“We’ll get a hold of your daddy and talk to him about a bucking horse,” she told him. “Now clean up this mess.”
The City Hall thermometer reads 86°
Late that night Charlene sat at the kitchen table and glued the broken parts of Danny J.’s trophies.
“Can’t even tell it was broken,” Rainey said, admiring Charlene’s work with proper appreciation.
“Super Glue can fix just about anything, I guess,” Charlene said, polishing a silver nameplate. “Except broken hearts. It’s useless there.”
“That’s God’s department. He binds up the broken-hearted,” Rainey said, and stuck her head in the refrigerator. “Do you have any chocolate? I think I’ll make some pudding. Chocolate pudding also helps the broken-hearted…and the pregnant.”
Ten
The City Hall thermometer reads 93°
Rainey had to leave. She kept telling Charlene she was sorry, but she really had to go home to Harry, as if Charlene were too dim to understand this.
“I know you have to go, hon. You cannot stay here with me forever. Even if you could, we’d drive each other nuts, or end up shootin’ each other or something.”
Charlene acted like she was putting up a brave front, to make Rainey feel good, but the truth was she was past ready for Rainey to leave and on the brink of shoving her sister out the door and tossing her clothes after her.
Rainey kept telling Charlene things like, “This time will pass,” and “You just have to be strong, hon,” and “Don’t let it get you down, Charlene.” As if Charlene being down was totally unacceptable. Whenever Charlene started crying, Rainey would look stricken. Upsetting Rainey made Charlene feel doubly guilty and overwhelmed. And she was getting awfully tired of Rainey observing her as if looking for the first signs of a crack-up.
With observation like that, Charlene herself was waiting for the crack-up, and she felt she could handle it better if she was alone with the children when it came. The children, being naturally focused on themselves as children tended to be, weren’t likely to notice or make too big a deal out of their mother cracking up. They assumed their mother was not in any way a woman; she was a mother, put on earth to provide answers and food and to pick up dirty socks. If she happened to appear a little unreasonable or unfathomable while doing these things, her children would just put it down to normal motherhood.
Another thing Charlene made up her mind had to leave along with her sister were all the maternity and baby clothes she had been saving in her hopes for another baby. The very thought of the things in the house had become intolerable.
She went to the garage and found the boxes, all neatly labeled, everything inside protected with plastic and cedar shavings. There were the wicker bassinet and little cushion for it, and all the eyelet lace that went around it, too.
“Might as well not let it set around and rot,” Charlene said. “I’m certainly not going to be using any of this.”
“Honey, you don’t know that,” Rainey said, because she thought she should say something of the sort, rather than agree with her sister, but already she was opening the boxes and pulling things out. Charlene had always bought really nice things and taken care of them, too, so even secondhand, most all of it was like new. Rainey admired the bassinet and lace and then went through the clothes, holding them up in front of her and swishing over to the mirror to get an idea of how she was going to look. But then she glanced at Charlene’s face and tried to hold herself in.
“Don’t bother to try any of it on,” Charlene told her, throwing things back in the boxes. “Just take it all, and what you don’t want, give away to one of those thrift shops.”
“Charlene, hon…”
“It’s okay, Rainey. I’m fine. Really. I’m forty-six, for heaven sake, and not one of those Hollywood movie stars who can get away with having a baby at that age. I have three wonderful children. No need to be greedy.”
She could not stand to look at any of it.
At last they had the little red Mustang packed. The bassinet and stand it went on took up almost all the back seat. Larry Joe had to tie the trunk closed with a cord. He said that would be perfectly fine to get Rainey up to Oklahoma City. He had also gotten the car gassed up, checked the oil and tires, and tightened a few loose screws in the door panel. Now he started the engine to get the air conditioner going so it would be cool when Rainey got inside.
Rainey told him as she hugged his neck, “The family has a doctor and an auto mechanic, so we have all the bases covered.” Then she hugged Danny J. and Jojo.
“I’ll call,” she said, sweeping them all with an earnest look. “And I’ll get back here in about three weeks.”
It sounded like a threat to Charlene, but she told herself it was three weeks away.
Rainey wrapped her arms around Charlene’s neck, and Charlene felt herself melt all over, and then she was hugging back.
“Thank you for stayin’ all this time, Rainey,” she said, her voice thick.
Breaking away, Rainey took Charlene’s cheeks between her hands and looked deeply into her eyes. “A year ago, when I was so confused about my life, you said something that helped me, Charlene. You said, ‘Don’t be afraid of yourself.’ Now I’m tellin’ you the same thing, honey. Don’t be afraid. Trust yourself. Trust the Spirit that is God inside you.”
Charlene really wished Rainey wouldn’t expect so much of her.
She said, wiping her brow, “It’s gettin’ hot out here. You better get goin’ in the air-conditioning. And don’t speed. You have to think about a baby now.”
Tucking Rainey into the seat of the little car about the same way she would tuck Jojo into bed at night, she closed the car door, then tested it to make certain it was shut tight.
