Tending to Virginia (6 page)

Sheila is a design consultant in New York, wealthy Richmond family, northeast girls’ school, though Virginia isn’t sure which one. Sheila would say, “women’s college” and emphasize the point. She has some advanced degree, probably making money hand over fist, probably has a baby named Thurstan Beauregard Something IV, probably would laugh her bony anorexic ass off if she saw Virginia’s house. Well laugh! Just goddamn laugh! That’s what she’d say. She’d say, “You need to eat meat! You need some bloody beef, good for you, give you color!” It makes her furious just to think of that woman even though she has never met her and never seen her except a small wedding snapshot that Virginia found mixed in with some of Mark’s old photos at his mother’s house in Pennsylvania. She could have
fixed that picture right up with some Flair pens had Mark’s mama not been sitting there. The photo was too small, too blurred. She doesn’t know that Sheila is thin as a post with long silky blonde hair and blue eyes, at least not the picture that comes to mind with that description of blonde hair and blue eyes. She might be gangly and transparent with buck teeth and thin stringy hair. For all Virginia knows she might even eat meat, though she bets not; it’s easy enough to get the whole picture from the bits and pieces that she knows, such as Sheila wanted everything natural, health food store food, which is why Mark hates herbal teas and such. That’s the fact: Sheila was into health foods. But, Virginia knows as well as the next what follows that: Perrier and brie, which she thinks tastes like what dirty feet smell like, granola, wine coolers and little spritzers if she drinks at all but no, probably not, and Virginia would love a drink right now; she’d love a shot of bourbon and a beer chaser. The doctor would say. “Have you been drinking?” No, Sheila doesn’t drink. A Perrier with a twist, thank you for not smoking, no caffeine, no soda? Why that is a vile filthy liquid; I only wear cotton; I only wear hypoallergenic cosmetics. My shampoo is pH correct and natural, it’s all natural. I use tartar-buster toothpaste and floss every single day. Nutra Sweet is poison. I jog and I play tennis and I go to the spa to work out and do aerobics three times a week and I only watch PBS, never anything other than PBS, and I never have PMS, and I only listen to classical radio stations and I would never hang a print on my wall and I would never think of anything but professional stripping for my fine furniture. Yeah, Virginia knows the type, that touchy feely, do it all perfectly, I’m okay you’re okay, my child can read at age two and will have a volume of Haiku by the time he’s four, type.

Virginia would tell her a thing or two right then and there. She would tell her that she loves bloody beef and coffee and Coke and Budweiser and Formby’s and 96 Lite which plays everything from Smoky Robinson to Dolly Parton to Lulu “To Sir With Love,” and that she likes to bowl and eat things with preservatives and take a Goody’s for a headache. “I’ll watch the goddamn ‘Brady Bunch’ if nothing else is on.” That’s what she’d like to say. And people standing
close by would applaud and Mark would never ever look back again. If Mark would just say that he hates Sheila and never wants to hear about her again, she would feel better, but he won’t.

“She was a nice person,” he had explained. “But it was a mistake.”

“Nice? Nice?” she asked.

“Yes, but it didn’t work. We weren’t right for each other. That doesn’t make her a bad person.”

“I was Junior Rotary Honey,” she told him after hearing the list of Sheila’s qualities which she had asked for, not knowing there would be such a list of credits. “I was second in my class. I am pregnant with your baby and my art teacher called me little Monet.” That was all true, all of it, the only details left out being that her high school class was very small and that Mrs. Abbott who had called her little Monet all through high school seemed to barely even remember Virginia now.

“I’ve moved into string art,” Mrs. Abbott had said when Virginia saw her in the grocery store. “I really love those knots. What did you say your name was again?”

“Virginia,” she said while Mrs. Abbott gazed at her with a blank stare; thank God, Mark wasn’t there.

“Virginia,” Mrs. Abbott repeated and shook her head while the woman pushing the chair stared pitifully down on Mrs. Abbott’s head.

“Turner, Ginny Sue Turner.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Abbott said and clapped her hands. “Ginny Sue Turner, my little Van Gogh.”

“I was Monet.”

“I saw where you got married, too,” Mrs. Abbott said. “It was the second time I saw you were getting married and I told the PTA that my little Van Gogh was married for the second time.”

“But I only got married once,” Virginia explained. “Two engagements but only one marriage.”

