“You get flowers every week? For how many years?” asked Rochelle Shartle, who had just come in to tan.
“Eleven.”
“I’d say that man of yours is a keeper,” said Rochelle.
“I didn’t always think so.”
“Come on! You and Harvey? Why, you two act like newlyweds! Harvey was bragging on you just the other day,” said Janet. “He told Dr. Strickland that you get up at 4:30 in the morning just to fix his cereal.”
“At 4:30?” said Rochelle. “Why?”
“Harvey works the early shift. He has to leave the house at 5:15,” explained Faye Beth.
“And he can’t pour his own bowl of Fruit Loops?”
“Harvey likes his cereal soft. I get up when he does so I can pour the milk on it for him while he’s in the shower. That way it’s ready to eat when he gets out,” said Faye Beth, as if that explained everything.
Rochelle’s jaw just about hit her chest.
“It’s not so bad. Once I’ve got it fixed, I go back to bed.”
“Girl! You have got that man spoiled!” exclaimed Janet.
“Some people are just made for each other,” said Rochelle. “I suppose you and Harvey have never had a cross word.”
Faye Beth snorted loudly and some of the diet Pepsi she was drinking came out of her nose. “Honey, have you ever driven by my house?”
“I don’t think so,” said Rochelle.
“You, Janet?”
“No, I haven’t. Don’t you and Harvey live way out down some little road past the cemetery?”
“We do. In a double-wide trailer. Harvey bought it before we were married. If you ever come out to see me, you’re gonna see that we’ve got a pretty little place. Lots of trees and flowers. Our trailer’s real nice too. The week before we were married, Harvey built a free-standing raised roof—set on steel poles—over the top of the trailer so as to make it safer for me. Harvey was proud as could be of that roof. He planned it, designed it, and set, framed, and shingled it himself. You know, a trailer isn’t the safest place to live, but it was what Harvey and I could afford. He said that roof would offer protection should a storm or something come up.”
“Good idea.”
“Would be, except it’s got a big piece of it all tore up.”
“Big wind?”
“You could say that,” Faye Beth laughed.
SINGLE UNTIL SHE WAS THIRTY-NINE YEARS OLD, Faye Beth Newman, bride of Harvey, did not take to marriage right off. “Harvey, Harvey,” he heard her hiss on their December wedding night. “Move over. I’m on the edge of the bed. And give me some cover. I’m freezing.”
Accustomed to sleeping alone, Faye Beth had a terrible time adjusting to a divvied-up bed. She, an only child, had never shared a bedroom, much less a bed. And Harvey, plagued with seasonal sinus trouble—bless his heart—sniffed, snored, and snorted something terrible when he slept. He also tossed and turned so much that every morning the fitted sheets were torn from both corners on his side of the bed. It was six months into their union before Faye Beth got to where she could get some semblance of a good night’s sleep.
A bed wasn’t the only thing Faye Beth had trouble sharing. When she and Harvey shopped for groceries together, they each picked out what snacks they liked best. Though she didn’t want to appear selfish, it rankled Faye Beth when she would reach into the refrigerator with her mouth all set for her favorite low-fat, cherry-vanilla yogurt, only to find that Harvey had eaten the last carton during one of his middle-of-the-night food forages.
“Harvey, honey, if you want cherry-vanilla yogurt, just tell me and I’ll buy it for you,” Faye Beth said in her sweetest voice.
“No need to do that, sugar. If I get a hankering, I’ll just have some of yours.”
Faye Beth took to hiding her yogurt in the vegetable bin of the refrigerator. Her snack was safe there, because Harvey’s favorite vegetable was spaghetti.
Then there was the checkbook. Unwisely counseled that truly committed couples share a single bank account, she and Harvey opened one together, which worked out fine until their first bank statement arrived. Comparing it to Harvey’s register in the back of his checkbook, Faye Beth got all confused.
“Harvey, darling, what do you mean you round all your checks up to the next highest dollar?”
