by Peggy Webb
“Jean, you’re not going to believe this! Dick is seeing Marsha Legget!”
“That skunk!”
“No. If he wants Marsha, he might be willing to get on with the divorce. But how can I get through to him if he won’t even talk to me on the phone?”
“Leave it to Lillian and me!”
“She’s not in any shape to do whatever you’re planning.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve talked to her today. Twice.”
“She’ll be killed if we leave her out. Besides, she can handle it.”
“You don’t know that, Jean.”
“Yes, I do. I’ve talked to her, too. Three times.”
“Oh lord, Carl is going to kill us.”
o0o
Two hours later I’m climbing into Jean’s car wearing black leggings and shapeless black sweater, a red wig, black baseball cap pulled low and a pair of cat’s eye glasses.
“Maggie?” Jean looks as if she’s about to slam the car door in my face, and Lillian, whose color is so hectic it worries me, says, “Good grief! You look like a bag lady.”
“That’s the general idea.”
Their plan was this: Since I can’t afford a man who drives a white van, I’m doing my own sleuthing. Even if I do nothing more than sit in the car and glower at the house that used to be mine, I need that satisfaction. I need to look at the cheerless house and perhaps catch a glimpse of my cheerless husband and say to myself, See, see there. Good thing I left.
“I brought my car, in case he remembers Lillian’s.” Jean says this in an off-hand way.
All three of us pretend that, otherwise, Lillian might be driving her car tonight. Before her diagnosis, we always traveled in her Thunderbird with the top down. There was something festive and hopeful about it. I think riding in that car made us feel young, as if we still had our whole lives in front of us.
“Good idea,” I tell Jean, knowing it’s highly unlikely Dick would remember the car, since he made a conscious effort to forget everything about Lillian, including her name. She can walk into a room of three hundred people, a perfect stranger, and have two hundred ninety-nine of them like her on sight. Dick, of course, would be the one who didn’t. But that says more about him than about Lillian. He never liked anybody except his immediate family and Graden.
I used to worry about this.
“Our circle of friends is so narrow it’s not even a circle. More like a squashed egg,” I used to say to him. “Can’t we have somebody over besides family or Graden and Sarah?”
“Like who? Your crazy cousin Jean or that ditsy friend of yours, Lilac?”
“Lillian. And she’s not ditsy. She’s lively.”
“She’s not only ditsy, she’s dangerous. Ever since she moved here you’ve been acting strange. I don’t why she didn’t stay in Tennessee.”
“Texas, and for your information, I’m not acting strange. Strange is my Aunt Jessie.”
Aunt Jessie won’t get into the car before walking around it three times, backward.
It’s an old superstition of hers. She says she’s programming herself to go back where she came from so that once she’s on the road she won’t have to worry about getting lost: her body knows the way home.
As we approach my old neighborhood, I strain forward to see every inch of the terrain I’d left behind. There’s the little country church where Lydia and Beth were christened, and where they later stood in matching pink outfits I’d made for Easter and sang “Jesus Loves Me” while I accompanied them on the old upright piano with a missing g. “Maggie, can you call somebody to fix it,” the preacher said, and I called a piano tuner and told him I was having trouble with my g string. I’ll never forget how he laughed.
There is the yellow brick house where the mail carrier used to live. His garden is out back, overgrown now, but it used to be filled with big green cucumbers and fat red tomatoes he would put into paper sacks and deliver along with the mail.
And there is the crooked frame house that was once a general store. Flats of petunias and pansies and slender fruit trees in burlap bags used to line the front porch where the For Sale sign hangs, and an old ceiling fan was kept running all summer long to cool the patrons who sat in rocking chairs along the railing eating double dips of strawberry ice cream in real sugar cones.
I’ve driven this street a thousand times - on the way home from the grocery story, rushing back from one of Lydia’s soccer games in time to make supper, hurrying to church on Sunday morning. I could drive it in my sleep, and I have many times since I left. In my dreams. Sometimes I’m hurrying back to see if I unplugged the iron. Sometimes I’m racing home for something I’ve forgotten, something I can’t remember. I search and search, then wake up in a panic, filled with loss.
