by Peggy Webb
“Hush up, Maggie. I want to see this through.” Lillian raises her hand for attention, and this time it stays upright, probably because she’s got her elbow propped on the handicapped railing.
Still, she has my attention and Jean’s, too. Her eyes look feverish and she has red spots in her cheeks as she tell us THE PLAN, spoken as if every word were written on the chalk board in all caps.
Afterward, I help her to her car while Jean races inside to fetch Carl. Then we stand as close as Siamese twins while they drive off into the night, still waving long after the car has disappeared. I glance up at the stars, searching for signs, but all I see is the steady blue beacon of Sirius.
o0o
I’m thinking back on those disappearing taillights and what they mean to our circle of friends. Lillian is the youngest, always the life of the party, the first one to start the revelry and the last to leave. It’s not right that Jean and I are the ones left standing.
Still, it’s because of Lillian that Halbert and I are finally sitting side by side in Jean and Bill’s living room trying to act as if we ended up here by accident instead of by a design divided halfway between cautious and reckless.
Halbert squeezes my hand and I notice that his palms are wet. I wonder if the dampness is due to fear or excitement. I quickly settle on excitement because people my age do this sort of thing every day. Don’t they? It’s the Hudsons of the world who think about the consequences, about fear and guilt and what the children would say if they knew.
It’s Beth’s voice that comes through the loudest. “Mother, you’re not going to pull up stakes and just walk out the door are you? Why can’t you and Daddy work things out? What are Daniel’s parents going to think?”
If Beth’s husband has a visible flaw it’s his parents, the ever-so-proper Texans whose thin veneer of manners can’t cover their anal-retentive world view.
“I’m not responsible for what Daniel’s parents think. They don’t have to sit across the breakfast table from Dick every morning.”
What would Daniel’s parents say if they could see what I’m up to now? I can imagine what Beth would say - if we were still speaking.
Would we still be speaking if I’d told her the truth, that even sitting close enough to touch Dick I felt alone, that looking at him buried behind the newspaper I couldn’t remember what it was like to be loved? Was it a warped sense of loyalty to Dick that held me silent, or have I turned into my mother and my aunts, those stoic women who used lies to hide the fact that they are breakable?
Sitting on the sofa beside Halbert, I feel breakable.
The thin silver orb shining through Jean’s curtains looks cold and remote, and I wonder why so many poems have been written about the moon and why moonlight is equated with love. Why not warm fuzzy blankets and comfortable slippers? Isn’t that what love should feel like?
Halbert squeezes my hand. “Maggie, I’ve never felt so intensely excited by a woman.”
All of a sudden I’m furious at Dick for forcing me to hide in Jean’s living room like a major criminal simply because I have normal urges that have been denied for so many years.
I’m mad at Beth, too, sitting smugly in her fancy house in River Oak side by side with Daniel on a white sectional sofa that overlooks the garden they designed and built. It looks like something out of Southern Living, one of those lush inviting spaces filled with bushes that have exotic names and scarlet flowers that attract hummingbirds.
Beth is Dick’s pride and joy, while Lydia has always been a source of discomfort to him, wild Lydia who dyed her hair blue and ran away from college with a trumpet player.
“Way to go, Mom,” she’d say if she could see me now.
Halbert squeezes my hand again, and I start to hum. It’s something I always do when I’m nervous. Another lie, another way to hide the chips and cracks that threaten to split wide open and let the real me tumble out like a wild river.
The song is “If They Could See Me Now,” and Halbert pulls me off the sofa and whirls me around the room, dodging footstools and the big octagonal coffee table. He holds me close and whispers things that make my ears hot.
“I have to be going,” I say.
“Is that a hint, Maggie?” When he laughs I see how white his teeth are, and I picture him using one of those new peroxide toothpastes that guarantee a dazzling smile.
I’m dazzled.
So dazzled that for a moment I forget I’m the one spending the night with Jean and Bill and he’s the one who has to go.
