I was his third wife, though he told me I was just the second when he married me. Now he was onto his fourth, but that was her problem, not mine. His Aunt Gina was the one that set me straight on being door number three. We were all at his parents’ house, some birthday party that wasn’t important, so they could invite me. Ninety-eight years old, Aunt Gina always held court in the kitchen, with glasses so Coke-bottle thick you wondered how she even saw to put her red lipstick on. As I walked by the kitchen, I heard Aunt Gina refer to my husband before adding, “But that was the first wife.”
“Are you talking about Linda?” I asked at the door.
She looked caught for a second, then narrowed her eyes behind those glasses. “No. I am not talking about Linda, you little tart, I’m talking about his first wife,” she said, moving the heft of her body in my direction. “Linda was the second wife. You’re the third wife.”
I swiveled on one foot and yelled out to the living room. “You want to come in here and talk about this?” I chewed him out in front of everyone, all “You mean to tell me” and “What the hell?” As he sputtered an explanation, his mother looked like she was deciding if she was too embarrassed to enjoy my embarrassment. He said it was in college, and she was the dean’s daughter. They thought she was pregnant so they made them get married, and it wasn’t anything.
“It was something enough that she got the family silver,” said Aunt Gina, looking at me with a silent Not you. She got the silver, and I was stuck with the husband.
When I got divorced, people assumed he hit me, because for a twenty-three-year-old woman to choose the social death of divorce in Arkansas, she must have been picking between that and getting beat to hell. But I wouldn’t let a man hit me. No. No, no, no. Though I had to let him get right up to it once, just so he could see in my eye what would happen if he did.
That was Easter 1983, when we went to his parents’ church for services. It was okay that Allison and I came to Easter services—that was for appearances and had the added bonus of saving her soul. He’d been picking at me all day. He got like that before seeing his parents. They’d been tough on him with the belt. His parents went to a brimstone church, the hard kind that would raffle a hunting rifle to raise money for the youth group summer trip or whatever. We were out of the car and walking alongside the church, him behind me. I had Allison in my arms when I said something about “getting this over with.”
It was the match that lit him up, I guess. He got me cornered, and I almost dropped Allison as he pushed me against the wall. He reared back like he was going to hit me. Maybe because I thought he was going to accidentally hurt Allison, I just looked at him with some kind of fury. He could get one in, but a man has to sleep.
He had to do something with all that mad, so he took his fist and scraped his knuckles against the brick of the church. A bloodletting.
“Damnit,” he said, to me or himself. “Damnit.” I shook my head and walked in to sit next to my in-laws, who greeted me with their usual unspoken wish that Allison and I did not exist. He tried to hide the rash of his bleeding hand, wiping the blood on the dark of his socks until his mother, Imogene, finally leaned over and asked what happened. When he shrugged, she looked at me like I had let something happen to him.
He wasn’t my problem anymore, except he barely paid child support. Still, he was a good father to Allison. He took her every weekend, and they had a relationship that was separate from ours. Though I had a strong suspicion he was only such a good dad to make me look like a bad mother, I wasn’t going to take that away from Allison. Even though he made it clear he’d take her from me in half a heartbeat, just so I’d have nothing.
“She’s burying homosexuals, Your Honor,” I said aloud, looking out the window for his car. “Dragging my daughter into all this sick.”
And now here he was, pulling into the driveway that used to be his. I fixed a smile when he drove up to the house, pleasant but flat, the way you do when seeing someone who thinks you owe them something. But I gave a real smile when I saw Allison jump out of the car.
“Mama!” she yelled.
He stayed in the car but called out the window to her. Some inside thing, real or invented for the moment. He always did this, and the charitable part of my heart thought he did this because it was hard for him to leave her. The harder part knew it was to break the spell of my reunion with her. Get her to look back and maybe make me really look at him. I didn’t.
When he cut it close like this, I became a scold. It was the last Sunday before Christmas, so I had to get Allison into her pretty green dress before church. It had taken me weeks to hand-smock it myself. It was important to me that we always look presentable. I relaxed once we were in the car, holding her face for one last inspection. I reflexively put my hand to her forehead to check for fever. It had become a ritual. I went some place, set adrift for a second, until Allison pulled away.
On the drive over to First United, she got bored, or maybe sleepy because of how late her daddy let her stay up to prove he was the fun parent. I did my usual trick of pretending the cars in front of us were driven by monkeys.
“They’re throwing banana peels. Duck!” I yelled. “Duck, Allison!” She squealed as I moved my hands on the wheel as if to swerve, bracing for some imaginary impact.
Sunday school was in the breezeway, and I helped lead the class while Allison was over in the nursery. I did it mainly because I wanted to be of use, and the women of the choir had made it pretty clear they didn’t want a dyed-blond divorcée singing “Abide with Me” next to their husbands. Sunday school was always a nice little morning upper to go with the Bloody Marys people had had that morning. There were different themes to different classes, and this one was service—a lot of talk about feeding the sick and taking care of your neighbor.
