by Webb, Peggy
What an unusual reference for a man. “Do you have kids?” I ask him. Or rather, I ask the radio.
Maybe he’s just somebody who likes to curl up with a children’s classic on rainy days. Maybe he’d like to curl up with me – Maggie Dufrane who is making chicken pie exactly like Mama’s. Real cream and butter. No fake stuff. Love in a spoon.
“Remember the yellow brick road, folks?” Rainman continues. “Well, don’t get on it tonight. You could land clear in Oz.”
“If I could, I’d get on it and go clear to California, but I lost my red shoes.”
Jefferson whines. “I know, but at least Rainman’s company.”
I wonder if he’s all alone at that radio station and whether he’s had dinner and if he likes chicken pot pie.
I wonder what he’d do if I called to find out.
Clearly I need…something. Something I don’t have. Something I’m too tired to imagine.
After I take Jefferson out to pee and he settles onto his doggie pillow, I crawl into Mama’s cedar four-poster bed and pull her white blanket under my chin.
The ringing phone jerks me upright, but when I see Stanley’s number on the caller ID I lie back down. My ex-husband’s voice comes over the answering machine, amplified. “Maggie, I heard about Victoria. Call me.”
I won’t. We’ve already said everything we need to say.
Mama’s blanket smells like the bath powder she uses – roses – and I snuggle there inhaling her scent.
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Chapter Four
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It’s a good morning for cuddling under the covers with your sweetie – if you’re lucky enough to have one. If not and you’re jockeying through traffic, keep your cool. Three minutes could be the difference between here and eternity.
Rainman
“What are you supposed to do if your sweetie turned sour? Answer me that, Rainman.”
The rain has turned me surly. Normally I’m serene and collected in the early morning, the kind of woman who loves to walk barefoot through the dew and watch the sun rise. That is, I’d love it if I had a house and a yard instead of an apartment where high-rise poles with l,000 watt bulbs bleach out every heavenly display worth watching.
“And stay off Eason, if you can,” Rainman adds. “Traffic is backed up from Main to Veterans.”
“No kidding.” I inch along behind an RV pulling a blue Honda, leaning over the steering wheel to peer through the deluge. It’s just like Mama to get deathly ill in the middle of a monsoon. She never does a single thing without fanfare. I wouldn’t put it past her to have created the traffic jam. I don’t know how. Maybe the power of that strong will of hers.
“God, if you’re listening, let that independent spirit of hers still be ranting and raving inside her beat-up, hooked-up body.”
I circle the hospital’s parking garage three times before I find a slot on the back forty. If I walk fast enough to mow down laggards, I wonder if the fifteen-minute trek to the intensive care waiting room would count as exercise.
Jean is curled in a tangle of blue blankets with nothing but a few tufts of blond hair, a pert nose and the soles of her pink tennis shoes showing. She always did love to sleep with the blanket over her head. I grew up alternating between loving, sisterly hope that she wouldn’t smother (eighty percent) and sibling-rivalry desire that she would (fifteen percent).
Now I ease into the chair beside her, hoping she can get a few more minutes rest before the hospital comes alive with anxious family filing in to console each other over the condition of loved ones.
Does Mama know she’s a loved one? Did Jean and I tell her or did we take her for granted, assume she’d always be there - our safe haven in every storm?
Suddenly I’ve lost my appetite for sausage in Hardee’s big butter-crusted biscuits, but I open the paper bag anyhow and take my first bite. Carbohydrate comfort. Greasy courage.
Jean pops out of her bunched wooly bundle. “Do I smell biscuits?” She grabs the sack and attacks her calorie-laden, fast-food breakfast.
“Has the doctor been in?” I ask.
“Not yet. They say he comes around seven.” She picks fallen crumbs off her blanket and sucks them off the ends of her fingers before she starts biting her nails. “Mama’s dying, Maggie.”
“You don’t know that.”
“She never did wake up. I went in every time they allowed visitors, and she didn’t respond to a single thing I said or did.”
