“It’s just been a rough week,” Mark whispers, his voice this time with sincere optimism, the same way her dad says at the beginning of each summer that he’s going to grow a giant squash, the same way her mama had stopped midway to the trash pile with weeds in her arms and said, “I knew you’d come home. We all missed you terribly.”
“I wasn’t gone long enough to be missed,” she had said, picking up a weed that her mother had dropped.
“Oh yes you were.”
“I miss you,” Mark is saying now. “Last night is the first night we’ve been apart.”
“But I’m glad to be home,” she says and watches the confused look on his face. Now is not the time, not the time to say that she doesn’t want to go back there. He has boards to take. Now is not the time. “There is never a good time for something hard to do,” Gram says. “You think you’re ready to handle a loss but there is never a good time. You just do what you have to do.”
Virginia feels her cheek wet against his now and she can’t tell where it’s coming from. She thinks of the small pale girl at the back of the first grade class, eyes wide and damp, her seat wet. “I didn’t do it,” she told Virginia. “I didn’t.” And she thinks of Lena on her way to the nursing home, her hand on the car handle as if she were about to jump. “Somebody spilt something back here on this seat,” she told Virginia’s mother. “It’s soggy wet and I didn’t do it.”
“Just sleep,” Mark whispers. “You’ve still got a fever,” and she closes her eyes against that tired Mary Weather face, circles and lines that were not there the first time that she ever saw him, a party, plexiglass living room; every time she looked his way, a corner of men, he was looking back, and how long ago was that? Two years? Three years? It all happened so fast, too fast to think. “Your mom said I could stay there,” he says, hand so cool on her forehead. “Or, I could go on home and try to study. Hannah said there’s really nothing that I can do but I brought my books in case you want me to stay.”
“Do you want me to stay or go?” he had asked, well after midnight, the TV a dim gray flicker in the dark room where she lay on the couch facing him, an awkward jumble of arms and legs, and she felt like she just wanted to fall asleep that way, but there was the thought of morning, going to work, needing to brush her teeth, and things were going so fast.
“I think maybe you should go,” she said, says now.
“Are you sure?” he asks and for a moment she feels so powerful. What does he want her to say? He wants to go home, she knows he does, doesn’t sleep well when he’s away, doesn’t study well; and yet, she has the authority, she can say “stay” and he will. And then what? Stay and be a martyr and resent it for the rest of your life.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she says and feels his beard, one-day stubbles, rough against her cheek. And even with his body so close, she feels him slipping away, hears his key turn the lock of that small rented house, his footsteps echo down the hall to find dishes in the sink, the bed twisted and rumpled, creaking with his weight as he stretches there and stares at the small cobweb in the corner. “He’s been here so long you might as well let him stay,” he had said one night, laughed when she pretended that she had never seen it, stood on the bed and waved a magazine at the web, catching and wrapping it like a strand of cotton candy. She sees him stretching on the bed and staring into that corner and what is on his mind, the spider, baby, her, Sheila?
“I sure will be glad to get you . . .” he pauses, “home” on his tongue and changed to “back.” I sure will be glad to get you back. “I don’t look forward to another night without you.”
Another night. She has only been gone one day. It is only Saturday and it seems like years, stretching like that late afternoon light, measured by the gentle rhythm of Gram’s clock.
“I don’t look forward to the rest of this party,” he had whispered, cocktail glasses clinking. “Want to go to the movies?” She looked at this person, a stranger who had talked for fifteen minutes without introducing himself, this stranger who was now asking her to go out with him. She could have eaten a cigarette but no one there was smoking. “We can catch the seven-thirty if we leave right now,” he said and looked at his watch, not Rolex or sport digital, a generic watch that told her nothing about him, just like his clothes, white shirt and striped tie, socks that didn’t match, generic shoes. “Then we can go get dinner,” he said. “What are you in the mood for? Yuppie burgers? Italian? Chinese? Mexican? I’ll eat all but Soul Food.”
