He realized his mother was speaking.
“There wasn’t room for Muriel in this house. There was too much of her father and mother and stepmother in here. God knows they were a brooding bunch. E. G. Porter clung to every last dollar and possession of his pitiful life, until he lost it.” She rubbed her shoulders and cast a disdaining eye around the kitchen.
Tate, following her gaze, saw wallpaper peeling in the corner and the dingy paint on all the woodwork.
“It is hard to breathe in this house,” his mother said. “Muriel was chokin’ to death here. And now all you’ve done since you came is bring old junk from your old life and add it all in. There is no room for new life, because of all the old dead hanging around.”
His mother could get some far-out ideas.
His mother looked at him in that way she had that indicated she saw things inside him.
“I never had a house before,” he said.
Maybe what he meant was that he had never made such a commitment before, not to a house, nor to creating a family life.
“Are you here to stay?”
“Yes,” he said with some aggravation. “Marilee and I have talked about the house.” Yes, they had. “There are lots of changes we’ll be making. We’re goin’ to have another bathroom installed down here under the stairs, get everything painted.”
He left off, unable to recall what exactly they had spoken of. Their discussions had been the sort of talk people indulge in when they’re dreaming out loud.
“Life is a flow, Tate. When you hang on to things, you dam up the flow. Discard what is no longer used…what no longer suits,” she said in an emphatic manner, “and you make way for the new and better and perfectly suitable to enter. Do you really need an antique refrigerator?” she asked, putting her hand on the old Kelvinator.
Without waiting for an answer, which Tate was trying to come up with, she came toward him and touched his arm.
“Let go of the old life and start with the new, Tate. Simply begin.”
After several long seconds, he said, “Yes, you’re right,” and bent and kissed her cheek.
He started out of the room, then paused at the doorway. “What will I do when you are gone?” he asked her, struck suddenly to the core with the horrendous thought.
“What makes you think I’m goin’ first?” she snapped at him, adding her saucy grin.
He shook his head and walked out, his eyes misting over, thinking about the foolish assumption that there came a day a man got too old to listen to his mother. He had not reached that stage. Maybe because his mother kept one step ahead of him at all times. One step ahead of just about everybody, really.
In his bedroom, from the top drawer of his dresser, he brought out the black velvet ring box. He opened it and looked at the band inside that matched the diamond ring on Marilee’s finger.
With this ring, I thee wed. That was what he had thought when he slipped the engagement ring on her finger. He had, somewhere in the past days, forgotten that. He had made his commitment to her, and then gotten sidetracked.
Possibly commitments had to be reconfirmed each day.
Replacing the ring in the drawer, he stood looking around for a full minute, assessing the situation with the eye of a man of renewed conviction.
Then, moving in long strides, he went to the bedside table and pulled out a well-worn leather address book, flipping through it until he found the number for the travel agent he used most often. Guy, down in Houston. He dialed, and when Guy came on the line, he told him to put together a vacation at Disney World for two adults and two children. “The best rooms, the best wine, the best…well, you get it. This is a trip for a lifetime,” he told the young man. He was already in debt; going deeper didn’t seem a problem.
As he said goodbye, his eye dropped down the short page of the worn address book and stopped on his ex-wife’s address and number. He had not used it in some ten years. Yesterday, dead and gone. He ripped out the address and tore it into small pieces, then tossed it into the trash basket.
Again he surveyed the room. Somewhere he had read that the bedroom set the tone for the marriage. Should start off on the right foot—make this an incredible room, since he hoped what went on in here would be pretty incredible. A room for lovers.
A room for his fair love, for the heart of his heart, for the wife he would love as he loved himself.
But, and here was a daunting dilemma, he had no idea how to bring about such a room, or quite what Marilee would find suitable for incredible happenings.
A knock sounded at the door, and his mother poked her head inside. “Here, dear. I knew I saved this card for a reason. It’s the card of an interior decorator in Dallas. I used to go to yoga class with her mother. Delightful lady. Liked colors. I imagine her daughter will be equally adept at colors and such.”
“I was just thinking about a decorator,” Tate said, slowly taking the card.
“Oh, I’m sure you were. The memory of that card just popped into my mind.” She glanced around the room. “God knows we need some help here.” She swept out in her usual sweeping manner.
The name printed on the card, in iridescent turquoise, was Honey Moon. “Specializing in personal expression and harmony in environments.”
Sounded really New Age.
Taking a deep breath, he picked up the telephone. Never let it be said that he wasn’t ready to move right along with the modern era.
He went through several assistants, but stuck to his guns in his intention to go to the top and speak to Honey Moon herself. If nothing else, he wanted to know what a woman with such a name sounded like.
“Yes, this is Honey Moon.” Her tone made him think of moonlit nights in the bayou, just the type of interior decorator he suspected he needed.
He explained his need, and, much to his surprise, she told him she could do all the work from Dallas. “I have clients all over the country. I will have everything delivered and set up by emissaries.”
Emissaries? Sounded expensive. He had good credit, thus far.
She said, “I will e-mail you a questionnaire. Fill it out, skip no questions. Make a drawing of your bedroom, and include the directions north, south, etcetera. Send that and a picture of you and your intended bride. Don’t fax those. Send them FedEx.”
