Maggie Sweet

by Judith Minthorn Stacy

  By the time the sink was filled with hot, sudsy water, I was filled with rage. “Good old reliable Maggie doesn’t have anything else to do!” What an awful thing to say! It wasn’t even true. I had plenty to do. It was just that no one would let me do it.

  Then this feeling of unbearable longing came over me and tears stung my eyes. It was true. I didn’t have anything else to do. Nothing important anyway. I’d spent all my life waiting around for Steven or someone else to give me permission to start living my real life.

  A few minutes later, when Steven strolled into the kitchen, I was scrubbing the creamed-potato pan with an S.O.S. pad. He poured himself a cup of coffee and said, “We’re having the meeting here Wednesday night. I need you to do the usual—serve cake and coffee, take minutes.”

  I kept scrubbing away, not saying a word. I wanted to say I’d rather take poison that do that. Finally I said, “Steven Presson, it might surprise you to know that I’ve got my own plans Wednesday night.”

  He stared at me over the top of his half glasses. “What are you doing that’s so important?”

  “I’m seeing some friends.”

  “Well, Maggie, this is a fine time to tell me. This meeting’s important. You can see your friends any time.”

  This was getting worse and worse. I turned the water on full force and clanged the pans together as much as possible, hoping if I ignored him, he’d go away. But he just stood there, rolling his eyes, giving me his Lord-give-me-patience-with-fools-and-Maggie look.

  I turned off the water and slung the pan into the dish drainer. “Look, Steven, you had no right to volunteer me. No right at all! You can make the coffee and serve the cake. Maybe poor overworked Theo will take the minutes. ‘Good old reliable Maggie’ won’t be here!”

  Steven just looked at me. Finally he said, “For heaven’s sake, Maggie. Sometimes I wonder about you. You get so worked up over nothing.” Then he sighed real big, like I’d let him down once again, and stomped back to the den.

  The minute the den door shut, I felt as if a hundred-pound weight landed on me. Why had I made such a fuss? I didn’t even want to go to Modine’s party. Maybe I did get worked up over nothing. Maybe I owed it to Steven. I started toward the den to apologize, to tell him I’d changed my mind about helping. Then I remembered good old, reliable Maggie. I stood stock-still. I was always changing my plans to suit everyone and what did I get for my trouble? “Good old reliable” was what I got.

  Well, it was time to sink or swim, fish or cut bait, drop the coin or get off the bus. Only a fool or pluperfect martyr would work for the title “good old reliable.”

  An Around-the-World Home Lingerie Party seemed like an odd place to start. But I had to start somewhere. At least Modine’s party was my choice, and I wouldn’t be serving coffee and cake to the likes of Steven and Theo Bloodworth.

  By Wednesday I was looking forward to the party. I was only sorry Mary Price couldn’t go. With her singing at the That’lldu Bar & Grill and all, she’s just busy all the time. She made me promise to call her later and tell her all about the party, which I planned to do anyway.

  All that day, I caught myself wondering what people did at lingerie parties. In my mind, I pictured row upon row of underwear displayed like shiny, pastel, see-through Tupperware on a big table in Modine’s front room.

  While I dressed (I planned to wear my beige church dress, but it went all to pieces in the washer so I had to wear my navy dotted swiss even though it was pushing the season) I wondered if Modine would make her husband, Ellis, keep the children out of the house for the entire evening, the theme of the party being underwear and all.

  Right after supper I set the dining room table with a linen tablecloth, the silver tea set, and a chocolate chess pie. Then I left the house early to avoid Steven’s how-could-you-do-this-to me? look.

  Driving down East Main to Townsend Avenue, I passed the city limits sign, the That’lldu Bar & Grill, the farmer’s market, then under a bridge spray-painted with the warning “Jesus or Hell.” Within seconds, there were rolling fields dotted with wild azalea, bluebonnets, buttercups, and clover. Cattle grazed on the hillsides. I rolled down the car window and took a deep breath. The air was thick and sweet. I could feel it on my skin. A minute later, I bypassed Modine’s old farmhouse, a stand of loblolly pines, Belews Pond, then, on impulse, I circled back to Chatham Road—Jerry’s old home place.