“I don’t even know you,” she said. “I really don’t know anybody here.” And she felt herself wanting to run from the plexiglass living room, to run to the safety of her car, FM radio and cigarette lighter.
“So, how’d you get invited?” he asked so seriously that she caught herself looking at him with a mixture of “are you crazy?” and amused.
“I know the hostess,” she said, staring at her flat leather moccasins and realizing suddenly that every other woman in the room was in pumps or sexy strapped sandals. “She teaches at the elementary school where I give art lessons.”
“Oh,” he nodded, one of the front pockets of his pants pulled up empty and hanging out. “I know a friend of a friend of the host,” he said, no information in that. “Small world, huh?” he laughed and looked around, probably looking for another woman standing off by herself who would talk to him, and she wanted to say something that could keep him there a little longer so that she wouldn’t be the single woman standing all by herself but she couldn’t think of anything. “I think I saw some of your art work in the Trucker’s Diner when I was in Clemmonsville,” he said, struck a pensive pose, no smile, sarcastically serious with that voice that clearly said he was a transplant. “I told the waitress, ‘y’all got some good art here’ and I asked her what your name was and she told me and I wrote it down on a napkin and now I can’t remember and don’t have the napkin on me, must be in my other pair of pants.”
“I see,” she said, deciding not to give any more information about herself, trying to figure out if he was flirting or making fun of her. I see, a careful enunciation of each word, cut the “I” off quickly, no ahh.
“I told the waitress that I could tell you were a regional artist and sure enough, went in the bathroom and there was an ad for your work, had your picture, name, phone number, place and date of birth.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Mark Williams Ballard,” he said and extended his hand. “But my friends call me Mark.”
“And so what should I call you?” she asked without smiling, a slight flush behind his ears.
“Honey will be fine for starters,” he said. “You don’t want to get all carried away in front of all these strangers. You have a reputation to maintain.”
She focused again on her moccasins, again on the first grade teacher, a different person with white wine instead of chalk in her hand. He was looking around again, hands deep in his pockets. “What’s playing?” she finally asked and watched his shoulders relax.
“I’ve met someone really nice,” she had told Gram two weeks later. “He makes me think of things you’ve said about Gramps. He has blue eyes like Gramps.”
“Where’s he from?” Gram asked. “Right close by so he can drive out here in the country to get you? James would come down that road in his buggy and somehow I knew he was close before I even saw him. I wasn’t hanging on the porch post or peeking out a window either because nice people don’t do such. Except Lena. Lena would peek out the windows all the time no matter how many times my mama told her that good people don’t go peeking, but not me. I didn’t have to look out to know he was coming. It was just something we had with one another. I just always knew he’d be there, always knew he’d never carry me too far from my home.”
“Should I stay here or go home?” he had asked, again lying on the couch, the TV station going off the air. It had become a joke of sorts. He would say, “What if I get in a wreck on the way home and here it is the middle of the night an
d my clothes are all wrinkled and my hair all messed up? I have a reputation,” and he would say the word “reputation” with lengthy slow pronunciation in response to her voiced wonderings of what her neighbors might say should they see him leave the next morning in the same clothes that he had worn to pick her up the night before.
“Stay,” she had said that night, the warm gray flicker of the TV, his long legs thrown over the arm of the couch, making her feel like she didn’t give a damn about anybody or anything right then, except being with him. “Stay,” she said, says, but he is gone, and it has gotten darker outside, the light on in the kitchen where she hears her mother’s voice, singing quietly, her dad sitting in Gram’s Lazy Boy.
“About time you came to, Ginny,” he says. “Your mama is fixing a good dinner.”
“Where’s Gram?” she asks and follows her dad’s pointed finger to the doorway of the kitchen where Gram is sitting in her wheelchair with her glasses on the end of her nose and a Bisquik coupon in her hand.
“She’s overseeing,” he says and laughs.
“I thought I was going to have to wake you,” her mama says, standing in the doorway, Gram thrusting the coupon into her hand. “I asked Mark to stay for dinner but he said he better get back before too late.”
