Maggie Sweet (14 page)

Her first words, when she came in the door, were, “Lord, Maggie. You look like you’ve been drug through hell backward!”

I got busy pouring tea, slicing lemons, not trusting myself to speak.

But the minute I sat down, she drilled me with her eyes and said, “I hear the old boyfriend went to Jacksonville.”

Suddenly fat, salty tears were running down my face, soaking the front of my T-shirt and plopping onto the table.

“Jumping Jesus! I was afraid of that. You love him, don’t you?”

I nodded, but the tears were coming too fast to say anything. I never knew there could be so many tears.

“Oh, Lord, Maggie, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know love would make you so miserable.”

“I didn’t know I could feel like this. Didn’t know I could have such feelings. One minute my eyes are welling up from pure gratitude for being alive. Then I’m bawling because he’s gone—maybe forever. Oh, Mary Price, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe it was just five minutes of wonder for a lifetime of pain. And everyone will hate me.”

She patted my hand. “Hush now. You can’t worry about what everyone thinks. You’re not the first married woman to fall in love with another man. And you won’t be the last. Why, I have days when I’d run off with the Jewel Tea man if he talked nice to me. Now, dry your eyes,” she said, handing me a letter that was postmarked Jacksonville, Florida.

I looked at her, then tore it open.

Dear Maggie Sweet,

It’s almost midnight. I’m sitting in my motel room, thinking about you. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But suddenly I wanted to write something for you. I haven’t felt like writing since high school. But then no one ` since high school. I’ll send this through Mary Price and hope it won’t be too awkward for you.

T
HE
G
IRL AT
B
ELEWS
P
OND

In a Chevy

overlooking Belews Pond

a boy and a girl

too young

give themselves

to time and light

for all of memory.

Then torn by youth and rules

and small-town gossip

they drift apart

do the “right” thing

numb their senses

take up separate lives.

At midlife,

in a kitchen

in Poplar Grove

they collide

and the universe shifts—shakes itself

—comes clear.

For, there, in her eyes

he finds his soul

where he’d left it,

with the girl at Belews Pond

Always remember. I loved you then. I love you now. I’ll ALWAYS love you.

Jerry

After I read it, I cried harder than ever.

Mary Price didn’t say anything. She just got the box of Kleenex, laid the pack of Virginia Slims on the table next to me and sat with me, ’til I calmed down.

Graduation
was Friday. Thursday afternoon, right after school, Steven planned to drive to Chapel Hill to pick up Mother Presson.

At three o’clock, I was slicing potatoes into a skillet for an early supper, when Jill slammed into the kitchen.

“You can forget the whole graduation thing,” she bawled. “I’m not graduating, I’ve been expelled.” Then she ran upstairs to her room.

Before I could go after her, Amy banged into the room. “This time she’s done it. She’s disgraced us for life. I could die. I could just die.”

“Amy, what in the world…?”

“God, Mama, it was awful! Jill and her sorry friends greased the school banisters and everyone was falling all over the place. Then they rigged up a shoe to make footprints everywhere, even on the ceiling. They took the vice-principal’s Volkswagen apart and put it back together inside the school lobby—” Amy stopped mid-sentence, gave me a look that said all of this was my fault, and ran up the stairs to her room.

I started to go after her, but the telephone rang.

“Tell Jill to be there when I get home,” Steven said, in the coldest voice I’d ever heard.

I hung up the phone and ran up the stairs feeling like the sky was falling.

When I got to Jill’s room, she was sitting on her bed, hugging her pillow against her chest.

“Oh, Jill, what have you gone and done? You promised to behave.”

“God, Mama. I was trying to enter into the spirit of things…I know it was stupid…but…everyone’s carrying on like I killed someone.”

Downstairs a door banged and Steven bellowed, “Jill? Maggie? I’m home.”

“Oh, Lord, Daddy must have run every stop sign.”

Jill looked like a deer caught in headlights. Then her eyes went flat.

Steven was coming through the front room heading toward the stairs, when I caught up with him.

“Where’s Jill?”

“In her room. Oh, Steven, calm down before you go up there.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. My own daughter’s made me a laughingstock at school. I tell you I’ve had it this time. She can shape up or ship out.”

“Please, Steven, get a hold of yourself.”

He brushed past me toward the stairs, but the telephone rang in the kitchen and he froze. I ran to answer it.

“It’s the principal, Mr. Fentress,” I whispered, holding my hand over the receiver.

Steven glared at me, grabbed the phone and changed from Mr. Hyde into Dr. Jekyll, right before my eyes.

“Yes, Braxton. How may I help you?”

I held my breath, got busy wiping off the counter, pouring iced tea, trying to hear what they said. I couldn’t make out the words, only the low rumble of Mr. Fentress’s voice. And Steven had his back to me so I couldn’t read his face.

Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it another second, Steven said, “Thank you, Braxton, I appreciate your seeing it that way.”

