Tending to Virginia (18 page)

“But what if somebody else is there, too?” she asked, still clutching her Barbie overnight case. “What if there’s a man coming to get you?”

“No man will get you,” Gram said and the nightlight burned while they lay on that featherbed, the lights from cars passing on Carver Street circling the room, the clock ticking. She focuses on the ticking of the clock, the ticks in rhythm with Sheila’s heartbeats as Mark’s mouth moves down her body, so pale in the glow of the streetlight, her breasts and stomach, eyes closed, lips parted, her breath rising and falling, slight and then quickened.

“Mama?” Virginia calls, her eyes focused on the heavy outline of Gram’s highboy. “I’ve come home to stay. I made a mistake and I’ve come back.” She waits, the outline of the highboy becoming clearer and sharper, the quiet answer of her mother’s steady breathing, broken only by the ticking. “I’ve always had a feeling when the time was right,” Gram said and stared into the sky, her face held back, turning slowly to face the wind, her pockets filled with seeds and a tin of snuff. “I’ve just always known.”

* * *

Cindy wishes that Constance Ann would just go on home with her potato chip-stuffed self. How can you talk to someone that if she’s not asleep and snoring her ass off, is matching every story that you’ve got to tell? Cindy told about the trauma at Ramada and Constance Ann said she has a cousin from somewhere that’s going through the exact same thing except the cousin
also
has to have a hysterectomy.

“Now, she’s got it bad,” Constance Ann said, her hair pulled up in a high pony tail and rolled over three juice cans. Nobody has done their hair in juice cans for years. Everybody stopped using juice cans when Cindy was in high school. Orange juice cans went out, with sanitary belts and vanilla Cokes.

“I’ve
got it bad,” Cindy screamed. “I still . . .” and she caught herself. Constance Ann is a talker; besides Constance Ann doesn’t listen to anybody but herself. All she’s done all night is stuff herself and stare into a
Cosmopolitan
or walk around looking for the TV. “I thought you were my friend,” Cindy screamed and Constance Ann said that she was, that she had recently taken a friendship test for feminists and that their friendship came out to be slightly above mediocre.

“I am not a feminist,” Cindy screamed. “I’m liberated, though. You can just look at me and know I’m liberated but when you get right down to it, every woman whose hormones are in drive instead of reverse or neutral wants herself a man.”

“But I can live without one,” Constance Ann had said, those juice cans rocking on her head. Constance Ann could lose about
twenty pounds and cut that hair and she’d look fine. Constance Ann has always looked this way, though, just like she does right now with that big ass facing Cindy. It’s her home training. Constance Ann was never taught the things about being attractive and seductive, never taught what men like and what men might mean when they say something like, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” Some women think that’s a stupid line but it’s more than that. When a man says that, what he really means is “Hey chick, I wanna jump your bones.” And when a man says, “let’s meet for coffee,” that means that he is all tied up but wants to get something simmering on the back burner. If he says, “What a lovely sweater or blouse,” then he means, “good boobs.” She knows all of that and thank God, her daddy cared enough to tell her the things that she would need to know. All her mama said was, “Don’t show the merchandise if you ain’t selling.”

“You can live without one,” Cindy said, her voice suddenly filled with sympathy, more than that, downright gutwrenching depression. “Because you’ve never really had one. An alcoholic who’s never had booze, ain’t an alcoholic.” And Cindy had watched Constance Ann smile that twisted smile that halfway said “I hurt” and halfway said “You don’t read enough, Cindy.” Constance Ann put down her magazine and stared at Cindy, those pale eyes filming behind her polo glasses that Cindy talked her into buying, telling Constance Ann that if what she wanted to be was an egghead glued to magazines and sex books then she should look the part and they are an improvement over what Cindy called the cat glasses. God helps those that help themselves. “And you’ll find somebody, Constance Ann,” Cindy said. “Somewhere in this world there is a man for you.” And Cindy smiled even though she doesn’t believe that. It was hard as hell for her to get the two that she did, Buzz Biggers not fit for anything short of a Hefty trashbag and Charles Snipes; Charles Snipes might not have even married her if she hadn’t been pregnant. His mama didn’t want him to marry Cindy and just who did they think they were? Cindy’s house was bigger and her daddy made more money and she had her own car which Charles did not. “He will never measure up, Little Goldilocks,” her daddy said and
gave her a hundred dollars to go buy some lingerie she had seen in Belk’s, safari gown with matching robe, wild, like Charles said he liked her. “Take a walk on the wild side,” she yelled at him and jumped from the bathroom, her stomach then looking like Ginny Sue’s does now and she was never sick with Chuckie, not a day, sex like clockwork and no busted up veins. Ginny Sue might be faking a little, wanting some attention and God knows she doesn’t have to beg for it; she can walk in that old duplex and sugar drips from every old sapless tree in the joint.

