Standing in the Rainbow

THE EIGHTIES

A Scare

FOR ALL THE YEARS and hours that Norma had spent worrying over every little thing, the moment that something really terrible did happen she was the one who was calm and was able to keep a clear head. She had not said a word to Macky or Aunt Elner. All they knew is that she had gone in for her yearly checkup. She did not tell them anything until two weeks later. That night after dinner, after she put the dishes in the dishwasher and turned off the kitchen light, she sat down by Macky in the family room.

“Macky, I’m sure it’s nothing but they saw a little something on my mammogram that they didn’t like and Dr. Halling wants to do a biopsy.”

Macky felt the blood drain from his body. She went on.

“So, I’m going to go in on Wednesday. I should only be there for a day or so, but anyhow, I’m going to fix a few things and put them in the freezer for you so you can have them to eat while I’m gone.”

Macky finally got his voice. “Jesus Christ, when did this happen?”

“A few days ago.”

“A few days ago—why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because there was no point for you to worry. The only reason I’m telling you now is because they might keep me overnight, depending on what they find, and I didn’t want you to come home and wonder where I was.”

“Have you told Aunt Elner or Linda? Is she coming home?”

“No. Like I said, there is no point to telling anybody anything until we know what it is and it’s probably not anything at all.”

“Why would you keep something like this from me? What is the matter with you?”

“Nothing is the matter, honey, I just didn’t think you needed to worry, that’s all.”

“I’m your husband, for God’s sake, you don’t just say, Oh by the way, I think I might have cancer.”

The minute he said it he was sorry. But Norma got up and came over, pushed his hair back off his forehead, and patted his shoulder. “Oh, honey, I don’t have cancer.”

“But you could have.”

“The chances are rare, but even if I do, it’s not the end of the world. He said we caught it early.”

“Does he think it is?”

“No, he meant if, on the off chance that there is something, we caught it in time.”

After they went to bed he could not sleep and got up at about three in the morning and walked out in the backyard and tears ran down his cheeks. Not so much because he was scared to death but because it was her bravery that had always touched him more than he could tell her.

The next few days were pure hell. He realized that if he lost her he would never forgive himself. He wanted more years with her, so he could wake up every day and look at her and appreciate who she was, what she was. She was his wife, his lover, the mother of his child, but most of all she was his best friend. Without her he would be more lost than he already was.

He sat in the waiting room of the hospital and while they were doing the biopsy on Norma he thought about time, the one thing that could not be stopped. As a child, time had seemed like a windup toy. It had seemed so long on those days he sat in school waiting for the bell to ring and so short when he was having fun. So long from Christmas Eve night to Christmas morning. Now, in just a few seconds, the doctor would tell them the results. In those few seconds his life would never again be the same—or they would have another chance.

Did the white-coated people in the lab know what they were looking at? Would they go to lunch and not know that whatever they found under the microscope would change lives forever? He wanted to yell at the entire hospital, That’s my wife, that’s my entire life, our entire future you’re looking at. Here was a man who could not stand to have anyone else drive, hated to fly because he was not comfortable unless he was at the controls, and now he was helpless. Totally dependent on the hospital staff, who looked to him to be no more than teenagers. What had happened to the older, gray-haired nurses and doctors he had remembered the last time she was in the hospital, having their daughter, thirty-one years ago, and what the hell are they so happy about? Didn’t they know how serious life and death was, for God’s sake? That poor sweetheart could wake up with her breast gone and be told that it had spread everywhere and that she was dying. Why in the hell hadn’t they found a cure for this thing yet?

What are we doing sending money all over the world, spending billions on the military budget and on making stupid movies and television shows? People are dying every day and we’re just throwing money away. Why aren’t they giving it to the scientists to find a cure? Something is wrong—cancer has been around too long; somebody must have a cure, they’re just not letting anybody know. He had worked himself into a murderous rage when the doctor came down the hall.

