Yet, rather than be jealous, Junior had become, she noticed, more energetic about lovemaking. He was less tired at night and more demanding of her. They were barely in their bed lately before he started. The night-light bulb was still hot to the touch when she felt his heavy hand stirring the blankets, searching for her in the darkness.
“How about it, Thel?” he would ask, as he patted her barely perceptible buttocks. “Do I get to hear my little cheerleader tonight, or don’t I?”
So that was it. He thought the new Thelma was nothing more than a revival of the old high school cheerleading days, when they’d first met, rather than the work of a mature woman with an experienced lover in tow. A lover who also happened to be the king of the game shows. What else, then, could she do? Would it take a ménage à trois with Monty Hall to get her husband to sit up, despite his cumbersome belly size, and take notice?
It was Christmas Day that Thelma had taken her first extra Valium, a week after hearing Milly’s conversation in the restroom. And on Christmas Day she didn’t bother to give Junior his biggest, best present. It was a belly toner called Belly Beautiful, complete with an exercise program to help him shed his burgeoning gut. Thelma had wrapped it three weeks earlier, but she left it right where it was, behind the summer dresses in her walk-in closet. Instead she let him poke sadly among the balled-up wrappings and flattened bows that covered the floor of the family room. And when his sad eyes met hers they almost cried out to her, “Didn’t I hint a thousand times that I wanted a Belly Beautiful?” Even when he rounded up his ties and socks and Fruit of the Looms into a somber heap and sat looking at it vacantly, she said nothing. Two days later she took Belly Beautiful back to Sears.
“It wasn’t something my husband needed,” she had told the holiday returns clerk. On the drive home, she had barely noticed the fat flakes of snow as they pelted against the warm windshield and were eaten up by the wipers.
“Let Monique Tessier fight for breath beneath him, the way I did for years,” Thelma thought as she drove. “I won’t help him get rid of his belly just so he’ll have an easier time crawling into bed with her.” She had driven around for an hour, past other people’s happy holiday homes, up and down the streets of Portland, like a delivery woman of some sort, until she remembered she had a house of her own, with a family, with a Christmas tree in a den full of scrunched-up paper. Until she remembered she had a fat-bellied husband. Thelma had parked her little yellow Corvair in the driveway, and then gone straight upstairs and found the ring Junior had given to her as her big gift. It was an opal. Her birthstone. She didn’t want it. It would be like a birth certificate around her finger, reminding her. “I’m sorry I was ever born,” Thelma had said, as she stood staring out into the streets, into the heavily falling snow that could cover up mistakes so easily if you let it. She took another Valium, another sort of snowfall, a warmer kind of covering.
Now Thelma looked out her spring window at the balmy April day, at the same scene that had been freezing and snow-filled, and so like a New England Christmas card, just a short time ago. The day she had flushed her birthstone ring down the upstairs toilet. Where the mounds of snow had been, there now were flowers. There were no longer white things everywhere but green things. Green as money. Greener than envy.
Thelma went to Junior’s tiny bar and washed another Valium down with a splash of club soda. She had never dreamed the day would come when she would abuse her prescription. She felt about the prescription the same way she had felt about her first credit card. A mark of maturity. Dr. Phillips would never believe that his little Thelma would take more pills than he told her to. It was like disobeying her father to disobey Dr. Phillips. He had been the doctor who was there when she was born. Born. Birth. Birthstone. Christmas. Junior. Junior and Monique. Ocean Edge Motel. Oh, wasn’t the mind a terrible thing sometimes? Sometimes it seemed that even if you started out with nice thoughts, it could lead you right back to painful ones.
Thelma was still sitting in the den when Junior arrived home on time for a change. Randy, his son, and now Junior realized, his chaperon, was with him. Junior looked at Randy’s hair, cut so short you could see the white scalp. He looked at the tweed suit, which had once belonged to Jimmy Driscoll before Marvin fired him for insubordination. The tweed hurt his eyes. The sight as a whole reminded Junior of his own first days in the family business, sans tweed.
