Tending to Virginia

  TENDING to

  VIRGINIA

  A NOVEL BY JILL MCCORKLE

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  IN MEMORY OF Claudia Meares Bullington

  WITH LOVE FOR

  Margaret Ann (Annie) Meares Collins

  Melba Collins McCorkle

  Jan McCorkle Gane

  AND

  Margaret Ann (Annie) Gane

  Thus strangely are our souls

  constructed and by such slight

  ligaments are we bound to

  prosperity or ruin.

  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  Contents

  Genealogy

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  PART 1

  VIRGINIA WAKES TO the gentle pressure of Mark’s hand, there, the baby, distended abdomen like a moonlit mountain in the pale glare of the streetlight. She lies dark beneath it as though there is no connection to this mound of flesh, no connection to the man whose hand has found its way to her. She turns her face to a cool spot on the pillow, aware that his hand has fallen beside her, touching her thigh; but, she is heavy with sleep, with eyelids that won’t open, at that fine line between the two worlds, and turning back to a scene so clear in her mind. Perhaps there was a photograph, somewhere, in some box, or maybe it is a picture that she has made up herself, outlined by words and memories, and then colored:

  Gram is sitting in the front porch swing, her hair dark then, the calm heartshaped face, pale green eyes, a wide placid stare and when the movement begins, she pushes lightly off the gray planked floor, swing gently rocking, her fingers running down the split husk while peas fall into the colander in her lap. Gram moves freely in this scene, up and down the garden, while her little sister, Lena, sits on the porch railing, one foot propped up while she paints her toenails bright red. Lena’s loose white skirt billows with a slight breeze, showing her thigh; her dark auburn hair, frizzy and bobbed. She is waiting for Roy Carter to pick her up in his fancy car with the convertible top.

  “Lena thought I needed her company the summer my baby died,” Gram said. “I didn’t have the heart to tell her there was nothing anybody could do.”

  Lena said, “Emily needed me all that summer. I couldn’t go back to New York with her that way. It was like I was her mama.” And Lena stayed the summer, Roy Carter driving down from New York to see her, while Gramps sat in the side yard and whittled pointed ends on tomato stakes and stared at the chicken-wire dog pen built years before.

  * * *

  It is going to be another beautiful day, no clouds, might hit a hundred, rain not in sight for a week, better water those lawns. Virginia could kill the weatherman, kill Mark for not turning off the radio alarm and the sun not even up. Barefoot and pregnant. That is the line that stays in her mind this summer. Barefoot and pregnant and hot as hell. She stretches her legs flat against the sheet, so cool where the sweat has gathered behind her knees, and focuses on the sound of the window unit as it spits and gurgles and stirs the humid air. She would kill for central air, kill for a cigarette, to be on a beach towel, the ocean roaring, that breeze, hipbones visible while the radio plays old songs. When I was a single girl used to go to the store and buy. Now I am a married girl, just rock that baby and cry. That’s what she sings in her head but it clashes with Nat King Cole’s “Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer,” Mark whistling, whistling “Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer” when he is the one that complains about the North Carolina summers even though he goes and sits in an air-conditioned library all day to study, even though he can put on clothes that he wore seven and a half months ago, even though she is ready to explode like a bottle rocket.

  The dull morning light, framed by the window, clouds when Mark opens the bathroom door and stands there, towel around his waist, thick curly hair slicked back. He steps into the darkness of the room and just stands there, a dark shadow at the foot of the bed, a faceless creature who tiptoes, slowly opens drawers in a way that prolongs every creak and whine. She feels the bed slope, hears him pulling up his socks. One hundred dollars to the fourth caller who can name the song that we played to wake you up this morning. If you’re heading to the beach, better take sunscreen. We’re talking heat wave, folks, and here’s Linda Ronstadt. . . . Too late for sunscreen, got a brown patch, just above the right cheekbone, symbol of fertility. She turns and tosses, writhes as if she is asleep when Mark’s mouth, fresh with Colgate brushes her lips. “I love you,” he whispers, and though there is an impulse to respond, she continues to act, a deep sigh as she turns away from him. She wishes she could place her face into the cool pillow, hide, but there is an obstacle, a large round obstacle which houses a mutant-looking creature with tiny ears and arms, and the creature just hides there, waiting. As soon as its baby pink lungs become independent, it will bust out and take control of her life. And for those of you students taking off for a wild season, just remember . . . See You in September.