Jean’s report is the worse than I expected, even coming from the world’s biggest pessimist.
Michael Holman is the doctor who comes in, and I feel a huge surge of hope. He’s been Mama’s family physician for centuries, it seems, partially because he’s the only one she’s never been able to intimidate but mostly because of his brilliant mind. I call him the Brain, and now I’m looking to him for miracles.
“Under the circumstances, Victoria’s doing as well as can be expected.”
Jean and I listen with greasy fingers linked and twin lumps in our throats.
“What, exactly, does under the circumstances mean?” I ask.
He reaches for my hand and I want him to hold on, want him to say, I’m here, everything’s going to be all right. Instead he says, “Hearts like hers can’t survive continued trauma. All we can do now is wait and hope.”
There are a million things I want to say, but I don’t get a chance because suddenly he’s gone, leaving me shell-shocked and lost on a chair minimally padded as a nod to grief. I want to call him back. I want to say, Wait, don’t go, I can’t be brave alone.
If it weren’t for the courage pulsing between my fingertips and Jean’s, I’d fall over. While we wait our turn to tiptoe into ICU, I hang onto my sister’s hand, grateful for the resilience of women, grateful and amazed.
*
The silent, white-faced, shrunken-looking woman on the bed bears no resemblance to the politically active mother who stormed northeast Mississippi last summer campaigning against the Republican candidate running for Governor.
“I’d vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for an old Republican,” she said. “They’re nothing but a pack of trouble.”
It turns out Mama was expressing a minority opinion, but she still swears that if the Democrats had had six more people like her, they’d have won.
Make that seven and I’d say she’s right.
Now Jean strokes her hair while I grab her hand and say, “Mama, you’ve got to wake up. We can’t do without you.”
Does she hear me? I read somewhere that hearing is the last sense to go, and so I keep talking, telling Mama about making chicken pie using her recipe and giving Jefferson some in his sturdy stone dish as a reward for hanging onto his hair.
“Just a small portion, Mama. Not enough to interfere with his appetite for dog food.”
She’s strict about that. “You are what you eat,” she says, “Even dogs.”
No wonder my insides feel as if they’ve floated off and left my empty body standing here, not knowing what to say - all that fat for breakfast, every bit of it the kind that’s bad for you.
I’ll do better tomorrow. Oatmeal with skim milk. Maybe a fat red strawberry or two. Heart-healthy fare because I have to remain upright and hardy to fill this huge void that was once occupied by Mama.
As if I can. As if anybody can.
I don’t know anybody besides Victoria Lucas who was born knowing everything and who uses wings or horns - whatever the occasion demands - with equal aplomb.
Jean’s standing beside the bed wadding used tissue in her fists. “She can’t hear you,” she whispers.
“Yes, she can. Watch this.” In a voice loud enough to catch the attention of the crepe-soled, starched nurse, I say, “Mama, the governor’s cut education funding again.” The monitor shows changes in her vital signs, erratic lines that tell the tale of her fierce political leanings.
Jean lifts one eyebrow, still not convinced, but I keep talking to fill u
p the empty space, telling this shell-Mama about the camping trip she and I had planned for this summer, describing cool green mountains and clear lakes, quaint cabins with stone fireplaces and hooked rugs of red and yellow and blue, the two of us curled by the fire reading while Jefferson dreams about chasing rabbits.
“No leaky tents and crazy camp chairs for us this summer, Mama,” I tell her, hoping she’ll remember our trip to the Smoky Mountains right after my divorce and how we laughed at everything, even the mosquitoes that bit every movable body part and the chair that folded up with her inside. According to Mama it was obviously manufactured by Republicans.
In the sterile, too-white, too-quiet space of the curtain-enclosed cubicle, I keep fear of a Mama-deprived future at bay with talk of normal comings and goings, plans for spring cleaning and garden mulching and walks to the lake with Jefferson.
But when our time is up and we’re in the hall with Mama sealed behind heavy doors warning that visitors can come in only during allowable hours, I am bereft, even of words - especially of words.
