Maggie Sweet (8 page)

Lordamercy! It was worse than I thought. My hair hung limp past my shoulders. There were circles as dark as bruises under my eyes. My legs were still good and the stretch marks on my breasts and stomach had faded to faint silvery lines, but when I turned sideways and sucked in my stomach, nothing moved. Also, my behind seemed lower than I remembered.

I wondered if Steven had noticed the changes in me. Then I remembered his potbelly. I’d never noticed his stomach at all until it was a full-fledged potbelly.

I stared for a while, wondering if potbellies and stretch marks had as much to do with keeping couples faithful as church vows and children. It’s easier to show a tired old body to a tired old husband than to risk yourself with someone new.

How did a new man feel about stretch marks put there by another man’s children?

Was there time for plastic surgery before the reunion?

Did movie stars who went from affair to affair and marriage to marriage worry about such things?

Why was I even
thinking
about such things?

I got dressed and went out back to the glider to brood.

Ten minutes later, I was back in the bathroom with a copy of
Southern Hairdo
and the hair-cutting shears. I cut, moussed, and dried my hair into a style Mama Dean called “boiled and hung upside down to dry.”

In the bedroom, I rummaged through the dresser draw
ers, found the snug jeans, purple T-shirt, and big earrings Jill had given me for Christmas. I put them on, then painted up a little.

A few minutes later, I picked up the car keys and headed out the door.

All
the way to Mary Price’s, I grinned and patted my moussed curls. I felt sassy and reckless. I wanted to laugh out loud. For years Mary Price had shocked and surprised me. Now it was my turn.

Her Silverado was parked in the driveway, along with Hoyt’s faded Econoline van and a pickup with out-of-state license plates.

Through the screen I could see Mary Price, Hoyt, and another man having coffee at the kitchen table. I knocked on the door, then let myself in. Mary Price bolted from her chair when she saw me. “I tried to call you,” she whispered, coming toward me.

I barely heard her. My gaze was glued to the man sitting at the table. He had dark hair, long, lanky legs, and the bluest eyes in the world. It couldn’t be! It wasn’t possible! I hadn’t laid eyes on him since high school. How on earth had he got here? It was the wrong time, the wrong place.

“Jerry?”

“Maggie Sweet, is that you?

“Lordhavemercy.”

“Godamighty.”

He stood, looked confused, then happy, then embarrassed.

“I was just passing. I’m in a hurry. I need to get home…”

“Don’t run off yet, Maggie. Have some coffee,” Hoyt said, looking at Jerry and me, me and Jerry.

I gave up. We stood staring at each other. He was smiling. He took my hand. I wanted to fling my arms around him, wanted to say,
I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.

“It’s good to see you, Maggie. You look great.”

I touched my hair, thought about my morning makeover. Now I was sweating. I probably looked awful. “Thanks. So do you.”

I stared at him, couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was more beautiful than I remembered. His hair was short and neat, just beginning to gray. There were crinkly lines around his eyes. Eyes that still had the power to dazzle me. I got lost in his eyes.

My legs were shaking. I sat down.

“I really did try to call you,” Mary Price mumbled.

I thought about the note taped to the phone the night I’d stomped out of the house. I’d been too tired to call her back, too depressed by that sad woman in the mirror. But I should have known her call was important. Mary Price never called or came near me when Mother Presson visited.

There was a pause that seemed to last hours, but was probably only seconds.

“Well, well, if it isn’t old home week,” Hoyt said, too heartily.

I looked at Jerry’s tanned arms: the hair that grew on them was spun gold. I looked at his hands. No wedding ring. I looked away.

“Jerry’s come home,” Mary Price said. “Got his retirement money from the Navy on Tuesday and by Thursday he’d bought back his old family home place.”

It
was
Jerry uptown the day of Mama Dean’s doctor appointment. He’d been here this whole time.

“Yep. Put his money in his jeans and came on home. Right, old buddy?” Hoyt said.

Jerry grinned at me. “There’s a lot to be said for home. After Brenda and I split, I figured I’d stay in Jacksonville to be near my son, Trey. But when he joined the Navy there didn’t seem to be any reason to stick around. And I’d been thinking about home, must have thought about it a million times.”

Oh, Lord, he was divorced and back in Poplar Grove for good.

He grinned at me. “I’ve been uptown a few times and I haven’t seen it yet. Weren’t you going to have a beauty shop…Styles by Maggie or something?”

I grinned back. He remembered. “Things changed. You were going to be a writer. Whatever happened to that?”

He laughed. “Lord, Maggie Sweet. You’re the only one in the world who’d remember that, the only one who
knew
about it.” He grinned at Mary Price and Hoyt. “Who would have thought it? All those years I tried to be this tough guy, but Maggie Sweet had my number all along. You all didn’t know it, but I was really Dixie Burger’s writer-in-residence.”

Everyone laughed. Jerry reached over and filled my
coffee mug. I stared at his arms, his long, slender fingers. Just talking about all our old dreams made me sick with longing.

I shook my head to clear it.

“Well, Maggie, we’re fixing to ride out, see what all Jerry’s got to do to the old place,” Hoyt said.

