Tending to Virginia

by Jill McCorkle

  She runs that computer at work like she might have been born right there in front of a Video Display Terminal and all she has is high school equivalency. She can talk about bits and bytes and hemorrhages as good as anybody and does her dull mama think that’s as good as Catherine selling a split-level over on Dupont Road? Hell no, and all her mama does when she gets home from work is play solitaire.

  “I’m getting a Bernoulli box to back up my data in case there’s a thunderstorm,” Cindy told her mama a couple of weeks ago and her mama said, “Cindy, you’ll have to speak English.”

  “Well, don’t you ever say periodontal nothing to me again,” she told her.

  It’s a trap, all of it. Cindy would lose her mind if it wasn’t for Friday afternoons at the Ramada happy hour and the fact that her mama will keep Chuckie, let him spend the night. One night. She gets one night to herself and her mama and Chuckie both acting like it’s the end of the world just to give her that one night. Chuckie doesn’t want to go over there; who would blame him? But he has to. That’s the bottom line. He has never had control over what’s done and at age twelve, is not going to start trying. It’s times like that when she knows that she needs a man, a big strong hunk of man to look at that wirey pimply child of hers in a way that would make him go back to popping wheelies on his bike in front of the house. Now what he does is sneak in her underwear drawer so he’ll know what to imagine those seventh graders are wearing under those ripped up tee shirts and miniskirts. God, Cindy would like some minis herself as hot as it is. She’d look good in a mini and her mama would say, “That’s too young-looking for you,” like she always says. Her mama was born old and plain.

  Cindy is thankful every day that she did not take after her mama. Every day, she thinks at least once, “Thank you, Jesus, that I ain’t huge like my mama.” A man could take care of this frustration. She needs a man like Randy Skinner who works as a pharmaceutical salesman out of Raleigh and who for the past three weeks has come into the clinic on Fridays and gone with her to Ramada.

  “This might be the next Mr. Cindy,” she had told Constance Ann, but Constance Ann has never been married and so doesn’t know how important it is. Addicting and habit-forming; sex is just like using the bathroom and eating supper. Just try going without something you did so often you didn’t even notice. Ginny Sue ought to count her blessings instead of feeling sorry for herself. Feel sorry for yourself, pout and carry on and that man will leave sure as shit. A little pregnancy shouldn’t make everything else stop. God knows, that’s when you need to keep his interest up. That is just good common sense. She knew when she was carrying Chuckie that Charles was lying there thinking he had a fat wife. Well, not really because Cindy didn’t get enormous like Ginny Sue has. But, still, had to keep that fire burning. If she didn’t feel like trying to angle herself some way, then she’d just borrow books from Constance Ann and she’d say, “Here, baby, read a little of this and then I’ll come back and take care of things.” It kept him off the streets. Ginny Sue ought to wise up; men will leave women and women will leave men just for that reason.

  Constance Ann will need to wise up if she ever finds somebody. She can talk up a blue streak and doesn’t know a thing about it all. Constance Ann will sit right there and eat a danish which she needs like a hole in the head and talk about the “zipless.” The Zipless Fuck is the exact title, which Cindy doesn’t like to think about because it reminds her of her first date with her second husband, Buzz Biggers, which she’d just as soon not think about. It was a vulnerable time in her life; blame it on frustration. Blame it on that shrink. Blame it on whoever said, “if you fall off a horse you got to get back up and ride.” Buzz Biggers was standing at the bar inside Blind Tom’s Bar and Grill out in the county. Old Tom ain’t really blind because Cindy asked the management. Old Tom just acts blind so people who don’t know better will leave big tips. “I’ll fuck your eyes out if I get half a chance,” Buzz Biggers said after about five minutes of talking.

  “Just see if you can,” she said, and of course he didn’t. Those baby blues are still right up in her head. She rode again, all right, but she had saddled herself with pure trash. It was that scar across the side of that rough hairy face that made him so exciting, made her mama look white as a sheet and say, “What kind of man is he?”

  “A wild man,” Cindy told her. “A wild raring stud.” And Cindy laughed to see that look on her mama’s face. Her mama needed that.

