Tending to Virginia

by Jill McCorkle

  Tables for two all over that Kentucky Fried place and it pisses her off. Just once she’d like to see a table for one. “Two Snaks, white meat,” she says and stands there waiting, listens to the couple in line behind her, a kiss on the cheek, the little gasp of a hug. She hears the man whisper something that sounds like “cooter clam” in the woman’s ear and Cindy turns around and stares at them. Now, they look like they belong together. He’s big and burly and she’s got all this wild frosted hair.

  “You’ll have to forgive what he said,” the woman tells Cindy. “We are on kind of a holiday for the night. It’s our anniversary.”

  “That’s nice,” Cindy says, wondering why in the hell anybody on a holiday would come to Saxapaw and eat at KFC.

  “You have got the prettiest headful of hair,” the woman says and smiles at Cindy. “Hair is my business and I’ll swan if you don’t have a nice headful.”

  “Thanks,” Cindy says, and she feels like she’d like to stay and talk to them, be on a holiday with them, but her chicken is up and she knows Chuckie is sitting at home waiting. She gives the girl her money and turns back around. “You know I was scared to try this hairdo but I’m glad I did.”

  “Oh yes,” the woman says and squeezes that man tight. “You’re little enough to carry it off. That’s natural blonde too, isn’t it?”

  “She’s a bottle blonde,” the man says and squeezes back on his “cooter clam.”

  “Well, have fun,” Cindy says and leaves, watching them in the reflection of the door. She envies them and it pisses her off. The woman says, “I love thighs” and he says, “I love breasts” and the two fall together and laugh like they might be in high school. God, Cindy wishes she was back in high school.

  PART 4

  VIRGINIA’S HOURS are all confused; when it’s dark and still, she is wide awake, tossing, turning; and when daylight appears in Gram’s window, she is too tired to open her eyes. The days seem to bleed and run, meals and game shows, cramps and weather reports and tick after tick of the clock. It is morning, Thursday morning, but when she tries to put the days in order, when Mark came, when he called, it seems like one long day with bright hot light through the window and no rain.

  She concentrates on the ticking, the clock, so out of place in the duplex. It used to be in the wide hallway of the house on Carver Street, there by the stairs on the pine floors that Gram painted brown every other spring. Gram would hide presents and snacks on top of the clock where Virginia and Robert couldn’t reach them.

  “If that clock ever stops,” Cindy had told her once, Virginia only six, “Aunt Emily will die just like on ‘The Twilight Zone.’”

  “No.” Virginia shook her head. “Stop it!”

  “What honey?” Esther peeks around the corner from the kitchen and Virginia shakes her head. “You’re starting to act like her,” Esther says and points to Gram who is dozing in the Lazy Boy.

  “It’s just a TV show,” her brother, Robert, had told her after Cindy left and he found her sitting there in front of the clock, watching the pendulum, thinking if it started to slow down that she would very quickly turn the little key, open that glass door and push it back and forth, back and forth until someone came to fix it. Robert had sat beside her, his long legs tan and skinny, the Saxapaw Junior Baseball jersey that it seems he wore for years. “I mean it Ginny Sue,” he said, those clear brown eyes squinting with his smile. “You’ve got to learn to fight back. I’m not always gonna be around to take up for you.”

  “I know.” She nodded but it seemed that he would always be there; it seemed that they would always eat Sunday dinner with Gram in the house on Carver Street. It seemed she would always be able to run into his room if she got scared at night, that they would always race to see who could get to the bathroom first when they got up in the mornings. They would always sit in those same chairs at the kitchen table and read the backs of the cereal boxes while their mother packed school lunches. They would sit on his bed those rare nights it snowed, the drapes pulled back so they could see by the streetlight while the flakes got bigger and bigger, the yard finally covered in a film of white. “No school tomorrow,” he’d say, hope in his voice. And they would get up the next morning, tired from no sleep but urged by the slight flakes still falling. She would sit with her knees pulled up under that long flannel gown while her mother scrambled eggs or pressed seams, and they listened to the radio, listened for cancellations, Saxapaw Schools.

