Stars to Lead Me Home: Love and Marriage (A Novel)

by Peggy Webb

  “When did Lydia leave?”

  “Day before yesterday.”

  She drove away early in the morning, her car loaded with sweaters and sweat pants and blue jeans with holes in the knee, with an old guitar she’d bought in a pawn shop and a tennis racket that needs restringing and a duffle bag full of clean laundry she swore she’d fold when she got to Beth’s. Presiding over her mound of possessions was the raggedy old Pooh Bear she’s had since her first birthday.

  The newsboy down the street was filling his stand with the morning papers while we stood on the sidewalk saying goodbye. She hugged me hard and I pretended a jauntiness I didn’t feel.

  “‘Bye, Mom. Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

  I gave her the thumbs up sign and watched her disappear around the corner, taking normal with her.

  “Call Halbert,” Jean says. “Maybe he can come this weekend.”

  “He’s probably busy.”

  “How will you know if you don’t ask him?”

  “Halbert hasn’t called since before Lydia left, not even to answer my messages.” All of them cheerful.

  Hi, this is Maggie. Uplift on the g’s, a singer warming up for a concert. Sorry I missed you.

  Hi, this is that dancing demon from Mississippi. I’m off to the movies with my youngest. Catch you later.

  Then, finally, I’m getting a little worried. Hope you’re not sick.

  “That jerk!” Jean balls her hands into fists. “I’d like to knock some sense into him.”

  “I make up reasons why he doesn’t call me: he’s working late or out of town or too tired or too sick. Most desperate excuse of all: he’s planning to surprise me, just walk through my door and take up where we left off.”

  “Forget him, Maggie. Don’t you dare call him again. Any other man would be so grateful for a woman like you, he’d be kissing the ground you walk on.”

  “I’m not even going to tell Lillian. She doesn’t need anything else to worry about. Besides, this is just petty compared to what she’s going through.”

  “Of course, we’re going to tell Lillian. We tell each other everything!”

  “Tell me what?”

  Seeing Lillian unexpectedly is like standing on a balcony overlooking the Pacific, bracing yourself in the face of a good stiff breeze. I pause to catch my breath. The comeback she’s made since Birmingham is miraculous. Looking at her now, you’d never know this is the same woman who was crushed because her chest was too small for the long-awaited heart.

  “About your cousin, the Tampa two-timer.” Jean never has to pause and catch her breath for anything. “He stopped calling Maggie without a single word of explanation.”

  Lillian absorbs the shock of this slowly - the news of Halbert’s perfidy, Jean’s jaw stuck out, my bewilderment over having to wear the hair coat I thought I’d tossed away.

  “Maggie?” She stares at me, waiting for a sign. And I’m split in half, loyal to Jean who has seen me through every major crisis in my life, and loyal to Lillian who thought she was doing me a great favor by bringing Halbert into my life.

  I wait too long. When Lillian walks out I hear the rustle of wings.

  “Lillian,” I call, but she’s already out of earshot.

  “She’ll get over it,” Jean says.

  “My lord, Jean! After all she’s been through, she doesn’t need this drama.”

  I start to race after Lillian, but Jean grabs my arm.

  “Wait.” She shoves a handful of chocolate chip cookies at me. “Soul food. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “I’m not the one I’m worried about. This is ridiculous.”

  “Not as ridiculous as you trying to treat Lillian like she’s breakable. You know how she hates that.”

  “You’re right.” Since the donor heart disappointment, most of the teachers here have acted as if Lillian is somehow hard of hearing and senile, to boot. They offer to fetch her lunch tray and carry her briefcase, all in overly loud, overly solicitous voices that grate like fingernails on chalkboard. “I’ll just have to be patient.”

  o0o

  But I’m not patient. Never have been, probably never will be.

  The minute I get home from school, I call Lillian and listen to the ring tone then her voice, telling me to leave a message.

  “Lillian, this is Maggie,” I say, as if she won’t remember the sound of my voice. “Listen, about today… What’s going on between Halbert and me has nothing to do with you. Call me.”