“I’ll show you. It works like this. When I write a check for say, $23.37, I write it down as $24.00. If it’s for $19.79, I write $20.00. That way I know we always have more money in the bank than we think we do. Haven’t bounced a check in twelve years. Pretty clever, huh?”
Marriage. What had sounded like a good idea to Faye Beth when she and Harvey were courting turned out to be not what she had expected at all. During the first few months of their union, she stuffed down a lot of what she felt inside. That didn’t work for long. By their first anniversary, she had quit stuffing and had given herself over to irritability. Faye Beth still loved Harvey; she just didn’t like him very much. Seemed that no matter what he did, it made her mad.
As for Harvey? He, who hated conflict, couldn’t believe the sour turn his life had taken since he’d married Faye Beth. As a single man, he had been able to do things just the way he pleased. If he had known that marriage to Faye Beth was going to be like this, he would have given it some more thought.
To make matters worse, the couple differed in the ways that they dealt with their unhappiness. Faye Beth made a loud fuss over just about everything. Harvey feigned contentment.
“She’s just a bit high strung, is all” was how he explained Faye Beth spinning their Chevy out of the church parking lot, leaving him to find his own ride home because she was tired and he, in her opinion, had stood around and talked way too long. What? An hour was too long?
“She’s a good woman, just got a lot on her mind,” Harvey offered as an excuse when at a yard sale she stomped her foot and threatened to leave him for good if he brought home one more VCR that he was sure he could fix. So what if three nonworking models stood precariously on top of their living room TV?
“Faye Beth is having a little trouble with her hormones,” he offered other diners when down at the Wild Flour Café, after he had helped himself to a bite of her Spanish meatloaf, then her crowder peas, and finally her garlic mashed potatoes, she stuck him with her fork and drew blood. (He, not really hungry, had only ordered iced tea.)
Couples residing in a city might have chosen to visit a counselor. But in Ella Louise? Folks don’t take kindly to the idea of having their heads shrunk. So Faye Beth and Harvey just limped along.
Until the day Harvey let his goats get into Faye Beth’s rose garden. That was the thing that got on her last nerve.
Harvey, arriving home from work an hour late that afternoon, at first didn’t remember leaving the gate open. He supposed he could have accidentally done so early that morning when he went out to the storage room to retrieve an old issue of Field and Stream so he would have something to read during his lunch break. With a sinking feeling at the sight he saw when he arrived home, Harvey knew that’s what most likely had happened.
What Harvey saw was the remains of Faye Beth’s rose garden—her pride and joy. Faye Beth had babied those roses same as he babied his goats; he’d swear he heard her talking to them when she thought he wasn’t listening. Her garden boasted roses of every color, size, and variety. Faye Beth researched roses, read about roses, even sent off to the UPS man for roses. Once a week, she cut some roses and took them down to the elderly folks at the rest home. From the spent blossoms she made rose potpourri. When he had a cold, she made him something called rose-hip tea.
But Faye Beth wouldn’t be doing any of that for a while. The sight that greeted Harvey when he arrived home on that day was a bunch of almost-chewed-to-the-ground bushes and a yard full of happy goats with rose-scented breath. Pals of Harvey, the herd raised their heads in unison and called “baa” when they saw him get out of the truck, as if to say “We’ve all had a very good day. How about you?”
Then a movement on the roof of the trailer caught his eye. Faye Beth was up there, but because her back was to him, the only thing Harvey could see from his spot on the ground was Faye Beth’s red-Capri-pants-clad bottom.
“Faye Beth?”
She didn’t hear him.
“Honey?”
She didn’t hear him because she was busy.
“Sugar?”
Busy busting a hole in his precious roof.
JANET HAD FORGOTTEN about her potholes and Rochelle her tan.
“Faye Beth, you have got to be lying!” said Janet.
“You knocked a hole in your own roof?” said Rochelle. “For real?”