“I have seen and heard all of you today that I care to,” Junior said to Randy, and the boy went promptly up the stairs to his room, where he had cleverly hidden a fat joint for a rainy day. “Thank you, though,” Junior said as Randy slammed his door, “for sharing yourself with me.”
In the den Junior stopped at the bar to pour a quick drink. He also wanted a few seconds to size up Thelma, determine her mood, before he interfered with it. He found the opened wedding invitation from his cousin Amy Joy where Thelma had left it, leaning against a bottle of club soda. He hoped the notion of a wedding, of sacred vows, of words like “honor” and “obey” hadn’t thrown her into a emotional dump. He never knew what might set her off. One time it was a radio advertisement for Chicken Delite. The description of juicy thighs had reminded Thelma that Monique Tessier had some.
Junior eyed his wife. She seemed fine. She was sitting on the sofa, her legs crossed, holding a record album and thinking, brows knitted.
“Trying to remember some old song,” thought Junior. He prided himself on being as good as any damn disc jockey when it came to the whos and whens of music trivia. He would help Thelma out. Things were better between them, weren’t they? A few months ago she’d come alive in bed. Even after she caught him with Monique, it hadn’t put a damper on things. Just last night he’d tried again, and sure enough. It was so good he thought she might accidentally wake the kids. Stir up the neighbors. He even imagined a fire truck pulling up and turning a spray of water loose through the bedroom window. Maybe that’s what women needed sometimes. A little push now and then. A little jealousy to stir up the old home fires.
Junior stared at Thelma’s thoughtful brow curiously. He would help her out, the way she’d been helping him through the nights lately.
“She keeps that up,” Junior thought, “and I might start coming home on time, with or without Randy.” Besides, he didn’t want to be like his father. A million times in his childhood he had heard Marvin ask Pearl, “And how was your day?” and then never bother to listen to her answer.
“What are you trying to think of?” asked Junior. He noticed Thelma had The Hits of Bobby Vinton in her hands. What could be puzzling her? The year “Roses Are Red” was a hit? 1962. “Blue Velvet”? 1963. Come on, it was Thelma here he was dealing with. How tough could it be? Vinton’s nationality? Polack.
“What’s the problem, hon?” Junior prodded. “Are you trying to think of a year?”
At the sound of the question, Thelma burst into loud sobs. She shook her head.
“It was 1948, you asshole!” Thelma screamed. She made a motion with her hand, quickly, the way one throws a Frisbee, and Junior ducked as Bobby Vinton sailed through the air and struck the wall behind the bar. “Just tell me what we paid for that damn Maytag!”
SICILY GRAPPLES WITH HER CONSCIENCE: ARSENIC, OLD LACE, AND YOUNG FRENCHMEN
“Ed Lawler run around on that woman every chance he got. He pillowed and plundered and bedded, I tell you, all he could. But Sicily’s a saint. She stuck with him every inch of the way.”
—Winnie Craft, at the 1962 Avon party
Sicily McKinnon Lawler took her wedding dress, still in its original box, down from a shelf in her bedroom closet. She wiped away a cobweb that had attached itself to one corner. There had been no spring cleaning done that year, thanks to the wedding revelation by Amy Joy. Sicily no longer cared if cobwebs festooned the entire house. The spiders could have it, for all she cared, and the few acres of land too.
