After emptying the large box in the living room, Thomas and Mickey transported the stacks of dishes into the kitchen and set them upon the counter. I then filled one side of my kitchen sink with hot suds and the other with clear, scalding water, and Birdie and I stood side by side. I washed each dish and handed it to Birdie, who first dipped it into the clear water for rinsing and then wiped it dry with a large white dish towel, the very dish towel, in fact, she had given to me. It was made of flour sacking and bore in one corner an embroidered assortment of colorful vegetables: carrots, corn, tomatoes, and the like. After drying each dish, she placed it upon the countertop. We proceeded at a leisurely pace.
“I hope I haven’t complicated things for you,” she said at one point. “Do you even have room to store all these dishes in your cupboards?”
I had already considered the matter, of course, and told her of my plans, nodding toward each cupboard as I explained the necessary adjustments to be made. I have never been one for accumulating items or for retaining ones that have fallen into disuse, so my few kitchen cupboards afford adequate space.
“I will donate our old set of dishes to the Salvation Army,” I said, and Birdie nodded approvingly.
“That’s a real thoughtful thing to do, Margaret,” she said. “Not everybody would do that.” She paused and then added, “I sure hope it won’t be hard to give away your old ones, though. I’d feel bad if I knew you were attached to them.”
“I do not attach myself to things,” I said at once, then lest I seem ungrateful for her gift, I attempted a qualification. “Of course,” I said, handing her a plate to rinse and dry, “I have never owned a set of dishes to equal these.” I lifted my eyes briefly to meet hers, then turned aside quickly.
In the living room our husbands were keeping up a continuous flow of talk. It appeared that they had discovered a mutual interest in the old Andy Griffith Show and were testing each other’s knowledge of characters and plots. Mickey called into the kitchen, “Birdie, you’ll never guess. Thomas here knew the answer to the pretzel question!”
“Well, almost,” Thomas called. “I knew it was pretzels, and I knew it was Lydia somebody, but I couldn’t remember her last name.” The question, Birdie explained to me, concerned a character on an episode of the Andy Griffith Show, whose excuse when declining the offer of a pretzel was “They lay on my chest.” Lydia was Goober’s date in one episode, Birdie went on to say, and her last name, which Thomas could not remember, was Crosswaithe. Though I was tempted to point out Lydia’s confusion between the verbs “lie” and “lay” and, furthermore, to ask of what possible use was such inconsequential knowledge of obscure television characters, I said nothing.
“Ask him the one about the Smithsonian!” Birdie called back.
In the living room we heard Mickey pose the question to Thomas. “Okay, okay, here’s a good one. You know how Barney always gets words mixed up—well, what did he call the Smithsonian Institute in that episode where he bought the motorcycle and sidecar?”
“Easy,” Thomas said. “The Smith Brothers Institution.”
“Oh, he’s good, he is. Yes, he’s really good,” Mickey said, to which Thomas replied, “That’s the best imitation of Floyd Lawson I ever heard!”
“Listen to them in there,” Birdie said to me. “In lots of ways those two are like peas in a pod, aren’t they?” Indeed, it had already occurred to me that, were our lives a work of fiction, Mickey and Thomas could never reside as primary characters in a single plot for this very reason: They were too much alike. There was a want of conflict between them, which would render their coexistence bland and static or, rather, redundant. Many physical differences separated them, of course, as well as a wide gulf in matters of religion. In temperament and personality, however, they were cut from the same bolt.
“They do seem to have a great deal in common,” I said, easing the rest of the plates into the sudsy water. Neither one of us spoke for several moments as we listened to Mickey and Thomas quiz each other on Mayberry trivia. “Who taught Aunt Bee how to drive?” “What did Andy call his best fishing rod?” “What brand of gas did they sell at Wally’s station?” “Who was Barney’s favorite waitress at the diner?” “What was Mayberry’s largest department store?” “What three things did Opie wish for from the fortune-telling cards?” and the like.
