“At least CNN ain’t carrying the full story,” said Marlene. “They’ve just been showing the trailer every now and then, and mentioning that some nut up in Maine has taken a poodle hostage. It don’t seem to matter that he’s got those women, too. That’s small potatoes these days, what with people going into McDonald’s and killing everyone they see.” Rita patted her hand about on the kitchen table, feeling around behind the plastic flower centerpiece that Mattie kept there.
“I can’t find my cigarettes,” she said.
“That’s because they’re out on the porch,” said Mattie, “which is where smoking will take place from now on, at least while you’re all staying in this house.”
“Now, Mama,” said Gracie. “You’re overreacting again.”
“I’m curious about something,” said Mattie. “So just for the fun of it, fill me in. Why aren’t you all in your own homes?” Marlene exchanged looks with Gracie, who peered anxiously at Rita.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Rita, as though she were talking to a ten-year-old. “We’ve been all through this before. You don’t exactly have your thinking cap on tight when it comes to Sonny. And when them journalists find out the truth, which they will because even journalists can root up the occasional acorn, they’re gonna come down on this house like locusts.” She shook her head, tired of explaining the obvious.
“So?” asked Mattie. “I can handle a few locusts.”
“Mama, listen to me for a minute, please.” It was Marlene’s turn. Mattie directed her full attention to her middle daughter. Marlene was probably the prettiest of the girls, had been so when she was a baby, what with Lester’s deep chestnut eyes and butterfly lashes, not to mention his ample lips. Mattie waited.
“Come on, Marlene,” said Gracie, “say something or get off the pot.”
“It’s just that Mattagash, Maine, is kind of used to watching Sonny carry on. It’s nothing real new to them, except that now it’s on television.” Rita seemed too eager to agree with Marlene for once. She was nodding so much, Mattie feared her neck might break and the head roll away. Or maybe it was the onslaught of a nicotine fit Mattie was watching unfold.
“Sonny always did stand out like a turd at a pee party,” Rita said. Mattie shook her head. More pious talk from the Born Again. Rita must have gotten that from Deuteronomy.
“And you, Mama,” Marlene continued, “well, you’re what they call vulnerable right now. You could say and do anything. Everybody knows how you favor Sonny, and, well, if something tragic should happen, who knows what might swim through your mind.” She was finished. Mattie watched her closely, watched her fidget in her chair. They never could take being stared down, the girls couldn’t. Swim through her mind. What did Marlene think? A school of salmon was gonna swim upstream in Mattie’s head and spawn there? She looked at Gracie, who looked again at Rita. Were these really the babies she’d born, anemic but healthy babies, babies who had missed out on those things, what the doctor called antigens? Were these three grown women her kin?
“We’re just trying to help,” Rita, one of them, said.
“This is one way,” said Gracie, that schoolbook look on her face again, “for us four to finally bond, the way mothers and daughters should do.” Now they waited, the daughters. Mattie thought about the consequences of throwing them out the front door, onto the porch with their cigarettes. They had been whining for almost thirty years that Sonny was the pet, Sonny was too spoiled, Sonny called the shots in Mattie’s life. Well, she would sit it out another day, holed up in the house. Sonny had two women. She had three. And Mattie knew very well why the girls weren’t taking turns watchdogging her. They were all afraid that if one spent too much time with Mattie, bonded too well without the other two being there to prevent it, the little mushroom of a house would go to that one daughter in Mattie’s will.
“You’ll smoke on the front porch,” Mattie told them. “And that goes for all of you.”
“Wesley says that Sonny’s losing his charm when he has to take women at gunpoint,” Marlene told her sisters, who both snickered. Wesley. This was Wesley Stubbs, from Watertown, who had swum upriver himself one day, to spawn with Marlene. Sonny used to say that if Wesley Stubbs had been born Indian, they’d have called him Brave Who Cheats Workmen’s Comp. “He’s a chiropractor’s best friend,” Sonny had told Mattie many times, and the two of them had laughed together, as the girls were now laughing. They had bonded, she and Sonny, many times. “If it weren’t for workmen’s comp, Wesley would be putting the holes in doughnuts in one of them Dunkin’ places,” Sonny would say. And then he would have to quote his favorite line. “If Wesley Stubbs had been born Indian, Mama, they’d have called him Skidoo That Rides Like the Wind.” It was pretty much general knowledge that Wesley spent the summers with his hands grasping a fishing pole, winters with his hands grasping the throttle of his yellow snowmobile. Mattie smiled, just thinking of Sonny and his crazy sense of humor. “If so-and-so had been born Indian” was the beginning of one of Sonny’s many routines.
