Tending to Virginia (38 page)

“This has gone on long enough,” Hannah says. “I say it’s time we all wake up and grow up,” she pauses and looks at Ginny Sue. “And get on with it. This kind of talk will get you nowhere.” Hannah glances around the room now and they are all silent. Somebody has to do it; somebody has to step in and keep things moving. “I’m going to fix a big pot of spaghetti and hope that Ben will come on over soon. I think the storm has passed.”

“It’s not but five,” Madge says. “The radio says the watch is on until seven.”

“The weatherman is not always right,” Emily says and shakes her finger at Madge. “God knows better than the weatherman.”

“But what am I going to do?” Virginia asks and for the first time other than walking to the bathroom, she gets up off that daybed and starts pacing. She goes over and straightens that hat on Lena’s head because it has been about to drive her crazy seeing it tilted that way, and she straightens out Gram’s drapes where whoever opened them this morning let them get all twisted. “Just because Cindy is being nice to me doesn’t fix everything right up.”

“I think somebody that chose to live with a person, chose not to marry that person, decided on a college and a major, chose another person to live with and did marry, ought to be able to think for herself.” Her mother is standing in the doorway of the kitchen with a pack of hamburger meat in her hand. “You decided all of those things without any help from me. Why, then, at twenty-eight years old and ready to be a mother yourself are you asking for advice?”

“Because I need it,” Virginia says. “You’ve always given me all kinds of advice that I didn’t need, how to spray starch a collar, how to hem a skirt, how to make biscuits like Gram used to make, but now I need some advice and you won’t give it to me.”

“Well, pardon me,” Hannah says and drops the hamburger meat to the floor. “I have done all that I know to do, done and done and done for years and this is the thanks that I get.” Her voice shakes and the tears roll from the corners of her eyes. “Why are you coming to me now? Why, after all these other things have gone on in your life and you didn’t see reason to tell me.”

“You wouldn’t have understood,” Virginia says, her head light and dizzy. “What would you have said if I had told you that I was living with somebody?”

“I would have told you that I thought you had lost your mind. I would have told you that you were making a big mistake.”

“And that’s why I didn’t ask you,” Virginia says and sits on the end of the daybed. “You’ve always done things exactly right. You wore white when you got married and it meant something. You
don’t smoke; you had two children, a station wagon, a business that was all your own, and you’ve never been in therapy.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Hannah says and shakes her head back and forth. “You talk like my life has been easy and perfect, like I’ve never had a problem.”

“You haven’t.” Virginia shakes her head from side to side.

“Oh, I haven’t?” Hannah laughs sarcastically and looks away from Ginny Sue, those eyes too much like her own, this conversation like one that she could’ve had with her mama years ago. “I’ve had my share of problems,” she says. “Just imagine if you were to lose Robert right now and never have him again. Just think about that. I lost my brother and I was as close to him as you are to Robert, maybe even closer. I don’t have my daddy either, Ginny Sue. And, yes, we all lose our parents, people talk about it all the time but it’s different when it’s yours and there’s nothing that anybody on this earth can do to prepare you for it.” Hannah pauses and looks over at her mama, feels the dryness of her throat. “And I’ve made my share of mistakes and don’t you ever forget it.”

“You have?” Madge asks and Hannah feels like the rug has been pulled out from under her. She hasn’t been divorced and hasn’t killed anybody but God knows, she’s had problems like everybody else.

“Of course I have.” Hannah picks up the hamburger from the floor and pulls a piece of dust away from the cellophane. “I left Ben one time,” she says which is the truth though Ben never knew of it. She’s never been able to figure out if she really at any moment intended to leave him or if it was just a game, a trial to see how she would feel if she really left him, and she drove down to the beach and sat on a beach towel and watched the ocean and thought about Ben Turner until she cried and got back in the car and drove home, sunburned and sandy and so glad to get there.

“What’s wrong?” he had asked and held her so close. “I was afraid you had left me,” and he laughed, those rough hands of his cupping her face, and he told her all about a Rolls that had pulled through, stopping for gas, heading to New York, and how he called Roy on the phone and Roy had gotten there just in time to see it pulling off.
“Roy wanted to get under that hood so bad,” Ben said. “And I wanted him to, kind of to pay him back for all the times he let me look at his Lincoln. I sat down with a piece of paper and drew it all out for him.” And that’s when she made up her mind that this was her life, no make believe and no fairy tales, this was it, and she knew that she’d be a whole lot happier just knowing and accepting; it’s been a fine life with Ben Turner.