“Mickey just loves that show,” Birdie said at last. “He used to watch the reruns every evening when they came on at 6:30. They moved things around, though, and now I think it comes on in the morning sometime. When he thinks of it, he’ll set the machine to record it, and then we’ll both watch it after supper. I like it a lot, too. Do you?”
“It is better than some programs,” I said. I imagined Birdie and Mickey sitting side by side on the couch in the basement watching Andy Griffith reruns, laughing together. I wondered briefly if Mickey worked on his latest cross-stitch pattern as he watched; then I remembered that Birdie had once said they sat upstairs in their recliners when they did needlework. Perhaps, instead, he put the finishing touches on his nut people while keeping one eye on the television. Or perhaps he did nothing else as he watched. It was not difficult to picture him mesmerized by the antics of the Mayberry hayseeds, leaning forward to catch every word and gesture, storing away questions to share with other fans.
“…and I told him I didn’t know,” Birdie was saying.
Not having heard what preceded this, I did not respond. I immersed a small stack of fruit bowls beneath the soapy water and then stirred the water a bit with my dishcloth.
After a pause, during which Birdie hummed lightly as if to cover an awkward silence, she said, “It doesn’t really matter, though, and I can sure understand if you’d rather not talk about it. We all have things we don’t like to discuss.”
Though I had not heard her question, I felt sure that she was correct, that indeed I would rather not discuss whatever it was, and so I said, “I would prefer not to.” I did not speak brusquely, however, and she smiled as she took a bowl from me with no sign of having been affronted.
“Wasn’t that what that man in the story always said?” she asked, drying the inside of the bowl with great concentration.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“The man who always said he’d prefer not to do whatever anybody asked him to do? Mickey and I read that story together a while back, but now I can’t remember the man’s name. It was a funny name. I keep thinking of Barney, but that’s probably because I keep hearing the men in there talking about Barney Fife. It’s not Barney, but …” She raised her voice and called to the next room. “Mickey, what was—”
“Are you referring to Bartleby the Scrivener?” I asked.
“That’s it! Bartleby! Never mind, Mickey, Margaret answered my question.” She looked up at me with the admiring eyes of a child. “I should’ve known you’d come up with it, Margaret. I bet you could really help us out with our reading. We’re just—” She broke off abruptly and lowered her eyes as if from sudden shame.
“With your reading?” I asked, puzzled. Frankly, it surprised me to find that Birdie was acquainted with Melville’s tale of Bartleby.
She fluttered her fingers. “Oh, you’ll probably think it’s silly, and it probably is, but we’ve been trying to read different books and stories and things together for the past few years….” She paused, emitting a nervous glissando of laughter. “And then we talk about them. It’s just a little project we thought might …” She did not finish the sentence but shook her head and clamped her teeth upon her lower lip as if wishing she had not spoken of the matter.
Was there nothing that Birdie and Mickey Freeman did not do together? I wondered. It struck me as a severely confining way of life.
“It is a commendable project,” I said. “I do not think it silly.”
Birdie laughed again. “Oh, heavens, I’d be embarrassed for you to hear us talk. We know so little about what’s really good. But still, it stretches us and makes us think, I guess. W
e didn’t do a whole lot of reading as children, neither one of us, so we’ve got a lot to make up for.” She stepped back, opened up her dish towel, and waved it about as if to dry it out. “We’ve started taking turns picking what we’ll read next,” she continued, “and we try to have a little variety. When we first started, I think we read three books in a row by Louis L’Amour until I finally told Mickey I was ready for a change!” She stepped forward and took another bowl from me. “I need to ask you sometime for a list of things you’d recommend. We’re trying to raise our level a little bit as time goes along.”
She went on to extol the virtues of a novel that they had recently finished, a book that I myself had read ten years earlier, shortly after its publication in 1984: Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns. “Oh, but I was so upset at the ending!” she exclaimed. “Why that author had to go and make Mr. Blakeslee die I’ll never understand. That was the most disappointing way for things to turn out just when everything looked so hopeful!” We worked in silence for a while, and then she said, “But, really, I guess that’s the way it goes in real life, too, lots of times. Things are going along just fine and then all of a sudden they turn upside down.”