“I remember your cousin, too. And she’s been married twice I believe, too.”

“She has but I haven’t.”

“Try knots little Manet,” Mrs. Abbott called out. “Knots are so knotted.”

“Monet!” Virginia insisted, heard only by a woman in barefoot sandals reading a Correctol box. Mrs. Abbott had given everyone a name; everybody’s report card had a different name and all that time she thought she was special, thought she was the first, thought she had been given a name because she was good and different from the rest. She probably wouldn’t have even majored in art otherwise. She probably would have majored in something else and been a consultant instead of knotting knots and getting frustrated with sixth graders who always drew pictures that came close enough to resembling body parts so that all class control was lost, frustrated that she can’t seem to get the ideas that she has in her mind onto the canvas; somewhere in midair they get all twisted and dark and ugly and everything changes too fast, Gram and Lena, and her stomach. There were probably hundreds of Monets over the years and Virginia is certain that her waterlilies looked nothing like the real ones though Mrs. Abbott had clapped her hands and said, oh yes they did. “That woman’s so full of shit,” Cindy said when Virginia brought up Mrs. Abbott once. “She called me her little Charles Schultz.”

Virginia’s waterlilies, a gift to Gram, a small watercolor in a cheap frame is still in Gram’s bedroom, but it looks nothing like the
real
waterlilies, nothing about it. Mrs. Abbott did not tell the whole truth—a lie, deception. Virginia at that time had never seen the
real
waterlilies, and ignorantly believed Mrs. Abbott, only to later, on a trip during college, find herself in front of a Monet exhibit. Her face flushed with inadequacy while reality burst forth,
you will never in your life do anything that can compare.
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” Gram always says.

The sun is in full view now, hot and hazy, the Corvette door slamming as the thug makes his way to God knows where in his loud orange tank top. It is already nine o’clock and here she sits, having done nothing. Her great-grandmother, the other Virginia Suzanne, at her age would have already cooked a huge breakfast and
be working on lunch. She would have already fed chickens and washed clothes that would be hanging and blowing in that warm country air. Virginia Suzanne, a familiar name, a name shared, Virginia Suzanne Pearson, she thinks as she gets up and goes to the bathroom. Virginia Suzanne Turner, Ginny Sue Turner, Virginia Turner Ballard, little Monet. Suddenly an image comes to her mind of a tombstone with all of those names listed on it, last of which is Mrs. Ballard, whispered in her mind with the voices of those first graders whose faces are now so sharp in her mind, faces that she may soon forget, faces that will change and perhaps pass her unnoticed.
Virginia Suzanne White, wife of Cord Pearson, devoted mother and child of God.
Virginia had seen that tombstone, had knelt there in what used to be a churchyard and now is the back side of a parking lot, and she read those words over and over while Gram placed a plastic flower arrangement that the two of them had made.

“Mama would be so proud of this arrangement,” Gram said and bent the wire stem of a rose down so that it didn’t block the word “child.” “I know she wouldn’t like all these cars pulling in and out, though. It would scare her good, I know.”

“Would she have liked me?” Virginia asked and turned to Gram who was shielding her eyes and staring up into the sky, the horizon that she knew as a child, trees and tobacco fields, now cluttered with mobile homes.

“Oh, she would have loved you,” Gram said. “She’d have been so proud that you have her name.”

“Do you think she can see me?” Virginia asked, followed by a series of beeps from Roy Carter’s Lincoln. He and Lena had driven them out there and now were ready to leave. Virginia stood, her eyes level with Gram’s waist, and while Roy whistled and clapped and tooted the horn again, Gram knelt, ignoring the parking lot as if it weren’t even there.

“Do you see that tree way out yonder?” she asked and pointed to a huge oak, underneath which someone had abandoned an old car. “That’s where we had our pump. That’s where I’d sit sometimes and wait for my daddy to come in from the field.” Gram’s voice was low and quiet, like she was telling a secret. “I loved my home.”

“Do you think she can see us right this second?” Virginia whispered and moved in closer to Gram, a sudden chill coming over her as if she had been lifted and carried to a place different from anything she knew.

“I hope so, Sweets,” Gram said. “I hope she knows.”

“Knows what?” Virginia asked and Gram smiled, shook her head, Lena’s shadow falling over them.