  “I just can’t stay around here, Ginny,” he had told her years later, his legs filled out, a fraternity sweatshirt on, as he sat in a lawn chair, frayed green and white webbing, and twirled a long-handled fork while the steaks dripped into the fire, sizzling and flaming, her dad in the garden, cap pulled low, Mama on the screened porch smocking the tops of tiny christening gowns that people ordered from her as soon as they got home from that first doctor visit. It seemed there would always be steaks on Saturday nights and Sundays on Carver Street with Gram, family vacations to the beach when they returned salty and sunburned, a present of peanut brittle for Gram. “Now how did you know just what I wanted?” Gram asked while she rubbed Virginia’s sunburned back with Jergens.

  “Take good care of her,” Robert said, shook Mark’s hand, the wedding cake looming in the background like a miniature castle. “It’s not such a hard job; I’ve had it for twenty-five years.” Susie was hugging Virginia, the two of them laughing, Cindy off to the side sipping champagne, mimicking Susie whenever she could catch Virginia’s eye. “She’s real gullible,” Robert was saying, Mark laughing and acting like he was taking notes. “She won’t go to the bathroom by herself at night; you have to go with her and turn on all the lights, stand outside the door until she’s through.”

  “Not true!” Virginia screamed while Robert wrapped his big arms around her and hugged.

  Water runs in the kitchen, glasses clinking into the drain board, clock ticking, Gram breathing. All the movements, every little sound so clear. If Virginia closes her eyes, she could be anywhere, anywhere at all. It is inertia that makes Gram’s mind wander, roaming back and forth, up and down the streets of the county before they were paved, before Virginia was born. It isn’t age that makes it all confusing but inertia.

  “You could go home,” her mother had said. “To our house I mean.”

  “Easier here,” she mumbled and dozed, comfortably surrounded by the heavy dark furniture, faint mothball smells from the closets where quilts are piled like a mountain, the sounds, Gram’s whispered words, so soothing like the house on Carver Street, making Mark and the rented house seem so far away.

  “Bad, bad old dreams,” Gram had said and lifted her up, hugged her close. “You’re right here with Gram, sweets,” and the cars on Carver Street passed and turned, circles of light and she listened to the clock while Gram lay beside her and whispered a prayer, all of the words to all of the prayers. “You needn’t worry, Ginny Sue. Gram’s right here.”

  “I can’t stay,” she had told Bryan Parker. “I’m sorry but it would be a mistake.”

  “How long have you felt this way?” Bryan Parker asked, with the stunned expression that she can’t forget. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Why did you wait until now to tell me? She rode on the bus until Atlanta was just a sign by the side of the road.

  “Put your little bag there on the seat beside you,” Gram had said when she was leaving for Camp Tonawanda. She didn’t want to go to Camp Tonawanda but her parents wanted her to, her parents had all the pictures from Cindy’s brochure, horses and nature trails and a clear mountain lake. “Then nobody will sit beside you.”

  “It’s a rainy night in Georgia,” the bus driver sang and laughed. Carolina moon keep shining. “Sit there behind the driver, baby,” Gram said. “Don’t take candy from strangers,” Lena said. “Have a wonderful, wonderful time,” and her mother pulled Virginia’s hair up and out of the collar of her new go-to-camp outfit, pastel plaid seersucker shorts with a bib and a pink tee shirt.

 
; The ride from Georgia took hours and Cindy was in the Saxapaw station waiting under the glare of those bright fluorescent lights. “Look at you now,” Cindy said. “The bride of whatever fallen. Isn’t that a book?”

  If you mess up you can paint right over it, or you can strip it away, coat by coat, dissolving, diluting; you can vacuum that mess. She had painted the same canvas over and over, kept messing up, had to start over. Bryan Parker went to work and she painted a bride from behind, the church doors opened outward, looming large and heavy in the foreground, the bride a fuzzy blur of white midway on that narrowing aisle, blurred faces in bright summer colors filling the pews like dots. But when that was all dry, she painted condos, rigid brick structures with a yardful of dirt, no trees, miniblinds and a fierce dark sky. Then she left and she painted a night sky, no stars, the glare of a Trailways bus sign, small brick building, a Coke machine glaring red beside a woman dressed in brown sitting on a bench, her legs splayed, face lifeless. She was at home then, back in her childhood room, easel by the window, and she painted an old establishment that then was long deserted; something she remembered from going to Gram’s old house as a child, a little cinderblock building at the far end of Pecan Avenue right near the tracks, where people had gone for years to get bootleg liquor and various other things. There were two black men that were always out front in straight-back chairs, their feet propped up on old washtubs; one picked a banjo. “Cutty’s Place” was spray painted on the front of the building and Cutty, though long dead, was the big black woman who owned the house and kept her liquor hidden somewhere while there were always baskets of butterbeans out front in the summer with a for sale sign and dolls with dresses made of bits of pastel foam so that they’d sit on a bed like a pillow.