  I hang up then wish I’d said more. I’d like to wring Halbert’s neck but certainly not yours. Maybe he’s turned out to be Mr. Wrong, but you thought he was Mr. Right. All of us did.

  I head into the bathroom to draw a tub of water, then sit on the edge of the tub remembering our excitement at the New Year’s Eve dance, how we’d all crowded into a stall to plot ways Halbert and I could sneak off together, the mystery of it all, the anticipation.

  I dump honeysuckle-scented bubble bath into the water, then sink in up to my neck, inhaling. The fragrance reminds me of the farm, of being seven and plucking honeysuckle blossoms off the vines to suck the nectar so I could turn into a humming bird.

  I would have a ruby throat that pulsed as I flew from flower to flower drinking my fill, and a body that shone iridescent in the sun, and wings so tiny they were invisible but so strong they could take me anywhere in the world. Even Argentina.

  I wish I could turn into a hummingbird now. I lean my head onto the bath pillow, close my eyes and think about soaring so high in the sky that everything below me is no bigger than a pinhead. I try to feel free and weightless. Instead I feel like a bowling ball, careening out of control. Everybody around me is falling like ninepins - Beth, Lydia, now Lillian.

  My flight to freedom was supposed to be a solitary journey with the risks and consequences falling solely on me. Am I only now finding out what John Donne knew hundreds of years ago, no man is an island; or was it something I knew all along but ignored out of necessity? For to stay in the place I left would surely have been to die, if not physically then mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

  I shake off this pensive mood. Halbert’s to blame. I wrap myself in a towel, take his picture out of the frame and pad barefoot back into the bathroom, murder on my mind.

  Ripping the photo in half gives me a self-righteous thrill. I can picture how Halbert will look going down the toilet, soggy and distorted. A man no woman would look at twice.

  One hand is over the flushing lever, the other hovering over the toilet bowl. I can’t do it. I can’t go from love to hate in a single flush.

  Walking back to my office to get the scotch tape I notice how neat everything is. No socks balled up in the corner of the sofa, no nightshirt draped across the back of a kitchen chair, no jogging shoes flung carelessly under the flimsy table that holds a portable TV. It has a thirteen inch screen. Lydia complained every evening.

  “Shoot, Mom, Dad has two. Why didn’t you at least take one?”

  Loss threatens to choke me. All this while, and this is as far as I’ve come, a tired woman leaning against a doorframe clutching the two halves of another broken dream.

  I tape Halbert’s picture back together, being careful not to get his lying lips crooked, and then I drag the telephone to the side of my bed. In case he calls. In case Lillian calls. In case both of them have lost my cell phone number.

  o0o

  “I must be crazy,” I say. I tell Jean about taping Halbert’s lying lips together and about the telephone beside my bed. The one that didn’t ring.

  Jean and I are at Cancun, the restaurant where we go for drinks every Friday after school. There’s an empty chair at the table.

  Jean notices me looking at it. “She’ll be back.”

  “You said that three days ago.”

  “I may be a genius, but I’m not psychic. What are we having?”

  “Fruit?”

  “Fried mushrooms. We need fat to help us get through this crisis.”

  O
rdinarily I would argue about the fried mushrooms, citing the obvious: We’ve moved the buttons over on all our waistbands. Today, I’m silent. What does one plate of fried mushrooms matter when one of your best friends is not speaking to you?

  “Tomorrow we diet.” Jean orders the mushrooms and two glasses of white wine.

  “Make that three,” I tell the waitress. Then to Jean, “In case she shows up.”

  The waitress leaves us with glasses of water and fat-gram guilt.

  “She’s not going to show up, Maggie.”

  “You don’t know that. How do you know that?”

  “I saw her today, third period. You were at the FAX machine. I saw her walk past the door.”

  “Did she stop?”

  “No. She didn’t even glance our way.”