“Mr. Warren, we just got the report from the lab and it’s absolutely benign, so we’re gonna close her on up. She should be out of recovery in a few hours.” He spoke over his shoulder to another doctor that had just passed him in the hall. “Hey, Duke, can you get me two more tickets for the game tomorrow?”

Macky didn’t hear Duke’s response. He stood up and took a walk outside the hospital. Everything inside had been cold and sterile and now he was back out in the warm sunshine and he felt as if he could breathe again. He found himself smiling at the people he passed and at that moment he made a deal with himself. Anything that woman wants from now on, she gets.

Afterward, he had to remind himself of that deal he made that day outside the hospital. When he asked her the next year where she wanted to go for a vacation, she said, “Well, there is one place that I have been dying to go to, but I don’t know if you will want to.”

“Norma, I told you we will go anywhere you want.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Las Vegas and see Wayne Newton in concert.”

He would have gone to the moon had she wanted.

Revitalize Downtown Elmwood Springs

SIX MONTHS after they returned from Las Vegas, Norma finally found the civic cause she had been searching for. Somehow it seemed that after Neighbor Dorothy died, nobody ever came to town anymore. When she had her radio show, people came from miles around by the busloads, but now, with the new interstate, downtown was dying on the vine. At the next chamber of commerce meeting a brand-new committee to come up with solutions to revitalize downtown Elmwood Springs was formed and Norma was voted to head it. After walking downtown, clipboard in hand on a fact-finding tour, Norma reported her conclusion at the next meeting.

“We are too dull—what we need is a theme.”

“A theme? What kind of a theme?” asked Leona.

“A theme, something to make us different, make us stand out, set us apart from other towns so people will want to come here. We just don’t have any character; every building is just willy-nilly. We need to make an impression. When you drive in, what do you see? You see a sign that says Welcome to Elmwood Springs but we need more than that. We need to have one that offers an idea, a claim, something unique. Home of the World’s Largest Sweet Potato or something. We need to give people something unusual, an attraction that will make them want to get off the interstate and stop.”

They all fired at once:

“Can’t we think of something like that to get us in the Guinness Book of World Records?”

“Like the world’s largest cake. Or pie or pancake, even.”

“What about a waffle, the world’s biggest waffle?”

“But once you make it, it won’t last—you have to offer them something to see that’s still here.”

“We need something that’s indigenous.”

“How about home of the largest squash ever grown? Don’t you remember when Doc Smith grew that squash and sent it to the state fair?”

“How do you know it was the world’s largest squash? It was the state’s, but we don’t know for sure if it was the world’s.”

“All right, we can say the state’s largest squash—who’s going to know anyway? Or care?”

“I think they took a picture of it. We could find out, we could display that.”

“Well, I tell you what. I certainly wouldn’t turn off the interstate to look at a squash, much less a picture of a squash,” said Tot.

“What do we have a lot of?”

“Corn?”

“No, Iowa has corn. Idaho has the potato.”

“Rhubarb? Does anyone else have rhubarb?” asked Verbena, biting into a doughnut. “We could get a whole bunch and plant it real quick.”

“Why does it have to be a vegetable—why can’t it be a meat or a pastry or a beverage?”

Norma said, “I still think a theme would be better and permanent, like having Main Street look different somehow. Maybe have it look like a street in a different country, you know, like that Danish town in California.”

“What about this: We could have a town theme. All we would have to do is change everything into Swiss chalets and put bells on the cows and things. Call ourselves ‘Little Switzerland’ or something.”

“What cows? We don’t have any cows in town.”

“All right, you come up with something.”

“What about Hawaiian, I love that, everybody could wear muumuus and Dixie teaches the hula—maybe she could teach the whole town and we could give everybody a lei when they drove into town. Something like that.”

The next morning Norma drove around town trying to envision a theme that would, as the committee eventually had suggested, “more easily lend itself to fit the existing topography.” There was not a body of water to speak of, unless you included the lake or the springs, so the Hawaiian idea was out. Nor was there a mountain within three hundred miles. Elmwood Springs was as flat as the world’s largest pancake and inland.

