Tending to Virginia

by Jill McCorkle

  Madge tears up the letter in teeny shreds and washes it piece by piece down the garbage disposal, closing her eyes the whole while that disposal is groaning and gurgling like it is trying to breathe, like it is choking on every word.

  “Are you coming or not? Call me at the crack of dawn and then not even ready.” Cindy lets the back door slam and Madge jumps and clutches one last little scrap of paper that she missed. “I been waiting and tooting and it’s hot as pure hell; my hair will be flat as a pancake before I even get to my VDT.” Cindy flops down at the kitchen table and jingles her keys back and forth impatiently. Madge can’t tell which jingles the loudest, the keys or all those chains wrapped around Cindy’s neck and falling where she’s about to show her bosoms with that dress cut like one you’d wear to a beach party and not to work where decent people of this town come and go and know that Cindy is Madge’s daughter. Cindy’s hair is pulled straight up in the front like something just scared her.

  “Don’t stare at my jewelry!” Cindy snaps. “It’s Napier, gold-filled.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “No, but you thought it. I don’t know why you don’t say something because you usually do. I got these at the Thalhimers in Clemmonsville; they’re Anne Klein and Napier. Good jewelry, not like those old out of style cheap chains you wear.”

  “I only wear one at a time.” Madge gets her purse off the table and goes to the door. “I just think that they are pretty and that’s why I say that they’d show up prettier if you’d just wear one at the time.”

  “Randy Skinner loves them. Randy Skinner says he’d like to see me wrapped in gold.” That sounds like something Raymond would have said and it sends a chill down Madge’s spine. She just nods; all those men’s names come and go out of Cindy’s mouth like a faucet turned on and off. “Randy is a pharmaceutical salesman who I meet on Friday nights, like tonight while you keep Chuckie.” Madge walks outside and gets in the car; Cindy had left it running, the air full blast, radio full blast, and a cigarette just burning away in that ashtray, making Madge’s eyes water. “But of course you could care less about who I meet at the Ramada Inn.”

  “I care, Cindy.”

  “Just say if you don’t want Chuckie in your house. Just say ‘cause I know that’s what’s on your mind.” Cindy backs down the driveway and out into the street without even looking to see if anything’s coming.

  “Nothing’s on my mind.” Madge leans back in her seat so that the line of sunlight shines right in her eyes. “I guess I’m just tired.”

  “Tell me about it!” Cindy says and pulls right up to a red light without even slowing and slams on brakes. “I’ve got so much on my mind that it makes me tired just thinking about having to think about it. Of course, you don’t want to know what’s on my mind, you never do, so I’ll just keep it to myself. You don’t even ask where I got this dress that I’m wearing and I got it from Miss Ginny Sue so know that and think about it before you mention my titties about to show and think that Ginny Sue must’ve shown her little bit whenever she wore it.”

  “It’s a nice dress, Cindy,” Madge says. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well,” Cindy turns off the radio and stares at Madge all the while driving down Main Street which makes Madge nervous as a cat. “I’ve heard that Charles Snipes is remarrying.”

  “Well? You remarried,” Madge says and is glad to see that they are almost at the office building.

  “That’s not why I’m pissed.”

  “Please don’t use that word.”

  “Please don’t use that word,” Cindy mimics and slams on brakes right in front of the dental office, the whole car rocking back and forth. “He could’ve told me first. Chuckie has a right to be the first to know. Chuckie is his son, flesh and blood and sperm.”

  “Hush,” Madge says, not about to open that car door for the world to hear what Cindy has to say.

  “I could just kill Charles Snipes. Randy Skinner would never be so thoughtless. I could kill him deader than dead.”

  “Hmm,” Madge says and gets out before she has to hear one more word. “The service station said they’d bring the car to me.”

  “Thank you, Cindy.” Cindy says and messes with her eyelashes in front of the rearview. “Thank you for being the one daughter who can do something for me other than have her tubes woven into a miniature egg basket, thank you prodigal son’s brother, thank you child of God and child of Raymond Sinclair whose tubes are not tied and who caters to her mother’s needs.”

  Madge looks away from Cindy and stares at the brown nubby grass in front of the building. Things like that don’t bother her so much now, her own azaleas brown and curling from lack of rain. Just curl up and die. “Thank you Cindy,” she says and slams the door, that blazing sun feeling so good like it’s bleaching her all over as she walks into the building where she loves that calm piped-in music and cramming cotton in people’s mouths so that they can’t say a word, not a solitary word.

