Tending to Virginia (26 page)

“You’re never alone, Ginny Sue,” Gram had said. “When you’re lying in your bed at night, God is there with you. God is always with you.”

“But I’m scared to be alone,” she said. “I want somebody with me.”

“It’s not so bad being alone,” Gram had said and ran her finger down that hull, the peas plopping into the tin pan. “I’ve got things to think on, things I didn’t have time to think on before,” and Virginia sat there beside her, reaching her small bare foot to the porch banister to push the swing while they sat there and waited for dark. “Your granddaddy and me had too many good years for me to question why I’m left here alone.”

“But I’m with you.”

“Yes, you are,” Gram said, her hair just starting to gray then.

“So, you’re not alone. You’re not by yourself because you’ve got me and Mama and Daddy and Robert and Lena and Roy.”

“You’re right,” Gram said. “And it fills up the ways that I am alone.”

“But then, you’re not alone,” she had insisted and Gram stopped her shelling and stared out in the yard like she might have seen something or was listening to something.

“There are many ways a person can be alone,” Gram whispered. “One day, you’ll understand that. Sometimes I feel so alone and what I’m lonely for is my mother. There’s a kind of day that makes me lonely for her, winter days mostly, winter days when it’s a bit cloudy because those are the days we’d be sitting there in the house. She’d say, ‘You’ll take a cold out there on a day like today,’ and so we’d just sit there indoors, her rocking in that chair and knitting and teaching me and Lena.” She laughed and went back to her shelling. “Lena couldn’t knit. She’d make her yarn into a mess and then throw it outside for some old cat to play with.”

“These cats keep me so much company,” Lena had said. “Roy’s got to work, work, work, go, go, go and as soon as that car cranks, that’s an invitation for all the cats to come on in. I let ’em in and they are such good company.”

“I’m so lonely here,” she had told Bryan Parker, for the first time really wanting to hug him but he moved away. “I’m so sorry.”

“I thought this was what you wanted,” he said. “You acted so sure this was what you wanted.”

“I know it isn’t exactly what you’d want,” Mark had said when they were standing in that rented kitchen with the sink backed up and boxes to unpack. “But we won’t be here forever.”

“You ain’t ever gonna find what you want,” Cindy had said. “You’re looking for a brain like what’s his name, you know the Jew with the bushy hair.”

“Einstein?”

“Yeah, you know you’re looking for a brain like his, and a bod like Rocky.”

“I don’t like Rocky.”

“Well who then? Whose body do you want?”

“Borg, lean and graceful like Borg,” she had said, laughing. “Or maybe Nureyev when he was younger.”

“Shit, I don’t know who they are,” Cindy said. “And whose face? Huh? Paul Newman? Al Pacino? Richard Gere?”

“Or William Hurt.”

“God, you see?” Cindy asked. “Honey, they ain’t out there. Believe me if they were, I would’ve found ’em. And you probably want poetic too, don’t you?” Cindy had poured herself another drink. “You want Joyce Kilmer,” she said and Virginia laughed until she ached. “Or is Joyce a woman?” Virginia held her sides while Cindy continued, a straight face while she drank her rum and Coke. “Oh yeah, and your man can’t think of sex as anything but a moment out of space and time, a union of love.” And Cindy had reached her arms to the ceiling and hummed “Trees.” “Like that boy at the beach made you float.”

“No, no, no,” is all Virginia could say.

“Admit it, Ginny Sue,” Cindy said. “You are never gonna find all that you’re looking for so you might as well just spin around and pin the tail on the donkey. Pick a jackass and ride. I mean that’s
what I did. I did that and now I’ve got Buzz Biggers, and he is something to ride let me tell you. If you fall off that horse, just get back up and ride like hell. It’s better than being alone.”

“God is always here,” Gram had said. “You are not alone.”

But God doesn’t say, “scrooch up sweets,” and God doesn’t change the washcloth when your head is so hot and God doesn’t pick you up and carry you to the commode if you are too sick to stand. God doesn’t brush back your hair and tell you that you are not alone; he doesn’t squat close to you when you smell like marigolds and have dirt under your nails, doesn’t call on the phone to ask how you are, doesn’t make things familiar when a long-distance call comes, the lonely sad news, and you turn to face rooms and windows and faces so unfamiliar that it makes you ask why am I here this way? He does not step in and tell you that you are about to make a mistake, that you’ve made a big mistake because you are moving far from your home and will always be lonesome when the winter sky is gray and cloudy and when Sunday afternoon comes and nobody goes to Carver Street and Roy Carter does not step from that maroon Lincoln and say “Do unto others before they do it to you,” and if the clock stops, it will stop and if the baby dies, it will die, and if those shoes are on the step, they do not go away but come closer and closer and closer.