Jean blows her nose hard and loud, not caring that grief is messy. “I want to pick out caskets,” she says.
“That’s morbid. Stop it.”
“One of us has to be practical.”
“For Pete’s sake, Jean. Mama’s not dead.”
“Did you see the way she looked? Not a speck of color. Not a twitch.” She honks her nose again using the same wadded, torn tissue. I fish in my purse and hand her a new one. “I’m not fixing to let her die without proper preparations.”
I’m breathing hard and fast, trying to hold onto sanity. Somebody has to.
“Come on, Jean. We’ll talk about this in the car.”
I can’t abide scenes, especially public ones. Mama once told me, “Maybe if you’d bawled Stanley out a couple of times instead of pussy footing around, the two you would still be together.”
Maybe she was right. When I get back to the farm I might find a spot where Mama’s neurotic dog can’t hear me and practice screaming. Better yet, I’ll call Janice Whitten and try to un-stall my career.
Beside me, Jean is saying, “I’m not fixing to crawl into that car with you until I know where you’re headed.”
“Not to any funeral home, I can guarantee you that.”
*
“Mama wouldn’t be caught dead in a pink casket,” is what Jean is telling the skinny, unctuous undertaker, while I hover behind her mad at myself for ending up at Eternal Rest Funeral Home planning for Mama’s demise.
By the time I had backed the car out of the hospital parking space, Jean had cried enough to fill a Jacuzzi hot tub. Tears win over logic every time.
Now she asks, “What do you have that matches red? Mama wants to be buried in red.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say. “How come I didn’t know that?”
“Because you were too busy getting rid of Stanley to talk about anything else.”
It’s not enough that I’ve practically lost my sassy, cantankerous mama; I’m losing my sister, too, because I’m fixing to haul off and slap her into next Sunday. I haven’t been this mad at Jean since she broke the head off my wedding Barbie. I was five years old at the time, and she cried for a solid hour when I shoved her into the wading pool as retaliation.
If I punch hard enough she’ll land in the prissy, pink casket she blackmailed me into seeing. Fortunately, my reasonable, civilized side reasserts itself – the one who recognizes I’m enraged at congestive heart failure, not my sister, the one who curbs childish impulses and baser instincts.
Besides, it’s not Jean’s fault that she married a saint and I married somebody who forgot to appreciate my finer qualities. I sidle up to her and reach for her hand. Grown up. Supportive. A great big pushover.
“Let’s look at the upscale line,” I say.
Clinging together as if we’re already orphaned, Jean and I follow the weasely-looking man into another room where the array of resting places screams ostentation. I decide on the spot to be cremated.
But, lord help me, I’ll never mention the subject to Mama again. Three years ago when Stanley’s grandmother died and I told Mama I thought cremation was a sensible, civilized alternative to pouring money into a six-foot hole she said, “If Maxine DuFrane is fool enough to be scattered in Lake Piomingo and end up as goose shit, that’s fine with me, but I plan to go out in style. Lay me out in my good pearls and put me on display. I want a proper sendoff. And you’d better not put me in a tacky, cheap casket, either.”
When the undertaker pitches a sleek casket without ornamentation, I tell him, “Pricier. Mama wants to be buried in style.” I point to a model that looks like something fit for Catherine the Great. “How about that one?”
The undertaker smiles as if he’s won the Florida lottery, but Jean says, “I don’t know. The pillow looks awfully uncomfortable. Maggie, why don’t you climb inside and try it out?”
Obviously grief has unhinged her. I grab a tight hold on her arm and hustle her out.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “I’m not finished. What are you doing?”
“I’m getting you out of here before you come up with any other hair-brained schemes – like burying me alive to see how Victoria Lucas will adjust to the dark.”
*
On the way home Jean makes it perfectly clear that the casket business is unfinished, and I see my future unroll as a series of daily visits with undertakers, Jean finding fault with every casket and me barely avoiding jail by not strangling her. I’ll turn into a female, human version of loyal Jefferson, going along with every crazy notion but sacrificing my hair.
