Tending to Virginia (7 page)

She sits on the edge of the bed and leans her head as far forward as her stomach will permit. Her face feels so hot, so flushed from the anger, the anger that makes her want to run so fast she’d leave this stomach way behind. “It’s hard to go home once you’ve got a child,” Gram said. “I used to go out to the country every single day. I’d let James leave for work and off I’d go home. He didn’t know of it half the time, didn’t need to know, and it helped to pass the time. Imagine that me and my mama didn’t have a better thing to do but to pass the time. That’s why I never would have married a man who would carry me from my home.” She had looked hard at Virginia, her eyes so clear and honest. “I would have been scared I’d never get back. And those were good days with my mama. I’ve always been so glad that I was there with her when she died.”

Virginia opens her eyes now, her head feeling so heavy that she can’t even cry. And she wants to; she feels like she’d like to scream her lungs out because she did marry a man who will take her from her home, already has, slowly, bit by bit, moving further and further from what she knows. And one day it will be Gram and the news will come to her in a long-distance call the same way it did when Roy Carter died, and she will hang up that receiver and turn to face rooms and windows and faces so unfamiliar and she will say: Why? Why am I here this way?

PART 2

C
INDY SINCLAIR SNIPES
Sinclair Biggers Sinclair is so pissed off, which isn’t unusual given her frustrated state, and that’s all it is—frustration with a capital
F.
It is not some personality DEFECT, some disease of the mind like that shrink would have liked for her to believe. “Paranoid,” he had said as if that meant one thing to her. “Paironerds,” she said to that man and his secretary on her way out. “Masochist” is another word he used and she is dead sure that he was feeling her out to see if she did any kinds of way out stuff. Well, she didn’t or doesn’t, but she sure as hell knows what’s going on, mainly because her best friend, Constance Ann Henshaw reads all of those magazines that are wrapped in brown paper down at the Quik Pik. Constance Ann swears that she only buys those books for a little humor, that she
never
looks at the pictures. Constance Ann swears that in real life she has never glanced down at a man’s covered up privates which Cindy knows is a lie. Everybody has done that whether they know or admit it. Where else are you supposed to look in those underwear ads but
there.

Well, Jim Palmer ain’t the norm and Cindy knows that for su2re; she ought to know, been married two times and has every intention of marrying again. She admits that she has checked men out that way; men do it all the time. Men will glance down at your boobs and back up to your mouth the whole time you’re trying to talk. Of course, maybe men don’t do that to everybody; Cindy has got something for them to see is all, and they can’t help it. She’d wonder about a man that
didn’t
look. Hell yes, she’ll admit all that and it has nothing to do with therapy. It’s just the truth. She admitted a lot of truths to that shrink before she realized what he was up to and he
suggested that he might should “admit” her. You admit the truth and they want to admit you, make commitments that you can’t possibly on God’s green earth keep and they want to commit you.

“It sounds like a love/hate situation,” that shrink said. It didn’t matter
who
she talked about, her parents, Ginny Sue, Constance Ann, the old relatives, or Charles Snipes, that’s what he said.

“You sound like a damn parrot,” she told him. “I’ve paid money to come here and have you say that same thing over and over, love/hate, love/hate. My daddy is dead and nobody in his right mind hates a dead person; Ginny Sue is like a sister to me and that’s why she pisses me off. Pissed off is what sisterhood is all about.”

“What about your real sister?” he asked, looking just like those sea monkeys that grin and wave from the comic books like they can think when they ain’t anything but little midget shrimp. Give a man a diploma and a desk and he’ll sit there and grin and wave like he’s something he isn’t.

“Catherine is a slut,” Cindy said. “Now, who’s going to love a slut who takes an oath on a King James Bible that she will never claim me as a sister? Nobody, that’s who.”

“But that was years ago.” Smile and wave now, whoa sea horse monkey.

“Well, I never forgot it. She can put on a three-piece suit and shake her Rolex wrist out that dwarfed Yuppie van, pointing at which houses she’s trying to sell if she wants but she’s still a slut. Give somebody a real estate license and a little van and a husband that sips on that thick liquor in a glass the size of a thimble and they think they can smile and wave and act like they’re something they’re not.” He looked away and wrote on his little pad because he was probably one of those thick liquor drinkers himself, likooor as they say. “Catherine comes home and we kill the calf.”

“What do you mean? Kill the calf?” Got a diploma but no Sunday training.