  Constance Ann got that zipless from an Erica Jong book. Constance Ann thinks that Erica Jong is Jesus Christ Born Again and Fear of Flying is her bible. Cindy finally read it just so she’d know what Constance Ann was talking about and she didn’t like it near as much as she liked The Love Machine or Peyton Place. The worst part of Fear of Flying was that man that didn’t wipe himself well. That was so dumb. Chuckie at age three could wipe himself and she could not bear to think of a grown man who could not. Even Buzz Biggers, as filthy as he was, wasn’t like that, and if Cindy had been that woman in the book that slept with that man, she sure as hell wouldn’t have told it. Constance Ann said it was symbolic and so Cindy just let it go, didn’t argue because Constance Ann knows a lot about symbolic things and as a result can quote lines from all of the Jill Clayburgh movies; that’s what Constance Ann has over Cindy, that and a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Constance Ann says looking at naked medical pictures is different from the other.

  Paranoid, masochistic—then that shrink had the nerve to bring up her daddy who was a fine man, book smart and deep. It’s nobody’s business that he got himself all wrapped up in King Tut. A lot of people have hobbies. Cindy’s mama plays solitaire, and Cindy collects those little squat Coke bottles that you hardly ever see anymore.

  “Why don’t you cash these in?” Charles Snipes asked her once. “Then you can buy a whole case.”

  “Buying is not the same as finding!” she told him, which made good sense to her but did not to Charles Snipes or her mama who said more or less the same thing at Cindy’s daddy’s funeral.

  “Just take the whole crate, Cindy,” her mama said. “Don’t stand around in the front yard waiting for somebody to lay one down so you can say you found it.” God, that pissed her off just like it did when that shrink asked her questions about her daddy and how he was homebound due to a rare paralysis that came and went. The shrink said “psychosomatic,” that word which means it’s all up in the head. So stupid.

  “If it was all upstairs like you say,” she told the shrink, “then it would have been his scalp that was paralyzed instead of his legs, an arm from time to time, his eyelids.” Cindy couldn’t stand the thought of her daddy sitting in that Lazy Boy recliner with his eyes closed, paralyzed that way; it made her ache. It was a rare cancer that overtook him; a man who had an interest in Egypt, an artist of the mind, overtook and struck down by a rare cancer which is why he shot himself in the chest the way that he did, too much of a man to let himself get weak and helpless. That sea monkey asshole, dragging it all up again. It wasn’t his daddy that had been stretched out at the funeral home like he’d been starched and pressed. Catherine was studying real estate and thinking of getting her tubes tied and Ginny Sue was going to fraternity parties and making A’s on things like African Astronomy, and there Cindy was facing her first divorce and a dead daddy. “Let’s stick to the present,” Cindy told the shrink. “I know about what has already happened.”

  Ginny Sue can go right on thinking that therapy is the thing to do if she wants but Cindy ain’t buying. Cindy has never even figured out why Ginny Sue went to therapy in the first place, a little broken engagement, big deal. Ginny Sue came home from Atlanta in a pure crazy fit just to say the wedding was off. That pissed Cindy off; there she’d already driven to Raleigh to get a bridesmaid’s dress that was so god-awful sweet-looking she wouldn’t have worn it to a dog fight. The dress couldn’t be returned because Cindy’s waist is so tiny that it had been altered; she gave it to a child down the street to wear for a Halloween suit.<
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  “I started painting a lot when I was depressed,” Ginny Sue had said, like Cindy is depressed. Of course, that was before Ginny Sue knew that Mark had knocked up his first wife. “That’s what you need, Cindy. Something that you do for yourself, something that you do for yourself and enjoy.” Ha! A lot of good all that therapy is doing Miss Ginny Sue now.

  “Yeah, well I’d like to fly to Greece and buy a string bikini,” Cindy said, as if she has the time between a nine-to-five and a girl-crazy adolescent and a slut sister. And why does Ginny Sue think that Cindy doesn’t have something she does that is as good as coloring pictures and messing in wheat paste? Cindy has ideas; she has the idea that she could write some books, not for godssakes the kind Ginny Sue reads, but the kind you hear about, the kind you see in every grocery store and the lobby of Ramada. She’s got all the titles already figured out, a medical series: How An Anesthesiologist Put Me To Bed, The Virgin Meets a Surgeon, and The Series of G.I.s That Led to My GI Series. She could do it, make big bucks, get up from her VDT (Video Display Terminal) and say she’s going to lunch and never come back just like she did at the loan office of Southern Trust one day during the second divorce. She could write country songs, too.