  Virginia always wanted one of those dolls. She always wanted her mother to stop at Cutty’s and let her go up and touch those dolls, pink and white like a birthday cake doll. “Lock your door,” her mother would say and drive by without once turning her head towards Cutty’s Place.

  Virginia had seen Cutty out there once, a large black woman in a faded pink floral dress that looked like it was a real expensive church dress at one time. Her hair was pulled back and she was fanning herself with one of those oriental fans like they used to have at the dime store and she was arranging those dolls on a card table out front. Men were playing horseshoes under a large pecan tree. That’s how she painted Cutty’s, from memory, the large black woman arranging those dolls, a horseshoe in midpitch, a pale summer sky, the bare dusty dirt beneath the pecan tree, a blue Mercedes parked on the corner, so out of place, the timing all wrong and it seemed that the painting should be split down the middle, the same way that Saxapaw could have been split down the middle at one time, the old part and the new part, until the old finally fell away. The old family farms, fields and sky, distorted by a bright red and yellow Burger King sign.

  That’s what the canvas looked like when Virginia had a small showing of her work at the Saxapaw YMCA. “It would do you good to get out of the house,” her mother had said. “It would be a good reason for you to shave your legs.”

  “Why did you put my car in the picture?” A woman that Virginia didn’t even know had asked. “I am the only person in Saxapaw that drives a Mercedes and I never went to Cutty’s Place. I never even drove down that street if I could help it.”

  “I don’t even know you,” Virginia said.

  “Well, you must.” The woman pulled ten dollars out of her billfold and held it there, shook it. “Here, I’ll buy it. I don’t want anybody else to see it.”

  “This one isn’t for sale,” Virginia said and pointed to her smaller paintings, floral watercolors and ink-sketched farmhouses. “But those are.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” the woman persisted, her face so red against her dark Joan of Arc haircut.

  “It has nothing to do with you.” Virginia looked away from those hard blue eyes, glanced over to where Cindy was sitting on the floor, listening and laughing. “It’s representative,” Virginia continued, feeling that she owed an explanation. “It’s a kind of place, a kind of car, each dating the other.”

  “Well, it isn’t any good.”

  Cindy stepped up, her hands in the back pockets of her cutoffs. “It’s better than those country chickens that you cross-stitch and sell for an arm and a leg.”

  “Who are you?” The woman turns and stares at Cindy.

  “Never mind who I am,” Cindy said. “My mama bought one of your cross-stitched robins, though, and I had to ask what it was. I mean who do you think you are, that man, Ginny Sue, what’s the bird man’s name?”

  “Audubon.”

  “Yeah, who do you think you are, him?” Cindy rubbed her finger over the wheel of the Mercedes. “This is art. Your birds are arts and crafts and not good ones at that.” The woman turned and hurried off, her canvas bag swinging behind here, and Virginia sat down on the floor beside the painting. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “Thanks Cindy,” she said. “I needed some help.”

  “Aw, you could’ve just told her where to go. She thinks she’s hot shit because she used to live somewhere like Idaho. She probably used to cross-stitch potatoes.” Cindy had rubbed her fingers over the letters of Cutty’s Place and laughed. “That robin Mama bought really doesn’t look like a robin. I don’t know what it looks like but not a robin. I do have to tell you though,” Cindy paused, her face serious. “I don’t see why you paint such sights as this. I mean I don’t want a retarded-looking robin on my wall but I don’t want black men pitching horseshoes, either.” She paused again and stared at Virginia. “I mean no offense but a picture ought to make you feel good.”

