Tending to Virginia (22 page)

She sits down at her VDT and calls up that little secret file of hers that she keeps hidden, a file that she named “AB” because Constance Ann is squeamish about blood and therefore, wouldn’t bother herself to look. Even if anybody did, it wouldn’t matter, because Cindy has put all kinds of little signs and symbols at the beginning of the file there and then has a long list of big medical blood words. She runs the screen past all of that, past all of her book titles, past the list of addresses and phone numbers of men that she thinks are right cute. She doesn’t do anything with those numbers, of course, because most of those men are married; still you never know when one will divorce, happens all the time. She runs past the addresses, down and past her period chart that she set up for herself so she’ll always know when she’s due.

When she gets past that, she makes a new heading: REASONS WHY CHARLES SNIPES SHOULD NOT MARRY NANCY PRICE. She has been thinking of these reasons all weekend:

1. Nancy Price wears her hair like an old woman.

2. If they have a child, it will have great big ears.

3. Nancy Price is way out of style.

4. Nancy Price has a sister that does drugs.

5. Nancy Price has a sister that can’t sing.

6. Charles Snipes needs a woman in step with the world because he is not.

7. Nancy Price is not in step with the world.

“You’re here early,” Constance Ann says and Cindy zooms that file up to the top where she has all of her blood words. “What are you working on?”

“The blood data,” Cindy says. “Sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever finish it. I could use some help but I know how you feel about blood words.”

“Can’t stand to even type them out,” Constance Ann says and bites into a huge apple fritter that she has wrapped in a napkin. “It makes me sick to hear those words.”

“Words like coagulate?”

“Stop!” Constance Ann looks at her, that big fritter an inch from her mouth. “I’m trying to eat a little breakfast.”

“Is that what that is?” Cindy asks. “I thought it was a frisbee.”

“Oh ha ha.” Constance Ann walks around to her desk. “You’re one to be talking after the way you were falling apart the other night.”

“Constance Ann, let’s drop it. I don’t ask you to help with the blood data, do I?” Cindy stands up and leans over her desk so Constance Ann will have to look at her. “I have seniority and I could make you type some blood data but I don’t because you are my friend.”

“Well, the quiz did say . . .”

“And the quiz was exactly right,” Cindy says, Constance Ann with her mouth dropped open, ready for some more fritter but too surprised to bite it. “I always take the quizzes and I believe they tell the truth.”

“Why didn’t you say that the other night, then?”

“I had a bad night is all and I took it out on you because you are my friend.”

“Thanks, Cindy,” Constance Ann says and looks like she might cry. “And thanks for not making me type all that stuff.”

“You’re welcome,” Cindy says and sits back down. “Just so you never accidentally have to see those words, the blood data file is named AB.”

“Well, I’ll never open that one,” Constance Ann says, her words mumbled up with fritter.

“You can if you want, but you know I thought I’d warn you.” Cindy zooms back to the end of the file when she hears Constance Ann typing.

8. Nancy Price probably takes quizzes which is stupid.

9. Charles Snipes is used to better.

10. Charles Snipes has a son with acne who needs his father to spend time with him.

By the end of the day, Cindy has a list as long as her leg, and is tired of staring at the VDT and listening to Constance Ann. Thank God she doesn’t have some man expecting her to get home and cook dinner because she is too tired; she’ll swing by Kentucky Fried and get her and Chuckie some snak paks, but first she stops at old Emily’s to check on Ginny Sue.

Ginny Sue is still all propped up and looking out of it, Emily watching that damned TV with no sound and that hick woman Esther in the kitchen.

“Hey girl,” Cindy says and squats on the floor beside Ginny Sue. Ginny Sue turns and opens her eyes, asks what time it is. “Monday,” Cindy says. “The day is Monday and the month is July. You’d have a shitload of trouble if you had to talk to a shrink right now.”

“I’m tired,” Ginny says.

“I know you are, baby,” Emily whispers and then turns on Cindy. “Why don’t you walk on to where you’re walking?”

“I came to ask Ginny Sue a question is all,” Cindy says and now she doesn’t even feel like talking to Ginny Sue, doesn’t even feel like telling how Charles Snipes is planning to get married. Nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn what is going on in her life. Ginny Sue has been a touch sick and you’d think it was Armageddon.

