A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) (3 page)

I remember how hard I watched him all the first week he worked. I’d cut through the yard when he was out there just to see him better, so he could see me. Then my girlfriend and I saw him with a couple of the other workers in town, in the movie lobby. And I remember pointing him out to Jean Anne and she said, “He looks just like Tab Hunter! Just clean him up a little, put some pleated pants on him, and he’s just the spitting image.” I think that right that minute I shaped his hair, cleaned his fingernails, took
a tuck in his pants here and there and got an idea of him that stayed with me until after we were married, when the bad times started. I’ve heard that you can want to see something so badly that you can convince yourself to really see it, and I know it to be true. I even convinced myself that his idea of courtship, which was sending word up to the house through one of the women in the crew to meet him in town at such-and-such a time and place, I even started to believe that was romantic. I said, This’ll eventually be another Peyton Place, me against my family, me in the right and them not understanding my feelings and so forth. But it was never any me against mama and daddy. Either one of them would’ve gladly died for the baby girl, and look what I was doing to them. Even after everything happened and I finally went home, tail between my legs, after all that time I’d stayed gone, mama and daddy just wanted to know if I was okay, if I had any money in my pocket, if John Woodrow had hurt me. They said they would’ve gone out after me but they knew I’d be back in my own time, which I did after I married Jack and felt like I could face them.

Looking back on it all, I think the mistake I made with John Woodrow had more to do with the careful way they raised me than anything else. Growing up, I had absolutely no idea anything bad could happen in a life because nothing bad had happened in mine, no catastrophes. My
grandmother died but mama and daddy helped me through it, and I’d spent so much time with her, watching her get weaker and weaker, that I felt like dying was the next step for her, something that naturally should happen next.

But worse than my ignorance of any bad coming into a life was the fact that I didn’t have the imagination, the pure imagination to see that hard things or ugly things might happen farther on down the road. I was just whistling along. I can’t remember making decisions on my own. I might’ve made a mistake, and that was something my parents were real careful about. It took me a long time to learn that mistakes aren’t good or bad, they’re just mistakes, and you clean them up and go on. In my case, I buried my mistake and got married again, and just trusted my insides to tell me I hadn’t made another one. But anyway, my parents protected me from bad choices by making the choices for me. And alot of it had to do with me being the baby girl in the family. My mama was the kind of woman who believed girls in girl clothes are less apt to get in trouble than girls dressed like boys. I remember begging her for some pants to play outside in, and when she finally made me some she sewed eyelet around the cuffs, just a touch of girl on those pants. And my daddy and brothers were just as bad. If I had a tough piece of meat on my plate, the minute one of them saw me struggling they’d lean over, take my knife and fork from me and cut the meat up for
me. I never rebelled against it, snatched my knife back and said, “I’ll cut my own meat up, thank you.” All the women in my family were calm women. They wouldn’t have said a word. It was just the way things were. The only woman I knew who wasn’t calm was Sudie Bee, our housekeeper. She ran the house for mama, and how could she do all she did and not get ruffled, not make some decisions and some mistakes? I just hated that the first big decision I ever made was the kind that can kill you if you make a mistake, and it almost killed me.

When John Woodrow asked me to marry him I might as well have been in a school play, hearing what I thought was my cue and asking the teacher, “Is this when I say my part?” And she says to go ahead so I say, “Yes, yes I will.” Then everybody’s supposed to clap and nod and sing your praises, and then they throw rice at you on your way out, and you take all your pretty presents and put them in his car and drive off. But that’s not the way it turned out, play, marriage, nothing.

I can see mama on the front steps, yelling that she’s going to go find my daddy and brothers and tell them to come stop me. But I tell her I’ve already decided I’m leaving with him, and I roll up the car window so I don’t have to hear her. I can see her though. John Woodrow drives this old car he’s borrowed all up on the lawn turning around, and we leave mama there crying.

