Stars to Lead Me Home: Love and Marriage (A Novel)

by Peggy Webb

  “I don’t think my adoring public is ready for me,” I tell Jean.

  “I’m not going to let you say no. Lillian is going to be there. She can barely breathe, let alone dance! If she can do it, you most certainly can.”

  “Are you trying to send me on a guilt trip?”

  “Whatever works.”

  “OK. Maybe.”

  “There’s no maybe about it. Bill and I will pick you at eight and bring you home, all nice and safe and legal.”

  “I’ll think about it, but that doesn’t mean I’ll go.”

  But Jean had already hung up without saying goodbye, a habit of hers that would drive me crazy if I’d let it. Even as I replace the dead receiver I’m wondering what I’ll wear.

  The clock says eleven and I’m keyed up as I walk through the tiny hallway that separates my bedroom from my office, touching my treasured possessions - a signed copy of Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides, a blue dragon frozen in a water globe, a tiny pair of white gloves Beth, my firstborn, wore on Easter Sunday when she was two, a bedraggled Pooh Bear Lydia, my wild child, told all her secrets to, a pink china elephant brought back from my honeymoon, the family photographs, Beth holding onto her daddy’s hand as she takes her first step, a picture of Lydia three years old and already perfecting that defiant glare Dick and I came to know so well.

  I shake the water globe, setting the blue and silver crystals afloat, then wind the key and listen to the music box strains of “Camelot” and wonder how my dreams of “happily ever aftering” came to this, me sitting alone at a desk in a strange apartment late at night when other people are cuddled under comforters, two by two as God intended, hands touching, breathing in sync, dreaming the same dream and knowing that when they wake up everything around them will be familiar.

  My life is no longer familiar to me. I feel betrayed, as if generations of women in my family conspired to cover-up the truth. The platitudes I grew up with no longer hold fast. Marriage is not forever. Women should never turn a blind eye or grin and bear it. And when you make your bed, you absolutely do not have to lie in it.

  Nothing in my life prepared me for this aching aloneness, this death of dreams, this fear of the unknown future. Even though I escaped a bad marriage, I have not escaped loss. I am adrift in uncharted waters without a life raft.

  Work, Daddy always, said. That’s the thing you can count on.

  “I hope you’re right, Daddy,” I whisper as I turn on the computer.

  The green cursor blinks at me as it moves across the blank screen. I type one word and it fills up the emptiness: MARRIED.

  A dream, long buried, pushes its way toward freedom

  I begin to type.

  “Ellie spent most of her waking moments thinking of ways she wished her husband would die.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The thing about living in the Deep South is that everybody not only knows who you are and where you work: they also know where you shop for groceries, where you go to church, and who you’re sleeping with. If anybody.

  When I first left Dick, rumor had it that some rich, handsome stud had turned my head and done no telling what all to the rest of me. In spite of two years of clean living and celibacy – not to mention the years preceding - rumor still persists that my phantom lover has cleverly managed to avoid detection.

  I can feel the weight of their thoughts as I walk past the elite of Jackson. Beneath that sea of tuxedos and evening gowns purchased out of town so the owners can brag that they had to drive all the way to New Orleans or fly to Atlanta to buy a dress for the New Year’s Eve dance, everything from curiosity to outright hostility follows me across the room.

  There are random glances of sympathy, too. And I don’t know which weighs heavier. But I hold up my head and put an extra swish in my hips as if to say, “Stand back, everybody. Here comes Maggie Hudson. I may be down, but I’m not defeated. Not by a long shot.”

  My training in community theater is finally paying off. Years ago someone asked me how I managed to come onstage and scream my way through the role of the White Witch, and I lied and told them I was a good actress. What I didn’t tell them was that I had a lot to scream about.

  Dick had distilled his opinion of me into three little words: “You are worthless.”