“I sure will,” Charles said to her and got up from the couch where he was reading a plumbing book, his face so red, those Prince Charles ears so red, just like tonight at Ramada.

“You said ‘I still’ and then stopped,” Constance Ann said, mind like a steel trap that girl, doesn’t forget a thing, and Cindy just told her that she was so upset over their friendship that she completely forgot what was on her mind. “I still feel something for Charles Snipes,” is what she wanted to say.

She does feel something but she can’t figure out what it is. “Always want what you don’t have,” she can hear her mama saying, her mama always bending forward a little so she doesn’t look so big, not fat, but big, big boned. It’s pitiful when her mama stands next to Hannah.

“That shit about the apple don’t fall far from the tree doesn’t apply to me,” Cindy had told Charles way back. “I’m my daddy’s child and so look at him, lean and still good-looking.”

“I like your mama,” Charles said and when Cindy told her daddy that, he laughed, threw back his head with those lifeless paralyzed arms clutching the Lazy Boy and laughed. “Learn from that, Goldilocks,” he said. “Your mama has never attracted men.”

“But she got you.”

“I felt sorry for her,” he said slowly, shook his head and then burst into laughter which made Cindy laugh, too. Laughter is contagious, everybody knows that. “And, it was a way for me to redeem myself after all of my wild years. But you, my baby girl,” and he paused and stared at her with love in his eyes. “You haven’t had your wild years, yet.”

“Your old man is trying to bust us up,” Charles had said and
made her look at him. She was rinsing out Coke bottles and Chuckie was asleep. “Please don’t let him,” Charles said, that same look of love in his eyes, the water running, her hands dripping with water until Charles pulled them up and kissed that water away. It makes her chest pound to think of it, makes her wish that was Charles Snipes over there snoring instead of Constance Ann. Charles is probably right this minute with Nancy Price; he doesn’t have to worry about where Chuckie is spending the night. There’s no way that Nancy Price could ever look as good as Cindy there naked in a bed.

“My daddy just wants what’s best for me,” she had told Charles. “If you really loved me, you’d just live with it.”

“If he really loves you,” Charles said and looked at her in a way that went clear to the bone just like Hannah can do, making you feel like you need to confess something, “he would let you go.”

“Let me go? You make it sound like I’m tied up and in a closet.” And he just stood there and looked at her with a look that said “maybe you are, Cindy” or “maybe you need therapy, Cindy” or “maybe you need to read more books.”

“He is my daddy and you are my husband,” she said, Chuckie screaming his ass off from the other room. “I don’t have to make a choice do I? Nobody on God’s green earth has to make a choice like that. It’s sick. That’s a sick thought.”

“I’m not saying make a choice,” Charles said, stopping in the doorway on his way to Chuckie’s room. “Just figure out which is which.”

“Are you gonna sit up all night?” Constance Ann asks now and reaches for her glasses on the table beside her. “I mean really, Cindy, what do you care if he remarries. You did.”

“I don’t. I don’t care,” Cindy says and takes off her nylon leopard robe that she bought when she burned a hole in the safari one. “It’s more than that, Constance Ann. You might know what I’m feeling one day if you find yourself married and then divorced.”

“I’ll never get divorced,” Constance Ann says. “I’ve read enough to recognize all the warning signs and know what to do if I see them.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Cindy says and gets under the cover
without even taking off her makeup. Never say never. When the Lord slams a door, a window flies open. She gets so sick of the way people act about divorce; even Ginny Sue can’t see beyond that bloated-up belly that things change, sometimes so suddenlike, like the weather. Nobody says, oh it’s never gonna rain, never gonna snow. But they think my house will never get uprooted from the dirt by a tornado and I will never get VD or cancer or tetanus or hardening of the arteries. Just look around and know that ain’t so. Just put your quarter in one of those machines and get what you never in your life wanted but take it and live with it. Bodies are like that, those little clear plastic eggs, and you take what’s good out of it, a red rubber worm or a fake diamond ring and then throw that little egg in the trash. Her daddy gave her all that he had that was good. “Take what you can get,” he told her. “Get all that you can get and take it with you.”