“That is true,” I said. I could not help thinking of a book I had begun reading to Tyndall on his fourth birthday, a book that, because it was too advanced for him to grasp with full appreciation, I had paraphrased for him. In an early chapter of the book—The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame—Mole, Rat, and Toad ventured from the narrow country lanes onto the highroad, where “disaster, fleet and unforeseen, sprang out on them.” I have never forgotten the words. I have reminded myself of them often, for they have so aptly described my life.
“Mickey thought it was funny the way I took it so to heart,” Birdie continued. “He tried to make me laugh and get over it, but I wouldn’t listen. He kept saying, ‘It’s just a made-up story! It’s not real!’ But I just pulled the covers over my head and, like I said, wouldn’t listen.” By this I surmised that their reading sessions must take place at bedtime.
She went on to discuss another book they had read earlier: Selected Short Stories of O. Henry. I was somewhat taken back, in a pleasant sense, by her assessment of the writer, whose given name, as the reader knows, was William Sidney Porter: “He could tell a good story, all right,” she said, “but for some reason I got a little tired of them before we were done. They all had a funny little twist at the end, and none of them seemed very natural somehow.” I would have expected her to adore O. Henry’s gimmicks.
“Of course,” she added, “I guess things like that happen in real life, too, don’t they? Take what just happened right here in your house, for example. Who would ever have thought that we’d both give each other dishes in the very same pattern?” This remark sent a small tingle through me, for had I not, upon opening Birdie’s gift some thirty minutes earlier, seen certain comparisons to O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi”?
From the living room came the sounds of sustained laughter. “And the one where he gets Gomer to go with him to the haunted house!” we heard Mickey say. “Oh, and the Fun Girls—you ever see that one?”
“Yep, that’s a good one all right,” Thomas said. “And the one where he joins the choir—that’s my all-time favorite I think.”
Birdie smiled. “Mickey sure gets a kick out of Barney Fife. You know, there used to be a man who went to our church who looked just like—but what am I thinking of? You would know all about that, I guess, seeing he was related to you. It’s sure been nice to see his daughter at our church a couple of times lately.” I did not know that Joan had attended the church more than once. “Tell me,” Birdie went on, “did other people see the resemblance or just us?”
I knew of course that she was speaking of Thomas’s uncle Mayfield Spalding. “It was a fact that attracted frequent notice,” I said. Indeed, Mayfield had often complained about the number of people who regularly accosted him with inquiries: Was he related to Don Knotts? Was he Don Knotts’s father? Was he Don Knotts’s brother? Was he Don Knotts? One time, when Mayfield was younger, he was waiting to cross a street and a man had leaned out a car window and yelled, “Hey, Barney, where’s Andy and Opie?” I decided to tell Birdie this and did so. She laughed with delight.
By now I had begun washing the cups and saucers. We would soon be finished with the set of dishes.
“You know, people looking like other people reminds me of something,” Birdie said. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this because some people don’t like to be told that they favor somebody else, but I said to Mickey the first time I met you that I thought you looked like that actress…you know, the one who’s had all those husbands. What’s her name—Elizabeth something or other. Her name’s on some kind of perfume, too. I sprayed some on once in Belk Simpson, but it’s way too strong for me.”
I pretended that I did not recognize the woman’s identity. “Well, anyway,” Birdie said after I shook my head and assumed a blank expression, “she used to be a real pretty woman when she was younger, so it was meant as a compliment.”
I handed her a cup, which she rinsed and began to dry. “High praise indeed,” I said, “to be likened to someone who used to be young and attractive, who cannot keep a husband, and with whom you associate an overpowering odor.” I suppose I meant these words, which were spoken without a trace of levity, to be a test of sorts. If Birdie read them one way, our friendship would remain as it was now—tentative and polite; that is, if she hastened to clarify and apologize, I could keep her at arm’s length. Had I been permitted at the time to choose her response, I would perhaps have preferred this one. By reading my words in another light, however, she could nudge our relationship into something closer to sisterhood.
