Cold Tea on a Hot Day

by Matlock, Curtiss Ann

  The window drew her, and she looked out toward the Valentine home, wishing for Winston to come across the pasture. He had visited her at Marilee’s, but they had not been alone since she had left home.

  She washed the cup and glasses left in the sink and cleaned the counter that had food and coffee stains on it. She went on to wipe over everything and sweep the floor. She looked toward the Valentine house again, then sat at the table to drink her coffee. Halfway through it, she began sobbing. The suddenness and depth of the sobbing frightened her. When she managed to stop, she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  Then, swept along on a wave of fresh desperation, she took up the telephone and dialed Winston’s phone number.

  Winston himself answered the phone. A sign from God.

  “Winston, I’m over here in my kitchen. Could you come down? I’d like to talk.”

  After what seemed a very long moment, during which Vella worried what Winston must think, he said he would come right away.

  Fairly flying around the kitchen, she got Winston’s favorite blue mug from the cupboard, wiped it shining, then poured it full of coffee and set it on the table along with sugar and cream. With the roses and her cup there, the table looked inviting.

  She glanced out the window and saw Winston coming across the small fenced pasture between their houses at an encouraging rate, even with his cane.

  A man hurrying to her. Tears sprang to her eyes at the wondrous sight. She whirled and, with the heart of a young woman, she raced to the back door and opened it before Winston had time to make it up the few stairs.

  “Are you all right, Vella? You didn’t sound very good on the phone.” His expression was filled with concern as he came stiffly up the stairs.

  “No…no, I’m not all right.” The words poured forth, and then she burst into tears and had to avert her face in shame.

  Winston, whose ripe age and experience with women had accustomed him to tears, reached out, drew Vella against him and let her cry into his shirt. She leaned on him a bit, and he had to balance with his cane, and after about a minute, he began to worry that Vella might push him over. He didn’t want to break a hip here in her kitchen and have the paramedics have to show up and everyone know he was alone with her.

  “Vella…here, gal. Sit down and drink some coffee. That will help you feel better.”

  He got her sat down, and then he sat himself down and felt greatly relieved at having averted breaking his hip. Old age was a pain in the neck, as well as the hips, elbows and knees.

  He poured coffee for both of them. After a few sniffs, Vella took up her coffee cup with both hands and drank. Winston drank his, and for a couple of minutes there was silence, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator and Vella’s sniffs.

  “This is really good coffee,” Winston told her. “I’ve missed it.”

  Instantly he realized he had said a wrong thing, because she began to cry again. He decided to retreat into the safety of silence, drink his coffee, and wait her out and hope she stopped crying before Perry came home.

  Keeping silent did the trick. Before he had finished his coffee, she managed to get ahold of herself and, as so many people did, slipped from sadness into anger.

  “Oh, Winston,” she said with some vehemence. “I miss my house, and I miss my roses.”

  Winston nodded, biting back the comment that she should just come home. There was no telling what might set her off again.

  “I feel so foolish…leavin’ my house and Perry like I have. At my age, Winston.”

  Winston nodded again.

  “It’s just that…well, I’m all confused. I don’t seem to fit. It’s like all the rules have changed…like there just aren’t any rules today.”

  Winston said, “Things are sure different,” and nodded.

  “My heaven…even my menopause was later than most.”

  Ohmygod. He sure hoped she did not continue on that subject.

  She didn’t. She snatched up a magazine from a stack atop the microwave oven and shook it at him. “Just look at all the people they are puttin’ on the cover of Modern Maturity these days. Movie stars. Do we all have to compare ourselves to movie stars? Do we have to have advice from people who get their faces and Lord knows what-all lifted and tucked? I can’t look at the thing anymore.”

  With that, she tossed the magazine to the floor with force enough to send it sliding through to the dining room. Winston laid his hand firmly on the table to hold the cloth if need be.

  “I look in the mirror and there’s this old woman,” Vella said with passion, “but I don’t feel that in my heart.”

