by Fannie Flagg
Another Unexpected Perk
WHEN MAGGIE GOT HOME FROM WORK, SHE WALKED IN AND picked up the mail. It was mostly junk and another reminder of the annual Halloween night Boo at the Zoo gala. When Hazel was alive, they usually went. Hazel loved any excuse to dress up in a costume, but now Maggie hardly went anywhere anymore. She had lost touch with most of her old friends, and it had been her own doing. It was easier not to see them. She knew they were probably as disappointed in her as she was in herself, but they were just too nice to say so. Besides, she wanted to have all her good clothes packed in boxes by Friday, so she wouldn’t have anything to wear anyway. She would just send a donation.
She went into the bedroom and was putting on her workout clothes for her Tuesday night aerobics class at the gym when it hit her: What was the point of working out now? Why get in shape now? For what? She hated exercise; and no matter what they said about endorphins, exercise never made her feel better, just glad to get it over with. She now realized she would never have to exercise again. What an unexpected perk that was. No more worry about her upper arms or thighs. If cellulite wanted to form, let it. Have a ball. She then took off her clothes, put on a robe, then gathered the rest of her workout clothes, tennis shoes, sweats, socks, etc., and threw them into a big plastic bag for the Salvation Army and promptly called the gym and canceled her membership, and that felt good.
Unfortunately, as hard as she was trying to forget it, the subject of Crestview was still stuck in the back of her mind. But what could she do? She had no way of finding out if it was even true. Of course, she did know one person who would know and might even be able to help, but she really couldn’t impose on a friendship like that. Oh Lord, she wished she hadn’t gone to the beauty parlor today.
She fixed herself a glass of iced tea and went into the closet and had started pulling out boxes of stuff she had stacked up in the back. She began going through her old papers again when she came across her sixth-grade report card. Her teacher had written across the bottom, “Maggie is a quiet, well-behaved, pleasant child.”
Dear God, how perfectly sad. She had not progressed since the sixth grade. Lately, she had begun to suspect that underneath that pleasant exterior was just another pleasant exterior. She had gotten older, but not wiser. She’d always thought she would be so much smarter by now, but she wasn’t. If anything, she was losing ground.
Then she opened a new box and came across a few notes and cards from Hazel she had saved. Reading them again made her smile.
Sweetie Pie,
Happy Birthday. Get yourself a good piece of jewelry!
H.
Baby Cakes,
Keep on keeping on, you are the best!
H.
Miss Maggie Pie,
Let’s go roaming on Sunday … okay?
H.
Hazel had always been so generous. The first Easter after Maggie’s parents died, when Maggie was so in debt, Hazel had given her a big white chocolate Easter dove and later, when she was eating it, she found five one-hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside. When Maggie called and asked her about it, Hazel feigned surprise. “I have no idea how it got there; it must have been an Easter miracle,” she said.
Every year after that, Hazel gave her a white dove with money inside, and every year, Hazel pretended not to know how the money got there. Now, without Hazel, Easter was just another Sunday.
She pulled out another box and found it was full of old photos. She picked up the only photograph she had of Richard and wondered why she had ever thought he looked just like Eddie Fisher. She must have been delusional. He didn’t look a thing like Eddie Fisher. Had it just been a case of wishful thinking? Had she been so in love with Eddie Fisher just because Debbie Reynolds had married him? Lord, what had she been thinking? That was the problem; she hadn’t been thinking. But after Charles, Richard was the only other man she had been attracted to. To this day, she still wondered how she could have ever done such a thing. Even though she’d been as far away as Dallas, she had still lived in constant terror that someone would find out. The very idea of a former Miss Alabama being involved with a married man was shocking, even to her, and she’d been the one who was doing it! If you had asked anyone, they would have said that Maggie Fortenberry was the last person on earth they would ever suspect of doing something like that, and she would have agreed with them. Having the affair was bad enough, but how could she have done something like that to another woman? She would never forgive herself for that.
In her defense, Richard had not been married when she first started going out with him; he had simply failed to mention that he was engaged to another girl, one his parents (or so he said later) had picked out for him. “It was more of a business merger between two wealthy families than a romance,” he said. Of course, he hadn’t told Maggie about the other girl until Maggie had fallen hopelessly in love with him. And in all fairness, he tried to break the engagement off. He decided to tell his parents he was in love with someone else and wanted to marry her. The night he was to break the news, Maggie sat waiting at her apartment, expecting him to come rushing through the door any minute with his parents’ blessing and an engagement ring. Richard’s father owned department stores across the South, and Richard said that after they were married, they could live in Birmingham. As she sat and waited, she began envisioning their future life together. First the big wedding, then the beautiful home atop Red Mountain, with an entire wing just for her parents. She would furnish the house with rugs, antiques, paintings, and dishes and silver she would pick up at one of the many shops in Mountain Brook or English Village. She imagined all the Junior League luncheons and Miss Alabama reunion parties she would give, all the small dinner-dance parties under the stars on their lovely terrace overlooking the city. She could just see the large but tastefully decorated Christmas tree she would display in the living room window, oil portraits of her children over the fireplace. It was a perfect scenario for her Miss Alabama bio.