“I want to see you again, Maggie.”
And that’s how easy it is.
o0o
I’m up to my ears in homemade quilts, ensconced in Jean and Bill’s spare bed for the night, but my mind won’t shut off.
I know women who have lived all their lives and never taken a single risk. Not one. I see them in their pastel colored jogging suits pushing carts through the grocery store, heads bent so low over their lists they don’t even notice that the produce section has passion fruit so vivid it makes you think of being on a beach in Waikiki watching tanned young men thunder toward you on the blue and white surf.
“Yes,” I’d said to Halbert.
I say the word once more, out loud, and the taste of it in my mouth is like cherry ice cream. Barefoot, I pad to the cedar dresser and view myself in the triple mirrors. In the dim glow of the nightlight I’m softened, a photograph of myself taken through a fog filter. But even in that faint light I can see a gray hair in my temple that appeared overnight like a fairy’s wing.
I climb back into bed wishing I could be bold like Lydia and dye my hair blue. Or at least a nice shade of golden brown.
CHAPTER FIVE
I’m standing in my kitchen as flummoxed as if I’ve landed in the middle of a foreign country. I must have been insane to suggest that Halbert come to my apartment for dinner. Dick has changed lawyers again. At this rate, I won’t get a divorce anytime this century and I most certainly am still legally married.
“Stop it,” I tell myself, and then I race around, checking all the windows to make sure his private eye can’t find a single opening for his long lens camera. In the bedroom, I notice myself in the pier mirror. That can’t be me. I suck in my stomach and massage the new lines fanning out from my eyes, but there’s no way I can rub away the image of myself transformed from a woman of truth and honor to a woman capable of intrigue. Why did I ever imagine I was ready to date?
I punch Halbert’s number into my iPhone then stare at his name on the screen. I’ve change my mind, I’ll tell him. Or, I’m coming down with something dreadful. Fear is dreadful, isn’t it? Lack of courage? An overdose of caution?
If it were late enough, I’d turn on the radio and ask Mr. Fixit.
I wait too long to tap Halbert’s number and the screen goes blank. Reprieved! I hurry back to the kitchen.
Now that I live alone I rarely cook. There’s too much waste. Nobody to help eat the leftovers, and not even a patch of green grass where I can toss out remains of breakfast then watch the cardinals fly in to eat the bread crumbs.
I love cooking, not the daily grind but the kind where you tear out recipes from the Sunday edition of the newspaper or copy down something that sounds exotic from Southern Living or Gourmet, then race down to the grocery store and buy things you’d never buy in an ordinary shopping trip - squid and mango chutney and Indonesian chili paste and Asian radish sprouts.
I consider trying something daring for Halbert’s visit. I picture myself serving cider and calvados gelees with champagne grapes, then Halbert being so overwhelmed with admiration he will . . .
My imagination takes me no further. That’s the big problem. Now that I’m committed to this risky business, what will happen?
“I suspect he’ll put the roses back in your cheeks.” This from Lillian who’d called me up at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. “Meet me at Victoria’s Secret.”
I knew better than to ask, “Are you up to it?”
She got to the mall before I did, and was wearing dark glasses and no makeup. Even in jeans and her hair up in a pony tail she still looked sensational. Still I tried to be discreet as I studied her to see if her casual look was a sign that the New Year’s Eve dance had put such strain on her damaged heart she could no longer wield a set of make-up brushes.
“You look like the cat that’s swallowed the canary.” She peered at me over the top of her shades, and I heaved a sigh of relief that she hadn’t noticed my worry.
“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, Lillian. Nothing happened after the dance and I’m not planning for anything to happen now. It’s just dinner.”
Lillian picked up a pair of thong panties from the nearby table, sheer black nylon with red sequined hearts pointing the way to paradise.
“That’s why we’re here, right? Nothing’s going to happen?”
“I believe in being prepared. That’s all.”