  The house needed painting—had always needed painting. But I’d always loved it. It was a small Victorian, with a wide, sunny side porch, an open gazebolike turret, yellow and purple stained-glass windows, all on a couple of acres of land.

  I hadn’t been here for years, but back when the girls were little and I first knew I’d married a stranger, I rode out to Chatham Road a few times. Then one day, I stopped. Jerry was gone. It was time to forget him. I was married to Steven. My life was decided.

  Now I inched into the dirt driveway, ready to back out at any signs of life. But the house looked deserted: the curtains were closed, the porch furniture was gone and the grass was mowed in a careless, chewed-off way of a neighbor trying to keep it from getting snaky-looking.

  I wondered if Jerry’s folks had sold the old place when they’d retired. I wondered where they were now, where Jerry was now, but most of all I wondered why I’d come here after all this time.

  Memories washed over me, memories of summer nights parked at Belews Pond. The crickets chirping in the tall grass, the air heavy with the scent of honeysuckle and Jerry’s Canoe after-shave, his melting blue eyes and the catch in his voice as he sang “Chances Are” along with Johnny Mathis on the car radio.

  I sat there for a while, maybe five minutes. Then, heaving a sigh for good things past, I made my mind go blank and circled back to Modine’s.

  By the time I got there, there were half a dozen cars in the driveway: Doris Binfield’s old green station wagon, Geneva Cantrow’s blue Dodge Dart, Jessie Rae Moore’s white Honda Civic, and Dreama Nims’ Ford with the I B 4 JESUS-WHO U B 4 bumper sticker.

  For some reason, Dreama answered the door. She was wearing her usual polyester muumuu, bubble-gum pink lipstick (even on her teeth), and her hair was piled up so high she was in danger of the ceiling fans.

  I had just joined the others in the front room, when suddenly Modine shouted, “That’s a pure lie, Doris! Toy Overcash is the best wife and mother I know.”

  (Doris Binfield is the choir director’s wife. She and Modine have been best friends for years. I just wish you could have seen the hurt look on Doris’s face when Modine called her a liar.)

  Jessie Rae Moore, who is pretty as a picture but so quiet, I used to think she was backward, started crying. “I know. I know,” she said, so broken-up I could hardly understand her. “But it’s the Lord’s truth. She’s gone. Bag and baggage.”

  “Well, I won’t believe it. I won’t believe it! There must have been foul play,” Modine said.

  “No…she left a note,” Doris said. She was fanning herself with a mint-green nightie from the lingerie display. All the color had left her face and she looked like she was about to faint.

  Dreama just stood there smirking all over herself. She was dying to tell me the whole story but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking her personally.

  “What’s going on?” I asked again. But everyone was too wrought up to hear me.

  “The note said ‘I just can’t take it anymore,’” Geneva said, and her chin began quivering and she started to cry too.

  Now I was all shook up. “Can’t take what anymore?” I shouted. By the way everyone’s heads whipped around I could tell I’d said this way too loud.

  “Oh, Maggie Sweet.” Dreama said, “You don’t know, do you, darlin’? Toy Overcash left. Just like that,” and she snapped her fingers to show me how it was. “She just said ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ and walked out on Bobby and the kids.”

  Well, I like to have had a dying duck fit. The blood in my ears roared so loud I couldn’t hear
anything else. It just couldn’t be true! If ever there was a town good woman, Toy Overcash was it. She’d spent her whole life teaching Sunday school, volunteering at the Methodist home, and sending recipes to the Pillsbury Bake-off. (If she won she planned to give the prize money to the homeless. Even Mary Price says that next to the word good in the dictionary, they could just show a picture of Toy Overcash. Good wouldn’t need any other definition. ’Course, Mary Price, being who she is, laughed when she said it. But it was true.)

  I thought back to last year, when Miss Skurlock, my old homeroom teacher and one of Mama Dean’s boarders, died. Toy got there right behind the ambulance. By the time Mother and I got back to the house, she had Mama Dean settled and was organizing the wake. Why, she cooked and vacuumed through the entire tragedy.

