Maggie Sweet (12 page)

We’d talked about me leaving, about almost nothing
else, since that first day. But I’d never really thought it through. Somehow I just pictured it happening: Maggie and Jerry living happily ever after at the farmhouse. Wave a magic wand, wish upon a star, blow out your birthday candles, and make your dreams come true. But I’d never thought about the actual steps; the actual
telling
.

How would I tell them? Call a family meeting, announce it to all the relatives over Sunday dinner? Tell them at the graduation party? I could bring it up casually while Steven carved the ham. “Oh, by the way. I’m moving out right after dinner. But you all take your time. Don’t worry about a thing. The U-Haul won’t be here ’til after dessert.”

Would my motherless daughters’ lips tremble over the potato salad? What about Mama Dean’s tragic broken figure, the hurt in Mother’s eyes, Daddy and Willa Mae’s embarrassment, Mother Presson’s sinking spell? What would Steven do? In spite of everything, he was clueless. He seemed to think we’d limp along side by side ’til All Souls Cemetery and eternity.

Could I wait ’til he was asleep, leave a note, slip off in the dead of night—the coward’s way out?

But for some reason, even more than telling Steven and the girls, I dreaded telling Mother and Mama Dean.

“Oh, Lord! They think my whole life’s settled—that I’ll always do the right thing. They see me as this good…”

Jerry sighed. “Lord, Maggie, you sound like you did back in school. I thought you were past that.”

“Well, I guess I have lost my ‘good girl’ standing,” I said, covering myself with the queen-size sheet. “But everything I’ve ever known is flashing before my eyes. I just…I don’t know how to do this.”

Jerry sat up, pulled on his clothes, and left the room.

I wrapped the sheet around myself and followed him.

In the kitchen, he kept his back to me as he scooped coffee into a filter. He looked calm, but the set of his back said pure tight-lipped Navy.

“Tell me what you’re thinking. Don’t shut me out if you’re mad,” I said.

“I’m not mad. It’s just…God, Maggie. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. I keep thinking about what happened to us back in school. You wouldn’t stand up for yourself then and you can’t stand up for yourself now.”

“That’s not fair. It’s only been a few weeks. I need time to work everything out. You said yourself that it’d be a mess, that I was the one with everything to lose. I just want everyone to be all right,” I said.

He stared past me, out the window. Then his shoulders slumped. “Yeah. You’re right. I
am
rushing you. It’s just—for a minute there, it was like we’d had this exact conversation before.” He shook his head to clear it. “Do you remember the first time we were together here at the farmhouse? You asked me if I thought two eighteen-year-olds could have been in love for real—could have been each other’s real life? Do you understand how lucky we are to have found each other again? How special it is to get another chance? I know it won’t be easy, but we can’t let that stop us. Don’t you see, Maggie, this might be the last chance we get.”

He got up and poured coffee strong enough to walk to the table by itself. When he’d made the coffee, he’d forgot to measure. He hadn’t been calm and collected after all.

“We’re not eighteen anymore, Maggie. We’ll never see
our golden wedding anniversary. I want us to walk through town holding hands—to get started.”

“Do you really think they’ll be all right?

“They’ll be fine, honey. They’ll be better than fine,” he said.

I reached for his hand. “If I tell them as soon as the girls graduate, we’ll only be eighty-eight on our golden wedding anniversary.”

The
next week, when I wasn’t with Jerry, I concentrated on the girls’ graduation party. For months, I’d been stocking up on cake mixes and confectioner’s sugar, macaroni, pickles, mayonnaise and mustard, Jell-O and canned fruit for salads, a fancy paper tablecloth and napkins, candles, butter mints, nuts, and ingredients for the punch. Wednesday, I bought a twenty-pound ham on sale at Winn-Dixie.

I’d just wrestled the ham into the kitchen when Jill came up behind me.

“Hey, Mama.”

“Lord, Jill. You scared me to death! I thought you were in school.”

