Tending to Virginia

by Jill McCorkle

  “I’m going to save these.”

  “Shoot,” Cindy said, blowing a short puff of smoke. “You think what everybody did before Columbus was so great, well think now, my Grandma Tessy smoked a pipe, for years she smoked a pipe and every now and then would flat out chew tobacco. Look at your grandma, for godssakes, Emily dips snuff with her lips like this.” Cindy put her tongue down to make her chin stick out and kept talking that way. “Lena smokes more than I do.”

  “But they didn’t know what it could do to them.”

  “And now they do. In their eighties and they know. Grandma Tessy would know, too, if she was living but tobacco didn’t kill her; she lost her mind is what killed her.”

  “Will you stop talking like that?” Virginia breathed a sigh of relief when Cindy lifted her tongue up towards her nose as if stretching it back in shape.

  “Getting a little testy these days, Ginny Sue, better smoke up. Think about it, you say you love Saxapaw, over and over you talk of how much you love home which we all know is because you don’t live there, but aside from that, think about it. If it weren’t for tobacco we wouldn’t have public schools, that new shopping center they’re building which is going to have a Nautilus Center and a Baskin Robbins; we wouldn’t have the Duplex Cinema or the putt-putt range.”

  “That’s not true,” Virginia laughed. “And Tessy did not lose her mind. Gram talked to Tessy the day that she died; Gram said she was sharp as ever. And Mama saw her that day and Tessy . . .”

  “I know, I know, that dogwood tree story. You have told it so many times that I can say it by heart.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Virginia stated, the same tone in her voice that she has always used when Cindy doubted the stories.

  “Maybe Emily talked to Grandma Tessy and Emily said, ‘Hannah is going to plant herself a dogwood tree today,’ and then when your mama got to the hospital, Grandma said, ‘Hannah, I sure hope that dogwood lives.’”

  “But it didn’t happen that way,” Virginia said adamantly.

  Cindy could get to her so easily, had always been able to get to her. “My mother hadn’t told anyone that she had bought that tree. She was at Roses and for some reason she felt the urge to buy a dogwood tree and it was sitting right there in the back of that old Chevrolet station wagon of ours when Mama went in the hospital.”

  “And Grandma Tessy died and turned into a tree,” Cindy said, fumbling again in her bag and this time finding a cigarette.

  “I have never said she turned into a tree!” Virginia said, enunciating each word and feeling her face go hot with each wide-eyed lift of Cindy’s eyebrows. “We just like to think that it was a sign that her spirit would go on.” Virginia was sorry as soon as the words got out.

  “Well, I say that if Grandma Tessy wanted to be a tree during eternal life that she would have been a tree in our yard. I mean if I was going to be a tree, I’d be a tree in Chuckie’s yard so I could see what he was up to rather than being a tree in your baby’s yard.”

  “Let’s stop.” Virginia stood, her hands pressed to her back. “Come see if you can wear these dresses of mine.”

  “Now, if I had a husband when I died, I’d probably want to be planted in his yard so I’d know what he was up to.” Cindy brushed off the seat of her pants and followed Virginia inside. “Of course, Grandma Tessy wouldn’t have wanted to be in Granddaddy’s yard even if he had been living. You know there was that other man that Lena says Grandma had the hots for all those years.”

  “You don’t know that,” Virginia said and pulled two sundresses from her closet. She hated seeing them there, size sevens that were snug last summer. “Try these on.”

  “That’s a story, a family story.” Cindy lifted her shirt over her head. “Grandma got the hots for this young traveling man, traveling man, isn’t it sad about Ricky Nelson?” Virginia nodded and watched Cindy pull the first dress over her head without even taking off her shorts. “I can’t say that I blame her with my granddaddy old as the hills.”

  “Gram says nothing ever happened between Tessy and that man.”

  “Emily ain’t God. Besides, Lena says something did happen so who knows? My mama doesn’t. The whole world is going to pass her by while she plays solitaire and gets bigger.” Cindy reached back and pulled the zipper up. “I’m not going to wear a bra with this, waist is a little big but I’ll just wear a belt.” It made Virginia sick to see that material so loose and full around Cindy’s little wasp waist. “My mama might be a love child. How ‘bout that?”

