Rainey was getting really hot and thinking of getting out and going into the air-conditioning, where she could call Harry and make certain he was still there and being her husband, when Charlene burst out with, “I just don’t know what I’m goin’ to do, Rainey!” Her eyes were wild. “I really don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Oh, Charlene, divorce is not the end of the world. Life does go on, and you are not alone. Me and Harry and Daddy are here.” It seemed a little silly to make any mention of Freddy, who even when he wasn’t crazy had never been a great help. “And you have the family house. Mama left that house to you, and it is yours, so you’re not without resources. There’s plenty of room for you and the kids and Daddy.”
“Oh, good grief,” Charlene said. At least her panic had turned to annoyance. “I can just see it. Me and the kids and Daddy and all those old women he keeps taking in nowadays. It’s like an old women’s home. I don’t know why he can’t take in old men.”
“He does. It’s just that they keep dyin’ faster than the women.”
Charlene stared at Rainey, and Rainey stared back.
“Well, I do not want to go back to that house,” Charlene said emphatically. “I don’t care that Mama left it to me. As long as Daddy’s alive it is his house, really. And how would I move everything? Just look at that garage.”
Rainey looked and had to agree it would really be a job. The garage was so stuffed the door had to be left open.
Charlene said, “You know what I’ve done for the past fifteen years? I’ve been a mother and a homemaker. The most I’ve done that I could put on a resume was that I’ve substituted up at school, minding a classroom of kids. I can’t do anything. I have no education. It would take months to get my beautician’s license again. I can’t even drive, Rainey.”
“You can drive. You just won’t drive,” Rainey felt called on to point out, although she felt vaguely sorry for doing so at this moment.
Charlene had not driven for almost six years, since the time she had collided with a drink truck, giving Rainey a hard enough jolt to cause her to lose her baby. The doctors had thought at the time that Rainey would have lost the baby anyway, but no one had ever been able to convince Charlene of that.
“Would you want me to drive you right now?” Charlene asked. For an instant her depressed state seemed to fall away, and she gazed at Rainey’s belly with that raised eyebrow that, as always, said she knew some things.
“I would ride with you after you have a little practice,” Rainey said.
She realized then that she was holding her belly, and she moved her hand and smoothed her shirt. It was a little distressing that she was not bigger in the belly. She was not a skinny woman, but she was a hard-muscled one. Harry loved her body, she recalled with a pleasurable warmth. He liked to run his hands over her and say, “You are beautiful.” Harry was the most open, honest man she had ever known.
“You know what is the worst?” Charlene said, demanding.
“No…what?”
“The worst is that I’ve loved Joey since I was twenty-two years old. Any time I felt angry at him, I’d pray for God to help me love him. I would think of how Mama had hurt Daddy so much, and how I used to lie in that bed and pray for Daddy to come home. I never wanted Joey to leave me, so I’ve worked and worked and tried to be the best wife in the world, and I’ve still messed it up.”
Charlene went to crying mad then. She had to open the glove box again to find more napkins for her runny nose. That was the awful thing about crying—a runny nose. Here one was having a major heartbreak, about to go crazy, and one had to deal with hardly being able to breathe and snot running everywhere.
“I have to get myself together,” she mumbled to Rainey around the napkin at her nose. “I have to take care of my children. They can’t have a mother comin’ apart.”
Blowing her nose, she straightened up to go inside and be cheerful.
Five
The City Hall thermometer reads 82°
Saturday morning, when Winston came in the back door after the flag raising and tending the rosebushes, he found Mildred sitting at the kitchen table in her fuchsia silk bathrobe and white sleep turban, her face powdered and blushed and lips colored brightly.
“Northrupt’s got a new flag,” he told her as he laid her rose on the table. “He’s gone to half a size larger.”
Mildred was digging into her purse, pulling out things one by one. She seemed to take this inventory on a regular basis. She paused, looked at him and blinked. “A bigger flag?”