“I’ve got, uh, cramps. The school nurse tried to call you.”

I gave her Midol and the heating pad and she went back to bed. Then I carried the ham down the basement stairs and put it in the deep-freeze and went back upstairs to check on Jill. She was in her room with the phone cord stretched under her door.

Starting toward her room, I heard, “You’ve got to see
me…no, I haven’t seen a doctor…I just
know.
You said you’d take care of it! All right, I’ll see you at three.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, my heart pounding like a hammer. I cannot tell you all the thoughts in my head.

A second later she came out in the hall and saw me standing there. We stared at each other for a full minute. It was awful.

Finally Jill said, “You scared me to death. I thought you were downstairs.”

“Who were you talking to?”

“When?” she asked, pale and shifty-eyed.

“Just now. On the phone. I heard you.”

“You shouldn’t have been listening in on me. What did you hear?” She was trying to turn it around, like I’d done something wrong.

“We can stand here all day if you want to, but you
will
tell me.”

“Nothing’s going on. Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“I’m your mother. I’m not going to leave you alone.”

“Don’t start that talk-to-me-I’m-your-mother stuff. You always say that but when I tell you anything you get upset. Besides, it’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it.” She prissed past me into her room and shut the door.

I barged in behind her. I didn’t even bother to knock. Her saying “my body” made the hair on my neck stand straight up. “Don’t you slam your door on me. Tell me what’s going on.”

“All right! If you really want to know, I’ll tell you. In fact, I’ll show you.” She turned around and dropped her jeans.

For a minute I got swimmy-headed.

Jill had a tattoo on her butt—an eagle tattoo!

“Are you happy now?” she wailed. “Oh, Mama, I think it’s infected! Gangrene’s setting in.”

I stood there with my mouth dropped open and my stomach heaving. I didn’t know what to do. Part of me wanted to hug her ’cause it wasn’t any of the terrible things I’d been thinking, but I also wanted to hit her ’cause hotalmighty-damn! my own little girl had a tattoo on her butt!

“Lord, Jill! When did you do this?”

“Friday.”

I thought back to Friday. I’d gone to Chatham Road that day. If I’d been home, it might not have happened. Then I thought,
Jill should have been in school on Friday.
“So you played hooky, too?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve got all the credits I need so they have to give me my diploma. Besides, I’m not going to graduation and I’m not going to college, either. I’m taking carving classes from the chief and that’s all there is to that.” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at me like Mama Dean.

I couldn’t believe it. She was going to stand there and get snippy with me, talk back to me when she had a tattoo! I pinched her hard on the arm.

She looked shocked. “God, Mama, that hurt!”

“If you say another word about graduation, I swear I’ll pinch your head off. I shudder to think what your daddy will say about all this.”

Her face went white as flour. “Why do you have to tell Daddy?”

This went right through me. It didn’t matter one
almighty bit what I thought, but let her daddy get mad and she went all to pieces. “I have to tell him. You can’t go around doing anything you take in your head to do.”

She started to cry. “But he’s always mad at me. It’s like I had to do something he’d hate to get back at him.”

“You can’t go around disfiguring yourself to get back at people.”

“I know it was stupid. But it seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said, sounding like she did at two.

I checked the tattoo. It wasn’t infected, only new and tender. I thought of infection, blood-poisoning, my daughter paying cash money to get herself disfigured for life. For a minute I thought I might vomit.

I got the first-aid kit from the medicine cabinet, found the tube of Neosporin, and handed it to Jill. I was too queasy to dab it on myself.

By then I was so dizzy, I had to lie down. I went to my room and thought about Steven and Jill. It was true, they did nothing but fuss and argue now. If I told Steven about the tattoo it would only get worse. Steven’d have a hissy. Jill would stomp out the door. On the other hand, if I didn’t tell him and he found out…I tried not to think about that. How much of this was my fault? Would it have made any difference if I’d been home that day?

