Tending to Virginia Read online

  “Gram’s life has been perfect,” Ginny Sue said. “I hope I’m like Gram when I get old.” And Hannah did manage to bite her tongue on that one, to bite down on the bad times that Ginny chose to ignore. You can’t do it for them, got to find out on their own that if you’re waiting to catch that falling star and put it in your pocket, you might as well cash in your chips. That’s what happened to Raymond Sinclair, couldn’t live up to all his big-talking ways. No sir, you keep a little in your pocket at all times, something to simmer on the back burner, something that nobody else can get and then you just get on with it. Hannah always has material on hand and a pattern of some sort to go with it, start it and see it through. If Ginny Sue would do that then she wouldn’t have a dozen different things halfway done and if she’d listened to Hannah long ago when she was getting all caught up in planning a wedding that never even took place, she wouldn’t have come home from Georgia looking like a toothpick with hairs on her legs long enough to plait and trips to a therapist who had hairs just as long.

  Hannah has never once mentioned all that money that was already spent on the wedding that never was. Ginny Sue stood right out there in the backyard and poured lighter fluid on that wedding portrait, lit a match. Hannah stood on the back porch and watched the bits of hard-earned money turning to cinder. “Well? You didn’t want it did you?” Ginny Sue asked, barefooted and wearing a cardigan that had belonged to Hannah’s mama about a century ago, supposed to be white and soiled gray. Did she say Clorox? Don’t play with fire? “No, I see no sense in keeping it. But it was a pretty picture.” The photographer had looked at Hannah and said, “She looks just like you.” And they did look alike when Ginny was all dressed in Hannah’s wedding dress and had that long dark hair pulled up and back from her face. The real wedding was small, private, and Hannah was a little disappointed that there weren’t more people to see the strong resemblance. “Oh, I thought you were my wife,” Mark had said at the reception, and hugged her. “Does this mean I’m in the secret club, now?”

  “What club?” Hannah asked and laughed because she has never been a joiner, has never gotten over the time that Madge talked her into being a Lady Lion. Ben was going around selling brooms and lightbulbs and having a wonderful time learning what kind of car everybody in town drove, while she was responsible for telling everybody what to fix for the steak dinner, and learning who did not know how to pick out good meat.

  “You know,” Mark said, “that club that meets at your mother’s house. All the women. When a man comes in it gets quiet.”

  “Didn’t used to be that way,” Ben said. “You better count your blessings. When Roy was living, it wasn’t that way.”

  “That’s because Roy and Lena could barely separate to use the bathroom,” Hannah said and looked at Mark. “You can come sit any time you please.” Mark just laughed and hugged Ginny Sue tight. Thank God, he seems crazy about her and heaven forbid that anything should happen. And things do, all over this world; you can see it on those daytime shows and made for TV movies and “Phil Donahue.”

  Ginny Sue told Hannah before she brought Mark home that first time that sometimes he was quiet and they shouldn’t take it wrong, that he had grown up in the NORTH, like Hannah couldn’t see that for herself. How could she not see it; she cooked butterbeans and he said that he’d never seen that kind of soup before. Philadelphia; certainly she’s heard of Philadelphia. “You’ve heard of the Phillies,” Ben said and she shook her head. “You know what W. C. Fields had on his tombstone?” he asked and she said she didn’t even know he was dead. You can live and work and you get out of touch with things, but Hannah is catching up. It would spin everybody’s head to know how much Hannah does know, and it all comes from living day to day and year to year. Ginny Sue will know how it feels one day when this baby wants to spend her time with Hannah, when this baby takes to sewing and smocking and tells Ginny Sue that she wants to grow up to be just like Hannah.

  It makes Hannah smile now to think of a baby, a baby to dress up like a little doll. When Ginny Sue came along, Hannah couldn’t afford to go out and do a whole lot of buying. Now she can; she and Ben have already bought a stroller and some stuffed animals. She has made a comforter of white eyelet.

  She steps out the back door and walks towards the garden. Ben is still working, bending and working. “I’m going to get Lena,” she yells, the sun so warm, sinking into her navy sundress while her barefoot sandals swing from one hand. Ben looks up, returns her wave with a squash in each hand and his face red as a beet; even from this distance she can tell that it is. She told him, tells him every day to use that sunscreen but he won’t listen and tonight he’ll be in her Oil of Olay and saying how he can’t believe that he could get his face so burned with his cap on for that short a time in the garden. “Do you need anything from the store?”