  Winston watched her press her hand in the middle of her very ample bosom. Something stirred inside him, a natural curiosity to see her lovely bosom. He was pleasantly surprised at his reaction.

  “Perry has not touched me in so long, Winston.”

  Winston, who definitely did not want to go any deeper with that, said quickly, “You are a lively woman, Vella. And you are not so old. I’m old,” he added, heavily.

  “I’m sixty-six.”

  “You are still in the youth of old age,” he volunteered, thinking of how he was in the old age of old age.

  Vella said, “I don’t look forty…but I don’t feel sixty-six.”

  “You are a handsome woman, Vella.”

  She regarded him in a way that made him feel uncertain.

  “At my age,” she said, “my mother was a really old woman and didn’t do anything but sit on her porch and talk about eating. She talked about what she had for breakfast and what she was going to have for lunch and for supper. Minnie Oakes talks about that, and what she plans to watch each night on television. She marks it all down in the TV Guide.

  “The only other woman my age that I think may have my same feelings is Odessa Collier, and she’s…well, it is understandable for Odessa to be a little wild and loose, because she has always been wild and loose. She’s artistic,” she added pensively.

  “You’re artistic,” Winston volunteered. “Just look at how you grow your roses and then arrange them.” He gestured at those in the mason jar.

  Vella looked at the roses. Then, feeling an urge to move, she got to her feet and stepped to the counter. She now wished she had not started pouring her heart out to Winston. But since she had started, she might as well continue. She had so thoroughly tossed everything to the wind, what did she have to lose?

  “I am not like Odessa. I’m just not like anyone, and being my age is not like I had imagined at all. I don’t know what to do with myself. I still want to do so many things. I still feel so many things.”

  She sighed then, a sigh that hovered between exhaustion and desperation. She felt herself in a precarious balance between sobs and screams.

  Winston got to his feet. He had begun to worry a little about Mildred coming down to check on him, and his bones pained him when he sat too long. He thought it time to look for an exit.

  “It’s a good thing to feel, Vella. It proves you are alive. And I guess being a little mixed up is a big part of livin’. It is better than the alternative,” he added.

  This was a phrase he had been telling himself a lot of late. He wasn’t believing it so much anymore, though. Death had come to look pleasant, an end to many aches and pains and annoyances.

  Vella lifted her head and looked at him. He was startled to find it was like she was aiming at him, and the very next moment she moved right up against him and kissed him. He saw it coming and couldn’t do anything but stand there and take it.

  “Thank you, Winston, for your kindness to me,” she whispered with her lips still brushing his.

  Her kiss had not been a thank-you sort of kiss. It had been an invitation, and she remained against him, looking him in the eye with that invitation that kindled a surprising feeling inside him.

  He further astonished himself by encircling her with his free arm and kissing her with a passion he had not known he could summon. He wasn’t dead yet.

  Th
e sun was far to the west when Vella turned the Crown Victoria into the alley at a high enough rate of speed to cause the front to bounce precariously, but without slowing, she shot on past behind the police station and came to a jarring halt at the back door to the drugstore, right behind Perry’s dusty Lincoln parked in his space. She jammed the shift lever into park, left the engine running and propelled herself out from behind the steering wheel.

  Rounding the hood, she stalked to the rear passenger door and pulled out two suitcases. She started dragging them on their wheels; they fell over on the gravel, and she didn’t bother to right them, but dragged them on their side, until she got to the door, where she hefted them inside, making a lot of commotion in the endeavor. She was, after all, a sixty-six-year-old woman throwing around suitcases that each weighed half as much as she did. The thought brought her strength, and she threw the second case halfway across the storeroom.

  Belinda appeared in the doorway from the front. “What in the world…?”

  “I’m bringin’ your daddy’s things.”

  “You are what?” Belinda took a wide stance and put her arms akimbo on her hips, as if to block Vella’s entry.