I got up, went down the hall to Jill’s room. She looked miserable. I sat on the edge of her bed. “I’ve decided not to tell Daddy.”

“Thanks, Mama,” she said, her eyes full.

“Don’t thank me yet. You’ve got to go to graduation—behave yourself. We can’t be having World War Three around here all the time.”

“I know. But the rules around here are so stupid.” She leaned on her elbow and studied me. “Why’s Daddy mad all the time?”

“He’s not mad at you. He’s mad at me because of Palomino Joe’s.”

“That was ages ago. If he’s still mad over that, he’ll never get over me not going to college.”

“Jill—”

“I’m not going, Mama. I plan to carve. People say I’m good. I’ve got to see what I can do. Daddy makes everything so hard. Why can’t he just let me be?”

I started to say “it’s for your own good.” But I stopped myself. Was going to college really for Jill’s good, or was it just what was expected of Steven Presson’s daughter? I thought back twenty years, when my family had shipped me off to Chapel Hill, changed my life forever, for my own good. Maybe if they’d let me be, I’d be married to Jerry now and running Styles by Maggie Roberts instead of sneaking around, trying to fix my eighteen-year-old life.

Oh, Lord. What we did to the people we loved for their own good.

That afternoon, when Jill went out to the garage workshop, I drove to the pay phone at Dixie Burger. “I’m sorry about today, honey. Jill’s been home all day. I’m calling from a pay phone.”

“Sick?”

“Not exactly. I don’t want you to think bad of her…but she got this tattoo….”

“Tattoo?”

“An eagle tattoo on her…well…I couldn’t leave. It was awful. She thought it was infected and got all torn
up. Then I got torn up. She says she’s not going to college no matter what. Steven’ll have a hissy when everything hits the fan.”

“Slow down, honey. Did you say a tattoo?”

“Let’s not talk about it anymore. You didn’t cook, did you?”

“I marinated steaks all night.”

Jerry always cooked for us, marinated steaks, blackened fish, key-lime pie; foods I’d never heard of. Then he served them all man-style, right from the pan.

“I’m sorry. Seem’s all I ever say is ‘sorry.’”

“Don’t worry, honey. The steak’ll keep. And don’t worry about Jill. From everything you’ve said, I like her. She just had a dumb-ass attack. Seems to go with the territory. So many attacks per teen. Did I ever tell you about the dumbest thing I did in my teens?”

“Does it have anything to do with me?”

“It has everything to do with you.”

“Tell me again.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

There
was either a full moon, or Mama Dean was right, the world was going downhill in a handbasket.

I was driving down East Main Street, on my way to the farmhouse, when I saw a
FOR SALE
sign in front of the Curl & Swirl. I like to have crashed my car through Shirley’s plate-glass window when I saw it.

I parked the car and went inside. Shirley was at her appointment desk, under a set of wind chimes, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. When she saw me, she gave me a quivering grin and said, “Lord, Maggie. I didn’t plan to get caught like this. The realtor just left and I’m having a squalling spell. I’m almost through. It’s only a mini-squall.”

“Oh, Shirley, I didn’t know,” I said, close to having a spell of my own.

“I’ve decided to sell the place, get a condo at the beach. Quit while my legs are still good enough for a bathing suit.” She hiked up her pant leg to show off a muscular calf in orange support hose. Then she picked up a mirror and scrubbed at the smudged mascara under her eyes. “Lordymercy, I’m a mess. Reckon I better fix up this face or go down to the pound and apply for a dog license.”

I knew she expected me to laugh, but her trying to joke at a time like this only made me feel worse. I ached to hug her. There were a thousand things I wanted to say. But she was making it clear that the last thing she wanted was a fuss. She wanted me and everyone else to think she was shrugging off the Curl & Swirl with a wink and a wisecrack as if it wasn’t breaking her heart. I gathered myself. If I said the wrong thing, made one false move, she’d go all to pieces and embarrass herself to death.