“Sure did,” said Faye Beth. “When I saw what Harvey’s goats had done to my roses, well, something just came over me. Next thing I knew, I was up on that roof, whacking away at the shingles.”
“What did Harvey do?” asked Janet.
“He brought me a glass of tea.”
“No!”
“He did. When I saw him coming up the ladder, trying real hard not to spill it—he had fixed it with lemon just the way I like it—well, I realized that my Harvey was a pretty brave man.”
“Brave?”
“Honey, I had a sledgehammer in my hand.”
“What did you do then?”
“Well, first off I drank the tea Harvey had fixed. Then finished knocking that hole in the roof. After that, I climbed down, went into the house, and fried up some steak for us to have for supper.”
“Harvey didn’t say anything?”
“Not a word, except could I please pass the black pepper. I suppose there wasn’t much he thought he could say. Pretty soon, he went in to take his bath, and I got out my Bible to do my evening reading. You know what verse I came to?”
“What?”
“Proverbs fourteen and one. I wasn’t the only one swinging a sledgehammer that day. The Lord had one too. Hit me right between the eyes. Right there in black and white were these words: ‘The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down.’ All of a sudden all the hurt and anger I felt just drained away, and all I felt was shame. I knew that I had been one foolish woman for many, many days. When Harvey got out of the tub, I was waiting for him with a big bowl of ice cream. I told him that I was sorry, and he told me that I wasn’t the only one to blame and that he was sorry too. We vowed then and there that we would try harder to get along.”
“What a story!” said Rochelle. “I guess after you made up and all that, Harvey fixed the hole in the roof. Did you get up there and help him?” asked Rochelle.
“No, I didn’t. Hole’s still there.”
“Just a small hole then,” said Janet.
“Big enough to drive a riding lawn mower through.”
“Really?”
“Then how come Harvey hasn’t fixed it?”
“I asked him not to. You see, Harvey and I are both plagued with short memories. Even though we were real sorry about everything that day, knowing us, it wouldn’t have been any time before we were back to our old selfish ways. This way, every time we come home and every time we leave home, neither one of us can help but see the roof of our house and think about how we nearly tore our marriage apart for nothing more than not paying attention to what our actions were doing to each other. So that’s why if you ever drive out to see our place, you’ll see a big old hunk tore out of our roof.”
MOST COUPLES RELY ON WEDDING RINGS, old photos, or some other romantic momento to remind them of the vows they’ve taken to love and to honor until death do them part. Faye Beth and Harvey are the only couple I know who have chosen hacked-up plywood and missing shingles to do the same thing.
But you know, it works. Whenever I’m in Ella Louise, I make it a point to drive out to their house. If I’ve been acting testy with my own dear husband—which, given my high-strung temperament, is too often the case—one look at their house and I’m back on track.
Yes. I agree with Faye Beth on this. Sometimes a gaping hole is best let be.
12
BUTTER UP
SIX MONTHS AFTER HER HUSBAND, Joe’s, sudden death from a heart attack, Bessie Bishop paid cash for a house in Ella Louise. It was a frame house, a story and a half, white with dark-blue trim, on a street one block south of downtown. She picked it from among all the ones she looked at because it had a porch swing and a birdbath.
For all of their married life, Bessie and Joe had called various large cities home. First Los Angeles, then Boston, Pittsburgh, and finally Houston. Joe’s job as a corporate executive required the moves, and Bessie, a nurse, never had any trouble finding part-time work wherever they lived. But while they’d made the best of those years—enjoying concerts, plays, and nice restaurants—Bessie and Joe had looked forward to the day when they could retire and move to a small town. Joe had always said that when you took away his shirt and tie, he was really a country boy at heart. When the time came, he planned to trade in his Buick for a Ford pickup truck.
“Bess, I want us to move someplace where I can spend my Saturday mornings leaning back on a bench with the other old men—you know, in front of the drugstore or the courthouse. I want to hear fat lies about women and war,” said Joe. “Sugar, I’m warning you. I aim to become a codger in my old age. I may learn to spit. And how about you?” he teased. “You gonna take up crochet?”
