Tending to Virginia

by Jill McCorkle

  “She was a nice person,” he had explained. “But it was a mistake.”

  “Nice? Nice?” she asked.

  “Yes, but it didn’t work. We weren’t right for each other. That doesn’t make her a bad person.”

  “I was Junior Rotary Honey,” she told him after hearing the list of Sheila’s qualities which she had asked for, not knowing there would be such a list of credits. “I was second in my class. I am pregnant with your baby and my art teacher called me little Monet.” That was all true, all of it, the only details left out being that her high school class was very small and that Mrs. Abbott who had called her little Monet all through high school seemed to barely even remember Virginia now.

  “I’ve moved into string art,” Mrs. Abbott had said when Virginia saw her in the grocery store. “I really love those knots. What did you say your name was again?”

  “Virginia,” she said while Mrs. Abbott gazed at her with a blank stare; thank God, Mark wasn’t there.

  “Virginia,” Mrs. Abbott repeated and shook her head while the woman pushing the chair stared pitifully down on Mrs. Abbott’s head.

  “Turner, Ginny Sue Turner.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Abbott said and clapped her hands. “Ginny Sue Turner, my little Van Gogh.”

  “I was Monet.”

  “I saw where you got married, too,” Mrs. Abbott said. “It was the second time I saw you were getting married and I told the PTA that my little Van Gogh was married for the second time.”

  “But I only got married once,” Virginia explained. “Two engagements but only one marriage.”

  “I remember your cousin, too. And she’s been married twice I believe, too.”

  “She has but I haven’t.”

  “Try knots little Manet,” Mrs. Abbott called out. “Knots are so knotted.”

  “Monet!” Virginia insisted, heard only by a woman in barefoot sandals reading a Correctol box. Mrs. Abbott had given everyone a name; everybody’s report card had a different name and all that time she thought she was special, thought she was the first, thought she had been given a name because she was good and different from the rest. She probably wouldn’t have even majored in art otherwise. She probably would have majored in something else and been a consultant instead of knotting knots and getting frustrated with sixth graders who always drew pictures that came close enough to resembling body parts so that all class control was lost, frustrated that she can’t seem to get the ideas that she has in her mind onto the canvas; somewhere in midair they get all twisted and dark and ugly and everything changes too fast, Gram and Lena, and her stomach. There were probably hundreds of Monets over the years and Virginia is certain that her waterlilies looked nothing like the real ones though Mrs. Abbott had clapped her hands and said, oh yes they did. “That woman’s so full of shit,” Cindy said when Virginia brought up Mrs. Abbott once. “She called me her little Charles Schultz.”

  Virginia’s waterlilies, a gift to Gram, a small watercolor in a cheap frame is still in Gram’s bedroom, but it looks nothing like the real waterlilies, nothing about it. Mrs. Abbott did not tell the whole truth—a lie, deception. Virginia at that time had never seen the real waterlilies, and ignorantly believed Mrs. Abbott, only to later, on a trip during college, find herself in front of a Monet exhibit. Her face flushed with inadequacy while reality burst forth, you will never in your life do anything that can compare. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” Gram always says.

  The sun is in full view now, hot and hazy, the Corvette door slamming as the thug makes his way to God knows where in his loud orange tank top. It is already nine o’clock and here she sits, having done nothing. Her great-grandmother, the other Virginia Suzanne, at her age would have already cooked a huge breakfast and be working on lunch. She would have already fed chickens and washed clothes that would be hanging and blowing in that warm country air. Virginia Suzanne, a familiar name, a name shared, Virginia Suzanne Pearson, she thinks as she gets up and goes to the bathroom. Virginia Suzanne Turner, Ginny Sue Turner, Virginia Turner Ballard, little Monet. Suddenly an image comes to her mind of a tombstone with all of those names listed on it, last of which is Mrs. Ballard, whispered in her mind with the voices of those first graders whose faces are now so sharp in her mind, faces that she may soon forget, faces that will change and perhaps pass her unnoticed. Virginia Suzanne White, wife of Cord Pearson, devoted mother and child of God. Virginia had seen that tombstone, had knelt there in what used to be a churchyard and now is the back side of a parking lot, and she read those words over and over while Gram placed a plastic flower arrangement that the two of them had made.

