Tending to Virginia

by Jill McCorkle

  “I haven’t seen you shed one tear, not one.” Cindy’s eyes were twitching back and forth so fast they looked like they might fall out. “I keep expecting to see him,” Cindy said, her words slowing down. “I saw him this morning. I was sure of it. He was right in front of Rexall when I went to fill my prescription. I ran up to the door and he was gone.”

  “Lay off the Valium, Cindy,” Madge said. Just the thought of Raymond suddenly appearing anywhere gave her gooseflesh. She was relieved when Hannah came into the room with Chuckie.

  “I want some candy,” Chuckie said and in no time at all, Cindy was squatted down with half her slip showing and her arms wrapped around him.

  “Bless your heart,” Cindy said and kissed all over the top of that child’s head. “I know you’re having a hard time understanding that Granddaddy has passed on. It’s a trauma you will remember your whole life.”

  “I want some candy,” Chuckie said again and looked at Madge. She got him a Hershey’s kiss out of the cabinet.

  “He wanted his mama,” Hannah had whispered and gripped Madge’s arm. “Ginny Sue is on her way over and maybe it’ll do Cindy good to see her.” Hannah, still watching Cindy squatted there, leaned closer to Madge. “Are you okay?” Madge nodded and couldn’t help but smile when she saw Chuckie put that kiss in his mouth and roll it all around. It wouldn’t be a trauma for him unless Cindy turned it into one.

  “Granddaddy is up in heaven,” Cindy continued. “Heaven is up there with the clouds and God and Jesus.” She pointed upwards. “When people die, especially people with long incurable diseases,” she glanced up at Madge and Hannah looked at her as well; she knew Hannah was wondering what in the hell Cindy was talking about. “These people with rare cancers go and live with God and they watch over us just like Jesus does and sometimes they take a little trip back to earth to let us know how much they care like when we saw Granddaddy at the Rexall today.”

  “Cindy?” Madge whispered but it did no good.

  “Your body is only a shell, baby,” Cindy said and hugged Chuckie closer. He had chocolate all over his mouth and it got on the front of Cindy’s dress. Cindy still sometimes blames Chuckie’s acne on the chocolate that he ate at Madge’s house during the funeral. “Your body is like a pecan,” Cindy had said, except she said it like “peecan” and Madge had to bite her tongue near about off to keep from correcting. “A pee can is what people used to keep under their beds,” she had told Cindy once and that made Cindy say it twice as much.

  “You know the pee-cans that are out in this yard?” Cindy asked and looked at Chuckie who was eyeing the cabinet that had the kisses. “And you crack the shell and take out the good part.”

  “Eat the good part,” Chuckie said. “I want more candy.”

  “Our bodies are the shells and inside of us where we have souls is the good part and that’s the part that lives with Jesus. Do you see?” Cindy shook him and Chuckie twisted to get away. “I know it’s hard to take, but life is hard. It’s damn hard for me and the worst of it all is the way that good for nothing daddy of yours tried to take me.” Cindy leaned back and sat straddle-legged on the floor and Madge took Chuckie’s hand and pulled him over to her. He needed to be told that what he just heard about his daddy was not true. Hannah was washing glasses in the sink and Madge knew, was trying to pretend that she had heard none of Cindy’s mess.

  “How about a little lunch, Cindy?” Hannah asked. “It might help.” Cindy rolled her head from side to side, kneecap to kneecap. “Ginny Sue will be here soon.”

  “So?” Cindy asked. “What good can she do me at a time like this? Her daddy isn’t dead. Her husband didn’t leave her only to come back and try to get it.”

  “Where’s Jesus?” Chuckie asked and Madge took his hand and walked out on the back porch. It was crisp and cold outside and Madge walked Chuckie over to the pecan tree where the nuts had fallen. She stood and watched him running around, first chasing a frightened squirrel and then picking up the nuts. She waved when Ginny Sue pulled up and parked, but Madge stayed out there in the yard with Chuckie; Ginny Sue would have to understand, they all would, that she needed some fresh air.

  “Jesus is in here,” Chuckie said and handed her a nut. “Jesus stays in this pee-can.”

  “It’s a pecan,” Madge corrected. “And Jesus is in heaven.”

  “My mommy says it’s a pee-can. Mommy says Jesus stays in it.” Madge just smiled at him and let it go at that.

  “You’re not thinking of me,” she had said to Raymond. “You’re not thinking of us. You’ve got to help yourself get better.”

