Beaming Sonny Home

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Where’s your mind right now?” Gracie asked, and Mattie remembered her daughter there, in the cool night air. “See? I told you it’s dangerous for you to get into your rocker and rock yourself toward a deep thought.” Mattie felt a sudden urge to say something important to Gracie, something a daughter could hang on to after a mother’s death, words a daughter could bite into. She wanted to say, Sweetie, I know how broken your heart must have been to find out about Charlie and Sally Fennelson. I know how even your breasts can ache on them lonely nights you sit up waiting, how all the veins running up and down your arms hurt. I know how loud the seconds can sound as you stand by a window and peer out into the night, a child sleeping somewhere in your house so that you can’t cry out loud. I know what it feels like, so come here and let me hold you until some of that soreness goes away. But Gracie had never admitted to her family that Charlie was the one to leave. Just as it had happened to Mattie, it had happened to Gracie: all the town knew but the two of them. Mattie hadn’t known about Charlie either, or she would’ve told her daughter. Mattagash had managed to pull the wool twice over Mattie’s eyes. When Gracie told Charlie to get out because he was never home anyway, she probably knew in her bones something was going on somewhere. But it gave her a parcel of pride that it happened the way it did, and Mattie felt good about that. A week after Gracie officially told Charlie to leave, Sally Fennelson threw her husband, Duane, out of their house trailer and long, lanky Charlie Craft moved into Duane’s shoes, into his life. “She can have him,” Gracie had announced about Charlie, “now that I got rid of him.” Mattie herself didn’t know the truth until Rita and Marlene just up and told her one day, let her hear all about the soap opera. Charlie had been seeing Sally for a year. Well, peace of mind comes in the strangest boxes. But Gracie’s fake pride prevented Mattie from some of that bonding Gracie was forever talking about. Besides, how could Mattie tell her girls what a rogue their beloved father had been? They really believed he had been playing poker all those nights, as he used to tell them. Maybe word of his actions had reached the girls finally, as adults, but they grew up thinking he had strung the stars. And Mattie let them. But then, Jupiter and Venus had been two of those stars, or so they thought.

  “I was just thinking of your father,” Mattie answered, finally. It was the truth. “I was just thinking of Lester. It’ll be almost five years since he died. And I was thinking, in a way, of Clarence Fennelson. Twenty-eight years. Imagine that. I must mention this to Elmer if he ever turns up again. Clarence was his favorite nephew.”

  “Where is Elmer?” Gracie asked. “You two are like ticks on a dog and yet I haven’t seen him once since I been over here.”

  Mattie shrugged. “Yesterday I called Pauline and told her to peep through the windows during her Avon rounds. But his pickup truck is gone, and so is Skunk. So Elmer’s kicking up his heels somewhere. Pauline said everything looked fine through the windows.” A speeding car passed in a screeching of wheels as it rounded the bend in the road, music pounding from its interior, and then it was gone.

  “Crazy young fools,” said Mattie.

  “I gotta tell you that I’m glad in a way Elmer isn’t here,” said Gracie. “I know darn well he’d drive you to Bangor, and I can see the two of you now on television, with Skunk sitting up between you in Elmer’s rusty old pickup.” Mattie said nothing. The nighthawks were still busy. Pee-ik. Pee-ah. The bats circled the pole light frantically, swooping and diving. The summer peepers kept up their strain, filling the swamp with their own music. Behind the house came the sound of the Mattagash River, gallons of water tumbling over one another in order to get to the ocean. Mattie waited. Gracie waited. At first, Mattie thought her daughter might say something, might try to tear a brick out of that wall of bricks between them. Did she even care anymore? The truth was that, with Elmer vanished into the Mattagash Triangle, Mattie needed a friend, someone to talk to, someone who would listen patiently and then give up some honorable advice. A car’s headlights swung around the turn in the road. Mattie heard the engine first, and now she waited as another neighbor roared past the house, this time in a long white car. There was only one long white car in Mattagash, where cars were as recognizable as people. As it passed the house and went on its way, following its beams of light, two heads rode silhouetted inside.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Gracie softly. “That was Charlie’s car. That was Charlie and Sally Fennelson.” Her voice sounded old suddenly, older than Mattie’s, an old, old woman talking now, there in the evening shadows, singing out with the nighthawks. Mattie knew the sound of that voice. She knew. It wasn’t that Gracie hadn’t seen them together before, or at least expected to see them. It’s just that it could catch you off guard now and then, stick a knife into your fortitude if you weren’t expecting it. Mattie reached out and gripped Gracie’s arm.

