Tending to Virginia (33 page)

“Anyway,” Cindy continues. “They are dead, but I tell you, every time I lay my eyes on Charles Snipes, I have to ask myself why? Why didn’t it work?”

“It’s just never going to work,” Charles Snipes had said that day, early morning, Chuckie not even awake yet, Fisher Price people without arms and legs strung across the hallway, and he put those greasy plumber’s hands up to his face while she slowly filled a Coke bottle with water and put an African violet leaf in it to root. She loved to see his hands that way, loved to smell those old blue shirts that had “Charles” written up on the pocket. She must have used a
ton of laundry powder during those first three years and she always bought the big size just like her mama always did. She’d use extra-strength whatever on Charles’s and use Snowy Bleach for Chuckie, and there were times when she was happy, really happy. “I’ll never be able to satisfy you,” he had said. “I’m a plumber, okay?” He wrapped his arms around her from behind, squeezed, and then walked away. “I asked you not to ask your daddy for money. I told you we didn’t have to have a new car, that stereo, the TV.”

“I thought you’d be happy,” she told him, spitting the words with an anger that she really didn’t even feel. “I can’t sit around here and never try to improve when my sister is flying to Aruba with likoor-sucker to get a tan.”

“You knew it was going to be hard when you married me,” he said.

“And why did I marry you? Why?” she yelled and turned to see Chuckie in the doorway in his little sleeper pajamas. “That’s why,” she said, and she watched Charles squat there and hug Chuckie. “It’s somebody else, isn’t it?” she asked. “It’s not exciting for you now that I’ve shown all that I have to show.”

“No, no, you need more,” he said. “You and your dad need more.” And she had spent that whole day crying before she pulled herself right together. “It was mutual,” she had told everybody. “He doesn’t try, will never get ahead because he is lazy and is not good in business. He beat me up a couple of times,” she told a few but none of that was true.

“Sometimes I ask myself why it didn’t work,” Cindy says now. “Ginny Sue made a fool of herself that time she called off her engagement, but at least she didn’t marry somebody who would leave her.”

Virginia just listens now, the words, the rain.
Why didn’t it work?

“I’m sure you thought it would work,” Hannah says, the nicest that Cindy has ever heard her be. “You wouldn’t have married him if you had thought otherwise.”

“She had to get married,” Lena says. “Everybody knows she had to. Roy said it didn’t surprise him one bit.”

“But I didn’t have to,” Cindy says. “I could have got an abortion!”

“Don’t you say such with Ginny Sue about to give birth,” Emily says, her eyebrows raised and lips pursed.

“Chuckie is a blessing,” Madge says. “Don’t you ever say that in front of that child.”

“I just said I could’ve,” Cindy says, sits in a chair and pulls her knees up to her chest. “I didn’t say I would’ve. It’s the wondering about it all which is why I say that divorce is worse than a death.”

“Death sounds pretty good to me,” Lena says and lights a cigarette. Cindy points out to Madge a card that she can play up on the board.

“I didn’t love Buzz Biggers, though,” Cindy whispers. “I know that I didn’t.”

“Then why did you marry him?” Hannah asks and Cindy just shrugs and pulls on those wisps of hair near her face.

Cindy had known in the first week that she and Buzz Biggers would never share a double monument, no way would they die together; they couldn’t even live together. He’d say, “I’m a steak and potatoes man—a man’s man.” He’d say all those “man” things that in the beginning turned her on, and he’d tell crude jokes that made even Cindy blush. All those things that she liked about him were all those things that made him so different from Charles Snipes. “The niggers and women are taking over the world,” Buzz had told her. “They got a place and they ought to stay there.” And he made fun of Jane Fonda, too, knowing full well that Jane Fonda is one of Cindy’s very favorite people in the world. Jane looked up to and took after her daddy the same way that Cindy looked up to hers. “Liberals,” Buzz Biggers would say and crush a beer can on the side of his head which Cindy had grown tired of; it didn’t make her laugh anymore to see him do that. “There’s no place in this world for liberals.”

“I like Jane Fonda,” Cindy had said.

“I don’t,” he said, his cap pulled low, a little Skoals in his gum, a Confederate flag patch on his army jacket. “I’d fuck her, though.”

“You’d fuck a whale,” she said and he grabbed her arm tight and twisted it. “I’d fuck your cousin, too,” he said and grinned. “I think
that’s what she needs, too. I’d love to fuck those long lean bones.”