“Everything needs doing,” Jerry said. “But the Navy always called us Seabees the ‘dirt Navy.’ We built barracks, cleared land, only now it’ll be
my
place,
my
land, and I’ve got all the time in the world.”

“All the time in the world.” He’d actually be
living
here. I’d be bumping into him everywhere. Suddenly all the air went out of the room. If Jerry so much as looked at me again, I’d start hyperventilating, calling for a paper bag. I’d look like a fool, sitting here in Mary Price’s kitchen with a paper bag over my face.

I stood. “It was good to see you, Jerry. But I’ve got to go…got a lot to do.”

He stood. “It’s been great seeing you. I wish you could stay. But I guess we’ll be seeing each other all the time now.”

Mary Price winked. “Thanks for the warning, right, Maggie?”

This was where I was supposed to say something clever, some high school line like “Not if I see you first!” But nothing came to mind.

Thank heaven, Mary Price slipped her arm through mine and walked me to the door. Walking and breathing seemed to be a full-time job.

All
the way home, my thoughts raced. What was I going
to do? I’d never considered being unfaithful to Steven. Never even been tempted. Why had Jerry come here, now, at the most mixed-up, restless time in my life?

Then I remembered his eyes, the way the whole room seemed to disappear around him, just like the first time we’d met, all those years ago at the sock hop. For years, I’d pushed Jerry’s memory so far back in my mind that there were times I’d started to think that I’d made him up. Made
us
up. Now here he was. A live flesh-and-blood person; near at hand, just out of reach. It would be so easy.

You’re not a love-struck teenager anymore. You’re married.
I know!
You’ve got to stop this.
I know!
What are you gonna do?
I don’t know.
You’ll stay away.
I’ll stay away.

That
night at supper Steven said, “Well, for heaven’s sake, Maggie. Aren’t you going to comb your hair today?”

“It
is
combed. It’s the latest style in
Southern Hairdo
magazine.

“Then it’s supposed to stick up like that,” he said, trading a smirk with Amy.

My hands automatically smoothed my hair.

“Don’t touch it, Mama. I like it,” Jill said.

“Thanks, Jill.”

“Well, I wouldn’t get too excited, Mama. We all know what tacky taste Jill has,” Amy said.

I didn’t say anything. I just looked at Amy.

“Now, Maggie, don’t go getting your feelings hurt,” Steven said. “All Amy’s trying to say is you’re thirty-eight, not eighteen. You’ve got to admit that middle-aged women look ridiculous when they try to look young.”

That
night, I dreamed I was in a woods, following a path through a heavy fog. The fog was so thick I could barely see, but I knew if I didn’t stay on the path something awful would happen. I fumbled on, keeping my eyes down, concentrating on never letting my feet leave the path. At times the fog got so bad, I couldn’t see the path at all. When that happened, I’d stand completely still, afraid that if I moved, even an inch, I’d get so far off the path, I’d never find my way back.

Then the fog would lift for a second and I’d take another step or two before the path vanished again.

Suddenly the path just stopped and I was at a crossroads.

I stood there, staring at the Y in the road. There wasn’t a single sign to guide me, to show me which road to take.

I looked back toward the path I’d already taken, but it had vanished without a trace to show it had ever existed.

There was a sinking feeling in my stomach as I turned and faced the crossroads. I knew I had to decide which road to take, or stand in the same place for all of eternity.

Monday
morning, after everyone left for school, I decided to stay too busy to think. I covered my hair with a bandanna and started the spring cleaning. I was defrosting the refrigerator when Mary Price knocked on the back door. She was dressed in a yellow cowgirl outfit and carrying an Eckerd bag.

“Maggie Sweet,” she said, pushing past me into the kitchen, “I’ve had the greatest idea in the world and you’re the only one who can help me.”

I froze. I hadn’t talked to Mary Price since Saturday. For two days, I’d been hiding out in the house. I still wasn’t ready to talk about Jerry, not even with Mary Price.

She went to the counter, poured herself a cup of coffee, and lit a Virginia Slim, talking a blue streak the whole time.

“It’s been a whole year since me and Hoyt started playing at the That’lldu. If I’da known we’d still be there I’da stuck my head in the oven and been done with it.”

I relaxed. She wasn’t here to talk about Jerry.

“It isn’t that bad, Mary Price,” I said, avoiding her eyes while I told this big lie.

“It is that bad,” she said. “But something happened Saturday night that told me what I need to do to get out of there.”

“You’re not going to quit, are you? I mean, it might not be much, but the That’lldu is the only place that pays you cash money to sing.”

“If you call that money. The way Hoyt manages us it’s costing us money to work there. Anyway, I’m not quitting. Not yet.”

She flopped down in a kitchen chair. “But what I’ve got in mind is my ticket out. I just know it’ll start me and Hoyt on the road to fame and fortune.”

She set the Eckerd bag on the table and pulled out a package of Lady Clairol Champagne Blonde hair color, plastic gloves, and a beautician’s cape.

“Well, Mary Price…what in the world?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Saturday night, I was strutting my stuff, belting out a Tanya Tucker number….”

