“How do you know you can trust him?” Glenda said, watching me take my first bite. “How do you know he’s a good man? How do you know where he comes from or what he wants?”
“Maybe he just loves me for who I am. Is that so hard to believe?” I asked between mouthfuls. “Am I so terrible that a man can’t want me for myself?”
“You know that’s not what I’m saying.”
“Sure sounds like it. That’s the message I’m getting.”
“Well, it’s not what I meant.” Her eyes followed the fork from my plate to my mouth. “How’s the pie?”
“Nasty. I knew I should have got the lemon meringue. Why don’t I listen to my instincts? This one tastes like something you pulled off the bottom of your shoe.” I licked the fork. The whip cream wasn’t bad. “You want a bite?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry you don’t like it. You don’t have to finish it if you don’t want.”
“Flag that waitress down. I want some coffee.”
When she’d filled my cup, I said, “I feel like my old self again, after all these years. Not my self that everybody knows, but from a long time ago. My whole self, before things happened.”
Glenda didn’t know what to make of that. To tell the truth, we weren’t used to talking that way. No one was more surprised than me, but I wasn’t done yet. “I know it’s hard for you to hear this, after your daddy and all. Don’t worry about him. Him and me had us a whole life together. This is apart from that. It’s altogether different. This is just me, my whole self, at the end of my life.”
She took a sip of my coffee. Her eyes welled up—I don’t know if the drink was too hot, or she was hurt. “But why?” she asked. “What is it about this man that makes how you feel different?”
Well, I’ve been asking myself the same question, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to let on. “I been hurting a long time,” I started out, feeling my way. “I been … Well … you know. Sick. I wasn’t well.” I stopped to put the last few bites of pie in my mouth.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” she said, narrowing her eyes like she didn’t believe what I was telling her.
“Them pills and all. How I was sleeping. And my heart, it was breaking all the time. Slow breaking. I was so lonesome. Pining, deep inside. I couldn’t tell no one.”
“But how did it happen?”
“Something inside me perked up,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t know how else to explain it. Something woke up and took notice.”
“But why him?”
“I never met no one like Vitus. He’s from another country. He don’t look at me like a regular man. He looks at me different. Like a person. A whole person.”
“Daddy didn’t?”
She was fired up, ready to defend Abel tooth and nail, so I had to be careful. “I’m not blaming your dad,” I said, “but it was just different between me and him. Maybe I didn’t let him. I don’t know. He wasn’t interested in the same things.”
The waitress came with the bill. Glenda looked at her watch and let go of another sigh. “I guess we should be going. I got to take you back so I can get on the road before all the traffic starts.”
“Are you going to try and stop us?” I asked while she was taking money out of her wallet to pay the bill.
She made a big show of not answering me while she figured in her head, counted out the bills, and finally dug through the change compartment of her wallet to find a few pennies.
“The thing that bothers me,” she said as she pushed the tray with the money and check to the edge of the table, “is that I don’t know how this man feels about you. You’ve told me how you feel, but how does he feel in return?”
“That is none of your business,” I snapped. “That is a private matter that has nothing to do with you.”
She put her wallet in her purse and took out her keys. You can’t believe how many doodads she has hanging off the key ring—charms, feather, beads, shells, even a little flashlight. Weighs a ton, and jingles like a mule team.
“You’ve been honest with me,” she said. “Some people might think you’ve been too honest. So, I have to tell you right out in the open.” She paused, then looked me square in the eye. “That man did not make a good impression on me.”
“You’re not a kid no more. You don’t have to live with Vitus or do what he says. This is between him and me. I ain’t asking you to call him Dad.”
“Let’s go,” she said.
It took me awhile to scoot out of that booth, which may sound bad to you, but to me it’s a big improvement because six months ago I wouldn’t have been able to sit in it at all.
“Thank you for lunch,” I said when I stood up. I brushed off my lap and straightened my top. “I appreciate it.”
She was tight-lipped all the way home. I figured two could play the silent-treatment game, so I clammed up, too. While I looked out the side window, I got my revenge by picturing me throwing out those renters in my house, moving in, and getting all new furniture. I saw me and Vitus in the living room, him stretched out on the couch, me in the armchair, Lulu in her spot under the coffee table. “Woozy darling,” he said in that gorgeous accent of his. He put his fingers to his lips and threw me a kiss.
THE FALL
After lunch day before yesterday I thought I’d take a shortcut across the courtyard instead of going back down the hall to my room. The gardener had washed down the pavement and before I knew what was happening my feet slipped (the soles of those damn gold slippers are slick as snot) and my legs windmilled and I got that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells you you’re about to fall. You know what I’m talking about? For one split second I thought I might save myself, but the next instant a voice inside said, Get ready girl, you are going down.
Well, I just couldn’t believe it. When you’re a kid, falling is no big deal. You do it every day. But let me tell you, at my age falling down is a major event. It’s something you don’t soon forget. Way too often it changes your life, and if you don’t believe me, you should see this place, which is chock-full of old ladies who lost their homes and their freedom just because they slipped and broke a hip. They are stuck here for no other reason than their cat got underfoot or they missed the last step or they got up in the night and had a dizzy spell. One little flop and their lives might as well be over. If they’re lucky they can still hobble around on one of them walkers, but like as not they’re tied to the bed for the rest of their lives, which turns out not to be too long because who can hold up for any length of time like that?