  “I’m thinking of the future,” he said and grinned, his teeth unbrushed, graying hair disheveled. “I bought a cemetery plot didn’t I? That’s thinking of us.” He pulled the receipt from his shirt pocket. “One of the nicest spots there is, little stream nearby, shrubbery, so quiet you can hear acorns thump the ground.”

  “But you won’t be hearing it,” she had said, crying. There had been so many times when she was crying.

  “Who’s to say?” he asked. “The Egyptians believed that life went on. They took it all with them, valuables, food. Some of them had their wives put in the tomb.” He looked at her and she felt her spine freeze, a split second of fear that she knew he saw before she responded.

  “It’s not right to spend your life getting ready to die,” she said.

  “I bet people didn’t think King Tut was crazy. I think it was right, and I’ll be ready, oh yeah, I’ll be all ready.” Then he laughed and went back to his book, the pictures of tombs and mummies. Cindy never saw what was happening; Cindy said that her father was “cultural,” an artist of the mind. Cindy bought him that King Tut record that Steve Martin did and though Madge tried to talk Cindy out of giving it to him, and tried to explain, Cindy would not hear of it. He got out the hammer after Cindy left and cracked that record into hundreds of pieces there on the living room floor. “You shouldn’t make fun. You shouldn’t make fun,” he had said over and over, eyeing Madge while he beat that record.

  “I can’t believe that we’re not having a church service,” Cindy had said when Madge and Chuckie came back into the kitchen. Cindy’s words were so slow, like she had a mouthful of cotton and Ginny Sue was trying to get her to drink coffee. “And a song or two. We need for somebody to sing ‘Love Lifted Me’ or ‘Take Me in Your Arms, Sweet Jesus, I’m Ready.’”

  “I’ve never heard of that one,” Hannah said and it was one of those strange moments when in the midst of a serious time, something becomes hilarious. Madge could tell that Ginny Sue was trying not to laugh and once she and Hannah had let go, she joined right in, the kind of laughter that brings tears. It made Cindy furious.

  The sunlight had been warm, sinking through Madge’s dark coat as they’d walked from the small dirt road to the graveside. There were flowers everywhere, straight metal chairs. Cindy was sobbing uncontrollably before anything even started so Madge pulled Chuckie closer. Before the service was over, Madge had to turn and motion to Ginny Sue to come get Cindy, and during the silent prayer, she watched Ginny Sue halfway carrying Cindy over to that funeral home limousine. And then there was a silent prayer and yes, she could hear the stream, and yes, she thought she heard an acorn. People began walking towards her at the end but she stepped away a minute so that she could see what Raymond had done, all of the plans that had occupied all those years. There was concrete like a vault, a room, a picture of a pyramid on one wall, a TV stand that she had never seen before with that brand new widescreen color set, books, and a huge metal grate off to one side of the grave that she knew was meant to cover the top, to seal the tomb. It sent a chill through her body to watch them lower that casket onto a small bedframe, her Raymond, that Raymond, both gone. And again, there was that slight shiver when she realized that there was no room for her, no way for that seal to be broken once the concrete was poured over the top. He had never intended for her to be with him.

  “That wasn’t granddaddy,” Cind
y was whispering to Chuckie when Madge got back in the car. “It was a shell of a man.”

  “You’re right,” Madge had said and watched Catherine and Brent lingering to talk to people. Madge thought about cleaning her house from floor to ceiling. She would take Chuckie to a Walt Disney movie or to the zoo. Or maybe, she’d just go right back to work and keep right on playing solitaire.

  “Jesus is in the pee can,” Chuckie said and Madge couldn’t help but laugh, hurting her cheeks, tears springing to her eyes.

  “What’s so funny?” Cindy asks now and Madge shakes her head, looks at Hannah.

  “I was thinking of how Chuckie said Jesus lived in a pee can,” she says, the tears coming to her eyes. “At the funeral, that’s what Chuckie said.”

  “That’s not funny,” Cindy says. “Chuckie was a baby and that’s how I happened to explain death to him.”

  “A pee can?” Virginia asks now, only for Cindy to sigh out loud like she could pop.

  “Oh I’m sorry. All of you speak such good English. Pecan, okay? Pecan! I mean I’m the only one that gets corrected, right? Nobody says a word when Emily says Chicargo or Lena says ain’t or the way Mama calls Thalhimers with a Th. She says Thall like shall, thallhimers.”