  “Mama would be so proud of this arrangement,” Gram said and bent the wire stem of a rose down so that it didn’t block the word “child.” “I know she wouldn’t like all these cars pulling in and out, though. It would scare her good, I know.”

  “Would she have liked me?” Virginia asked and turned to Gram who was shielding her eyes and staring up into the sky, the horizon that she knew as a child, trees and tobacco fields, now cluttered with mobile homes.

  “Oh, she would have loved you,” Gram said. “She’d have been so proud that you have her name.”

  “Do you think she can see me?” Virginia asked, followed by a series of beeps from Roy Carter’s Lincoln. He and Lena had driven them out there and now were ready to leave. Virginia stood, her eyes level with Gram’s waist, and while Roy whistled and clapped and tooted the horn again, Gram knelt, ignoring the parking lot as if it weren’t even there.

  “Do you see that tree way out yonder?” she asked and pointed to a huge oak, underneath which someone had abandoned an old car. “That’s where we had our pump. That’s where I’d sit sometimes and wait for my daddy to come in from the field.” Gram’s voice was low and quiet, like she was telling a secret. “I loved my home.”

  “Do you think she can see us right this second?” Virginia whispered and moved in closer to Gram, a sudden chill coming over her as if she had been lifted and carried to a place different from anything she knew.

  “I hope so, Sweets,” Gram said. “I hope she knows.”

  “Knows what?” Virginia asked and Gram smiled, shook her head, Lena’s shadow falling over them.

  “Roy is getting fidgety,” Lena said and fanned herself with a neat little patent leather clutch bag. “God, it’s a blessing Mama don’t know she’s out here in such a cheap part of town. She’d turn cartwheels there in that grave.” Lena waved to Roy and walked ahead of them. “I can’t believe we used to live here, can you, Emily?” But Gram just smiled and shook her head, turning back once to look at that tree and squeezing Virginia’s hand so tightly that all of it was pressed into her mind.

  Virginia is suddenly so aware of the stillness of the house, the fact that she left the door to the porch open, the fact that she is alone. What would she do if she heard someone come in through the porch right now, footsteps through the house like that time at Cindy’s. What if she heard that kitchen drawer open, the fumbling of silverware, while she’s here in this bathroom, as pregnant as possible in an orange nightshirt. Barefoot and pregnant. Barefoot and pregnant. She closes the bathroom door, locks it, checks behind the shower curtain. She turns on the bath water and starts to turn on the shower when she realizes that she can’t hear anything in the house with the water running, couldn’t hear the phone ring if Mark called, if he called to say that he was serious, did want a divorce, or if her mom called with the words that she has dreaded for years, “Gram is dead.” No, no, she couldn’t hear if someone were fumbling in the silverware right this minute, walking closer and closer, those brown wingtip shoes closer and closer, Anthony Perkins, Sharon Tate, Uncle Raymond. I’m in your door, I’m on your stairs. I’m at your room. I’m at your bed, under the bed, out the window, behind the shower, in your backseat. Now she is holding that orange nightshirt up to her chest, a deep breath. Slowly, she opens the bathroom door and the bright sunlight is coming through the window. The bright su
nlight making everything look so much better.

  She drops the orange nightshirt onto the bed, quickly pulls the yellow sack over her head, her back to all of the photographs on the dresser. Once, at home, she had a poster on her wall, Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Butch and Sundance, a black and white poster with only their eyes colored bright blue, and she couldn’t undress in front of them; it was like anywhere she went in that room, they could see her.

  “You can’t even put on a bra without turning your back to a dumb piece of paper,” Cindy used to say. “You are so crazy, Ginny Sue. I’d take the damn thing off my wall if it kept me from walking around my own room nekked.”

  Virginia turns slowly and lifts her dress in front of those photos, catching a side glimpse of herself in the mirror; Mark’s parents, her parents, Gram, great-grandmother. “Virginia!” the real Mrs. Ballard would gasp.