“Nobody should ever be late,” Gram says. “I’m not used to eating so late. Eat early, go to bed early, and wake up early. That’s the way we do it here.”
It seems so late when Virginia feels her dad bend and kiss her forehead and then the room is dark and quiet, her mother again on the pallet beside her, and she thinks of those Sunday dinners on Carver Street, with Gram in the kitchen, polka-dot apron and hands covered in flour while Virginia licked the cake batter from the large mixing bowl; she thinks of Mark opening a can of tuna and walking down the hall to her bed where Sheila hovers like the cobweb in the corner, ready to wrap and twist and strangle their life like a cord around a neck.
* * *
Emily is tired of her house being a rest stop for every Tom, Dick, or Harry that gets tired of walking the streets and decides to stop by. Lena and Roy have that great big house all to themselves, or so they say, and why don’t they just stay in it once in awhile and give her some peace. “You got to make time for yourself,” her mama always said. “You got to be a wife as well as a mother no matter how hard it might be.” Yes Lord, her mama believed that you have to tend to the living, tend to your husband and children and brothers and sisters. Her mama had told of that clap of thunder that sent her to her knees right there atop of the grave of Emily’s older sister who got so thin with the pneumonia and died. “I learned you can’t spend all your time with the dead when there’s the living to tend to,” her mama said.
People come and people go. Ask that man who was here yesterday who he might be and he said “Mark” like she might believe that old Mark McIntosh is still with the living. “Mark McIntosh is dead and buried,” she had told him and he said that he’s married to Virginia. “Virginia is my mama,” she told him. “And you are not my daddy. My mama and daddy are both dead.”
“Ginny Sue’s husband,” he said and laughed; Ginny Sue is her grand baby, pretty little thing with that dark curly hair and them ways of hers, that way of wanting her hands to do whatever yours are doing. “You can paint that porch for me,” she can tell Ginny Sue and send her off with a pail of water and a paint brush and that child will paint all day long; porch dries and she wets it down again. A good child. A good good child who don’t need to be worried for some old hog that’s got his eyes took out, a hog long ago slaughtered and not feeling pained. A child who don’t need to be worried over this dry spell that’s ruined the crops near about. There’s no need in a child worrying over no money. No crop of tobacco to take to the market, no money come fall and school time, but a child needn’t know of it. A child will know of it all soon enough, money and clothes to wash and a husband to feed.
“Ginny Sue is a little girl with no need of a man,” she told that one that called himself Mark. It’s not right for a grown man to take some young child from her home. She loved her brother Harv Pearson, yes she did, but he never should have took Tessy Brock from her home so young. Tessy didn’t have time to be a child before she had a whole flock of her own. Mark, he couldn’t fool her with that fancy way of talking. No sir, he was just like the rest, come into her house just waiting for her to leave the room so he could pull out that banjo and commence to playing them old senseless songs and to take a clean towel smelling of the good country air to wipe off himself. She can just see Mag Sykes gathering those towels and sheets in from the line. “I got to admit it, Miss Emily,” Mag had said, her chin filled up with some dusty snuff. “I can’t hardly bear to see no white sheets strung across a line.” She stared down at them worn shoes of hers. “I can glance at it kind of quicklike, sideways, and it looks to me like them bad men coming with they torches and hoods and words of hate like them that killed my daddy.”
“You ain’t got to worry Mag,” she said, thinking of Mag’s daddy Curie Sykes. God, she loved old Curie too good. “I’d have it in my mind to kill one that set a foot in my yard.”
“I ain’t never heard you say such strongness.” Mag turned her back on those sheets and towels blowing there against that wide blue sky, pecans soon to fall, put ‘em in a tow sack.
“I ain’t never felt such strongness,” she said. “My James feels it, too.”