“Don’t you talk about Ginny Sue,” she said and it made her feel sick. She didn’t even want Ginny Sue around because of the things Buzz Biggers would say about her after she left.

“Jane Fonda sucks,” is what he had said when he saw Cindy all dressed up in new leotards that she had gotten on sale at Belk’s. Magenta tights, a magenta and black striped leotard with a low “V” cut in the back. She thought he’d like it; she thought he’d get off his talk about Ginny Sue, thought he’d like the fact that she and Constance Ann were going to the Saxapaw YMCA three nights a week so that when she hit forty, she’d look like Jane. “That’s a bunch of shit,” he said and grabbed her suit by the “V,” near about stretched it all out of shape.

“It makes me feel good to Fonda,” she said and took off her outfit before he could stretch it any more. “Where’s Chuckie?” she asked and before she could get those tights from around her ankles he had pushed her back on the bed and had her feet pulled up just below his belt buckle. “I’ll show you what feels good,” he said and forced her legs back, knees bending, and leaned over her. “I like this little fleshy part here,” he said and pinched up the soft white skin around her navel.

“Don’t worry about it,” Charles Snipes had told her and rubbed his hand over her navel where Chuckie had stretched her all out of shape. It was her first night home from the hospital, Chuckie finally asleep. “Who’s gonna see but me and I think you look beautiful,” Charles said and he was so gentle with her like she might have been a virgin; it was just like the first time they were ever together, both of them virgins, up in her bedroom on a Saturday afternoon while her parents were at a doctor appointment. And then, who fucking saw but that wide-assed redneck mobile home salesman, Buzz Biggers.

“Think about it,” Buzz had told her the night they were sitting in the Bonanza steak house and decided to get married. “You’ve come up a notch or two, come from the sewer up to a home.” If Charles
Snipes hadn’t been sitting in the corner of Bonanza with grease under his nails and a copy of
Popular Mechanics
spread out in front of him, she might not have even married Buzz Biggers. And if Charles Snipes hadn’t been at the Ramada the other night with what’s her name, Cindy probably never would have gone back to see Randy Skinner again.

“Oh, oh, oh,” Buzz Biggers had said, digging into her like a fence post digger and it didn’t sound like a thing but divorce, loud and clear, it said divorce, and Cindy hopes that her Grandma Tessy at some point in her life did get what she wanted. She hopes there was some moment when that old spooky woman was everything all at the same time, that she was a child and a virgin, and a whore all rolled into one.

“I didn’t love Buzz Biggers,” Cindy says. “It was a mistake. I made a mistake. I got left the first time and the second time I made a mistake.”

“Well, just don’t make another,” Madge says.

“Just don’t make another,” Cindy mimics. “Like a person knows when he’s making one.” Cindy sits up straight and looks at Madge. “Only one of those was my mistake so you might as well say I was only divorced once.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Madge says.

“Well, y’all think Mark is so great,” she says, glances at Ginny Sue who is rising up on her elbows like a ghost from a coffin. “And Ginny Sue is his second.”

“Cindy,” Virginia says but with one glance around the room, she sees that no one is surprised.

“Oh I told them ages ago,” Cindy says and waves her hand. “I told them before you told me not to tell.”

“I told you not to tell before I told you,” Virginia says, the blood rushing to her face.

“Now, don’t get upset,” her mama says and pushes her back down flat on her back. “You are in no condition to get upset.”

“You knew?” she asks her mother. “All this time you knew he was
divorced and you never mentioned it?”

“I told Ben,” her mama says, sits down on the daybed and toys with the top of Virginia’s sock where the yarn is pulled. “I don’t know why you felt you couldn’t tell me. You must think I have no sense of what goes on in this world.”

“It’s not that,” Virginia says. “I was just scared of what you’d think.”

“What?” her mother asks, still staring at the pulled sock, her eyebrows raised. “That he made a mistake? You think I wouldn’t forgive someone a mistake?”

“Tessy knew she made a mistake,” Gram says.

“By marrying my daddy or with that other man?” Madge asks but Emily just shakes her head.

“But it’s the same difference,” Cindy continues. “If Ginny Sue ever leaves Mark then that man will be divorced two times and only one will be his fault and he’ll have to carry his mistake and Ginny Sue’s mistake right on with him forever.”