  I am acutely aware of Lillian’s absence. I’m aware of friend-sized hole in my heart, of the way I used to stand in the teacher’s lounge long after she’d gone, listening to the echo of her laughter, of the way I wake up in the middle of the night, startled out of sleep with my breath coming in spurts as if I’m being chased through a-deep forest by a monster without a face.

  In daylight, sitting at a table in a public place with Jean, I know the monster’s face: it’s loss.

  Jean mistakes my silence for guilt. “I’m the one who made her mad. Not you.”

  “It’s bad enough that we might lose Lillian because of her heart. It’s unbearable that we might lose her through carelessness, Jean, and I don’t intend to endure another day without her.”

  Our food and drinks come, and Jean lifts her glass.

  “I’ll drink to that. You come up with a plan, and I’m Gung Ho.”

  “I’ll work on it.” I click my glass to Jean’s. “I’ve joined a divorce recovery group.

  Jean snorts. Sometimes she knows me better than I know myself. “Why? You hate group anything.”

  “The group leaders are well trained.”

  “So was that psychologist you went to last year. What was his name? Dr. Kevorkian?”

  “Be serious, Jean. Look at the mess I made with Halbert. I need help.”

  “What you need is a whip and a chair,” Lillian says.

  She’s standing beside our table bearing a white flag, her handkerchief tied on the end of the magic wand from a fairy godmother costume she wore at the school carnival four years ago. Jean rips a Kleenex from the travel pack in her purse and ends up waving one ragged corner while I wave my napkin. We all laugh as Lillian slides into her place at the table, though I scrutinize her, looking for signs that this new blow to my heart has caused hers to deteriorate.

  Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, I sink back into my chair, relieved. Still, I have some crow to eat.

  “Lillian…,about the other day…”

  “Don’t say another word about it, Maggie,” she says, and so I don’t.

  Jean picks up her wine, and we clink glasses. Nobody accuses and nobody apologizes. Lillian is back where she belongs, and we move forward.

  “I’m glad you didn’t order something wimpy. I need soul food.” Lillian nabs my fork and digs into the mushrooms. “I called Halbert and gave him a piece of my mind.”

  “Hear, hear!” Jean says.

  Before I left Dick I would have sat back and waited to find out my part in the telephone drama, and if Lillian didn’t want to tell, then I wouldn’t ask. Somewhere along the way, a she-bear moved in and my old timid self stood back and watched in awe as she took up residence.

  “What did he say about me?”

  “He’s too lily livered to say anything. But believe you me, I’m not. I asked him point blank who did he think he was, God’s gift to women? I said, ‘Maggie’s not a bus that you can just get on and get off at your leisure.’”

  I wish I’d said that to him. If I ever see him again, maybe I will.

  After the quick exultation, sadness. I mourn the rose bush I’ll never plant with Halbert. I had it all figured out. The rose bush would be the old-fashioned kind. English. It would have fat green leaves that perked up like a Golden Retriever’s ears every time we watered it. And blossoms of deepest pink. A pink that would remind you of sunsets and a favorite blanket you had as a child.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “In divorce there are two groups of people: the dumpers and the dumpees.”

  The speaker is tonight’s leader of the divorce recovery group, a middle-aged balding man whose three degrees can’t disguise the fact that he’s boring. He reminds me of an onion. I am sitting on the third row in a semicircle of chairs next to a woman who resembles a hydrangea bush, squat and rounded and fluffy, all decked out in blue. On my right is a man who puts me in mind of a carrot, tall and angular with a tuft of orange hair sticking up.

  I could go on forever with this game. It’s one the children and I used to play when we were stuck at the airport waiting for Dick to come back from a Woodmen of the World convention.

  I remind myself that I’m not waiting for anybody anymore, and that if I expect to learn anything, I had better pay attention.

  “Dumpers are people who walked out of the marriage.”

  The audience reaction draws me up short. “Boo,” they yell, expressing disapproval of people who say, I’ve had enough, then do something about it.

  “Dumpees are the people left behind.”

  Cheers from the crowd. Lots of clapping. What did I expect?

  With sweeping generalizations and broad strokes, the leader paints everything as black and white, right and wrong.

