Tending to Virginia (11 page)

“Nobody can see it,” Ginny Sue whined her whole childhood when Hannah pointed out the dust under the bed.

“That doesn’t make it go away.” Hannah had been able to use that answer for years and then Ginny turned it on her.

“There’s a man in my closet,” Ginny Sue told her one night after screaming bloody murder. “A man with a knife.”

“I don’t see a thing,” Hannah had said, the lights on, closet door open, Ben’s snores that could wake up the dead coming from their room.

“That doesn’t make it go away,” Ginny Sue said. “He’ll be back as soon as you leave me.” And she had kept on until Hannah had let her make a pallet on the floor of Robert’s room. He hadn’t minded, so calm and protective; looks just like his father, tall and lean. Hannah misses him, misses that laundry basket full of dirty baseball socks which she knows his wife Susie probably never gets clean. Susie is sweet and cute and gets along with everybody so well the couple of times a year they fly in from California, but she doesn’t
use bleach. She stood right there in Hannah’s kitchen while Ginny Sue was stenciling a heart over the doorway which Hannah didn’t particularly want over her doorway but was too tired from fixing the big Christmas dinner to say anything, and said, “I can’t ever get Rob’s socks clean.”
Clorox,
is what Hannah was thinking,
Clorox
and
nobody has ever called him Rob, I didn’t name him Rob.
A son is a son until he takes a wife she told herself, wondering why in the Sam hill Ginny Sue was making that heart green when there’s not a thing in her kitchen that is green except for her eyes when she’s in it. You have to bite your tongue and be thankful for what you’ve got, though, and she reminded herself of Madge sitting in that plastic-covered house with Raymond dead and two daughters that fuss all the time.

She could handle that heart over her door, it’s still there, and she could handle Ginny Sue’s spooky stage that seemed to go on for years. What Hannah could not handle was when Ginny Sue finally, years later, came out of it all and made an about-face and thought things were so lovely, so interesting, and she’d talk about people and music that Hannah had never even heard of. Hannah had to break in and say something like, “I’ve seen a mimosa tree, Ginny Sue. I know how pink they are.”

“One day I’m going to have long blonde hair and be on the front of a magazine,” Ginny Sue said one day and Hannah had not been able to take it. Her mama and Lena just feeding right into those tall tales like it might be possible. Some parents may go right along with all of that, telling their daughters that they’re the prettiest thing to land on earth, the smartest and so on like Raymond Sinclair did to that Cindy, but Hannah wasn’t one of them.

“Ginny Sue,” she said. “You may be on the front of a magazine, nobody knows, but you will never have blonde hair unless you bleach it out and look like a streetwalker.”

Ginny Sue had cried and pouted a little, wanted to blame Hannah for her dark hair, but it hadn’t really changed things, hadn’t stopped her from staring off and making up all these wonderful, beautiful things either. She’d go on and on about how her life was going to be, a long list of college courses and types of furniture, how her yard would be landscaped, what colors would be best for a
wedding and not even a ring on that hand, and not one thing out of all that Ginny Sue wanted even resembled anything that Hannah had. “No life is perfect,” Hannah told her. “If you are happy, then you’ve got more than a lot.”

“Gram’s life has been perfect,” Ginny Sue said. “I hope I’m like Gram when I get old.” And Hannah did manage to bite her tongue on that one, to bite down on the bad times that Ginny chose to ignore. You can’t do it for them, got to find out on their own that if you’re waiting to catch that falling star and put it in your pocket, you might as well cash in your chips. That’s what happened to Raymond Sinclair, couldn’t live up to all his big-talking ways. No sir, you keep a little in your pocket at all times, something to simmer on the back burner, something that nobody else can get and then you just get on with it. Hannah always has material on hand and a pattern of some sort to go with it, start it and see it through. If Ginny Sue would do that then she wouldn’t have a dozen different things halfway done and if she’d listened to Hannah long ago when she was getting all caught up in planning a wedding that never even took place, she wouldn’t have come home from Georgia looking like a toothpick with hairs on her legs long enough to plait and trips to a therapist who had hairs just as long.