  He shakes his head and walks closer, circles under the arms of his shirt, and she wishes he wouldn’t get so hot. She knows that one day she’s going to look out that window like Lena did for Roy and see him having a stroke there in the garden. Keep a little in your pocket, don’t think about what hasn’t happened, the Lord could take me in an hour right there in the car. She’s already passed the year, fifty-nine years old, which is how old her mama was when her daddy died. That’s superstitious, any therapist or Phil Donahue would have told her, but she was so glad last month when she turned sixty, so relieved to have made it. “I was going to check your oil,” he says and grins. Ginny Sue would never in her life believe that the two of them had such a joke that had gone on all these years.

  “Well, you’ll have to check it later,” she says and shakes her head, so thankful to see him standing there. She will fuss over all those towels like she always did Robert’s dirty socks and she will love every minute of it.

  “No, Hannah, I really do,” he says and tilts his cap back on his head. “Your car sounds a little rough.”

  “I won’t be long,” she says. “You better use that sunscreen.” She drops her sandals to the ground and slips her feet in, bends to buckle them. “Why don’t you go in and cool off?”

  “I will,” he says, nodding, but she knows he won’t unless it’s to call the station and find out what’s going on. “And I’ll check your oil when you get home.”

  “I’ll let you rotate my tires, too,” she says and watches him laugh. It’s funny how somebody you’ve known your whole life doesn’t change a bit, ever, until somebody pulls out a picture box and points it out to you like Ginny Sue does just about every time she’s home.

  “I want to look under your hood this evening,” Ben used to say at dinner, Ginny Sue and Robert going right on with baseball and watercolors and never even seeing her face flush or his eyebrows lift as he glanced away, a sneaky bashful expression that he had had his whole life. “Just because you have a child doesn’t mean you stop being a wife,” Hannah tells Ginny Sue every chance she gets. You don’t have to read it in a magazine to know that a woman has to learn to be everything at the same time. It’s common sense is all it is, good common sense, but the best advice on a pair of ears that don’t want to hear isn’t worth beans.

  “I see how fast you’re getting in from the sun,” she yells to him when she passes by the edge of the garden in the car, and he just nods and waves an ear of corn, the silks falling over his hand like the blonde hair that Ginny Sue never had.

  * * *

  Madge writes to her cousin, sits back and stares at the words, “Dear Hannah, I killed Raymond.” Her handwriting suddenly looks so unfamiliar, as unfamiliar as those last years with Raymond had been—the little curl at the bottom of her D, the way he bathed himself in alcohol morning and night and then lifted his hands to his face to get the smell. “He held the gun but I pulled the trigger. He begged me. He said, ‘Madge, I can’t even die; I can’t do anything.’ He held that gun by the barrel and pointed it at his chest. He said, ‘Do it, goddamnit. If you love me, you’ll do it.’ This was not the first time this had happened; it began yea
rs before. It began so slowlike that I didn’t even notice or must not have noticed from the very start. I figured Raymond was acting strange every now and again because he was getting into middle age. But then when Mama died and Raymond asked that he be let to watch them embalm her body, I knew that something awful had crept into my Raymond and eaten away at him. He came back from the funeral home that day like he felt so pleased, like most men look after a good meal or, uh, relations. Hannah, he told me what mama looked like lying there at a slant and all drained of her life liquids. ‘Tessy’s skin was so very very white,’ he said and it made me sick as a dog, not just because I didn’t want to picture mama that way but because it struck me that Raymond was terribly ill. I got him to go to a doctor when all that paralysis that came and went started up and those doctors told me in private that there was a lot of mental disturbance, that Raymond needed long-term treatment, drugs maybe. Raymond said, ‘My body is a holy pyramid over which I reign.’ It made my flesh crawl all over to hear those words coming out of the mouth of my husband, the man that I had married, the man who dressed up on Halloween to answer the door for the little children; a man who for years could bowl 200 consistently, was forever getting employee of the month down at Chevrolet, the father of Catherine and Cindy; and Hannah, the only man that I have ever in my entire life seen without clothing.

  “He pulled out that gun for the first time years ago when Cindy was only thirteen and was over at your house for Ginny Sue’s spend the night. I should have told you then, should have told you that morning when I picked Cindy up instead of taking her to J.C. Penney’s to buy a pair of red sneakers that she wore all of three times. Every morning when I washed my clothes, I’d reach up over that washing machine to make sure the gun was still there and I did not sleep through a night that I was not expecting to hear that sound, that same sound that had scared me so when I’d follow my daddy out in the woods and watch him practice on liquor bottles that mama knew nothing about. He’d get a look on his face that made you think of death, like that was what he was thinking the whole time and I’d cover up my ears ready for the blast and yet, it made me jump every time just the same. I’m the same way with balloons. Remember when Chuckie used to love to take a straight pin and pop a balloon. I’d say, ‘Cindy, don’t bring balloons to my house.’ Cindy said I was ridiculous; she said what I really meant was ‘don’t come to my house’ which I didn’t. My door is always open. Hannah, you know I’ve always had a open door, my back door and my heart’s door.

