Tending to Virginia (8 page)

Ginny Sue can go right on thinking that therapy is the thing to do if she wants but Cindy ain’t buying. Cindy has never even figured out
why
Ginny Sue went to therapy in the first place, a little broken engagement, big deal. Ginny Sue came home from Atlanta in a pure crazy fit just to say the wedding was off. That pissed Cindy off; there she’d already driven to Raleigh to get a bridesmaid’s dress that was so god-awful sweet-looking she wouldn’t have worn it to a dog fight. The dress couldn’t be returned because Cindy’s waist is so tiny that it had been altered; she gave it to a child down the street to wear for a Halloween suit.

“I started painting a lot when I was depressed,” Ginny Sue had said, like Cindy
is
depressed. Of course, that was before Ginny Sue knew that Mark had knocked up his first wife. “That’s what you need, Cindy. Something that you do for yourself, something that you do for yourself and enjoy.” Ha! A lot of good all that therapy is doing Miss Ginny Sue now.

“Yeah, well I’d like to fly to Greece and buy a string bikini,” Cindy said, as if she has the time between a nine-to-five and a girl-crazy adolescent and a slut sister. And why does Ginny Sue think that Cindy
doesn’t
have something she does that is as good as coloring
pictures and messing in wheat paste? Cindy has ideas; she has the idea that she could write some books, not for godssakes the kind Ginny Sue reads, but the kind you hear about, the kind you see in every grocery store and the lobby of Ramada. She’s got all the titles already figured out, a medical series:
How An Anesthesiologist Put Me To Bed, The Virgin Meets a Surgeon,
and
The Series of G.I.s That Led to My GI Series.
She could do it, make big bucks, get up from her VDT (Video Display Terminal) and say she’s going to lunch and never come back just like she did at the loan office of Southern Trust one day during the second divorce. She could write country songs, too.

Ginny Sue ought to do that kind of thinking for a change instead of trying to figure out whose eyes she’s got, whose nose? She’ll sit for hours and ask Emily and Lena questions like that, or questions about people who have been dead so long that there’s probably a motel built over their graves. Both of those women are senile as hell but Ginny Sue believes whatever they tell her. Ginny Sue will drive her baby crazy, twisting its head all around to see whose neck it has or whose ears. It has always reminded Cindy of that story she heard in school once about that god man who had all kinds of nekked women, little
tiny
nekked women which have a name that Cindy can’t think of, chasing after his bod but he wouldn’t touch one with a ten-foot pole because he was so taken with himself that he just sat and stared at himself in some water until his mind was completely eaten up. Now
that’s
disease of the mind. Ginny Sue is not in love with
herself
; she’s in love with everybody that’s lived, died, and been related since Columbus.

Cindy told Ginny Sue the god man story once, hoping to make a point. She told it good, too, as good as old Miss Harris had told it in P.E. class so that the girls wouldn’t sit and stare at themselves and boobs, whatever, while dressing out. “Vanity is the root of all evil,” Miss Harris said, but of course she had nothing to be vain about; Cindy’s mama would probably say the same thing.

“That’s because she’s never had a root,” Cindy had whispered to Constance Ann. They shared a gym locker. They laughed so hard that Cindy popped a snap on her gym suit and when Miss Harris
said, “what’s so funny?” for the third time, Cindy spoke up and said, “I said that I’d rather have lots of little nekked men chasing me through the woods than to stare at myself.” Miss Harris didn’t laugh but everybody else did. School was fun that way; she didn’t learn much but she sure had some fun.

Ginny Sue was going to therapy that time, sitting and thinking over useless things, when she should have been doing something. She should have been shaving her legs and rolling her hair and going on dates. The Lord helps those that get off their asses and do something. When Cindy left Buzz Biggers, she did all sorts of things that made her feel good. She went in the bathroom of the loan office on that day that she went to lunch and never came back, and she wrote “Fuck Buzz Biggers in the nose” right there beside where she had written “Fuck Charles Snipes in the ear.”

Cindy mousses her bangs and pulls them straight just like that woman on “Knots Landing”; only a petite person can get away with the cockatoo look. Randy Skinner just loves her hair this way. TGIF! She thinks that tonight might be a good time to ask Randy over to her house instead of just kissing in a parked car in the lot of Ramada.