  She will see it before September. She will see it in August, a month and a half and she will see it; she will be up on that table like the women in the films, her knees bent and parted, while she stares at the mirror on the opposite wall. She will see her face, white and drawn, a hand on her arm, and she will breathe, breathe, scream as it fights its way out for air, scream when she sees it, small and bloody.

  Barefoot and pregnant. It is a growth the size of a pumpkin that makes her pee incessantly, makes her sit with her legs splayed like a woman she once saw at a bus station—brown polyester, plastic bubble beads, a child with Nab crumbs all over its mouth. “I told you to sit in that chair and be still,” the woman snapped and he obeyed, one little tennis shoe going back and forth like a windshield wiper until the woman slapped his leg. Now, she can’t get that dirty little face off of her mind, the small solemn girl who always sat at the back when Virginia went on Tuesday mornings to give the first graders their art lesson; the girl would never look her in the eye, would never smile and lean close as the other children did when she squatted by their desks. Screams echo through Roses Dime Store every time she goes to buy more Formby’s refinisher. Everywhere she goes there are children that need to blow their noses, need to tie their shoes, sitting in grocery carts, grunting with their little arms outstretched for Smurfberry Crunch or Lucky Charms.

  When she hears Mark’s car door slam, she makes her way into the bathroom. The fluorescent glare of porcelain makes her squint as she bends to pick up wet towels, dirty socks and underwear, stops the shower from leaking, puts the cap back on the toothpaste. And this is only the beginning, the beginning of another long boring day, the beginning of another six weeks, and then what? God, then what? “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” a girl with straight orange hair used to tell everyone in junior high. The girl would say, “Smile, God loves you!” and once she had made her way over to Virginia after Sunday school. “God would like for us to be friends,” the girl said. “God and I know that you’re a believer but what good is it if you won’t tell others? What good is it if you act like you’re too good? Today is the first day of the rest of your life!” And Virginia had frozen, hoping that someone, something would intervene. She finally smiled noncommittally and said that she had to be excused, had to hurry, had to go meet her cousin.

  “Why don’t you just tell her you know all that already?” her cousin, Cindy had asked. “Why don’t you say ‘yeah and I ain’t going to spend the rest of my life listening to you. Dye your hair. It would make the rest of mine and everybody else’s life better.’” Cindy had laughed, leaning up against the back of the church building, smoking a cigarette, planning how she was going to skip ch
urch. The thought of the orange-haired girl placed next to Cindy was sad, Cindy with her thick blonde hair streaked by the sun, and those pale blue eyes made bluer by her tan.

  “I can’t say that!” Virginia said, worried that Cindy was going to get caught, though Cindy didn’t seem the least bit worried.

  “Then live with it. Live the rest of your life with it,” Cindy said and made herself comfortable on the large root of a shade tree. She pulled a worn copy of Peyton Place from her pocketbook and opened it. “See you after church.”

  Now, that girl with the orange hair has an illegitimate baby and bartends in Clemmonsville. She wore tight black jeans and a halter top to Virginia’s high school reunion. And what happened to her? What shaped that shy, orange-haired born-again girl who could add and subtract so well in the first grade into that? And to Cindy? Cindy, now married, divorced, married, divorced, and still ticking along like a little windup toy, still talking about Peyton Place whenever book reading is a topic of conversation. Cindy’s daddy killed himself and nobody has ever been exactly sure why; Cindy’s own sister won’t have anything to do with her, and she just keeps right on going to Ramada Inn every Friday night hoping to meet a man. Cindy does not get along with her mama, which is sad since Madge is all by herself now. It would be hard enough to have Cindy for a daughter, petite and cute and full of herself, while Madge is as big and lifeless as a rock, long ago given up on fashionable clothes; she wears drab dark pantsuits when she’s not in her hygienist uniform.