  Like my alter ego Ellie, I spent a lot of hours dreaming of an easy way out. Somebody would come by and sweep me off my feet, the mailman or the butcher or that old romantic standby, the traveling salesman. He would challenge Dick, then carry me off in a long Buick with fishtails and we would live on a beach in southern California watching spectacular sunsets and eating coconut straight from the shell. Or Dick would say, “This isn’t working, Maggie, so let’s be civil and divide everything equally without lawyers and depositions and accusations.”

  Or he would die. The easiest of all. I’d be a widow, and everybody would offer sympathy and pound cakes.

  But none of that happened, and instead of pound cakes I got headaches.

  I feel one coming on now as I negotiate the length of a dance floor that is suddenly as endless as the Sahara. I worry that I’ll sweat on my silk blouse and people will notice. I worry that my feet will swell and I’ll have to take my high heels off and not be able to get them back on. I worry that somebody who knows Dick will phone him and he’ll race down with a camera and snap me just as I trip and fall into the lap of some man I don’t even know.

  “I can’t do this, Jean.”

  I bolt for the door, but she grabs my arm and drags me toward a table.

  “Yes, you can.”

  When Jean and I were kids, we were always dreaming up schemes that would get us into trouble, and one of us always kept a lookout for adults. I have that same feeling as we run the gauntlet of stares - that Jean and I have embarked on some reckless adventure that requires one of us standing sentinel.

  “Who’s on lookout tonight,” I say, “you or me?”

  “Relax. Nothing bad is going to happen with Bill here.

  Reliable, affable Bill. He has forged ahead to find our table, and I see him now sitting beside Lillian, bold as a poppy in red, with her third husband Carl, wearing a blue tuxedo and the look of a man smitten with and addicted to his wife.

  And then I see the man, this perfect stranger sitting at the table with people I know, and before I can turn and run he’s standing up with a look of expectation and I can’t remember what it is he expects of me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s just Lillian’s cousin from Tampa.”

  Jean doesn’t fool me for a minute. She and Lillian have hatched this plot and I’m the victim.

  Lillian is making the introduction, but I don’t hear her cousin’s name. I’m too busy wondering if this is the man who was supposed to fall out of a tree at my feet, and how I’m going to keep the remarkable resurrection of my libido a secret.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Maggie.” This stranger takes my hand, and all of a sudden I feel spotless and new and as full of expectation as I was when I walked down the aisle with Dick and said I do.

  In spite of my advanced pregnancy announcing that this was a shot-gun wedding, I’d meant every word - to love, honor, and cherish. Cherish had been the first to go. Like a precocious baby bird that sprouted wings overnight, it had flown the nest while I wasn’t even looking.

  I’m thinking about broken vows now as I sit beside this man whose name I don’t know, sit here smoldering and wishing he’d put out my fire.

  Hypocrite that I am, I twist my legs sideways so my knees won’t touch his.

  Dick used to do the same thing, twist away from me in bed when I’d curl into his back and touch him in the special way of wives who know what their husbands like best.

  “What time is it, Maggie?” he’d say.

  “I don’t know.” What does it matter what time it is when your body’s on fire?

  “Go to sleep, Maggie. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

  All our days were long, but
leaving someone I’d promised before God and my in-laws to cherish forever has not been easy.

  And letting go is even harder.

  I have the feeling I’m involved in somebody else’s dream, and all of a sudden the chair I’m sitting in sprouts wings and floats backward so that I view myself from a distance. Who is that middle-aged woman wearing a party smile and pantyhose that are too short in the crotch?

  “Lillian tells me you teach.”

  I am being addressed by this perfect stranger, perfect being the operative word, and under cover of my black velvet skirt I grip the seat of my chair as I’m jolted back to reality.

  “Yes. Second grade.”

  “You must have some funny stories to tell.”

  “Yes, I have stories to tell.” But all of them aren’t funny.

  I launch into a tale of last year’s Christmas pageant where the live donkey relieved himself on the stage and the dog posing as a sheep tore lose from his leash and sent one of the wise men into the audience screaming.

  I am grateful for small talk and for my mother – God rest her soul - who insisted I learn that dying art.

