Maggie Sweet (5 page)

In just a few minutes it filled up the entire first floor. Then before you could say Jack Robinson, it started oozing up the stairs to where Bobby Overcash and the children were fast asleep. And without any warning whatsoever, Bobby Overcash and the four Overcash children were completely overcome.

That’s how Toy found them when she came home the next morning after thinking things over. In the short time she was gone her entire family had drowned in their sleep in a sticky, writhing mass of uncooked bread.

That’s when I sat up straight in bed in a cold sweat.

I was wide awake for a long time thinking about Toy and Bobby. They’d seemed like a perfect couple. I wondered if they’d had one big fight or if they’d just drifted apart over the years.

Everyone thought Steven and I were perfect too.

Suddenly this feeling of utter doom came over me and I felt like the loneliest person in the world.

Steven, who was sound asleep next to me, must have sensed something because even in his sleep he mumbled, “Maggie Sweet, are you all right?”

For some reason, this set me off and I started crying. I guess it was the unexpected kindness of it. When he rolled over to his side of the bed, I reached for his hand but it was wedged tight under his pillow. So I stretched out my foot and found his tangled up in the sheet.

The last thing I remember, as I drifted off to sleep, was my foot resting against Steven’s and what a comfort it was.

Thursday
morning, Mary Price picked me up in her Silverado and we drove to the Overcashes with our dishes. I took a chicken rice casserole and Mary Price took a store-bought pecan pie.

But when we pulled up in front of the Overcash house, there in the driveway, big as life, was Toy’s red Volkswagen.

“Lord, she’s back! Don’t stop!” I shouted.

Mary Price threw the Silverado into gear, hit the gas pedal, and kept on going.

“That story about her leaving’s probably a bold-faced lie from beginning to end,” Mary Price said. “Nobody runs away for just one night.”

I thought about all the times Mary Price had left Hoyt for an hour, or a night, or however long it took to get her way, but I didn’t say anything. We just drove around the block trying to figure out what to do. Then I noticed the car in front of us was circling the block, too.

“Why, that’s Geneva Cantrow’s Dodge Dart!” I said.

She’d been circling the block about as long as we had.

Mary Price looked in the rearview mirror. “Lord, Mag
gie Sweet, that’s Doris Binfield’s old green station wagon following us. Why, every good woman in town has turned out.”

(Mary Price has a morbid fear of being seen with gaggles of good women. She says, “Those high-pitched voices trying to out-nice each other make me want to scream and claw my eyes out!”)

Next to Doris, in the passenger seat, was Modine Dingler. And behind them, Jessie Rae Moore’s Honda Civic. All the women from last night’s party were driving past the Overcash house, then circling the block.

Finally we all pulled over at a stop sign and got out of our cars. Everyone agreed it would be real awkward for us to bust in on Toy and Bobby if they were trying to iron things out. We decided to go for coffee at Eckerd’s and talk things over.

(I decided not to say anything about my sourdough dream, even though the Overcash house was as quiet as a tomb. I figured everyone was already upset enough.)

When we got to Eckerd’s, we found a booth in the back. After about three cups of coffee apiece, we decided that since Geneva’s husband, Knoxie, and Bobby Overcash are comanagers down at Winn-Dixie, she’d be the first to hear. Geneva promised to call the rest of us the minute she heard anything.

Modine had baked two lemon chess pies. Doris had a green bean casserole. Geneva had half a honey-baked ham, and Jessie Rae had this orange congealed salad that hadn’t quite jelled. But we all knew Jessie Rae had really tried so we divided everything up equally and went home.

After Mary Price dropped me off, I was too worked up to do any housework. I just sat in the front room in Steven’s La-Z-Boy trying to figure things out.

I thought about Toy and Bobby together again; how she’d been the perfect wife right up to the moment she walked out the door. Now she’d have to spend the rest of her life making up to Bobby for one mistake. I thought how awful that would be.

Then I remembered how sweet Steven had been last night, comforting me like that. So far nothing had happened between us but a little boredom. Maybe if I quit worrying about how boring my life was, I could think up something to add some excitement to our marriage before things got worse. Once we were getting along better, I could explain to Steven just what he was doing wrong.

I had to try, I mean, you don’t throw away a nineteen-year-old marriage and a house in the historical part of town because of a little boredom.

The rest of the afternoon, I sat in the La-Z-Boy thinking and reading back copies of “Can This Marriage Be Saved” in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
.

Just before my family got home, I came up with an idea.

Right after supper, when Steven went into his den, as usual, I sent the children over to Mother’s. I told them she needed help with her yard work—which wasn’t exactly a lie, even though Mother had never
asked
for help.

Then I poured Steven’s favorite wine into our best glasses. The wine tasted like Alka-Seltzer to me, but our marriage was worth the sacrifice.