  “I do not,” Madge says but Cindy is determined to go right on and right on and drive her out of her mind.

  “Mama says purrio, too, instead of perio when she does all of her teeth talk.”

  “I do not.” Madge is blushing and has put her cards aside. “And there’s no such song as ‘Take Me in Your Arms Sweet Jesus, I’m Ready’ and it’s not natural to wear blue nail polish.”

  “Well, I see,” Cindy says. “You got an audience now so let’s hear it. Just go right on and say what about me you hate, and Daddy, go right ahead and talk about him, too.”

  “He was crazy,” Lena says and Hannah tries to Shh her now, the wind whistling outside, rain pelting against that window. “Roy said he knew that man was crazy as hell when we saw him there atop the hardware store acting like a woman.”

  “It was a campaign for Chevrolet,” Cindy snaps and looks around the room. “Everybody knows that!” She looks at her mama but she’s staring out at that rain like a zombie. “Will you tell them the truth?” she asks and her mama turns and looks at her with those eyes all teared up again; her mama is diseased, disease of the mind, and the rest of them here are diseased in the brain, won’t even listen, won’t even talk. “Will you tell them that Daddy was not crazy!”

  “He was, though,” Emily says. “Me and Ginny Sue know. Me and Ginny Sue and God. I said, ‘Ginny Sue, me and you and God, that’s all that needs to know.’”

  “Gram,” Virginia says, everyone looking at her.

  “What?” Cindy asks. “Just tell me what. Go ahead and make up some story. Great weather for it. Thunder and lightning so go right ahead and tell some ghost story.”

  “He just scared me one time,” Virginia says, staring back at Gram, nodding until Gram nods with her.

  “Who hasn’t scared you?” Cindy asks. “All you got to do is say ‘boo’ and it scares you.”

  “When?” Hannah asks, remembering all those times Ginny Sue flung herself down on the floor, begging not to go to Madge’s house.

  “Years ago,” she says, shakes her head but her mother and Madge are still staring at her. “I was there and he came up the steps with a mask on and it scared me.”

  “That was a game,” Cindy says. “My daddy liked to have fun. My daddy did things other than grow squash and pump gas.”

  “Yes, he did,” Madge says. “He did things like dress like a woman and climb on top of the hardware store.”

  “It was funny when he did that,” Cindy says, her hair drying in frizzy little wisps. “It was a creative thing.”

  “Well, it wasn’t a campaign for Chevrolet,” Madge says, gaining strength as she looks around the room. “We all remember it; people have been nice about acting like they don’t remember but we all do.”

  “I remember,” Lena says and laughs, stands by her chair and twists one arm out behind her, the other out front in an Egyptian pose. It tickled Roy so when she’d strike that pose.

  “He’s crazy as hell,” Roy had said and parked the Lincoln there in front of the hardware store. Lena could see him up there big as Ike, dressed like a woman with his eyes all made up and everybody in town coming out to see. “I got to tell him a thing or two before he gets arrested.”

  “Well, you can try,” Lena said and lit a cigarette, that sweet little Pooh Kitty stretched out on the backseat in the sunshine. “But me and Pooh are going to sit here in the car where it’s cool.”

  She had sat there and watched it all, pure tee embarrassment. Madge was all slumped over on that slut-looking Cindy with shorts so tight they rode into her crack, and people, good decent people taking the time out of a hot as hell busy day to just pull up a yard chair and sit and watch like they might be in New York preparing for a Broadway play. God, she had missed the city, missed the walking and bumping and horn blowing, flashing blinking lights and mannequins in windows dressed in pure gold, while she held that cigarette lighter out to Roy, and swayed back and forth there on the street corner with that colored man playing the sax while Roy whistled for a taxi and they flew through the streets from place to place. There are things in this world to see, and there all those people had sat and watched Raymond Sinclair on top of Kinglee Hardware. Lena wished he’d just jump if that’s what was on his mind so she and Roy could get on home and have a little time to themselves.

  Pooh had stretched and growled, tiptoed right into the front seat and sprawled out on her lap. She saw Roy walk out on that rooftop and shake his finger at Raymond, shake his head, throw his arms up in the air and let them slap to his sides like he always did when she got the last word in an argument. “Sheesh, Lena,” he’d say and those hands would slap his sides, “I give,” and she’d say, “I take,” and wrap her arms around him and they’d flop down in a chair or on the sofa, bed, floor, whatever was closest and stay that way till he felt the urge to tinker with a pipe or draw some lines on a piece of paper.