“I can’t believe you do that,” Constance Ann said just yesterday. “Eating face in the parking lot of Ramada Inn right there in the center of town.”

“Some things you never outgrow, Constance Ann,” she said. “It’s like putting a quarter in one of those machines at the grocery store knowing full well that you don’t want that rubber worm or plastic bracelet inside of it. But you do it. You do it every now and then; pay your money and take a chance just to feel that little plastic egg sitting there in your palm and remembering how you never got exactly what you wanted but you played with it anyway.”

Cindy goes now and sprays a little Halston in her cleavage, puts on some mascara and tells Chuckie if he eats all those Cadbury Eggs that she bought up right after Easter that his face will look so bad a dermatologist won’t touch him. She tells him he’s going to spend the night with his grandmama whether he likes it or not, that if he’s bored just to go in a different room from the one her mama’s in.
How My Dermatologist Makes My Skin Tingle. My Psychiatrist Had A Lobotomy. A Prescription For Love
by Cindy Sinclair Snipes Sinclair Biggers Sinclair (maybe Skinner).
It’s The Man Behind The Pills That Makes Me High.
Cindy laughs right out loud there in the front yard of the house that her slutbucket sister would NEVER have wanted to show. Cindy might buy that house from her landlord. She might get a satellite dish so she can pick up the whole wide world. Then again, she might not. They need to make those dishes look like something other than giant-size diaphragms. Good God, it makes her laugh to picture a woman big enough to insert a satellite dish. The sun is shining like her daddy is smiling from heaven, just smiling, but without the gunshot. He’d say, “There’s my pretty little Goldilocks.”

The day would be perfect if she didn’t have to see her mama, but of course she does. Her mama needs a ride to work, a favor, so what else is new? The Prodigal Son’s brother got the shit end of the stick. Do this, do that, Cindyrella. If she drives real fast like she did in high school, screeching and revving, she can keep from getting pissed off when she sees her mama. It’s a wonder Cindy doesn’t die from pissed off. Her mama makes people want to die; that’s all there is to it. “Dead due to pissed off,” the doctors would say. “Her mama did it to her.”

* * *

Emily Pearson Roberts sits in a green Lazy Boy most of the day, a small tin of snuff tucked deep down in the pocket of her pink fluffy robe along with a little cash and a piece of note paper with important phone numbers written in her own tiny scrawl. The days seem to flow by in a winding weary manner much like the Saxapaw River which curved all around this county and then on to who knows where; it still does though she hasn’t laid her eyes on that deep, brown water in years, possibly hasn’t touched that water since that day in the rowboat all those summers ago when she had let her hand trail down alongside the boat and leave a momentary mark while James sat there with his shirt sleeves rolled up and lifted that oar from side to side, his fishing tackle spread out between their feet, her whole body hidden from the sun by the large straw hat
that she wore, the same hat that her sister Lena said made her look like an old country woman. She reckoned she did, an old country woman, especially compared to that piece of animal Lena wore on her own head. An old country woman, wasn’t nothing wrong with that. There weren’t any fish, at least not that day, and she was glad because she felt that river was nasty and that anything that lived there was probably nasty, too.

“Is this the same woman that loves pigs’ feet?” James had asked and laughed. Even in those last years he was as handsome as ever. He’d say, “Look at that would you?” and point to the shore and there would be a bird or a rabbit or an oleander in full bloom. Oh, how she loves those oleanders, filled that side yard there all along the street full of oleanders like a tropical paradise, like Lena wrote telling of Florida all those years ago. Years and years ago, passing on the shore, and she could not take her eyes off of him, that strong dark face, though tired by then and, behind that face and those eyes, the blood that the doctor said could go sky high if he didn’t watch it. She watched it for him; she would have crawled inside his body and held that rush of blood back if she could’ve.

“Look a there,” he said and there was an old possum swinging from a tree. She glanced at it and went right back to trailing her finger in the water. “Never in my life have you made possum stew,” he said and grinned. “My mama used to make it when I was a boy.”