Rainey started down the drive and thought of Harry and pressed the accelerator so hard she slung gravel. Immediately, imagining Charlene’s frown, she let up on the pedal and cast a wave out the window. When she glanced in the rearview mirror, she saw dust billowing and blowing away, and the children already going in the front door, while Charlene stood there, her hand still raised in a wave.
Her sister looked so small and sad.
Rainey felt really sorry for Charlene, but she felt the need to get home to Harry and make certain he was still her husband even more strongly. Turning onto the blacktopped highway, she hit the gas for home.
Charlene stood there staring at the rear of the red Mustang as it disappeared down the highway. She didn’t realize she was standing there alone and staring at nothing until a good gust of wind hit her.
The wind had come up hard. She blinked, dust getting into her eyes. The wind sent the three horses thundering from the big west pasture to the big east pasture. She looked upward, but the sky was still bright, so bright her eyes hurt. She shaded them and saw the wind sending dirt devils across the empty corrals and creaking the training pen gate that was still hanging open and crooked.
She heard Rainey’s voice: Don’t be afraid.
She braced herself and put her face to the wind. It came hot and dry on her cheeks, sucking her breath and all traces of moisture from her skin. It was so strong that when she finally turned for the house, she was practically sent running in order to keep on her feet.
She slammed the door closed and leaned against it for a few seconds, breathing rapidly, hearing the wind buffeting against the door, as if it was trying to get inside and suck her dry some more.
Pushing away from the door, she went to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of ice tea and rubbed lotion on her face and hands. She turned on the television, flipping through the channels, looking for an episode of Father Knows Best. She caught the last ten minutes of one and watched about a time when life was easier and everything could be made right in a half hour. After that, she flipped over to CMT to get country music, because she didn’t have a radio in the kitchen.
She watched a minute, then turned the little television set to face the wall.
Larry Joe was
getting a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator and asked, “What’d you do that for?”
“I just want to listen. I don’t want to see any of it.”
She did not need to see all of those trim, unlined twenty-five-year-old women swaying and thumping all over the place and attracting men like flies.
“I don’t know why they can’t have real women in any of those videos,” she said.
Larry Joe said, “No one would watch, I guess.”
When in good spirits, Charlene recalled her early childhood, until the age of eleven, in pleasant scenes like those out of a Bessie Pease painting, all sweet and rosy-cheeked. She recalled lovely times of walking along the tree-lined sidewalk with her hand in her mother’s on their way to church, of sitting between her parents when they drove to visit her father’s family. She recalled the easy way her father drove, and that he let her have a Popsicle in the car. There were scenes of racing around on horseback with her mother, while her father watched from the fence.
Her brother Freddy only flitted briefly in and out of these pleasant scenes. Freddy was five years older than Charlene, in the throes of adolescence by the time Charlene was turning eleven, and had never had much to do with her. Early on he had taught her things: to be firm on a horse, to ride a bike, and to tie her shoes. Then he grew up and became the big brother who existed on the fringe of her life, hardly there at all, really.
Charlene’s life was running home from school to show her mother her papers and then helping her mother prepare supper. Many times it was just Charlene and her mother having supper, but these times seemed special and cozy. And when her father was home, after supper he’d sit in the living room and read the paper, and she would sit on the floor and play with something and smell the scent of his Camels. He had always smelled of Old Spice and crisp shirts and Camels, and her mother of flowery bath powder and Chanel No.5. Sometimes her father called her Princess.
All this seemed to change one summer. The year she turned eleven, when her mother had become pregnant with Rainey. Her memories of this time were blurry and dim, like shadowy out-of-focus shots from a camera. She had not been told outright about her mother being pregnant. Just one day she knew, and that her father was very mad about it. Before this she had never seen her parents fighting, and then suddenly they were, terribly, and all the time.
She would be awakened by angry voices and would creep to the stairs and crouch there on a cold step, holding on to the enameled posts, and listen to the sharp tones coming from the living room. She wished a number of times for Freddy to come home, because her parents would restrain themselves then. But Freddy seemed gone most of the time.
“I don’t need this!” her father often shouted, and she would catch a glimpse of his khaki trousers as he strode to the front door. He slammed the door behind him.
Once Charlene raced down the steps to find her mother crying on the couch. “Oh, Mama…what’s wrong? Why are you and Daddy fighting? Where did Daddy go?”
Her mother straightened and wiped hastily at her eyes. “Nothing is wrong, darlin’. Nothing for you to worry over. Your daddy and I were only havin’ a discussion. He’s gone down to the store for a pack of cigarettes. Now, you need to be in bed. Go on…”
Charlene was confused by what she saw in contrast to her mother’s explanation. She would lie in bed and listen to sounds from the kitchen: water running in the sink, a pan hitting the stove, the clink of a dish. Soon aromas of coffee and frying meat or baking breads would waft up. Sometimes she would hear the radio playing low. She would listen very hard for her father’s return. Sometimes he would be home by morning, in which case they would all have a big breakfast that their mother had cooked in the night. Sometimes he was gone long enough to return not only to breakfast, but a full meal of chicken pot pie, gelatin salad and tomato pudding, and if he was gone for days, there would also be pecan pie and peanut patties and maybe chocolate cake that her mother had whipped up during frenetic hours in the kitchen.