While she concentrated on her makeup, I thought about making an excuse and slipping out the door to give her time to pull herself together. Then I heard another set of wind chimes and Mrs. Mabes, Shirley’s mother, came out of the back room carrying a coffee pot.

“Hey, Maggie,” she said.

“Hey, Mrs. Mabes.”

Mrs. Mabes handed us Styrofoam cups of coffee, gave the wind chimes a look that should have frozen them into silence forever, then glared at Shirley. “Maggie Sweet, I want you to talk some sense into Shirley. She’s letting them aliens run her out of town.”

Shirley set down the mirror. “Mama calls the people at the Beauty Box ‘aliens.’ She calls everyone who wasn’t born in Poplar Grove aliens. But they’re not running me off. Retiring to the beach isn’t exactly a punishment from God, Mama.”

“Why, I wouldn’t go to the beach to see Jimmy Carter himself,” Mrs. Mabes said, snorting.

Shirley stirred her coffee and sighed. “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be discussing this for the millionth time this week. Mama thinks I’m giving up, not retiring.
She thinks I ought to go out kicking and screaming.”

Mrs. Mabes looked at me. “I tell you kicking and screaming’s the only way to go. Before I’d let them aliens run me out of town, I’d advertise more, run more specials, load the seniors from the Methodist home on a bus and drive them down here myself if I had to. We was here first. I sure as the world wouldn’t roll over and play dead for no aliens.”

“I’m not playing dead, Mama. We’ve had a good run. Now it’s over.”

“We could give door prizes, put in a tanning bed, give bikini waxes….” Mrs. Mabes went on, talking right over Shirley.

Shirley shook her head. “Hope springs eternal for Mama. ’Course she also believes that big hair and beehives are making a comeback.”

“It could happen. Stranger things than that have happened,” Mrs. Mabes said.

“Lord, Mama, you’re just being stubborn. We’ve hung on too long as it is. From the minute the Beauty Box moved into the mall, it was meant to be. Our fate was sealed. It was in the stars. Part of some universal plan. Now it’s time to quit, to let it go,” Shirley said, twirling her crystal pendant absentmindedly.

“Bullshit and applesauce! That’s universal hogwash and you know it. I didn’t raise my daughter to be no quitter.”

“You didn’t raise me to be a fool, either, Mama. Now let’s stop this fussing. Maggie didn’t come here to listen to us fuss.”

“Well, pardon me for speaking. I’m just as universally sorry as I can be.” Mrs. Mabes pulled herself up stiffly,
gave the wind chimes a jerk, and hobbled to the back room.

After she left, we sat there awhile, not saying anything.

Finally Shirley said, “Lord, Maggie, I’m sorry you had to witness this mess.”

“She’s just upset.”

“Don’t I know it. We’ve been fussing like this for weeks. I know it’s hurt Mama—hurt her to the core. But I didn’t plan to go out like this either. I’ve done all I know to do and more. But I swanee, I’m still eat up with guilt like a dog’s eat up with mange.”

I thought about Shirley and Mrs. Mabes, how the Curl & Swirl had been passed down from mother to daughter like farmland being passed down from father to son. Mrs. Mabes had started it before World War II with money borrowed from her mother. In the late fifties Shirley had taken it over and turned it into the busiest shop in town. Now after all these years, Shirley was the one to lose it. No wonder she felt awful.

“There’s got to be another way,” I said.

“We’ve been dead as a hammer for two years.”

“What would it take to turn things around?” I asked.

“Vidal Sassoon…an accident at the Beauty Box involving kerosene and a match. Any way you slice, it’d take a miracle.”

“There’s got to be something…”

“I’ve turned it over and over in my mind for months,” she said.