“What do you want to ask me?”

“I want to ask you why you don’t wake up and prop yourself up a little, brush your hair and put on some cheek color?”

“Because she has good sense,” Emily says and points that remote at Cindy like it might be a laserbeam gun.

“I haven’t felt like fixing up,” Ginny Sue says. “They told me to lie flat.”

“Well, then tell me this.” Cindy pauses, jingling her car keys. “Why is it that you see couples who look like they don’t go together? You know what I mean and you say, ‘what is that Don Johnson
hunk doing with
her’
because she is not as attractive as he could do.”

“Because pretty is as pretty does,” Emily says and turns the set on and up loud. Cindy wishes somebody would take that damn gadget away from her.

“You never know what that person is really like,” Ginny Sue mumbles. “You might think you know somebody and then you don’t. You don’t know them at all.”

“Well, I do,” Cindy says, meaning that she does know Charles Snipes; she knows him better than Nancy Price, knows him better than anybody, but all this mumbling is getting her nowhere. It’s just making her more depressed and thank God it’s a good TV show night. This place, Ginny Sue included, is as depressing as her mama’s house. Cindy sees Hannah drive up and decides to go ahead and leave so that she doesn’t get stuck talking to her. “I’ll see you,” she says and heads to the door.

“Thanks for stopping by, Cindy,” Ginny Sue says. “Sorry I wasn’t good company.”

“Oh now, you’re good company,” Emily says. “I’ve always said that you were good company to have.”

“And what about me?” Cindy asks and looks right at Emily.

“You need to press your slacks,” that old biddy says and Cindy slams the door behind her, tells Hannah she’d love to stay and talk but that she has a million things to do.

She gets in her car and heads to Kentucky Fried, feeling so mad. Nobody ever says anything that’s nice to her. Her daddy is the only family member who ever called attention to how good-looking she is. “Your mother’s family is queer,” he had told her. “They are the strangest people you’ll ever meet and you’re better off without them.” He was probably right about that, probably right about Charles Snipes. She could do better. She will do better, but it still pisses her off that everywhere she goes people are coupled up. There’s a couple of teenagers hanging out in the parking lot and they are all smooched up like she used to do with Charles Snipes. The boy is in a KFC suit and the girl is wearing a miniskirt which she’s too big to wear. Cindy could wear it.

Tables for two all over that Kentucky Fried place and it pisses her
off. Just once she’d like to see a table for one. “Two Snaks, white meat,” she says and stands there waiting, listens to the couple in line behind her, a kiss on the cheek, the little gasp of a hug. She hears the man whisper something that sounds like “cooter clam” in the woman’s ear and Cindy turns around and stares at them. Now, they look like they belong together. He’s big and burly and she’s got all this wild frosted hair.

“You’ll have to forgive what he said,” the woman tells Cindy. “We are on kind of a holiday for the night. It’s our anniversary.”

“That’s nice,” Cindy says, wondering why in the hell anybody on a holiday would come to Saxapaw and eat at KFC.

“You have got the prettiest headful of hair,” the woman says and smiles at Cindy. “Hair is my business and I’ll swan if you don’t have a nice headful.”

“Thanks,” Cindy says, and she feels like she’d like to stay and talk to them, be on a holiday with them, but her chicken is up and she knows Chuckie is sitting at home waiting. She gives the girl her money and turns back around. “You know I was scared to try this hairdo but I’m glad I did.”

“Oh yes,” the woman says and squeezes that man tight. “You’re little enough to carry it off. That’s natural blonde too, isn’t it?”

“She’s a bottle blonde,” the man says and squeezes back on his “cooter clam.”

“Well, have fun,” Cindy says and leaves, watching them in the reflection of the door. She envies them and it pisses her off. The woman says, “I love thighs” and he says, “I love breasts” and the two fall together and laugh like they might be in high school. God, Cindy wishes she was back in high school.

PART 4

V
IRGINIA’S HOURS
are all confused; when it’s dark and still, she is wide awake, tossing, turning; and when daylight appears in Gram’s window, she is too tired to open her eyes. The days seem to bleed and run, meals and game shows, cramps and weather reports and tick after tick of the clock. It is morning, Thursday morning, but when she tries to put the days in order, when Mark came, when he called, it seems like one long day with bright hot light through the window and no rain.