The air in the house was perpetually thick with aromas and anger. The more anger, the more aroma, neither visible, but both so thick that sometimes Charlene felt she had to stay outside to play in order just to breathe. And after many nighttime arguments, she got to where instead of remaining in bed listening, she would creep back to the living room and switch the television on low. Bonanza, with Little Joe and handsome Adam, became her favorite show. There were also Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver and The Beverly Hillbillies. All stories of families with people who ended up happy with each other. When she came home from school, she took up watching game shows, like The Price Is Right and Password. She would sit close, so close as to be absorbed by the television. At times it seemed that she had been absorbed by it and was looking out, watching people walk past her but never seeing her. Her parents didn’t seem to see her at all. When she volunteered to help her mother with supper, her mother would only nod absently, and more and more her father would walk off down the street, and if she followed, he would tell her to go home.
Then Rainey was born, and her parents seemed to get a lot happier. Her father and mother both smiled a lot at the new little baby girl and showed her to all the people who came to see her. Then the only one who seemed to be mad all the time was Freddy, but he still wasn’t around much, so this didn’t affect the returning harmony in the house.
Rainey became “Little Bit,” and Charlene went from “Princess” to “Daughter.” The big sister all grown-up, her parents said, as if looking at her for the first time in two years. By then Charlene was achieving A’s in spelling from all the Password watching, but her eyesight suffered and she had to get glasses for reading, and she was some fifteen pounds overweight.
What she learned from these years was that people you loved could forget you.
The City Hall thermometer reads 101°
Joey called and spoke at length to Danny J. about the bronc riding business. Charlene, making banana pudding, lingered in the kitchen, watching her son’s face light up with anticipation as he spoke of it, of this bronc rider and that one, and all his hopes and dreams of glory on the backs of wildly bucking horses. She caught mention of his already beginning to practice, incidents that she had no idea had taken place, and which he told of in a low voice, cupping the receiver.
Then he said clearly, “Mama really says it’s okay, Dad. Here, she’ll tell you. Tell him you said it was okay, Mom.”
Charlene took the receiver. “I said it was okay with me, Joey, if it was okay with you.”
“Well, okay then.”
Joey’s low, soft voice brought a jumble of yearnings roiling over her. She squeezed her eyes closed. But then Danny J. was reaching for the phone.
“I have a few more things to tell him, Mom.”
Charlene was having trouble letting go of the receiver. “Danny J. has some more to say,” she got out before the receiver was pulled from her hands.
She had more to say, too, she thought. We need to talk, Joey, not yell at each other. Can’t we do that? Can you come home, Joey?
She waited with her ear cocked and her breath held, but Joey didn’t request to speak with her.
Danny J. plopped the receiver on the hook and said, “Dad’s gonna look for a buckin’ horse.”
After her son left the kitchen, Charlene gazed for a long minute at the phone. Then she strode out of the room and went to lie in her bed with a cool rag over her eyes.
The City Hall thermometer reads 86°
She would write Joey a letter. She got her favorite blue ink pen and linen stationery and sat at the kitchen table, with CMT playing on the television with its screen turned to the wall. Then she sat gazing at the night-black window reflecting the kitchen, seeing in her mind’s eye Joey’s blue truck arriving in a hurried dust ball and herself running out there to hear him say, “I’ve come home. You won’t be a divorced woman.”
What she truly wanted was to wake up and find him riding a horse around the training pen and that all of it h
ad been some horrible nightmare that she could forget. She so wished everything to be like it used to be between them, in the good times, before it all fell apart.
Remember that first kiss? Oh, Lord, what a kiss.
It had been their third date before Joey kissed her. They’d been driving home from a movie in Lawton, and she’d been sitting beside him, imagining what it was going to be like to kiss him, imagining turning into his arms when he pulled up in front of her house, tingling from the sweet anticipation of every bit of it, when all of a sudden, Joey ripped the truck off the road, jammed on the brakes and looked at her with his chest heaving. Then he grabbed her and kissed her socks right off.
She blinked, coming out of memory and seeing the blank paper in front of her. She smoothed the paper and then wrote: Dear Joey, I…
And where was she going to mail this letter? To Sheila Arnett’s?
She got the telephone book and ran her finger down the listings. Arnett…Sheila A. Address listed simply as “East of City.”
She stared at the phone number for long minutes, imagining the sound of Sheila Arnett’s voice answering on the other end.
Sitting herself down once more, Charlene again took up the pen. All she had to put on the envelope was Joey Darnell, the Arnett farm, and the letter would be delivered. That was how things were in Valentine.
Yes, and before the afternoon was up, word would be whispered from one end of town to the other that Charlene had sent a letter to her husband out at the Arnett farm. And it would be black-haired Sheila Arnett walking to her mailbox and pulling out the letter meant for Joey. Charlene saw it all clearly in her mind.
Throwing down the pen, she shot up from the chair, and before she knew it, she had walked out to the Suburban parked beneath the swaying limbs of the elm.
Opening the door, she got in behind the wheel. The keys were in it; they were always in it. Larry Joe would say, “Mom, really, who’s gonna steal it?”
Driving Lessons Page 10