“Where’s Esther?” Gram asks.

“She wanted the night off.” Virginia’s mama comes into the room. “She was all dressed up, too. I wonder if she’s got a date.”

“Date. Pshhh,” Gram says. “Esther needs a man like a hole in the head.”

“She might be happy,” Madge says. “She might be happy for the first time in her life and she deserves it if it’s the truth.”

“That’s true,” Virginia says and looks over at Gram who nods with her.

“I think you’re so lucky, Ginny Sue,” Madge says. “I wish Cindy could find herself a nice man like Mark. What kind of law is Mark going to do?”

“Mostly business stuff,” she says. “Contracts, wills, divorces, I don’t know.”

“So, he’s not going to be like Perry Mason and solve the murders?”

“If he was,” Virginia’s mama calls from the kitchen. “He couldn’t have more to solve than right here in Saxapaw.”

“I love Perry Mason,” Gram says. “Now he goes by the name of Ironside because he’s old and on wheels like me.” Gram laughs until the tears run down her cheeks and she pulls a Kleenex from her robe pocket. “Sometimes I laugh till I weep,” Gram says. “I don’t know why I do that but it’s something I’ve always done.”

“These Pearson girls,” Roy Carter used to say. “Cry at the drop of a hat, happy, sad, monthlies or no reason at all.”

Gram had stood by the kitchen table and cried like she was the child instead of Virginia. And Virginia saw the ambulance on the street below, the red light flashing around and around as she stood on a stool and looked out the kitchen window. Gramps was in the bedroom, silence behind that closed door, and her mama sat there at the table with Gram and watched that door as if she were afraid to open it. Virginia had a stuffed clown that Gram had made. His ruffled yellow suit had patches. “I made his hat out of one of your Uncle David’s favorite shirts that he had as a child, and I made his suit out of some of James’s old pajamas.” The clown had brown buttons for eyes and Virginia wanted them to be blue. Blue, she mouthed, her breath fogging the window over the sink where she sat on the counter. They should have been blue and Gram should have known that she’d want him to have blue eyes. She felt she could not give the clown a name until the eyes were right. She had found the ones she wanted, shiny pale blue buttons, and she had them there in the pocket of her corduroy pants. Those buttons did not have holes in them like the brown ones, but small silver hooks on the back so the eyes would be smooth and all blue.

“These are the right eyes,” she had told Gram and showed her the buttons but Gram just rubbed her head and nodded.

“I’ll do it later, Sweets,” Gram said. “Why don’t you and that clown take a little nap?” But Virginia couldn’t sleep. There was an
ambulance on the street and men were coming up to the house with a stretcher and she couldn’t sleep at all. The men came in when Gram opened the door and they followed her to the bedroom where Gram showed them the way in but stayed outside herself, her eyes on the edge of the rug in front of her.

“Don’t leave. Please don’t leave,” Virginia had screamed when they brought him through the kitchen, and she jumped from the counter and ran over to Gramps. “Please finish the story,” she said but his blue eyes were closed and he did not reach up and catch her nose between his fingers like he usually did. “Got your nose,” he would say and hold up his hand, thumb pressed between fingers to look like the stolen nose. “Please?” she asked. “Brer Rabbit?”

“I’m going to miss you,” Gram said and traced her fingers down his nose, around his lips, lightly over his closed eyes. “There will never be another,” she whispered, and Gram’s lips quivered like she was freezing cold. “I will do right by you. I love you,” she said and then looked at Virginia’s mama, at Virginia. “We all do.”

And Virginia’s mama and Gram had followed the men outside, leaving her there in the house by herself and she got back on the counter, her feet in the sink, and watched. Gram’s African violets were blooming there on the windowsill, purple, pink, white, and they put Gramps into the ambulance and the men got in and started it up. It moved from the curb and Gram and her mama stood there on the sidewalk with their heads pressed together and arms wrapped around each other. Gram started walking back in, bending to pick up a piece of old newspaper blowing in the yard, but her mother still stood there. She looked up and saw Virginia there in the window and lifted her hand, that brown sweater buttoned close and her mama’s hair blown back from her face, Gram in her gardening dress, the piece of paper in her hand while she stared in the other direction, stared out at the garden.