Maggie sat waiting for Richard all night, but he never showed up. The next day, he came over, looking terrible. When he’d told his parents he wanted to marry someone else, his father had threatened to disown him, his mother had fallen to the floor in a heap, shrieking, and his sister had collapsed beside their mother, screaming, “You’re killing our parents!”
So, as much as he loved her and wanted to marry her, he just couldn’t upset his family. Tearful goodbye, miserable days, sleepless nights.
A year later, just as she was beginning to get over him, a midnight call came from a desperate Richard. “The marriage has been a terrible mistake,” he said. “I’m in love with you; I can’t go on without you. I have to see you.” After months of his begging and pleading, she finally said, “All right. But promise me you won’t let me wind up in some clichéd relationship where the man promises to leave his wife but never does.”
“Oh, no!” he said. “Never.”
Of course, she should have left sooner. Not that she didn’t try. Three years into the relationship, when she could see it was never going to change, she told him she was leaving; he panicked and told his wife. She said she could care less about his affair, but as far as she was concerned, they had made a business deal, so no divorce. What could Maggie do? He stayed in a miserable marriage, and she stayed with him. It had been humiliating to have to hide and sneak around all those years, but at least she had never been a “kept woman.” She had made it a point to pay her own way. He had tried to buy her things; in the first year, as a birthday gift, he had surprised her with a down payment on a condo, but she had insisted on making the monthly payments and had bought all the furniture. Looking back, she could see now, that entire section of her life had been just like the plot of the movie Backstreet, starring Susan Hayward: the wife doesn’t really love the husband but won’t give him a divorce. When it was going on, her love affair with Richard had seemed like a great tragic romance, but in reality, she had been just another dumb fool involved in just another ordinary, dime-a-
dozen extramarital affair. Now, thanks to her wasting all those childbearing years, years she could never get back, her official 2008 Miss Alabama bio now read, “Margaret never married and is presently involved in real estate.” Dear God, how perfectly pitiful.
In retrospect, considering her lack of gardening skills, she wondered if she would have made a good parent. She dearly loved flowers, but her garden had never been a success. Every spring, Hazel had sent over Easter lily bulbs, and every spring, she had planted them; she watered them, she waited; but every year, Easter came and went, with no Easter lilies. She didn’t understand it. Hazel planted the exact same bulbs, and every year, without fail on Easter morning, she had hundreds of lilies blooming all over her yard. Maggie had wanted to give up, but Hazel had insisted she keep trying. She said, “You just wait, Mags, one of these years, they will bloom when you least expect it.” When the cactus she planted died (how can you kill a cactus?), she just gave up and had the entire garden covered over with decorative rocks and stuck a birdbath in the middle. If children didn’t turn out right, you couldn’t just throw rocks over them and go on; you were stuck for life, so maybe things had worked out for the best. Brenda, who volunteered with Planned Parenthood, said each person who did not breed was doing the planet a big favor in the long run. Brenda said it was not going to be nuclear war that destroyed the world, it would be overpopulation; and she was probably right. Still, Maggie couldn’t help but wonder what she had missed. To this day, she couldn’t pass by a children’s clothing store without mentally shopping for the little girl she might have had.
Political Aspirations
MAGGIE WAS RIGHT ABOUT BRENDA. SHE DID HAVE ASPIRATIONS to run for mayor. In her opinion, it was about time Birmingham had a woman mayor; the men had been in long enough. And when the last one had been sent to jail for taking bribes, a lot of people had begun to agree.
Brenda Peoples was already a familiar name in local politics. She had served on a lot of different committees in town, and she had personally started the Youth at Risk program. She was the president of the local alumni chapter of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She knew that to be successful at anything, it was important to know as many people as possible. This was something she had learned firsthand from Hazel.
In 1979, Hazel had finished her big speech at the Women in Business luncheon with this statement: “And so, girls, in closing, I’ll leave you with these three words of advice: Network, network, network.” It was a credo Hazel lived by, and Brenda had taken Hazel’s advice about networking to heart. Just last month, when she and Maggie had gone to the symphony, Brenda had gone backstage and introduced herself to the entire orchestra and to all the stagehands as well. “Everybody votes,” she said to Maggie later. And voting was not something Brenda took lightly.
While Maggie had been busy learning to play her harp and dreaming about becoming Miss Alabama, Brenda had been across town, trying to make some sense out of what was beginning to happen. She knew white people lived in one part of town and her family lived in another. Her parents had informed her in a roundabout way that some white people were nice and some weren’t, but it had not affected Brenda much one way or another. Her family had a very full and active social life where they were. Her father was the dean of an all-black college, and her mother was a high school English teacher. They lived in a nice house in a good neighborhood. But when she was about ten, Brenda noticed that the grown people had started talking in troubled whispers about something that was upsetting them.
