Tending to Virginia Read online

  “You are lucky,” Virginia told her.

  “Well, learn something other than school, Ginny Sue,” she said, then no trace that she had cried except that her mascara, midnight blue then, was clumped in the corner of her right eye. “You’ve got a hell of a lot to learn.” She shook her head from side to side. “And I mean the important stuff, none of that what so and so who’s been dead forever said about the moon or the pope, you know? And don’t let them tell you stuff about Jesus that isn’t true, and don’t you tell that I brought Jesus up because I don’t want Mama or anybody else asking me to go to their Sunday school class.”

  “I won’t.” Virginia took hold of Cindy’s hand and squeezed that plastic Coke bottle key chain which Virginia thought was so tacky, even the day she saw Cindy pick it out and buy it in the check-out line at Roses, Virginia thought it was tacky.

  “God, toughen up. Stop acting like such a queer,” Cindy said. “You ain’t going to the moon.”

  “No.”

  “Jesus, God, two hours from home and you’d think you were moving to Russia.” Cindy jumped off the car, readjusted her little gold anklet. “I hope you’ll mature a little.”

  “You started it,” Virginia said, the blood flooding her face. “You cried about it.”

  “Shit, I cried for something else. Something a hell of a lot bigger than school, real things you know?”

  “What? Tell me.” Virginia had pleaded but Cindy only laughed and looked away. “You can tell me. I’m your cousin, remember?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “Maybe someday when you’re all grown up and married with a baby like me, I’ll tell you or I won’t have to tell you ‘cause you’ll see for yourself.”

  “I’d probably understand right now.”

  “Oh come on. Now why would I spill my gut to somebody that has a chair with a school decal on it? Why would I trust somebody with such a queer and tacky chair?”

  “You fixed that chair!” Virginia screamed. “I have nothing to do with that chair. I didn’t pick out that damn decal. I would never have . . .” Virginia caught herself and looked away from Cindy.

  “Damn, ooh, ohh, Emily would be surprised to hear her little grandbaby said ‘damn’ and that Ginny Sue played technical-virgin sex with a boy so dumb he can’t write his name in a rented cottage at the beach while her mama thought that she was chaperoned all hours of the day and night.”

  “Cindy!” Virginia screamed. “I know things about you, too.”

  “Honey, I don’t care what you say about me because I’ve got enough stored right up here that could shock the earth.” She got in Madge’s car and blew the horn several short times. “I knew you hated the chair. Admit the truth, let the skeletons out of the closet.”

  “You’ve got some, too, and I’d never tell, never.”

  “What, that I got pregnant and then got married, me and the Virgin Mary, tell it, ain’t news to a soul. Tell how I got pulled and had to walk a line on I-95 coming back from Clemmonsville. My daddy paid the ticket.” She blew the horn again. “Tell how much I hate my sister Catherine and call her a slutbucket. Shit, I wrote that down on a piece of paper, signed my name to it and gave it to her. You can’t tell a thing on me that isn’t known.”

  “Your dad,” Virginia said and was sorry she had let it slip, sorry when she saw Cindy’s eyes narrow and her face go as pale as the white eyeshadow that was right under her brows.

  “What do you mean?” She lowered her voice, took her hand off the steering wheel. “My dad isn’t well. He has cancer.”

  “He doesn’t have cancer.” Virginia’s voice was slow and deliberate.

  “Well, Miss doctor know-it-all, what is it then?”

  “You know.” Virginia stared down at the grass, feeling Cindy’s glare the whole time.

  “No, no I don’t know but I’ll tell you this much, he wouldn’t care if he knew you told people something other than the truth about him because he’s never really liked you, Ginny Sue. He is forever saying how strange acting and plain looking you are and how you’ll never amount to anything. He says you are so unfriendly and that all you’ve ever been is jealous of me and what I had. He says you’ll be lucky if you ever get a husband.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “He told me about that time he caught you in my room going through my things and I remember, I remember coming in with my tap shoes still on and you were crying because you got caught going through my things, and Mama said, ‘oh poor little Ginny Sue she didn’t mean any harm. She didn’t mean to break the vanity mirror.’”

  “But I didn’t break it.”