When Joe was two years from retiring, they had begun looking around at prospective locations, wondering what it would be like to live in this area or that one, weighing the plusses and minuses of various small communities. It was two months before Joe died when the pair of them, on a weekend jaunt, had come upon Ella Louise.
“Nice place,” Bessie remembered Joe saying. “This little town might be the one. It’s got a grocery store, a library, and a pharmacy. The folks seem friendly, and it’s less than two hours from Houston. What do you think, hon?”
She’d thought the town was just right. So much so, that even though Joe was gone, she was still heading toward Ella Louise.
ON MOVING DAY, Bessie’s sons, Leland and Roy, nearly killed themselves trying to move their mother’s things. Getting her antique player piano into the house proved to be almost more than they could do. Even after backing the rented U-Haul up close to the front door, the two struggled to hoist the thing up the house’s five front steps.
“Lands!” said Leland to Roy. “If I’d known this thing was so heavy, I’d have insisted she hire a mover. I’m not sure we’re gonna make it.”
“You know Mother. Anything to save a dime.” Roy stretched his lower back. “This piano’s heavy all right, but remember, we’ve still got the hide-a-bed ahead of us.”
“Reckon it’ll be as bad?”
“You know it.”
While her sons were at the new house in Ella Louise, straining themselves with the heavy stuff, Bessie was in Houston, packing up her kitchen, her hall closets, and her backyard storage building. She was also fretting about her cat, Baby. “I feel silly worrying about a cat,” she confided to her long-time neighbor, Sandy, who had come over to help her pack. “I’ve never been one to carry on about a pet, but ever since Joe died, Baby’s been a comfort to me. I don’t want to lose her, but they say cats don’t take to a move very well.”
“Couldn’t you just keep her inside?”
“Maybe I will for a few days, but she’s always been an inside-outside cat. Mostly outside. Last year, when we had that long spell of cold weather, I got her a litter box so she wouldn’t have to go outside. Stubborn thing refused to use it. When she wanted outside, she’d go stand by the door and meow. She’s a funny little cat. Pretty opinionated. I’m afraid she’ll run away from the n
ew place.”
Sandy thought for a moment. “My grandmother loved cats. She had three. I remember that when I was a little girl and she and my grandpa moved, she rubbed butter on all of their feet.”
“Butter? What’s that supposed to do?” Bessie asked.
“I’m not exactly sure, but I think it has something to do with the cats concentrating so hard on licking the butter off that they forget they’ve moved. Now, for it to work, you’re supposed to rub the butter real good—lots of it—between the cat’s toes. Way I remember my grandmother telling it, by the time the cat manages to lick all the butter off, they’re supposed to have come to think of the new place as their home and not try to run away.”
“I never heard of such a thing. I guess it’s worth a try.” Bessie looked over at Baby, asleep in an heirloom crystal fruit bowl. “Wonder if Parkay margarine would work. I’ve let my pantry and refrigerator get down to almost nothing. I’m out of real butter.”
“I don’t think I’d take a chance,” said Sandy. “I’ve got butter in my fridge. I’ll run and get you a stick.”
When Leland and Roy came back with the U-Haul to get the rest of her things, Bessie, with Sandy’s help, had gotten everything packed and ready to go. She’d also buttered Baby and closed her in her carrier. In the process, she’d gotten butter all over herself, but she was careful to clean off the evidence so that neither of her sons would know what she’d done; they would likely make fun. It didn’t take them long to haul the last of the boxes and smaller pieces of furniture into the truck.
Sandy hugged her. “I’m not going to stay and watch you leave. It’s too hard. You know that I’m here if you need me.” She tried not to cry. “Call me.”
“I will.”
Watermelon Days and Firefly Nights: Heartwarming Scenes from Small Town Life Page 11