  “I brought your daddy’s things from home,” said Vella, who had righted both cases and started tugging them forward. “He is down here from dawn to dusk anyway, he might as well move on down here. I’m movin’ back home.”

  “You aren’t!”

  “Yes, I am.” Vella was heading for the rear pharmacy door. She yanked it open. “I made that home for forty years. I worked down here, too, but I’m choosing the house. Your father already chose this pharmacy years ago. Perry!”

  There wasn’t any need to yell his name. Her husband was struggling to get himself out of his old chair. His eyes were wide, and his mouth open.

  “What in the world are you doin’ now, Vella?”

  “You heard me, I’m sure. Here are your things.” She did her best to swing the cases forward, and in the process she almost toppled herself and had to grab the doorjamb to keep from falling. Breathing deeply, feeling her heavy breasts move up and down, she added in a more controlled manner, “I’m movin’ back home. You can stay here. I’m seein’ Jaydee about a formal separation.”

  She turned and headed out of the store, and Belinda followed, saying hysterically, “Mama…don’t do this. Don’t do this to me…leavin’ Daddy with me!”

  Vella was listening for Perry, God help her, but she listened in vain, because her husband did not call to her.

  With her vision blurred by tears, she got back into her car and headed on down the alleyway, bumping out on the other end.

  Seventeen

  Situations Unfolding

  “Marilee?” Vella called out as she entered the house and tossed her purse onto the couch. She breathed deeply, feeling depleted and therefore totally calm.

  The house was warm. Marilee had not put on the air-conditioning. The windows were wide, and late-afternoon sunshine shone across the porch and through the front screens.

  “In here.”

  Vella followed the sound of the voice to the back bedroom, where she found Marilee sitting on the foot of the bed, which was covered with clothing and shoe boxes and various other paraphernalia. In fact, the entire room was covered with a wide variety of paraphernalia.

  “It looks like a tornado hit this room.”

  “What? Oh.” Marilee, who had been reading something, looked around as if seeing for the first time. “I was picking out a dress to wear tonight, and then I got to lookin’ for the box with my birthday stuff…tryin’ to find the candle for Parker’s birthday cake on Saturday. Pretty soon I had so much out, it seemed a good time to clean thoroughly.” She paused. “I had a keep pile and a giveaway pile, but now I don’t remember which is which.”

  “You have a certain candle for Parker’s cake?” Vella shifted a pile of clothing to make room on the corner of the bed, sat and slipped off her shoes. Her big toes were becoming arthritic and suffered in shoes, although it struck her now that this was the first she had thought of it all day. That seemed a good sign of how alive she felt.

  “The number four,” Marilee was saying. “I’ve been savin’ the four and just buy a new number to go after it. I used it on my cake last year. We blow it out real quick, so it’s like new.” She twisted and reached a hand to the windowsill, bringing back the candle to show Vella. “See…just a little bit melted there.”

  “It looks fine.” Vella thought that her niece could sure be thrifty.

  The two sat there a minute, as if both out of breath. Vella found the room dim after the afternoon brightness outside. Golden light beams filtered through the trees and the window screen. A faint breeze brought the sound of the children’s voices in the backyard and gently stirred the drapes. Watching the drapes move, Vella thought, not for the first time, that her niece showed a marked fondness for a forties look; the draperies were of a large flower pattern similar to one Vella herself had in her living room way back when. She did not care for it now.

  Perhaps for a while the young got old, and then the old got young again.

  Her gaze came around to her niece, as if to see herself at that age. She then noticed Marilee’s disheveled appearance.

  “Have you been crying?”

  Vella had long ago given up expecting Marilee to be truly happy. It was a set of mind that Vella, too, had struggled with when in her forties. Maybe she was just now coming out of it, she thought.

  “Oh—” Marilee wiped her eyes “—yes, and it’s silly really. I just got to reading some of Stuart’s old letters.” She fluttered one and indicated the shoe box filled with folded papers and envelopes. “I kept them…heaven knows why, but I did. I just now found the box in the back of the closet.”

