by Lynne Hugo
“You take ’em.”
“I have told you over and over that in the first place I have to work, and…”
“Lydie works later ’n you,” Mama taunts.
“Lydia works for someone who will let her off just whenever she wants. And you know I can’t drive on Dixie Highway. Those turning lanes, off this way, then that way…I can’t, you know that. Why do we have to have this conversation every other month?”
Mama snorts. “Git me a Coke, will you?” She says git deliberately, Ellie can tell, knowing how it irritates her daughter.
“Get up and get it yourself.” Ellie’s retaliation feels cheap, but still she puts her shoulders back and walks from the living room to her bedroom instead of into the kitchen, where the linoleum is cracked and chipped down to the black glue in spots and two of the stove burners haven’t worked for three or four years. Ellie’s bedroom is festooned in pink with white gilded furniture that she bought and paid for herself because it put her in mind of Lisa Marie’s room in Graceland.
“That dog’s about as fat as Elvis when he keeled,” Mama shoots just before the slam of Ellie’s door tallies her bull’s-eye. “Charles,” she says, then repeats, louder. “Charles! Get me a Coke, will ya?”
“Seventeen thousan’ dollar…” he says without moving.
The sun has set and Ellie emerged from her room to heat the soup when Madalaine arrives with a foil-covered Pyrex dish, her ten-year-old in tow. The screen door into the kitchen slams from the vacuum of the May breeze, and Ellie jumps.
“Hello Maddie, hi Jennifer,” Ellie says, composing herself deliberately.
“Hey Auntie El, where’s Presley?” Jennifer, so blond she looks out of place with her dark-haired mother, ducks her head around to glance into the living room.
“Please, Jennifer, I’ve asked you nicely…”
“Sorry. Aunt Eleanor. Where is Mister Presley?” The girl’s voice is sassy as she enunciates with exaggerated precision.
“Jen…” Madalaine warns her with the syllable. Then she aims her voice at her sister, gesturing with her chin toward the living room. “How is she? Is the cold better?”
“What do you care?”
“Don’t start with me, El. Look, I brought you a meat loaf.” Madalaine holds it out, trying to distract her sister.
“Well I’m sorry. It’s very nice for you and Lydia, isn’t it? I’m the one left to take care of this freak show.”
“For God’s sake.” Madalaine speaks with the frustration of the long weary in a conversation that repeats itself like hiccups. “Does it ever occur to you that I have problems too? My husband’s child-lover is about to give birth. Does it occur to you that Jennifer and Brian are affected by that? That I am affected by that? How do you think I feel about my life these days? Geez, hand me a rag. This counter is covered with grease.” She swipes at the discolored space next to the stove, noting that the stove itself is equally dirty. When she tries to flip on the light over the chipped sink, nothing happens. “How do you see anything around here? That light was burned out last week.”
“At least you had a chance. You had a husband. It’s not my fault if you didn’t take care of him.” There are faint lines across Ellie’s forehead and deeper ones that connect her nose to the corners of her mouth, but her long brunette hair is fixed much the way her niece, Claire, fixes hers, which is with the sides pulled up and fastened in the back, the rest hanging loose. Ellie fixes hers with a bow, whereas Claire uses a plain tortoiseshell barrette. Today’s pink bow bobs as Ellie flounces her hair with a girlish gesture related to the way she has taken to cinching in her belts two holes more tightly than would be comfortable.
Madalaine is overcome with indignation for a fleeting moment, then her eyes fill. “Bitch,” she says under her breath. “Jennifer, come on, we’re going.”
Jennifer is in the living room teasing the dog with a handkerchief that Charles left on the end table. Presley is becoming frenetic, dashing back and forth between Charles and the television as Jennifer waves the handkerchief toward his face. “It’s mine and you can’t have it,” she taunts. From her recliner, Mama chuckles but her throat breaks it into a cough. A moment later, Jennifer’s thin arm is wrenched upward and startled, she looks up into her mother’s teary face.
“I said, we’re going. Leave the damn dog alone.” The upward pressure of Madalaine’s grip makes it awkward for Jennifer to get her feet underneath her, but her mother does not loosen her hand.