“Yes. He just had to beat me out. That’s why he did it. A whole new rig that rolls straight down.”
“Well, that’s nice.” Mildred had returned to digging in her handbag.
“It almost touches the ground. He’s gonna have to raise his holder if he wants to be sure it doesn’t touch the ground.”
“Here they are…my coupons! I have one for Jimmy Dean sausage. Vella gave it to me.”
Winston gazed at her.
“Jimmy Dean Sausage, hot, medium or mild,” Mildred read from the coupon, then said, “Vella says Belinda has real high blood pressure.”
Winston wondered at the woman.
“Ruthanne’s blood pressure isn’t so good, either. What are we going to have for breakfast, Winston?”
He sighed and said, “I imagine we’ll whip up somethin’.” By we, he meant him, because Mildred never did anything but pour orange juice and maybe get toast out of the toaster, and they didn’t let Ruthanne near the stove.
He threw out yesterday’s flowers and placed the new blooms in the green vase. Then he poured himself a cup of coffee.
“We only have two eggs and no sausage,” Mildred said.
He snapped open the newspaper. It was thin today, always was on Saturdays. The top headline read More Glitches in the Time and Temperature. They were sure having a problem with the new sign. The time still did not display, which probably was a blessing, because it wasn’t keeping the correct time, anyway. They finally got it to bong on the hour, only the few times it successfully bonged, most thought it was cannon fire from up at Fort Sill. The mayor was taking a lot of flak over this sign.
Mildred said, “We have this coupon, but the sausage is still down at the store. Oh, yes, it’s still in date. Expiration 12-31. It doesn’t have a blood pressure warning. Maybe it should have.”
He looked up from the paper. Mildred’s own blood pressure was no great shakes, but it didn’t stop her from eating. Food had become a main reason for Mildred’s living. He probably should be glad. Once sex had been her focus, but since the stroke it was food, and that really was easier to deal with.
She was again digging into her big handbag. “We could have a small breakfast and go out for a big lunch,” she suggested and stopped to look up at him.
“Okay. We could drive up to the Squire’s Cafeteria in Lawton. How ’bout that?” In Lawton he could buy a new flag at the army surplus store. Northrupt had raised, and he was going to call, by golly.
“Oh, yes…” Mildred fairly glowed. “And I have some packets of Thousand Island dressing in here somewhere, I’m sure I do.”
Winston moved down to the next headline, Heat Wave Takes Toll. He hoped it wasn’t anyone he knew. No, they were talking about the condition of the roads.
“Squire’s makes a really good green salad, but I don’t much like their dressing. That dressing Charlene makes is really good—she should bottle it. Do you think now that she and Joey are broke up, Charlene might like to have Sunday dinner every Sunday?”
Mildred’s question finally got through, and he looked up to see her gazing hopefully at him.
She added, “It might take her mind off her troubles, you know, to keep busy. She is such a good hostess.”
This was not the first time she had suggested Charlene should have dinner every week. No restaurant was able to please Mildred quite as well as Charlene could.
“For all we know Charlene and Joey might be back tog
ether. I don’t think we need to jump to conclusions.”
“They weren’t yesterday. You know that. When we saw Larry Joe, I asked, and he said they weren’t. Larry Joe needs new shoes. Why does he wear those beat-up boots? Maybe you could buy him new ones.”
Winston gazed at her. She was not looking at him but at the array of coupons and food packages in front of her.
“I don’t see how they can ever get back together,” she said, her voice turning sharp. “Not after all that Joey has done.”
“Well, maybe it isn’t so much what Joey has done,” Winston inserted, “as what they both do about it. And it isn’t anyone else’s business.”
“No…I suppose not. But he has just humiliated her.”
“He’s just run off, not dunked her head in a puddle.”
“How can you say that? Oh, here’s that Thousand Island dressing. I knew I had it. Are you going to ask Charlene about this Sunday’s dinner?” She lifted hopeful eyes.