I was crying too, but I thought time would take care of me, that once we had our rings and a nice honeymoon hotel that everything would be just fine. I’d call daddy and we’d chat just like Elizabeth Taylor and Spencer Tracy in
Father of the Bride,
one of those daydreamy movies that had contributed to the mess I was in. But that didn’t happen. I got no ring, no nice honeymoon hotel, just a quickie thrown together mess and humiliation. As soon as I left my mama I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know how I’d gotten myself into this, and I surely didn’t know how to get myself out. That sort of thing comes from one too many suppers of having someone reach over to cut your meat for you.

If I’d had the good sense to turn John Woodrow down I could’ve waited for somebody else to come along, and I bet he would’ve been a nice boy, probably somebody I’d known all my life. And we would’ve gotten married with both our families there, and we’d have built a house on a piece of land daddy’d have given us, and that’d be that. A hail storm every few years or maybe a miscarriage would’ve been the only troubles we’d have seen.

That’s how my parents were. They sat down at the dining room table and made out Christmas cards together, and I licked the stamps. They took my brothers and me to the capital every September to buy school clothes, and we always spent the night there and went to a movie or a play.
Sudie Bee and her husband, Lester, lived in an apartment off the side of our house and we were taught to respect them as much as we did each other. We never ran or yelled in the house, and we always used cloth napkins, company or no company.

And mama and daddy were both good-looking people, mama especially. She was just vain enough to be funny about it. Every time before they went out to dinner she’d check herself in the long mirror, turning around and smoothing her dress down over her hips, asking him if she looked all right. He’d say, “Pretty as a picture. I’ll be beating men back with a stick.”

I remember having to stay at home those nights with Sudie Bee, and I’d imagine mama and daddy out together, everybody looking at mama, admiring her. I’m sure they did. Nobody would’ve looked at them and said, “Look at that country-come-to-town over there.” Daddy was the kind of man who couldn’t finish a meal somewhere without at least one person coming over to the table, shaking his hand and introducing his wife or his son or somebody. People knew he ran a good farm, a big place, and they respected him for it. He served two terms, maybe more, as a county commissioner, and I can barely remember holding the scissors with mama, helping her cut his picture out of the paper when he won a Ruritan award.

You don’t find it much better than that. My parents did
a fine job raising us, the kind of job that most people say they plan to do but just don’t have it in them to ever get done. But they sure had it, all the love and strength day in and day out. And even though they never taught me to handle the kinds of decisions I’d need to make about John Woodrow, they did teach me self-respect, and self-respect should’ve protected me from John Woodrow’s advances.

I should’ve said, Ruby, you love yourself and your home too much to insult either one with this excuse of a man, but I didn’t. Oh but I had enough self-respect to pack my nicest underwear and my pretty gown and robe set, and I thought enough of myself to make sure I was clean and powdery for the trip from home. And I also had enough self-respect left to cry when he ripped my robe and my gown and pawed at my nice underwear. And there was enough left to tell him not to do that anymore, that he’d hurt me. But I more than made up for that in ignorance and dreaming, believing him when he said he was sorry and believing every other lie he told me.

See, he had me convinced he came from something, that the only reason he was working migrant labor was because his brother and sister had ruined him. He said they made sure he didn’t get his cut of their daddy’s farm, talked him down to their father and so forth, made up a pack of lies and got themselves good and set up. And when their father died, poor John Woodrow was left out in the cold.

He was a real victim, which then, to me, was the exact same thing as a real hero, only different, as Jack would say. He said he was trying to work his way back up from the bottom, but so far the only good to come from his efforts was me, that if he hadn’t been working on daddy’s farm that summer we would never have met. Don’t you know it to be so!

See, daddy had added extra acreage that spring and our usual help wasn’t nearly enough to manage the crop, so he had to do something he didn’t want to do, hire migrant labor. They stayed in a camp a few miles from our house, and every morning at dawn an old rusty truck would pull up under the big sycamore tree and what looked to me like a hundred men and women would crawl out of it and go spread out on the grass and sleep until daddy and Lester took them to the fields. And I can remember standing at the kitchen window with mama, and she’d look out at them and comment on how dusty and dirty they all looked for it to be so early in the day. I don’t think she ever accepted the fact that not everybody in the world takes, or even wants, a nice hot tub bath before bed. And I know this now as well as I know myself, if my daddy had known I’d take up with one of those men sleeping in that yard he’d have let the crops burn in the fields before he’d have let a migrant worker on his land.

