by Fannie Flagg
“You just lie here and try and relax,” Lee said. “I’ll be back.”
As Dena tried at last to calm down, she could hear them out in the living room, talking and even laughing, glasses clinking. It was so strange; everyone was working so hard to keep up a brave front, talking about everyday things, as if that would lessen the loss. Dena heard the children in the den throwing a ball to the dog, who was excited to have playmates. It all seemed so unreal. Howard was gone but life went on and all that was left was an empty chair. At that thought she started to cry again.
Lee came back in after a while, sat on the bed, and took her hand. “How are you doing?”
Dena shook her head. “I don’t know … I’m sorry.”
“It’s perfectly OK, Dena, it happens. Something touches you and sets off old memories, some old loss. It’s OK. You just take your time and come on out when you feel like it.”
After Lee left, she tried to think. What in the world was she crying about, so deeply sad about? Could it all be Howard’s dying? She had not cried when she heard the news. She had been upset, but she had not cried. She liked him, she respected him, she would miss him, but not enough to break down like this. Was it something about saying good-bye? Was it about her own father? She didn’t think so; she had not even known him.
What was wrong? Maybe she was just weeping about living in a world without Howard.
Two Letters
New York City
1977
Dena arrived home from Howard Kingsley’s memorial service at about twelve-thirty that night and the minute she came in the door she opened a bottle of vodka, put her nightgown on, and drank much of the bottle. At about 4 A.M., drunk as a loon, she got the idea that she would finally tell Ira Wallace what she thought of him. She went to her typewriter, sat down, and started typing.
Dear Scumbag,
How dare you even say all those terrible things about Howard Kingsley. You aren’t fit to wipe his shoes, you scumbag. You think nice people are chumps. You laugh at anybody who has integrity … you belittle everybody, strip everybody of any dignity. If anyone should get respect and be looked up to in this country, you have to throw dirt on them … pull them down in the gutter with you. You don’t care who you hurt. You are not loyal to anyone but yourself … you worm … people are going to learn to hate and suspect each other just like you do and when it’s not safe to go out your front door, what do you care? Don’t forget I know where your money is, you scumbag, tax evader, bald-headed scumbag and I don’t think you are a good American either, you fat buttermilk-pancake-face scumbag. I quit. So long, good-bye, auf Wiedersehen … and good riddance. I don’t know why I ever liked you, you rude cigar-smoking little worm.
Sincerely,
Dena Nordstrom
P.S. Howard was the top.
You’re the bottom!
Dena finished writing at about five-thirty in the morning and felt a great weight off her; she felt free, went to bed, and slept like a baby for the first time in weeks. At around one o’clock that afternoon she woke with a new hangover from hell and a terrible stomachache. She made herself coffee, had Maalox and three aspirins, and read the letter she had typed. What a pile of sanctimonious crap. Who was she to point the finger at anyone? Who did she think she was to imagine herself in the same category with Howard Kingsley? Such a bunch of holier-than-thou, self-righteous drunken babble … Then a wave of panic hit her when she realized she might have gone out and put it in the mail chute. Thank God she hadn’t mailed it. Last night she had been so sure she believed all this stuff, but today she realized all she was doing was spouting off some of Howard’s thoughts. Last night the vodka convinced her that she really believed all she had written. Today she had no earthly idea of what she really thought or felt about anything anymore. Who in the hell was she to judge? Did she really care about anybody but herself? Ira Wallace at least loved his kids and that was more than she could say; at least he loved something. She ripped the letter to shreds and threw it in the wastebasket. A fresh sheet of paper was in the typewriter. She typed a few sentences before she went back to bed with a Valium.
To whom it may concern and to those who don’t give a damn … Who the hell am I? Help! Help! Help! Fireman save my child. Blab blab blab, who cares, who cares, who cares. Leave me alone!!!!!!!!!!!
Across town Gerry O’Malley was leaning over the center-island counter in his kitchen, wearing his red baseball cap, scribbling out another one of the many letters he had started.
Dear Dena,
There are so many things I want to say to you, but mere words are not enough to convey to you what I feel in my heart. I am like a painter who visualizes a beautiful painting full of vivid colors but is only given sticks and mud to work with. I wonder how I can reach you. I don’t want words that skim lightly over the top of what I feel for you. There are too many words that are spoken from the mind and like a roomful of firecrackers pop and are gone. I want words that will produce a long deep boom of explosion, that will jar you to your very bones and stay ringing in your ears forever. That’s how I want to talk to you. I want you to hear me through your skin. I want you to drink my words in like rich red wine, to reach down in every part of you until there is not a place left untouched. I want to be in your bones, your muscles, all the way to the ends of your hair. I want you to know I love you in every cell of your brain, in every sleeping and waking thought. I want it to be in the air you breathe … so with every breath you will know there is someone on this earth that is yours, knows who you are, loves you forever and if there is anything after forever … even after that.