  A look passes between my two best friends, a self-congratulatory look of triumph. I’ll deal with Lillian and Jean later. Right now I’m too busy dealing with the mutiny of my body to think of anything else.

  The band strikes up a tune and the stranger asks me to dance. Herb? Harvey? Huckleberry?

  “Excuse me, please.” I race off in the direction of the ladies’ room where I lean my head against the cool tile and try to get my bearings.

  “Maggie.” Jean pushes through the door and her hand is suddenly on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes… No… I don’t know.” I rip off a length of paper towel, plunge it into a basin of cold water then hold it dripping to my hot cheeks. “Good grief, Jean, why didn’t you tell me George Clooney was going to be here?”

  “You mean Halbert?”

  “Is that his name? And don’t change the subject. You and Lillian set me up.”

  “Guilty.” Lillian has come into the bathroom and is leaning against the porcelain sink, her face as white as death.

  I feel like a toad, a selfish beast, the silliest woman on the face of the earth. Here I am, healthy as a horse and mostly sane, whining about meeting a gorgeous man while my friend is probably going to die on a cold bathroom floor. And all because of me.

  “Oh, my God, Lillian!” I dab at her face with my wet paper towel. “Are you all right? Do you need a doctor?”

  “She needs you to get it together, Maggie.”

  “I’m okay, Jean.” Lillian gulps in air and I see color return to her cheeks. “Really, I am.”

  “No, you’re not. Just be quiet and breathe, Lillian.” Jean jerks the soggy paper towel out of my hand and throws it into the garbage can. “Maggie, you’re making a mess.”

  “How could I make a bigger mess than I already have?”

  Jean checks around the corner of the stalls to see that we’re alone. “Are you having regrets, Maggie?”

  About coming here tonight? About leaving Dick? About leaving my house and my church and my community? About thinking only of myself when I raced out of the ballroom and nearly caused Lillian to faint, if not worse?

  I can feel the tension building. I used to get in the car and drive till I found a deserted place, and then stand there screaming. The primal scream, it’s called. Pain and fear with a voice.

  Jean and Lillian put their arms around me and I lean into them, all of us taking comfort, drawing strength the way good friends do.

  The band is playing, a song from the nineties, the music muted as it filters through the bathroom speakers. Suddenly, I am riding around in a Thunderbird convertible with the top down, my hair flying in the wind, thinking I’ll be sixteen forever.

  “I have no regrets,” I say. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d do the very same thing.”

  “Good.” Jean digs in my purse and hands me a compact and lipstick. “Get gorgeous.”

  “Halbert’s itching to dance with you,” Lillian says, and I’m relieved to see that she no longer sounds breathless when she talks. If you didn’t know she needed a heart transplant, you’d never guess by looking.

  “Lead the way, Lillian. I’ve got my big girl panties back on and I think still know how to scratch.”

  The three of us leave the bathroom arm in arm, giggling.

  Halbert is a fabulous dancer, and I forget everything except the music and the laughter and the welcome relief of being held in the arms of a nice, polite man.

  “You’re a wonderful dancer, Maggie,” he tells me as we dance the twist. “You have wonderful eyes, Maggie. Angel blue eyes.” This during a foxtrot, and then during the waltz . . . “You are wonderful, Maggie.”

  My hair is damp from unaccustomed exertion and hanging in limp strands around my face. My pantyhose have worked themselves below the folds of my belly, and I’m holding them aloft by sheer willpower. The straps of my shoes have cut ridges in my swollen feet.

  And yet I believe him.

  I don’t want the waltz to end. I don’t want the evening to end. I don’t want to be standing beside Halbert, hands locked, hidden from public view by the folds of my skirt as we listen to the band play “Auld Lang Syne.”

  I want to be wonderful forever.

  o0o

  The dance is winding down, and I am about to jump out of my skin.