  * * *

  Virginia goes to Roses and puts everything that she wants in her cart; it is a good place to go for a walk, cool, a lot to see. It has always made her feel better to do this. She has made many important decisions while walking the aisles and filling her cart with items that she has no intention of really buying. It was in an Atlanta Roses where she decided that she could not marry Bryan Parker before returning to that condo where they were living together and told him. It had taken hours that day, and then she abandoned the cart in the far corner of the store amidst draperies and rugs, bought a Coke and a pack of cigarettes and left. And Bryan Parker was a nice person; she could say those same words to Mark, “he was a nice person but it didn’t work” except Mark doesn’t want to know anything about Bryan Parker. He doesn’t want to know the guilt that Virginia felt just living there while her parents and Gram and everyone else in Saxapaw thought she lived alone. Even now, it makes her shudder to think of the look that would have crossed her mother’s face, Gram’s face, if they had seen the unmarried Bryan Parker stretched full length on that bed in his underwear. Bryan Parker’s parents didn’t care; they were cosmopolitan. They owned a chain of seafood restaurants, not even calabash style, and never ate before dark even in daylight savings time. They were young and exciting and nice, but something was wrong. It was not a black/white or red/blue decision; it was lilac and lavender, pale apricot and shrimp.

  “I lived with a man once,” she had confessed to Mark on their third date; she had never even told Cindy that. And he just squeezed her hand while they sat in the theatre waiting for the movie to begin and told her that he was divorced. She felt a brief moment of iciness but it didn’t last; he was with her, holding her hand, everyone makes mistakes. Though now she can’t help but wonder when he would have told her, if he ever would have told her. “How long were you married?” she whispered as the lights went down, and she felt his whispered “two years” in her ear while the screen filled with a blast of color. She waited two weeks before asking “who,” a month before asking “what happened,” receiving only what she asked for, never being asked about when she almost got married, never feeling that she got to the root of it all. “It’s all in the past,” he would say. “None of it matters now. We matter. What we have is what matters.” And she would repeat his words in her head, feeling closer and closer, feeling like nothing could ever come between them. So why? Why did he wait until now to fill in the blanks?

  She pushes the cart faster and it soothes her; every aisle of Roses soothes her; she could be in a dimestore anywhere. She could be in Saxapaw. There is a rose-colored satiny comforter that can be reversed to deep wine, the eyelet sheet set, redwood bird feeder, twenty pounds of bird seed on sale for $2.99, buy it! Purple leotard, red stockings, a black lacy bra with cups as pointed as darts, take it. Little red plastic shoes like we’re off to see the wizard, protect from athlete’s foot in public showers and other fungi. Fungi and Fun Guy. “Bryan Parker’s not what I’d call a real fun guy,” Cindy had said
. “But megabucks, and he’s big and cute, can’t have it all.” Virginia wants it all. She wants mascara, dial a lash, very black for herself, anything but midnight blue for Cindy. Calgon take me away! Oriental Garden, Ah so, Oil of Olay for night and day, say Pond’s cold cream in Japanese and don’t think of anything else like your husband in bed with a long and lithe blonde who has never eaten Beef Jerky or Cheetos. Apricot scrub and cucumber gel, vinegar and water douche, make yourself a salad, make yourself a salad. Music—Beethoven and Chaka Khan, Marvin Gaye, Tanya Tucker, Disney on Parade. Hammers and screwdrivers, heavy on the vodka. The doctor says, “Have you been drinking?” Little nails, big nails, clamp on nails and nail polish, plumber’s friend, sketch pad and Crayolas, periwinkle blue and burnt sienna, diaphragm jelly to throw people off.

  “I’m just fat this way,” she would say. “I have a tumor,” and she would watch their faces turn ten shades of purple. No, no she wouldn’t do that and it isn’t working. Nothing is working. One day her phone is going to ring; one day her mother will call to tell her that Gram is dead and she will say, “Oh God, why wasn’t I there? Why was I here? Here with a person that I don’t even know?” She sees her mouth shaping the words.

  “Don’t you worry, Ginny Sue,” Gram whispered long ago, so many times, words so constant. “I’m here with you. I’m not going to leave you here in the dark.” Virginia feels her throat closing, her legs aching as she hurries as fast as she can to the back of the store, the draperies, behind the draperies. There’s not enough time. She feels urgent as she makes her way back down the aisles, past a salesperson who is glaring at her because he saw what she did, the cart, the merchandise, everything abandoned. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about anything right this second except getting home. “I’m home,” she will say. “I made a mistake and now I’m back.”

  She cranks the car and starts driving, the steering wheel so hot, air so heavy. “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you,” Nat King Cole sings, easy listening, good for the budgies as she speeds along, hills and buildings, knowing exactly where she is every minute of the way and she can’t get to where it’s flat fast enough, flat and wide and hot, cornfields and speckled butterbeans. “I’ve always been partial to the speckled,” she can hear Gram say. “Here in Saxapaw everybody likes the speckled.” It seems she can’t drive fast enough, the songs can’t change fast enough, and she thinks “Saxapaw, Saxapaw” over and over, Gram’s voice saying “Saxapaw” the word itself briefly ridding her mind of everything else, and she thinks of Gramps sitting in that side yard, his blue eyes squinting as he does his Brer Rabbit voice. He says, “Do anything, Anything. Just don’t throw me in that old briar patch.”