  “I know, I know, you were reaching up to get my best doll off of the cornice and almost fell off the vanity and in the process broke the mirror. All my daddy even said to you was ‘seven years bad luck.’ He didn’t even yell at you and you sat right there and wouldn’t say the words ‘I broke it,’ just sat there and cried until my daddy drove you over to Emily’s house where you’d be treated like a little baby, that’s what my daddy did for you.” Cindy took a deep breath. “He paid for your summer camp that one year that you got to go. Did you know that? Did you know that your parents couldn’t afford Camp Tonawanda like we could every summer and you pitched a fit to go until my daddy had to pay for it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Ask Aunt Hannah, just ask her, and then you tell things that aren’t true about my daddy.”

  “I will ask her,” Virginia said, the anger that had brought a rush of words, things, that broken mirror, to her mind, slowly passing with the dull sick numbness that anger always leaves. “Can we forget it?”

  “Sure, sure, just forget it.” Cindy, with a sweetly put-on smile, waved her hand out the window when Madge and Chuckie came onto the front porch. “Hey baby!” she yelled and then, “Mama, I wish you’d hurry. Charles Snipes might want to see me a little bit today.”

  “Cindy,” Virginia whispered. “I didn’t mean anything about your daddy, I’m sorry that he’s not well.”

  Cindy tooted the horn right when Madge was in front of the car and laughed when she jumped. Virginia laughed too, patted Cindy’s arm and tried to get Cindy to look at her in a way that would make things okay again. “I won’t tell mother what you just now said,” Cindy said and cranked the car, not even looking at Madge who was sitting in the front seat in her burgundy pantsuit.

  “Take care, Ginny Sue,” Madge said, the heavy sighs returning. “We’re proud of you.”

  “Yes, all of us,” Cindy said. “Me and Mama and Daddy. Don’t do anything I’d do, you might have fun.” She laughed, that hand still out the window as she drove around the corner.

  “Is that the same old shitty chair we gave you?” Cindy had asked last weekend with no mention of the whole scene that followed. “I wonder if that tacky decal is still there?”

  “I never took it off,” Virginia told her, the thought coming to her that one day this chair would be sitting in some garage for some child of some child to strip through all the layers, down to the decal and on under to bare soft pine.

  “Looks better red,” Cindy said. “I never really liked that kind of chair anyway, only reason it caught on was because of those Kennedy boys who looked all right if they could get their mouths closed over those teeth and that voice they all have, I mean we ain’t talking Magnum P.I.” She laughed and patted the chair like it might be alive. “That’s some tough car next door to you, though,” she said and pointed to the Corvette that raised the hair on Virginia’s neck every time she heard it crank and rev and screech and scratch.

  “I love it, though,” Virginia said, meaning the chair, smiling as if by repeating the same words she had said ten years ago, they could redo that scene, correcting and editing the bad parts, the parts that had worried Virginia all through freshman orientation to the point that she wrote Cindy a long letter. “Your father did pay for my camp,” she had written, not going into the explanation that she had gotten from her mother.


  “I can’t believe she told you or that they told her,” her mother had said. “Ben’s garage hadn’t done very well that year. It was his idea. He wanted you to go to that same camp because he knew you wanted to and he went and asked Raymond for a loan.” Her mother had paused and stared hard as if she was reading the fine print of a document. “It was done real formallike because Ben wouldn’t do it any other way and we paid back every cent.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You would have felt bad; a child shouldn’t worry over money, that comes soon enough.”

  She didn’t tell Cindy that part of the story, didn’t tell how Raymond had pulled her father aside at every family gathering and whispered. “Don’t worry about it, Ben. You may never be able to repay me.” No, she just wrote that what Cindy had said was true and she apologized and then continued to send cute little funny cards to Cindy and to Chuckie, always mentioning Charles and Madge and Raymond, and Cindy never responded once.

  “Why don’t you ever write?” Virginia had asked over Thanksgiving.