  “That’s just two people riding in a car,” said Mattie. “That’s just two people using up the highways and byways of Mattagash, Maine. Don’t you give them any more credit than that, honey. Don’t you let them be something bigger than they are. They’re just two heads in a car.” In reply, she heard what sounded like a small gasp, there in the unlit shadows, and then Gracie’s voice, opening up for the first time since all this happened with Charlie. Gracie finally talking.

  “I wish I could live my life over,” she whispered. “I wish I could live it over so I could leave out all the bad stuff.” Mattie said nothing, and when she realized that Gracie was actually waiting, waiting, for a comment from her mother, she cleared her throat. She needed now to say the right thing. That Gracie was her daughter should have been reason enough. But what was suddenly more important to Mattie was that Gracie was another woman, another woman scorned by a heartbreaking man.

  “I’d leave out all the bad stuff,” Gracie said again, “if I could just live my life over.” Mattie thought about this statement.

  “Trouble with that, sweetie,” she said, “is that it can’t be done. Living life is like knitting a sweater. You drop a few stitches here and there. The only trouble is, when you go back to redo them lost stitches, when you go back to repair the damage, you gotta unravel a whole bunch of good stuff to get there. And you don’t want to do that, Gracie. You never mind about Charlie Craft. You never mind about them dropped stitches. You just go ahead and remember all the good stuff that life has shoveled up.” Mattie stopped for a minute to think about this. Funny, but it had come out of her mouth as the gospel truth, and it sounded right, sounded like good advice to a woman with tainted memories of her marriage. Yet Mattie herself had done just the opposite all her life. Mattie had undone a million sweaters in going back to examine lost stitches. She would tell Gracie this, she decided. She would say, Look at me. I’m the perfect example of what not to do. She wanted to say much more, pass on her experience to the next generation, her knowledge and lore and home remedies for a broken heart. But before she could speak again to her youngest daughter, before she could finally hope to pry open that bulging can of earthworms, the front door opened instead and Rita bustled out onto the porch, noise following her like a dark cloud of grackles.

  “What’s going on out here?” Rita asked. “Are you two coming in to watch the late news? Any mosquitoes out yet? Willard told me that if you wear dark clothes and aftershave at dusk in the summertime, you’re just asking for mosquitoes to flock to you in droves. Who would’ve ever thought?”

  Gracie took this opportunity to leave. She opened the door and disappeared back inside the tiny house, the way Charlie and Sally Fennelson had just disappeared in the sound of their own engine, two broken marriages trailing after them like tin cans. Now the nighthawks and peepers had only a brief chance to be heard before Rita started up again.

  “Wow,” she said, and pointed at Venus. “Look at that big bright star over there in the sky.”

  13

  The next morning Mattie stayed in bed until the girls finally crawled out from under their own b
lankets. She could hear them in the bathroom, arguing over the toothpaste, towels, combs. She could hear them in the kitchen, quarreling over the coffee, the cups, the toaster. And, as she drifted in and out of sleep, her mind running between the voices in the kitchen and the dream images in her head, it seemed as if time had caught its hook into the person she’d been almost thirty years ago, when her daughters were still in their teens and Sonny just starting school. Time had hooked the old her and was reeling her back. The funny thing was, Mattie didn’t want to go. Oh, she knew for certain there were all kinds of people who craved their youth, who would run like gazelles toward that fishhook of time, peeling off the years like old imagined skins. But not her. Not Mattie. Time meant heartaches and loneliness and lessons learned too hard and too late. No, not Mattie. So she had struggled to come out of her reverie, one in which she imagined the school bus was in the yard, honking its horn as it used to do, for the girls were always late. And this was when she remembered Sonny. What would he be then? Six, seven years old? He might be young enough to save, if she let time reel her back to the shores of the past. Sonny might be salvageable, like a shiny coin that’s driven into a river bottom, something good enough to dive for. She could take him away and let him grow up as another boy, in another town, in another life. As the squabbling voices of her daughters leaked into her dreams, Mattie could see Sonny’s blond head bobbing through the hay field, a bunch of smelly blue irises held aloft as a prize just for her.

