Emma had been playing with designs for the wedding invitation. Something very personal. She had once volunteered to take care of the invitations, and Gracie had seemed quite taken with the idea. But since Gracie hadn’t mentioned it yesterday, Emma had kept silent. From all that she had read, the wedding invitations were the domain of the bride and her mother.
There remained the invitations for the barbeque. She put that on her list. Then she drifted off in thought about various designs and other things, until all of a sudden she was gazing at her daily calendar and read the notation: Catherine, 11:30.
Oh, my word. She had totally forgotten her private session!
Gazing at the notation, as if doing so would erase it, she tried to recall making the appointment and for what purpose. It seemed all of it had happened months ago, rather than less than a week. She thought of canceling, but only for a split second, because, of course, she couldn’t do that at this late time. Not only did canceling at the last minute mean that she would still be charged the fee, but it would be irresponsible and rude.
Then, “Emma…yoo-hoo!”
It was her mother’s voice calling out from the front of the house, followed by heavy footsteps approaching. This was a surprise, since it was only eight-thirty in the morning. Her mother was not an early riser; in fact, she rarely rose before ten, then usually sat reading until noon.
“You’re up so early. What’s wrong?” Emma said, having a small panic and inspecting her mother for signs of possible heart attack or something of that nature. Her mother looked a little disheveled. Perhaps she had been attacked.
But her mother replied, “Why, nothin’, honey. I’m not up early. I haven’t been to bed.” Pushing a curl from her forehead, her mother plopped heavily into a chair and went on to say that she had gotten pumped up from something Wadley Smith had said, and had been up all night researching and writing an article about General Linus Gregory, a family ancestor and hero of the Revolution in North Carolina.
“Wadley’s family and ours are related—I’m sure of it—through the General Gregory connection.” Her mother was still so jazzed—likely from the pots of coffee that she always drank during these marathon writing sessions—that she leaned forward with intensity and continued with all the names of who had married whom and produced whom. This sort of subject was born in her mother’s blood. It was like hearing a reading from the Bible. Emma had grown up with it. She had listened to her grandmother do the same thing to her mother, and it occurred to her that she was likely to do this to Johnny. It was a disconcerting thought.
“I’m goin’ to send it to American Heritage Magazine,” her mother said of her article. “Or possibly each of the Southern state magazines. I get an article in any of ’em and that will put cotton in Pamela Markham’s mouth, by cracky.”
“That will be wonderful,” Emma said, instantly feeling a little torn. Wishing cotton into someone’s mouth did not seem quite appropriate. Still, one’s loyalty lay with one’s mother.
“Might I have a cup of coffee, honey?” her mother asked.
“Oh…I just poured it out.”
Her mother regarded her expectantly.
“I’ll make a fresh pot,” Emma said.
While Emma made the coffee, her mother went into the living room to retrieve the family album that she was compiling for Gracie and Johnny, which she had forgotten the previous evening. Returning, she pointed out a photograph of a large rural house and identified it as her great-grandparents’ home—the “home place,” she called it—saying they had been descendants of General Gregory.
“Mother…what is this?” Emma pointed to a black-and-white photograph of her mother and herself. Another figure had, apparently, been standing behind her but had been neatly snipped out of the picture.
“Oh, that was your father, but he left our lives,” said her mother. “That’s how I illustrated it…but that tree…” She pointed. “…It stayed for as long as we lived there.”
Emma could think of nothing to say to that. She gazed at the picture until her mother turned the page to a wedding photograph of her and John Cole.
“You do remember those photographs of you and John Cole that you said you would find?” her mother said.
“Yes. I will look this evenin’.”
“Oh, good. Sylvia said she would send me the info and photographs for Gracie’s pages. She said there weren’t many. That her family didn’t keep pictures. Can you imagine?”
Emma said she couldn’t imagine it, and she really couldn’t. Her family saved everything. Even pictures where her mother had cut out her father. Her mother had once had a stack of bills saved by her grandmother for over forty years. Emma herself had some drawers of colorful wrapping paper that she saved just in case she found a creative use for it.