“I love Tanya.”

“Me too. Especially ‘I’ll Come Back as Another Woman,’ which is something I’m fixin’ to do.”

“Lord, Mary Price!”

“I mean it. Saturday night this old boy at the bar kept staring at me. Finally, during our break, he came over and said, ‘Honey, you sound just like Tanya when you sing that song. You even look a little like her too.’” Then Mary Price started waving the boxes around, like I could read her mind.

“Saturday, when I saw your new hairstyle, I knew you could do it,” she said, seeing she had to spell it out for me.
“I want you to color my hair like this,” she said, pulling out a record album with a picture of Tanya Tucker on the cover.

“You want me to bleach your hair?”

“Does Bubba drive a truck?” she asked. She tore the Clairol box open, like it was decided.

Stalling for time, I started a new pot of coffee. But Mary Price was already covering her cowgirl outfit with the cape.

“Mary Price, sometimes you worry me to death. You know this is a cut, rinse, set, kind of town. I haven’t done a bleach job since beauty school. I mean, I get to do a precision cut now and then, or even a Frost ’n Tip, but never an out-and-out bleach job.”

“Jumping Jesus, Maggie Sweet! You wouldn’t recognize opportunity if it knocked you slam into next week. You’ve been talking about Styles by Maggie for years. Now I’m offering you the chance of a lifetime, a chance to be Maggie Sweet, hairdresser to the stars!”

“But bleach, Mary Price. It could ruin you for life.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Only that your hair could fall out. There isn’t much call for Kojak look-alikes in the country-western field.”

“Shoot! It’s only hair. If it don’t work out, it’ll always grow back. Besides, I want you to whack most of it off anyway; one of those precision cuts but not
too
precise. Sort of a cross between Tanya, Tammy, maybe a little Anne Murray. You know, my
own
look.”

That’s Mary Price all over. Impulsive and hardheaded. Once she gets an idea in her head, there’s no talking to her. Also I’ve noticed that since she’s taken up country
singing she talks country all the time. She doesn’t have to. She just wants to. But she sure knew how to work me. Maggie Sweet, hairdresser to the stars, did have a nice ring to it.

After stalling all I could, I poured myself a cup of coffee, read the Lady Clairol directions over and over again, and then did it. I bleached her hair. ’Course the whole time I was slathering on the bleach goop, I kept praying that it would come out all right.

By lunchtime we were finished and when I handed her the mirror, she was tickled to death. “Lord, Maggie Sweet, it’s even better than I thought. I just hope Hoyt can stand all this beauty in one person.”

She was right. The short champagne blond hairdo suited her. All her life she’d had mousy brown hair. “Hair-colored hair,” she called it. ’Course her personality more than made up for it, but now her hair matched her personality.

When she got ready to leave, I followed her. It was as if I couldn’t stand to see her go. Because Mary Price had changed. She was all lit up, like someone had flipped on a switch. When she went out the back door, I had this terrible sinking feeling that my old friend was gone forever, that this sparkling, shimmering stranger had taken her place.

I walked her out the driveway and as she got in the Silverado, I said, “Mary Price, what in the world is Hoyt going to say about all this?” (I didn’t really care what Hoyt said, I was trying to keep her from leaving, from going out of my life.)

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, drilling me with her eyes.
“All weekend, we fussed and argued. Finally this morning he said, ‘Hell, Mary Price, why don’t you just suit your own damned self. That’s what you always do anyway.’ Well, that flew all over me! I mean, if I’d been suiting myself I’da never been at the That’lldu in the first place. So I said, ‘All right, Hoyt Bumbalough. I
will
suit myself.’”

She paused, then looked away. “I’ve been thinking how it’s been twenty years since we left school. Twenty years, Maggie Sweet! And I’ve settled for being a second-rate singer in a redneck bar. Well, maybe I can’t do any better than that, but I’ve got to try. I mean, even Toy Overcash was willing to try.”

Until that moment, I’d always thought Mary Price was fearless. Now I saw she was scared, just like me. Only, scared or not, she was going ahead anyway.

“Listen, Maggie Sweet, our lives are slipping by while we wait around for something to happen. Well, we can’t just wait. There’s no law that says a person has to settle. We’ve got talent, Maggie. We’ve got what it takes. We’ve just got to let everyone know it.”

“Lord, Mary Price, I don’t have any talent.”

“You’re only the best hair stylist in town. Only you’ve been so busy doing whatever it is housewives do that we all forgot. When I saw your new hairdo Saturday I thought, Lordymercy, I didn’t know Maggie had it in her. I’m your best friend and even I didn’t know. We’ve got to show them, Maggie. And that’s what I’m fixing to do.”

Then she climbed into the truck, blew me a kiss, and drove off.

After she left, I stood on the porch for a long time. I wanted to chase the Silverado down the street, wanted to
shout, “Mary Price, come back. Please don’t leave me! I’m not ready. I need you to tell me what to do. I don’t know what’s right or wrong, what’s brave or foolish.”

And then, because I didn’t know what else to do, I dried my eyes and went back inside to finish the refrigerator.