“Are you crying?” Constance Ann asks and sits on the edge of the bed. Constance Ann wears men’s pajamas; Cindy has never known a man that wore pajamas, not even her daddy. “I’ve never seen you crying.”

“Well, I don’t do it often,” Cindy sits up and pulls the covers close to her neck. She ain’t used to sporting her lingerie in front of women, not even Constance Ann. It’s okay with Ginny Sue because she’s related and doesn’t seem to check you out like Constance Ann does behind those polo glasses.

“Your period must be coming,” Constance Ann says. “Sometimes ovulation will do it, too.”

“Do what?”

“Make you cry,” Constance Ann says. “A woman’s body is much more complicated than a man’s. You should read
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
Cindy.”

“My body is going to sleep,” Cindy says and slides back down against her pillow, thinks about all the nights she had with Charles Snipes, nights when she’d reach over and grab him, move her hand back and forth and say, “this is why women like to drive straight drives.” Nancy Price will never get him so excited, make him laugh so. “Close your eyes and think about what I’ve told you,” her daddy would say. “Your body is sleepy, sleepy . . .”

“I can’t believe it,” Constance Ann says. “Ask me over here to talk and then you don’t talk. Wake me up and now you go to sleep. No telling what J. R. did tonight that I missed.”

No telling what Charles Snipes did tonight that she missed. “God, you’re the cutest, sexiest, wildest thing on earth,” Charles used to say, and she’d shift down to second, then back up to third. “I’m going to strip your gears,” she’d whisper and watch those cute Prince Charles ears turn bright pink.

* * *

Madge sets her coffee cup beside the deck of cards and begins to write. “Dear Hannah, Raymond was so crazy that he made me kill him.” She has already won back a hundred dollars this morning which doesn’t put a dent in what she owes. Now is probably not the time to write to Hannah with Ginny Sue so sick. Still, it makes Madge feel better to do it. She will confess first to Hannah and then to the police and then to the preacher and then they’ll put her in handcuffs and drag her off. Just drag her away like they had to do her mama that time.

“Treat me like a mad dog then!” Madge’s mama had screamed. “Call somebody to carry me off. They can’t carry my mind away, no, can’t carry what’s in my head. Emily knows; Emily will keep a secret.”

“I just want you to get some help now,” Madge said, those two Mormon boys still standing across the street in their little black suits, their faces so pale like they had seen a ghost. “I’m not working against you, Mama.”

“You have worked against me since the day you took root,” and her mama’s face was all twisted and screwed up like a shriveled little crazy mouse, those lace-up boots bigger than she was.

“You don’t mean that Aunt Tessy,” Hannah said and kissed Madge’s mama on the cheek. “Madge loves you, I love you.” Thank God that Hannah had come when she called, stopped her sewing and rushed right out in the country where the houses were so far apart. “I don’t know why those boys chose this area in the first place,” Hannah said. “I guess so they’d have less houses.”

“Mighty long bike ride,” Madge said, feeling sorry for those boys.
“But they’re doing God’s will.”

“A lot is done in God’s name,” her mama said and shook her head. “Bad things have been done in God’s name. I don’t mess with nobody. I keep to myself and they come messing. I said ‘get away from my door, alley cats’ but they kept right on knocking. I had no choice but to get the gun.”

“I’ve wanted to get her into town,” Madge had told Hannah later. “I want her to live with me, to let me just once in her life do something for her.”

“She’d get used to it I’ll bet,” Hannah said. “I’ll help you, Madge. We can take her to visit Mama more often and it would be good for both of them.”

“But,” Madge whispered, watching Raymond from the corner of her eye wrap a dead bird round and round in toilet paper, little Cindy watching every move of his while Catherine walked through her mama’s house knocking on walls and looking in closets, telling Madge later that she never realized her grandmother lived in such a dump. “Raymond won’t let me take her. Raymond says I cannot bring Mama home to live.”