There was the briefest of pauses, and then she spoke without looking up, continuing to wipe the cup, which was already so dry that the dish towel made small squeaking sounds against it. “Of course,” she said, “she’s overweight, too. Did I mention that? Yes, she’s gone downhill something awful. In fact,” and here she broke off, frowning slightly as if searching her memory, then opening her mouth in feigned dismay, “now that I think about it, that woman might even be dead by now.”
Neither of us laughed outright, but as our husbands began whistling the theme song of the Andy Griffith Show in the next room, we exchanged the smallest of smiles.
It was a few minutes after five o’clock when we finished with the dishes. Thomas had turned on the television, and he and Mickey were chuckling over a ridiculous program of which Thomas was fond, a program called Mystery Science Theater 3000. He had tried to entice me to watch it one day by telling me that it was too funny to try to explain, and I had replied that as soon as my hands fell idle on a Saturday I would accept the invitation. By this I meant, of course, that I would never watch the program.
“Well, I guess we’re all through,” Birdie said with satisfaction, hanging the damp dish towel on the metal rod from which she had taken it earlier. “Could I help you switch your dishes around and get these up in your cupboards?”
“No,” I said. “I will do that myself.” I had loosened the stoppers in both sides of the sink, and the water drained out with great sucking noises. With my dishcloth I was wiping down the porcelain.
Birdie nodded at me. “I understand perfectly. There are just some things nobody can help you with, and I guess rearranging your kitchen cupboards is one of them.” She put a hand to the top of her head and patted in a small circle as if checking for loose hairpins. “My, we’ve got to get on home,” she said, looking at the clock on the stove. “I never dreamed it was already five. Oh, and look at your bread,” she said, pointing to the stovetop. “I hope I haven’t thrown your baking schedule off.”
I could not remember a time when I had left a loaf of bread to rise too long. I quickly twisted the oven knob to “Bake” and set the temperature at 400 degrees.
We heard Mickey from the living room. “Birdie, mousekin, you’ve got to see this!”
“I wonder what they’re up to now,” she said cheerfully. “Can I help you with anything else in here, Margaret?” When I shook my head, she turned and exited the kitchen. “Well, let’s go see what our men are laughing about now,” she said. But I stayed behind to remove the wet dish towel from the rod and take it to the back porch, where I spread it across the top of the washing machine. I finished wiping out the sink, selected a clean dish towel from a drawer and laid it across the rod, and then set the bread in the oven to bake. An idea had suddenly taken shape in my mind, but it unnerved me to think of carrying it out. My heart had begun to pound at the very thought of it.
When I stepped into the living room moments later, Birdie was sitting on Thomas’s green ottoman next to Mickey, who was seated in my rocking chair, which he had turned and pulled closer to the television. I stood for a moment surveying the scene. The three of them were watching the television screen, upon which a ghastly, moaning figure draped in white appeared to be stumbling toward a precipice; tremulous violin strains accompanied his melodramatic progress toward doom. “Okay, okay, if you’re going to get that upset about it, I’ll raise your allowance!” quipped a tiny voice. Thomas, Mickey, and Birdie laughed in unison.
“Shhh!” Mickey tapped Birdie’s arm. “You’ll miss what they say next.” The camera panned down the side of the cliff to a rocky shore, where a dark-haired young woman in a bathing suit stood scanning the coastline anxiously. “Hey, Annette!” called the little voice. “What’s the matter? Did you lose your beach blanket?” Thomas, Birdie, and Mickey laughed again.
The concept of the program, I soon understood, was to exploit outdated substandard movies for a bit of fatuous entertainment—or put another way, to generate from inanity yet more inanity. As the original movie played itself out, a trio of mockers posing as theater-goers were silhouetted in the corner of the screen, and from this vantage offered sarcastic witticisms and droll comments concerning the action and dialogue upon the screen.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 33