  “Why?” Virginia asked and leaned her head against the easel.

  “I don’t know.” Cindy shrugged. “I’d like to see you paint the ocean with lots of shells around and me and Buzz stretched out on a big Budweiser towel there by the water.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Sure you can! You’re getting better and better all the time.”

  “Well.”

  “Really, I do have faith in what you do.” Cindy said and helped her pick up the other paintings and wrap them up. “Didn’t sell a one did you?” Virginia shook her head. “Well, don’t feel bad. I mean as soon as you work up to fruit and bottles and religious stuff, you’ll sell them faster than hotcakes.”

  Virginia opens her eyes to see Esther standing there with a spatula. “I said do you want some hotcakes?” Esther asks and places her other hand, grease-coated, against Virginia’s forehead. “Still got a fever and I never can remember if you’re to feed or starve the fever.”

  “Starve, I think,” Virginia says, the thought of pancakes and butter and syrup making her sick.

  “My daddy died of fever,” Gram says. “And I had a sister that starved right in front of my mama’s eyes; she got the pneumonia she was so thin. ‘Eat just a taste,’ Mama would say and leave a tray of food there by her bed and not a bite touched.”

  “Better speak up,” Esther says over Gram’s story. “The kitchen is gonna be closed real soon now,” and Virginia shakes her head. Now, Esther is back in the kitchen, radio tuned to country, Dolly Parton, Mama’s run off with my traveling man.

  “Hurry up,” her daddy had yelled, sitting in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon. “Dolly’s gonna sing one without Porter.” And Virginia had come over to watch, her Barbie all dressed up to go to the prom with Ken. Cindy said her Barbie with the twist ’n turn waist was going to a shindig and wasn’t going to take a thing to put over her bathing suit.

  “Dolly sure is cute, isn’t she?” her daddy asked and Virginia didn’t like for him to say that people other than her mama were cute.

  “Not as cute as mama,” she said and Cindy laughed great big and then covered her mouth. Dolly was singing “Coat of Many Colors.”

  “I gave you that shirt you’re wearing, Ginny Sue,” Cindy said and her Barbie doll did a split.
“My daddy says that this kind of music is for the simple-minded,” and she crawled back over to where she had her shindig all set up, a background of Coke bottles.

  “Lord, this is a tearjerker,” her mama said and wiped her eyes, looked at Virginia’s daddy and they laughed.

  “The shindig is starting up,” Cindy had called, flat on her stomach with her knees bent up and her feet going back and forth. “I want your Barbie to come and sell the hot dogs.” You’ll sell ’em faster than hotcakes. Hot cakes and syrup and butter; the tigers run faster and faster around that tree, Little Black Sambo way up there in the limbs and the tigers run until they turn to butter and Little Black Sambo’s mama gets that butter and puts it on the pancakes. Run run fast as you can, tiger tiger burning bright. Nothing was loud enough or fast enough, not Roses, not the shindig, way down yonder in New Orleans wild cats jump on the sewing machines, sew so fast, so so fast, couldn’t get on that bus in Georgia fast enough, driver couldn’t drive fast enough. Her chest was tight, so tight the heartbeats couldn’t get through and she wanted it to beat, she wanted that sucker to beat like insanity so loud it rang in her ears, she wanted music, music so loud it made her chest hurt, vibrate and her head—goddamn, she wanted her whole body to pulse and throb and spin around and around in a circle, whirring and whirring, fly away home—she wanted to be on a subway nonstop express, faster and faster, so fast that the speed holds you upright, inert while the world flies by, bobbling, bumping, blending, graffiti and lights so fast that it blurs, it’s all a blur. Run like hell for miles and miles, run fast fly home, fly north, fly south for winter spring summer and fall, but don’t fall, just don’t fall till your legs get heavy numb like rubber and your heart beats till you can’t breathe, sand that wood, sand it hard and feel it when it digs in your hands; the shindig has started and you ain’t there ‘cause you ain’t the first, just ain’t the first; you’d run if you could move your legs, slow and then fast fast spinning, spin goddamnit before it all stops and cry if you have to, cry, you can cry if you try, you can cry.