Alone, I couldn’t bear to come back, but protected by a bulwark of friends, I can make the pilgrimage.
Jean eases the car through the stone columns that guard a cluster of red brick houses, but I’m ahead of her. I’ve already turned the corner and raced ahead to the house with green shutters that used to be mine. My programmed body knows the way home.
“We’re here.”
Jean says this in a voice too loud, as if everybody in the car is deaf as well as blind, then Lillian turns toward me and say, “What do you want to do, Maggie?”
What I want to do is be a young mother again. I want to race toward the oak tree in the front yard with Lydia in my arms and Beth running along beside me on short stout legs, to spread a quilt my mother made by a pattern she calls around the world. I want to sit on the patchwork pallet and answer Beth’s questions about whether ladybugs are ladies and why holes are called holes and why the sky is blue. I want to watch Lydia discover the feel of grass tickling her knees and the taste of leaves.
I see the wind chimes I hung on the front porch - over Dick’s dead body, I remember - and I wonder why he didn’t take them down after I left.
And there in front of the carport is the redbud tree my daddy dug up on the farm and transplanted when Dick and I built this house. The tree is in its prime now with a vigorous trunk and spreading branches covered with deep pink blossoms, grown big from a small sapling. In a few more years the trunk will be gnarled and roughened with bark that’s beginning to peel away in places, and the lower limbs will be stout enough so you can hang a rope swing for a grandchild.
I want to watch the tree grow. I want to stand beside it on creaking legs and lift a grandchild into the swing. A breeze sets the branches swaying, and I can hear the childish laughter that climbs upward like a kite caught in the wind.
“I don’t know what I expected, coming here,” I say, but really I do.
It’s not revenge I seek, not youth I want to recapture, but the sense of promise, the feeling that the future stretches out before me, a bright path I can see so clearly that there’s no danger of losing my way.
“For one thing, you expected to catch that two-timing jerk in the sack with the floozy.” Jean slings her purse over her arm and prepares to bail out of the car.
“Wait. What are you doing?” I yank her back.
“I’ve got a camera in here.” She pats the sides of the big brown purse that doubles as her briefcase. Second grade math papers stick out and artwork done on pink construction paper.
“No doubt,” Lillian drawls. “You’ve probably got the kitchen sink in there, too.”
“Are you going to sit there and make jokes, Lillian,” Jean says. “Or are you coming in with me?”
“Do you think Dickless is going to just open the door and say ‘come on in’ when he sees us? I don’t think so.”
“Who said anything about ringing the doorbell? Maggie can use her key. . . You have your key, don’t you, Maggie?”
“This is still my house, isn’t it?”
I dig around in my purse to show that of course I have a key.
Suddenly I’m laughing. I hold my purse tight against my belly and laugh so hard tears stream down my f
ace.
“Good grief, Maggie,” Jean says. “What now?”
I gasp for breath, wipe my eyes on my shirt sleeve and rummage around in my purse for a tissue. “For one thing, Lydia said Dick has changed the locks. For another, he’s not even here.”
“His car is in the carport,” Jean says.
“Somebody picked him up. If he were in that house, he’d already be out here, ranting and raving.” I dab the tissue under my eyes. “Can you imagine what he’d say about this getup? Not to mention what the neighbors would say.”
I point out Susie Sullivan across the street, coming out her door with a watering can.
Susie has a daughter Beth’s age, and the two of us used to take turns sitting in each other’s kitchens on Saturday mornings drinking tea and watching the girls romp in the sunshine. That was before things got bad at home.
She was one of the first of my former neighbors I’d called after I moved into my apartment, “Come by and have lunch, see where I live,” I would say. Or, “I’m right downtown, let’s meet for coffee.” She never came, never called, never returned my messages.