“The first wasn’t Mark’s mistake,” Virginia says and rises to her elbows. “You know that. Why didn’t you tell everything you know?”

“You told me it was mutual,” Cindy says. “You said that Mark said it never would’ve worked.”

“That’s what he says now,” Virginia says, feeling her mother’s stare, so she concentrates on Gram who is staring into the blank TV. “He got left.
She
made a mistake. She left him just like Charles Snipes left you and what happened? What happened?” Virginia feels her heart beating faster, face flush. “Buzz Biggers, that’s what.
Your
mistake!”

“It’s not the same,” Cindy says. “Good God, I just used you as an example.”

“It is the same, it is.” Virginia lies back down and stares at the ceiling, her mother’s hand as heavy as a stone on her foot. “You didn’t know what was going to happen or you wouldn’t have married him; nobody knows.”

“Harv sure didn’t know,” Lena says and fans herself with her hat. “I think he come to know but there was awhile there that Messy
was standing in front of that store showing herself and he didn’t know.”

“She did not show herself,” Emily says. “They didn’t even talk to one another if others were around.”

“You know something,” Madge says suddenly, looking at Emily who stares up at the ceiling and shakes her head. “You know all about it.”

“Tessy said, ‘Emily, I got no one to tell but you,’ and I said, ‘you can pray over it.’” Those banjos are starting up again and Emily leans forward so she can see just which one of them is making the most racket. “Tessy said, ‘throw some boiling water out there on the porch and that’ll get rid of them.’”

“She was so hateful,” Lena says. “She hated cats and I hated her.”

“Well, I loved her!” Emily says to Lena but Lena ain’t going to pay any mind. Mama says “Lena, go get the water from the pump” and Lena is gone running across that field like a squirrel, ain’t about to do as she’s told, argue with a fence post and that Roy just like her.

“Why did she leave him?” Virginia’s mama asks, and Virginia looks past her, out the window where a large tree across the street is rocking and swaying against that dark sky. “He’s a fine person,” her mother continues. “I’m sure it wasn’t his
fault.”

“Let Cindy tell you,” Virginia says. “Or has she already?”

“No, I haven’t.” Cindy leans back on her elbows, crosses her feet. “It’s no big deal.”

“No, no,” Virginia says. “It’s no big deal. His wife got pregnant and didn’t want it so she just left and had an abortion.”

“Poor Mark,” her mother says. “That must have been hard for him.”

“It really isn’t a big deal,” Cindy says. “Good God, Ginny Sue, every event of your life has been so BIG, so COMPLICATED, a major secret.”

“Better than a soap opera,” Virginia says and stares at the cheap square tiles of the ceiling. She wishes she was in her room at Gram’s old house, the bead board ceiling, Venetian blinds raised while the rain hit that tin awning, slow and then fast, rising, falling.

“Soap opera?” Cindy asks and Virginia just wishes she would
drop it and leave.
Poor Mark, that must have been hard for him.
Gram flips on the TV, changes channels, static and noise, and then cuts it back off. “I don’t think I should play this during a storm,” Gram says and Virginia’s mama agrees, goes and unplugs the set.

“You’re the soap opera,” Cindy continues, ignoring Madge’s Shh. “Your first period was like the Red Sea had parted, and my God, what a scene when you lost your virginity.” Cindy pauses, Virginia’s mama’s eyebrows go up. “And no, I haven’t told about that if you’re wondering. You break off an engagement after I’ve spent a fortune on a dress that I’ve got no place to wear and you act like you’re the first to ever get hurt over something or be a little upset and then you marry Mark and it’s like the first wedding, like you might be Lady Di and now you’re pregnant and getting all of the attention for that.” Cindy is all red in the face, her blue eye shadow showing up like sparkly clouds above her eyes. “That’s the soap opera, As Ginny Sue Turner Turns, like you might be the world.”

“That’s a lie,” Virginia says, feeling too tired to argue.

“We sent you to summer camp and we never even told about how you broke my vanity mirror.”

“Ginny Sue did not break that mirror,” Emily says. “She told me she didn’t and I believed her in spite of what Raymond Sinclair said. I never believed all he had to say.”

“He got his seven bad years,” Lena says.

“What?” Madge and Hannah ask at the same time but Cindy jumps in.

“Talk about a lie!” Cindy shakes her head back and forth. “You have always been jealous of my daddy, Ginny Sue. I remember when you said he was crazy. Don’t worry, I’ve never forgotten.”