“Somebody’s got to call Aunt Mary Quana.” Jean rescues me from imaginary baldness, but I’m still on my pity pot. Of course, the somebody she means is me.
“If I call her, she’ll strike out in that old land yacht of hers and blow everybody between here and Atlanta off the road,” I tell my sister.
Aunt Mary Quana has the size of a rat terrier and the heart of pit bulldog. She views her 1969, fish-tail Cadillac with the souped-up engine as a race car and all roads as the Talladega Speedway.
I can just see the headlines: 70-year-old Woman Jailed for Doing 95 in a 40-mile Speed Zone. That, or Reckless Geriatric Claims 6 Lives in 5-car Pileup.
“Let’s wait a while before we call her,” I add.
“We can’t keep it a secret forever. Aunt Mary Quana will kill us.”
If Mama doesn’t do it first. She believes in being the center of attention. The bigger the audience, the better.
“At least let’s wait till Mama’s out of Intensive Care.”
“You assume she’ll get out. Alive.”
“Of course, she will. Mama’s too feisty to die, especially right off the bat. She likes lots of drama.”
Jean punches me on the arm. “You’re awful.”
“I made you laugh, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but don’t think you made me forget about the caskets. Because you didn’t.”
“I know. I know.”
“Then we can look again tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
What else do I have to do? No meals to prepare, no contract to fulfill, no heroes to seduce.
Lord, lord, how can I think about sex at a time like this? I must be depraved.
Or deprived.
As I go inside Jean’s house to make sure burglars and rapists are not hiding in her closet with her forty-five pairs of shoes – mostly pink – to pillage and ravish and do no telling what-all to my helpless sister, I think about the amazing power of the mind to keep panic at bay by refocusing on the frivolous and the unnecessary. If you consider sex frivolous… and I guess it ought to be at a time like this. But wouldn’t it be a great release?
Of course, casket hunting is totally unnecessary, but if it keeps Jean from breaking apart, I’m willing to do the driving.
*
As I drive back to Mama’s I focus on another thing, not at all frivolous. Finances. Mine.
Given the current state of my bank account I can keep a roof over my head another six months.
When I divorced Stanley I never dreamed I’d lose my muse and my career along with my spouse. The divorce settlement was puny, to put it politely, not because Stanley’s stingy and didn’t want to pay what I’m worth, but because I’m proud and didn’t want to depend on him for anything.
I would live on what I earned. I would be an independent woman. I would be Mama only less…oh, I don’t know….less everything. Nobody can duplicate her kind of hocus pocus razzamatazz.
I store milk, stash dog food and then grab my checkbook on the way to the kennel. While Jefferson races around Mama’s backyard debating the merits of forsythia versus hydrangea bushes, I flip open the checkbook cover and start searching for errors.
The way my lump sum divorce settlement has dwindled you’d think I’d been flitting off to Milan for couture dresses and Pamplona to run with the bulls instead of shopping the bargain aisles of the grocery store and checking out Wal-Mart for tee shirts without slogans that declare Hot Mama or Street Angel.
Alas, I did the math right. There’s no windfall in my checkbook. I’ll just have to hope that when I pick up telephone messages from my apartment, Janice Whitten has called to gush and salivate over my latest mystery.
Jefferson is relieving himself on trees now. As soon as he finishes marking his territory I’m going straight to the telephone. I whistle for him, but my mouth is dry and this comes out as a wimpy sound that wouldn’t bring anything on the run, let alone a dog determined to christen every tree along the back fence.
I hear a sharp whistle and Jefferson trots up to have his ears scratched by my pressed, white-shirted ex-husband.
In a fit of temporary weakness, I think about trotting over myself to see if Stanley will scratch me where I itch, but I’m too embarrassed to admit it. But, oh, where would be the sizzle, the can’t-get-enough-of-you, tumbling-all-over-the-bed, sweat-drenched lust? Where would be the love?
“Nobody called back so I came by to find out about Victoria.”