“You did not,” Virginia states in her best school-teacher voice. “You’re just saying that to make me feel bad for what I said to Mark.”

“Or to make me feel better,” Madge says.

“She’s saying it because I told her so when she was a child,” Emily says and nods her head.

“Maybe I’m saying it because I want to say it and because it doesn’t have a thing to do with a one of you here,” Hannah says. “I do have some life all my own, you know. My whole life is not tied up to all of you.”

“I am your mother,” Emily says.

“I am like your mother.” Lena stands on her wobbly legs and shakes a finger.

“Yes and Madge is my cousin and Ginny Sue is my daughter and Cindy is some kind of cousin.”

“Just say niece,” Cindy says. “Really I’m like a niece.”

“Yes, a niece,” Hannah says so that she can say what she wants before the conversation goes to some other godforbidden secret of death or babies or incest. “But what goes on behind closed doors is my business, a life that has nothing to do with any of you. I’m sorry but that’s the truth. Ben is my husband and I love him dearly, but he ain’t perfect.”

“Does he do funny things with his underwear?” Madge asks.

“Is he a redneck in the Klan?” Cindy asks and Hannah is getting madder by the minute. Not once in her entire life has she been able to have a headache or a sunburn or indigestion that somebody in this family has not had it worse.

“Can’t I have a problem of my own?” Hannah asks. “Aren’t I a person?”

“I’ll give you my problems,” Madge says and Lena nods, starts to talk, but Hannah jumps in while she’s got the energy.

“I don’t want your problems,” Hannah says, her voice causing Madge to shrink, causing Cindy to jump right over and put her hand on her mama’s shoulder. Good, that’s where Cindy ought to be, where she should have been years ago. “I’ve had my own.”

“But why would you want to leave Daddy?” Virginia asks. “How could you have ever thought such a thing?”

“The same way you’re thinking it now,” Hannah says and watches that know-it-all look come to Virginia’s face.

“You’re making this up.” Virginia grips her stomach when it kicks, a hard one, and her mama doesn’t even ask if she’s okay; her mama just shakes her head. “Then why did you leave him?”

“Because it wasn’t going like I expected.”

“It never does,” Gram says and laughs. “I told Hannah when she got married, I said, ‘Now, it ain’t always going to go as you expect and you might from time to time wish that you weren’t there; you might wish that you were here at home with me and your daddy.’”

“You didn’t tell me that,” Hannah whispers and goes and takes her mama’s hand, those blue veins so large, the wedding band loose and worn, trapped under that swollen knuckle. “I wish you had but you didn’t.”

“That’s what Mama told me,” Emily says. “I’d go to her house and James didn’t know. I’d say, ‘Mama, it ain’t like being at home’ and she’d say ‘one day it will be though. One day when I’m dead and buried you’ll all of a sudden feel like you’ve got a home.’” Emily shakes her head and smiles to think of her mama so old then and the way her mama took to roaming the streets, forgetting where and who she was. God, to be able to walk and to get out on those dusty roads and walk towards town with nothing on your mind but buying some calico and hoop cheese. “It comes on you sudden like,” she whispers. “You get out and start walking and it starts to get dark and you say to yourself, ‘I got to get myself home before the storm comes’ and your feet carry you home but not way out in the country a piece where your mama still boils her bath water on the stove. No, you go on home where you got children wanting their dinner.”

“God, I fixed Pooh some good dinners,” Lena whispers. “Sardines.”

“Pssshhh,” Emily says. “Them cats ate better than people.”

“Because they’re better than most people.” Lena rubs the pillow on her lap.

“But why did you leave Ben?” Cindy asks. “You knew him. You had known him your whole life.”

“For the very reason Mama just said,” Hannah says. “I was feeling homesick and I was starting to realize that I was never going to live in New York and be a fashion designer like Lena had always said I could be. I realized that I was never going to be a housewife and sip coffee and chat. No, I was going to work; I was going to send my children to school with keys around their necks. I was homesick for all the times that I had been able to sit around and think about what I wanted to be instead of having to get out and be something.”