Inland. She had a brainstorm. Why not capitalize on just that, Elmwood Springs right smack in the middle of the country. After all, they were not too far north, not too far south, east or west. And if you dropped New Mexico and Nevada, which you could because they were mostly desert, then Elmwood Springs was truly sitting right smack-dab in the middle of the country. Everybody said that if you climbed high enough you could see into Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and all the way down to Iowa.

And so it was voted on. George Crawford painted the sign and on May 22 the committee held the sign unveiling and applauded. There it was for all the world that passed by on the interstate:

NEXT EXIT ELMWOOD SPRINGS, MISSOURI, [BR /]VOTED THE MOST MIDDLE TOWN IN AMERICA

Not a single car turned off the road because of it, but the town felt better.

The Gospel World

ONE AFTERNOON Mrs. Pike of Spartanburg, South Carolina, received a surprise visit from her old friend Minnie Oatman, who was passing through on her way to join the group for a sacred-music festival in Dadeville. Minnie was in the living room, holding forth about the state of her health and the state of the gospel music world. “You know, I was laid up for four months a while back.”

“Yes, I heard you were,” said Mrs. Pike with concern.

“But as soon as I got over my heart attack I get on a plane and go on up to Detroit to join the family and, honey, I did not get back a minute too soon. While I was laid up the boys and that fool Emmett went out and got themselves a manager. I look up and here they come, wearing them tight little pants and skinny little neckties and long sideburns and pencil-thin black mustaches with their hair all combed way up in slick pompadours on the top of their heads and the worst of it was they thought they looked good. I said, ‘You boys is just one step away from show business and if your daddy could see you he’d roll over in his grave.’ Oh, I was fit to be tied and I can’t blame Beatrice, she can’t see what they had on. Anyhow, I ran that manager off. But you know, I worry to death about how gospel has just gone commercial. I think it all started when the Oak Ridge Boys let their hair grow long and went country. And now lots of these boys have turned country trying to make a fast buck. I’m scared Vernon is gonna run off to Nashville for good and start popping those pep pills with the rest of them. Bervin got hisself a new wife and is threatening to run off and be an Amway salesman and if he does there won’t be anybody left to sing tenor.” She took a swig of her iced tea. “I had hoped to bring Betty Raye’s two boys into the family group someday but that’s not gonna work out. Neither one of them can carry a tune.” She heaved a sigh and looked away, baffled. “I just don’t understand it. Both of them tone-deaf, with me and Ferris for grandparents.”

After her second term Betty Raye retired from politics altogether and spent most of her time doing just what she had wanted to do all her life. She stayed home and gardened. The only other thing she did besides an occasional visit with her boys was to serve on the board of the twelve Hamm Sparks schools for the deaf and the blind she had founded in her late husband’s name. After Peter Wheeler’s wife died he and Vita married and were traveling the world on cruise ships. Jimmy Head moved into Betty Raye’s guest house out in the back and was very happy.

In 1984 Hamm Sparks Jr. ran for governor and won. People say they heard Earl Finley turning over in his grave.

As far as the Hamm Sparks case, after tracking the boat back to Mr. Anthony Leo, Jake Spurling hit another brick wall. He could not find the boat. He and his men scoured the records of all missing boats found and every piece of a boat found from St. Louis to the Mississippi border and on out to the Gulf of Mexico but nothing showed up. And Jake was still not sure if the missing hearse or the missing boat had anything to do with the men’s disappearance. All he knew was that Hamm had been in Jackson, Mississippi, one night and had vanished the next morning.

Every hunting and fishing camp in the area had been gone over with a fine-toothed comb and with a pack of bloodhounds. Nothing. Every fiber, bone, tooth, or hank of hair that had been recovered in the past seventeen years had been examined but nothing matched any of the men. So far this case was turning out to be the most baffling one he had ever run up against. If Jake Spurling had not been a pragmatic man and a forensic scientist who believed only in what he could see under a microscope, he might have started to wonder if they had really just disappeared into thin air like people said.