  She lets the dress fall back around her legs, a sense of dignity coming to her. “We all have bodies, Mrs. Ballard.” She puts on her tennis shoes, now just pregnant, and gets her car keys and pocketbook off the dresser, the other Virginia Suzanne staring out of that brown tin photo. I hope she knows. Virginia has a Kenya bag, too, only she bought hers because it’s big enough to hold everything; she will be able to carry Pampers and rattles and pacifiers. “Shit, you bought it for the same reason I bought mine,” Cindy had said. “You bought it because everybody else on earth has one.” Everybody else, any and everybody. You ain’t the first to have a baby. You ain’t the first wife he’s had. You ain’t the first little Monet. You just ain’t the first.

  A person with the budgies should not be alone, drop a rusty nail in a bottle of vinegar. A person with the budgies should be where it’s cool and quiet, high ceilings and shade trees. She could drive home blindfolded, the road so straight and flat, cornfields and tractors, Gram coming in from the garden with a sack filled with butterbeans that she could finger while shelling them into that tin pan. High ceilings, cool, fans blowing and whirring. “I’ve come home to stay,” she would say. “I made a mistake and now I’m back.”

  But, she can’t do that. Then live with it. Live the rest of your life with it. She is going to go to Roses, walk every aisle, spend a hundred dollars in that air-conditioned building, piddle away these long hours where she can be near people that she doesn’t know, people who will not take one look at her and say, “Virginia, what’s wrong?” Strangers, she wants to be surrounded by strangers who do not notice that she is there, filling her cart up with useless items which Mark will sift through and say, “I’m surprised at you, we can’t afford this” and she will say, “I’m glad you’re surprised; I’m glad because I can’t afford you. I’m at your door, I’m in your bed, Surprise! Tell it to your first. Just go on, leave. Leave me here all by myself, big as a squash, because you wouldn’t know a speckled butterbean if you had it in your mouth!”

  She sits on the edge of the bed and leans her head as far forward as her stomach will permit. Her face feels so hot, so flushed from the anger, the anger that makes her want to run so fast she’d leave this stomach way behind. “It’s hard to go home once you’ve got a child,” Gram said. “I used to go out to the country every single day. I’d let James leave for work and off I’d go home. He didn’t know of it half the time, didn’t need to know, and it helped to pass the time. Imagine that me and my mama didn’t have a better thing to do but to pass the time. That’s why I never would have married a man who would carry me from my home.” She had looked hard at Virginia, her eyes so clear and honest. “I would have been scared I’d never get back. And those were good days with my mama. I’ve always been so glad that I was there with her when she died.”

  Virginia opens her eyes now, her head feeling so heavy that she can’t even cry. And she wants to; she feels like she’d like to scream her lungs out because she did marry a man who will take her from her home, already has, slowly, bit by bit, moving further and further from what she knows. And one day it will be Gram and the news will come to her in a long-distance call the same way it did when Roy Carter died, and she will hang up that receiver and turn to face rooms and windows and faces so unfamiliar and she will say: Why? Why am I here this way?

  PART 2

  CINDY SINCLAIR SNIPES Sinclair Biggers Sinclair is so pissed off, which isn’t unusual given her frustrated state, and that’s all it is—frustration with a capital F. It is not some personality DEFECT, some disease of the mind like that shrink would have liked for her to believe. “Paranoid,” he had said as if that meant one thing to her. “Paironerds,” she said to that man and his secretary on her way out. “Masochist” is another word he used and she is dead sure that he was feeling her out to see if she did any kinds of way out stuff. Well, she didn’t or doesn’t, but she sure as hell knows what’s going on, mainly because her best friend, Constance Ann Henshaw reads all of those magazines that are wrapped in brown paper down at the Quik Pik. Constance Ann swears that she only buys those books for a little humor, that she never looks at the pictures. Constance Ann swears that in real life she has never glanced down at a man’s covered up privates which Cindy knows is a lie. Everybody has done that whether they know or admit it. Where else are you supposed to look in those underwear ads but there.

