Maggie Sweet (10 page)

Palomino
Joe’s is a big, square, windowless building filled with picnic-style tables, a bar at one end, a bandstand at the other, and a huge sawdust-covered dance floor in between.

Saturday night two hundred people of every age, shape, and size (everyone but Jerry) crowded the floor while The Traveling Bumbaloughs sang the oldies, “You Picked A Fine Time To Leave Me, Lucille,” “Delta Dawn,” “Satin Sheets,” then the newer, “Modern Day Romance” and “She’s Single Again.” Toward the end of the first set, Mary Price winked right at me and sang “Walking After Midnight.”

I have to admit, I shed a few tears. I had always known what singing meant to Mary Price. Now I was choked with pride. She strutted all over the stage while her voice filled the room, owned the room, and everyone in it.

I couldn’t sit still. It was all I could do not to throw my head back and howl. I tapped my feet, drummed the tabletop, wanted to shout, “That’s my friend! That’s my best friend!,” like a Little League parent whose child just hit a home run.

A whole new world was opening up to me. While I’d spent Saturday nights at committee meetings, or at home watching Steven rest, then having routine right-after-the-eleven-o’clock-news-sex, some of Poplar Grove’s finest were stomping it up at places like Palomino Joe’s.

Geneva and Modine volunteered their husbands to dance with me, and I line-danced with everyone. But I was happy just sipping Pepsi, listening to the music and watching everyone.

Around ten the Bumbaloughs took a break, and the pickup bands were thrilled for a chance to make music.

Mary Price dragged me off to her dressing room to redo her hair. “Hot damn, Maggie! This is the night I was put on earth for.”

“I never knew you were this good,” I said, hugging her.

“I’ve never
been
this good. It’s like something’s come over me. Hurry with my hair. They’ve asked us to do another set and I don’t want them to see that the pickup bands are good, too.”

When she went back to the bandstand, I looked at my watch. If I didn’t get home soon, Steven would never let me out of the house again. But suddenly the energy level in the room went into high gear. A spotlight hit Mary Price and everyone started to whistle and stomp. Even a tourist like me knew something special was happening.

She took center stage and shouted, “Are you all having a good time?”

The crowd screamed, “Yes!”

“Are you ready for a song about a low-down woman going low-down places?”

They shouted back, “We’re ready!”

“I can’t hear you!” she called.

“
We’re ready!
”

The music started, then built—Mary Price at the keyboard, Hoyt at the microphone. Whole tables of people circled the floor, grabbing the belt loops of the person in front of them while they sang-shouted, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” to the rowdy Bumbalough beat.

Modine and Ellis dragged me to the floor, and off we went, joining the line, dancing our feet off ’til we collapsed back at the table.

As soon as I stopped panting, I picked up my purse and started to say my good-byes. That’s when he came up behind me.

“Looks like I got here in the nick of time. How ’bout the last dance?”

I knew who it was without looking. I stood, put my arms around him, and we moved to the dance floor. Mary Price was singing “You Were Always on My Mind.” We didn’t miss a beat.

Nothing had changed in twenty years. He was still a mile taller. It still didn’t matter. I laid my head on his chest. Good Lord.

“We haven’t had a chance to talk since I got back,” he said.

“I know.”

“Why didn’t we run off graduation day?”

“I called you.”

“When?”

“Graduation day.”

He stepped back, looked in my eyes. “You did? I forget. I was crazy back then. Crazy from wanting you.”

“You weren’t home. I didn’t know what to do.”

“God. All those years,” he said, pulling me close.

“All those years…”

“I didn’t know you still wanted…”

“I know.”

“Godamighty.”

“Oh, Lord.”

We went back to our table. Two hundred sets of eyes watched us. He didn’t say, I’ll call. I didn’t say, we shouldn’t. We just knew.

Monday
morning, I drove out to his old home place. I don’t remember the drive; it was like a dream. But I couldn’t
not
go anymore than I couldn’t not breathe. I didn’t think about the cost or how long it would last. It didn’t matter. Deep down inside, I knew it was my last chance forever.

I hadn’t told him I was coming, but he met me in the yard.

He just looked at me; nobody had ever looked at me like that before. Then he took my hand and we went inside.

There are no words. Music comes the closest thing to what it was like to make love after all those years. But to say that making love with Jerry was like “Unchained Melody” or “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” isn’t enough. To say there were times when I didn’t know where he left off and I began, that I was him and he was me, comes close.