Monroe

BOBBY HAD FLOWN to New York for a round of business meetings. Fowler Poultry was in the process of merging with another, bigger company. On the third night, when he came back to his hotel he picked up at the desk the message Lois had left for him.

YOUR FRIEND MONROE NEWBERRY PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL IS WEDNESDAY AT 2. CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS.

He went up to his room, sat down, and called her. Thank God for Lois. She had arranged everything with their travel agent and booked him on a flight from New York directly to Kansas City, where a rental car was reserved; he could drive to Elmwood Springs. After Bobby’s mother had died, Doc had gone to Seattle to live with Anna Lee, and Bobby had not been back to Elmwood Springs since the day of his mother’s funeral or seen Monroe for years. He had been so busy. But he and Monroe always called each other on their birthdays and at Christmas just to check in. They always planned to get together and do something but they had not. Both had always figured they had plenty of time. Now it was too late.

In Kansas City, his rental car was waiting and as he drove out onto the new superhighway he began to think about so many things he and Monroe had done together. Climbing the water tower, swimming at the Blue Devil, the train trip to the Boy Scout Jamboree, all the hundreds of times Monroe had spent the night at his house. The promise they’d made to one another that night, looking up at the stars with his grandmother, to call each other in the year 2000. Each had been best man at the other’s wedding.

But time and distance had taken its toll. Bobby had moved up in the world. He had new friends. He and Lois had bought a home in Shaker Heights in Cleveland, where the corporate offices were now located, and had joined the country club. Monroe had stayed at home to manage his wife’s father’s tire store.

Bobby arrived at the church around 1:40 and said the appropriate words to Monroe’s wife, Peggy, and a few other classmates. Then he walked over to the casket. He reached out and patted the body lying there, a body that was supposed to be Monroe but was only some cold, hard thing just taken out of a freezer. It startled him. Why was he so cold, had they put him in an icebox? What was lying there in a brown polyester suit and tie looked like a bad mannequin someone had made of Monroe as a joke. What was death anyway, some cruel magic trick pulled by the universe? One moment people are here and then somebody waves a cloth over them and in an instant they are gone.

What was once Monroe had disappeared. Where had he gone? Bobby wondered, just as he had as a child, what happened to the rabbit that the magician pulled out of the hat and made disappear—was Monroe hidden in a secret compartment somewhere waiting to come back?

He knew he should be feeling something more but he just felt numb, almost detached. And as he sat in the pew listening to the minister drone on and on, he realized that he had started to hum a little tune that for some unknown reason kept playing over and over in his head. A tune he had not sung in years. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think./Enjoy yourself while you’re still in the pink. He knew he should be paying attention to the service but he could not concentrate. When it was over, the women, as usual, handled everything well; they even seemed to know when to cry. And how to cry, what casserole to make, and where to bring it. All the men did was show up and line up as pallbearers and even then they had to be told what to do. As he carried the body he was still unable to comprehend that it was really Monroe in the box he was lifting. It couldn’t be. He was only forty-nine years old. He was supposed to have had so many years left. Monroe had been walking down the aisle at the Wal-Mart garden and patio center, looking for a good crabgrass killer, and the next thing he was on the floor, dead of a massive heart attack. They say he never knew what hit him.

But Bobby wondered if Monroe had felt it coming, if he had had even a few seconds of wondering what this was. Was he dying? Was it all over? Had he been shocked to realize that this was it, the way it was going to be? Did he have a second to think about the last thing he said to his wife or his children? Did he think about what he had not done? Was he mad, was he scared? Had his life passed before his eyes, as they say it does? Or did it just go black? Is it like sleeping? Do you dream? Was Monroe somewhere watching him right now, pleased he had come after all these years—or did anything Bobby did today really matter?

If Monroe had known how short his life was to be, would he have done things differently? Would he have wasted so many days just fooling around his workshop or looking at baseball games? What would he have done, had he really known how fast life goes, like one train whizzing past another—a roaring noise, a vibration, and then gone as fast as it came.