  She looked at the letter she held, and Vella did, too, recalling the tall, handsome man who had swept her niece off her feet, and for whom Vella had never cared. She had known Stuart James instantly as a childish philanderer, without an ounce of giving anywhere in him.

  “We wrote a lot of letters to each other, even when we were together. We were both writers.” Her niece smiled wanly, looking in that instant so very young.

  “Of course you kept them. We like to go back over things like that so we can cry all over again.” Then, more gently, “They are memories that are important. They deserve to be kept.”

  Vella thought perhaps she was speaking to herself. She automatically reached to take out a letter.

  “You can’t read them!” Marilee pushed Vella’s hand away and gathered the box to her lap.

  “Oh, I wasn’t thinking. Of course I can’t read them.” She had simply been following curiosity, with the box right in front of her. Her escapade of the afternoon had her thoughts all awry.

  “Well, some of them you could read.” Marilee’s expression was apologetic. “Most of them, in fact. We did a lot of discussing of theories in general, like love in general. Most of them were written when I was in college and indulging in an intellectual phase that is so far removed from reality. I was profoundly impressed with Stuart’s mind. I guess I thought he knew everything there was to know about life. He’d seen so much, done so much traveling to exotic places, and he presented such a wise philosophical figure. He was like a guru. He loved that, gathering all of us admiring students around him. Look, here’s a picture of our little gang.”

  “Where are you?” Vella pushed her glasses down her nose to sharpen the bifocals.

  “I’m…this one, here’s my head.”

  “Oh.” She recognized her niece’s face, in the rear of the picture and half-hidden by hair. Marilee in those days had been quite introverted, hiding her feelings and her entire self, if possible. She still hid her true self to a great extent, Vella thought.

  “Reading the letters now, I see that I put a lot of intentions into them that were never there. I built Stuart and our love up into some great fantasy that it never was.” She paused. “Maybe I didn’t love him as the man he was but
as a fantasy of him in my mind. Then, when he was the human man he was, I got mad at him for disappointing me.”

  “Oh, everyone does that when they fall in love,” Vella said. “None of us would ever get married if we saw our lover as human. We have to be blinded by love and then grow to accept the reality. By the time we do, we’re a little more used to it.”

  What had happened to her being used to Perry? Maybe she simply could only take so much reality of him.

  “Well, it was a great disappointment when I could suddenly see. Stuart didn’t want a wife. He wanted a perpetual cheerleader.”

  “Don’t most men?”

  Marilee laughed at that. “Yes, but most do grow out of it by the age of forty.”

  “Hmm, maybe.” Vella, whose spirits were sinking by the minute, thought that it would be nice if Perry wanted anything more than someone to mop up after him.

  Marilee stuffed the letters back in the shoe box and put the lid on it. “I’ll need to go ahead and get rid of these. I doubt Parker would take very kindly to me hauling my former husband’s letter along into our marriage.”

  “You’re goin’ to marry Parker, then?”

  “Yes. And here’s the dress I’m going to wear tonight to tell him. What do you think?”

  “It’s lovely.”

  Holding the dress before her, another one that reminded Vella of the forties, Marilee observed herself in the mirror. “I’ve been rude and thoughtless to Parker,” she said to her aunt and to herself. “Keeping him waiting all this time. I didn’t mean to be…. I just don’t want to make another mistake.” Marilee’s eyes were dark and had that bit of worry that seemed always to be there.

  “Oh, honey…you are human, and the plain fact is humans make mistakes all over the place. Don’t be so hard on yourself, and don’t expect to escape making mistakes. Every mistake makes us smarter.”

  Marilee turned to face Vella and said, “We won’t be getting married immediately. We’ll have to make plans, get Parker’s house ready for us…but you can come with us, Aunt Vella. There’ll always be room for you with us.”