Afterward he held me. “Where’ve we been all these years?”

“I don’t know.”

“I remember we broke up. You moved away….”

“Daddy came for me graduation day. He’d signed me up for school in Chapel Hill. I had to go. I had an hour to get ready; that’s when I called you.”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t get your letter ’til September. By then it was too late. I was in too deep,” he said.

I’d forgotten about the letter I’d written from Daddy’s that summer—a letter full of longing and empty pride.

“Someone forwarded it to me in Jacksonville but it was weeks before it caught up with me,” he went on. “All that summer, all I could think about was getting over you. I bought a motorcycle, did some drinking, the whole James Dean bit. You always saw through my hood act, but Brenda believed it. Next thing I knew she was pregnant; we were married. I thought it was the right thing to do. But how could it be right when we didn’t even know each other?”

“You raised your son,” I said.

“Yeah. Trey was the one good thing that came out of it. But I stayed too long…like I had this spare life to throw away. I thought I could squander all those years and still have this other life waiting for me.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Can you understand? Does that make any sense?”

I remembered back to when I met Steven. My heart was broken. He said he loved me. I thought it was enough. I thought he was grown up enough for both of us, that he knew the ways of the world. We married and nine months later the girls were born. And even after I knew I’d married a stranger, I still believed if I was good enough, tried hard enough, stayed with it long enough, sooner or later it would be enough.

“You kept waiting around for your real life to begin,” I said.

He propped himself on his elbow, gazed at me. “You know, don’t you?

I nodded, reached for his hand. He’d said more in an hour than Steven had said in nineteen years. He looked me in the eye, let me finish my sentences, heard what I said, what I
meant.
After all our years together, Steven and I still didn’t know how each other’s minds worked. But Jerry and I were on the same wavelength.

We lay there, holding on to each other, neither of us saying anything. Finally I said, “Do you think two eighteen-year-old kids could have been in love for real? That maybe they
were
each other’s real life?”

“I know I loved you to pieces.”

“And I thought you’d hung the moon.”

I held on to him. It
had
been real. Over the years I’d started to wonder if I’d made it up. But we really had loved each other.

Later, after we drank coffee, he took me on a tour of the house. It was smaller, gloomier than I remembered. “It’s dark as a cave in here, but I plan to change that. I want light, lots of light,” he said. “I might not even hang curtains.”

I noticed paint cans stacked neatly in the corner. Cream and gold paint. The colors I’d wanted for
my
house. The same wavelength.

When it was time to go, Jerry walked me to my car. “I won’t call you, Maggie. Today might just have been one of those things, something we needed to do to put ‘The End’ to Maggie and Jerry.”

“Jerry, don’t—”

He brushed my lips with his finger. “Hush. I mean it. I want you to think about it. My divorce will be final in June. It’s you that’ll be in a mess. You’re the one with everything to lose. If we don’t see each other like this again, just know that I loved you then, I love you now, I’ll always love you. Maybe that’s enough.”

I touched his cheek. I’d come here out of awful longing. He’d given me back a part of myself that had been missing—I was him and he was me. It didn’t matter what anybody said or how messy it would get. I had to have him. I loved him blood and bone.

Are
you alone?”

“You said you wouldn’t call.”

“I know.”

“It’s all right. I’m alone.”

“I know. I drove by your house. The LTD was gone; only your old car was there.”

“I miss you like crazy.”

“No second thoughts?”

“Sure. Second and third thoughts. And they all make me run slam out of breath.”

“When can you get here?”

“I’m leaving right now.”

“Good. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

When
I got there, he said, “Close your eyes.”

I closed my eyes and stood there while he turned on music and took me in his arms, waltzed me through the farmhouse to “A Rose and a Baby-Ruth.”

“Do you remember?”

“Our old song.”

“I found it unpacking some boxes. Lord, Maggie, there
were so many memories. I spent last night going through old photos, the prom, picnics at the pond…remember our first Christmas?”

Like so many of my Jerry memories, I’d shoved that first Christmas so far back in my mind it seemed to have happened to another girl, another life. But now that Jerry was here, it was safe to remember.

I held him close, followed his steps and thought back to the Christmas Eve we’d parked on a hillside on the outskirts of town. We got so lost in necking, we didn’t notice how much time had passed. Suddenly the whole world lit up like daylight. We both panicked, thinking it
was
daylight. But it had snowed. The windshield sparkled like diamonds and there was an unearthly stillness as pure white silent snow drifted down. We’d never seen a white Christmas in Poplar Grove. It seemed like a miracle. We sat there holding on to each other, as hushed as in church. I remember thinking
you will never in your life be as happy as you are at this moment.