Mag Sykes is welcome in her house but the others is not, them that come and take in their heads to mow through her shrubbery and to pile groceries all there through her house, pile fruits up there on the bed and swing some hams there in the bathroom where she bathed the children, where James would be bright and early with his face covered in lather and ready to shave while she was in that dark bed watching every move he made. They had no right to bring all that into her house. It’s not yours anymore, they all say, it’s the Piggly Wiggly. Try to forget. And how can somebody forget that? How can somebody forget that she had those violets there in the kitchen window where she washed umpteen dishes and her grand-babies, too? How can she forget that her mama is buried out there where people come and park cars and blow horns when there used to be nothing but a still breeze up in the branches.
She clicks on the TV and watches those gray people moving back and forth, a preacher carrying on with hellfire talk when she’d rather hear the talk of heaven, the talk of James and David and Tessy and her mama. She turns the sound down so that she can’t hear it. Nobody can say a thing that interests her except them and the weatherman and Mag Sykes. But none of them are here, don’t come too often, just that woman stretched out there on the sofa with her stomach all in that way that a woman ought not to show.
“Who are you?” she asks now and watches that woman, her hair not even brushed out good, sit up a little and look at her. Finally the weatherman is on and she turns up the sound and watches every move of his little stick. There’s a storm on the TV there, way down past Florida where Lena used to live. The man says that rain is likely to come but it’ll be a few days. No sir, a few more days of dry hot sunshine, that corn stunted and burned, river bank dry and dusty as a bone.
“We got to have some rain,” Curie had told her all those years ago, his big strong arms wrapped around her as he lifted her off the front porch and set her on the ground. “I’m praying for some rain, yes Lord, but if I had the power, I’d get out in that yard and dance a jig, do a rain dance.”
“Do it, Curie,” she told him and looked out over the yard where Lena was trying to pump water from that dried up well and Lena was going to get herself whipped good, there in the center of the yard and stripped down to her underwear. And Emily would’ve liked to be in her underwear but she was almost seven years old, too old for such. “Do a rain dance,” she said again and laughed when Curie took off his old straw hat and lifted his knees up high like he was marching, raised his arms up and said, “Rain, rain, rain.”
“Now, it’s your turn,” he said and winked at
her, and she looked behind her through that front door to make sure her mama wasn’t standing there, and she looked at Lena with her hands stuck up in the mouth of that pump, and she turned slowly at first, staring at the sky and then faster and faster, arms lifted, rain, rain, rain. “Dance yourself a jig, Miss Emily,” Curie said. “Dance us up a storm.”
And it rained. She can’t remember if it was that day or the next, or the next week, but there came a storm that set the windows rattling, and lightning that filled the sky. “We might have to build us a ark,” Curie said. “We all gonna float on down the Saxapaw whichever way it might go.” And her mama came in soaked to the bone and her eyes wild as a trapped dog and her mama ran through the house and knelt there by the bed, shaking her head and looking at the ceiling.
“It’s raining ’cause me and Curie did a dance,” she told her mother later when the thunder had stopped and there was just the steady sound of rain on that tin roof.
“It’s raining because God means to make me tend to the living,” her mother said. “You know better than to dance and carry on, Emily. The Lord’s work is serious.” And she nodded her head yes to her mother’s words while she stood at the window and stared out at that front yard, the dusty dirt that she had swept clean now muddy; she watched Curie hurry down the road, his hands holding his hat on his head while he ran through that cool rain to his own home. “Last time I ask you to dance a jig,” he had whispered to her before leaving, his dark face so warm next to hers.
“It’s me, Gram,” that woman says and Emily has to stare hard at her, think like she might be in school. “It’s me, Gram. It’s Ginny Sue.”
“Well precious,” she whispers. “I knew that was you.”
“Gram? Gram?” Ginny Sue whispers now. “Tell me about Gramps, when you first married him, or when you had mama. Tell me about it.”
“Well, I married him,” she says. “And I had two babies. I had Hannah and then I had David and they both went through all the classes at school. I didn’t get but to six.”
Tending to Virginia Page 16