The dress was still softly beautiful. The lace
design had always reminded Sicily of frost creeping across icy windowpanes during Mattagash’s wintry months. What is it about spring that old memories seem to thaw out too, along with the flies, the fields, the river, the buildings? Sicily remembered Ed Lawler, so nervous on his wedding day that he had vomited, leaning out of John McRyder’s new Pontiac. Sicily had always suspected nerves had little to do with it. John McRyder, Ed’s old college classmate and best man, was famous for the bottles of alcohol that poked out from the springs of the Pontiac’s seats. A rainy August day in 1931, the skies so dark and foreboding that someone not so much in love as Sicily might have taken it as a bad sign. A kind of matrimonial omen. Funny that John McRyder came to mind. She had looked at Ed’s old college class book just a few days ago and had found them both, John and Ed, arms around each other’s shoulders, cocky in their football uniforms, faces so young they were almost unrecognizable. “John ‘The Flying Scott’ McRyder, Captain,” is what the caption said, “Gets a Pat on the Back from Ed ‘The Lawless’ Lawler. Championship Game, 1929.” It was in the late forties that John McRyder had gone up in a little yellow airplane at the Houlton state fair for a five-dollar joyride and the plane had come plummeting down to earth in a potato field. For years afterward, during the harvest, kids found pieces of yellow like chunks of sun turned up by the digger and tossed among the rows and rows of russet potatoes. Sicily had always liked John, despite his philandering ways, which she worried would rub off on Ed. But John had even managed to get himself married to a nice girl, and he had settled down before he died. And didn’t Mrs. John McRyder cry at the funeral! Ed and Sicily had driven all the way to Houlton to attend.
“Can you imagine?” Emily McRyder had cried out to Ed in her grief. “Can you imagine going up in an airplane just to look down?” The McRyders had enough little kids by then to fill that old Pontiac. It pained Sicily to see Emily McRyder so.
“They might just as well have buried that woman along with him,” Sicily had told the women who gathered around her back in Mattagash, anxious for news of the wake. A little yellow airplane never took enough interest in Mattagash to crash there. They were always flying over, toting hunters and fisherman from the city into the virgin lakes that had once been safe from such men. But now Mattagash’s geography was being plundered, thanks to yellow Piper Cubs and red Stinsons, which never landed for a chat but chose instead to stay above it all, tipping their wings mockingly.
John McRyder. He had been so dashing in his day. Sicily realized years after his death, when it was perfectly safe to admit such things, that she had had a passionate crush on John McRyder. She held the wedding dress beneath her chin and studied herself in the mirror. She had never been thin—none of the McKinnon women had ever been accused of that. But it was all tied in to the reason their ancestors had been strong enough and sturdy enough to withstand the raw country that faced them, to be the first in that country. Yes, the McKinnon women, like the men, were all big-boned and solid, a compliment for young girls of that place and time. But Sicily had become a little more big-boned and solid over the years than she cared to be. And besides, it was all over now, this pioneering notion, this striking out to hinterlands unknown. Why did she need the childbearing, water-carrying frame of a woman you see nowadays only in National Geographic pictures of Russia? It all seemed a bit unfair in 1969. Oh, maybe a great-grandchild of hers would end up on the moon one day. It was possible. They were getting ready to send a man there, Neil Armstrong.
“Imagine that, Ed,” Sicily thought. “A man on the moon. You always said we were close.” And then Sicily smiled to remember how Ed used to tease old Mr. Fennelson about going to the moon.
“There’s gonna be trouble,” the old man would sputter. “You mark my words. God don’t want mankind on the moon. God wants to keep as far away from mankind as he kin.” Now they were both dead, moonwalking or not. And soon man would go off to the moon, seeking rivers maybe and warm places sheltered from the snows and winds, just as Sicily’s ancestors had done.
“Look out, God,” Sicily thought. “Here we come.” And then she was suddenly unhappy that she had been caught between pioneering ages, the way some young men complain of being lost between wars.
Sicily folded the dress carefully and tucked it back inside the shell of its box. The dress, her very own wedding dress, did not fit her anymore, it was true, but with a few adjustments, it would suit Amy Joy just fine. Tears filled Sicily’s eyes. All the times she had dreamed of seeing little Amy Joy gussied up in her mother’s wedding lace! What had she expected all those years? Perhaps that Amy Joy would meet a nice young boy at Loring Air Force Base, a boy from Delaware or New Jersey or one of those civilized states. Or perhaps Amy Joy would go off to college somewhere, since a high school degree didn’t create the brouhaha it used to. In Mattagash the hot new item was a year or two of college. So perhaps Amy Joy would go off to college and at that college, all hidden mysteriously in those intelligent green vines, Amy Joy would sip a Pepsi in the cafeteria next to some young boy whose family was influential in some way or another, like the Rockefellers or the Kennedys, and they would fall in love and marry. And the whole influential family would come to Mattagash to meet Sicily, and their entourage would stay at the Albert Pinkham Motel, and Sicily would fix a pot of Tetley’s so that they could all come by her house for a cup of tea, and they would sit on the back porch and listen to the Mattagash River and be thankful that their son had the foresight to chase down one of the descendants of Mattagash’s founding family.