Hannah has never once mentioned all that money that was already spent on the wedding that never was. Ginny Sue stood right out there in the backyard and poured lighter fluid on that wedding portrait, lit a match. Hannah stood on the back porch and watched the bits of hard-earned money turning to cinder. “Well? You didn’t want it did you?” Ginny Sue asked, barefooted and wearing a cardigan that had belonged to Hannah’s mama about a century ago, supposed to be white and soiled gray. Did she say
Clorox? Don’t play with fire
? “No, I see no sense in keeping it. But it was a pretty picture.” The photographer had looked at Hannah and said, “She looks just like you.” And they did look alike when Ginny was all dressed in Hannah’s wedding dress and had that long dark hair pulled up and back from her face. The real wedding was small, private, and Hannah was a little disappointed that there weren’t more people to see the strong resemblance. “Oh, I thought you
were my wife,” Mark had said at the reception, and hugged her. “Does this mean I’m in the secret club, now?”

“What club?” Hannah asked and laughed because she has never been a joiner, has never gotten over the time that Madge talked her into being a Lady Lion. Ben was going around selling brooms and lightbulbs and having a wonderful time learning what kind of car everybody in town drove, while she was responsible for telling everybody what to fix for the steak dinner, and learning who did not know how to pick out good meat.

“You know,” Mark said, “that club that meets at your mother’s house. All the women. When a man comes in it gets quiet.”

“Didn’t used to be that way,” Ben said. “You better count your blessings. When Roy was living, it wasn’t that way.”

“That’s because Roy and Lena could barely separate to use the bathroom,” Hannah said and looked at Mark. “You can come sit any time you please.” Mark just laughed and hugged Ginny Sue tight. Thank God, he seems crazy about her and heaven forbid that anything should happen. And things do, all over this world; you can see it on those daytime shows and made for TV movies and “Phil Donahue.”

Ginny Sue told Hannah before she brought Mark home that first time that sometimes he was quiet and they shouldn’t take it wrong, that he had grown up in the NORTH, like Hannah couldn’t see that for herself. How could she not see it; she cooked butterbeans and he said that he’d never seen that kind of soup before. Philadelphia; certainly she’s heard of Philadelphia. “You’ve heard of the Phillies,” Ben said and she shook her head. “You know what W. C. Fields had on his tombstone?” he asked and she said she didn’t even know he was dead. You can live and work and you get out of touch with things, but Hannah is catching up. It would spin everybody’s head to know how much Hannah
does
know, and it all comes from living day to day and year to year. Ginny Sue will know how it feels one day when this baby wants to spend her time with Hannah, when this baby takes to sewing and smocking and tells Ginny Sue that she wants to grow up to be just like Hannah.

It makes Hannah smile now to think of a baby, a baby to dress up
like a little doll. When Ginny Sue came along, Hannah couldn’t afford to go out and do a whole lot of buying. Now she can; she and Ben have already bought a stroller and some stuffed animals. She has made a comforter of white eyelet.

She steps out the back door and walks towards the garden. Ben is still working, bending and working. “I’m going to get Lena,” she yells, the sun so warm, sinking into her navy sundress while her barefoot sandals swing from one hand. Ben looks up, returns her wave with a squash in each hand and his face red as a beet; even from this distance she can tell that it is. She told him, tells him every day to use that sunscreen but he won’t listen and tonight he’ll be in her Oil of Olay and saying how he can’t believe that he could get his face so burned with his cap on for that short a time in the garden. “Do you need anything from the store?”

He shakes his head and walks closer, circles under the arms of his shirt, and she wishes he wouldn’t get so hot. She knows that one day she’s going to look out that window like Lena did for Roy and see him having a stroke there in the garden. Keep a little in your pocket, don’t think about what hasn’t happened, the Lord could take me in an hour right there in the car. She’s already passed the year, fifty-nine years old, which is how old her mama was when her daddy died. That’s superstitious, any therapist or Phil Donahue would have told her, but she was so glad last month when she turned sixty, so relieved to have made it. “I was going to check your oil,” he says and grins. Ginny Sue would never in her life believe that the two of them had such a joke that had gone on all these years.

“Well, you’ll have to check it later,” she says and shakes her head, so thankful to see him standing there. She will fuss over all those towels like she always did Robert’s dirty socks and she will love every minute of it.