He hung up the phone and slid onto a kitchen chair. I carried tea to the table, stealing sideways peeks at him, searching for a clue. He sat there a minute, staring at the glass as if he’d never seen it before.

“For goodness sake, Steven! Tell me what he said.”

He blinked, then looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. “The school has decided to chalk it up to graduation-week high spirits since half the seniors were in on it. If they clean up their mess they’ll be allowed to graduate.”

“Oh, Steven. See? It wasn’t just Jill. It was half of her classmates. It was just a group dumb-ass attack,” I rattled on, light-headed with relief.

Steven looked at me like I had nine heads. “Just this once, Maggie, try not to be vulgar.
You
might be relieved, but Jill’s not getting off that easily with me. I meant what I said. She can shape up or ship out. I won’t have people talking about us. She’s nothing but a juvenile delinquent and I told her so.”

Up ’til then, I’d tried to see Steven’s side, but the words
juvenile delinquent
flew all over me. Jill was not a juvenile delinquent. A fart in a whirlwind, maybe, a thorn in his side, for sure, but
not
a juvenile.

“You called Jill a juvenile?”

I still could not believe it. Ever since the girls were born, Steven had lectured me about name-calling. Why, once when Jill was little, I was playing around and called her a little booger. Steven got all over me like white on rice. He said calling children names, even if you were fooling around, was the worst thing a person could do. He even read me a section out of a child psychology book that said “‘Name-calling is as bad as physical abuse. It can scar a child for life.’”

’Course now that Steven was upset, it was all right to scar away.

“Jill is not a juvenile, and I do not appreciate you calling her one,” I said.

“For God sake, Maggie! It’s not juvenile, it’s juvenile delinquent. Can’t you say anything right? And don’t defend her. You’re always defending her. A lot of this is your fault. You’ve always encouraged her. You and your whole family have encouraged her to embarrass me to death.”

I was already upset, so when he started in on my family, I really lost my temper.

“I’m sorry, Steven,” I said, my voice as cold as ice. “I’m sorry if we embarrass you. If me and my family don’t measure up to you and your family’s standards. Your la-di da family who can’t sit in a room together for more than five minutes and haven’t so much as hugged each other in nineteen years.”

“Don’t change the subject. I tell you you’ve spoiled her, spoiled her to death.”

Oh Lord. We’d been having this same argument about Jill her whole life. Even when she was a baby he’d say,
“Don’t pick her up every time she cries. Don’t feed her but every four hours. You’ll spoil her.”

And I’d feel guilty as homemade sin wondering if he was right, if I was spoiling her.

But Jill was a prickly, colicky baby, jumpy as a cricket, flying into tantrums for no reason. How could I not pick her up? How could I let her scream for hours until the next feeding? Jill was different. She was different from Steven, different from me, different from Amy, who seemed to be born with the cool, dignified Presson standards.

There was a fierceness about Jill that scared me to death but filled me with wonder, too. I loved her fierceness.

She never saw any danger. She was always pitching herself off the edges of furniture or stair steps, jumping into the deep ends of pools, sure that someone would be there to catch her. And mostly I did catch her. But what was I supposed to do? Let her fall or drown to teach her about caution? Teach her about rules? I’m her mother, for the Lordsake and a mother’s job is to protect her children.

When I thought about Jill, I saw her with her head thrown back laughing, bright as new money, full of life and fun and down-to-earth sense.

Steven only saw her as a girl who broke the rules. His rules. Everybody’s rules. He couldn’t stand that. He thought she broke the rules out of meanness, to embarrass him. But Jill didn’t seem to know there were long lists of rules, didn’t know she was supposed to be silenced, withered by a look from Steven.

I tried to keep my mouth shut, but I couldn’t.

“She’s not spoiled. She’s just different. But she’s your daughter. Doesn’t that count for something? Maybe if
you hadn’t stayed locked up in your damned old den all the time, making up lists of rules, worrying about what everyone else thinks of us, maybe if you’d been
part
of this family, you’d
know
your daughter—caught her doing something good instead of only noticing when she does something wrong. Dammit, Steven, you never notice any of us unless we break one of your almighty rules.”

Steven’s face looked purple. For a second, I thought he might hit me. “Don’t you
ever
talk to me like that! I tell you I won’t have it. I won’t have you contradicting me. I won’t have the entire town talking about us. Do you understand?” Then he slammed the den door so hard the ancestors on their guy wires rattled.

I stood there for a minute, feeling as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. This had gone too far for a few pranks. But the argument wasn’t about Jill. It had been building between us for years. Now the words had been said. We could never take them back or forget them.

After awhile, I gathered myself as best I could, and went upstairs to see about Jill.

She was standing beside her bed, emptying her dresser drawers into a duffel bag.

“Oh, Jill. Don’t”

“I’m gone, Mama. Don’t try to stop me.”

“Things will calm down. It’ll be all right. Mr. Fentress called. You can still graduate.”