  Well, Jim Palmer ain’t the norm and Cindy knows that for su2re; she ought to know, been married two times and has every intention of marrying again. She admits that she has checked men out that way; men do it all the time. Men will glance down at your boobs and back up to your mouth the whole time you’re trying to talk. Of course, maybe men don’t do that to everybody; Cindy has got something for them to see is all, and they can’t help it. She’d wonder about a man that didn’t look. Hell yes, she’ll admit all that and it has nothing to do with therapy. It’s just the truth. She admitted a lot of truths to that shrink before she realized what he was up to and he suggested that he might should “admit” her. You admit the truth and they want to admit you, make commitments that you can’t possibly on God’s green earth keep and they want to commit you.

  “It sounds like a love/hate situation,” that shrink said. It didn’t matter who she talked about, her parents, Ginny Sue, Constance Ann, the old relatives, or Charles Snipes, that’s what he said.

  “You sound like a damn parrot,” she told him. “I’ve paid money to come here and have you say that same thing over and over, love/hate, love/hate. My daddy is dead and nobody in his right mind hates a dead person; Ginny Sue is like a sister to me and that’s why she pisses me off. Pissed off is what sisterhood is all about.”

  “What about your real sister?” he asked, looking just like those sea monkeys that grin and wave from the comic books like they can think when they ain’t anything but little midget shrimp. Give a man a diploma and a desk and he’ll sit there and grin and wave like he’s something he isn’t.

  “Catherine is a slut,” Cindy said. “Now, who’s going to love a slut who takes an oath on a King James Bible that she will never claim me as a sister? Nobody, that’s who.”

  “But that was years ago.” Smile and wave now, whoa sea horse monkey.

  “Well, I never forgot it. She can put on a three-piece suit and shake her Rolex wrist out that dwarfed Yuppie van, pointing at which houses she’s trying to sell if she wants but she’s still a slut. Give somebody a real estate license and a little van and a husband that sips on that thick liquor in a glass the size of a thimble and they think they can smile and wave and act like they’re something they’re not.” He looked away and wrote on his little pad because he was probably one of those thick liquor drinkers himself, likooor as they say. “Catherine comes home and we kill the calf.”

  “What do you mean? Kill the calf?” Got a diploma but no Sunday training.

  “Have you ever heard of the Bible?” She waited for him to nod. “Well, there’s a story in there that shouldn’t be. A story of this boy who leaves home and spends all his money on things he doesn’t need while the other boy stays at home and does stuff like picks th
ings up at the A&P when his mama needs it or talks to her on the telephone when she’s lonesome because her husband is dead and she’s too boring to have any friends. He does all that and then when that other boy breezes in “Just for a sec to check” it’s like heaven has come to earth and that mama says things like ‘Don’t you look so nice all dressed up?’”

  “That’s all. Breeze in and breeze out and she just lives right over there in Clemmonsville, but that’s a ‘city’ mind you. She just ‘couldn’t live here in this town.’ Ginny Sue lives two hours away and she comes to visit.”

  Cindy is not going back to that man. The only reason she went in the first place was out of curiosity. If you keep up with what’s going on and what’s in style like Cindy does, then you know that everybody is either going or has gone. Even Ginny Sue had a little therapy way back.

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” Cindy’s mama always says and that pisses her off, too. She thinks that if that was the God’s truth, we’d all be dead. Constance Ann would be dead for sure because she does look at the pictures and she does glance at covered up privates whether she knows it or not. Constance Ann is a little on the drab side and would rather stay at home and read about things than to get out and try it. The only reason they’re friends is because everybody else from the high school class has moved on and because she and Constance Ann work together down at Southern Point Medical Center. Cindy’s picture isn’t even in the high school yearbook because that was when they wouldn’t let pregnant girls finish. Sometimes it makes her sick to look at all those people smiling and waving out of that yearbook, especially Charles Snipes because they did let him graduate even though it was his you-know-what that got her that way. It makes her sick during the holidays when she sees some of those people in the grocery store because they like to go on and on about how much everything has changed; not a damn thing has changed, boring as ever; the courthouse hasn’t moved and people still get sick and die.