I can also remember the first day they worked and how
Sudie Bee told mama she’d better send to the store for some picnic plates to feed them on. She said they would break mama’s good things, and to be safe, we’d better fix a buffet on a table outside and let them eat in the yard. Mama said that wouldn’t be necessary, that she had more than enough serving pieces and so forth, and that there was plenty of room around the long table on the side porch.

Sudie Bee just said, “Go ahead and get your family’s dishplates busted up. See if Sudie Bee cares.” I listened to both sides, and I had to agree with mama. These people would be tired, hot, hungry, and they’d appreciate a cool porch and a square meal. And all the time I was helping Sudie Bee get the dishes down she was mumbling things like, “She be coming up saying she ’gwine listen to old Sudie Bee next time, all them dishplates busted up.”

We set a good table for them and then the three of us started our lunch in the kitchen. When mama heard them coming up in the yard she went to the side door and yelled out for them to come on in, that there was more than a plenty and they should just come on in and eat, make themselves right at home. Sudie Bee said, “She ’gwine find out. Be like telling the pig family make they-selves at home.” But they came on in, and when we heard water running in the utility sink, mama looked at Sudie Bee and said, “See? They’re washing up.” Sudie Bee said that’s what it sounded like and that Lester’d be in that
utility room all night mopping up the flood and fixing the stopped up drain pipe. Mama didn’t say anything back, but I knew she was thinking Sudie Bee had too little faith in her fellow man. I knew she was because I was thinking that myself, and I was my mama’s girl.

When they left we went out there and Sudie Bee just stood at the end of the porch and said, “You be listening to me next time.” Plates on the floor, under the table, in the chairs, food everywhere, butter turned out in the tea pitcher, not to mention the mess in the utility room, towels crammed in the toilet and so forth. Sudie Bee started scraping and stacking dirty plates, motioning up and down the window ledges with a fork at how most of the leaves had been stripped off the ferns. And the only time I can ever remember hearing my mama swear was when she saw how they’d used her African violet for an ashtray. She used to water the roots of that plant with a syringe.

The next day Sudie Bee made big platters of sandwiches and potato chips and I helped her put everything out on the picnic table. But you can bet mama didn’t help. She stayed in her bedroom reading most of the morning. She’d been stung and she knew it, and she didn’t want to be up close to those people until she knew she was ready, and a person like my mama is never ready.

We saw what people who don’t care can do to people who do care about things, even if those things are only
glasses and plates. What the things are, what they’re worth in dollars, all that just isn’t the point. But instead of running away from it, like mama did, I rushed to it and tried to forgive and understand it. That’s all very well and good. That’s a perfectly fine way to be, but not if one of those men out there urinating all over your mama’s rose bushes has his eye on you.

That eating outside business was one of the things John Woodrow started throwing up in my face when we’d been married not more than a week or two. He said it showed how my family was too uppity, too picky, and way, way too rich. And nothing I could’ve ever told him would’ve changed his mind about us. But like a fool, I kept trying. I should’ve known he was lying about his own past as soon as he started ridiculing mine. But sometimes the hardest things in the world to see are the ones that are right up on you.

It never occurred to him that my daddy might’ve simply worked for what we had, that we weren’t rich by any means, that we just looked that way from where he was situated. My parents might’ve taken us to the city to buy school clothes and all, but I know for a fact that the trip was planned three months ahead of time and budgeted down to the penny. But all John Woodrow could see was us riding off on a wild spree, throwing money out of the car windows, daddy draping furs all over mama in some
fancy store while my brothers and I gorged ourselves on big milkshakes. Hearing him talk like that used to drive me crazy. I’d get so frustrated!