Folly (8 page)

“Want a glass or a can?” Lenore asked.

“Can's fine.”

They both sat on the floor. “What's on your mind?” Lenore asked her.

“Nothing much.” Mary Lou looked away and neither of them spoke for a moment. Finally she asked, “What do you think of Roland?”

“Roland Tucker?”

Mary Lou nodded.

“I think he's a turkey.”

Mary Lou laughed. “That's pretty good.” She thought of Roland's penis and a turkey neck and laughed some more.

“I get along okay with him as long as I just have to pass him at the time clock. We hardly ever work at the same time.”

“I went to the movies with him last weekend,” Mary Lou admitted.

“Oh.” Lenore became guarded. “How was it?”

“Well, I wouldn't of minded seeing the movie, if he'd let me.”

“He was on the make?”

“You might say.”

“From what I hear, he always is.”

Mary Lou could feel the intensity of Lenore's dislike for him filling up the room. “He
is
a turkey,” she said. “I didn't give him a thing,” She knew it wasn't true as soon as she said it and suspected that Lenore did, too.

They were sitting in silence, contemplating this, when the phone rang. Lenore picked it up, and surprised, turned to Mary Lou. “For you.” Mary Lou's heart shot adrenalin out to the ends of her limbs. No one knew where she was except Roland.

It was Folly saying Daisy was having another stroke. The ambulance was coming and they were taking her in to the hospital. “I want you to see her,” she said, “in case she dies. I know how she loves you.”

“Oh, Ma.” Tears formed in her eyes and Mary Lou's throat closed up so she couldn't speak more.

“I know it's hard,” Folly said. “Can you get someone to bring you down to the hospital?”

“Yes, Ma. Okay. I'll be there. I'll get Lenore to take me right over.”

Lenore stood, restless and helpless, as Mary Lou told her what had happened. “My gramma . . . she's having another stroke. She's not really my gramma. She's Martha's mother. She lives next door.”

“Come on. I'll run you over to the hospital.” Lenore was already collecting her keys and her handbag.

“I think I have to use your bathroom,” Mary Lou said.

“Go ahead.”

While Mary Lou splashed cold water on her face to try to calm herself, Lenore paced the room, looking for a place to put the energy that was in her arms. She saw Roland, an octypus with his arms crawling all over Mary Lou trying to make her, and she couldn't even open her arms to soothe her without worrying that someone might think she was weird.

She opened the door on the passenger side first, and when Mary Lou was seated, she pressed the door closed securely with both arms, as if the car door might be capable of communicating her embrace. Then she went around and got in herself and drove them to the hospital.

10.

Mary Lou put her books in the chair in the corner of the room and went to Daisy's bedside. Daisy was asleep as she had been every day since they'd brought her to the hospital—semi-comatosed—the doctor said. When he jabbed her feet with pins, Daisy groaned. Sometimes she seemed to come partly awake and would utter a long wailing series of “oh, oh, oh, oh's.” Mary Lou had spent hours of the past few days watching and wondering what Daisy could feel in her coma.

Right then she was very still. Her body looked as if it were turning into a skeleton. Her arms were on top of the sheet, and Mary Lou noticed that her left hand wasn't fisted up anymore the way it had been for years from earlier strokes. Mary Lou froze for a second, thinking that maybe Daisy was dead. She had had this moment every day for the past week at the beginning of her visit. She stared at Daisy's chest, trying to detect movement. She thought she could see movement. Then she thought she had made it up. She hadn't ever seen a dead person. Would she be able to tell? Would Daisy's hand go back up into a fist?
Please, Daisy, don't die,
she prayed, but she prayed less fervently than she had earlier in the week. The only one she had ever known to die was her real grandmother on her mother's side and that had been when she was only five, and she hardly had a clear memory of her. And her real grandmother had never lived next door. She felt like an adult when she thought of the idea of having to go on without Daisy. She put her hand on Daisy's arm and felt reassured by the warmth of Daisy's skin. There were red splotches under her nearly transparent skin on her forearm. Mary Lou covered the ones on her right arm with her own hand and watched Daisy's left arm. When did these splotches come?
They seemed to appear between one visit and the next. She thought maybe if she watched long enough she would see one come.

What would become of Daisy if she died? Mary Lou's mind brought that question to her over and over, then seemed to brake at thinking further. She didn't believe in Heaven or Hell because her mother had never followed any religion. Her ma said people soaked up religion to try to feel full when they were hungry. “I try to keep us in enough food,” she said. That was fine for eating, but what about death, Mary Lou wondered. She tried for a minute to believe in Heaven and think of Daisy dead, Daisy's body floating in some heavenly sky. That picture did not seem at all right to her. She thought of Daisy in a grave. She felt a hollow feeling inside herself. She understood then, in the passage of that moment, that this was what her feelings were about—the lonely hollow of Daisy's absence in her own life.

