by Webb, Peggy
“Hungry?”
“Hmmm.” In more ways than one. I’m blushing and not caring who sees.
“Wait right here.”
I’m feeling so langorous I couldn’t move if a stampede of African elephants headed my way. I stretch out on the quilt, close my eyes…
“Welcome back, sleepyhead.” My head is cradled in his Joe’s lap and he’s smiling down at me.
“I can’t believe I did that.” Oh, lord. I feel old, like one of those women who falls asleep in front of the TV.
“I’m flattered, Maggie. It means you trust me.”
“I do. Completely.”
Amazing, all the things you can learn about a man if you take things one step at a time. If I had used Joe merely as a way to satisfy a newly awakened libido, I might never have known that he’s the kind of man who packs Kentucky Fried Chicken and cloth napkins in a wicker basket, that he’s the kind of man who carries a harmonica in his pocket. And – oh joy! - that he’s the kind of man who plays the blues harp in such a soulful way it breaks your heart.
It’s dusk when we leave, a lovely, honeysuckle-scented evening that feels important, that makes my skin tingle and my heart race. Joe takes the long way home, a meandering drive down the Natchez Trace that allows time to stop by the side of Davis Lake underneath a lethal moon-Venus conjunction.
We watch the stars in heart-thumping silence, and when he leans close, I slide into his arms, drunk on the heady scent of honeysuckle, the taste of his mouth, and amazement.
*
It’s the kind of amazement that won’t let me sleep, and after Joe takes me home, I turn on my laptop and fall into the fantasy world of unicorns and magic.
By the time I come out of my imagined world, it’s three o’clock and I’ve finished a new proposal. With white candles and a brimming-over heart, I go outside and pay homage to the Universe, to the perfect order of stars and moon and to the spirit of women everywhere who still believe in miracles.
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Chapter Twenty
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“It’s going to be mostly sunny today with patches of light showers in the early afternoon. If you like being prepared, take your umbrella. If you enjoy the surprise of life, kick off your shoes and sing in the rain.”
Rainman
Although I didn’t go to bed until three-thirty, I’m up at eight, feeding Jefferson, poaching an egg and keeping one eye on the clock. At exactly nine o’clock – ten eastern time- I grab the phone and dial Janice Whitten.
“I have a new proposal.”
“Great. Send it.”
“It’s not another revision of my mystery. It’s a story that came to me and wouldn’t go away. Fantasy with a touch of sci-fi.”
She pauses, and I wait, barely breathing, worrying at a fingernail I chipped on my keyboard. A lifetime and one ragged nail later, she says, “I can’t wait to read it, Maggie.”
I tell her goodbye, do a little jig then send her an email copy. Because of who I, (old-fashioned) and who she is (a woman who loves to read on the train), I race into town, mail her a hard copy by Federal Express so she won’t have to print, swing by Belle Gardens to see Mama, then go home and collapse. The phone wakes me at two o’clock.
It’s Joe, calling to thank me again for a lovely day and to see how I am.
“Great,” I tell him. If I felt any better I’d be turning Aunt Mary Quana’s cartwheels. But I have much better activities than she does planned for the moon.
*
On Monday, I drive to my first eight o’clock class at MSU.
It’s six-thirty and I’m barreling down highway 45 while the rising sun puts on a show just for me. At least, that’s the way it feels.
“Do you see the sunrise, Rainman? Have you ever seen anything more spectacular?”
I always call Joe Rainman when I talk back to him on the radio. Lord knows why. Habit, I guess. And even that feels good – the comfort of the familiar.
I warble on. “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, I gotta dance and spit in your eye, can’t help imitatin’ that Mama of mine…”
Lord, I wish she could see me now. I wish she were in the passenger’s side watching the sun rise over soybean and cotton fields, unfolding like fat green and white ribbon mile after mile, black Angus cattle gathered around gold-washed blue lakes, an abandoned shot-gun house with a cane-bottomed rocking chair waiting on the front porch for its owner to come back and sit down with a tall glass of iced sweet tea.