  “I see you couldn’t talk him down,” she had said when Roy got back in the car, those eyebrows arched and eyes like hard round pebbles, just like when he always got agitated. He was something else when he looked like that. “You do better talking Pooh from a tree.”

  “Pooh ain’t crazy as hell,” he said and patted Pooh on the head. Pooh craned his neck, and his little cat eyes squinted like he always did when he wanted a little loving. That Pooh was a love, yes Jesus, loved her so. “I told Raymond he was making a big fool of himself.”

  “And?” she asked, spotting several women that she knew and turning her head so she wouldn’t have to wave to them as they passed.

  “He said, ‘Fuck you Roy.’ Can you believe he said that?”

  “He’s trash,” Lena said and pulled Pooh up to her face so she could hear his motor. “Right Pooh? Pooh knows he’s a trashy trashy man, yeah, pooh, little pooh pooh knows. Raymond Sinclair is shit. Right little pooh?”

  “Pooh knew he was crazy,” Lena says. “Yessir, we all knew.”

  “I knew,” Emily says. “You and Roy told me he was on the hardware store.” It didn’t surprise Emily a bit when she heard what he did. No sir, he had scared Ginny Sue that time and she knew that man couldn’t do a thing that would surprise her. Dressed like a woman and why did he marry if that’s what interested him? Felicia is a good woman and she is that way but Felicia doesn’t show herself on top of a hardware store and Felicia doesn’t scare children. She wasn’t surprised; she isn’t surprised at what they’ve got on TV. People walking down beaches with near to nothing on sipping a soda like there aren’t peas to shell and get to boiling and corn to shuck and clothes to wash. Emily was so glad that Tessy didn’t have to hear of her son-in-law on top of the hardware store, ‘cause Tessy would have lit into that man like a fevered dog, the same as she done that time them young Mormon boys come to
her screen door that time. Tessy shot ’em with that BB gun of hers, put a blister on one of those boy’s faces, told Emily all about it over the telephone.

  “I’m glad Tessy didn’t have to hear of it,” Emily says. It makes her laugh to think of Lena striking that pose with her hands all crooked. Lena has always been able to strike a pose that way. Lena is striking one now with her mouth dropped open and that skint animal hat pulled to one side. Lena looks old and bad but she can strike a pose like nobody’s business.

  “My God, it was no big deal,” Cindy says now and fluffs her hair. She hates when it goes flat. “Your hair looks nice,” Randy Skinner had said just last night and nuzzled up to her in the parking lot of Ramada. She knew she shouldn’t have gone at all, but she told herself well, if she’d had something better to do, she would have done it. “Play with fire, you get burned,” Constance Ann had said late yesterday afternoon. “Don’t call me to come spend the night again, because I’m warning you now. Besides, I can’t stand to miss ‘Dallas’ two weeks in a row.” And Cindy didn’t call her last night after making out with Randy Skinner; she didn’t need to call anybody because Randy Skinner meant nothing to her except a way to kill a little time. Charles and Nancy Price weren’t there even though Nancy’s sister was singing again.

  “Don’t go, Cindy,” Constance Ann had turned right around and called on the phone to say. “Really, I’ll come spend the night. We could pop some popcorn.”

  “Thanks, but it’s something I’ve got to do,” Cindy told her and even though the whole night was boring, two kamikazes and kissing on an old married nothing, it was something Cindy had to do. Constance Ann does not understand desperation; Constance Ann does not understand what a difference a little manly attention can make in this otherwise suck hole world. If Cindy’s going to make a mistake, then it’s her mistake, her business and the fact that Ginny Sue is sitting over there pregnant as a horse with a lawyer husband does not take back the mistakes that she has made. Give somebody a marriage certificate and suddenly they’re the born again virgin, like the honeymoon opened that door for the first time. Everybody knows that when the Lord slams a door, he tries to crack a window and all she’s doing is just as he would have her to do, sniff down that window with a crack and fling it to the roof, let the world in. Anybody that looks hard enough can find a crack in this world, it might not be the one they’ve always dreamed up like Ginny Sue wanting to be Barbie and live in the dream house or like Constance Ann thinking a man is going to come along and find her there in her bathrobe watching TV and fall madly in love with her. The Lord helps them that helps themselves. “His cancer was a big deal,” Cindy says. “But not the hardware store.”