  “Write? I’ve got a baby and a husband, a sick daddy and a mama that gets on my nerves the tee-total time.” They were eating at Gram’s house—the old house before she had to move to the duplex—as they had done every year; Gram, bustling around the kitchen where she had a ham, a turkey with all the trimmings, vegetables that she had frozen from her garden, fried apple pies. Lena, standing in the kitchen chain smoking, talking and pacing so that it seemed like she was doing something even though she wasn’t while her husband, Roy Carter, sat with a newspaper spread over his lap and puffed a cigar, leather driving gloves still on his hands, a flat tweed cap on his head.

  “Take off that cap you look like a clown,” Lena yelled.

  “Ah, ya, ya, ya, ROlena.” He looked up, their eyes meeting and staring, never blinking, the room going silent as it always did during their momentary outbursts. “Just shut up and do something other than pace and act like you’re doing something.”

  “I do more in a damn hour than you’ve done in your life!”

  “I hope Charles and I never get like that,” Cindy said to Virginia. “Charles and I will never be like that, and I won’t be like my mama either. God, I don’t know why Daddy married her.”

  “Write?” Cindy had asked just four months after Thanksgiving. “How could I write a letter back about what little dip shit fraternity party you went to when I’m getting a divorce and have a dead daddy?”

  Virginia rocks faster, her legs feeling so full and heavy; all those years, the bits and pieces that she can’t get off her mind, and then it started changing, one thing after another; Gram’s move to the duplex, a Piggly Wiggly replacing Gram’s old house, Raymond’s suicide, Roy dying, Lena having to move to a home, Cindy divorced remarried and divorced again, and Gram’s hair turning so white, her mind wandering back and forth over the years. Gram, the one person who could always say where she was and what she was doing and why she was doing it, suddenly roaming through her mind, here, there, places she’s never in her life really been.

  Virginia has what Gram would call “the budgies”; can’t keep still, can’t stay in one place, so wishy-washy restless and uncomfortable. “Lena was born with the budgies,” Gram used to say on those Sunday afternoons when Roy and Lena would climb in that Lincoln and head back down to Florida.

  “Drop a rusty nail in a bottle of vinegar, shake it up and then, rub your legs down good,” Gram has said countless times. “That’s what’ll cure the budgies. Then a body can relax.”

  * * *

  “Relax? Relax?” Lena screamed when she was being moved to the rest home, her hand on the car door as if she were preparing to jump out. “How can I relax with Roy dead and doing what he’s doing?” All that was left of Lena’s life was in a Samsonite bag and a pasteboard box.

  * * *

  “I believe in love at first sight,” Gram said. “That’s how it was when I met your granddaddy. I no sooner met him but what he said, ‘Emily, I’d like to call on you right regular’ and I said, ‘very well.’”

  * * *

  “Your daddy and I knew each other our whole life,” her mother said. “We just up and one day realized it was a whole lot more. That’s a good feeling to know it’s a whole lot more.”

  * * *

  “Fireworks,” Lena said. “I met Roy Carter and it was fireworks—a man—I was tired of those silly boys and Roy Carter was a man.”

  * * *

  Their voices, their lives and words and stories are so clear, so familiar as if there have been no changes at all; and this house and Mark, the things that should be familiar and are so foreign, becoming more so with each slow passing day while an image of Sheila lingers like a caution sign. Was Mark the same person when he was with Sheila? The same person that she met and fell for so quickly? And what made him different? What made her want to turn and roll into his warmth when the room was dark?

  The stone flooring is cold despite the heavy humid air and Virginia pulls her feet up on the rung of the chair, her stomach resting on her thighs—a kick, already it is telling her what to do. Put your legs together, ladies don’t sit that way; she had always obeyed.

  It is easy to picture Gram right: she is sitting in her wheelchair in front of the TV, her hair so white, gum packed with snuff, blank stare. Or Gram twenty years ago; brown cotton “frock,” as she bends and works down a row of beans, her hair dark with only slight streaks of gray, voice like a lullaby that teaches how to do things, shell the butterbeans, make a French knot, bake a pound cake. And, she can picture her mother forty years ago in her plaid skirt and saddle oxfords, chestnut hair, smooth and shoulder length. Or now, right this minute, in the kitchen fixing coffee, frying bacon, her hair in a short fluffy perm, whistling or humming. But, she can’t picture Mark with Sheila, can’t imagine his familiar voice saying all of the words that he must have said, all of the thoughts that he must have thought when he married Sheila, words like forever—words repeated when he married Virginia.