  During the course of one evening I’ve shed two and a half decades and emerged a teenager in a middle aged woman’s body. If you can call forty middle aged. Shops that specialize in party supplies make black balloons that call it over the hill, but I’m not prepared to let myself believe that kind of propaganda. Not tonight, at least. Tomorrow when I see myself in broad daylight I’ll probably question my sanity as well as my ability to take care of myself, but tonight I’m intent on taking the advice of my nightshirt. My animal instincts want lots of giving in to.

  “Maggie, are you okay?” Lillian leans in to whisper, and I notice she has gone two shades paler during the evening, the wear and tear on her heart so obvious I’m ashamed of myself for not asking her that question first.

  “Let’s get you out this crowd and someplace quiet.” I motion to Jean then take Lillian’s arm, and we troop back to the ladies’ lounge where I urge Lillian into the only seat available, a straight backed chair along a mirrored wall.

  I race to place wet paper towels on her face while Jean hands her a cup of iced tea she’s nabbed somewhere along the way. Probably from the tray of a waiter we passed, but it could have been from somebody else’s table. With Jean, you never know.

  “Quit hovering.” Lillian’s eyes are too bright, and for the first time since she’d announced her need for a borrowed heart, I don’t think she really means what she’s saying.

  “Who’s hovering?” Jean doesn’t move an inch, and neither do I.

  “Jean’s right. We’re not hovering. We’re just making sure you behave. Without us, you’d be running hog wild and pig crazy.”

  “Oh, hush up, Maggie.” Lillian tries to wave me off, but her arm won’t stay aloft. I feel Jean stiffen and have to force myself not to exchange telling glances with my cousin, worried looks that say she’s fading away and we’re going to lose her. “You’re the one who should be going crazy wild.”

  “Not much chance of that,” I tell Lillian. “Not with Dick’s private eye tailing me.”

  “Shoot!” She says while Jean says something that won’t bear repeating. “Jean, you’ve got to figure something out.”

  “Who? Me?”

  “Yes, you! You’re the logistics person.”

  Bill is the one who can manage schedules and numbers in the blink of an eye, not Jean. Does a damaged heart deprive a person’s brain of oxygen? Are we going to lose Lillian in pieces, one little bit at a time? I scrutinize her, trying to discover the answer, hoping I’m wrong, silently praying that her small mental lapse is due to fatigue f
rom the dance and not some larger, more diabolical picture.

  The door bursts open and suddenly women flood in to repair their hair and touch up their makeup. The bathroom explodes with loud talk about the best all-night diner that serves ham and biscuits and who wore the most expensive dress to the ball.

  The three of us look at each other and move of one accord toward the only space that will give us some privacy, the handicapped stall.

  “You take the throne, Lillian,” I say, and she sinks down, grateful, I think, not to be standing. I feel my heart crack and understand without looking that Jean’s does, too.

  “Now I know why they say three’s a crowd.” Jean’s trying to squeeze herself between the commode and the toilet paper dispenser. She uses humor to get through every crisis, large and small. I could hug her, but there’s not room to move in here. “Here’s the plan. Bill and I will follow Maggie and Halbert to her apartment then we’ll park out front and honk if we see the white van coming.”

  “Good lord! That’s not a plan. It’s a blueprint for disaster.” I have a mental image of patrol cars racing down Broadway, stopping underneath my bedroom window with blue lights blinking and sirens blaring. They would create all kinds of excitement.

  But not the kind I have in mind.

  “Maggie’s right, Jean. You can’t just sit out there and honk the horn. Then you’d have the police to deal with.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I say. “I’m ridiculous. If my girls could see me now, what would they say?”

  “Lydia would cheer you on,” Jean says, “and who cares what Beth thinks?”

  “I do. I still do.” Thanks goodness, Jean doesn’t have a comeback. She doesn’t like Beth’s stance on my divorce, but she knows me well enough to understand that I’ll never give up on my oldest daughter. “Let’s just all go home and call it a night.”

  I don’t have to state the obvious. Lillian’s in no condition to endure anything else, even something as non-taxing as concocting a plan to resurrect my dying libido and keep Dick’s private eye from catching me in the act.