  “Sonny,” Mattie said, “I’m over here, sweetie.” But Sonny just kept on walking, his supple frame heading toward the creek, a ghost boy walking in a ghost dream. Mattie could see the green of his jacket, that jacket she had bought him at Buzzel’s in Caribou, a jacket she’d not given an inch of thought to in almost thirty years, but there it was, as new as the day she took it off its hanger. Sonny, still young enough to shape, to mold. Sonny in his bright green jacket. Mattie would make him study this time around. This time around, there would be no wild, poetic stories, no running off from school, no masterpieces painted on frosty windows. And when he drew crazy pictures of lighthouses and sharks and silos, she would rip each of them up. She would make him draw canoes in the Mattagash River, like the other boys. She would make him draw pulp trucks and chain saws and skidders, like the other boys. But just as she was reaching out a hand, hoping to get close enough to grab the collar of that green jacket, just then the murmur of voices brought her full awake. The girls had moved from the kitchen because now whispers were coming from outside Mattie’s bedroom door. Her daughters were rallying themselves toward a plan. She could hear them. Let her sleep. But it’s not like her. Do you think she’s okay? Open the door and take a quick look. She needs the rest. It’ll keep her mind off Sonny. It’ll keep her from getting into any trouble. Mattie heard the door open gently, a sweet little squeak disturbing the silence. She kept her eyes closed, her right arm flung upon her chest. The sweet squeak again, then the door closing. Mattie opened her eyes and waited, waited for the rustle of their coats, the thump of their big purses against the hallway walls, the front door opening and closing, cars coming alive in the driveway, pebbles grating against tires, and then the sounds of car engines fading away in the distance.

  For a long time she did nothing but stare at the ceiling. Then she studied the wallpaper she had gotten in Watertown, a pale yellow background with tiny clusters of purple flowers here and there forming a nice pattern. She had bought a lavender bedspread to match it, and lavender curtains. A fluffy yellow rug lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. She couldn’t keep a fluffy rug with Lester living in the house. He never bothered to take his work boots off, not even when he came into the bedroom. Then, as soon as Gracie was finally married and gone, in 1974, Lester had moved into the girls’ room. He had not mentioned this decision to his wife, as if it were nothing more than changing coats. Mattie waited a full week, and when it was apparent that Lester wasn’t moving back, she got Rita to drive her to Watertown and she bought herself the fluffy yellow rug. She bought the pale yellow wallpaper with the purple clusters and the lavender spread and the lavender curtains. And then, for fifteen years Mattie had lain beneath her lavender shroud and watched the moon inch across the orbit of her bedroom window. She had watched the snow pile up on the horizon of her windowsill. Rain. The occasional hail. Autumn leaves fluttering. For years she lay there and listened to her husband’s breath coming and going like a runaway train, on another track from hers. She lay there and wondered what Lester was thinking of just then, what he was thinking of the day he asked her to marry him. That had become the great mystery in Mattie’s life. Not why he wanted other women. There was no puzzle in that. But why he wanted her. In 1978 Sonny moved out of the house, moved in with some woman from Watertown who couldn’t wait to jump up at the crack of dawn and cook him pancakes and squeeze him some orange juice into a glass, all while wearing a see-through negligee. Never having had fresh orange juice before, Sonny was convinced that this was a life experience he couldn’t turn down. “She even puts the sugar into my coffee, Mama,” he had told Mattie. And so he had shed the narrow bedroom, with the Rico Petrocelli baseball, and the lewd pack of playing cards, and the posters of beautiful women. Up until that day, Mattie had been able to bear the loneliness, knowing that Sonny was just next door, knowing that, in the heart of the night, Sonny’d be home from some fascinating date and he’d come in and sit on the edge of her bed and make her laugh with his crazy stories. Then he’d go off to bed and she’d feel less alone, there in her lavender grave, able to hear his occasional cough, his bed squeak as he rolled over with a dream, could imagine him all tucked in safe for the night. So four of those fifteen years weren’t so bad. But the last eleven were. When you don’t know enough about life to know what you might have missed out on, your imagination plays wicked tricks on you. For a few years, Mattie could see herself married to a millionaire somewhere if she hadn’t married Lester, burning up money like it was a pile of dead leaves. At the last of it, she came to know the truth: she would be happy for someone who would reach out once in a while and pat her hand. Sometimes, you need to be touched to know you’re still alive. Those were the nights that Mattie rose in the darkness, or in moonlight, and padded her way down the hall to Sonny’s room. And, lying on Sonny’s bed, surrounded by all those skimpily clad women on Sonny’s posters, she felt less alone. After all, Sonny’s friends were her friends.

