto everything that has some sentimental value, she has never been able to part with George, or with Virginia’s equivalent, Pinky, a large pink rabbit that in the pictures is bigger than Virginia. George and Pinky have been wrapped in plastic and sitting in the attic for years now.

When Virginia was old enough for a bed, and Robert complained that she broke his crayons and touched his things when he had told her not to, Virginia was moved into the sewing room where her mother sat and worked most of the day, the hum of her machine nonstop, bolts of cloth piled in the corner at the foot of the “big girl” bed, which had a pink polka-dot spread that her mother had made. “Don’t sit on the cloth,” her mother would say, her words garbled by the straight pins that she held between her lips.

“It just isn’t fair is it?” her mother asked one day after she had told Virginia that she couldn’t take her shoes off until the room had been swept free of pins. They had already started having to keep that headless black mannequin in the living room at night because Virginia couldn’t sleep with her in the same room. “It isn’t fair to either one of us.”

Soon after that, her mother rented a part of a small building downtown. It was a green cinderblock building that had been attached like some kind of afterthought to the long line of tall stores
and offices on Main Street. Two men came to their house in a pickup truck and loaded the sewing machine, floor lamp, bolts of cloth, and headless woman and took them to the building where Virginia stood and watched the backwards letters as her mother stood outside and carefully stenciled “The Busy Bee” on the large plate glass window.

“It’s all yours now,” her mother had said, and in came the maple dresser and mirror that Lena had grown tired of, up went the white curtains with the pink ball fringe. “Now you have your very own room just like Robert.”

She had always had her own room at Gram’s house, at least that’s what Gram said. Gram had two bedrooms that no one ever even used unless she had company. Virginia’s room there had a big high double bed that sank when she got in the middle, the feather mattress fluffing up all around her so that if she got up very carefully, she could see where she had been, her shape like a snow angel, left there until Gram came in and fluffed it back up. It was a corner room that got the late afternoon light that made everything look golden, the specks of dust riding the thin planes of light that came through the Venetian blinds. There was a large wardrobe, the inside piled with quilts, and a big overstuffed chair positioned such that whoever sat there could see out into the side yard and into Gram’s garden.

Virginia loved to spend the night with Gram, and she would go first thing and place her clothes in the top drawer of the big dark dresser, put Pinky in the center of that bed. But when it started getting dark, she would have to go get Pinky and bring him into Gram’s room. Virginia only slept in her room in the daytime, at nap time, when she could raise the blinds and see Gram out working in the garden or picking up pecans in the side yard. When night came, she slept with Gram, a secret which Gram promised never to tell. “This is my room,” she would tell Cindy whenever Cindy went with her to spend the night. “This is where I keep my clothes,” and she would show Cindy her drawer and then offer the one beside it.

“It’s not
really
your room,” Cindy would say and flop down on the
soft bed which Virginia would then fluff back up. “It’s your grandmother’s room. It used to be your uncle’s room and he’s dead. He might even come back at night and want to sleep here and then what are you going to do?”

“That is nonsense,” Gram said, when it was just the two of them. “If David did come back, which he isn’t, he wouldn’t hurt a hair on your head.”

When Virginia turned thirteen, her mother said that she could decorate her room any way that she wanted, within reason, of course. Getting a set of French provincial furniture like Cindy had with a canopy bed and little velvet-seated vanity was not within reason, so they painted Virginia’s furniture white. She had in her mind that she could then get some gold paint and edge around all of the drawers and her headboard; her mother said that she didn’t think that was a good idea so they compromised on a trip to Sherwin-Williams, where Virginia was allowed to pick out her wall paint. Her mother liked the pale, iced pink and Virginia liked the flamingo pink, a color that would have matched a piece of Bazooka bubblegum. They finally settled on lavender and waited while the man mixed the colors to match the little card that Virginia held.

“And look what I just happen to have,” her mother said when they got home with the cans of paint, and she pulled a bolt of cloth from under the living room sofa; it was a bolt of thick shiny cotton, stripes in pastel colors. “The lavender is a perfect match,” she said and held the card against the cloth; the pale iced pink would’ve matched it, too. “I can make curtains and a bedspread.” But Virginia wanted the white eyelet one that she had seen in the J.C. Penney’s catalog; she didn’t want a pastel baby room, and had already imagined that white spread with lots of velvet pillows in a deep purple.

“Isn’t that beautiful?” her mother asked when Virginia showed her the picture. “I could never make one like that I’m afraid.” And while Virginia waited, trying to imagine what she could do with the room if it had those pastel stripes, her mother went to the phone and called J.C. Penney’s to place the order.

Now, she goes into
its
room, its pale yellow room, where she has halfway painted a large canvas, her version of The Animal Kingdom, a cross between Noah and the Ark and Mutual of Omaha, a clear hot blue sky and the yellow eyes of a tiger. She bought that canvas with such a nice picture in her mind, tame gentle animals with cute little faces like Care Bears and Peppi Le Peu, but she has done the opposite.

“Maybe if you didn’t use the encyclopedia,” Mark had said last night when he finally came home from the library, dark circles under those big blue eyes. She didn’t feel sorry for that, a little sleep or an erase stick will cover that; his fate is not in a jar of Porcelana. The library is where he said he had been but he could have been anywhere at all and how would she know?
Don’t believe everything you hear.
Whole truths, half truths, believing in something only to find that there’s more to it. “You know, maybe you could use the Frosted Flakes box for a tiger, Kix for a rabbit.” He leaned against the doorway and smiled, tired, earnest eyes.

“Look,” she said, her paint brush dipped in serpent-tongue pink. “Am I going to tell you how to run a divorce when somebody comes to you wanting one? Am I going to tell you how to divide and separate somebody’s life like an egg?”