Then later, when all the upheaval in Birmingham began, her parents, like a lot of their friends and neighbors, had not approved of using children in the protest marches. They were afraid of what might happen. They kept Brenda, Robbie, and their younger brothers home from school the day of the marches. But their oldest sister, Tonya, was thirteen that year, and her best girlfriend told her how much fun the march would be and said to come on and go. She said there would be so many kids downtown, their parents would never find out. Tonya, always up for fun, slipped out of the house and met her friend on the corner of Fourth Avenue North. And it had been fun; the two of them were running around and laughing their heads off, tickled to be out of school, tickled to be downtown without their parents knowing; they were still laughing when they ran around the corner.
To this day, Tonya could still remember how it felt: the sudden shock of the huge round sledgehammer of hard, cold water hitting her in the chest, knocking her down to the ground. She could still remember the sounds of laughter turning into screams of terror; dogs barking, people running, water everywhere. Tonya would always remember the moment when the world stopped being fun.
The next day, when the pictures hit the front pages, the entire city was horrified. How could it have happened? This kind of brutality would never have been condoned if they had known about it in advance. The head of the fire department immediately informed the city commissioner that his men would “never again” use fire hoses on human beings. But it was too late.
If Tonya had been stunned at the sudden turn of events, Maggie was just as stunned. This was not the Birmingham she lived in. She had never heard her parents or anyone she knew say an unkind word against black people. Up until that time, Maggie had had no idea they were so unhappy. She had never gone to school with a black person. She’d been told that they preferred to be with their own. When the black high school bands marched in the parades downtown, they seemed very happy. They were always laughing and looked like they were having a good time. Maggie knew on some level she was better off being white, but she had never given it much serious thought. When she was growing up, teenagers had not been very political, certainly not the ones she knew. They were too busy obsessing about boys and clothes and worrying about pimples to think beyond the next day, much less about social injustices. Sadly, the blacks lived in one world and they lived in another, and they just didn’t see it, or at least she hadn’t. But unfortunately, history always expects people, young or old, to have known better at the time.
Then later, when four little black girls were killed in a church basement, the city was so shocked, they simply could not believe it. It was such an unspeakable and vile act. A lot of people in Birmingham found it easier to believe it had been radicals from the North who had blown up the church, trying to get more national press, or else it must have been just a horrible accident of some kind. It was too frightening to believe that there was that much cruelty and hatred anywhere, and especially in their own city. But years later, when the white men who had done it were finally arrested and convicted, the city had no choice but to face facts, and it hurt.
What Had Possessed Her?
AFTER A FROZEN DINNER, MAGGIE CONTINUED ORGANIZING, AND BY ten-thirty that night, she had all her paperwork stacked into the throwaway and shred piles. Going through all of those old things and seeing Richard’s photograph had brought back so many memories. What had possessed her to stay with him so many years?
Richard did have curly black hair and a sweet nature, but she now realized (too late) that he had also been weak and a little dumb. His father had been the smart one, though he had been completely ruthless in business, a trait she did not admire. In fact, had she met the family first, she might have had second thoughts about getting involved with Richard at all. She had been modeling at a charity luncheon in Dallas when two women demanded in loud voices that she come to their table so they could feel the material of the suit she was wearing, and as they were complaining about how cheap the material was (it wasn’t), Maggie happened to glance down at the name cards on the table and realized it was Richard’s mother and sister. Oh, dear. Not only were they rude, they were two of the most unattractive women she had ever seen. They looked like frogs with large pop eyes. Through some quirk of genetics gone right, Richard was a prince born into a family of trolls, but you never know when those other family genes might strike again.
Richard never did leave his wife. He dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage at age forty-six. If th
at had not been enough of a shock, three days later, she was handed an eviction notice. Richard’s family (armed with a copy of an old canceled check) claimed that he had bought her condo with company money, and not only did they want the condo, they wanted all the furnishings, dishes, silverware, paintings, television sets—things she had paid for. She could have fought them, but in order to avoid a scandal, she left the next day with nothing but the few clothes she was able to pack.
After Maggie left Dallas, she found a job on a cruise ship teaching classes in scarf tying and napkin folding. It sounded good on paper, but the cruise line she worked for was a far cry from the Queen Elizabeth or the Crystal cruises. She had hoped to teach people who wanted to learn about how to set a lovely dinner table, but her classes were filled mostly with children whose parents just needed a babysitter for an hour. And so when her parents became ill and she had to move back to Birmingham to take care of them, it was a mixed blessing. During the time she had been living in Dallas and she had come home to visit her parents or to attend the yearly ex–Miss Alabama reunions, it had been so much easier to keep up a good front. All anyone at home really knew was that she was modeling for a major department store in Dallas or, later on, working on cruise ships. Both professions had sounded somewhat glamorous from afar (they didn’t know the details), but now that she was home for good, it was going to be much harder to maintain even a semi-glamorous image. Her parents’ medical bills were piling up, and she had to find a job, and it was not going to be easy. She was getting too old to model, she couldn’t type, she had failed algebra (twice), so bookkeeping was out, and a former Miss Alabama couldn’t very well wait tables at the Waffle House or Hooters.