  Now, with all three girls safely gone, probably to feast at Lola Monihan’s satellite dish, in case CNN had any new developments, Mattie made the decision to get up out of bed. Only when she had the flu so bad she couldn’t move, that sick time she mentioned to Henry a couple days ago, could she remember ever lying in bed as such. But it had occurred to her that maybe life’s truth was something she could escape, if she stayed in bed long enough. The same reason Gracie was sleeping later and later into the day, women’s studies or not. But it wasn’t. Left behind in the air now seeping under her door was the smell of leftover breakfast, of coffee and burnt toast. And it was enough to get Mattie up.

  Pauline Plunkett had obviously been by. Sitting on the kitchen table was a brown bag with Mattie written in black letters across the top. Inside, Mattie found a large bottle of Skin So Soft and that morning’s copy of the Bangor Daily News. Bless Pauline’s heart. She was always thinking of others, even on those early morning runs to Watertown to pick up Avon shipments. The girls must not have looked inside the bag. If they had, the pages of that newspaper would’ve been scattered like autumn leaves all over the house. Poor Simon Craft. This would make two days that he would be denied the joy of putting Mattie’s Bangor Daily News into her hands, Sonny’s name plastered across the front page. Yesterday, Mattie had watched from behind her curtain as Simon fidgeted in his mail car, pretending to be sorting and arranging letters, before he’d finally given up. She had no doubt that he’d discussed the hostage incident fully, at every single stop along his route, and was most anxious to pass some of his gl
eanings on to her. Sonny had once remarked that Simon Craft was Mattagash’s first satellite dish. “The mobile kind,” Sonny said.

  Mattie took her freshly perked coffee, her bacon and toast, and arranged herself in the living room, her plate before her on the coffee table. The Bangor Daily News carried almost bouncy headlines. THE GIFFORD TRIANGLE: WOMEN STAY, POODLE GOES. Beneath the announcement were photos, including one of the hostage poodle as it stood trembling on the trailer’s front porch, looking like it might prefer to be back inside with its captor. Other photos were of the crowd, including the man who was wearing the specially designed T-shirt. In another shot, the JOHN LENNON LIVES! sign loomed over a mass of heads. Mattie studied the photos carefully. All the faces in the crowd were cheering Sonny onward, no doubt of that. But here and there Mattie could pick out the grainy face of a policeman, grim and tense. The article went on to talk about Sonny Gifford’s “soft voice and folksy mannerisms,” his “Great Americans list, which includes Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Sheila Bumphrey Gifford, his estranged wife.” The article then mentioned the arrival of other journalists, from Boston and New York, and spoke of how the story of Sonny Gifford seemed to be growing. “Americans look for heroes in the strangest of places,” the article stated, “and Sonny Gifford seems to speak for a generation of unemployed, unempowered, and disillusioned young men who are seeking answers by taking control of a situation in which they feel helpless. Sonny Gifford may very well be Maine’s first Angry Young Man.”