  “Your grandma knew that man long before your mama was born. Besides, nothing happened. Here,” Virginia handed Cindy the other dress, “they’re the same size, I’m sure it’ll fit.”

  “Well, I want to try it anyway. This material is kind of cute looking, you know prissy and out of date. I might not like it.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosey.”

  “Beggars? Beggars? My whole life I tossed clothes your way until you got so much taller. Good clothes, expensive clothes.” Cindy stood in the center of the room in her bra and shorts, hands on those thin hips. Just four inches taller, Virginia is only 5’5”, was a normal size 7/8 before pregnancy, but Cindy could make her feel like Paul Bunyan’s ox. Cindy could make Audrey Hepburn feel fat. “I happen to know that you never even wore that red crushed leather miniskirt that I wore all through the sixth grade.”

  “It was way out of style by the time I got it.”

  “I never noticed you were in style,” Cindy said and pulled the other dress up from her feet. “You went to college and lived in blue jeans for four years; my life and wardrobe weren’t so easy. I wouldn’t care if my mama was a love child, a product of lust, Lord God it would be nice to know somebody in the family was hot-blooded.” Cindy went and stood in front of the mirror, turned from side to side, smoothing her hands down her stomach. “Don’t shake your head like that. You’ve got all those ideas of how everything was or should be and it doesn’t make it right. I could be right. Look at my mama some time why don’t you? Me and that slut sister of mine, who I don’t speak to and so can’t recall her name, are the only signs that my mama ever did the act. If I didn’t know that Tessy had been as petite as me and hair just as blonde, I’d think I was adopted.”

  “Do you want that dress?”

  “I’ll take it, wouldn’t wear it to Ramada but I might wear it around the house.” She pulled off the dress and put back on her tee shirt. “I mean I hope that baby of yours is the product of a little lust, ‘cause if it isn’t then your marriage might be on shaky turf.”

  “Just take the dresses,” Virginia said and thrust the other one at Cindy.

  “What is bugging you?” Cindy took the dress and crammed it into her purse. “Did I hit a raw spot or are you just in need of some nicotine? Mark won’t know. I say play while the tomcat’s away.”

  “He’s not the reason I’ve quit smoking.” Virginia fluffed up the pillows on the bed, wadded up that orange nightshirt and stuffed it in a drawer.

  “Shit. That is the reason, scared he’ll get upset with you. I learned from Charles Snipes and then with Buzz Biggers that you can’t please ’em all the time so you might as well do what you take in your head to do.”

  “Well, I needed to quit. It’s not good for me, not good for either of us.”

  “Mark is not perfect. God knows that no man is perfect.” Cindy pulled her car keys out of her back pocket. “I mean he’s divorced, not perfect I’ll tell you, now I know you hate to think about it but it’s the truth, the God’s truth. Your husband is divorced.”

  “He made a mistake. Look at you, you’ve made two mistakes.”

  “And I might make a third but I don’t pretend like I never made them. I don’t pretend that none of that ever happened.”

  “Mark doesn’t pretend.” Virginia felt her face getting hot again and she wished suddenly that Cindy would get the hell out, take those skimpy-looking dresses and get out.

  “No, but you do,” Cindy said. “You c
an’t stand to think that there was somebody before you.”

  “Of course I can. I mean there were people before him. I almost got married myself one time, remember?”

  “Do I ever?” Cindy bit her bottom lip and then came over and slung her arm around Virginia’s shoulders. “I’m just picking is all. All I’m saying is that he made a mistake so if he says, ‘Ginny Sue,’”

  “He calls me Virginia.”

  “See? I always forget how you went off to college and changed your name. When he says, ‘Virginia, where there’s smoke there’s fire. I smell smoke on your breath and in your hair’ well, then you say, ‘Marcus,’”

  “His name is not Marcus.”

  “‘Mark, I made a mistake just like you made a mistake and I can’t take that smoke out of my lungs just like you can’t get back all the sperm you lost with what’s-her-name.’”

  “You’re gross.”

  “But I’m your favorite cousin.”

  “You’re not even a first cousin!”