I caught the Johnson brothers staring at me. They were my age and had been whip smart as teenagers. Now they were still as horny. When the class was over, they lingered at the door to watch me walk out.
I turned slightly, putting my hand to the back of my collar. “Is my zipper all the way up in the back?”
They both looked confused.
“Because you undressed me all during Sunday school,” I said, “so I wanted to make sure you had me dressed back before I went out in public.”
I stayed just long enough to see their faces go beet red, then went over to the nursery to pick up Allison. She was sitting apart from all the other kids, who were playing family and fighting over who was the mother.
We sat each Sunday in the eighth row, center pew, right on the aisle. Regulars at church picked a spot and kept it. It’s why they got so bent out of shape at Easter and Christmas when the heathen hordes came in and took all their seats.
“Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” our pastor, Dr. John Hays, said as a greeting to us all. He could give a good sermon, and I always marveled at how Allison actually listened and took what he preached to heart. He was older, his white hair still cut for when he took over the church in 1954, his look complete with dark heavy-framed glasses. His sermons challenged us to live as Jesus did, which was okay with the congregation, because that challenge ended as soon as he closed with “Amen.”
When a lay leader got up to make some endless announcement, I kept my hand on Allison’s shoulder to quietly hold her in place. As they droned on, my eyes went where they always did, to the stained-glass window high above the altar. It was Mary and the angel at the tomb, gorgeous, but you could barely see it because of the organ pipes in the way. It was just silly to block such beauty, but the organ was a hand-me-down from a theater they tore down.
I had big plans for after church, so I got right up when it was over. You could stand in line for an hour to shake Dr. Hays’s hand as you exited the church, so I was both mortified and relieved when Allison hustled halfway through the crowd to get in line sooner. I made a small
show of sweetly reprimanding her and looked back apologetically. The people behind us gave flatline smiles and looked away.
Dr. Hays kept glancing at me in line, and I looked down at my dress to make sure I didn’t have anything on it. When I got to him, his voice was urgent.
“Ruth,” said Dr. Hays. “I have been meaning to call you.”
“Oh, really?” I said, my eyebrows shooting up. I instinctively picked up Allison and braced myself. I wondered if he had seen me at a hospital. Or the cemetery.
“I’d like to put you on the church’s finance committee,” he said.
“Me?” The finance committee was the most important group in the church, approving fund requests and handling all the pledges. It was all these important men in the town, and there had never been a woman on it.
“Dr. Hays, that would be such an honor,” I said.
He put a gentle hand on Allison’s head. “I think you’ll bring a lot to the committee, Ruth.”
“Thank you, Dr. Hays,” I said. “I will do my best.” I looked back quickly at the people behind me, and saw the flatlines of their smiles had curled just slightly into sneers. I smiled.
“Enjoy your Sunday,” I told them.
I had to hurry to get on with the day.
While I was at a hospital in Little Rock that week, a doctor told me he had heard the darnedest thing. “There’s a bunch of AIDS patients living together,” he said. “Like three of ’em.” A psychologist had given them a house. “In Hillcrest,” he said. “Can you imagine an AIDS house in that neighborhood? Around all that money?”
I had to meet them. “Please, just give me a name,” I said. “I won’t say where I heard it.”
I called the psychologist and was direct, putting on my doctor voice. “I have been, uh, seeing a lot of these patients,” I said. “I would like the opportunity to meet with these men.”
He got real funny, understandably. I’m a realtor at heart; I knew he’d never be able to sell that place. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I keep meeting people when it’s too late,” I said. “If someone—I don’t know, eats some fruit or vegetable regularly or takes a different type of vitamin—and then doesn’t get as sick, we can use that information.”
“No,” he said.
I thought how I would feel if someone called offering to help. I’d take it. I’d be so grateful. But maybe he had reason not to trust people.
“Listen, I just want to bring them Christmas,” I said. “I can come by this weekend. I won’t bug them or do anything else. I just want to meet them.”
He paused, said the address quickly, and raced to hang up on me.
Now, in the church parking lot, I watched as everyone got in their cars to go for fancy lunches. They were all in their second-best red and green, saving their best outfits for the Christmas Day service. I got out two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches I’d made that morning. I handed one to Allison.
“Allison, we’re gonna get Bonnie and drive out to Little Rock to see some people who need Christmas, okay?” When I asked Bonnie if I could borrow her pickup to bring a Christmas tree to a bunch of AIDS patients who were living together, she immediately said she was coming too. She wasn’t gonna miss the show.
Allison took a mouthful of sandwich and nodded, cross-legged in the passenger seat. She was four, the in-between of a toddler and a big kid. Depending on the light or her mood, she changed back and forth, from my baby to my girl, right before my eyes.
Dr. Hays had scared me. If people knew what I was doing, I could so easily lose her. Just the thought of it made me wrap up my sandwich and start the car. Sometimes if you’re doing, you don’t have to think.