  * * *

  Hannah spots her Aunt Lena as soon as she rounds the corner. Lena is pacing back and forth in front of the home, whirling around every now and then, and talking and laughing as if someone is right behind her. Sometimes Hannah feels like she can’t take it. Sadness. There’s Lena and her mama so confused and helpless; there’s Esther all by herself. The whole world has got problems. There’s Alzheimers and mental illness, homosexuality and divorce, you name it. It’s all right there on “Phil Donahue”; for years Ginny Sue had talked about what was on “Phil Donahue,” but who had time to watch?

  “We are paying for you to go to college and not to watch TV,” Hannah would say. Though now she sees that you can probably learn everything you might want to know about this world and things you’d just as soon not know right there on “Phil Donahue.” She is trying her best to catch up on things and it isn’t easy. It isn’t easy to get up and face a day where she doesn’t have to go down to The Busy Bee and sew all day, that nice soft humming of the machine, fabrics running under her fingers. She’d press her foot on that pedal and she’d forget all about who she was and where she was and how the years were unraveling like a hem so long she could never get it basted back. The Busy Bee was hers, all hers, twenty-five years of her life.

  “Give it up,” Ben had said. “Now’s the time for us to go places, do things.” And she had and now what they do is grow, can, and freeze vegetables and where she goes is to the rest home to get Lena and to the duplex to check on her mama. Sometimes she does Esther’s grocery shopping while she does her own; it’s the least she can do. Esther is somehow related, takes good care of Hannah’s mama and only makes minimum wage.

  Hannah held interviews for a housekeeper who could sleep in on occasion because it had gotten to where she could not keep two houses clean and run The Busy Bee all at the same time. It had gotten to where her mama couldn’t even get to the bathroom by herself. How could she not hire Esther with her somehow related?

  Lena is laughing now, her head thrown back with that hat tipped off to one side. She used to have thick auburn hair curled and fixed, perfumed, and colored bangle bracelets that she’d let Hannah wear. “I brought you this dress from New York,” Lena had said and opened a box with fancy script on the top and pulled out a lacy pink dress with a wide satin sash. “One day you’ll be making dresses like this.”

  “Hannah’s not but sixteen,” her mama had said. “And that dress cut to the bosom.”

  “It’s a party dress, Emily,” Lena said and fluffed the full skirt.

  “There are things in life other than parties.” Hannah’s mama went back to her cooking while Hannah put on the dress and turned around and around on a stool in front of the mirror. Lena clapped her hands, those long glazed nails, while Roy Carter whistled from the next room. She wore it to the high school prom and danced all night with Ben Turner, his thick dark hair combed up off his forehead, his socks matching for once. It was beautiful with those parachutes hanging from that gym ceiling and the Eiffel Tower painted on a huge piece of pasteboard in one corner. Hannah had painted most of it while Madge and some other girls had put little paper flowers in vases which would go on those little café tables with checkered cloths. Madge was wearing a dress that Tessy had made, a dress that could just as easily have gone to church and Madge had fingered the lace on Hannah’s skirt when they were in the bathroom, asking over and over “where did you get it?” Hannah had lied; Hannah had said that she borrowed the dress. Madge, after all, was Lena’s niece, too. “But you’re my favorite, Hannah,” Lena has always said.

  Madge probably didn’t believe that the dress was borrowed; who did Hannah know to borrow it from? And years later when Madge was going through one new Chevrolet after another and ordering clothes from New York, Hannah wondered why she had lied, why she didn’t say, “this is my dress.” Hannah had twirled around and around under those parachutes with her mind spinning and her heart beating so fast with just one look from Ben Turner. “One day we’ll really go to France,” he had whispered. “One day I’m going to give you everything you’ve ever wanted.”

  “Hannah?” Lena leans forward and squints, her polyester pants slipping down to cover the gold slide slippers. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me.” Hannah hugs Lena close, her spine like a little hooked railroad track. “How are you?”

  “Bad,” Lena says and shakes her head. “Jesus God take me I’m so bad.” Lena clings to Hannah’s shirt. “You’ve got to get me out of here. You’ve got to tell them I can’t come back.”

  “We’re going to go to Mama’s for a little while.” Hannah pulls Lena away and leads her over to the bench. “Let me tell them that I’m taking you. Sit down and I’ll be right back.”

  “Don’t tell them,” Lena whispers. “They gave me a little poison this morning.”

  “I’m taking Lena for a little while,” Hannah tells the nurse, quickly, businesslike. That’s how she’s decided to handle it. That way they will feel like she’s up on everything, that she’s keeping a close check of the way the place is run. It looks clean here; the people seem nice enough but there is always that shade of doubt when she leaves Lena here. It’s like that question Ginny Sue used to sit and think over about if there’s a chair in the room is it still there when you close the door or the
one Ben says about if a tree falls in the forest. Those are foolish things to think over but not this way, not “are they nice to Lena when I’m not here?” Lena says not. Lena says all kinds of things and it is hard to stop believing someone that you have believed your whole life, someone who had been places and knew things. “You couldn’t have a better husband than Ben. You couldn’t have finer children. Hannah, the dresses you make could sell in New York City.”