“Maybe you could find some young stylist in Charlotte. Bring her here. Offer that cute apartment in the back…
you know, a package deal. Why, anyone starting out would be lucky to have—”

“I’ve tried that. I’ve gone as far away as Atlanta. But they’d take one look at our big-hair, tight-perm clients and say, ‘Sorry, Shirley, I’m gone.’ Times have changed, Maggie. Use to, a young stylist would be thrilled to have a setup like this. But nowadays they don’t see it as a place to start. They see it as a career move—a bad career move. They figure if they’re seen in my shop, their reputation as an up-and-coming stylist would be ruined before it got started. Next thing I know they’ve signed on at the Beauty Box or they’ve caught the first bus back to Atlanta.”

“Why don’t you take some classes? They’re bound to have refresher courses now that short dos have made a comeback,” I said.

“I tried. I can cut hair ’til the cows come home, but these precision cuts are tricky. I just can’t seem to get the hang of ’em. Guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I need to face it, I’m precision-cut illiterate.”

“Lord, Shirley, I wish there was something I could do.”

“I wish that husband of yours had let you work here. You’d have a big following by now. We could’ve given the Beauty Box a real run for its money. But there’s no use crying over spilt Dippity-Do.”

I thought about my plan to leave Steven. I’d need a job, a place to live. It would be perfect.

“What if I said I could come to work now? That I
want
to work,” I said, my voice rising. I’d daydreamed about this moment for years.

Shirley didn’t even look up. She sipped her coffee and stared off into space. Finally she said, “Law me, I’d love to
have you here, just for the company. But there’s no use breaking up your happy home over a lost cause. Besides, even if you started this very day, it’s too late. No one comes to the Curl & Swirl looking for modern cuts. You’d just be standing around, wasting your time. I’ve already had to cut Dixie and Lurleen’s hours to the bone. But thanks, Maggie. I appreciate the offer.”

We sat there drinking coffee, not speaking. Shirley didn’t believe I wanted to work. She thought I was just being nice, saying the right thing to cheer her up. I considered telling her I’d be needing a job, that she’d be doing me the favor. But it didn’t seem right since I hadn’t told my family I was leaving.

Now I wondered what I’d do. I’d taken for granted the Curl & Swirl would be waiting for me when I got ready. Now that I was ready it was too late.

Cutting hair was the only thing I was qualified to do. The only thing I wanted to do. I wouldn’t work at the Beauty Box out of loyalty to Shirley, and the next nearest shop was thirty miles away, too far for my old car to travel on a daily basis.

I saw myself working in the Zippy Mart, wearing a blue smock with the name Maggie emblazoned on the pocket. I’d emboss credit cards, turn hot dogs on a rotisserie, pour syrup into a Slurpee machine, say “Y’all come back,” a thousand times a day from behind my bulletproof shield. Oh, no!

I thought about the Methodist home. They were always giving nurse’s aide courses. I’d pass dinner trays and bedpans, learn to give back rubs, move on to bed baths and Fleet enemas. Oh, Lord!

We sat there for a long time, lost in our own thoughts. I didn’t leave ’til the wind chimes announced the first customers: ninety-something Mrs. Gentry and her sister, Mrs. Lovelace. Mrs. Gentry wore a blue-rinsed tight perm and Mrs. Lovelace’s hair was so thin, you could set it all in one pincurl.

When I said good-bye, Shirley shrugged and gave me a tired I-told-you-so wink.

All
the way to the farmhouse, I thought about the generations of women who’d come through Shirley’s doors—regulars with weekly standing appointments, women who came for only the most special events of their lives like weddings and graduations. I’d spent my teens there—taken for granted I’d spend my grown-up years there, too. Now any hope of that was gone. It was the end of an era, the end of a dream.

As I drove down Chatham Road toward the farmhouse, I saw Jerry riding his John Deere, an acre away. I waved, pulled my car behind an outbuilding, and let myself into the house.

Going through to the kitchen, I was in such a fog, I barely noticed the newspapers strewn on the front room couch, the cups on the coffee table where we’d left them two days before.

