Tending to Virginia (37 page)

“I got so homesick,” Gram says. “I’d go to my mama’s during the day I’d get so homesick. I never would have married a man who would carry me from my home.”

“I know,” Virginia says, speaking only to Gram now, wanting so much to be told that everything’s okay. “But I have married somebody who’s going to take me from my home. He already has and I don’t know what it is but sometimes I feel like I’m going to lose everything, that bit by bit everything that I love is going to be taken away from me.” She looks at her mother now. “I have always wanted to be like Gram. And I’m not, look at me. I have never been like I want to be.”

“Yes, you always said you wanted to be like me,” Gram says. “And I always said ‘yes Sweets, I know, but you’ll have to be more than me; the world will change.’”

“You never said that,” she says and shakes her head. “How could I be more when I can’t even be like you? I’ll never be like you.”

“Then be like me,” Lena says and smiles, adjusts her hat.

“That’s who I wanted to be like,” Hannah says and points to Lena. “I dreamed of being just like Lena, so funny and exciting.”

“I wanted to be like Emily,” Madge says and drops her deck of cards into the trashcan. “Or you, Hannah.”

“Better watch it, Ginny Sue,” Cindy says and laughs dramatically, trying so hard to act normal. “I bet your baby will want to be just like me.”

“Oh God,” Lena says and shakes her head.

“That baby will be fine if it takes after me,” Cindy says. She feels the life coming back into her body, the sun after the storm and all that kind of shit that people will say to make you feel better. This has all gone far enough. “Ginny Sue? You know your idea about me finding a hobby?” Cindy stands in the center of the room, her hands on her hips. “Well, you were exactly right. I have found that I’m good at putting words together in a funny way. I make up titles for
books and I make up lines to country songs. I’ve even been thinking I might take me a poetry class at Saxon Tech ’cause I’ve got it in my mind that I could write some funny greeting cards.” Her mind is flying; it has to. There’s no other way to go.

“Good,” Virginia says and grips her stomach like she might be dying, probably had a little kick and she better get used to it. Children, parents, men, and life will kick you right in the teeth and you best get used to it, learn to live with it. Cindy feels better, stronger, lightheaded; she knows she is never going to see Randy Skinner again; she is going to try to get Charles back, make it all up to him before it’s too late. “I’ll show you,” she says now, Ginny Sue still so pale and long-faced. “Here’s one thing I came up with just off the top of my head.” Cindy tilts her head to one side and laughs. “My name’s not Merle, but I am Haggard. My name’s not Charlie but I got some Pride. My name’s not Tanya, but I am Tuckered so Parton me, ‘cause your Dolly’s got to ride.” Cindy bows and Madge and Hannah clap, Ginny Sue smiling a weak smile. “That’s as far as I got. I was at work and you know my job is complicated, serious and complicated, everything from cardiac arrest to anorexia nervosa, to the major depression.”

“Oregano is good for the melancholy,” Emily says.

“Well I need to eat spaghetti every day,” Madge eyes the trashcan but decides to forget that deck of cards. She has carried that dogeared deck around for eight years and it’s time to say good-bye.

“We can have spaghetti tonight,” Hannah says. “I think Mama’s got all we need right there in the kitchen and y’all can stay.”

“I might have plans,” Cindy says, still wondering if she’s got the nerve to get on her knees and tell Charles how she knows that she fucked up. No, no, that’s not her style. He loved her for being wild and so that’s how she’ll be. He’ll open that front door and she’ll say “I’m a doctor I’m a lawyer I’m a movie star; I’m an astronaut and I own this bar. I’d lie to you for your love,” and she’ll grin and he’ll let her in because Charles Snipes loves the Bellamy Brothers and then she’ll start singing what was their first song that they had together, Grass Roots, “Sooner or Later,” and then Don McLean’s “American Pie,” and then a little of Paul Anka’s “You’re Having My Baby.”
Faster, go faster. She turns to Emily. “I don’t think doctors would agree about oregano.”

“Makes no difference if they agree or disagree,” Emily says. “It’s true.”

“Well, listen to this then,” Cindy says and waits until she has Ginny Sue’s attention. “I also make up songs about Jane Fonda and they’re all to the tune of hymns.” Cindy waits, her palms held out while she turns around to make sure everybody is paying attention; you can’t really expect Lena and Emily to pay attention but she still waits until they’re looking at her. She clears her throat. “What a friend we have in Jayyyne, all our cellulite to spare. It’s a privilege to Fonda, all it takes is tights and air.” Emily’s eyebrows go up, Hannah’s too, but it looks like Ginny Sue might laugh any minute now. “Praise Jane when you ain’t got cellulite, praise Jane when you can touch your feet. Praise Jane when your butt don’t shake. Praise Jane when you feel your muscles ache.”