  After Dick and I started sleeping in separate bedrooms, I would lie awake in Beth’s bed with my right foot sticking out of the covers and the window cracked open just in case I had to run.

  My nose begins to itch, a sure sign that I’m going to turn a wild pig loose in the vineyard. I push back my chair, stand up, and wait for acknowledgment.

  “Yes? Ah...” Our leader looks at my name tag. “Maggie, is it?”

  “Yes. Maggie Hudson.” It’s the only thing we’ve agreed on all evening, my name. “I’m a dumper.” I sweep the audience with a long look, mistress of the dramatic pause. “I left because I was dumped on.”

  There is an uncomfortable silence while the good doctor searches his notes. The woman beside me plucks my sleeve.

  “I’m so glad you said that,” she whispers. “I’m a dumper, too.”

  I reach over to give her a hug.

  “Moving on,” the leader says, his neck now a deep shade of red.

  We move on to tight little circles of five with instructions to spill our guts to these strangers who had to swear secrecy before they could enter the room.

  A woman with tight yellow curls is taking the instructions to heart. She punctuates her story with sobs.

  “My husband left me, he just walked out the door one day while I was at my sister Myrtle’s getting a home permanent, I remember because I still had the curlers in my hair when I got home, and there was this note on the kitchen table, on blue lined paper, he didn’t even bother with the good stationery, I don’t love you anymore, it said, I’ll never forget.”

  She’s sobbing so hard I’m afraid she’s going into hysterics. I lean over and pat her hand.

  “Everything’s going to be all right.” Women know this to be true because eventually every situation does resolve itself, and we go forward from there. Whole or in pieces. It doesn’t matter. We go on.

  She clings to my hand, pleads for validation with tear-washed eyes.

  “Time helps heal the wounds,” I say to her. “I’ve been out a couple of years now, and already I can tell the difference.”

  This bit of advice sets off a fresh gale of weeping.

  Alarmed, I ask, “How long has he been gone?”

  “Seven years, and I’ve been coming to this divorce recovery workshop every year, I don’t know what I’d do without it.”

  I know what I would do. Instead of sitting on this hard chair trying to look sincere, I would be sitting in my comfortable blue rec
liner reading Isak Dinesen’s Letters From Africa. I would have on a nightshirt that doesn’t care whether the skin underneath is wrinkled or smooth and a pair of worn slippers that feels like a hug. Music would fill the room, something slow and bluesy that makes you think of hope hiding behind the heartache, waiting patiently.

  o0o

  I promised myself I would come to the divorce recovery group tonight with an open mind, and I sit with my knees together, feet side by side on the floor as if this severely upright posture will qualify me as serious.

  “Tonight we will be dealing with the S word.”

  Our group leader this evening is a beautiful woman in her thirties without degrees but with plenty of experience. She’s been divorced twice, and if that doesn’t qualify her, I don’t know what would.

  “Most of us in this room understand what it’s like to be cut off from the intimacy that’s a part of every relationship,” she says.

  I cross my legs, squirm, bite my tongue. I wonder what she would say if she knew what I dumped into the garbage can. I wonder what she’d say if she knew one of the first people to come knocking on my door after I left Dick was his best friend, Graden.

  I opened the door and offered him coffee, but he had come for something more.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Maggie.”

  The compliment spoken in the privacy of my apartment and in the absence of his wife took on a sleazy quality that made me uncomfortable. Still, this was a man I’d known and trusted since I’d married Dick.

  “Sit down, Graden. I’ll pour us some coffee.”

  “Maggie, wait. I don’t want coffee.”

  “Hot chocolate? Tea?”

  He draped his arm across my shoulder, a good buddy, getting set to confide. “Don’t you know why I’m here, Maggie?”

  “I not good at guessing games, Graden.”

  But I was. Even before he pulled me toward him and ran his hand up my sweater, I had guessed why he was there. Still, the censor in me stood back and chided for being silly, for letting my imagination run wild.

  “A good-looking woman like you . . .I can help you out, if you know what I mean.”