Believe it or not, all of that was going through my mind while my arms were spinning like propellers and I was doing my damnedest to get my balance back. That falling took a long time. I finally gave up and thought, Here I am, I’m really falling and Lord knows it’s going to be a bad one because the ground is coming up at me mighty fast and I’m not at all ready for it.
Last time I fell was a good ten years ago, when Abel was still alive. There’d been a frost overnight and I was going down the back steps when my feet flipped up over my head and I slammed down on my tailbone and bumped down the rest of the steps like a rubber ball. I’m talking hurt like you never felt before. Each stair I screamed louder, so that Abel came running with shaving cream still on his face. He found me splayed out at the bottom of the porch like a rag doll. Almost scared him to death.
I had time to remember that, too, as I was going down. Had time to wonder—while I flew with my arms straight out in front of me like Superman—just how many bones I was going to break and who was going to see me fall and whether I might need surgery once it was all over. Round about then I hit the sidewalk like a ton of bricks, hit harder than I even imagined I would, my hands first and then my knees. The jolt went up through every joint of my body, clanging the bones together like a pileup on the freeway, the cars smacking into each other bang bang bang in a chain reaction. My neck snapped back
, my teeth crashed together, and the wind got knocked out of me. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, my teeth flew out of my mouth and skidded like a hockey puck across the pavement.
I crouched on my hands and knees like an animal and gasped for breath. My housedress was thrown up over my backside, but all I could do was moan and roll over onto my side. Wouldn’t you know that a little knot of people just coming out of the dining room saw the whole damn thing? Bad as I was hurting, I saw those fogies push and shove to get a better look at me lying there like a beached whale. My teeth were two blocks away, over on the edge of the grass. I couldn’t tell if anything was broken, if I’d had a heart attack, or paralyzed myself.
The gardener who’d caused the whole thing ran over and tried to help me up. He was no bigger than a gnat and I pulled him down on top of me. The show was getting better and better. I’d started to get my breath back by that time, and I could hear the crowd buzzing, excited as if they were at a circus.
“Somebody fell,” a geezer said.
“That fat lady,” another one had the nerve to add, as if I was already dead with no ears to hear.
One of the nurses’ aides came running over, her and the boss lady with the big caboose. The more I got my wits about me, the more the misery sunk in. I covered my mouth with my hand and yelled, “Fetch my teeth! They’re over there by the spigot.”
Lord, what a production. My hands were smarting, my knees were throbbing, and my back was way out of whack. I’d smacked my chin on the cement and—before my teeth flew out—I’d somehow managed to bite my tongue. But all I wanted right then was to haul myself up and get out of the sight of those vultures who were ogling and whispering and drooling like they were at a peep show. The boss lady and the workers were cooing and clucking, asking me if I was all right, but for the life of me I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t get up, either. The best I could do was drag myself up on my hands and knees and pant like a dog.
Then I heard Poison Ivy. She bustled her busybody ass over to me and said in a voice loud as a bullhorn, “Don’t move, Cora! Stay right where you are! Wait there ‘til they come with a gurney.”
Well, not much could have raised me, but when I heard that voice and crooked my head up to see her smirking down at me in her gold earrings and painted nails and perfect little pantsuit, I reared up on my knees like a stallion. “Get over here!” I hollered to two of those boys who clear the tables. I grabbed one under each arm and grunted and groaned and almost mashed them into the ground, leaning on them until I hauled myself up and stood.
“I don’t need no gurney,” I spat at the crowd. The gardener handed me my teeth and I jammed them in my face. “I can walk back to my room.”
SO HERE I am, writing in bed. I got an ice pack on my knees, which look like they been through a meat grinder. The little finger on my right hand is swollen up to the size of a broom handle and I can barely bend my wrist. The palms of my hands are scraped up and pocked with gravel. My tongue feels like those cow tongues you see at the butcher shop, my one ankle is big as a tree stump, and my neck is so sore I can’t turn my head. The icing on the cake is my chin, which is scraped raw. It keeps bleeding down the front of my nightgown like I tore up a live rabbit and ate it for dinner.
I’ll tell you again, it’s no joke to fall down at my age.
My first thought was to load up on pills and drift off to never-never land, but I wrestled with myself and fought off the urge. I did! All I took was a couple of aspirin; now I feel like there’s a halo floating over my head while I sit here in bed. I can’t believe I didn’t snap my wrist or break a leg, and even though I feel like a truck ran over me, backed up, and did it again for good measure, I’m lucky. I could have ended up in B Wing, locked up in bedlam with those lunatics and half-deads. As it is, I’m still walking, still got my wits about me, and still making plans to get out of here.
A WAY OUT
Marcos brought me a big book of maps from the Day Room. I put it across my knees and use it as a writing table. I’m stuck here in bed all black and blue, so I’m making the best of it and catching up on my story. Better than laying here looking up at the ceiling.