  Everything she knows is still there, still at home, just changed and disguised, a scene on a scene, different colors and textures, Gram’s hair gone white, but every texture of the new scene interrupted by a bump or a groove beneath the surface. Homesick—twenty-eight and homesick and who would have ever thought. She never imagined herself this way. She always imagined a little lacy apron over a cute little maternity smock with gleaming tile counters in her kitchen, loaf after loaf of home-baked bread cooling, when the front door opened and someone said, “Hey Honey, I’m home,” and swept her back in a kiss and told her how beautiful and wonderful she was. But, that was only part of the dream because she was also a professional woman of independent means who toured the country with her paintings, who on a whim would reupholster the furniture in an array of watercolors in the spring and warm rich plaids in the winter when a blazing fire filled the fireplace that she does not have, and she sat in a worn cherry rocker and knitted just as she has imagined her great-grandmother, the other Virginia Suzanne. And people would say, “How have you done it all?” and they would look at Mark, wink and say, “You better hold onto her for life” and he’d say, “don’t worry” and all traces of Sheila would float away forever.

  Sheila is a design consultant in New York, wealthy Richmond family, northeast girls’ school, though Virginia isn’t sure which one. Sheila would say, “women’s college” and emphasize the point. She has some advanced degree, probably making money hand over fist, probably has a baby named Thurstan Beauregard Something IV, probably would laugh her bony anorexic ass off if she saw Virginia’s house. Well laugh! Just goddamn laugh! That’s what she’d say. She’d say, “You need to eat meat! You need some bloody beef, good for you, give you color!” It makes her furious just to think of that woman even though she has never met her and never seen her except a small wedding snapshot that Virginia found mixed in with some of Mark’s old photos at his mother’s house in Pennsylvania. She could have fixed that picture right up with
some Flair pens had Mark’s mama not been sitting there. The photo was too small, too blurred. She doesn’t know that Sheila is thin as a post with long silky blonde hair and blue eyes, at least not the picture that comes to mind with that description of blonde hair and blue eyes. She might be gangly and transparent with buck teeth and thin stringy hair. For all Virginia knows she might even eat meat, though she bets not; it’s easy enough to get the whole picture from the bits and pieces that she knows, such as Sheila wanted everything natural, health food store food, which is why Mark hates herbal teas and such. That’s the fact: Sheila was into health foods. But, Virginia knows as well as the next what follows that: Perrier and brie, which she thinks tastes like what dirty feet smell like, granola, wine coolers and little spritzers if she drinks at all but no, probably not, and Virginia would love a drink right now; she’d love a shot of bourbon and a beer chaser. The doctor would say. “Have you been drinking?” No, Sheila doesn’t drink. A Perrier with a twist, thank you for not smoking, no caffeine, no soda? Why that is a vile filthy liquid; I only wear cotton; I only wear hypoallergenic cosmetics. My shampoo is pH correct and natural, it’s all natural. I use tartar-buster toothpaste and floss every single day. Nutra Sweet is poison. I jog and I play tennis and I go to the spa to work out and do aerobics three times a week and I only watch PBS, never anything other than PBS, and I never have PMS, and I only listen to classical radio stations and I would never hang a print on my wall and I would never think of anything but professional stripping for my fine furniture. Yeah, Virginia knows the type, that touchy feely, do it all perfectly, I’m okay you’re okay, my child can read at age two and will have a volume of Haiku by the time he’s four, type.

  Virginia would tell her a thing or two right then and there. She would tell her that she loves bloody beef and coffee and Coke and Budweiser and Formby’s and 96 Lite which plays everything from Smoky Robinson to Dolly Parton to Lulu “To Sir With Love,” and that she likes to bowl and eat things with preservatives and take a Goody’s for a headache. “I’ll watch the goddamn ‘Brady Bunch’ if nothing else is on.” That’s what she’d like to say. And people standing close by would applaud and Mark would never ever look back again. If Mark would just say that he hates Sheila and never wants to hear about her again, she would feel better, but he won’t.