After the graveside service, they went back to the house. Peggy had set up a little table with a candle on it, where she had put out some photographs. Bobby walked over and saw the one of Monroe sitting on a pony, the same pony he’d been on, and school pictures, Monroe’s wedding picture, frames with his family’s pictures of him holding a string of fish, Monroe getting heavier as the years went by but still that same, sweet, good-natured Monroe, who had gone along with every crazy thing Bobby had thought up. After a while, all the guys eventually went out on the back porch and stood around talking, trying to remember all the funny things over the years. That time when Monroe had shot his little toe off when he tripped over his hunting dog, the time he had been caught trying to steal Old Man Henderson’s wheelbarrow, all the nutty times of their childhoods. One of the guys passed a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey around and they each took a drink. Most of them, including Bobby, had lost a parent but that was to be expected. This was different. This was the first friend of their own age who had died. This was too close for comfort.

Death did not scare Bobby; he had seen too much of it in Korea. What scared Bobby was the moment or even the few seconds when you might know you were dying and that everything was over. He had almost drowned once and had thought for a fleeting second that maybe it was his last moment on earth. But at the time he had been so young and after he had the devil scared out of him, he’d promptly forgotten it and continued to take stupid chances. The young can forget easily. As you get older, it becomes harder and harder to forget your own mortality. There are so many reminders. Little individual end of the worlds start to happen all around you. When your grandparents go, your parents are ahead of you, but when they go, you look around and realize you are next in line. Then one day you are actually talking about cemetery plots and insurance.

It was about five when the get-together was over. Before he left to go back to the airport, Bobby decided to take a walk around town. He had not been home since his mother’s funeral all those years ago. As he walked down streets where he had once known every face he passed, there were now strangers who had no idea who he was. They thought this was their town. Streets and houses that he had once known as well as the back of his hand had all changed. He walked along his old paper route but there were strangers in the old Whatley house, strangers sitting on the porch where the Nordstroms used to live. He cut down a few alleys, which years ago had seemed twenty feet wide, and was surprised to see that they were just narrow little footpaths, lined with garbage cans. He had not remembered so much garbage. He walked by his old house. He and Anna Lee had sold it a few years ago and he was glad to see it looked just about the same, only so much smaller than he remembered. Everything was much smaller. Downtown was just a block long. It had seemed so much bigger, like an entire city, as he remembered it. He stopped in front of the window of the Morgan Brothers department store and wondered how they had managed to get a winter wonderland in that little window. The barber pole was gone. Almost every business on the street was closed for good, except for the hardware store and his dad’s old drugstore. The glass doors to the old Elmwood Theater were chained shut, and a poster of the last movie shown there, in ’68, was dusty inside the glass frame. He stood outside on the sidewalk and stared up at it. God, he thought, the hours he had spent inside, the theater filled with screaming children and squeaking seats being flipped up and down. The green tin light sconces up the sides of the walls, a place so dark you would be blind for a few minutes as your eyes adjusted, until you could make out those little white lights on the floor by each row of seats and you would head down the aisle, your feet carpeted by some wonderfully soft, multicolored maroon and pink and green stuff leading you deeper into the theater, closer and closer to the big screen, where life was exciting and full of a million possibilities and dreams. He walked over and peered inside the lobby but could not see much. He did not know if it was because of the Jim Beam but as he stood there he could almost hear the large glass machine popping corn. He could taste the salty, buttery taste of that popcorn in the greasy red-and-white-striped bags. And even though the diner had closed years ago, he could still remember the tangy taste of mustard and chili on the hot dogs, washed down with bottles of ice-cold Orange Crush. And as he went by the drugstore he could taste all the root-beer floats, lemon and strawberry sodas, the banana splits, and the steaming hot-fudge sundaes he had eaten over the years.