“Have you ever heard of the Bible?” She waited for him to nod. “Well, there’s a story in there that shouldn’t be. A story of this boy who leaves home and spends all his money on things he doesn’t need while the other boy stays at home and does stuff like picks
things up at the A&P when his mama needs it or talks to her on the telephone when she’s lonesome because her husband is dead and she’s too boring to have any friends. He does all that and then when that other boy breezes in “Just for a sec to check” it’s like heaven has come to earth and that mama says things like ‘Don’t you look so nice all dressed up?’”

“That’s all. Breeze in and breeze out and she just lives right over there in Clemmonsville, but that’s a ‘city’ mind you. She just ‘couldn’t live here in this town.’ Ginny Sue lives two hours away and she comes to visit.”

Cindy is not going back to that man. The only reason she went in the first place was out of curiosity. If you keep up with what’s going on and what’s in style like Cindy does, then you know that everybody is either going or has gone. Even Ginny Sue had a little therapy way back.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Cindy’s mama always says and that pisses her off, too. She thinks that if that was the God’s truth, we’d all be dead. Constance Ann would be dead for sure because she
does
look at the pictures and she
does
glance at covered up privates whether she knows it or not. Constance Ann is a little on the drab side and would rather stay at home and read about things than to get out and try it. The only reason they’re friends is because everybody else from the high school class has moved on and because she and Constance Ann work together down at Southern Point Medical Center. Cindy’s picture isn’t even in the high school yearbook because that was when they wouldn’t let pregnant girls finish. Sometimes it makes her sick to look at all those people smiling and waving out of that yearbook, especially Charles Snipes because they
did
let him graduate even though it was
his
you-know-what that got her that way. It makes her sick during the holidays when she sees some of those people in the grocery store because they like to go on and on about how much everything has changed; not a damn thing has changed, boring as ever; the courthouse hasn’t moved and people still get sick and die.

She runs that computer at work like she might have been born right there in front of a Video Display Terminal and all she has is
high school equivalency. She can talk about bits and bytes and hemorrhages as good as anybody and does her dull mama think that’s as good as Catherine selling a split-level over on Dupont Road? Hell no, and all her mama does when she gets home from work is play solitaire.

“I’m getting a Bernoulli box to back up my data in case there’s a thunderstorm,” Cindy told her mama a couple of weeks ago and her mama said, “Cindy, you’ll have to speak English.”

“Well, don’t you ever say periodontal nothing to me again,” she told her.

It’s a trap, all of it. Cindy would lose her mind if it wasn’t for Friday afternoons at the Ramada happy hour and the fact that her mama will keep Chuckie, let him spend the night. One night. She gets one night to herself and her mama and Chuckie both acting like it’s the end of the world just to give her that one night. Chuckie doesn’t want to go over there; who would blame him? But he has to. That’s the bottom line. He has never had control over what’s done and at age twelve, is not going to start trying. It’s times like that when she knows that she needs a man, a big strong hunk of man to look at that wirey pimply child of hers in a way that would make him go back to popping wheelies on his bike in front of the house. Now what he does is sneak in her underwear drawer so he’ll know what to imagine those seventh graders are wearing under those ripped up tee shirts and miniskirts. God, Cindy would like some minis herself as hot as it is. She’d look good in a mini and her mama would say, “That’s too young-looking for you,” like she always says. Her mama was born old and plain.

Cindy is thankful every day that she did not take after her mama. Every day, she thinks at least once, “Thank you, Jesus, that I ain’t huge like my mama.” A man could take care of this frustration. She needs a man like Randy Skinner who works as a pharmaceutical salesman out of Raleigh and who for the past three weeks has come into the clinic on Fridays and gone with her to Ramada.

“This might be the next Mr. Cindy,” she had told Constance Ann, but Constance Ann has never been married and so doesn’t know how important it is. Addicting and habit-forming; sex is just
like using the bathroom and eating supper. Just try going without something you did so often you didn’t even notice. Ginny Sue ought to count her blessings instead of feeling sorry for herself. Feel sorry for yourself, pout and carry on and that man will leave sure as shit. A little pregnancy shouldn’t make everything else stop. God knows, that’s when you need to keep his interest up. That is just good common sense. She knew when she was carrying Chuckie that Charles was lying there thinking he had a fat wife. Well, not really because Cindy didn’t get enormous like Ginny Sue has. But, still, had to keep that fire burning. If she didn’t feel like trying to angle herself some way, then she’d just borrow books from Constance Ann and she’d say, “Here, baby, read a little of this and then I’ll come back and take care of things.” It kept him off the streets. Ginny Sue ought to wise up; men will leave women and women will leave men just for that reason.