“I can make whatever she gives us look larger,” her mother said with confidence. “But would you remind Sylvia about the pictures when you talk to her?”
“I doubt I’ll be speakin’ with Sylvia, Mama.”
“Oh?” Her mother regarded her.
“There’s no reason for me to. I just had her to dinner because it was the polite thing. We aren’t close friends or anything. We won’t be related,” she added, rising to tidy up around the sink. She was going to have to get ready for her appointment, but she rather hoped her mother would leave first. She did not want to tell her mother that she was going to see a therapist.
“Well, honey, maybe if you call Johnny now, you can catch them before Sylvia and Wadley fly back. I really can’t give the kids a half-empty book.”
Emma turned and met her mother’s gaze. Then she stepped to the phone on the wall and called Johnny. He didn’t answer, so she left a message.
“Well,” said her mother, clearly disappointed.
“We can tell Gracie at the first possible moment. She will get what you need.”
Her mother brightened somewhat. “Yes, that will have to do—and Gracie is a lovely person.”
“Yes, she is,” Emma agreed.
“And Sylvia is lovely, too. Don’t you think?”
“Yes.” Emma took up her mother’s now-empty coffee mug to put in the dishwasher. “I have to get goin’, Mama. I have an appointment late this morning.”
Halfway expecting her mother to ask where she was going, she was ready with an explanation about visiting the printer to order invitations to the barbeque. She even had her mouth open.
But instead, as if not hearing her, her mother said, “I do hope Sylvia marries Wadley. That will help a little.”
“In what way?” asked Emma, puzzled.
“Well…it’ll bring her and Gracie a little farther south.”
“Oh, Mama! Now you sound like Pamela Markham.”
“I do not. North Carolina and Oklahoma are Southern. But Baltimore is stretchin’ it—I don’t care what the Census Bureau says.”
Emma drove over to New Hope Counseling Center with both hands on the wheel, air conditioner blowing hard, eyes shielded by dark glasses and foot firmly pushing the accelerator. Several times she blinked and realized that she had been so lost in thought as to have gone through intersections without any memory of them. Since she was on the road and between the lines, she held to hope that she had done the required stopping at the signs.
Her thoughts were bouncing from one thing to another in that rapid and annoying manner that sometimes took hold of a person—especially, it seemed, women—when they had a whole lot to do, and when they were puzzling out situations.
Emma kept returning to the memory of Sylvia Kinney coming into her home, and how they both pretended so well to be meeting for the first time. They could have been awarded an Oscar. She imagined standing at the microphone with the woman, both holding on to their Oscar. And then both starting to tug and ending up in a physical fight.
That she had lied by omission began to torture her mind and made her promise never to do such a thing again. God, if it can all just turn out all right… By “all right” she bas
ically meant “stay hidden.”
She also remembered Sylvia with Gracie, and how she had felt jealous. Yes, she had, and she didn’t like it, so she moved on from that thought.
Then she was thinking of her mother’s comment about Baltimore, which illustrated using a fact for her purpose when it suited her and discounting it when it did not.
Everything in life was a matter of opinion. Having an opinion did not make it absolute truth.
For example, John Cole and her mother said Sylvia Kinney was nice and a lovely person. Emma could agree—somewhat—with that opinion, but not wholeheartedly. She did not agree that marrying Wadley Smith was going to greatly improve the woman. She rather believed it quite possibly might end up detracting from Wadley. Sylvia was a forceful sort. She was likely to wear him down.
To describe Sylvia Kinney, Emma would more use words like elegant…sophisticated…chic, although Emma was never certain if the pronunciation was shick or chick or sheek. She could look the word up in the dictionary. Or ask Belinda, although Belinda might be just as country as Emma was and not know, either.