Rita went out on the front porch, letting the screen door bang behind her. Mattie watched through the window as she beat a cigarette out of her pack, lit up, and then exhaled. In seconds she was back at the screen door, peering through, her left hand cupping her right elbow as she held her cigarette aloft. Smoke rose up behind her head and wafted off in the general direction of downtown Mattagash, “the metropolitan district,” as Sonny called it.
“Were you saying anything?” Rita wondered through the screen.
“You didn’t miss a single syllable,” Mattie reassured her. Marlene turned to Mattie.
“I ain’t looked in my purse yet,” said Marlene. “Are my cigarettes still in there?”
“They probably are,” said Mattie. “I don’t go looking in purses. I never did when you was all teenagers, and I ain’t about to start now. I do, however, lay claim to what I find on my kitchen table.” Marlene sighed a weary sigh.
“I don’t smoke nearly as much as Rita,” she said. “But you’re sure none of us are allowed to smoke in the house.” This came not as a question but as a statement. Mattie answered her, anyway.
“Ditto,” said Mattie. Marlene took her purse and went out to join Rita.
“You got a spare match?” Mattie heard her ask. Now Mattie turned to look at Gracie.
“I’m trying to quit,” said Gracie, foreguessing what was on Mattie’s mind. “Smoking and exercise don’t really mix.” Mattie nodded. Well, maybe some good would come out of being holed up with Gracie.
In a few minutes, Rita and Marlene were back from smoking their cigarettes. Marlene measured coffee and water for the percolator and then plugged it in.
“If we get you a nice Mr. Coffee for your birthday,” Marlene wanted to know, “will you use it, Mama? ’Cause there’s no sense in getting you one if it ends up in the attic.”
“I like my old percolator just fine,” said Mattie.
“You gotta catch up to the world, Mama,” Gracie now noted. “It’s running ahead of you.” Let it run, Mattie thought. And while it’s running, she would sit on the front porch of her tiny house and have a cup of freshly perked coffee. That’s what that word meant. Perked. Coffee that’s been in a damn percolator.
“Not to change the subject,” said Rita, who was famous for doing just that, “but I run into Clarence Fennelson’s mother at Craft’s Filling Station this morning, and she told me it’s been twenty-eight years since Clare died. June of 1966. Can you even believe that?” Mattie was now not only interested in what Rita had to say—she was caught with surprise, just as she was whenever Father Time revealed himself to her for the trickster that he was. Twenty-eight years since Clarence Fennelson was treading the highways and byways of Mattagash, Maine! Twenty-eight years that the town had carried on without him, had got up in the mornings and perked their coffee, had turned down their bedcovers at night. Mattie guessed it
wouldn’t have mattered a whit if Clarence had had an old-fashioned percolator or a Mr. Coffee. Except that the old-fashioned percolator might’ve kept him at home a couple minutes longer, and maybe he could have used that extra time to consider if he really wanted to take his own life. He had been such a nice boy, and such a neat dresser, his suntan pants always carrying a straight, orderly pleat down each leg, his white shirts always smoothly pressed. But then, Alma Fennelson had been his mother, and you could eat off Alma’s kitchen floor. Everyone said so. Clarence Fennelson, who had once scored fifty points in a basketball game against Watertown and gotten his picture in the Bangor Daily News for doing so. When a small town loses one of its own, the death becomes a marker of sorts. “That was the summer before Clare Fennelson died,” someone might say. Or “That was only a couple winters after Clarence Fennelson jumped off the bridge,” someone else might say, and then time would do its snowball act, with the years rolling over each other, until the statistics of Clarence’s life and death had faded into Mattagash history, no longer a yardstick to anybody but the folks who came to stare at his tombstone once in a while and ponder at such a short life span.