Susie chose sides, and it wasn’t mine. I’m sorry I ever let her see me cry.
“I’d walk out there bold as brass and wave at her,” Jean says, and Lillian says, “Amen!”
I study my house, trying to recapture something I’ve lost, and then it hits me: You can’t dream backward, only forward. Promise is not a spot of earth, not four brick walls with a gray shingled roof. It’s not even a redbud tree in full bloom. Promise is a place in the heart.
“We won’t be doing any more sleuthing.” I roll down the window and toss the key into the front yard. Dick’s front yard. Maggie doesn’t live here anymore. “Step on it, Jean. I always wanted to say that.”
“Too many late night gangster movies,” Jean says.
What else was there to do in that love-forsaken house?
Jean speeds away. Don’t look back, I tell myself, don’t look back. I roll down the window, rip off my wig and let my hair blow in the wind like the flag of a small liberated country.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Since our clandestine visit to my old house, I’m burning with a need to get things done, on fire with what ifs. What if Lillian doesn’t live to see me free? What if she never gets to set foot in my new house? What if she never gets to see this book finished?
This is selfish of me, I know. I should be thinking about Carl and the girls. And I do. I really do. But in the end, all I can do is try to move forward with the things I can control.
I stow my purse and my briefcase, ignore the school papers I need to correct, then sit down at my desk and turn on the computer. It’s not easy to transition from school teacher to writer. I stare at the blank page, flex my shoulders then stare some more.
The green cursor blinks at me, and finally I begin to type: “Ellie escaped the house whenever she could, attaching herself to causes the way barnacles attach themselves to the bottoms of boats. In some of their worst quarrels, Rex called her Saint Ellie of Lost Causes. She retaliated by calling him Lord Do Nothing. It didn’t seem possible that love could turn so ugly.”
“My book.” I say the words aloud, tasting them, savoring them, hoping that saying them aloud will give wings to the dream.
I continue typing.
“She had to work hard to think of herself as wonderful anymore, or even worthy. Sometimes she would go to the park on Saturday, sit on the bench and imagine perfect strangers walking up to her and telling her that her dress looked nice, or her hair, or even her shoes. One day while she was sitting on the park bench all alone it started to rain, and she saw herself for what she was, an aging lonely women, depending on the kindness of strangers. Another Blanche DuBois, caught in a downpour without an umbrella.”
“That was the day Ellie decided to leave Rex.”
Lydia calls in the midst of Ellie’s epiphany.
“Dad says you have a court date. Is that true?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to my lawyer in a few days. When’s the date?”
“In two weeks. Beth’s shooting pouts at the moon.”
“Lydia,” I chide.
“Well, she is. She says that’s just what she needs, you and Dad in the courtroom airing the family’s dirty laundry. Is that how it will be, Mom?”
That’s how it always is when a divorce case goes all the way to court. Or so I’m told. Ugly accusations and counter-charges. A good old boy judge sitting on the bench and lawyers whose fervor is in direct proportion to their fees, digging up dirt. Nosy neighbors sitting in the pews, all ears.
What is considered frivolous or boring or drab in your own life is considered dramatic in the lives of other people. That’s why soap operas are so popular.
I have no intention of being a soap opera, and I tell my daughter so.
“No, Lydia. That’s not how it’s going to be. I promise you that.”
Satisfied, she moves on to other things, the spring flower garden she planted all by herself, the argument she and Beth had about the nude painting Lydia found at a flea market and hung in her room, the cute checkout clerk she met at Sack and Save.
“I’m so proud of you, honey. In spite of your little tiff, it seems that the two of you are doing all right together.”
“We’re cool, Mom. Don’t worry.”
“You think maybe she’ll come around after this divorce is final?” I hate doing this to my daughter, putting her in the middle, acting like a needy child instead of the parent. “Forget I said that, Lydia. It wasn’t fair.”
“That’s okay.”