I’m coming up on West Point now, gas stations and McDonald’s and Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken all in a row - the generic strip, anywhere U.S.A., that reveals nothing of the gracious antebellum mansions, the blues of Howling Wolf and the poignant history of this town.
I pull into Hardee’s in West Point for a hot sausage and biscuit. I know exactly where I’m going and what it took to get here, and I’m proud.
Still, when I leave the town behind for the twenty-minute drive to MSU, I start to get nervous. I haven’t been in the classroom in ten years. What will I say? Will I tell them everything I know about writing in the first fifteen minutes, and then run out of anything to teach? Can I make them understand writing is more than words on paper, more than ideas set down for others to read? Can I inspire my students to write with wide-open heart and split-apart soul, with color and truth and no-holds-barred passion?
Oh, I must. I must.
I’m scared when I park, but triumphant, too. Faculty, the sign on this parking lot says. That’s me. Maggie Dufrane. University faculty. An independent woman. Determined, purposeful and employed.
I step out of the Jeep and take a deep breath. Even the air feels different. Bursting with ideas and dreams. Energizing.
Lee Hall is just ahead, the oldest building on campus, old brick and stately columns and a million steps leading through the double doors. Four months of this and I can say goodbye to the saddlebags on my hips as well as the hole in my bank account. Hallelujah.
I climb the steps, trying to look like faculty, and my cell phone rings.
“Maggie…I just wanted to say good luck on your first day.”
“Thanks.” This is the first time I’ve heard from Jean since we moved Mama into her private room. A record. “How in the world have you been?”
“I’m good,” she says, which tells me exactly nothing.
“Walter?”
“He’s good.”
I could wring her neck. Here I am, headed to my classroom and I’m going to have to spend the next fifty minutes worrying and wondering about my unusually taciturn sister.
“For Pete’s sake. You know I’ve been worried about the two of you. What’s going on?”
“I’m not kicking him out, but we’ve still got a lot of stuff to work through.”
“You will, Jean. He loves you and the baby, too.”
“I know.”
“Well, good.”
I push through the doors – heavy, ornate, important-looking – and enter a long hallway that smells of lemon wax and ancient knowledge and the brashness of youth.
“I’ve got to go now,” I tell my sister. “I’ll call you this evening.”
I turn my cell phone off and go into room seventeen where twenty students are sitting in rows wearing faded jeans, MSU tee shirts and expectant expressions.
“Hello, I’m Maggie Dufrane,” I tell them, and suddenly I’m a writer, teacher, mentor, wise earth mother who wants to tuck all these young, young people under her wings and tell them not be afraid, to be themselves, that’s what I want them to learn. Be brave. Write freely. Live fully. But most of all, be kind and hug somebody. There’s too little kindness in this world.
My first-day teaching jitters vanish, and I take my place behind the podium and begin the unexpected, giddy process of falling in love – with my students, with teaching, with life.
*
On the way home I stop at Belle Gardens to tell Mama about my great day. She’s in the beauty shop, they tell m
e at the front desk. I find her in tight rollers, face pink from the heat of an old-fashioned hooded hair dryer, flipping through a House and Garden magazine dated June, 1999.
When she sees me, she shoves the hood back and announces, “This is my daughter Maggie. She teaches at MSU.”
I don’t remind her that everybody in this room has met me. Instead I stride into the middle of the tiny shop like somebody important, like somebody Mama’s proud of, and say hello.
“Maggie, you’ve got to settle an argument. I told Mert you didn’t have to reach around behind and nearly pull your arms off to hook your bra in the back. You could hook in the front and then turn it around. She didn’t believe me. Said it would get twisted. Tell her.”
“Mama’s right. She’s been doing it that way for years. And I’m fixing to start.”
“See. I told you.” Mama gives Mert a smug look. “And she’s a university professor.”