“Bye, Maw Maw,” Jennifer says, scarcely above a whisper. She’ll take on Auntie El, but she knows not to cross her mother when she’s crying again.
Her mother is still sniffling when she and Jennifer reach the car, so Jennifer gets into the back seat of their blue Chevy. She looks out the side window as Madalaine sighs, blows her nose into a Kleenex and starts the car.
“I didn’t mean to pull on your arm that way, baby,” Madalaine says into the rearview mirror.
“It’s okay,” Jennifer says to her own faint reflection. She’s told her mother that she wants her nose straightened, made as straight and small as Christina Uhlman’s. Not one cheerleader at her school has a big nose, and she is afraid hers will even keep growing until it looks like her mother’s family’s. All of the Sams sisters have faces and noses something like Maw Maw’s.
“No, it isn’t. Aunt Eleanor can just be…difficult, you know how she is. Tonight she said something mean and it just, well, my feelings got hurt.”
“Like Daddy hurts your feelings?”
Madalaine pauses, considering whether or not there is any similarity. “I guess so. I mean, well, see, Ellie thinks that her life is just so hard, you know? Like it’s my fault that she never got married. But we both know the real reason…” Jennifer had once confided to Madalaine her theory about the real reason a man never proposed to Auntie El, which is Auntie El’s nose, even more like Maw Maw’s than Aunt Lydie’s or her mother’s.
“She told me that when Aunt Lydie got married she threw her bouquet to you, but when you got married you threw yours to someone else so she’d have to stay with Maw Maw and Poppy and Charles,” Jennifer says.
“Uncle Charles,” Madalaine corrects automatically, then her voice changes. “She told you that? God, I don’t believe her. When did she say that to you?” Madalaine didn’t wait for an answer. “She doesn’t need to stay there. I’ve told her a million times to get her own apartment. Maw Maw and Poppy are still okay, they can take care of Charles.”
“But Maw Maw is so fat…” Jennifer says cautiously. “Will you get fat like Maw Maw when you’re old?”
“Absolutely not. Do you see me getting fat now? She’s always been fat. It’s not like Ellie really does anything, anyway. Why do you think I brought that meat loaf over?”
“Because Charles and Poppy must get tired of grilled cheese.” Jennifer gives her line of the litany in a singsong. She blows her wispy bangs off her forehead, aping her mother’s irritation.
“I guess they must.” Madalaine feels drained and falls silent for several minutes as the car passes through aging downtown Maysfield, past Gosset’s Drugstore, Lorenz Jewelry and the hundred-twenty-year-old courthouse, into an area still solidly settled in middle class. The homes here aren’t new, but they’re more substantial, some brick, some aluminum-sided, and there is landscaping. How to keep the house chews at Madalaine’s mind. She absolutely does not want to move back into an area like the one she grew up in, a scant step above the white trash, who were a scant step above the blacks in Maysfield. All the boundaries on that miserable west side were blurry, though. There wasn’t that much difference in the run-down, patched-roof houses, but the white streets mostly had sidewalks and got electricity back quicker after a lightning storm than the mixed and all-black ones. Her parents’ house has a sidewalk in front of it all right, but it’s a slatternly place, constructed forty years ago by an unexacting builder and little repaired since.
“Will Brian be home yet?” Jennifer says tentatively, ris
king a change of subject.
“He should be, honey. Aunt Lydie was going to let Claire have her car this afternoon, and Claire’s going to run Brian home after…I don’t remember, some meeting at school. That was nice of Claire, don’t you think, to say Brian and Christy could double with her and Kevin to the prom? I really didn’t want him driving. I know Aunt Lydie suggested it, but, still it was nice of Claire to go along with it.”
“You let him drive me,” Jennifer observes, a little miffed.
“Oh sweetheart, that’s different. I don’t have to worry about you trying to sit on his lap to make kissy face while he’s driving now, do I? Here, come on, climb over the seat and come up front with me.”