I took a sip of the wine, then carried both glasses upstairs to the bedroom and arranged them just so on the nightstand.

When I turned on the radio, Elvis was singing “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You.” I figured that was a sign.

I took another sip of the wine.

After I showered, I painted up and slipped into the black silk teddy I’d bought at the lingerie party. I’d never seen a teddy before. It’s a lot like shorty pajamas, only sexy. I figured me buying that teddy was another sign that I was doing the right thing.

I tried another sip of the wine, which was starting to grow on me. After that, I splashed on some Jean Nate and called Steven up to the bedroom.

The radio was playing “Love Is A Many Splendored Thing” as Steven came up the stairs. I stood, stark naked except for the teddy and tiniest spray of Nate, waiting for my whole new life to begin.

Well, I wish you could have seen the look on Steven’s face when he came through the bedroom door. He just stood there staring at me, his eyes all bugged out, his jaw dropped down to the floor, and his face dead white. I have never seen a man look so surprised in all my life. Then all at once his face went red. But not like he was blushing. More like he was about to have a stroke.

Finally he said, and I will never forget his words, “Maggie Sweet, what in the world has come over you? You know I have a Sons of the Confederacy meeting tonight. Besides, it’s only Thursday.”

Well, I
did
know he had a meeting. I just didn’t think he’d care about an old meeting with what I had on my
mind. I said, “Steven, do you love me? I need to know if you still love me.”

Steven just looked at me. “I married you, didn’t I? What more do you want?”

After he left, I sat down on the bed and had a good cry. If you have ever stood stark naked except for a teddy, in front of the person you
thought
had wanted you to do that very thing for years, and he doesn’t, then you know what I mean.

After awhile I gathered myself as best I could and packed the teddy away. Then I carried the wine out to the glider and drank until dark.

This is what I hope I can forget some day.

Friday
morning I was lower than a well. I’d been a fool to think a black silk teddy could change anything: make Steven notice me, make things better between us. Nothing was ever going to change. Steven wanted a quiet little woman, one who’d stay in the background, run his house, raise his children, and do it all so smoothly he could put her completely out of his mind.

But I didn’t want to be quiet anymore. I wanted to make a fuss, to shout, “It’s not enough!” Only somewhere along the way I’d lost him, lost the power to make him see or hear me.

One of Steven’s pet rules is about television watching. No one is allowed to turn on the TV ’til after supper. No exceptions. Not ever. He says there are a million and one things a person can do instead of wasting their life away watching TV. So that Friday I planned to watch TV from
Good Morning America
right through to
The Five O’clock News.

I was just getting settled when the telephone rang. It was Mary Price.

“What’re you doing?”

“Cussing, smoking, and watching TV.”

“Whoa! A walk on the wild side. What’s up?”

“Nothing. Nothing but Toy and Bobby. Steven and me. Nothing but life.”

“Lord, Maggie Sweet, life’s too big a subject to think about in the morning. I don’t mean to add to your burden, but I need you to pin up the hem on a new costume I got for this weekend’s gig.”

Mary Price rehearses at the That’lldu nearly every day. She and Hoyt have been singing country music there for about a year. The That’lldu is a real dump and only no-accounts go in there. But Mary Price says, “A person has to start her singing career someplace.”

“Try to come around one o’clock,” I said. “I’m fixing to watch TV all day and I don’t think I can live through the soap operas. I mean, all those couples having meaningful talks and making love right through kidnappings, killings, and amnesia…why, a Sons of the Confederacy meeting wouldn’t slow them down a heartbeat.”

“You’ll go into a total decline watching soaps in your mood. You need to get busy. Go down to the Curl and Swirl, watch Shirley work, shampoo a few people, throw yourself into hair. It’s therapy for you.”

“I know. But Shirley’s at a style show in Atlanta. She won’t be home ’til tomorrow. Besides, her shop’s dead as four o’clock since the Beauty Box opened at the mall with its air guns, blending shears, and vent dryers.”

“But Shirley’s always had the busiest shop in town.”

“Well, now its the second busiest and there aren’t but two shops.”

“Go to the Beauty Box. Watch them cut hair. All those
high-tech precision cuts. Weren’t precision cuts your specialty back in school?”

“I got straight As. But that was back when God was a boy.”

“It hasn’t been that long. Why, you could pick it up again in a heartbeat, start cutting hair at home.”

“Nobody wants their hair done at the kitchen sink, Mary Price. It’s too awkward. I need chairs that tilt, shampoo basins—”

“You need your own shop.”

“Steven’ll never allow that. Beauty shops don’t go with historical.”

“It’s a wonder he doesn’t have you dressing like
Little House on the Prairie
and churning your own butter.”

“I know,” I said, feeling low again. “I’d love to watch a good precision haircutter. I’m getting so rusty. It’s just…I’d feel disloyal to Shirley setting foot in the Beauty Box. Poor Shirley. Big hair and tight perms are dead as a hammer and that’s all she knows.”