Educated, Emma thought, was a word to describe Sylvia. But surely that could apply to herself, as well. She did know the meaning and spelling of the word “chic,” even if she couldn’t say it. Likely Sylvia would not know how to pronounce coyote. She would probably say, as many did, kie-oh-tee, but the original pronunciation was kie-ote.
“Highfalutin.” That was a word to describe Sylvia Kinney. Although the woman was not the type to use such a word.
Just then, glancing down and seeing her speedometer, she instantly lifted her foot. She was like Belinda. She tended to press the accelerator harder when she was thinking harder.
“How do you say the word, C-H-I-C?” Emma asked, as she followed Catherine into her office.
“Ah…I believe it is sheek. But I could be wrong.”
Emma was a little surprised that Catherine wouldn’t know. She had thought the woman very educated, certainly more along the sophisticated lines of Sylvia Kinney. She was also a little surprised that Catherine sat in the upholstered chair, rather than in her desk chair. Not that it mattered, but Emma noticed it. Things were obviously different in a private session.
Emma sat in the same place on the couch where she sat when she and John Cole came together for their sessions. She looked over to the empty place where he normally sat and felt funny.
“So why don’t you tell me what’s been going on?” Catherine said.
“Oh. Well, there’s been a lot, actually.”
In the manner of diving off a pier, she launched into the telling. She started with the Sunday dinner and her impressions of Sylvia—which, she explained, was why she had wanted to know how to say the word “chic.” She also put in that she did know how to say and spell “highfalutin.” Because of starting with the dinner, she then had to back up and tell about everything else. It seemed as if she repeatedly used the word “because.”
As she had done in the marriage counseling sessions, she found herself just talking and talking. A number of times she had a sense of standing off and observing herself rattling on. She could not seem to stop. Perhaps it was the way Catherine seemed to listen with attentiveness. And that Catherine was not family or a friend, so Emma could tell her how angry she had really been about Sylvia Kinney not liking Johnny, but how she had pretended to be all calm to Johnny and Gracie. And then she confided about Joella’s drinking, observing how Charlie J. ignored her, hardly noticing that she was in the room, his own wife.
Once, when Emma was speaking about finding Sylvia annoying, Catherine managed to get in, “Let’s look at that. What do you suppose is happening?”
“I suppose that she is looking down on us.”
“Uh-huh. Suppose we take a look at your feelings…”
“Well, my feeling is that she is on my last nerve,” Emma responded. “She’s standoffish. I’m as friendly as I can be—I extended a hand of friendliness, but it’s like all of it bounces right off her. She just looks at me and all the family like we aren’t up to her level. She doesn’t hardly talk. She’ll answer if you ask her something, and she smiles, but she doesn’t really carry on a conversation. It is like talkin’ to a brick wall.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Emma was a little surprised. She would have thought Catherine, being a therapist, could tell her the reason.
“Well,” she said, thinking about it, “you know, maybe she just doesn’t know what to say.” This thought came suddenly and intrigued her. “We really are quite different from each other. Our whole family is as different from her as night and day, and there she was, thrust into our environment. What is funny is that Wadley Smith isn’t—so different from us, I mean. He talks, and he’s just like home folks. Maybe that makes it harder for Sylvia. Maybe it’s hard to be so chic.”
She still had trouble with the word, but she was beginning to feel a little sorry for the woman.
“You know, I think maybe she annoys me because I try so hard but feel like she is set not to accept any of it.” This seemed quite a revelation. “My tryin’ isn’t helpin’ at all, is it? You can’t make someone like you. And I don’t know why her being uppity should bother me. My own mother can be uppity. She likes to criticize me for being too emotional. And my Lord, my grandmother could take the cake for uppity…. Well, we all have things about others that bother us. I’m sorry…you were about to say something?”
“Just that it helps to try to see from another’s point of view, which you are doing. Go ahead.”
“I guess I’m still annoyed at Sylvia’s point of view of not liking Johnny. I don’t care that she came out and gave her okay to the marriage. I could tell she still is not happy with it. But that’s just how it is, and I’ve tried and can’t change it.”