He didn’t think he would have been surprised if she had requested a lock of Marilee’s hair.
A shrill buzzing split the air, followed by what sounded and felt like a wrecking ball slamming into the house.
Marilee, reacting in the fashion of someone deeply in thought, as she was with the article she was writing about rabies in the state, jumped and let out a “Yaaa!”
Abandoning her chair, she raced into the laundry room, where the washer was halfway across the floor and into takeoff position. She threw herself atop it in an attempt to hold it down, while pulling out the knob. It halted abruptly, as if shot dead.
Whew. Catching her breath, she glared at the machine, wondering how it could barely wash clothes but could manage to walk a good two feet.
It probably was due to the strength of the quilt from Willie Lee’s bed. She should have taken it to the laundry but had not wanted to take the time, so she had stuffed it into her large-capacity, but not large enough for quilts, fifteen-year-old model that she had purchased from her neighbor Leon Purvis when, in an effort to bribe his wife into not leaving him, he had bought her a brand-new and sparkling Kenmore washer and dryer set. His wife had been appeased—indeed, had sang Leon’s praises for about a year—but eventually she had left him anyway to become a cross-country truck driver who apparently never had to bother doing her own laundry but used drop-off service.
She thought longingly of the washer she had seen in the latest Better Homes and Gardens magazine. It loaded from the front, like a commercial washer, and handled quilts and bedspreads with ease, so the advertising stated. It cost a mint.
She could buy one when she married Tate, came the whisper into her mind, followed
closely by the question: Would Tate mind her spending so much money on a washer?
Was she marrying Tate for a washer?
This dismaying and guilty thought sliced through her and was followed immediately by another: Would marrying him be in vain, if he wouldn’t let her buy a washer?
She did not like to think of herself as a woman who married for appliances. Of course that wasn’t why she was marrying Tate.
Although she would have to concede that it was a hard world, and women had married for less convenience than an appliance, she thought, just as the children burst in the back door, Willie Lee saying, “We are back from Mis-ter Win-ston’s, Ma-ma.”
“I can see that. Did you have a good time?”
“Yes.”
“Take your shoes off, Willie Lee,” said Corrine, always neat. “We fed the rabbits and cleaned their cages before we came in.”
“You two have been busy this mornin’.” Marilee shoved at the washer, and Corrine, familiar with the machine’s idiosyncrasies, stepped beside her to help move it back into proper position. Marilee jumping on one corner was required to get it level again.
“Hors-es have long necks,” Willie Lee said. “I pet-ted the baby. She lik-ed me. The mo-ther lik-ed me, too, but not too much.”
Marilee repositioned the quilt and started the washer; it wobbled like a chair that had lost a leg, but it ran okay. She went to make the children peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and to listen to tales of their experience with the horses. Talking of horses made her think of what Parker had told her about there being more cases of rabies in horses and cattle than in dogs or cats. She couldn’t find a pencil to jot down the thought.
“It’s in your hair,” said Corrine, the ever-helpful.
She jotted the thought on a napkin, stuck the pencil back in her hair for future notations and went back to being a mother, passing bread to the children. “Go on. What else?”
Willie Lee cocked his head and said, “They smelled like sun-shine. They poop a lot, but it does not stink so much like dog poop. And the mo-ther is grumpy.”
“She is?” She thought proudly that Willie Lee was doing good these days spreading his peanut butter on the bread.
“Yes. She kick-ed Beau. Hard.”
“She did? Who’s Beau? Is he hurt?” Becoming alarmed, she looked to Corrine for explanation.
“Just Ricky Dale’s dog…stupid puppy. He was annoyin’ the mare. He’s okay.”
“Oh, well, good.” She had the distressing thought that perhaps she had been negligent in allowing the children to go alone to see the horses. Some horses could be dangerous, and she had not even considered this, being preoccupied with laundry and writing to earn a living.
“He got dead-ed, but he is o-kay.”
He got deaded?
The doorbell rang. “Hey…anyone home?”
It was Stuart’s voice. He came into the kitchen at the same instant the washer had another fit. Marilee and Corrine raced into the laundry room and threw themselves on the washer to hold it down, Marilee fumbling to turn it off.
Into the resulting quiet came Stuart’s voice. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Overload,” Marilee said.
She doubted that the man had ever operated a washing machine in his life. At least not a private one.
There he stood, her debonair ex-husband, with his hands casually slipped into the pockets of his slacks, not a hair out of place, and wearing a perfectly starched cotton shirt and sharply creased chinos, done up at some hot, steamy laundry out of his view. He could have stepped out of a glossy catalog for high-priced travel clothes, while she, leaning desperately on a washer, with sweat curling her hair that she was not certain she had combed that morning, and wearing a worn T-shirt and jogging pants, felt she could be cited as justification as to why men ran off with their secretaries.
The pencil fell out of her hair and clattered to the floor.
Stuart bent to retrieve it. She saw the silky, shiny silver hairs at the top of his head as he did so. As he handed her the pencil, he chuckled and suggested that she was no match for a washing machine. This comment and accompanying laugh struck her in a fateful, wounded place.