She lobbied for the racy red hearts but I could picture the indignity of that wisp of string vanishing in the folds of my generous hips. Not to mention the discomfort. I settled on a more sedate matching blue set.
“It’s too ordinary, Maggie.”
“The panties are bikinis, French cut.”
I don’t know why I felt obliged to defend myself to Lillian. Sometimes the hardest thing about being alone is not the silence that gets so unbearable you talk to yourself just for the sound of a human voice nor even the sense of helplessness that comes when you imagine yourself getting run over by a car or mowed down by a dreadful illness and wondering who will pay the bills - the rent, the car payment, the utilities, not to mention the hospital bills?
Sometimes the hardest thing is the expectations of others.
I settled on the underwear in much the same way I finally settle on baked chicken stuffed with mushrooms and onions for dinner. Seeing Halbert is risk enough. Why court disaster trying something new?
I put on the chicken then hurry back to my bedroom to dress. I’m just zipping up my skirt when my phone rings.
“What are you wearing, Maggie? Besides the you-know-what?” It’s Lillian, sounding strong and peppy, taking a propriety interest because she’s kin to Halbert.
Her children are within earshot. I can hear Nancy arguing with Emily over the TV’s remote control.
“Slacks and a blouse.”
“What about that terrific blue knit dress with those sexy sling-back heels, Maggie? You have great legs.”
“The blouse I have on is red.” There I go again, making excuses for my choices as if everybody else knows something that I’m still struggling to learn. “Listen, forget my clothes. Tell me about Halbert.”
I know nothing about him, not really, except the obvious: he’s handsome, sexy, charming and terrific on the dance floor.
“He’s divorced. Twice. Has two grown boys, one in college the other somewhere in Arizona, I think.”
“He told me all that. I’m talking about the real stuff, the things that count. . . Is he kind?”
It’s a question I wish I’d asked before I plunged into trouble with Dick.
Lillian does not take this question lightly; she’s witnessed the damage a cruel man can do, first hand as well as second hand. The important thing I didn’t know about Lillian when we first met was that she’d had her share of troubles. Even now, with her struggling heart, she’s serene and beautiful, the kind of woman who appears to have skipped over the hard part of living. She gives the impression of having wings folded underneath her crisp white blouse, giant wings that carry her aloft whenever somebody sets out to wage war against her.
One day she showed me her battle scars, a thin pinkish line she’d put on her wrist when her first husband walked out leaving her with two-toddlers and a mountain of debt. She had no job, no money and no hope.
“That was the terrible thing, Maggie. The hopelessness. I got in the tub, turned on the water and picked up the razor. All I could think about was that I was alone and I might be alone for the rest of my life.”
I didn’t say, “What about the children?” Any woman who is reduced to just herself after being part of a pair knows how Lillian felt. The thing I did ask was, “What happened?”
“Nancy toddled in with her diaper hanging down to her knees and said, ‘Stinky, Mommy.’ I thought, if I end it all and leave her with a dirty diaper somebody will think I’m a bad mother.” She scavenged through the picnic basket we were sharing till she found the last piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“Ego, Maggie. That’s what saved me.”
When she threw her head back and laughed, the sun made a patch on her throat that looked like pale creamery butter. It wasn’t ego that saved Lillian: It was courage.
“How did you get from there to here?” My question was more than idle curiosity. The reason we were on the picnic in the first place is that I’d called her crying, and she’d roared to the rescue, a bucket of chicken in one hand and a box of Kleenex in the other.
“Lying,” she said.
She told me how she got back in the tub and washed her hair, the shallow cut she’d made bound tightly with Band-Aids. Then she dressed in her best suit, left her children with a neighbor, and went all over town lying her head off. She said she was the best typist in Texas, a hundred and twenty words a minute. On the way home she stopped at a garage sale and bought herself a typewriter for fifteen dollars, then taught herself to type. By the time she got a job as clerk-typist she was up to a respectable forty words a minute. Until then, she’d lived on food stamps.