“Darn that Jean Claude Cloutier!” Sicily said. “Or however you pronounce that god-awful French name.” She could actually poison him, if she thought she would get away with it. She could give him a plug of arsenic hidden in the creamy center of a homemade whoopie pie. But a Frog probably wouldn’t eat a whoopie pie.
She took the fragile dress back out of its box and held it to her body again, for one final look before it went off to belong to someone else, to become a part of someone else’s future. She turned before the mirror, for a side view. If someone had told her years ago, when she first started dreaming her wedding dreams for Amy Joy, that this dress would flounce its way down the aisle to weld Amy Joy to a French Catholic for eternity, she would have burned it, veil and all. Or better yet, she would have marched right down to the banks of the Mattagash River and heaved it far out into the rips. Let it float all the way down to the ocean at St. John, New Brunswick. Let it go back down that old river in the opposite direction to the one that the first McKinnons had taken. That’s just what it was like for Amy Joy to be marrying in the territory of Catholics. It was the opposite direction from any McKinnon before her. If you so much as glanced at the McKinnon family tree you would be able to pronounce in a second any name that your eye spied. Just how did they say “Cloutier” in Frogtown? “Clue-tier”? Or, worse yet, “Clue-tee-yay”? A person would sound like a cheerleader. Her poor little grandchildren. Yes, sir. The way Sicily felt about weddings and trousseaus and bridal showers now, she might just as well toss the dress into the Mattagash River and let the young girls down around St. John, New Brunswick, pull it out of the water and wear it. They were Canadians, true, a shortcoming. Yet they could still speak the King’s English down there. But she kept forgetting. Jean Claude wasn’t a Canadian. He was American, like the rest of them on this side of the border, on this side of the Mattagash River. And his family had most likely been American for a hundred and fifty years. Maybe more. Yet, and Amy Joy had told her this, Jean Claude’s parents could barely speak a sensible word of English. Americans, unable to speak English. Imagine that.
“You can’t depend on a river to separate folks in a proper manner,” Sicily thought. She had once said to Ed that she wished the French-speaking people in Watertown and St. Leonard would go back where they came from. And Ed had reminded her that a century and a half ago, her very own ancestors had come from New Brunswick, Canada. The Loyalists. And that there were names in her family tree f
rom Ireland who had been Catholic back in the old country, before the famine, before the passage, and they came here as orphans to be adopted by Protestants.
“Well, God meant for that to happen,” Sicily had answered him. “Maybe God caused the famine to disperse the Catholics so that they could find good Protestant homes in America.” Ed had only laughed, his “I know more than you” laugh. But it was true. And besides, why bring it all up now? Why bring it all back?
Amy Joy knocked on the bedroom door and Sicily quickly put the dress away and slid the box under the bed. She kicked her slippers off and lay back. As a final touch, she flicked some bangs down into her eyes and then pulled the spare woolen blanket, meant for cold winter nights and not balmy spring days, up around her neck.
“Come in, dear,” she said. The eyes that looked from beneath the heavy blanket were dull with remorse. Pain had erased all memory of a former, happy life.
“Oh, I didn’t know you were taking a nap,” said Amy Joy, and started to close the door.
“No!” said Sicily, showing much too much vigor. “What do you want?”
“Well,” said Amy Joy, “I guess it’s time I got the wedding dress taken in. Rose Henderson said she’d do the seamstress work as a present, and the wedding is only a week away. Have you decided to give it to me yet or not? It doesn’t matter, you know. I can get something at J. C. Penney’s at the last minute.”
A Wedding on the Banks Page 10