Daisy stirred and let out a long sigh which brought Mary Lou up to full attention. She opened her eyes and stared at Mary Lou with a stern look. Mary Lou was astounded that Daisy looked so wide awake and stared back. Daisy formed her lips as if she were going to say something. When she opened and closed her mouth, nothing came out but, “ef . . . ef . . . ef . . . ef . . . .”

“What?”

“ef . . . ef . . . frumbled,” she said. Then she closed her eyes and smiled. Spit bubbles formed on her lips behind the word.

“I know,” Mary Lou said. “I remember. That was my word.”

She tried to get her back. “Gramma . . . gramma?” Mary Lou repeated louder and louder, but Daisy seemed to have gone back into the coma.

Mary Lou remembered their game. She must have been about seven or eight because Daisy hadn't had her first stroke yet. Her mother was working second shift. The bus would bring her and Skeeter home from school and drop them off a few minutes before Folly had to leave for the factory, unless something happened to make them late. A substitute driver, a fight on the bus, a kid forgetting his books—what it was didn't matter—just the knowing that they were going to be late and probably miss their mother was upsetting to Mary Lou. She understood that her ma would be in trouble if she waited for them and was late for work. Still, when they got to the door and Folly wasn't there, she felt small and insignificant. She knew they were more important than her job, but the proof was lacking. She would take Skeeter by the hand then, and they'd walk over; Daisy would be watching out the back door
for them, Tiny already with her. Mary Lou would sulk those days and Daisy had to prod her into playing with anything. “What's the matter?” she would ask.

“Nothin'.”

“You look pretty mucky.”

“I do not.”

“You do so.”

“Do not.”

“How do you feel?”

“Not mucky.”

“Yucky?”

“Leave me alone.” Mary Lou would say this with great scorn as if to declare it the final word.

Daisy would change to an appeasing voice. “Come on, sugar. Give me a word. Try me out with a new one. Make one up.”

“Frumbled,” Mary Lou had said.

“I know exactly how you feel,” Daisy had said as soon as Mary Lou came up with the word. “I've felt that way sometimes myself.”

Mary Lou didn't believe her at first, but then Daisy went around the trailer saying, “This whole day has been right frumbled from start to finish. First the pilot light went out. Then I had to wait two hours for Shelby Johnson to get off the party line so I could call about it. While I wasn't watching, my coffee boiled. I tell you, girl, I know what you mean. Frumbled is a pretty good word for it.”

Mary Lou had ended up laughing at Daisy. She tried to think of the other words. Grotchetty, barrowed, urchy, meech. Meech was a scream with me in it. There were more she couldn't remember. She searched Daisy's face, but it didn't look frumbled. Maybe because she had said it. One always felt better afterwards—at least Mary Lou had. She went to the chair and started on her homework, glancing from time to time at Daisy. She couldn't see her face but she could see her chest through the bars of the bedrail, and she imagined she saw it rise and fall each time she looked.

Folly and Martha came straight to the hospital room from their stint on the picket line, greeted Mary Lou, and went one to each side of Daisy. They were sweaty and grimy, Folly with a dirty smudge on her face which Mary Lou was sure she didn't realize was there. When she thought of them marching back and forth with their signs, Mary Lou was fiercely
proud to know them and wished she were a few years older and a worker at the factory so she could be out there picketing, too.

“Daisy the same?” her mother asked.

“She is now . . . but she opened her eyes and spoke to me before.”

Surprised, they both turned to her. “What'd she say?” Martha asked.

“Frumbled.”

“What?” Folly asked.

“Frumbled. It's a word we used to say in a game when I was little.” Mary Lou got up and looked down on Daisy. “She opened her eyes up and stared straight at me and she stuttered a little and then she said ‘frumbled,' clear as day.”

“What's it mean?” Martha asked.

“It's hard to explain,” Mary Lou said. “It means
frumbled
.” She caught Folly's look which was one of no messing around, kid. “Sort of like frustrated and mixed-up feeling. Like nothing's going right today.”

Martha was listening carefully. “Do you think she was trying to say something else?”

“Nope. She even smiled, like she was playing with me.”

“Then what happened?” Folly asked.

“Nothing. She closed her eyes again and went back out. I tried to call her, but I don't think she heard me.” Mary Lou tried to remember if the smile had stayed for a while or what. Why hadn't she kept track? Daisy's lips looked dry and lifeless now, and Mary Lou couldn't really picture the smile.

Martha leaned over Daisy, jostled her arm gently and called her, “Ma . . . Ma . . . .” Her voice was husky. “Can you hear me, Ma?” Nothing from Daisy. Martha tried a few more times, then moved away from the bed over to the window. She looked weary and depressed.

“How about a cup of coffee?” Folly asked.

“Y'all go on and have one,” Martha said. “I'll stay with her a bit.”

Mary Lou was reluctant to leave, but her mother signaled her, and together they went down to the cafeteria. There was nothing to watching Daisy when she was like this, yet they had all hung close to her for a week now, with growing anticipation. Mary Lou was glad she had been alone with her when Daisy had spoken, although she felt badly that she wouldn't wake up for Martha.