“Your mama was poor, that’s why,” she said. “And that daddy of yours didn’t know what hunting was, so lazy he probably shot the first thing he saw.” She said that mostly out of habit; they had talked their possum talk for years. She never even met James’s daddy but she knew well enough that he had not been a good provider. “Unlucky,” James always said. “Just couldn’t get his head above water.” James had made himself everything he was, risen way above that part of the county where he was raised, but he never once put it behind him and forgot. “You’ve no one to thank but God for what you’ve made of yourself,” she told him once, him sitting in the side yard in his old age, feeling so guilty that he had done so much better than his father ever had. “You were just a young man when he died. You worked, did all you could to help.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I do have him to thank. You should never forget who reared you,” and his stare was so solid and strong that she knew he was saying the truth. He never forgot all those boys he grew up with down there, grown men that had houses full of children and no meat on their tables. They’d come to town on Saturday, five or six of them, and waste their money on getting drunk and then they’d be sitting out on her front porch with bottles and banjos trying to sing with their voices sounding like dying alley cats. They’d sing all those old songs with all kinds of filthy talk in between and her slaving in that kitchen and trying her best to keep Hannah and David away from that door. James would let those men come in and take baths, give them a tee shirt or pair of pants or socks which never came back clean if they came back at all, and they’d eat their fill and fall dead asleep wherever they chose to sit after dinner. Come morning and you’ve never seen such politeness with “Miss Em,” this and “Miss Em” that while she poured coffee and asked after their families, pitiful pictures coming to her mind of tired worn women and dirty little children.

She leans forward in her chair now and glances at that screened door, latched tight and nobody there. She would have sworn she heard somebody there. James knew every curve of that river, had trees that served as markers and he always knew right where they were. And he could sing, Lord in heaven knows that man could sing, and that voice would carry she thought across that river like a skipping stone right on down to South Carolina and back. He’d sing “Red River Valley,” and it made tears come to her eyes to hear that sweet sadness. He’d always turn and look at her when he sang “We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile.” That shore seemed to go on forever and as it got later the light would come and go from behind those trees, just come and go, and she took off the hat so she could see better, what with it coming and going. They didn’t play “Red River Valley” at the funeral; they wouldn’t have allowed that there in the church. She asked for “How Great Thou Art” because that was her favorite but she hadn’t known his. There were several he’d sing from time to time, “Love Lifted Me” and “Have Thine Own Way” but she didn’t know the favorite. All those years and she never knew which one.

“Go early with me, Hannah,” Emily had said the day of the funeral. “Let’s go be with him before everybody else comes.” Nobody was there, not even the preacher. “Play something real quiet,” she said and pushed Hannah up toward that altar and then behind it where there was an old organ. Hannah could play by ear, had her whole life, and they sat there side by side, just the two of them and sang so quietlike, “For they say you are taking the sunshine,” and Hannah started crying; Hannah could not even press the keys or sing, so Emily finished it out herself. Hannah’s mouth quivered so and those big eyes filling, her hand clinging to Emily’s arm and Emily had wanted so bad to take Hannah in her arms like she might be a baby and rock her there in front of the church. She wished for a minute that she could grab hold of her own mama and let the tears come. “We’ve got each other,” she told Hannah and patted her hand. “You’ve got a family all your own and your daddy wouldn’t want to see you so upset over him. He’d want you to be strong.”

Emily didn’t cry, really cry through that whole service because it was too personal and people should not have seen. If she had let herself cry, then they all would have started, Lena and Hannah, and James wouldn’t have wanted such a sad day. She sat through that service and concentrated her mind on Ginny Sue, pulled that child up on her lap and held her there, and while the preacher talked of how good James was, she thought of all the things that she’d tell Ginny Sue; she’d tell of when she met James and she’d tell of her own daddy and she’d tell all the funny stories about Lena, how Lena would try to sneak out of the house to go to school with her chest stuffed up great big with socks when she wasn’t but nine years old and how their mama grabbed Lena there in the front yard and pulled sock after sock out of that child’s dress, said, “There’ll be time enough for bosoms, Rolena Pearson. I wouldn’t go wishing things on my body before it’s time.” Emily caught herself wanting to laugh right there in the church. James had laughed for years over the things Lena had done and she knew that Ginny Sue would laugh that same way, that some day the two of them would be right by themselves and she’d tell those stories one right after another.