“I was ashamed,” she said. “Every time I went to the grocery store I glanced around to see if anybody I knew was there. One day I saw my postman in the frozen food section, and I left my half-filled cart beside the chicken gizzards and just walked out the door.”
Listening to Lillian, I could feel my bones strengthen and my spirit strain upward. Like the Cowardly Lion, I hadn’t known I had courage until somebody led me to the Wizard.
I have an education, a job, and my children are grown, I thought. What in the world makes me think I can’t take care of myself? And why in the world have I stayed so long?
The only answer I had then, and still have now, is that when you give somebody’s opinions more weight than your own they render you powerless. The answer is far more complex than that, of course. Fear paralyzed me - fear of change, of loss, of being alone, of being the brunt of gossip. Fear of not knowing when to change the oil in the car.
Suddenly I was ravenous. “Lillian, if you’re not going to finish that chicken leg, hand it to me. I’m starving.”
The look she gave me was a question and I nodded the answer. Yes.
“Way to go, girl,” she said, then, “Everything’s going to be all right, Maggie.” When she hugged me I felt a surge of power. This is what good friends do. We validate each other.
When I got home, the first thing that struck me was how strange my house seemed, as if I had moved away some years ago and had come back to find everything changed. It looked the same on the outside, a modest one-story brick house with green shutters and a small wooden plaque over the front door. The Hudsons, the plaque said, as if Maggie and Dick were one unit, forged together as solid and unchangeable as the letters burned into the wood.
It wasn’t the look of the house that was different: it was the attitude. It sagged, cheerless and shrunken in the afternoon sun, burdened, as if the house itself knew that the Hudsons, husband and wife, didn’t live there anymore. Only Maggie and Dick, complete strangers.
Still, it was not until that night on the lake that I found the courage to follow the true leanings of my heart, and then a few weeks later to actually get into the car and drive away for the last time.
Time and distance lend the memories a surreal quality, like a Fellini movie, and I know that the woman demanding answers now about a man who is going to be eating her baked chicken - to say the very least - is not the same woman who shed tears on the steering wheel as she said goo
dbye to her house.
To Lillian, I repeat the most important question I know to ask. “Is Halbert kind?”
“I wish I could say yes.” Lillian gives new meaning to the phrase pregnant pause. “He’s always polite and mannerly, and I’ve never seen him be mean, not even to taxi drivers in New York . . . but the truth is, I don’t know. . . Maggie, call him up and cancel.”
I can hear panic build in Lillian’s voice, panic on my behalf.
“Don’t be silly. This is not a life-time commitment. It’s just a dinner date.”
I halfway believe what I’m saying, and that’s good enough. Secretly though, there’s still a part of me who wants the fairy tale, who wants to be Cinderella rescued at the ball by Prince Charming. Or maybe I don’t want the fairy tale as much as I want the order and security of being part of a pair.
The doorbell buzzes, and suddenly I am a pioneer, attacked on the open prairie, lost from the circle of wagons.
“He’s here, Lillian. What am I going to do?”
“Just don’t do anything foolish, okay?”
“What you mean is don’t do anything I’m not willing to tell you and Jean. ‘Bye, Lillian.”
Cautious, I peer through the peephole and there is Halbert wearing a trench coat, a slouch hat, a false mustache and a rubber nose. Laughter wells up, fresh and cleansing. I fling open the door.
“I thought I’d come in disguise,” he says. “In case the Gestapo is watching.”
A memory drifts through my mind, pungent and wispy as smoke. Jean and I are eavesdropping under the front verandah at our grandfather’s house, trying to keep cool, our bottoms settled into holes we’ve dug, our bare legs sprinkled with sand, our feet packed in the damp earth. On the porch above us the women in the family are shelling peas. Round green nuggets ping against enamel, blending with the squeak of rocking chairs and the persistent buzz of mosquitoes. Jean and I don’t dare slap at the pests and give ourselves away. We stoically endure, scratching until we draw blood.