She sipped at her coke and kept to herself. The cafeteria was empty except for them and the maintenance man who was mopping the floor. He had indicated the dryest corner to them and they had taken two chairs and turned them over on their legs and sat down. Now they looked out on a sea of chair legs poking up from the tables around them,
and Mary Lou was casting through visions of living in an upside down world.

“So fumbled is when nothing goes right,” Folly said.

“Frumbled.”

“That's what I meant. It sounds like this day.”

“What happened?” Mary Lou looked at her mother and noticed the smudge again.

“Couple of Fartblossom's boys tried to run us over.”

“
Really
?”

“Yeah, really. That's what
I
said. I couldn't believe it. They came aiming right for us. I jumped one way and Martha the other or they'd have smeared us both. The other girls saw, too, from where they were sitting in the car. We all chased after them into the parking lot like a flock of banshees, hollering at their backs. You shoulda heard the language. We told them what we thought of them.”

“‘You shouldn't be walking in the road,' one of them said out the window.” Folly's voice was shaky. “Goddamned bastards. They had to get men to do it, too. I bet they tried to get those women who are scabbing to run us down, but you can't get women to do stuff like that. It ain't in 'em. It's in men.”

Mary Lou felt panic at the idea that her mother was in danger. Her strong, loud, outrageous, speak-out mother. She had always imagined her protected by making enough of a fuss to scare others around her. Now, suddenly, she realized that was what made her a target. “You must've been scared,” she said.

“You better believe it. I very nearly flew away. You never knew your ma to have wings, did you? Neither did she, before.”

“You think they'll try it again?”

“I wouldn't put it past 'em, but probably not. They figure they got us scared now . . . and that fear'll wear on us. Some of the girls already started talking this afternoon about shouldn't we go back.”

“You think they'll do it?”

“Over my dead body,” Folly said, fuming. She was quiet for a minute. Then she softened. “I don't know. Maybe we should. I sure wish Daisy hadn't gotten sick now. I was counting on her for good sense.”

“How come you think she talked to me, Ma?”

“I don't know. Maybe cause you're someone special to her. Then again, maybe just because you happened to be there when she woke up.”

When they got back to Daisy's room, Folly asked Martha if she saw any difference. “She seems more peaceful,” Martha said. “Still asleep.”

The three of them stood looking down on Daisy in silence, each taking in her meaning to them. Folly finally interrupted this meditation. “I guess we ought to go fix supper. You ready, Martha?”

“I think I'll stay, if you wouldn't mind coming back for me later.”

“Sure . . . or if you want to come home for supper with us, I'll come back down with you for the evening.”

“Thanks,” Martha said. “I think I'll stay now. I'll get something to eat later.”

Mary Lou reached over and caressed Daisy's delicate, wrinkled cheek with the back of her hand. “I'll see you Wednesday, Daisy. I gotta work tomorrow. You sleep well.” Then she got her books and went out to wait in the hall for her mother. She felt foolish talking to Daisy in front of Folly and Martha, but she was glad she had done it anyway because she had a feeling that Daisy could hear in her sleep. A superstition. Her ma didn't believe in superstition anymore than she believed in religion.

As they went out the Emergency Room entrance to the parking lot, Mary Lou remembered standing in that doorway the Saturday night before, waiting for Daisy's ambulance. A hot night but she had been practically shivering. She had wanted Lenore to drop her off and leave, had not wanted her mother to see Lenore, but Lenore had come in with her, gone to the desk and found out Daisy wasn't there yet, moved Mary Lou back out the doorway, saying, “Let's wait right out here.” Mary Lou had never told her she wasn't supposed to be making friends with her. It would be embarrassing to say that her mother thought she was too old. That would make her ma sound like a stooge, which she wasn't. Anyway, she was glad she didn't have to wait alone. They had heard the siren coming closer and closer, Mary Lou's heart following the urgency of its pressing sound. Daisy had looked pale, pale white on the stretcher. Suddenly Mary Lou had realized that the siren had stopped, leaving a large, blank emptiness in her ears, almost like deafness, and that Lenore was gone. Daisy's eyes had fluttered as they had carried her past Mary Lou. They had been cloudy was the impression she had, but it had all happened so fast, and she wasn't sure Daisy had even seen her.

As they got in Martha's car, Mary Lou realized how far off she was from getting her own. Folly didn't even have one. They shared this one with Martha, chipping in for gas and some of the repair bills. She didn't even know if her mother would let her learn to drive on Martha's car. She stored this subject away in a place in her brain which she reserved for things to talk about the next time she caught her ma in a real good mood.

She remembered Daisy saying frumbled and the soft feel of her cheek. “What's for supper?” she asked her ma.

“I don't know. We'll have to think of something.”

“Y'all probably think I'm an idiot, talking to Daisy when she's asleep.”