While Mama gets her hair combed, I tell her about my day, about Jason who sits on the front row and has a natural talent for writing, about Stephanie whose enthusiasm for life is infectious, about Gabe whose big smile makes this world a better place.
“My office overlooks a small courtyard with a fountain. You know how I am about my writing space. And I’ll have plenty of time for that, too.”
“You are where you belong,” she says. “I knew it all along.”
On the way to her room, Mama’s so slow that I walk beside her with baby steps and an anxious heart. When she sinks into her recliner, it takes a while to get her breath back.
“That hall gets longer every day,” she says, and I don’t say anything. I can’t.
Finally I remember the Reese’s peanut butter cups in my purse. “I brought you something, Mama.” There’s a Dollar General Store two blocks from Belle Gardens. I can stop there every day on my way back from MSU and get her a small treat.
“Good. I’m glad I don’t have that old hog rooming with me anymore. I’m going to eat every one of these, myself.” She unwraps one, and I stand by the window looking at a yellow rose while she eats.
“Maggie…” There’s something in her voice that demands attention, and I move to sit in the wingback chair across from her. “I want you to have my house.”
She has to stop for breath while I struggle to keep my thoughts from showing on my face. Mama will never come home again. The house will never be the same. Jean and I will never go there again and find her sitting in her recliner issuing edicts about everything from chicken soup for winter colds to the difference between vicious rumors and informative gossip.
“Mama, you don’t have to think about things like that.”
“You might as well hush because I’ve already called my lawyer to put the deed in your name.”
“But Jean…”
“Has a house and knows exactly what I’m doing, but even if she didn’t approve, I wouldn’t give a flitter. It’s mine and I’ll do what I want to with it.”
Suddenly I see that little house with pots of red geraniums on the front porch steps, a little patio out back with a water fountain and a wrought iron table just right for breakfast alfresco and laptops.
“Mama, I’m overwhelmed.”
“You and Jean take what you want and sell everything else. Or give it to Salvation Army and Goodwill. I don’t care. Build a big bonfire in the backyard and burn it, if you want to. I have everything I need right here. Besides, I don’t know what they’d do without me.”
“But, it’s not as if you’ll never be coming home again.”
“Flitter, I don’t want a bunch of old junk to have to worry about. When I visit your house, I’d better not catch you trying to turn into some sort of mausoleum. Slap some red paint on the walls. Put in a garden tub. Get a king-sized bed. Sounds to me like you’re going to need it.”
“What has Jean told you?”
“That’s between me and Jean and gatepost. Have you had sex with him yet?”
No, but I’d like to. “Why don’t I put an announcement in the church bulletin?”
“While you’re at it, you might want to put one on the Belle Gardens bulletin board.”
“What for, Mama? I have you.”
“Yes, you do. And you’d better not forget it.”
*
As I drive back to Mooreville and start thinking about dismantling Mama’s house, the wonder of having my own home fades. I can’t do it. Certainly not alone.
Suddenly it occurs to me that I’m not alone, that I don’t have to do this by myself. I have my sister, my brother-in-law, my friends. I even have Rainman.
My cell phone rings and his number flashes across the screen.
“Joe! Do you read minds? I was just thinking about you.”
“Maggie…” Oh, this doesn’t sound good. No lilt. No I was thinking about you, too tone. “I’m headed out of town for a few days.”
When? Should I ask him, or is that nosy? Does one kiss give me the right to know?
“I just wanted you to know. I’ll call you when I get back.”
Is he the kind of man who is scared off by the thought of intimacy? Does he excel at friendship and run at the first sign a woman wants more?
And I do. I do.
There’s only one good thing I can say about his phone call: it knocked everything else right out of my mind. That just goes to show the state I’m in. A woman ready to be ravished. Period.
I don’t hear from Joe all week, and I’m frustrated. I didn’t even ask him how long he’d be gone. It’s a relief to be so busy I don’t have time to think about him. At least not much.