I think about asking Lydia to see if Beth will come to the phone, then discard the idea. Still, after we finish talking, I feel the blues settling in for a stint that might last an hour but likely will continue through the night.
Piles of paraphernalia pertaining to the divorce cover the desk - the diaries I’d poured my anguish into; lists of assets, his and mine; files stuffed with receipts to prove I paid for my desk, my chair, my computer out of my earnings, receipts dating as far back as the Declaration of Independence. Or so it seems. The overflow covers the loveseat and obscures the far corner of the room.
I no longer have space to grade papers at my desk, but sit instead on the sofa or in the middle of my bed. When I write, I have to move files in order to find my computer.
My daughters are wondering if their private lives are going to be paraded through a courtroom like circus animals, and I’m a hostage of evidence, a prisoner of paper.
Enraged, I rake my arm across my desk, sending files flying like unwieldy birds.
I want an equitable settlement. I want a reasonable sum to show for my twenty-year partnership. I don’t want revenge: all I want is justice.
But not at this price.
Tomorrow I’m going to call my lawyer and tell her to end this, no matter what. I can’t wait to see Jean’s and Lillian’s faces when they hear my news.
o0o
I arrive at school, bursting with my news, but Jean’s holed up in a parent/teacher conference and Lillian is nowhere to be found. Fear skitters along my nerve endings as I race to the principal’s office.
The secretary is sturdy and gray-haired, a thirty-year veteran of this school, and nothing surprises her, not even me standing there panting as if I’ve run the Boston Marathon. She’s Ruth Allhart, and she’s the only person I know whose name sums up her character.
“Where’s Lillian?”
“She called in sick this morning,” Ruth says.
I fight the urge to bolt out the door and race to her house. “How sick?”
“It was her allergies, she said.”
“Maybe not.”
Ruth reaches across the desk to pat my hand. “Honey, I heard her sniffling. I think she’s okay. Really, I do.”
“Thank you,” I tell her, then head back to my classroom and get through the rest of the morning. At noon, I hurry to the teacher’s lounge where Jean is bursting at t
he seams with news of her own.
“Bill found you a house!”
“A house! I can’t possibly buy a house till after the settlement.”
“Bill says you can. He’s got it all figured out.” If Bill says I can afford a house, I can count it as law and gospel. Still, I have a set order in my head, and this is not it. “It’s a fixer-upper, Maggie.”
“Oh lord, just what I need. Something else that needs fixing.”
“He says Matt can do it.”
“Matt who?” In all the years I’ve known Bill, I’ve never heard him mention anybody named Matt. But then Bill never says anything he doesn’t have to. He lets Jean do all the talking, and that might just be the secret to their successful marriage.
“How do I know? I’ve only seen him once. He fixes antique radios as a hobby.” Bill has at least a dozen of them, and he’d hire only the best. “He’s cute, too.”
“Cute? Good grief, how can you think of match-making after that fiasco with Halbert?”
“For Pete’s sake, Maggie. I’m not playing cupid. I’m just trying to help find you a house!”
“I’m sorry.” I hug Jean, contrite, and she hugs me back. Hard. “You’ve heard about Lillian?” She nods. “After school, let’s check on her. But we have to act normal.”
Jean sniffs then grabs a napkin off the table and wipes her eyes. “I wouldn’t know normal if it kicked me in the seat of the pants.”
o0o
Carl answers the door looking harried. Still, I can’t tell if Lillian has shared the doctor’s latest prognosis.
“Boy, am I glad to see you two!” He swings the door wide then runs his fingers through hair that has thinned in direct proportion to Lillian’s physical decline. Loud music pours from every direction of the house. “I can’t get her to stay in bed, and she won’t let me make the girls turn down that racket.”
“Don’t worry about any of it, Carl.” Jean links arms with him. “I’m going to make you some coffee while Maggie sees what she can do with Lillian.”
I can tell Jean right now what I can do with Lillian. A big fat nothing. She might be frail but unlike me, she’s not the kind of woman you can boss around - ever, about anything.