  “‘If you love me, you’ll pull that goddamned’ (and I quote of course), ‘you’ll pull that goddamned trigger.’ It wasn’t love that I was feeling right then. Sometimes I think I was feeling nothing at all. Sometimes I think I was feeling impatient and ready to get it all over with so that I wouldn’t have to be ready to put my hands to my ears all the time. He was so weak. It seemed that weakness had covered over or erased every feature on his face. He just wasn’t the same man that I fell in love with and met at the end of the River Baptist aisle. I was staring at him there, those eyes like they couldn’t focus right, his hand forcing my finger into that hole and up against that cool metal trigger. There was no recollection; I suddenly felt like I might be preparing to kill a bug or a mouse that had frightened me. I was frightened. My hands shook like jelly. ‘Do it, do it,’ he kept saying over and over. ‘Don’t be scared to do it.’ I did it and it seems to me when I look back that I didn’t even hear a noise. For eight years I’ve tried to make myself hear that noise so that I can know that’s how it happened and get on with what’s left of my life. Eight years and I’ve never figured out exactly what it was I was feeling at the time. I thought of my mama on that slanted table; I thought of that look that my daddy had when he popped those bottles and the glass sprayed; I thought of Cindy when she was first born and Raymond said, ‘She looks just like me,’ and she does, more and more; sometimes it scares me that she looks so much like him because it makes me think that if she’s got those body genes, that she may very well have his brain genes, too.