So many sounds and smells. He thought, I must be drunk. He walked back to his car and got in and sat there alone. It was fall and the leaves were just beginning to turn and a thousand new memories flooded his mind.

That time. That place. That feeling. What he would not give to get it, to find it again for a day or even an hour, but he knew it was as impossible as trying to catch smoke in your hand. How could anyone know, when he or she was living it, that they would someday look back with longing, that these would be the good old days? No one tells us, “This is the happiest you will ever be in your life.” Why had he wasted so much of it dreaming about going to other places? For the first time, Bobby realized the thing he missed most in the world was gone forever and he sat there and cried like a baby. He wanted his childhood back. He wanted to go home, walk down the hall, and climb into his old bed, and wake up with his future laid out before him on a red carpet. He wanted to go back to when a day seemed to last an eternity and the field behind the house was a vast expanse that led to magic places and the swimming pool was as long and as wide as a lake. When your best friend was your blood brother and all the girls thought you were cute. He wondered whatever had become of the Bubble Gum King of 1949? That boy who was going to fly planes, jump freighters to the Orient, be a cowboy, and do so many wonderful things.

Nothing too terrible. He had just grown up.

Poor Tot

A BAD CHILDHOOD followed by a happy adulthood is one thing, and a good childhood followed by an unhappy adulthood is another. But for Tot Whooten, a miserable childhood had followed her like a black dog right into an equally miserable adulthood. She had been so busy she had not noticed until one day when she looked around and it seemed clear to her that life was not a constant struggle for other people. They seemed to actually enjoy it and look forward to the dawning of a new day.

It had suddenly become obvious to her that if you wake up every morning and it takes you almost an hour to talk yourself into just getting out of bed, something is wrong. Every morning for the past twenty-plus years she had been her own mental cheerleader, doing back flips and chanting, “Be happy you are alive, life is great, rah rah rah . . . sis boom bah! You will be dead soon enough, don’t waste your life away, get up, get up, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, it’s a new day,” and so on. But this morning the cheerleader inside just sat down with her pom-poms and flopped back on the bed beside her, saying, “I’m exhausted . . . I give up, I can’t do it anymore.” She was like that Old Man River, tired of living, but feared of dying, and this morning she had realized that she could no longer jes’ keep rolling along.

After a lifetime, day after day, of getting up and taking care of first her brothers and sisters, then her own children, a drunken husband, her parents, she was like the elephant, so exhausted from carrying such a heavy load that she just fell down and couldn’t get up. Poor Tot knew that not only could she not go on but she did not want to go on. Each of her children had been such a disappointment, and she had not had one good holiday in her life. Every Christmas had been the same. James drunk as a coot by ten in the morning, passed out by noon, and Darlene and Dwayne Jr. constantly fighting over something. Darlene was on her fourth marriage and her daughter Tammie Louise seemed to be taking after her—only ten and already crazy about the boys with the motorcycles. The last time Tot had seen Dwayne Jr. he had come to visit and walked off with her good silver candlesticks to buy more dope with, she guessed, or to hand over to that skinny girlfriend of his, the one with the penciled-in black eyebrows who smoked one cigarette after another. Where he had found her was a mystery that she was afraid to solve.

And neither one of her children would listen to her. They both snapped, “Well, look who you married.” Not that she hadn’t tried with Darlene. She had sent her to the Dixie Cahill School of Tap and Twirl, but Dixie had sent her back home with a note.

Dear Tot,

Darlene does not know her right from her left and I am afraid she will never make a dancer. You work too hard for your money to waste it on any more lessons.

Sincerely,

Dixie

Then, after years of putting up with James and his drinking, and begging and pleading with him to quit, they found him one day passed out in the back of the garage, sick as a dog from one of his long binges. The doctor finally told him, “If you take one more drink it will kill you.” After all the years of Tot threatening him, crying, that one sentence did it.