Constance Ann will need to wise up if she ever finds somebody. She can talk up a blue streak and doesn’t know a thing about it all. Constance Ann will sit right there and eat a danish which she needs like a hole in the head and talk about the “zipless.”
The Zipless Fuck
is the exact title, which Cindy doesn’t like to think about because it reminds her of her first date with her second husband, Buzz Biggers, which she’d just as soon not think about. It was a vulnerable time in her life; blame it on frustration. Blame it on that shrink. Blame it on whoever said, “if you fall off a horse you got to get back up and ride.” Buzz Biggers was standing at the bar inside Blind Tom’s Bar and Grill out in the county. Old Tom ain’t really blind because Cindy asked the management. Old Tom just acts blind so people who don’t know better will leave big tips. “I’ll fuck your eyes out if I get half a chance,” Buzz Biggers said after about five minutes of talking.

“Just see if you can,” she said, and of course he didn’t. Those baby blues are still right up in her head. She rode again, all right, but she had saddled herself with pure trash. It was that scar across the side of that rough hairy face that made him so exciting, made her mama look white as a sheet and say, “What kind of man is he?”

“A wild man,” Cindy told her. “A wild raring stud.” And Cindy
laughed to see that look on her mama’s face. Her mama needed that.

Constance Ann got that zipless from an Erica Jong book. Constance Ann thinks that Erica Jong is Jesus Christ Born Again and
Fear of Flying
is her bible. Cindy finally read it just so she’d know what Constance Ann was talking about and she didn’t like it near as much as she liked
The Love Machine
or
Peyton Place.
The worst part of
Fear of Flying
was that man that didn’t wipe himself well. That was so dumb. Chuckie at age three could wipe himself and she could not bear to think of a grown man who could not. Even Buzz Biggers, as filthy as he was, wasn’t like that, and if Cindy had been that woman in the book that slept with that man, she sure as hell wouldn’t have told it. Constance Ann said it was symbolic and so Cindy just let it go, didn’t argue because Constance Ann knows a lot about symbolic things and as a result can quote lines from all of the Jill Clayburgh movies; that’s what Constance Ann has over Cindy, that and a copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Constance Ann says looking at naked
medical
pictures is different from the other.

Paranoid, masochistic—then that shrink had the nerve to bring up her daddy who was a fine man, book smart and deep. It’s nobody’s business that he got himself all wrapped up in King Tut. A lot of people have hobbies. Cindy’s mama plays solitaire, and Cindy collects those little squat Coke bottles that you hardly ever see anymore.

“Why don’t you cash these in?” Charles Snipes asked her once. “Then you can buy a whole case.”

“Buying is not the same as finding!” she told him, which made good sense to her but did not to Charles Snipes or her mama who said more or less the same thing at Cindy’s daddy’s funeral.

“Just take the whole crate, Cindy,” her mama said. “Don’t stand around in the front yard waiting for somebody to lay one down so you can say you found it.” God, that pissed her off just like it did when that shrink asked her questions about her daddy and how he was homebound due to a rare paralysis that came and went. The shrink said “psychosomatic,” that word which means it’s all up in the head. So stupid.

“If it was all upstairs like you say,” she told the shrink, “then it would have been his scalp that was paralyzed instead of his legs, an arm from time to time, his eyelids.” Cindy couldn’t stand the thought of her daddy sitting in that Lazy Boy recliner with his eyes closed, paralyzed that way; it made her ache. It was a rare cancer that overtook him; a man who had an interest in Egypt, an artist of the mind, overtook and struck down by a rare cancer which is why he shot himself in the chest the way that he did, too much of a man to let himself get weak and helpless. That sea monkey asshole, dragging it all up again. It wasn’t his daddy that had been stretched out at the funeral home like he’d been starched and pressed. Catherine was studying real estate and thinking of getting her tubes tied and Ginny Sue was going to fraternity parties and making
A
’s on things like African Astronomy, and there Cindy was facing her first divorce and a dead daddy. “Let’s stick to the present,” Cindy told the shrink. “I know about what has already happened.”