Tears stung my eyes. “It was like we were the only two people on earth.”

“Like we were meant to see it together,” he said, as he led me to the couch to Emmy Lou Harris’s “Together Again.”

I went back to Chatham Road three times that first week. And when I couldn’t be there, I was planning to be there. It was just like the old days. I’d have walked through fire to be with Jerry.

But I didn’t have to. Steven stayed locked in his den and the girls were busy with their own lives. I went through the motions, cleaned the house, did laundry and cooked from
the menu; looked and acted, for the world, like the old Maggie Sweet. But I was someone else now. There was music in my head all the time and I couldn’t stop smiling. It shocked me that nobody else saw it. I figured the change in me stuck out like new paint. Everything seemed different, clearer; scents were sharper, colors brighter. I felt new again. I wanted to run out in the yard and turn cartwheels.

Apart from being in love, other things were changing, too. Two women who’d been at the Bumbaloughs opening called me to do their hair.

Early one morning, after dropping off a dozen brownies for the Band Boosters’ bake sale, I stopped by the Zippy Mart and bought two Styrofoam cups of coffee and four muffins. Then on impulse I went to a pay phone and invited myself to the farmhouse.

When I got there, Jerry was sitting on the back porch steps.

We sat side by side, sharing the coffee and muffins, breathing in the scents of the early morning air. After we finished, he said, “I want to show you something.”

He took my hand and led me to one of the outbuildings. “This was my dad’s machine shop when this place was a working farm. I’ve been clearing it out. I’m thinking about starting a carpentry business—you know, building kitchen cabinets, custom furniture for people. With my Navy pension and benefits I don’t have to make a lot of money. Brenda always planned for me to take over her father’s insurance business, but that wasn’t for me. I’ve always liked working with wood. What do you think, Maggie?”

“This building will be perfect.”

“What do you think about me doing carpentry work? I’ll never get rich. But it’s satisfying work.”

“Money isn’t everything. Not if you’ve got enough to get by. I want you to do what you want to do. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

Jerry grinned and spent the next twenty minutes showing me how he planned to set up his shop.

Later, when we stepped out into the sunshine, he said, “Do you feel like walking? There’s something else I’ve been dying to show you.”

He took my hand as we walked past the outbuildings, across a field of freshly mowed grass, then climbed a split-rail fence at the property line. The sun shone through the treetops, making them look like green lace against the sky.

I heard the creek before I saw it, a few feet into the woods.

“I walked down here the other night. I remembered that the creek ran the length of Chatham Road. But it’s closer to the house than I remembered. I wish you could have seen it with me at sunset. All those colors…”

We kicked off our shoes, rolled up our pant legs, and sat on a log, dangling our feet in the water.

I leaned back into his arms and told him about my two new hair customers.

“You never said. Why did you give up doing hair in the first place?”

I looked off into the distance. “That’s a long story.”

“I’ve got all day.”

I took a deep breath. “When Steven and I first got married, he told me to wait. He was older—sure of himself. I
wasn’t sure about anything. I figured he knew best, that he’d given it a lot of thought and had our best interest at heart. I waited when the girls’ started school, then on through high school. Last year, when they started their senior year, I asked him again. He wouldn’t even talk about it, just stomped off in a huff. That’s when I knew it was never going to happen, that Steven never meant for me to work. I’d trusted him—believed that if I did the right thing everything would turn out all right. But all he’d really wanted for us was to live our lives
his
way. I felt like a fool.”

Jerry held me close. I could feel his breath on my neck. “Why did
you
feel like a fool?”

“All those years I’d been kidding myself. I should have known that he’d never let me be a beautician.”

“But you were in beauty school when you started seeing him.”

“Yeah. But then I was only Maggie Sweet. It was all right for Maggie Sweet to be a beautician. It wasn’t all right for Mrs. Steven Presson. Everyone seemed to think I was lucky to have him, that I had this great life. Finally I gave up. I told myself it didn’t matter, that I’d just be whatever it was everyone wanted me to be.”

He turned my face toward his. “Steven’s the fool—he doesn’t know what you’re worth. If your work makes you happy, he should want it for you. Lord, honey, I feel like you do. If you’re happy, I’m happy. It’s as simple as that.”

I looked into his eyes. For us, it was as simple as that.