Winston said, “I imagine Charlene might better like it if we asked her to come out to a restaurant and eat with us once in a while.”
Her face fell. “Oh…yes, I suppose she might.”
“Have you smelled your rose?” he asked, giving up and folding his paper under his arm.
“Oh…no.” She held the rose up and inhaled deeply, and a slow smile came over her face. “Oh…”
“I’ll go get showered, and then I’ll come down and make some toast or something.”
Leaving Mildred happily returning to surveying the contents of her purse, he took his coffee and the vase of fresh blossoms upstairs.
The sounds of splashing and Ruthanne humming “Amazing Grace” came through the partially opened door of the hall bathroom as he passed. Ruthanne wasn’t being provocative; she just tended to forget. He shut the door for her, and she called sweetly, “Thank you,” as if to some stranger off the street come in to shut her bathroom door.
Winston continued on down to his own room, where he set the vase of roses beside the photograph of Coweta atop the dresser. “Where are you?” he asked the photograph.
His wife had not paid him a visit in a good many days. He thought this rude. And he thought she needed to be here for this new crisis with one of their children. She was the one everyone had always turned to in a crisis.
He had begun to feel someone looking at him outside, and now he wanted to see his wife, and she wouldn’t show up. He thought about calling out to her, whispering around, maybe, but that seemed to be too close to the narrow line between full and lost faculties.
Six
The City Hall thermometer reads 101°
Charlene spent most of Saturday in anxious anticipation of Joey’s arrival to get Jojo and Danny J. that evening. By the time he came, she had done a major fix-up. She had washed her hair, using a lemon rinse and brushing it dry in the sunshine to bring out the shine. Rainey had repainted Charlene’s fingernails and toenails to go with her dress. Charlene had the house downright cool so her makeup wouldn’t melt, and she had her hair curled and piled atop her head, earrings dangling at her ears, and was dressed in a cotton floral print sundress that was cut to accentuate everything she had—which was in generous proportion up top—and camouflage some of which she had too much of a little lower.
In the privacy of her bathroom, she stood in front of the mirror and tugged at the dress’s bodice.
The cut of the dress was not the motherly sort she normally wore; it barely covered what it was supposed to, which had been the idea when she’d bought it—when she’d been so desperately trying to capture Joey’s attention. On the two occasions that she had worn the dress, however, Joey hadn’t really seemed to notice at all. This memory dampened her faith that she might succeed in making him sorry for what he had left behind. But, still, she was driven to try.
In a further attempt to provoke a subconscious sensual aura, she bent over and whipped off her panties. She had read of this little trick in one of the women’s magazines out of New York City, which was always having stuff like that in it—how to be more alluring and sexy, all stuff that didn’t much relate to the life of a middle-aged housewife in middle America, but she read it at the doctor’s office anyway, wondering what went on in the lives of beautiful New York City women, who probably never had to clean a toilet. Each time she had tried the little stunt of going without panties, she felt quite bold and pleased with her secret; however, she always worried what might happen should she get caught in a wind that lifted her dress or have some sort of accident.
When Joey arrived, she peeked through the curtain of the window beside the door. She watched him get slowly out of the truck. He stood a moment as if uncertain which door to approach. As if maybe afraid to come to the door at all, and this was highly annoying. Was she such a frightening woman?
Hand grasping the knob, she whisked open the door and greeted him. “Hello, Joey.”
This threw him into a startled look, which she immediately handled by welcoming him inside with all the grace of a founding member of the Junior League.
“Come on in. Jojo and Danny J. are ready and waiting with anticipation.”
She smiled her warmest smile and spoke in her most charming voice. As she moved, she was conscious of the dress swirling around her bare legs.
“Here they are,” she said, as if presenting him with a gift.
She swept her children to their feet and out the door with their father, and stood on the front step waving them off. She stood there next to the scrubby climbing rosebush, waving while the truck drove down the drive and turned onto the highway, until it disappeared around the corner.