She concentrates on the ticking, the clock, so out of place in the duplex. It used to be in the wide hallway of the house on Carver Street, there by the stairs on the pine floors that Gram painted brown every other spring. Gram would hide presents and snacks on top of the clock where Virginia and Robert couldn’t reach them.

“If that clock ever stops,” Cindy had told her once, Virginia only six, “Aunt Emily will die just like on ‘The Twilight Zone.’”

“No.” Virginia shook her head. “Stop it!”

“What honey?” Esther peeks around the corner from the kitchen and Virginia shakes her head. “You’re starting to act like her,” Esther says and points to Gram who is dozing in the Lazy Boy.

“It’s just a TV show,” her brother, Robert, had told her after Cindy left and he found her sitting there in front of the clock, watching the pendulum, thinking if it started to slow down that she would very quickly turn the little key, open that glass door and push it back and forth, back and forth until someone came to fix it. Robert had sat beside her, his long legs tan and skinny, the Saxapaw
Junior Baseball jersey that it seems he wore for years. “I mean it Ginny Sue,” he said, those clear brown eyes squinting with his smile. “You’ve got to learn to fight back. I’m not always gonna be around to take up for you.”

“I know.” She nodded but it seemed that he would always be there; it seemed that they would always eat Sunday dinner with Gram in the house on Carver Street. It seemed she would always be able to run into his room if she got scared at night, that they would always race to see who could get to the bathroom first when they got up in the mornings. They would always sit in those same chairs at the kitchen table and read the backs of the cereal boxes while their mother packed school lunches. They would sit on his bed those rare nights it snowed, the drapes pulled back so they could see by the streetlight while the flakes got bigger and bigger, the yard finally covered in a film of white. “No school tomorrow,” he’d say, hope in his voice. And they would get up the next morning, tired from no sleep but urged by the slight flakes still falling. She would sit with her knees pulled up under that long flannel gown while her mother scrambled eggs or pressed seams, and they listened to the radio, listened for cancellations, Saxapaw Schools.

“I just can’t stay around here, Ginny,” he had told her years later, his legs filled out, a fraternity sweatshirt on, as he sat in a lawn chair, frayed green and white webbing, and twirled a long-handled fork while the steaks dripped into the fire, sizzling and flaming, her dad in the garden, cap pulled low, Mama on the screened porch smocking the tops of tiny christening gowns that people ordered from her as soon as they got home from that first doctor visit. It seemed there would always be steaks on Saturday nights and Sundays on Carver Street with Gram, family vacations to the beach when they returned salty and sunburned, a present of peanut brittle for Gram. “Now how did you know just what I wanted?” Gram asked while she rubbed Virginia’s sunburned back with Jergens.

“Take good care of her,” Robert said, shook Mark’s hand, the wedding cake looming in the background like a miniature castle. “It’s not such a hard job; I’ve had it for twenty-five years.” Susie was hugging Virginia, the two of them laughing, Cindy off to the side sipping champagne, mimicking Susie whenever she could catch Virginia’s
eye. “She’s real gullible,” Robert was saying, Mark laughing and acting like he was taking notes. “She won’t go to the bathroom by herself at night; you have to go with her and turn on all the lights, stand outside the door until she’s through.”

“Not true!” Virginia screamed while Robert wrapped his big arms around her and hugged.

Water runs in the kitchen, glasses clinking into the drain board, clock ticking, Gram breathing. All the movements, every little sound so clear. If Virginia closes her eyes, she could be anywhere, anywhere at all. It is inertia that makes Gram’s mind wander, roaming back and forth, up and down the streets of the county before they were paved, before Virginia was born. It isn’t age that makes it all confusing but inertia.

“You could go home,” her mother had said. “To our house I mean.”

“Easier here,” she mumbled and dozed, comfortably surrounded by the heavy dark furniture, faint mothball smells from the closets where quilts are piled like a mountain, the sounds, Gram’s whispered words, so soothing like the house on Carver Street, making Mark and the rented house seem so far away.