She felt a lot better with the insight. It was a little amazing how much better she felt. She had not fully understood how her feelings toward Sylvia Kinney had been weighing upon her.
Her eyes slid to the clock on Catherine’s desk, and she saw that the session was almost over. It had gone by fast.
“I can see why John Cole wanted a private appointment,” she said. “This has sure been helpful. I was able to talk about some things I wouldn’t, if he was here. Like about his brother and sister-in-law. John Cole would not have wanted to talk about any of that. He is not goin’ to talk about anything that might sound like his family is not perfect. I really would like to get your feedback on them, on what I might do to help them, the next time I come.”
She had gathered her purse and was halfway up when she noticed that Catherine had not moved but remained relaxed in the chair.
“I have a few minutes,” Catherine said. “Before we end today’s session, I’d like to touch on a few points.”
“Oh.” Emma slid back down on the sofa. She hadn’t known a session could be extended. She hoped no one was waiting, especially if they might be crying.
“One thing I’d like to touch on is how you feel about hiding your confrontation with Sylvia from Johnny and Gracie.”
“Well…” Emma gazed at Catherine, who was gazing at her; then she slid her eyes to the books on the shelf just beyond Catherine’s chair, saying, “It wasn’t so much of a confrontation. We did not speak a cross word. I extended a cordial introduction and invitation. And I don’t know how it got to be hidden.” The memory of not wanting to tell Johnny from the outset pricked at her mind. “I guess I didn’t think it through at the beginning, and then everything happened so fast. It’s just ended up this way, and everything has turned out. Speakin’ about it now would not help.”
Catherine nodded. “And what do you think might have happened if you had not interfered? Do you think that Johnny and Gracie are not capable of handling their own problems?”
The use of the word “interfered” echoed in Emma’s mind, falling right over the word “confrontation.” She thought Catherine might have a slightly wrong idea about the situation.
&
nbsp; “They were not handling the matter very well,” Emma said. “Gracie had been hiding the problem from the beginning. It was Johnny who told me, and not until he didn’t know what to do. And sometimes when we are young and startin’ out, we do need help. I think Johnny and Gracie would probably have gone ahead and gotten married, but there would have been hard feelings. It just isn’t a good way to start, with one of them feeling unwanted. That affects us all. And Sylvia could have ended up losing out, and she was smart enough to see that. Someone needed to speak up, and I did.”
When she ended with this, she felt quite certain, although she watched carefully for Catherine’s reaction, which was to nod in a manner that allowed Emma to relax a little, and to say, “All right, you seem satisfied. That’s good.”
Then Catherine slid forward in the chair, giving the indication of winding up the session. Emma prepared to rise, too.
But then Catherine stopped at the edge of her chair, so Emma stopped, too.
“I just have one more thought for you,” said Catherine. “In all you told me today, you haven’t talked about yours and John Cole’s relationship. You’ve barely mentioned John Cole at all. Where is he in all of this?”
“Oh, he was there. He hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still home.”
“Yes, I gathered that. But you haven’t mentioned him in connection with you. How’s the sex?”
Emma was surprised at the sudden question. “Well…we’ve been awfully busy what with the pool and everyone droppin’ in to visit. We haven’t hardly had a minute alone.”
Then she remembered the morning after her return from Baltimore. “We are connecting, though. John Cole was very interested the morning after I came back from Baltimore. But…then Johnny stopped by. It was mid-morning. He naturally expected us to be up and about,” she explained.
“Uh-huh.” Catherine nodded. “There are a few things I think you might want to think about. It was your son’s wedding that brought you and John Cole back together, but then, for a variety of reasons, you both made the decision to seek a permanent reconnection. You’ve been working well on that for some weeks, and then along comes a problem in your son’s life, and from everything you’ve said today, yours and John Cole’s relationship has for the past week pretty much been pushed to the side.”
Chin Up, Honey Page 19