Jennifer hesitates a moment but then complies, her colt legs folding and then depositing her sideways into the front seat. Her mother laughs and reaches over to help her right herself, then caresses her hair, as long as Ellie’s and Claire’s, but downy and flyaway, angel hair on a Christmas tree. Clips meant to hold ponytails slip right out of it because it is so thin. Madalaine is always after her to have it cut short, but Jennifer wants it to be like a cheerleader’s. Now Madalaine plays with the strands that have come loose from the rubber band to float beside Jennifer’s face and over her neck. She tucks one behind Jennifer’s ear, channeled neatly as a little whelk shell, nothing like Brian’s, oversize and raw-looking as his hands and feet. Madalaine has always observed the details of her children closely.
“I guess you’re getting too big to climb over the seat,” Madalaine says, a suppressed smile playing about the corners of her mouth. It’s important that Jennifer not think she was laughing at her.
“Mom, could you…I mean, could you, like, I mean, have another one…a baby?” Jennifer hesitates and lurches through the question.
“Are you wishing for one?”
“Sort of, so Melody won’t have anything over us anymore, but, I don’t know, ’cause you said being a middle child is awful.”
Madalaine breathes in sharply. Her eyes fill and she lets go of the wheel to use a bare wrist to wipe the sudden overflow. She doesn’t answer for a moment, then exhales in a long blown-out sigh and rakes the same free hand through her straight hair. Its chin-length darkness shows odd strands of gray here and there all over the top. When she looks in a morning mirror, she is often startled; her hair looks as though she’s walked through a faint spider web. It makes her unaccountably angry and she wonders if Lydie is coloring her hair these days. “I don’t want another baby,” she says, fighting to keep her tone light and losing right off. “I’ve got you, babe…” she sings, her voice wavery.
Madalaine signals left and turns onto the avenue that borders the section of neat crosshatched streets that Jennifer calls her neighborhood. By the time they reach their brick ranch house, with its orderly yellow shutters and doors, three bedrooms and family room with a fireplace, neither has found anything else to say.
CHAPTER 3
Mama’s had a spring cold all week and because Ellie feels put upon, she’s started talking about Graceland again. She completely ignores what happened when we tried that. I headed there with her almost a year ago, when Bill first left Madalaine, and I had to agree with Ellie that Maddie needed something to take her mind off things. Of course, I knew perfectly well that Maddie didn’t give a hoot about Graceland and that when Ellie suggested that I drive the three of us to Memphis, it had a whole lot more to do with Ellie and her ridiculous obsession than our sister’s broken heart. Ellie went on about how Elvis’s songs could help Maddie if she’d let them, and how we should go during Death Week.
“Death Week? Death Week?” I don’t usually get sarcastic with Ellie, but honestly. Sometimes it doesn’t seem possible that the four of us swam out of the same gene pool, no matter how much we look alike. “Oh yes, I can see how Death Week would cheer her right up.” The whole family was at my house. I’d invited them to cook out on the Fourth of July, hoping that the commotion would jolt Maddie out of her zombie state. Ellie and I were in my kitchen. I was making potato salad while Ellie was standing around adjusting her bra straps and smoothing the front of her flowered sundress.
“Don’t you know ‘Hurt’? That song’s exactly what she’s going through,” she said. “And my chart says the week of August fourteenth is ideal for a trip. The anniversary is the sixteenth, so you can see it’s a sign.” Ellie reached back and fixed her bow while she acted wounded and indignant at the same time.
I rolled my eyes, but managed not to say anything about her astrological chart, which is how Ellie justifies every batty notion she gets. “Yes, and Bill is a hound dog who belongs in the jail-house to sing the blues to that…teenager…he’s taken up with, but El, Death Week? I’m afraid it will give her ideas….” I tried to make my voice patient and nice while I beat the potato salad into smithereens. I smiled at her, but she wasn’t buying it.
“Let’s just let Maddie decide, then.” She was huffy.