“I can still remember where I was the day he died,” said Rita. “I was a junior in high school, and I was having my hair done for the Watertown prom, me and Lorraine and Theresa, at Chez Françoise Hairstyles, when Eleanor Ryan come running into the shop. She turned off all our dryers as fast as she could, one after the other, and that’s when she told us.” Rita had spent that time under the hair dryer for nothing, as Mattie remembered, because that star basketball player from Watertown High School had not bothered to pick her up and had later claimed he had never even asked to take her, that he was taking some Watertown girl instead. Poor Rita, and it broke Mattie’s heart to see her, it really did. She had waited in her long white gloves and yellow gown, her French curls piled high on her head, like little brown bales of hay. That’s probably why Rita would never forget where she was on the day Clarence Fennelson had died. With the clock ticking away the time and still no Watertown basketball star, she had asked Lester for the car and he had given it to her. Mattie still didn’t know who gave her the bottle of vodka. The police said it was vodka, and they should know. They were the ones who found it in the car. And that’s why they carried Rita from off that Watertown front lawn after the boy’s mother phoned them, as if Rita was some kind of big unwanted dandelion in her bright yellow gown.
“I was helping to decorate the gym for graduation,” Marlene said. “I must’ve been fifteen that summer. We heard the sirens coming full wail and we dropped all our pine boughs and run outside to see what was happening. That’s when Emily Hart tripped on the pavement and broke her leg in two places, and that’s the only reason they made birdbrained Debbie Plunkett the captain of the cheerleaders that next September. Emily’s leg never did heal right.”
“I was picking up some stuff at Blanche’s Grocery,” said Gracie. “I remember to this day what I was getting, too. It was a bottle of Pepsi, a pack of cigarettes, and a candy bar.”
“Things ain’t changed much,” said Mattie. “Does that mean you were smoking even then?” Gracie nodded.
“Cripes,” said Mattie, and shook her head. The stuff she learned from her girls when it was too late to do anything about it. Just as Clarence’s mother had learned too late. “If we had only knowed Clare was feeling that low,” Alma Fennelson had said for years, at every Tupperware party, at every fudge sale, at every PTA meeting, at every Christmas play, until no one had the heart to hear it anymore. “If we had only knowed,” Alma would say, looking off at the past as though it were a place one might still get to, in order to change all the buttons on the time machine. “We might’ve done something to stop it.”
“I was twelve,” Gracie said. “Denny Plunkett stopped in to Blanche’s for something and he told us. He said that Clarence Fennelson had climbed up onto the Mattagash Bridge, made the sign of the cross, and then let himself fall, silent and still as a leaf. He went right out of sight and they still hadn’t found him.”
“Some still claim it was an accident,” Mattie reminded them.
“Some are his relatives,” said Rita. “The rest of us know the truth. You don’t jump off a bridge by accident.”
“It was awfully rainy that day, as I remember it,” said Mattie.
“And slippery,” said Marlene. “That was why Emily Hart broke her leg. Her legs were just like two little pencils, though, so it’s no wonder.”
“He might’ve just been trying to walk that rail,” said Mattie, although she knew better. Tom Hart had come along and saw it all take place. He’d gotten out of his pickup and shouted when he saw Clarence standing on the bridge rail, in all that gray rain. “You better get down, son,” Tom had shouted. But it was as if Clarence was in a daze, Tom said, and then he saw him make the sign of the cross. And that’s when he fell.
“You don’t jump off a bridge by mistake,” Rita repeated.
The phone rang. Marlene beat Rita to it. It was Willard, Rita’s green-haired child.
“Willie says to turn on the TV quick,” Marlene shouted. “Sonny’s giving another press conference!”
12
And that’s what happened, no teaser, no time for the girls to pop up some popcorn or pick up a pizza. Sonny was back by popular demand, for now a crowd had swelled up in the background, ordinary folks who seemed excited just to be lined up on the road in front of the trailer. As the camera panned through the crowd, Mattie saw some of those folks waving happily.
“Hi, Mom!” one tall boy yelled, a baseball cap pulled down to his bushy eyebrows.