“Well, go to Eckerd’s and check out the new hair products. Do something!”

“I was supposed to do Jessie Rae’s hair today, but she canceled for the millionth time.”

“You do Jessie Rae’s hair?”

“Sad to say but I do.”

“I love Jessie Rae to death but she hasn’t changed her hairdo since 1979. And those roots…”

“I know. I keep trying to talk her into a change but she’s too timid to change anything, even her hair. It’s been six months since I talked her into a little number 104 natural golden brown hair color. Then her family pitched a fit
and she hasn’t been back. All that premature gray and no touch-ups…why, she’s got more roots than Alex Haley.”

“From the back it looks like a bald spot,” Mary Price said.

“If she had a streaking or a reverse frosting she wouldn’t get roots every little whipstitch,” I said.

“She’ll do that when hogs fly.”

“I’ve been trying to talk her into a shorter cut with full bangs. It’d bring out her eyes.”

“Lord, Maggie, she’ll be wearing that teased-up-bubble hairdo to the old-folks home. But I gotta go now. See you at one.”

After we talked I felt better. I turned off the TV, straightened the house, then carried my sewing kit downstairs so I’d be ready when Mary Price arrived with her costume. I was only pinning up a hem, but Mary Price traipsing all over town in her wild cowgirl outfits aggravated Steven to death so it tickled me to know I was in on it.

I managed to stay busy and before I knew it it was lunchtime.

I was in the kitchen fixing a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich when the menu on the side of the refrigerator caught my eye.

The menu is Steven’s latest attempt to land me in the quiet room at Broughten Mental Hospital.

Every month he makes up a menu of what we’ll be eating morning, noon, and night for the next thirty days. There’s no discussing it—it’s chiseled in stone like the Ten Commandments.

First he inventories every speck of leftovers in the house to see what we have to work with. (It’s a wonder he didn’t
find the Marlboros tucked behind the frozen zucchini.) Then he’ll spend hours studying grocery ads and clipping coupons. The only foods he considers are double-coupon food and two-for-one food.

And he’s as tight as Dick’s hatband with leftovers. Why, if you get carried away enjoying Sunday’s roast, you’ll eat meatless hash later in the week ’cause every ounce of that roast is rationed out for other meals. (You won’t like meatless hash one bit, either. I know.)

Being raised in a boardinghouse had taught me to cut corners. But the way Steven goes about it is enough to make a preacher cuss. Like last month, when we were shopping at Winn-Dixie, I picked up a bottle of ginger ale for this celestial golden salad we all like. (The one with oranges in it.) But when I carried the ginger ale to the checkout, Steven told me to put it back.
To put it back
, mind you, right there at the checkout, in front of everybody. Because it wasn’t on special.

Well, this flew all over me. So I plunked six quarters on the counter, to pay for the ginger ale, and prissed my tail right out of the store, leaving Steven to carry everything.

That’s when I decided to never shop with Steven again. But then I started thinking that’d probably suit him just fine and I wouldn’t have any say at all.

I was
still in the kitchen going over the menu when Mary Price knocked on the back door. She was dressed in a red tube top, tight jeans, and cowgirl boots. Also she was carrying a Coke. Mary Price never goes anywhere without a Coke. Just seeing her made me feel better.

But when I let her in, I noticed that her eyes were big
as plates, and underneath the pancake makeup, she was white as flour.

“Mary Price, what in the world…?”

“The beatingest thing has happened.” She slid into a chair and fanned herself with a paper napkin like she was having a sinking spell. “I’ve just had the shock of my life. Let me catch my breath and I’ll tell you.”

She lit a Virginia Slim and offered me one. I got up, closed the back door and all the curtains, and took it. If Mary Price was this shook up, I’d need all the help I could get.

Finally she took a deep ragged breath and started. “I just come from the That’lldu. Bobby Overcash’s brother Jimmy was in there.”

“Did you ask about Toy?”

“Do fat babies fart? Of course I asked. Jimmy said Toy had run off all right, to West Virginia—”

“West Virginia! Why, she won’t hardly drive to Charlotte. She’s scared of interstates.”

“Interstates?”

“Interstates and regular highways, too.”

“Well, she called Bobby from Parkersburg and told him she’d left him and wasn’t ever coming home unless he met her conditions.”

“Conditions? What do you mean?”

“She told Bobby he’d been having a middle-age crisis ever since she met him. Now she was fixin’ to have a crisis of her own. First off, she said, he wasn’t to call her Toy anymore, but Tamara. Bobby said he thought Toy was right cute, but if that’s what she wanted she could consider it done. Then she said he couldn’t go on any hunting
or fishing trips ’til she had the money to go back to school.”

“Wait a minute. Toy did go to school. She graduated with us. Anyway when did Bobby take up hunting and fishing?”