Gerry stopped writing and reread what he had just written and thought: That’s the most sickening, most embarrassing pile of hooey I’ve ever read in my life. And wadded it up and threw it in the trash can along with the others and started a new one.
Dear Dena,
I know this might come as somewhat of a surprise to you but since the first day I saw you I still have not been able to get you out of my
He stopped, tore that up, and said out loud, “God, why don’t you just call her, you idiot!” He went to the phone and dialed her number. But she had unplugged the phone.
True Love
New York City
1977
One of the hundreds of things Dena did not know about Gerry O’Malley was that he believed in true love. His father and mother had been madly in love with each other so he knew that it did exist and what it looked like. His father had been in the military and had a big job at the Pentagon and his mother usually left their home in Middleburg, Virginia, to go to Washington to be with him during the week. They hated to be apart even for a few days. Gerry and his father adored her. She was so bubbly, so alive, so much fun to be around, until his sister was born, with cerebral palsy. After that their lives had changed. His sister needed constant care and his mother, who had been the toast of the Washington party circuit, almost never left the house anymore. Gerry was sent to military school at the age of twelve.
As she got older, his sister’s condition grew worse, and as hard as his mother tried to take care of her, she could not. His sister finally had to be put in a special school in another state where she could receive twenty-four-hour medical care. It devastated his mother when she was forced to let her go. Each time he came home from school he noticed that his mother was drinking more and more, and his father would come downstairs to breakfast alone, saying his mother was sick that morning. He and his father had never discussed it then and so it was not talked about.
A year later, she never left her room.
The only time he had ever seen his father cry was one day after he and his father had been to visit her in the convalescent home. After they left, his father put his head on the steering wheel and sobbed. Gerry knew that he was crying over having to leave first his daughter and now his wife, who had slowly retreated into another world and had left him so alone.
His mother died of acute alcoholism the first year he was in coll
ege. His father had become so despondent from years of watching his wife slowly destroy herself and feeling helpless that he too withdrew from the world and left Gerry feeling helpless, not knowing what to do to reach him. The feeling of wanting to help but not knowing how or what to say was what caused him to change his major from music to psychology. Years later, his father remarried. It was nice. He had someone, but it wasn’t love. He never got over his first wife. Gerry knew it took courage to love like that. He knew firsthand how painful and dangerous it could be, but as it turned out he didn’t have a choice in the matter. Gerry recognized the woman he loved at once, remembered her as one remembers an old dream, and he was at once lost, at once found. His life was as changed as if he had gone to bed in one place and the next morning found himself clear across the world, a world vaguely familiar but new and full of wonder, as bright and fresh as the world had seemed as a child after a rain when the sun came out, a place of endless possibilities. He had all but forgotten that old dream of finding her. But dreams have a way of crashing through the darkest of places, the thickest of walls, and there it was, and her name was Dena.
From the moment she walked in his door that first day he had felt his former life, the one that had been so carefully planned, all behind him, barely remembered. He knew he would follow this woman wherever she wanted him to go. And there was something almost merciful about that moment; he didn’t have to fight it, or struggle, or regret, because he was as sure of this as he had been of anything in his life. He knew that trying to stop it would have been as futile as trying to stop himself from sliding down a glass mountain. He felt himself falling but there was no fear, no terror, only the sweet, burning anticipation of landing beside her, in her arms.
On the other hand, the object of all this earth-shattering activity was unaware of it. Dena Nordstrom did not believe in love, true or not. It almost killed him when he read in the paper that Dena was now dating Julian Amsley, the president of her network. Every time he saw their picture together in the paper, which was often, it almost broke his heart. But there was nothing he could do.
What Are Friends For?
Atlanta, Georgia
1978
Six months after Howard’s death, Dena spoke at the Mississippi College for Women, and Sookie had driven her back to Atlanta. They were driving around looking at houses, killing time before Dena had to get the plane back to New York.
“I wish I had paid more attention to current events when I was in school,” Sookie said. “Then maybe I wouldn’t be so surprised at what’s happening now in the world. I was busy trying to be liked.”
“You were liked.”
“Yes, but I had to work at it. You didn’t have to. People just liked you automatically, I don’t know why, you didn’t have to lift a finger. Not me. I had to run around like a chicken, smiling, joining this and joining that. I never got a good rest until after I was married.”
“Sookie, you’re still running around joining everything in sight.”
“I am not! You’d be surprised, the things I haven’t joined. And the things I do belong to I enjoy. Listen, don’t forget, it’s good for Earle’s practice to have a wife out there in the community, doing things; besides, what else would I do, sit home and stare at the walls? Look at that house! Are those not the most gorgeous boxwoods you have ever seen?”
“What?”
“Oh, you missed it. My boxwoods are just puny this year.”
Dena had no clue as to what she was talking about. “Sookie, have you ever spent any time alone? I mean really alone.”
Sookie thought about it. “Why would I want to?”