Then she came back into the house, slammed the door and flopped down on the couch, saying to Rainey, “I felt like the faithful family dog, left behind.”
Joey slipped into one side of the booth, while his two youngest children slipped into the other, both of them staring at him. He had the feeling they were looking into the deep shame of his mind.
He reached over and took the menu from behind the napkin holder, and in the process he managed to knock over the saltshaker. He set it straight, then brushed the spilled salt into his hand, and then he didn’t know what to do with it. He finally just brushed it off his hands under the table. Jojo bent and looked underneath.
Joey opened the menu. “Do you want the works?” he asked.
“All right,” Danny J. said, with a nod. He was slouched in the corner of the booth in a manner that looked obnoxious. Joey thought maybe he should tell Danny J. to sit up, but he didn’t know why the boy shouldn’t slouch if he wanted to. He thought maybe good fathers would know, but he didn’t.
He looked over at Jojo. She stared at him with her large hazel eyes. She had not said a word since he’d picked them up. She had sat very close to him, though, and smiled at him.
“Jojo, is that okay with you?” He felt as if he had to keep his voice real low or she might jump up and run like a skittish colt.
“I don’t like the olives.”
“You can pick the olives off,” Danny J. said.
“We’ll just get it without the olives,” Joey said, smiling at Jojo. “That okay?”
She nodded and gave a little grin that made him feel good.
“I like the olives,” Danny J. said with some force, causing Jojo’s grin to disappear.
Joey looked at him. Danny J. stared back for just an instant before turning to look out the window. Joey saw a teenage girl getting out of a car. Her midriff down to below her belly button was bare, and he didn’t think she had a bra on. And he knew his son was watching this girl.
“How ’bout we get two pizzas?” Joey said, feeling pleased to have come up with the logical idea that he was fairly certain Charlene would have started out with.
Just then, at the very moment of that thought, he glanced again out the window and was startled by seeing Charlene’s Suburban driving slowly past. Charlene, her face with dark sunglasses staring right at the restaurant…Rainey at the wheel.
Checking up on him, he thought with irritation. But then he wondered if she was coming to join them. Charlene could hardly let the children out of her sight. No, the truck went on past. She was just checking on him, and his irritation slipped a little into disappointment.
“Daddy…Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom.” Jojo was scooting out of the booth.
“Oh…okay. You know where it is?” Joey looked around with some confusion.
“Yes.”
Watching her go, he felt a little at a loss and experienced a strong longing for Charlene to turn around and come back inside and handle everything. He turned back in the booth, and Danny J. was gazing at him again.
The City Hall thermometer reads 99°
After making certain of the whereabouts of Danny J. and Jojo, Charlene had Rainey drive over to Stidham’s Texaco, so she could see Larry Joe, too. He worked at Stidham’s part-time. Norm Stidham wouldn’t put him on full-time because then he’d have to pay him benefits.
“Don’t you think you’re bein’ a little neurotic?” Rainey asked.
“Well, I think it could possibly be expected,” Charlene said. “Just go on over there and get some gas. I like to keep the tank filled, in case of an emergency. And I’m not being any more neurotic than you are driving careless. I wish you’d watch where you’re driving. I didn’t wear any panties.”
“What?”
“When we got into that argument about whether to take your car or mine, I forgot to go back in and put on panties.” Charlene didn’t like to ride around in Rainey’s—really Harry’s—little Mustang. It sat too close to the ground for her comfort, and she thought Rainey’s driving required more metal around them. “I don’t want to have a wreck and have the paramedics show up, or maybe get sprawled out for all the world to see.”
What Charlene really felt was an anxiety about being away from home. Almost as soon as Rainey had sped out of the driveway and onto the highway, Charlene had begun to experience a rather desperate urge to go back home, and now it had a strong hold on her. She felt as if she had lost her husband, and she might therefore lose her children, and her home might somehow disappear, too.
Driving Lessons Page 5