Bonnie was waiting outside, probably to stop me from going in and checking on how she was living. I had a habit of surveying her medicines and food supply to make sure she was doing okay.
“So, I thought we’d try to get a tree first,” I said, as I climbed into her pickup, getting it to a wheezing start. You always get what you think is going to be the hardest first. After that, the rest is easy. I didn’t have money to spend, so I would have to talk people into donating. “Then I was thinking about Christmas cards, so they could write to their families.”
“Are you going to say who it’s for?” Bonnie asked.
“I think I have to,” I said, pulling on to Highway 70. “I don’t want to make up a story and be a liar.” It would be a risk, but I would just keep track of who I told.
We pulled in to the Christmas tree lot and got out. The one guy there walked up, and I caught him doing a double take on Bonnie, then looking down at my legs, bashful, then up again.
“I’m hoping you can help us,” I said. “And I think you’re the guy.” People want to help, I told myself. You just have to give them small ways to do it.
I took a breath. “You know, there’s a house in Little Rock that has some AIDS patients, and they’re not gonna live much longer,” I said. “And I just think it would be nice if they could have a Christmas tree on their last Christmas.”
It was a lot for him to take in. He paused. He could say yes or he could say no, and it would be done with.
“Sure,” he said.
“Sure?” I said, catching myself before I gave him a chance to stop. “Well, that is great. I mean it, I am so grateful.”
I thought he’d give us some shrub of a tree, but he picked out a nice one and loaded it into the pickup for us as Allison danced around. “I’ll give you a stand, too,” he said. I acted like he’d handed me a lottery ticket.
“Thank you,” I said. “You have done such a wonderful thing, and I do appreciate it.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“It’s something,” I said.
As we drove off, Bonnie finally spoke. “That went better than I anticipated.”
“You’re telling me,” I said. “Okay, now, let’s get the Christmas cards.” I was a big shopper at Hallmark back then, so I figured that would be the place to go. Maybe I was a little cocky from how well it had gone at the tree lot. The woman who ran it was out on the floor, fixing up the displays of picked-over holiday cards.
“Good afternoon,” I said.
She smiled wide at me. She had a tiny bit of lettuce stuck to the edge of her front tooth.
“I’m bringing Christmas to some people living with AIDS over in Little Rock,” I said. She stopped smiling. “I wondered if you might be willing to donate a box of Christmas cards.”
She kind of ducked and looked around to make sure no one else had heard that. Then she looked at me, just stumped.
I continued. “I thought they could send notes to their families or whoever—”
“Who would want to hear from them?” she asked.
“Well, I don’t know.”
“I don’t agree with their lifestyle,” she said loudly. Proudly.
“Well, they don’t have long to live it,” I said. “So, you don’t have to worry.”
She looked at me a long time, like I was somewhere between revolting and stupid. I smiled. I was a good customer. Finally, she yanked a box of cards off the shelf. “Well, here. I guess they’re gonna die anyway,” she said, handing me the box. “What’s the harm?”
“What’s the harm?” I repeated quietly. “These are lovely. I will be sure to tell them about your kindness.”
“Don’t bother,” she said, puffing up her body to will us out of the store. Allison was already out the door, with Bonnie behind her.
I turned as I left. “And you have something in your teeth,” I said. The air went out of her. “I just thought you should know.”
We had one more stop, because I needed stamps for the cards. My best bet was a realty company that I knew was flush. A woman ran it with her son, Peter, after her husband died. He knew my dad, and I thought some of the goodwi
ll would be passed on. Peter smiled at me, older than me and just a real sweetheart. I brought in the cards as a sort of proof of need. I told them about the house and that I had twelve cards and just needed twelve stamps.
“I cannot help with that,” she said.
“I understand,” I said. I wasn’t going to argue with her about a dozen twenty-two-cent stamps. “Come on, Allison. Thank you for your time.” Just move on, I told myself. I could buy them when the post office opened Monday. Maybe bring them another time. I wasn’t sure how long I had, though.
I started the pickup, and the rumble-wheeze was just kicking in when Peter came running out. I opened the window, and he handed me a strip of a dozen stamps bearing a profile of the Statue of Liberty.
“Peter,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Okay,” he said. There was a finality to it. I nodded, but I was happy to have the stamps. I turned on the radio and turned it up when I realized it was the Ronettes singing “Frosty the Snowman.” We all sang, Allison knowing barely any of the words, and Bonnie quacking but singing nonetheless.
We pulled up right in front of the house. It was nice, a two-story Craftsman-type, with pale cream vinyl siding and a front porch bracketed by white-brick columns. I had built these men up in my mind so much that I had to remind myself I was a stranger to them.
“Allison,” I said quickly, in the quiet of the truck. “I need you to be really, really nice today, okay?”
She knit her brow. “I am nice,” she said.
“I know you are, baby,” I said, unfastening her seat belt. I pulled the tree out of the truck bed myself and dragged it to the door and knocked. A man answered, tall and lanky, but looking like he was lanky even before he was sick. Which he clearly was.
All the Young Men Page 5