And I don’t think about the house, either, because transforming it is an act of finality. And I’m not ready to eradicate the last bit of evidence that Mama lived – and reigned – here. I can’t.
On Friday when I stop by Belle Gardens with a bag of Hershey’s Kisses for Mama, she says, “Take me to Lowe’s.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to pick out paint for you.”
“You might not pick what I want. It’s my house.”
“Exactly.”
*
That night I call Jean over for a family conference. I invite Walter, too, because he’s still in town – the longest stretch I’ve ever seen – but she says he has work to do in his home office.
“I’ll fix supper,” I tell her.
I go into Mama’s kitchen – impossible to think otherwise – and start making spinach salads. And then because stress always demands butter, I make a peach cobbler and check the freezer to make sure I have some vanilla ice cream, real cream and plenty of sugar.
I set the table with Mama’s blue plates and bowls, run my hands around their cool rims and decide to keep them because I can’t imagine the kitchen without them. Jefferson interrupts his doggy nap under the table, trots to the front door and stands there wagging his tail. It must be Jean.
“How do dogs do that?” I say as I let her in.
“Yeah, I know,” she says, because she’s seen him do it a million times, stand in front of the door wagging his tail or growling, never mind that he can’t see who’s there. “Do you think they read minds?”
“Maybe.”
We go into the kitchen, sit down to eat and discuss dispensation of Mama’s worldly goods, and don’t make it through the salads.
I fumble in my pocket for tissue and hand her one, but she has already found one in her purse.
“If you’ve got something with butter and sugar, you’d better get it. It’s going to take a lot of comfort to get me through this.” She sniffs into her tissue.
“Me, too.”
I dump our half-eaten salads into the garbage, scoop huge servings of ice cream over mammoth portions of still-warm peach cobbler, and we don’t say anything for a while. It takes a lot of concentration to scoop exactly the right amount of ice cream with each bite of melt-in-your-mouth-buttery crusted cobbler. Especially when you’re bawling like a newborn calf.
Finally, I sa
y, “I can’t stand the thought of strangers pawing through Mama’s possessions, making offers.”
“Neither can I. I’d feel like Judas taking thirty pieces of silver.”
For once, over-dramatization is the only truth. We look at each other, mute, and then Jean holds out her empty bowl for more dessert. I refill mine, too, and finally, powered on sugar and fat, we walk through the house making decisions that pelt stones at our hearts.
Mainly, I make the decisions on what to keep and what to give away because now Jean’s crying so hard she can barely see.
“You’ll want Mama’s rocking chair for the baby’s nursery,” I say, and she nods. “The Swiss music box, too.”
There’s a satisfaction in knowing that another generation will hear the same “Blue Danube Waltz” Mama used to play every night when we were children. She’d tuck us in bed, wind the music box and wish us sweet dreams.
Now I take the music box off the shelf and wind it while Jean and I sit cross-legged on the floor, holding hands and remembering sweet dreams.
*
After she leaves, I go to the front porch swing. The moon and stars are turning in a bravura performance tonight, so bright they light Mama’s front yard with spotlight intensity. Correct that. My front yard.
I’m sitting here in my white nightgown, grateful for the privacy of country acreage that allows this kind of indulgence. If Horton and Hattie happen to look out their front door and glance this way – which is highly unlikely because they always turn off their lights at nine and don’t turn them on again until six the next morning – all they’d see would be a glob of white. And maybe not even that unless they’re using binoculars.
Jean’s at home now, and I picture her curled up in her pink wing-back chair talking to Walter about supervising the Salvation Army and Goodwill trucks. She volunteered his services and I didn’t say no, didn’t feel the least bit cowardly. If I’ve learned one thing since Mama began her battle with congestive heart failure, it’s that I can’t do this alone. Family matters. Friends count. Sometimes even the kindness of strangers can help us get through the day.