  “It’s like we’re first cousins, though. It always has been and I see no reason to get into removal shit or second this or that. The fact is we’re cousins which makes me your favorite cousin due to the fact that my sister is a slut and so you wouldn’t choose her over me.” Cindy tightened her arm around Virginia and squeezed once, then abruptly moved away. “C’mon, Ginny, admit it. You’re pregnant and that’s okay; you aren’t going to die like they used to do back in those old days that you think were so perfect. Women had a baby and dropped dead, some of ’em right in the middle of a push with that baby half in and half out. I’m telling you there’s nothing to be afraid of. I work in a medical clinic so I know these things. You’re pregnant and it’s okay. Your husband was married once before, got her pregnant and that’s okay, too.”

  “Cindy,” Virginia said. “I asked you never to mention that.”

  “I haven’t told anybody. I’m telling you. I don’t know what the big damn secret is anyway. I’ve been married twice and I had a baby and I’ve still got that money-eating baby all grown into a scrawny teenager who thinks he’s something.”

  “Please don’t ever tell.” Virginia grabbed her arm and held it. “Please don’t ever.”

  “Relax, Ginny Sue. Who would I tell, the old folks? Emily and Lena don’t even know who they are half the time.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “Well, I’m not even going to argue that one. But really, who am I going to tell? Your mama?” Cindy laughed. “Hannah would say I was lying because ‘Ginny Sue would have told something like that’ and I sure as hell wouldn’t tell my mama who would say I had made it up just to make you look like you’d picked a wrong number like I’ve done twice. I wish I did have somebody to tell but I don’t.”

  “Please, just don’t tell.” Virginia caught herself begging just like all the other times she had confided in Cindy. Cindy wouldn’t really tell; she would just mention it every chance she got to let Virginia know that she was over a barrel.

  “Okay. Thanks for the dresses. Don’t ever tell that you gave them to me. I don’t want Mama or anybody to know that you gave me these.” Cindy laughed and looked like a little imp with that punk hairdo and upturned nose.

  Virginia strikes a match and breathes in on that dried-out Virginia Slims and feels sick. But she’s going to smoke it, sit right on that porch and smoke it to the filter just like Lena does. She wishes Cindy could see her now. Cindy can get away with murder: married, divorced, married, divorced, looking for a third and all anybody ever says is “doesn’t surprise me,” whereas Virginia can’t get away with anything, never has been able to. It isn’t envy that she feels for Cindy because certainly she would not trade places for that soap opera life and she wouldn’t want that streak of wildness Cindy has that came from God only knows where. As children the difference had been easy enough to pinpoint: Cindy had that French provincial room and the Madame Alexander dolls; she had that vanity table covered with perfumes and makeup before she was old enough to wear it. On her sixteenth birthday, Cindy’s father bought her that baby blue Mustang convertible which Cindy drove to Clemmonsville every Friday night to buy beer while Madge and Raymond thought she was at the movies or at the library. “Goody two shoes,” Cindy always said to her. “Won’t even ride to Clemmonsville with your own cousin.”

  What? What is it about Cindy that makes her feel so lifeless, so predictable? They’d all be surprised if they could see Virginia right now, puffing away on that Virginia Slims with her nightshirt hiked up and her legs spread apart the way that Cindy always sits and it doesn’t surprise a soul when Cindy sits that way. She wishes she could name her baby Latoya Montreal Canada Ballard if she wanted to, because Cindy could. Cindy could have named Chuckie, Dirt Britches Snipes and no one would have batted an eye. If Mark was Cindy’s husband and had told her all about Sheila, Cindy would have said, “Thank God, I’d hate to have to think that it was going to visit me over the summer because that first wife of yours, slut that she is, would have ruined a child.” And maybe that’s what she envies about Cindy, saying whatever pops into her mind, though it is still a mystery where Cindy got that—Madge, so quiet and withdrawn and Uncle Raymond so methodical and calculated and crazy right down to killing himself. It makes Virginia squinch her eyes just to think of Uncle Raymond, to think of how crazy he must have been. She didn’t cry at the funeral or afterwards while Cindy was putting on a spectacle, which surprised no one, and Cindy’s sister, Catherine, was talking to a woman about getting her tubes tied and Madge was standing out in the backyard as stiff and silent as the huge oak tree where Chuckie was digging a hole.