“Lord, Maggie Sweet. You
have
been home too long. Why, Bobby’s always done anything he takes a notion to do. Toy’s wanted to go to art school for years, but every time she saved the money Bobby’d take a spell and spend it on fishing trips, hunting trips, at the That’lldu—”

“But I always thought they were perfect.”

“Shoot! The only thing they ever agreed on is that they were both in love with Bobby Overcash.”

“I can’t believe it. Toy is good at art, though. Remember her Coke-bottle stained glass back in school? And the cartoon pictures she made at the Lions Club barbecue?”

“Caricatures.”

“What?”

“Those cartoon pictures are called caricatures. Most caricatures make people look deformed but Toy’s were right cute. But when she mentioned art school, Bobby pitched a fit, said she was a wife and mother now, and it was time for her to grow up.”

“Lord, and her with a heart of gold. What happened then?”

Mary Price paused, put out her cigarette and lit another one. “That’s when she hung up on him!”

“She what?”

“She hung up. She gave him time to remember that she was three hundred miles from home, that the kids would be up in a few hours, and that he didn’t even know where
they kept the pots and pans.”

“That’d be my family. They don’t know where anything is.”

“When she called back he said he thought art school was a good idea. But that wasn’t enough for Toy. Not only did she want to go to school but he had to build her an art studio in the garage—and when he came in later’n ten o’clock he could cook his own damned supper ’cause she’d be busy in her studio.”

“Did she really say ‘damned’? Toy never cusses.”

“I reckon she did. That’s when Bobby should have known she meant business. But her cussing went right over his head. So the fool said, ‘That’s not one condition, Toy, that’s three. And who said anything about a art studio?’ And furthermore, Toy Overcash, don’t you ever, ever, hang up on me again.’”

“What’d she do then?”

“Hung up of course. She had to. She’d come too far to back down. By the time she called back, Bobby Overcash was a broken man. He agreed to everything and she went home.”

“Mary Price, I am shocked in my heart. Do you really think she’d have stayed gone?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t know what to think. I can’t believe she went off in the first place. I mean Toy’s always been so mealy-mouthed, like that woman in
Gone with the Wind.
”

“Melanie Wilkes.”

“Who?”

“Melanie—the woman in
Gone with the Wind.
Toy makes Melanie look like a painted hussy.”

“Jimmy said she’d been changing…watching Phil Donahue, saying things like ‘self-actualization’ and ‘down with oppression.’ ’Course Bobby didn’t know what any of that meant. He did think it was strange when she started wearing blue eye shadow in the day and her hair in a long braid like Willie Nelson.”

We sat there for the longest, not saying a word. After we took a last drag on our cigarettes, we stubbed them out, and I washed the ashtray and sprayed the room with Lysol.

Finally, Mary Price said, “All these years I thought Toy was a little nothing of a woman, but she has the guts of Attila the Hun! Maggie, do you think she was just pretending to be sweet all those years? I never trusted anyone
that
sweet. It’s not natural. Why, she completely blindsided Bobby. She blindsided the whole town.”

After
Mary Price left, I didn’t hardly have the sense to cook. All I could think about was Toy. But by the time supper was on the stove, I’d decided that Toy hadn’t blindsided anyone. Not on purpose, anyway. She didn’t have a mean, sneaky bone in her body. She was a good woman. That’s what had been her undoing. She’d spent her whole life helping everyone, and we’d all let her help us. But when she needed help, no one said, “Now it’s your turn Toy. You tell us what you need and we’ll help you.”

She ran away because she was worn out with being good.

I was still deep in thought when my family sat down for supper.

Right off, Jill said, “God, Mama. I’m sick of butter
beans. Why do we always have to have butter beans? Week in, week out, it’s butter beans, butter beans.”

I wanted to say, Please don’t fuss. I’m too upset to listen to fussing tonight. Besides it’s on the menu to have butter beans week in and week out and your daddy sets great store by his menus. What I said is, “Jill, watch your cussing.”

“I don’t want to speak to you again about your cussing,” Steven said, not looking up from his plate.

“Why is the meat loaf so bready? I hate bready meat loaf,” Amy said.

Naturally, it’s bready when it’s mostly bread. Your daddy only allows me three-quarters of a pound of hamburger for meat loaf for four people so he can buy
important
things like cemetery plots,
is what I was thinking. “The starving people in the world would be thrilled to have this meat loaf,” is what I said.

“Well, I’d rather have one skinny hamburger than a huge slab of bready old meat loaf any day of the week,” Amy said, looking down her nose at me.

“Maggie, are you sure tonight’s meat loaf night? I thought it was fish stick night.”

“No, Steven. Every
other
Friday’s fish stick night.” We’d had this conversation so many times, I wanted to put my head in the iced tea pitcher and drown myself.