“Hush now,” Emily says and finally Ginny Sue smiles; Ginny Sue is about to laugh and then the phone rings and everything stops.

Emily has the receiver pressed against her ear before it even rings the second time. “Ginny Sue,” she whispers. “It’s a man calling for you. I think it’s James or Raymond.”

“God, I hope not,” Cindy says and forces a laugh. It makes her scalp ache to think of such a thing for real, to imagine her daddy’s voice coming through a wire. “God,” she shakes her head from side to side. “Let the dead stay where they are,” and she sinks to her knees, runs her hand through her hair.

“Hello?” At first Virginia cannot focus on Mark’s voice, Gram and Lena saying how they wish they’d get long-distance calls, the static on the wire. “Thank God,” he says. “I’ve been calling for two hours and couldn’t get through. I was about to drive down there but the radio said there were some lines down on the highway, that the traffic is backed up.” Virginia twists the cord, listening, his voice so strange and distant. “I want you home, really, I called your doctor here and he said that it would probably be okay if I come and get you this weekend. Virginia? Are you still there?”

“Yes.” They are all watching her, listening, so she turns and faces the wall. “How were the tests?”

“I don’t know,” his voice comes through in sketchy breaks. “I think I did okay but right now I really don’t care. God, they said on the news that two tobacco warehouses down there were blown away.” His voice quickens. “Look, I’m coming tomorrow, okay? Virginia?”

“I’m not ready,” she says. “I don’t want to go back.” She concentrates on the faces around her, shapes and shades of mouths and eyes that know everything there is to know about her life. He is talking now, his voice cracking in her ear, cracking like plaster where she could reach her fingers and strip away, layers at a time.

“You really meant to leave, didn’t you?” he asks, crackling static. “When you told me that you wanted me to leave, you really meant it didn’t you?” She sees him standing there, pacing, that beige phone cord stretching as he moves from the door to the bathroom back over to the edge of the bed, his face gone pale, circles under his eyes as the bed creaks with his weight and he stares at that cobweb in the corner, weaving, netting, tighter and tighter, and she feels as cold and distant as that overhead bulb that she knows he has switched on.

“Yes,” she says, her voice so clear and cold. “I don’t have a life with you.” She holds the receiver tightly, the silence on his end, and he might be on the phone in the kitchen and she sees his back as he stares out that kitchen window where the wisteria vines wrap and squeeze, choking that maple tree that has shaded that rented piece of land longer than she’s been alive. “You don’t mean that,” he says, the same way that Bryan Parker said it, the same way that he must have said it to Sheila. “We have so much,” he says to Sheila but Sheila had a mind of her own, a life of her own.

“The only reason that you are with me,” she says, everyone watching her with frozen sketchy faces, her voice slow and deliberate, “is because it didn’t work with Sheila. If Sheila had been like me, if she had been passive and malleable and willing to put her life on hold . . .” she stops with the pressure of her mother’s hand on her arm, the frightened look on her mother’s face.

“But that’s not true,” he says and she can’t stand hearing him for another second, can’t stand the thought of all that there is to face.
She hands the receiver to her mother who refuses at first, but takes it when Virginia drops it to the floor and rolls back to face the cheap prefab wall, that yellow light from the window forming a distorted square.

“Tell him Ginny Sue needs some nicotine,” Cindy says. “Tell him it’s withdrawals.”

“She’s had a rather upsetting day,” her mother says. “We’ve all been talking over sad old things that we should have left alone.” Her mother pauses and Virginia can hear her sighs, hear her comforting words to Mark, Lena shuffling to the bathroom, Madge going through the trashcan. “I know that, honey,” her mother says and Virginia imagines what his words must have been. “I am her husband! Virginia is acting crazy!”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” her mother says. “Ben and I can follow and take the other car home.” Another pause and then, “Okay, yes I will” and then “You know that we love you, Mark.”