She said, “I’m going to take a hot bath. Children, you can take naps or watch television. Stuart…” She grabbed the basket filled with clean clothes and jammed it at him. “You can fold clothes. And when I get out of my bath, we’re going to have a talk.”
She strode past him, leaving the fumes of her anger in the passing, and leaving Stuart, thoroughly bewildered as to what he had said wrong, holding the basket.
He looked into it. There were lacy panties on the top. And bras. How did one fold a bra? He did not do his own laundry, except for washing out underwear and a shirt now and again while on a shoot in some wild yonder, and it had been years since he had been out in the wild yonder.
He looked down to see the girl, Corrine, staring up at him. He often found her watching him with her eyes deep and dark as those of the old witchy-women back in the Cajun bayou where he had spent his childhood, then escaped. Gave him the willies.
“How about I give you, say—” he checked his pocket “—three bucks, and you fold these things?”
He thought for a surprising instant that she was going to refuse, but then she said, “Okay,” and reached to take the basket. It was a load for her, but she seemed adept. She took it to the kitchen table, then turned to him and held out her hand.
“You fold them first.”
She shook her head and kept the hand out. He put dollar bills in it. “Smart girl.”
Some minutes later he had sat himself on the couch, idly watching cartoon figures that Willie Lee liked on television and wondering exactly what he should reveal to Marilee when they talked. He had hoped to make better inroads into her good graces before he had to reveal the state of his health. Or ill health, as was the case.
He had sent her roses, but she hadn’t brought them home from the office. He had been trying for a romantic candlelit dinner for two, but he couldn’t seem to get her away from a crowd of people. He had begun to think of a picnic, which was to have been his proposal this afternoon.
Then her voice echoed in his thoughts: “We’re going to have a talk.”
He began to feel a little panicked. He wasn’t ready for any deep, calling-to-account conversation. He just wanted to make up to her, somehow, to have things okay between them, so that she would feel kindly toward him when he told her the truth of his situation.
The girl appeared in front of him, stuck an opened magazine toward him and tapped it with her finger. “Aunt Marilee would like one of these.”
He stared at her a moment, then took the magazine and looked at what she showed him, an advertisement for a washing machine. “This one?”
“Yes. And you might want to get the dryer, too.”
Although Corrine could not name the desire that drove her, she felt a longing to take care of her aunt Marilee, if she could possibly do so, in the same manner that she looked after Willie Lee. In some general way she had the idea that they would all be better, no matter what happened, to get a washing machine while the getting was good.
She was pleased when Mr. James poked his head in the kitchen, where she folded clothes at the table, and said in a very rushed manner, “Tell your aunt Marilee that I’ll be back later.” He winked. “I’m going to get her a surprise.”
Marilee slathered on her best face lotion, blew her hair dry and billowy, and whipped on her makeup, doing the full job. Lastly she chose Sahara Sunset Red lipstick. With all this, she was putting on every bit of confidence she could rake up. She had a few things to say to Mr. Stuart James, and she would do best to look competent when she spoke.
Dashing in her robe from the bathroom to her bedroom, she slipped into soft jeans and a deep blue sweater with a draping boat-neck neckline. Sultry, but not too much. She spritzed White Shoulders on her neck and remembered how Tate always told her she smelled delicious when she wore
it.
What was she trying to do?
She looked at her reflection in the mirror. She did not want to be a woman a man left, as Stuart had left her. She could not abide appearing like that.
That was yesterday. Let go of the resentment. Deal with today.
She tried, as if heaving an enormous rock from the middle of her soul. The feeling would not budge. And today she still did not want to be the sort of woman a man ran from. She did not want to be ashamed.
Straightening her shoulders, she stepped out into the living room, where she found Willie Lee and Munro asleep upon the rug in front of the television, and Corrine slouched in the big chair, reading.
“Where’s Stuart?” she asked, casting a glance toward the kitchen.
“Oh, he left for a little bit,” Corrine told her. “But he said to tell you that he’d be back later.”
“How much later?”
“He didn’t say. But I think he went to get you something.”
“What? What did he say?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He just said he was going out to get you a surprise.”
Stuart had never once given her what she needed, Marilee thought, which was his undivided attention.
Twelve
Of love, women and washing machines…
Aunt Vella called. “Is now a good time to come over? I have some bridal magazines for you, and I want to talk to you.” Vella had learned, most especially in the last year, to say things straight out.
“I guess so. What do you want to talk about?”
Holding the telephone between her shoulder and her chin, Marilee dipped a peppermint tea bag into a cup of steaming water. She could only stomach herb tea when the lowest of moods came on her. Those moods were beyond even the ministrations of chocolate. Stuart’s inclination to keep leaving her, which had gone on throughout their entire marriage, when he had frequently left her places—stranded at hotels waiting for him; stranded out at back-country groceries, waiting for him; and even once stranded at an airport overnight, waiting for him—until one day he told her he was going and would not return, so there was no need to wait, seemed to overwhelm her, as fresh as when she had been married to him.
At the Corner of Love and Heartache Page 12