He sobered up and soon was holding down a good job and the next thing she knew he was sitting in the living room telling her about some woman he had met in A.A. He looked her right in the eye and said, “Tot, for the first time in my life I am really in love.” There she sat, after having borne his two children, put up with his drinking for over thirty-two years, and he had the nerve to tell her he was in love for the first time in his life. At that moment it occurred to her why people are driven to murder and she made a mental note not to support the death penalty.

If she had had the strength, she would have killed him, but she was unable to move. So she sat and stared while he went on and on about how sometimes in this life people are lucky enough to find their true soul mate. How for the first time since he was a boy he was able to laugh again. How the world looked bright and new and shiny again. About how much he liked the new woman’s children and that he felt he now had a chance to be a better father this time than he was the last time, now that he was sober, that is.

Then he finished off his dissertation on love and second chances. “I can’t tell you how much better I feel now that I’ve been honest with you.”

“Oh good. I’m so glad you feel better.”

“My sponsor said that the sooner I told you, the better off we would both be.”

“I’m glad he thought so,” she said.

“So now that you know, what do you want to do about it?”

“What do I want to do about it?”

“Yes,” he said and looked at his watch like he was late for an appointment.

“I want you to get up and call that woman and tell her that you are already married.”

“Oh, now, Tot, be reasonable. Jackie Sue needs me and you don’t.”

Tot could not believe her ears. “Jackie Sue Potts? Who’s been with every man in this town?”

“Tot, don’t say anything you will regret. You don’t know what a hard life she has had.”

“She’s had a hard life?”

“Tot, the past is the past. We all have to live in the present, one day at a time.”

“I’ll tell you one thing, One Day at a Time. I’ll give you a divorce but on one condition. You take that woman and you get as far away from us as you can because I will not live in the same town and have to see her or you, do you hear me?”

Tot had felt like a complete fool. Not only was the girl younger than her daughter, but all this time she had been fixing Jackie Sue’s hair. She had been doing it so Jackie Sue would look good for a date with Tot’s own husband!

Of course James had not moved and soon she had to see him and Jackie Sue floating all over town, showing off their new baby. That morning she wondered why she had finally reached the end of her rope. Maybe it was because she was just so tired. So bone tired that at long last she could not hold on anymore. By seven o’clock that morning the phone started ringing. She knew it was Darlene, wanting to know if she could drop her children off at the house so she and that new husband of hers could go off to the stock-car races. But for the first time Tot did not pick up the phone. Several more times before noon the phone rang, and several more people wanting something were annoyed because she did not answer. She heard the phone, but even the sound of the ringing did not stir the slightest, smallest interest or need to answer. Tot wondered what had happened. What in her had finally broken. What had undone her at last so she could lie there as peaceful and as silent as a radio that had suddenly been unplugged. That was it, she thought, I am unplugged. Dead inside at last. No more currents running through me, forcing me to keep going, to turn on, to feel anything.

Was this permanent or was this just the vacation she had never had in her life? How long would she be off, she wondered, and she hoped it was forever. It was so peaceful, so soothing, so painless to be alive but not to feel. It was as if she had stepped out of her body and left the house, although the woman who used to be her was still there, empty, hollow.

Around three o’clock she decided to try to get up out of bed. She was almost afraid that if she moved that old self might jump back in but as she slowly got up and walked through the house she was so relieved. She could move and nothing of her old self came back. She was a ghost in her own home, floating around and observing life, but not being affected by it in any way. What a pleasant state! What a peaceful way to spend the days! What was it? she thought, as she wandered through the house, pulling down the shades, taking the phone off the hook, and sticking it in the closet. What was this new state? After a while she identified it. It was quite simple. She just didn’t care. After a lifetime of caring, trying, struggling, looking for answers, today one had come. Today was the day that she simply did not care anymore about anything.

Let her kids get upset. Let the shop go to hell in a handbasket. Let the church committees wonder about why she wasn’t there. Let the world go to hell, she no longer cared.