  “I turned off the light because I didn’t want to see and I went to the bedroom and I called the police and an ambulance. I watched out the window waiting for them to get there and I didn’t even remember calling you and Ben but you beat the ambulance and next thing I knew you had your arms around me and had me out of that house on the front porch all wrapped up in a blanket and then in the front seat of the car where you had left the heater running and the radio playing. The moon was full and clearly we were in for some frost and I kept thinking about my bed of asters and how I hoped they would make it. Ben asked, ‘Why Madge, why did he do it?’ and I couldn’t say a word. Ben said, ‘HOW did he do it’ and I knew he was trying to picture Raymond with those weak sometimes paralyzed arms holding a shotgun on himself. I have nightmares now. His arms weren’t really deadened like he told people. He’d grab me hard by the arms and he’d say, ‘I never wanted you. Just the smell of you sickens me.’ I never said a word, all that time covering for him the best I could. Everybody remembered the time he was caught up on the roof of Kinglee Hardware with his eyes all made up like a woman, blue shadow and long black eyeliner tails. ‘Like Tut,’ he said. ‘Like Cindy,’ I said. I know you’ve noticed all that cheap makeup when I didn’t raise her that way; Ginny Sue never did that to her face. ‘Don’t you see what you’re doing to the girls? To me?’ I asked and I told everybody how he was dressed that way to try out a campaign for Chevrolet knowing full well that nobody would believe it because what does King Tut have to do with cars? But that was the only big thing prior to the funeral. All the other stuff happened there at home where only I knew. I tried to get Cindy to see but she never did and to this day won’t hear it; she blames me for Raymond’s illness, she says that Raymond was a ‘artist of the mind.’ Now you know and I know that in his good years Raymond was a whippersnapper of a salesman and dressed good, too, but he was never a artist of the mind. I know people saw things at the funeral; I know they couldn’t help but notice that brand new color widescreen TV when everybody knows that what I’m still looking at is that small black and white that I bought when Jack Paar was still on the ‘Tonight Show.’ It doesn’t pick up doodle squat these days and people tell me I’d enjoy these carry over shows that come on at night now though the Lord Jesus knows there’s enough pain in this world without watching make-believe. If people have said things, it’s never been told to me. I was sorry on the day of his funeral that I hadn’t confessed all of this to you. Don’t you see I was scared? Scared that I’d be put in prison. I was scared that I’d lose the only people I’ve got left, you and Ben and your children, your mama, and my girls. I don’t know that Catherine and especially Cindy could ever understand or forgive me and I just couldn’t face that. I can’t bear the thought that I could lose what little bit’s left, can’t bear the thought of prison. I just couldn’t face living my life that way though God knows it hasn’t been much better. I wanted so bad to tell you but everybody wanted me to bounce back and went out of their way so to help me. There isn’t really a nice widower over in Clemmonsville that I eat out with. I go to Clemmonsville and I go to the movies at City Square Mall, eat at Morrison’s and then spend the night at Catherine’s where I’m told that Cindy needs to grow up and then I come home and Cindy tells me that Catherine, and I quote, is a ‘slutbucket’ who needed to have more tied up than her tubes, like her mouth. Cindy says that to hear Catherine tell it her tubes were macraméd. Sometimes I think what Cindy says is funny but I don’t laugh, not ever; I don’t want to encourage her. I should have been here at home with that child instead of studying to be a hygienist at Saxon Tech, but Hannah, there was nothing to do when Raymond got that way but to take up a profession. We didn’t really have a lot of money back then like Raymond told everybody; we did all right but I’m still paying for this house and I just finished paying for all that Raymond bought to take with him and that cemetery plot big enough to bury every Pearson that ever walked. We would have had money if Ra
ymond hadn’t always taken it in his head that he had to buy the biggest and the best. ‘Buy the large box of Tide,’ he would say, you know that size that’ll barely fit in the grocery cart, ‘and stop buying Crisco. Oil, vegetable oil and get the biggest size,’ and ‘have them grind the hamburger for you, watch them grind it, tell them to wear gloves. Go ahead and get twenty pounds, never less than twenty pounds. It should be brown, Madge, not hot pink like when they inject the poisons.’ Now, Hannah, who doesn’t buy Crisco in the can? Who doesn’t do that so that they have the nice can to put their grease in and store it? Raymond wouldn’t let me save grease, not even bacon drippings. I bet Ben has never told you what you could and could not buy at the grocery. You don’t know how I envied women in that check-out line; I envied the old and young, coloreds and whites alike with their Pop Tarts and normal-size detergents and pretty decorator toilet paper. I had to buy white, only white. ‘If something strange is leaking from my body, I want to see it,’ he said. He made me buy the largest box of Kotex and now you know that’s something you don’t want everybody seeing in your cart, those young boys having to bag it up. And God, I envied those women their cans of Crisco. You and your mama both have always used Crisco, Loretta Lynn, too, and look at her; she’s done as good as a body could do. We might could have had money way back but that wouldn’t have eased my heart. ‘I’m freezing vegetables,’ I used to tell those women at the check-out when I unloaded box after box of baggies. That’s not why I bought all those baggies. I bet you always wondered why I bought all those baggies if you ever looked in my pantry and saw them. Well, now I can tell you. It was for his underclothing and socks, anything that directly touched his privates or feet. Every piece had to be put in a airtight baggie and I wasn’t supposed to use the same baggie twice. I did, though, a few times I did like when Cindy had come down with the mumps and I couldn’t get to the store to buy some. Thank God he didn’t notice or he would’ve killed me. He had more socks than everybody in Saxon County could wear in a year, black, gray, navy and dark brown—‘Never tan, Madge, brown, brown, as close to black as you can get and still be brown.’ I’ve listened time and again to you telling of how you were in J.C. Penney’s buying Ben some socks when your water broke with Ginny Sue and you don’t know how I’ve envied that. Raymond wouldn’t have put his foot in a sock from Penney’s, Ivey’s or Belk’s. He ordered most of his socks from the North up in New York, underwear too. He wore Gucci socks, fancy little briefs, and Gucci shoes which had to be kept in large broil in the bag baggies. I had to wash his socks by hand so that they didn’t get mismatched, pair by pair, then briefs and tee shirts, take them straight from the dryer and put them in a baggie. ‘You should care about losing your mate,’ I always wanted to tell him but I didn’t. I’ve seen Ben when his socks didn’t match; I’ve seen him standing right there in your kitchen just as barefooted as a yard dog and I’d think to myself, ‘Hannah sure is lucky not to have a man so taken with his own feet.’ I’ve always thought of you as a sister and I used to wish that we were; I used to wish that Emily was my mama and I used to hate going home those nights when I had spent the day playing at your house. I’ve tried to find the right time when I could tell you all of this, tried to think of when I could be with you all by myself. I think of us just packing up and driving down to Myrtle Beach. I picture us sitting on the beach, watching the ocean and sipping a little wine like we used to do and I’d start at the first. I’d start with that night when Raymond asked me to soak in a cool bath and then lay real still on the bed, so that by the time I got to clothing and Crisco and mama’s embalming that I could look at you and say, ‘Hannah, I killed Raymond,’ and that you would say that you were happy for me, that I had never deserved any of that, that you didn’t know how I had lived through it all. I’d like to think that’s what you’d say; I’d like to think you’d say there’s no court of law that would take my life after all that, that there wasn’t even reason that anyone should ever know. That’s what I want to think because I did love Raymond, my Raymond, the one I married with you standing right there beside me. I love you like a sister, Hannah, and I hope you can go right on loving me after knowing all this.”