  Ginny Sue ought to do that kind of thinking for a change instead of trying to figure out whose eyes she’s got, whose nose? She’ll sit for hours and ask Emily and Lena questions like that, or questions about people who have been dead so long that there’s probably a motel built over their graves. Both of those women are senile as hell but Ginny Sue believes whatever they tell her. Ginny Sue will drive her baby crazy, twisting its head all around to see whose neck it has or whose ears. It has always reminded Cindy of that story she heard in school once about that god man who had all kinds of nekked women, little tiny nekked women which have a name that Cindy can’t think of, chasing after his bod but he wouldn’t touch one with a ten-foot pole because he was so taken with himself that he just sat and stared at himself in some water until his mind was completely eaten up. Now that’s disease of the mind. Ginny Sue is not in love with herself; she’s in love with everybody that’s lived, died, and been related since Columbus.

  Cindy told Ginny Sue the god man story once, hoping to make a point. She told it good, too, as good as old Miss Harris had told it in P.E. class so that the girls wouldn’t sit and stare at themselves and boobs, whatever, while dressing out. “Vanity is the root of all evil,” Miss Harris said, but of course she had nothing to be vain about; Cindy’s mama would probably say the same thing.

  “That’s because she’s never had a root,” Cindy had whispered to Constance Ann. They shared a gym locker. They laughed so hard that Cindy popped a snap on her gym suit and when Miss Harris said, “what’s so funny?” for the third time, Cindy spoke up and said, “I said that I’d rather have lots of little nekked men chasing me through the woods than to stare at myself.” Miss Harris didn’t laugh but everybody else did. School was fun that way; she didn’t learn much but she sure had some fun.

  Ginny Sue was going to therapy that time, sitting and thinking over useless things, when she should have been doing something. She should have been shaving her legs and rolling her hair and going on dates. The Lord helps those that get off their asses and do something. When Cindy left Buzz Biggers, she did all sorts of things that made her feel good. She went in the bathroom of the loan office on that day that she went to lunch and never came back, and she wrote “Fuck Buzz Biggers in the nose” right there beside where she had written “Fuck Charles Snipes in the ear.”

  Cindy mousses her bangs and pulls them straight just like that woman on “Knots Landing”; only a petite person can get away with the cockatoo look. Randy Skinner just loves her hair this way. TGIF! She thinks that tonight might be a good time to ask Randy over to her house instead of just kissing in a parked car in the lot of Ramada.

  “I can’t believe you do that,” Constance Ann said just yesterday. “Eating face in the parking lot of Ramada Inn right there in the center of town.”

  “Some things you never outgrow, Constance Ann,” she said. “It’s like putting a quarter in one of those machines at the grocery store knowing full well that you don’t want that rubber worm or plastic bracelet inside of it. But you do it. You do it every now and then; pay your money and take a chance just to feel that little plastic egg sitting there in your palm and remembering how you never got exactly what you wanted but you played with it anyway.”

  Cindy goes now and sprays a little Halston in her cleavage, puts on some mascara and tells Chuckie if he eats all those Cadbury Eggs that she bought up right after Easter that his face will look so bad a dermatologist won’t touch him. She tells him he’s going to spend the night with his grandmama whether he likes it or not, that if he’s bored just to go in a different room from the one her mama’s in. How My Dermatologist Makes My Skin Tingle. My Psychiatrist Had A Lobotomy. A Prescription For Love by Cindy Sinclair Snipes Sinclair Biggers Sinclair (maybe Skinner). It’s The Man Behind The Pills That Makes Me High. Cindy laughs right out loud there in the front yard of the house that her slutbucket sister would NEVER have wanted to show. Cindy might buy that house from her landlord. She might get a satellite dish so she can pick up the whole wide world. Then again, she might not. They need to make those dishes look like something other than giant-size diaphragms. Good God, it makes her laugh to picture a woman big enough to insert a satellite dish. The sun is shining like her daddy is smiling from heaven, just smiling, but without the gunshot. He’d say, “There’s my pretty little Goldilocks.”