“Don’t people get on your nerves?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“No … not really, except for Mother, of course.” Sookie suddenly spotted something. “Look at that! Now, why would anyone paint their house that color, will you tell me?”
Dena looked at the lavender house with the dark purple shutters. “God only knows. But seriously, Sookie, I’m really interested in knowing why.”
“Why? New money, honey. Atlanta’s full of it. No taste, bless their hearts.”
“No, I mean why do you like people?”
“What a silly thing to ask. Because, why shouldn’t I like people? You’re supposed to like other people; everybody likes other people, don’t they?”
“I don’t know if I do or not.”
“Of course you do. You always liked people.”
“I did?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Maybe I’m just tired of people now.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone Bohemian, like Margo?”
“Who?”
“Oh, I told you about Margo, that girl from Selma who went to school up north.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do. She came back home all warped and weird? She acted so bored with everybody, wore black all the time?”
“I can’t …”
“Well, anyway, she wouldn’t join anything, not even Junior League. She just wanted to sit around and read or something. So finally, one day I went over there to see her and I said, ‘Margo, what in the world is the matter with you? Have you just given up on humanity?’ She closed her book and looked up at me and do you know what she said? She said, ‘I haven’t given up on humanity, it’s man that I’m disappointed in!’ And with that, honey, she just marched back in the house and left me standing there on the porch like a fool! And I guess by man, she must have meant woman too, because she never has gotten any nicer. She bought some little dinky house way out in the woods and raises those ugly little pug dogs. I hate to say it, but I think she’s peculiar.”
Dena smiled. “Well, then, I must be peculiar. I wouldn’t mind living in a house in the woods, all alone.”
“If you ask me, you are alone too much as it is. You need to have somebody to talk to, to share your innermost thoughts with.”
“Don’t worry. I have a psychiatrist I pay a lot of money to share my innermost thoughts.”
Sookie, alarmed, almost ran the car off the road. “A psychiatrist? Don’t tell me you’re going to a—Oh, my God, see, I knew something was wrong.”
“There is nothing wrong. A lot of people go to psychiatrists. And it’s not really psychiatry, it’s hypnotherapy.”
“What?”
“Hypnotherapy. She hypnotizes me.”
“Oh, my God, Dena! I hope you know what you are doing. Earle says most of those New York psychiatrists are card-carrying communists. You don’t know what he may be telling you when you’re hypnotized.”
“She.”
“Well, she, then. She may be turning you into a spy or something. You just better be careful, there are a lot of subversives everywhere now.”
“Sookie, where do you come up with this stuff?”
“I read.”
“Oh, Sookie.”
“Well, they are trying to get rid of Christianity and once they do that, then you watch. Our taxes will go up and they’ll take all our guns away and the next thing you know, a communist or a socialist will get in the White House and then it will be all over.”
“Sookie, surely you don’t believe that.”
“Honey, they are trying to outlaw prayer in the schools, right now, as we speak.”
“I think it has something to do with separation of church and state.”
Sookie turned the corner. “Oh, listen, that’s just some lame excuse they’re using to try to turn us into a Godless nation and corrupt our children.”
Dena was getting a headache. “Whatever, I don’t care that much.”
“You should care. It’s your country, it’s your children and my children we are talking about. Do you want them to come home from school someday and murder you in your bed?”
“I don’t have children.”
“Well, you’ll want to get married someday and have children. You have to think about those things.”
“I’m not getting married
.”
“Oh, sure. You say that now. But someday you’ll meet someone and fall head over heels. And I better be your matron of honor or I’ll never speak to you again. You’re my big claim to fame, so don’t you dare ask one of your movie star friends to show up and take my place.”
“You don’t have to worry because there isn’t going to be a wedding.”
“Don’t you want children?”
“No, I really don’t.”
“Oh, I can’t believe that. Every woman wants to get married and have children.”
“You have them and I’ll enjoy them, OK? I don’t feel the need to procreate.”
“Why not, for heaven’s sake?”
“Because any idiot can get married and have children; that’s no great accomplishment.”
“Well, thanks a lot!”
“Oh, I’m not talking about you. You know what I mean.”
Sookie’s face was all amazement. “I can’t believe you don’t want to ever get married. I thought I knew you better than that.”
“Believe it, we are just two different types of people. I keep telling you that—we always were.”
“No, we weren’t!”
“Yes, we were.”
“How so?” asked Sookie.
“For one thing, you were always boy crazy.”
“I was not!”
“Sookie, don’t tell me that. You used to go to bed with a cold rag on your head if some stupid boy didn’t call.”
“I did not. Once, maybe. What does that have to do with you not wanting to get married?”
“Haven’t you heard of women’s liberation? Not everybody wants to get married.”
“I know that but you don’t want to be alone the rest of your life, do you? And wind up raising a bunch of ugly dogs somewhere in the woods. You don’t need to go to some psychiatrist, Dena Nordstrom. I can tell you what’s wrong with you absolutely free. You think you don’t like people but you do; and you’re just scared of them, so you stay alone.”