“And you are something, Hannah,” Cindy says and Virginia can’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy when her mother smiles and nods at Cindy.

“There are choices to make,” Gram says. “James said ‘Emily, if you didn’t want to get married, you should have just stayed out there in the country with your mama.’ And I said ‘I can do both just fine, thank you’ and when I told my mama that she said ‘you got to learn to let go, Emily. God taught me with that thunderstorm that you just got to let go. Your place is with your husband, now.’”

“That’s what Charles said to me,” Cindy says and goes and sits in front of Emily’s chair. “Charles told me I might have to make some choices.”

“I sure made a bad one,” Madge says.

“So did your mama,” Lena says and shuffles over to the window. “I got to get home before dark. Roy can’t do a thing without me.”

“Please stay, Lena,” Virginia begs, her mind still on Gram’s words, still trying to form a picture of her mother, much younger, designing clothes in some big store in New York City. And where would she be if that had happened?

“Tessy never
had a choice,” Emily says and stares down at Cindy, smiles, her eyes widening in surprise. “I declare Tessy, you never had a choice over anything. That’s what I tell folks when they ask about the other, even Lena, that’s what I say. I’d never tell a word more, Tessy. I’d never tell your secrets.”

“And I hope you never do,” Cindy whispers and Virginia cannot believe that’s Cindy sitting there, her legs bent and tucked under her, her hair so soft and natural-looking.

“Tessy,” Emily says and clasps Cindy’s hand. “I do know that feeling you spoke of that day. At the time I didn’t but I come to find it just like you said, and I’d never tell. You know I never would.” She squeezes Cindy’s hand and giggles in a high girlish way. “I want you to have that green velvet dress so you can dance and laugh and know some happiness in your life. I danced that time, remember? Remember how I told you about the time I danced?”

“Yes, I remember.” Cindy pats Emily’s hand and then without looking at anyone, dashes into the bathroom, her hands up to her face like blinders on a horse, and she stands in the dark bathroom, splatters of rain on the window while she cries. God, how long will it take for it all to go away?

“I’ve got to get home now,” Lena says.

“Well, you and Roy come again.” Emily wipes her eyes. “You and Roy are always welcome here.”

“Oh, we’ll be back all right.” Lena laughs and smooths her hair back behind her ear. “Roy says we’ll be back before you can say Frank Lloyd Wright Eiffel Tower Brooklyn Bridge. He’s coming to get me in that car with the convertible top.”

“James come to get me,” Gram says now. “I was at my mama’s and he came in that house and said, ‘It’s time for you to come home’ and I said, ‘I’ll be there directly. I need to stay here with Mama a bit more,’ and he said, ‘I think you need to come now if you’re coming.’ He had never spoke to me that way and I got it in my mind that he never would again and I stared right back. I stood there in my mama’s front room and I watched him go out that front door and leave. I heard that horse clip-clopping off and my mama come in that room and she said that I best be going, that it was time I went, and I got to the end of the yard and I saw James way down the road. My mama was standing on her front porch waving her
hands at me like she might have been shooing an old dog and I felt myself walking faster and faster till soon I was running and the sky looked yellow like there might come a twister and I felt so scared like I needed to run faster.” She breathes quickly and closes her eyes.

“No, Mama said you gotta know when to let go a little, let go and just leave it there behind you and then go make yourself a plate of biscuits and bleach them shirts of your husband’s just as white as they can get and then just let go a little.”

PART 7

V
IRGINIA IS
walking down Carver Street, her thick dark hair pulled up and tied with tobacco twine, a sack dress in a faded lavender print pulled across her full belly while she drags an empty burlap bag. “It’s for bottles” she will say if anyone asks what she’s doing here where the town has fallen apart, freestanding chimneys amidst weeds and brambles like a long line of abandoned tombstones. There is no one else in the street, no Coke bottles in the ditch as she walks along, the concrete burning her feet as she steps over every crack, weblike filaments, tiny veins, silver shimmers where a slug has dragged his tired heavy body and hidden in the cool darkness beneath the cracks. Her back feels like it’s breaking, like it could snap like a twig, and the dry hot sun makes everything so white, so sterile. She has the impulse to run, to get away from the emptiness that leaks from the abandoned houses, to get away from the clip clip of those wingtip shoes, but her legs are so heavy, so tired and heavy.