  Virginia tosses the filter to the concrete and loosens her grip on that rocking chair, a red Kennedy rocker which she has painted so many times that she can’t count. For years she has painted that chair. If she felt good, she painted it red or blue or pink; if she felt bad she painted it black. Now, she doesn’t give a damn. She’d like to toss it to the side with a lot of other junk and forget about it. She’d like to be able to do the same with her brain, pick and choose what she wanted to know and toss the rest aside, to feel that everything was clean like that yellow room the day it was painted, like a fresh canvas, and then she could start over, carefully applying what would someday be observed by someone who would say, “this is my mom.” She doesn’t even know what time it is; cars still parked in driveways down the street, some people probably still sleeping. If she tried to paint something representative of herself for the sake of posterity right now it would be a smeary blob of nothing, scene after scene carved on top of another with nothing unique about any of it. It would be nothing like the soft pastels, soft as baby powder, that Gram would have, a strong dark background that holds the softness in place. Or Lena who would be a bright splash of color that, though opposite, would blend with Gram, or her mother who would be strong sharp lines that all connect and round at the corners. Even Cindy, though wildly abstract, would be appealing in the same way that someone says, “It’s really interesting but I wouldn’t want it on my wall.” If somebody did her it would be so typical like a bed of jonquils, sunny yellow jonquils on stiff stems, so stiff they’d stand as long as they could and then crack off to one side and she hates yellow right now, that jaundiced jealousy.

  “We painted the chair the university color,” Madge had said the day before Virginia was to leave for college. “Cindy bought the university symbol decal for me to put on the back there.”

  “I love it,” Virginia lied, her eyes still focused on the chair so as not to meet eyes with Cindy. “But you’ve done too much. You already gave me sheets and towels.”

  “Well, it’s special,” Madge said, somehow lighter than her usual deep sighs. “Not everybody goes to college. Not everybody comes out second in the class.” It was obvious that Madge was avoiding Cindy who was standing there in cutoffs with Chuckie perched on her hip like a grocery bag. “Not everybody gets to graduate,” Madge said and Cindy sighed and shifted Chuckie.

&
nbsp; “You hate it don’t you?” Cindy asked later when they were alone in the yard, Chuckie inside with Virginia’s mother and Madge. “I told her you’d think it was tacky.”

  “I don’t hate it, though,” Virginia said and finally looked at Cindy who was perched on the hood of Madge’s car and they both laughed. Cindy laughed until she started crying and then she sat staring down at her key ring, which was shaped like a Coke bottle.

  “Oh shit,” she mumbled and shook her head, those pale eyes filling with tears. “This makes me so goddamned mad.”

  “What is it?” Virginia asked, surprised to see Cindy that way, her shoulders shaking and those long-nailed fingers spread over her eyes. “Cindy?” Virginia stepped closer expecting Cindy to turn on her any minute, to burst into that raucous laugh of hers.

  “Hate to see you leave,” she said, wiped her eyes and then looked up with the most serious expression that Virginia had ever seen on her face. “You’ll never be back,” she said. “I mean for good. I’m stuck here, me and my one friend, Constance Ann Henshaw, and Charles Snipes and Chuckie the snot factory and Earl Conners.” She stopped and laughed quietly after saying Earl Conners, who was a man that for years sat out in front of Endicott Johnson’s and sold boiled peanuts, a man with one eye and no teeth who was given clothes by the Jaycees; for years, it had made Virginia cry every time she bought peanuts from Earl Conners, which is why her mama stopped taking her to Endicott Johnson’s even though they had the cheapest shoes. “Yeah, Earl and all the rest of us will be right here, but not you.”

  “Stop, I’ll be back,” Virginia said and hugged Cindy close, the scent of Ambush cologne filling her head.

  “You’re lucky,” Cindy pushed her away. “Not that I’d want to go, I mean why in the hell would I want to go when I’ve got a husband and a baby. I mean I’ll read Peyton Place or Valley of the Dolls, but really I think books are used best for mashing flat a corsage or stacking them up so you can reach something if you’re small like me.”