To my disgust, Maddie said, “Yeah, okay, whatever you want,” in a spiritless way that made me want to put my hands around her neck and squeeze hard just to make her stand up for herself. Instead, the next month I was stuck driving the three of us seven hours southwest to Memphis. I’ve always been like this. In my head I’m firm and direct and say no to crazy things, no matter who wants to do them, even me. In real life, though, anyone can leech the will right out of me, and I deliver the goods quietly with despair and a smile.
Except when it came to John. Being with him was my will, and the only time in my life I did exactly what I really wanted. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing a reckless stranger there. What was bizarre was that about a month before John and I met, I’d been to a classmate’s baby shower. Sherry, the hostess, had gone and paid a psychic from the Yellow Pages twenty-five dollars to come read our minds and palms and tarot cards. I can remember her exact words, when it was my turn. She first held my hand and sat a minute with her eyes closed. Then she opened them and studied me without a word, still holding my hand. Finally she bent over my palm another throbbing minute.
“I see you have problems with love,” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m happily married except when I’m picking up his dirty socks.” The women around me laughed and stacked up agreement about what slobs their husbands were.
“Any port in a storm,” she said with a shrug. “You will love.”
“I do love,” I corrected.
“My mistake,” she said coolly and went on. “I see a child, yes, a daughter, correct?” She traced a branch on my hand with a short unpolished nail. She did not look like a fortune teller. No blood-red lips and nails, no black eye makeup or black-dyed hair. And she was wrong again. That was during the time that I’d been trying for two years to get pregnant. Wayne’s sperm count made his shoe size look like a big number, and my friends’ baby showers were endurance trials for me. We were talking about adopting, even though Dr. Hays had told him to switch to boxer shorts and think big.
“No, I have no children.”
She lifted my palm closer to her face. “This is not the hand of a childless woman,” she said. My friends’ voices receded into silence.
“Well, your mistake again,” I said lightly into the dead quiet of my own aura, and went home to cry in the bathtub that night.
The thing is, within weeks I met John. Okay, so “problems with love,” could be said of any woman alive and breathing who doesn’t live in a convent. But what about the fact that less than two years later my Anna Claire was born? “Character is fate,” my sophomore English teacher kept telling us when we read Oedipus Rex and Antigone. I don’t believe that anymore. After what happened, I think fate is fate.
Sometimes it seems as though my whole real life was compressed into those couple of years, the time I spent with John, and later, when I was actually carrying a baby and felt her quickening, first a butterfly inside, and then like a Mack truck trying to turn around in a closet. In between a pain like an enormous single
amaryllis bloomed, so red, so intense it made me want to die, but that too, in retrospect, seems vital and more alive than I was before or after. Maybe when I tried to take Maddie and Ellie to Graceland, silly as it sounds, I hoped that something would happen. Nothing like a magical healing for Maddie, or a mystical balm flowing over Ellie’s shriveled heart—or mine, for that matter—but that, well, maybe the three of us would have a good time together. I wanted to laugh, to feel connected to my sisters in a way I couldn’t lose because they’d always be right near me, unlike Claire who I refuse to keep from having her own life. I should have known better. Sometimes I hardly think I know them at all.
That was the thing with John. When we first started talking, I felt as connected to him as threads woven into a cloth of coherent plaid. I say when we first started talking, instead of when we met, because that’s how it happened. I’d been going to Kathy’s Kookin’ Kafe for a couple of years, just whenever I hadn’t had time in the morning to put a tuna sandwich together, or I had, but then stuck it in the refrigerator at the office to save for the next day because someone died and I had to get out for a while. Kathy’s was a little lunch counter downtown that had six booths. If it wasn’t busy, I’d take a booth for myself and read while I ate. Other days, I’d have to sit at the counter, but that really didn’t bother me. I’d eat quickly and walk the long way back to the office, especially if it was a spectacular autumn and the air tingled with the clarity of burnt orange against blue.
And that’s exactly how it happened. On that kind of October day, I got to Kathy’s right at noon and, of course, the booths were full. I slid onto a stool and ordered my usual chicken salad on wheat. Kathy set my hot tea in front of me and mixed concern into her smile. “So who died?”
I shook my head. “Dick Bradshaw had a stroke. He’s in ICU over at St. Elizabeth’s.”