“Roy is getting fidgety,” Lena said and fanned herself with a neat little patent leather clutch bag. “God, it’s a blessing Mama don’t know she’s out here in such a cheap part of town. She’d turn cartwheels there in that grave.” Lena waved to Roy and walked ahead of them. “I can’t believe we used to
live
here, can you, Emily?” But Gram just smiled and shook her head, turning back once to look at that tree and squeezing Virginia’s hand so tightly that all of it was pressed into her mind.

Virginia is suddenly so aware of the stillness of the house, the fact that she left the door to the porch open, the fact that she is alone. What would she do if she heard someone come in through the porch right now, footsteps through the house like that time at Cindy’s. What if she heard that kitchen drawer open, the fumbling of silverware, while she’s here in this bathroom, as pregnant as possible in an orange nightshirt. Barefoot and pregnant. Barefoot and pregnant. She closes the bathroom door, locks it, checks behind the shower curtain. She turns on the bath water and starts to turn on the shower when she realizes that she can’t hear anything in the house with the water running, couldn’t hear the phone ring if Mark called, if he called to say that he was serious, did want a divorce, or if her mom called with the words that she has dreaded for years, “Gram is dead.” No, no, she couldn’t hear if someone were fumbling in the silverware right this minute, walking closer and closer, those brown wingtip shoes closer and closer, Anthony Perkins, Sharon Tate, Uncle Raymond. I’m in your door, I’m on your stairs. I’m at your room. I’m at your bed, under the bed, out the window, behind the shower, in your backseat. Now she is holding that orange nightshirt up to her chest, a deep breath. Slowly, she opens the
bathroom door and the bright sunlight is coming through the window. The bright sunlight making everything look so much better.

She drops the orange nightshirt onto the bed, quickly pulls the yellow sack over her head, her back to all of the photographs on the dresser. Once, at home, she had a poster on her wall, Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Butch and Sundance, a black and white poster with only their eyes colored bright blue, and she couldn’t undress in front of them; it was like anywhere she went in that room, they could see her.

“You can’t even put on a bra without turning your back to a dumb piece of paper,” Cindy used to say. “You are so crazy, Ginny Sue. I’d take the damn thing off my wall if it kept me from walking around my own room nekked.”

Virginia turns slowly and lifts her dress in front of those photos, catching a side glimpse of herself in the mirror; Mark’s parents, her parents, Gram, great-grandmother. “Virginia!” the real Mrs. Ballard would gasp.

She lets the dress fall back around her legs, a sense of dignity coming to her. “We all have bodies, Mrs. Ballard.” She puts on her tennis shoes, now just pregnant, and gets her car keys and pocketbook off the dresser, the other Virginia Suzanne staring out of that brown tin photo.
I hope she knows.
Virginia has a Kenya bag, too, only she bought hers because it’s big enough to hold everything; she will be able to carry Pampers and rattles and pacifiers. “Shit, you bought it for the same reason I bought mine,” Cindy had said. “You bought it because everybody else on earth has one.” Everybody else, any and everybody. You ain’t the first to have a baby. You ain’t the first wife he’s had. You ain’t the first little Monet. You just ain’t the first.

A person with the budgies should not be alone, drop a rusty nail in a bottle of vinegar. A person with the budgies should be where it’s cool and quiet, high ceilings and shade trees. She could drive home blindfolded, the road so straight and flat, cornfields and tractors, Gram coming in from the garden with a sack filled with butterbeans that she could finger while shelling them into that tin pan. High ceilings, cool, fans blowing and whirring. “I’ve come
home to stay,” she would say. “I made a mistake and now I’m back.”

But, she can’t do that.
Then live with it. Live the rest of your life with it.
She is going to go to Roses, walk every aisle, spend a hundred dollars in that air-conditioned building, piddle away these long hours where she can be near people that she doesn’t know, people who will not take one look at her and say, “Virginia, what’s wrong?” Strangers, she wants to be surrounded by strangers who do not notice that she is there, filling her cart up with useless items which Mark will sift through and say, “I’m surprised at you, we can’t afford this” and she will say, “I’m glad you’re surprised; I’m glad because I can’t afford you. I’m at your door, I’m in your bed, Surprise! Tell it to your first. Just go on, leave. Leave me here all by myself, big as a squash, because you wouldn’t know a speckled butterbean if you had it in your mouth!”