A LITTLE MORE than a week after Edward lit out, Ruby got married. She’d been planning it forever, and it was a big event.
I can’t rightly describe the state I was in except to say that I moved my feet and hands, I went through the motions of every day, but I hardly knew I was alive. I’d been like that since the minute I heard Edward had gone off to St. Louis without a word, leaving me holding the bag. I didn’t know such suffering was possible, that every minute could be filled with such misery that my body felt poisoned, soaked with sorrow. How could he leave me like that? The sorriest thing was that I still loved him. I did. More than ever. I pined for him day and night. I couldn’t get through one hour without wondering where he was, what he was doing, if he was thinking of me, of our baby. I touched my own mouth with my fingertips, pretending it was his lips. I handled myself, my eyes shut tight, imagining it was his touch I was feeling, his body next to me. Despite what he’d done, I yearned for him with every ounce of my being. I drove myself crazy, hoping any day now I’d hear a knock on the door and there he’d be, hat in hand. Saying he was sorry, that he’d thought better of things, had come to take me away.
Each day that got less and less likely, and I had to face the fact that I was in a stone fix. St. Louis could have been Timbuktu as far as I was concerned. I didn’t have the first idea how to get in touch with Edward, and I don’t think I would have tried even if I did. I missed my period for the second month, and I still didn’t breathe a word to anyone. With Edward gone, I was more ashamed than ever, and I was clean out of options. I decided I couldn’t live without him. I decided I didn’t want to.
I made my preparations. I chose the rope from the coils we had hanging on pegs in the barn. I’d already picked my branch, the one that reached over the creek down by the springs. When the panic set in at night, or when I woke in the morning still in the same fix, I told myself that soon it would all be over, and that calmed me, made me able to get through another day. It wouldn’t be right to spoil Ruby’s wedding, so I’d wait until she was married. Then I’d put an end to my problems.
Her wedding was on a Saturday in the middle of September. That morning was still and hot—every hour it just got hotter. The ceremony wasn’t until late in the afternoon. By the time we all gathered in the church it was stifling. Women fanned themselves and babies fussed. All buttoned up in our fancy clothes, we could hardly draw breath, me most of all.
Ruby had her best friend, Karlene, stand up with her. Calvin had his brother J.D., who worked down in the mines along with half the men there in the church. Our family was up in the first pew on the bride’s side, Ma and Daddy and me and Crystal and Jasper, with our aunts and uncles in the pews behind us, and our cousins behind them. Calvin’s ma sat across the aisle from us looking like a big old grizzly who’d been forced into a dress made out of a ground tarp. She kept blowing her nose so loud you couldn’t hear a word of what was being said.
I watched Ruby’s back, thinking how she’d been with me every day since I’d been born, how we’d slept in the same bed every night, how we’d laughed and fought and ate together. Pretty soon I wouldn’t be around anymore. I worked myself into a lather thinking how all those people there in the church would feel when they heard the news, how Ruby would go on with her married life and have kids who would never know me, their aunt Cora who died right after their mama got married. I started sniffling as I pictured all that life going on without me, but a lot of people were shedding tears, so no one paid me any mind.
I couldn’t help but think that it should have been my wedding, that I should have been standing up there with Edward. It affected me so bad that when Calvin finally kissed the bride and the preacher turned them around to introduce Mr. and Mrs. Roberts to the congregation, I let out such a sob that Ruby looked down at me f
rom the altar and raised her eyebrows. I cried the bitterest tears as they strutted to the back of the church together, man and wife, and I know everyone thought I was brokenhearted about losing my sister, but I was crying for myself, bawling my eyes out because there I was, only seventeen years old, and my life was over.
BUT WE DON’T really know squat about what’s going to happen to us and where we’re headed, do we? My daddy had rented Neosho’s banquet hall, and after the wedding everyone headed over there. They’d set up big barbecues in the back and some of my uncles were already out there stoking them.
Even though Baptists aren’t supposed to dance, my father hired a band—three boys playing fiddle, accordion, and guitar. There wasn’t supposed to be liquor, either, but you could see it being passed round, mostly by the men who’d taken over the side of the room by the little stage. The women were on the other side with the kids winding in and out of their legs. Folks danced in the middle, more and more by the minute, spinning and kicking up their heels. The younger kids played out front, chasing each other around in the dirt. There was quite a crowd, with so much noise and commotion you couldn’t hear yourself think.
I stood in a corner with the girl cousins. I had plenty, not to mention second and third cousins and relatives once removed, so many that I couldn’t keep track of them, not that there was any reason to try. They were watching the men across the room, making bedroom eyes at the ones they fancied while still keeping track of who was dancing with who, chattering about who was too big for her britches, how could so-and-so show up in such a getup, and generally being the biggest busybodies on the face of the earth. They were excited because Calvin’s family was there and that was a lot of fresh blood for those girls to sort out, deciding which boys were worth paying attention to and which didn’t deserve the time of day.
Breaking Out of Bedlam Page 16