  Toy Overcash was a rock. She’d helped everyone in this town. She was the one person we could count on, no matter what. If she could walk out on her family, nothing in this world was sacred.

  Well, after that news, it took a long time for the party to settle down. Modine apologized to Doris for calling her a liar, and they both cried several times. Doris was still hurt, but she said she knew it was just the shock of it all. And we all knew that Dreama stirred things up even more.

  Later we tried to continue with the party since Modine had gone to the trouble of making up all those little ham biscuits, a lime-green passion fruit punch, and her special coconut cake. But it just wasn’t the same. No one’s mind was on food or lingerie anymore.

  Right after we ate, everyone placed their orders and we all went home. I bought a discontinued sample with some grocery money I had stuck back and got to take mine with me.

  When I got home, I was still so worked up that even before I called Mary Price, I went directly to the freezer in the basement and pulled out the Sucrets Throat Lozenges tin, hidden clear in the back underneath the frozen zucchini.

  Last year when I quit smoking, I’d put four Marlboro Lights in the Sucrets tin in case of an emergency. I had to put the cigarettes in kind of kitty-corner, otherwise they just wouldn’t go. Then I wrapped the tin in foil, put it all in a Ziploc bag, and hid it under the zucchini.

  It was as if I knew that some day my life would be nothing but one big crisis right after another.

  Frozen cigarettes light as good as the regular kind. I’d wondered about that. I smoked one of the cigarettes right down to the filter. Then I wrapped up the three that were left, put them back in the freezer, and went upstairs to call Mary Price.

  We talked until real late about what we could do to help Bobby Overcash and the children. Their situation wasn’t exactly covered in Emily Post. Finally around midnight we decided that people have to eat, no matter what.

  But that night, I had the awfullest nightmare. I dreamed the sourdough rising in the Overcash refrigerator went completely crazy. You have to feed sourdough or it dies, it’s a living thing.

  In my dream, the day Toy left, she packed her bags, put a chicken in the Crock-Pot for her family’s supper, then on the way out the door she remembered to feed the sourdough.

  All I can figure, the state Toy was in, she fed the sourdough too much. So the minute she went out the back door it began pulsing and writhing. It made this sound like a little tiny heartbeat. By the middle of the night that heartbeat was so loud you could hear it clear in the next room. But the family, sleeping innocently in their beds upstairs, never heard a thing.

  Before long, that sourdough had doubled, and tripled, and quadrupled in size ’til it blew the door slam off the refrigerator. Then it really took off growing. By now the whole house reeked with yeasty smell of warm sourdough gone rampant.

  In just a few minutes it filled up the entire first floor. Then before you could say Jack Robinson, it started oozing up the stairs to where Bobby Overcash and the children were fast asleep. And without any warning whatsoever, Bobby Overcash and the four Overcash children were completely overcome.

  That’s how Toy found them when she came home the next morning after thinking things over. In the short time she was gone her entire family had drowned in their sleep in a sticky, writhing mass of uncooked bread.

  That’s when I sat up straight in bed in a cold sweat.

  I was wide awake for a long time thinking about Toy and Bobby. They’d seemed like a perfect couple. I wondered if they’d had one big fight or if they’d just drifted apart over the years.

  Everyone thought Steven and I were perfect too.

  Suddenly this feeling of utter doom came over me and I felt like the loneliest person in the world.

  Steven, who was sound asleep next to me, must have sensed something because even in his sleep he mumbled, “Maggie Sweet, are you all right?”

  For some reason, this set me off and I started crying. I guess it was the unexpected kindness of it. When he rolled over to his side of the bed, I reached for his hand but it was wedged tight under his pillow. So I stretched out my foot and found his tangled up in the sheet.

  The last thing I remember, as I drifted off to sleep, was my foot resting against Steven’s and what a comfort it was.

  Chapter 5

  Thursday morning, Mary Price picked me up in her Silverado and we drove to the Overcashes with our dishes. I took a chicken rice casserole and Mary Price took a store-bought pecan pie.

  But when we pulled up in front of the Overcash house, there in the driveway, big as life, was Toy’s red Volkswagen.