  “Having a baby is nothing,” Cindy said. “Just go in, lie flat on your back, say ‘I’m in terrific pain! I don’t think I can live!’ They’ll give you some drugs, prop your feet up, tell you to count a little and when you wake up you’re still on six and they tell you if it’s a boy or a girl.”

  “Mark and I are doing natural.”

  “Well, then don’t complain about it!”

  Pregnant. Barefoot and pregnant. A derogatory connotation, a picture of a female clad in a gunnysack with a brood of runny-nosed children and a distended belly just like her own.

  “Grandma Tessy had nine babies,” Cindy told her. “Good God what her stomach must’ve looked like. Now I can still wear a bikini. Of course I Fonda to keep myself this way.”

  “Tessy had herself a terrible time,” Gram told once. “Had herself three miscarriages. I didn’t have but one.”

  “I was in J.C. Penney’s buying your daddy some socks when my water broke,” her mother said. “I just drove on to the hospital.”

  “I didn’t have a child because I never wanted a child,” her great aunt Lena said and lit a cigarette. “Who had time?”

  There are times like right now when she doesn’t believe it, when she gets this odd sense that nothing is happening and that she will be this way forever with her navel turned inside out and poking up through the orange nightshirt that she has worn until it makes her sick. “The Great Pumpkin,” Mark likes to say when she’s getting ready for bed, rubbing his hand over her navel, the growth on the growth. Sometimes it makes her mad for him to touch it that way, to look at it; sometimes she doesn’t want to touch it herself and there are people that she barely knows who think they have some right to walk up and pat her stomach like it might be a dog.

  “Wait until it comes out!” she had snapped at one of Mark’s tennis buddies the other day. “You can pat it all you want then.”

  The man’s wife who was standing beside her had laughed, halfway, her teeth clenched together. But women will do it, too; that same wife had already patted her stomach and called her “little mommy” and gone on and on with “when we had our baby, when we had our baby, blah blah blah,” until Virginia wanted to throw up which she’s been doing quite often anyway. “Then go have mine,” she felt her mouth shaping the words. “If you know all about it, then go have mine,” but Mark was making his embarrassing moment apologies, laughing like no big deal and dragging her to the car.

  “That was uncalled for.” Mark turned halfway toward her on the seat as they were leaving the tennis courts, his hand suspended like he had been about to pat and caught himself, his mind really on this case or that case, the legalities of life, innocent until proven guilty.

  “It was uncalled for.” She clasped her hands protectively around her stomach. “He can pat his own wife. She loves having babies and is the specialist on it all so she can just get pregnant and he can pat her. People have babies all over the world, every minute. You can just about grow one in a bottle, keep it on your windowsill. It’s no big deal.” She laughed a sarcastic mimic of the tennis player, loud and obnoxious, and then fell silent, first staring at her stomach and then at Mark’s profile, straight nose, jaw clenched.

  “It is a big deal,” he said quietly, eyes on the road. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “But what if I wasn’t pregnant?” she asked, suddenly ready to prove her point. “What if I wasn’t, and men kept walking up to me and rubbing and patting my abdomen, women, too. What if everywhere we went, somebody wanted to feel my stomach, would that make you mad?”

  “It’s different,” he said calmly.

  “No it isn’t, it’s still my stomach. It’s like renting an apartment, I still own the building.”

  “Let’s not argue,” he said and reached his open palm across the front seat. “Please.”

  “I just don’t like him at all,” she said, a fact stated, calmness coming to her voice as she took Mark’s hand, loosely cupping her own around it. “It’s something about the way that his head is so flat and wide. I bet his mama had a hell of a time with that head.” She lifted up the bottom of her yellow sack dress and angled the air conditioning vent so that it would blow up her body and maybe cool her off.