“It won’t be all right. It’ll never be all right. Even if I graduate I’m not going to college or computer school. Daddy will just keep yelling and you’ll keep trying to save me. It’ll just go on and on.”

I put my arms around her. This was breaking my heart.

She stiffened. “Don’t Mama. I’ve only stayed this long because of you. If I don’t leave now, I’ll never have a life. I’ll be stuck right here, doing everything I hate…leading some boring life…this life that
he
picked…well, maybe that’s all you ever expected, but I’m not like you. It’s not going to happen to me.”

I tried not to think about how Jill saw my life. Her saying “maybe that’s all you ever expected,” said it all. Suddenly I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t just her timid little mama. I still had hopes and dreams. I planned to run off with an outlaw poet, a man I’d loved since before she was born. I wanted to say that I’d be living at his home place out in the country and she’d be welcome any time; that soon, very soon, I’d have something to offer her—a place to stay—an outbuilding for her carving.

And if Jerry wasn’t still in Jacksonville, if I’d already told Steven, if I was sure of anything in this world working out, I’d have told her. Instead I said, “You can’t go running off in the dead of night.”

“Oh, Mama.” She pulled away from me and stuffed more socks in the duffel. “It’s not the dead of night. It’s three o’clock, light as high noon.”

“Well, it feels like dead of night. I’m completely worn out. I want you to stop packing—talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. I’ll get a job, my own apartment…I’m grown up, Mama. You’ve done all you can do.”

She went to the dresser. I walked over and blocked it.

“
Move, Mama!
”

“Not until you listen to me. Sure, you’ll get an apartment in a bad part of town. In a month you’ll be thin and
ragged, working at the Zippy Mart, wearing a blue smock with the name
Jill
emblazoned on the pocket, sitting behind a bulletproof shield, embossing credit cards, skewering hot dogs on a rotisserie, pouring syrup into a Slurpee machine.”

I could recite all this in my sleep. It was my own worst possible scenario.

I pressed on. “You’ll be saving for months for classes you can’t afford, classes you have to put off from one month to the next, one year to the next, because the light bill’s come due, or you’re late with the rent. Oh, Jill, don’t you see, all your old lightheartedness will be gone, all your dreams will be—”

“All right, Mama! Hush!”

“I’m just trying—”

“God! You’ve made your point. You sound like Mama Dean with her the-end-of-the-world-is-at-hand-and-there’ll-be-weeping-and-wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth-forever-and-ever-amen.”

Once again I was stung. Was that really how she saw me? “Well, Jill—”

“I’m sorry, Mama, but sometimes you make me crazy.”

“I just want you to have a plan. Get a job, take summer classes with the chief. By fall, you’ll have some money saved, maybe a roommate to share expenses.”

“But fall’s a million years off.”

I bit my lip. Fall
was
a million years off. I’d hoped to be leaving this weekend, myself. How could I ask Jill to stay when I wanted to leave?

I slumped on the bed. I didn’t have the strength to fight her. If she really intended to leave, I couldn’t stop her.

She stood there for a minute, then flopped down beside me. We both just stared at the wall, silent and miserable.

Finally she said, “What about Daddy?”

I sighed again. “Lord, Jill, I don’t know. You’d be out of the house most of the time anyway.”

I kept expecting her to get up and start packing again. But she just sat there sighing and staring.

Just when I thought we’d sit there staring and sighing on into eternity, she said, “Fall isn’t
that
far off. It’d probably take me that long to move my stuff anyway.”

I sat still, waiting to see where this was going.

“I’ve only saved a hundred dollars so far,” she said.

I looked at her. “A hundred dollars. Where did you get a hundred dollars?”

“I sold some carvings at the flea market.”

“A hundred dollars for carvings! You must be good.”

She ducked her head, gave me a tired smile. “Yeah.”

“You never once showed me your carvings,” I said.

“You never asked.”

“I’m asking now,” I said.

“All right. But you’ve got to promise to give up your Mama Dean routine,” she said.

“Did I really sound like Mama Dean?”

She grinned, shoved the duffel bag off the bed. “Naw, I was just messing with you. I just said it ’cause I knew you were right and it burned me up. It got to you though, didn’t it?”

I glanced at her, then looked away. “At first it got to me. But then I started to like it,” I said.

She looked confused. “Mama?”

“Well, you’ve got to admit it, being a difficult woman
will probably be my only inheritance,” I said, straight-faced.

She looked at me another long minute.

“It’s a joke, Jill. I was kidding.”

“I know. But
you
joking about Mama Dean. You didn’t even look around to see if lightning was gonna strike you. You’re changing, Mama, getting weird.”

“Is that good?”

“I’m not sure. Yeah. I think so.”

Already the air between us felt lighter. Everything was going to be all right. Downstairs a door banged. A second later, Steven’s car started. I looked at the clock radio. “Daddy must be leaving to pick up Grandmother Presson.”

Jill covered her face with a pillow. We both sighed, lost in our own thoughts.