“Don’t do this to me,” Virginia says when Hannah hangs up. “Please. Don’t make me go.” And Hannah just wants to shake her, to tell her to grow up; but all Hannah can think about now are all those times that Ginny begged not to stay at Madge’s house. She thinks of when she had stood on the curb of Carver Street and watched the ambulance pull away with her daddy in the back, the sheet over his head. Ginny Sue was just a tiny thing, peeping out the kitchen window, waving her small hand when Hannah looked up. “Please don’t go,” Ginny had said, “Please,” when they carried that stretcher through the kitchen, Hannah and her mama following to the street, a child saying “please don’t.” Hannah had watched her mama roaming over toward the garden, litter that she had collected clutched in her hand; she watched Ginny pressing her forehead against that window, the glass fogging with her breath. And in that moment, Hannah felt all alone, the ambulance gone and all alone, straining to keep an eye on both mother and child, and then she had felt herself moving, acting, telephoning and cooking and washing dishes and straightening the house before people began to come while her mama sat and sewed a clown for Ginny Sue, all of her attention seemingly focused on a child who didn’t really know what was going on.

“You’re not thinking about your child,” Hannah says now. “You are thinking of no one but yourself.”

“Myself, that’s right,” Virginia says and sits up. “I’m thinking of myself like Madge should have done, thinking of myself like Cindy did when she left Buzz. Cindy and Chuckie are fine all by themselves.” She looks at Cindy who is shaking her head back and forth. Cindy takes the deck of cards from Madge’s hand and puts it back in the trashcan, then walks towards Virginia as if she’s in slow motion.

“Don’t blow it, Ginny Sue,” Cindy whispers. “You don’t know how lucky you are.” Cindy squeezes her hand. “You are lucky, lucky. Your whole life has been lucky. I can’t count the times that Mama has looked at me and said, ‘why can’t you be more like Ginny Sue?’”

“Oh Cindy, I’m sorry,” Madge says but Cindy just shrugs, smiles at Madge.

“I guess even my daddy felt that way,” Cindy whispers, her face turning pink. “I know Buzz Biggers did. Honey, if he could have had you, he wouldn’t have looked twice at me.”

“Cindy,” Virginia says, repulsed by the very thought of Buzz Biggers, but held fast by Cindy’s watery gaze.

“No, it’s true,” Cindy says. “You were two years behind me in high school and I always knew that whoever I dated would have chosen you over me if he could’ve, and I also knew that anybody you went out with wouldn’t have wanted to go out with me.”

“That’s not true,” Virginia says. “You are so much prettier, and look at your figure and you’re exciting. You were always so popular.”

“That’s what Charles said,” Cindy says, the tears coming to her eyes. “I guess Charles is the one person who I felt would have chosen me first; mainly because I asked him one time. I asked him if he wished I was more like you.”

“Oh Cindy.”

“No, let me finish.” Cindy leans back, her legs crossed Indian style on the daybed. “Charles felt that way about me and I blew it. I’ve always made fun of you and stuff but it’s because I was jealous. I was jealous of everything you had and it was easier to just do everything opposite from you than to compete.”

“Maybe you should tell Charles how you feel.” Virginia sits up,
looks at Madge. “Don’t you think she should tell him?”

“And you should think about how you feel about Mark,” Hannah says. “He’s a good person and he loves you.”

“Roy was a good person,” Lena says.

“Yes,” Emily nods. “But Roy Carter would not have had me. No, for I was a lady and Roy would not have had me.”

“No, he wouldn’t have,” Lena says. “And I’d not’ve had James, as sweet a person as I thought he was.” Lena looks around the room and laughs. “James was nice but he was dull. Roy said, ‘James is about as funny as a bubblegum machine on a lockjaw ward.’” She laughs and fans her hat back and forth.

“He was never silly,” Emily says. “If that’s what you mean.”

“I can’t believe you were ever jealous of me,” Virginia says, for the first time noticing the little lines leading from the corners of Cindy’s eyes where she used to draw long black eyeliner tails like a cat.

“Yes,” Cindy smiles, the lines reaching into her hairline, but she looks pretty this way with her hair in wisps instead of stiff and sprayed. Cindy laughs and slaps Virginia on the leg. “I guess that’s why I’ve always made a soap opera of something. Having people tell me what NOT to do was better than nothing.”

“Oh Cindy,” Madge gasps. “You needed attention, and here all this time I’ve ignored you thinking if I ignored something that it would stop.”

“Didn’t work with Daddy,” Cindy says and catches herself when she sees her mother wince like she might have just sliced a finger. “Oh, don’t get yourself all worked up and ready to hemorrhage over it.” Cindy waves her hand and Madge is almost relieved to have Cindy talk to her that way. You can’t just start your life over and everything be brand new, can’t teach an old dog new tricks.