  “Let’s not argue.” It seems that Mark has said that a lot these days and she hates that yellow dress. She loathes it and there it is right now hanging on the door, waiting for her to get in it again, transforming her from the Great Pumpkin into a giant squash like one she saw in her hometown paper once—a squash just about as big as its grower who was a farmer in a neighboring county. She was a teenager then, a thin, lean teenager who never questioned that she had ribs and hip bones, and everyone in the county, including her father, had spent the summers since tending their squash in hopes that one morning there would be one the size of a Volkswagen.

  “I’m going to shred this dress into dust cloths,” she had told Mark when they got home from the tennis court. He just nodded and stretched his legs out on the coffee table, one foot going back and forth like a windshield wiper. You sit in that chair and be still. “It’ll make good ones, cheerful bright dust cloths,” he said and she went out in the yard and pulled up every weed she could find; she even pulled a few out of her neighbor’s yard, the ones that looked like they would poke through the fence if they didn’t cut their grass soon.

  “We got a boy coming to cut it today,” Mrs. Short’s voice startled her and she pulled her hand back through the wire and stood up. “Can’t keep it cut often enough,” she said and swatted at a gnat with her hand. “Grow like weeds, that’s what people say about children, grow like weeds. One of mine’s a wild weed for sure.”

  Virginia let the weed in her hand slip to her own rented grass that came with the rented house, temporary, temporary, a temporary life; pregnancy is temporary. Breast-feeding, kindergarten, junior high, college, all temporary. Birth defects, reform schools, jail sentences, could be permanent. She knew Mrs. Short’s wild weed all right; he drives an old souped up Corvette and spends every weekend washing and waxing it, all kinds of things hanging on the rearview mirror, and then he goes off and does who knows what with his tee shirt cut up to show his navel and black spike arm bands. Virginia moved slowly to her flower bed and began weeding there, all temporary flowers, one shot. She won’t be here next spring; she won’t be here in three months. She will be in Richmond in another temporary place with a temporary job and temporary day care.

  “Gonna have yourself your own weed pretty soon,
” Mrs. Short said. “Hope it turns out all right.” She screamed something into the kitchen and Virginia caught herself staring at Mrs. Short, her full breasts under a polyester tank top, the disbelief that there was a time when that boy with his spikey hair and greasy hands had curled there. “You just tend to your own weeds now, I’ll get mine cut directly,” she snapped and went into the house. Virginia stood there, hands pressed into her back, dirt on the front of that yellow dress, first feeling her cheeks flame with the reprimand and then feeling so angry that she wanted to dump all of the weeds she had pulled over the fence. “You tend to yours,” she murmured, bending to pick up the one she had dropped.

  “If we had to stay here forever, I’d build an eight-foot fence,” she told Mark, who had not moved the entire time that she had been outside working like a dog. “When we move to Richmond, I want to live somewhere where I can come and go and never see another person.”

  “Don’t count on it,” he said solemnly, the same voice, same tone as when he said “let’s not argue.”

  And she won’t count on it, can’t count on anything except what she already knows, the future so unknown, looming like a big dead-end billboard, temporarily blank white with no clue of the end result. And what she does know—the quiet coolness of her grandmother’s old house, Lena’s laughter, the rhythmic whirr of her mother’s sewing machine—makes her so homesick. Hell, she’d settle for riding around with Cindy with the radio going full blast, and Cindy lighting one cigarette after another while she told with soap opera drama about her latest fling. Virginia wishes she had kept working; she bets her sixth grade art students have ruined their projects over the past two weeks. She bets that substitute knows nothing about putting papier-mâché on a balloon to make a puppet head. Well, that’s all right. Let them screw up their puppets. Another week and they’ll be singing “Put Away Your Books and Papers” and dashing from that cafeteria like a band of dwarfed devils on the verge of acne, to have bike wrecks and bust their heads on diving boards, and she can’t help that.