  The day would be perfect if she didn’t have to see her mama, but of course she does. Her mama needs a ride to work, a favor, so what else is new? The Prodigal Son’s brother got the shit end of the stick. Do this, do that, Cindyrella. If she drives real fast like she did in high school, screeching and revving, she can keep from getting pissed off when she sees her mama. It’s a wonder Cindy doesn’t die from pissed off. Her mama makes people want to die; that’s all there is to it. “Dead due to pissed off,” the doctors would say. “Her mama did it to her.”

  * * *

  Emily Pearson Roberts sits in a green Lazy Boy most of the day, a small tin of snuff tucked deep down in the pocket of her pink fluffy robe along with a little cash and a piece of note paper with important phone numbers written in her own tiny scrawl. The days seem to flow by in a winding weary manner much like the Saxapaw River which curved all around this county and then on to who knows where; it still does though she hasn’t laid her eyes on that deep, brown water in years, possibly hasn’t touched that water since that day in the rowboat all those summers ago when she had let her hand trail down alongside the boat and leave a momentary mark while James sat there with his shirt sleeves rolled up and lifted that oar from side to side, his fishing tackle spread out between their feet, her whole body hidden from the sun by the large straw hat that she wore, the same hat that her sister Lena said made her look like an old country woman. She reckoned she did, an old country woman, especially compared to that piece of animal Lena wore on her own head. An old country woman, wasn’t nothing wrong with that. There weren’t any fish, at least not that day, and she was glad because she felt that river was nasty and that anything that lived there was probably nasty, too.

  “Is this the same woman that loves pigs’ feet?” James had asked and laughed. Even in those last years he was as handsome as ever. He’d say, “Look at that would you?” and point to the shore and there would be a bird or a rabbit or an oleander in full bloom. Oh, how she loves those oleanders, filled that side yard there all along the street full of oleanders like a tropical paradise, like Lena wrote telling of Florida all those years ago. Years and years ago, passing on the shore, and she could not take her eyes off of him, that strong dark face, though tired by then and, behind that face and those eyes, the blood that the doctor said could go sky high if he didn’t watch it. She watched it for him; she would have crawled inside his body and held that rush of blood back if she could’ve.r />
  “Look a there,” he said and there was an old possum swinging from a tree. She glanced at it and went right back to trailing her finger in the water. “Never in my life have you made possum stew,” he said and grinned. “My mama used to make it when I was a boy.”

  “Your mama was poor, that’s why,” she said. “And that daddy of yours didn’t know what hunting was, so lazy he probably shot the first thing he saw.” She said that mostly out of habit; they had talked their possum talk for years. She never even met James’s daddy but she knew well enough that he had not been a good provider. “Unlucky,” James always said. “Just couldn’t get his head above water.” James had made himself everything he was, risen way above that part of the county where he was raised, but he never once put it behind him and forgot. “You’ve no one to thank but God for what you’ve made of yourself,” she told him once, him sitting in the side yard in his old age, feeling so guilty that he had done so much better than his father ever had. “You were just a young man when he died. You worked, did all you could to help.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But I do have him to thank. You should never forget who reared you,” and his stare was so solid and strong that she knew he was saying the truth. He never forgot all those boys he grew up with down there, grown men that had houses full of children and no meat on their tables. They’d come to town on Saturday, five or six of them, and waste their money on getting drunk and then they’d be sitting out on her front porch with bottles and banjos trying to sing with their voices sounding like dying alley cats. They’d sing all those old songs with all kinds of filthy talk in between and her slaving in that kitchen and trying her best to keep Hannah and David away from that door. James would let those men come in and take baths, give them a tee shirt or pair of pants or socks which never came back clean if they came back at all, and they’d eat their fill and fall dead asleep wherever they chose to sit after dinner. Come morning and you’ve never seen such politeness with “Miss Em,” this and “Miss Em” that while she poured coffee and asked after their families, pitiful pictures coming to her mind of tired worn women and dirty little children.