Virginia did not leave the window until they were back inside and Gram pulled down her sewing basket and fixed the blue eyes while Virginia’s mother made telephone calls, her back turned to them and shaking, while Gram sewed the eyes and made a little pompom for the hat. “And he needs a mouth,” Gram said and cut
what looked like a little valentine from a scrap of red velvet. “This old clown can talk and talk,” Gram had said and pressed it under Virginia’s neck, moved him back and forth. “He’ll tell you every story he knows.” And then people started coming and when Virginia went to sleep late that night, it was on a pallet on the floor near Gram’s bed, and when she woke up and everything was dark, she saw that Gram’s bed was empty and then she heard the glider moving back and forth on the porch. The front door was open and she stood there in the darkness, the clown clutched in her arms, and watched Gram swaying back and forth. “Gram?” she had called, and when the glider stopped and Gram turned to face her, she opened the door and stepped onto the porch. “Are you waiting for Gramps?”

“I guess I am,” she said and pulled Virginia up beside her, hugged her close, so close that Gram’s face felt wet against her neck. “But it’ll be a long time before we see Gramps again,” and Gram pushed off the floor and they rocked slowly, and Gram lifted the clown and made him dance a little in the air, back and forth, back and forth. “Do anything,
any
thing,” she said and laughed. “Just don’t throw me in the brier patch.” And Virginia felt herself lean closer and closer into Gram and never remembered being carried back to bed, only remembered staring down the road in the direction that the ambulance had gone and there was nothing there except sparse streetlights and the smell of smoke from some chimney way on down the road.

PART 5

V
IRGINIA OPENS
her eyes to daylight, a gray hazy sky out Gram’s window. It is Saturday, and for the first time in a week, Virginia really feels awake. It is Saturday, the day of Mark’s tests, the day to tell the truth. She will give him time to get home, time to open a beer and sit down, and then she’ll call.
It’s over
she will say.

“Well, I thought you were going to sleep the day away,” Madge says, glancing up from her cards. “Cindy has been wanting to wake you up.” Madge takes a sip of her iced tea and shuffles.

“Where’s Mama?” she asks, suddenly aware of the congregation. Gram is in the Lazy Boy, Lena stretched out on the sofa, sounds in the kitchen where Esther must be. “And what time is it?”

“Hannah had to run to the Piggly Wiggly,” Madge says and looks toward the bathroom door. “She’s awake now, Cindy, so you can stop pouting.”

“I’ve told her not to go to the Piggly Wiggly,” Gram says. “That is still my house.”

“No, Aunt Emily,” Madge says, pity in her voice. “It’s the Piggly Wiggly now.”

“Roy and me have been.” Lena opens her eyes and sits up. “Roy says they’ve got the seafood there where you used to sleep.”

“Well I wouldn’t have it,” Gram says and puts a little snuff in her gum.

“Where’s Chuckie?” Virginia asks, hoping to take the focus off the Piggly Wiggly.

“He’s swimming and I hope the rain holds off until late tonight so he can stay all day.” Cindy moves from the doorway and sits on the floor, flexes her feet out in front of her; her toenails are painted
the same shade of blue as her eyeshadow. “He’s getting to be a real pain in the rectum.”

“Cindy,” Madge says. “He is going through a difficult age.”

“Tell me about it!” Cindy snaps. “He stays in the bathroom forever; I’m beginning to think he’s you know whatting.”

“What?” Lena asks and now she and Gram turn to Cindy with a dull blank stare.

“God,” Cindy shakes her head and laughs. “I don’t know, probably in there squeezing pimples or something. He needs a man to talk to him but Charles doesn’t have a thing to do with him, ever.”

“He does when you let him,” Madge says.

“Oh right,” Cindy snaps. “He only wants Chuckie to do
fun
things. Charles is never around to see Chuckie when he looks so awkward and gawky; Charles doesn’t see him look like that when some sleezy little girl calls on the phone and he turns red as a beet, and Charles doesn’t have to stand outside that bathroom door about to pee in his pants while Chuckie’s in there you know whatting.”

“What?” Lena asks again, her voice so slow now, eyes so dull.

“Mashing bumps, I said!”