  “Lord, she’s back! Don’t stop!” I shouted.

  Mary Price threw the Silverado into gear, hit the gas pedal, and kept on going.

  “That story about her leaving’s probably a bold-faced lie from beginning to end,” Mary Price said. “Nobody runs away for just one night.”

  I thought about all the times Mary Price had left Hoyt for an hour, or a night, or however long it took to get her way, but I didn’t say anything. We just drove around the block trying to figure out what to do. Then I noticed the car in front of us was circling the block, too.

  “Why, that’s Geneva Cantrow’s Dodge Dart!” I said.

  She’d been circling the block about as long as we had.

  Mary Price looked in the rearview mirror. “Lord, Maggie Sweet, that’s Doris Binfield’s old green station wagon following us. Why, every good woman in town has turned out.”

  (Mary Price has a morbid fear of being seen with gaggles of good women. She says, “Those high-pitched voices trying to out-nice each other make me want to scream and claw my eyes out!”)

  Next to Doris, in the passenger seat, was Modine Dingler. And behind them, Jessie Rae Moore’s Honda Civic. All the women from last night’s party were driving past the Overcash house, then circling the block.

  Finally we all pulled over at a stop sign and got out of our cars. Everyone agreed it would be real awkward for us to bust in on Toy and Bobby if they were trying to iron things out. We decided to go for coffee at Eckerd’s and talk things over.

  (I decided not to say anything about my sourdough dream, even though the Overcash house was as quiet as a tomb. I figured everyone was already upset enough.)

  When we got to Eckerd’s, we found a booth in the back. After about three cups of coffee apiece, we decided that since Geneva’s husband, Knoxie, and Bobby Overcash are comanagers down at Winn-Dixie, she’d be the first to hear. Geneva promised to call the rest of us the minute she heard anything.

  Modine had baked two lemon chess pies. Doris had a green bean casserole. Geneva had half a honey-baked ham, and Jessie Rae had this orange congealed salad that hadn’t quite jelled. But we all knew Jessie Rae had really tried so we divided everything up equally and went home.

  After Mary Price dropped me off, I was too worked up to do any housework. I just sat in the front room in Steven’s La-Z-Boy trying to figure things out.

  I thought about Toy and Bobby together again; how she’d been the perfect wife right up to the moment she walked out the door. Now she’d have to spend the rest of her life making up to Bobby for one mist
ake. I thought how awful that would be.

  Then I remembered how sweet Steven had been last night, comforting me like that. So far nothing had happened between us but a little boredom. Maybe if I quit worrying about how boring my life was, I could think up something to add some excitement to our marriage before things got worse. Once we were getting along better, I could explain to Steven just what he was doing wrong.

  I had to try, I mean, you don’t throw away a nineteen-year-old marriage and a house in the historical part of town because of a little boredom.

  The rest of the afternoon, I sat in the La-Z-Boy thinking and reading back copies of “Can This Marriage Be Saved” in the Ladies’ Home Journal.

  Just before my family got home, I came up with an idea.

  Right after supper, when Steven went into his den, as usual, I sent the children over to Mother’s. I told them she needed help with her yard work—which wasn’t exactly a lie, even though Mother had never asked for help.

  Then I poured Steven’s favorite wine into our best glasses. The wine tasted like Alka-Seltzer to me, but our marriage was worth the sacrifice.

  I took a sip of the wine, then carried both glasses upstairs to the bedroom and arranged them just so on the nightstand.

  When I turned on the radio, Elvis was singing “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You.” I figured that was a sign.

  I took another sip of the wine.

  After I showered, I painted up and slipped into the black silk teddy I’d bought at the lingerie party. I’d never seen a teddy before. It’s a lot like shorty pajamas, only sexy. I figured me buying that teddy was another sign that I was doing the right thing.

  I tried another sip of the wine, which was starting to grow on me. After that, I splashed on some Jean Nate and called Steven up to the bedroom.

  The radio was playing “Love Is A Many Splendored Thing” as Steven came up the stairs. I stood, stark naked except for the teddy and tiniest spray of Nate, waiting for my whole new life to begin.