I rinsed out the coffee pot, measured coffee into a filter, almost bumping into a ladder that had been left in the middle of the room. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink. I washed two mugs, half saw the empty Miller Draft six-pack on the counter. If I hadn’t been so dazed, I’d have noticed that the whole house was messy and clut
tered, very unlike everything-in-its-place Jerry. But with my mind on the Curl & Swirl, the house barely registered.

By the time Jerry came in, the coffee was brewing. He gave me a quick, sweaty kiss, said, “I’ll be back as soon as I shower.” Then he disappeared down the hall to the bathroom.

Somewhere in the back of the house, a radio played Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

Deep in thought, I sat on the couch, drank coffee, and waited.

A few minutes later, he was back, smelling of soap and shampoo, dressed in clean jeans and a white T, his feet bare, his wet hair slicked back. He went to the kitchen, then carried his coffee mug to a chair six feet away.

“I’d have been here earlier, but I stopped at Shirley’s. You’ll never guess—” I started.

“I’ve got to go to Florida for a few days,” he said.

“What?” With all that was on my mind, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

“I’ve got to go to Jacksonville. I’m flying out this afternoon.”

“I thought the date for your final decree wasn’t ’til next week.”

“Yeah…that’s another thing.” He looked past me, out the window. For the first time I noticed how tired he looked.

“What’s going on?”

“Trey’s in a mess, had one of his dumb-ass attacks.”

“There’s a lot of that going around,” I said, watching his face, keeping my voice steady.

“Yeah. But this one landed him in the brig.”

“Oh, no, what happened?”

“He got knee-walking drunk, was late getting back from leave, got his ear pierced—”

“Oh, Lord!” I thought about all the messes Jill got into, how her worst punishment was being grounded for a week. “Couldn’t they talk to him, give him a warning? I mean, the brig, my Lord!”

He stiffened. “Look, Maggie, Trey’s in the Navy, not some Sunday school sleep-away camp. He deliberately broke regulations.”

When had my outlaw got so righteous, so rule-abiding? He’d spent his teens breaking rules.
We
were breaking all the rules just being together.

“How can you say that? When did rules and regulations ever make a damn to you?” I flared.

He turned, his eyes blazing. “My son makes a damn to me! I didn’t make the rules and regulations—the Navy did. Trey had choices, but he chose the Navy. Now they own his butt for the next four years. Like it or not, he can go along quietly, maybe learn something, or he can fight every rule that comes down the pike and make it four years of misery.”

He stopped talking. Silence fell between us. I’d never seen him like this before. For the first time ever, it hit me: for twenty years we’d had completely separate lives. He’d talked about his son, his almost-ex-wife, but, I’d never seen them as real people. I’d never thought of Jerry’s life apart from me as real, never imagined his years of struggle, arguing with his wife, following Navy regulations, raising his son to have an easier life than his. Somehow I’d
seen him looking out a window or reading a book (daydreaming about me?) while his life happened around him.

Now I saw his life had been as tangled as mine with worry and duty and trying to do the right thing. Except in my daydreams that other life had nothing to do with me.

My face burned with shame. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think….”

We drank coffee, stared past each other; close at hand, just out of reach.

Then I remembered. “You said there was another thing?”

“I didn’t want to tell you…but Brenda’s been calling.”

“But I thought—”

“I thought so, too. Then all this mess with Trey—she called me again last night.”

“Will you have to see her?”

“God, Maggie, our son’s in the brig. She’s a wreck.”

“There’s more, isn’t there?” I breathed in and out, shut my eyes and opened them. All the air seemed to have left the room.

“Yeah. She’s having second thoughts.”

“About you?”

“Yeah. The single life isn’t what she thought it’d be; she probably wants more money or something. She laid this whole guilt trip on me, said Trey never had any problems until we split…said it wasn’t too late…our divorce isn’t final.”