“No, Hannah, I really do,” he says and tilts his cap back on his head. “Your car sounds a little rough.”

“I won’t be long,” she says. “You better use that sunscreen.” She drops her sandals to the ground and slips her feet in, bends to buckle them. “Why don’t you go in and cool off?”

“I will,” he says, nodding, but she knows he won’t unless it’s to
call the station and find out what’s going on. “And I’ll check your oil when you get home.”

“I’ll let you rotate my tires, too,” she says and watches him laugh. It’s funny how somebody you’ve known your whole life doesn’t change a bit, ever, until somebody pulls out a picture box and points it out to you like Ginny Sue does just about every time she’s home.

“I want to look under your hood this evening,” Ben used to say at dinner, Ginny Sue and Robert going right on with baseball and watercolors and never even seeing her face flush or his eyebrows lift as he glanced away, a sneaky bashful expression that he had had his whole life. “Just because you have a child doesn’t mean you stop being a wife,” Hannah tells Ginny Sue every chance she gets. You don’t have to read it in a magazine to know that a woman has to learn to be everything at the same time. It’s common sense is all it is, good common sense, but the best advice on a pair of ears that don’t want to hear isn’t worth beans.

“I see how fast you’re getting in from the sun,” she yells to him when she passes by the edge of the garden in the car, and he just nods and waves an ear of corn, the silks falling over his hand like the blonde hair that Ginny Sue never had.

* * *

Madge writes to her cousin, sits back and stares at the words, “Dear Hannah, I killed Raymond.” Her handwriting suddenly looks so unfamiliar, as unfamiliar as those last years with Raymond had been—the little curl at the bottom of her
D,
the way he bathed himself in alcohol morning and night and then lifted his hands to his face to get the smell. “He held the gun but I pulled the trigger. He begged me. He said, ‘Madge, I can’t even die; I can’t do anything.’ He held that gun by the barrel and pointed it at his chest. He said, ‘Do it, goddamnit. If you love me, you’ll do it.’ This was not the first time this had happened; it began years before. It began so slowlike that I didn’t even notice or must not have noticed from the very start. I figured Raymond was acting strange every now and again because he was getting into middle age. But then when Mama died and Raymond asked that he be let to watch them embalm her
body, I knew that something awful had crept into my Raymond and eaten away at him. He came back from the funeral home that day like he felt so pleased, like most men look after a good meal or, uh, relations. Hannah, he told me what mama looked like lying there at a slant and all drained of her life liquids. ‘Tessy’s skin was so very very white,’ he said and it made me sick as a dog, not just because I didn’t want to picture mama that way but because it struck me that Raymond was terribly ill. I got him to go to a doctor when all that paralysis that came and went started up and those doctors told me in private that there was a lot of mental disturbance, that Raymond needed long-term treatment, drugs maybe. Raymond said, ‘My body is a holy pyramid over which I reign.’ It made my flesh crawl all over to hear those words coming out of the mouth of my husband, the man that I had married, the man who dressed up on Halloween to answer the door for the little children; a man who for years could bowl 200 consistently, was forever getting employee of the month down at Chevrolet, the father of Catherine and Cindy; and Hannah, the only man that I have ever in my entire life seen without clothing.

“He pulled out that gun for the first time years ago when Cindy was only thirteen and was over at your house for Ginny Sue’s spend the night. I should have told you then, should have told you that morning when I picked Cindy up instead of taking her to J.C. Penney’s to buy a pair of red sneakers that she wore all of three times. Every morning when I washed my clothes, I’d reach up over that washing machine to make sure the gun was still there and I did not sleep through a night that I was not expecting to hear that sound, that same sound that had scared me so when I’d follow my daddy out in the woods and watch him practice on liquor bottles that mama knew nothing about. He’d get a look on his face that made you think of death, like that was what he was thinking the whole time and I’d cover up my ears ready for the blast and yet, it made me jump every time just the same. I’m the same way with balloons. Remember when Chuckie used to love to take a straight pin and pop a balloon. I’d say, ‘Cindy, don’t bring balloons to my house.’ Cindy said I was ridiculous; she said what I really meant
was ‘don’t come to my house’ which I didn’t. My door is always open. Hannah, you know I’ve always had a open door, my back door and my heart’s door.