“What’s happening?” Mattie asked. “Why are all those regular people hanging out at the trailer?” Marlene turned the volume higher. Rita and Gracie dropped down before the television set, pulled their legs up beneath them and waited, just as they did as children when professional wrestling came on. Of course, back then everyone thought the wrestling was real. Donna was back, and so was the thin-haired, thin-faced man, and the important-looking woman. But more new faces were now standing in front of the trailer as well, microphones in their hands, cameramen breathing down their backs. The Channel 4 camera focused in on a plump man in the sea of faces. He was pointing happily at a sign he had hoisted into the air, his chubby face a massive smile. The camera zoomed in. JOHN LENNON LIVES! the sign declared.
Donna was gripping her microphone in one hand, holding it up to her face as though it were a big black ice cream cone.
“Dan,” she said to the camera in front of her, “there have been dramatic developments in the hostage incident here at Marigold Drive Trailer Park.” Mattie could see the crowd growing even larger behind Donna’s shoulder. Many of them seemed to be college students in a party mood. They were waving caps at the camera, making funny faces. If Mattie hadn’t known better, she might have thought they were attending a football game. Others appeared to be there just for the sheer entertainment of the thing: a man, two women, and a dog, all holed up in a house trailer.
“What do you suppose the new developments are?” Marlene wondered. She was leaning back against the sofa, her knees drawn up.
“Shh!” said Mattie. “Donna’s talking.”
“Dan, we’re told that Sonny Gifford, after intense phone negotiations with Chief Melon, has agreed to release one of the hostages,” Donna said. She was slowly making her way to the area that seemed to be reserved for newspeople only, next to the yellow plastic ribbon that encircled the porch of the trailer. Police were motioning the spectators to move back, behind another yellow ribbon encircling the lawn itself, confining them to the road. People scattered in the background as Donna and the cameraman made their way toward the porch. Now the flock of television reporters with microphones in their hands seemed even larger and more important.
“I think that’s a CNN camera!” Rita shouted, and pointed at the screen. “I’m going to Lola’s!” Sh
e was on her feet in an instant, Gracie following. Mattie watched as they flew through the screen door and out to Gracie’s car. An engine roared and pebbles flew, and then the sound of a disappearing car faded away to wind rushing in through the screen of the door.
“Are those two completely loco?” Marlene asked. The camera now did a quick pan of the scene on the road, where excitement seemed to be building further. Policemen were directing the spectators to stay behind the yellow plastic ribbon. But the crowd was having too good a time to care. Donna, who could not get to the trailer, put the microphone into the face of a young man, who had his arm around a freckle-faced girl.
“Why are you here today, sir?” Donna asked. Scarlet inched into the boy’s face as he fought for the right words. Even on Mattie’s small TV, she could see the color spreading.
“We just wanted to come by and tell Sonny thanks,” the boy said, and the words were barely spoken before the crowd pressing in behind him to listen picked up on his comment and began to chant, “Sonny! Sonny! Sonny!”
“Are you an acquaintance of Mr. Gifford?” Donna now wanted to know. The eavesdropping crowd behind the boy quieted to hear what his reply would be.
“We don’t know him,” the girl offered, “but he’s speaking up for poor people, and that’s what counts.” The group behind her liked this answer. They repeated their little song. “Sonny! Sonny! Sonny!” Another boy, wearing a University of Maine sweatshirt, pushed out in front and lowered his mouth to the microphone.
“As the great John Lennon once said, imagine if there was no hunger!” He held a fist into the air and the crowd went wild with enthusiasm.
Mattie looked at Marlene. “What’s wrong with them people?” she asked. “Why ain’t they home?”
Marlene shrugged. “Everybody needs a hero, I guess,” she said, “and those poor, misguided souls think Sonny’s theirs.” Now the camera was back on Chief Melon, who was waving instructions to a line of policemen who had taken up strategic positions on the trailer side of the rope. Chief Melon raised what looked like a cheerleading megaphone and said something Mattie couldn’t hear, and Channel 4 missed. She imagined Rita and Gracie getting the full story on Lola’s satellite dish and resented them for it.
Beaming Sonny Home Page 14