She made herself some Campbell’s tomato soup, drank a Coke, ate some crackers and a piece of cheese, and went back to bed. The dishes were still on the table. She didn’t care. She dreamed of that one day, that one afternoon when she was seven. It had been a warm day and her schoolmate had invited her to a birthday party and she had been allowed to go. For one afternoon in 1928 she had been allowed to go to a party alone. Not having to take her brother or sister, not having to do anything but attend a party. They had played games and eaten ice cream and afterward she had been allowed to run in the large meadow behind the girl’s house and run without her mother yelling at her to be careful, without having to watch out for her brothers and sisters. She had been happy for a while, for one afternoon when she was seven.

She wondered what her life would have been like if she had not had that one hour that one day.

Tot’s Flipped

EVERYBODY IN TOWN was concerned about Tot Whooten. Norma was speaking to Aunt Elner on the phone about it. “I am just worried sick. I drove by and there was Poor Tot out in the back of her house, wandering around in the fields all by herself like she didn’t have a thing in the world to do. You know, she’s quit the church and she told Darlene not to drop the kids by anymore. She’s stopped going to bingo altogether. Her yard is a mess and you know that’s not right. She never let her yard get out of hand. She always kept her lawn cut and those hedges neat and trimmed. Why, you could set a place setting on her hedges and serve dinner on them. That’s how right and neat she kept them.”

“Why would you want to eat on a hedge?” asked Aunt Elner.

“That’s not the point; I am afraid she’s flipped. I always thought I would be the first one in town to flip out and it’s turned out to be Poor Tot. Poor Tot, she has just gone around the bend. Just like her mother did.”

Aunt Elner said, “I don’t think so, Norma. I went over to see her the other day and she made perfect sense to me. She’s tired, Norma, that’s all that’s the matter with her, and she’ll either come around or she won’t.”

“Well, that’s a comfort, Aunt Elner. What do we tell Darlene and Dwayne Junior—your mother is either going to get back to her old self or she isn’t?”

“That’s the truth, Norma. What else can you say?”

Norma thought about it. “I guess you’re right. We can’t do it for her, she’s going to have to pull herself out of this one—all we can do is be there for her when and if she needs us. Isn’t that right?”

“As far as I can see, that’s the only thing we can do,” said Aunt Elner.

But other people in town took a different view. Mrs. Mildred Noblitt, a thin woman with a tic in her right eye, marched over to Tot’s house and banged on the door so long Tot finally had to open it and let her in. Tot was in her aqua chenille bathrobe with the pink flamingo on the back, and as Mrs. Noblitt marched in the house and sat down in the living room, she said, “Tot, are you aware that it is already ten o’clock and you are still in your robe?”

“Yes,” said Tot.

“Tot, everybody is very concerned about you. You are just going to have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get back into life and put your phone back on the hook. You can’t just sit around in your house all day with the shades down and your yard going to pot. What are people going to think?”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, you have to care what people think. Your yard has always been just lovely—you don’t want it to just go wild, do you?”

“It can if it wants to,” said Tot.

“Oh, Tot, now that’s not like you, you know you’re not like that.”

“No, I don’t. I haven’t any idea of what I’m like.”

“Well, I can tell you, you are a neat person. That’s why we are all so worried about you; you’re not being yourself.”

“How do you know?” Tot said.

“Because you have been the example of grace under pressure, a figure to be admired. You don’t want all of us to be disappointed, do you? We all look to you when anything bad happens, we always say, Yes, but look at what Poor Tot has had to put up with, and it always made us feel better . . . do better. If you fall apart, who can we look up to?”

Tot shrugged.

“All right, I’m going to tell you something that you don’t know. Do you know what people call you? They call you a Christian martyr. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: Poor Tot, she’s just a Christian martyr. There now, doesn’t that make you feel good to know how highly people regard you?”

Tot considered this for a moment. “Not really,” she said.

“Well, the point is—. Oh, I don’t know what the point is, except life is not worth living if you’re not going to enjoy it.”

Tot looked at her. “Bingo!”

“Listen, Tot, I just don’t like the way you are sounding, and you’ve let all your ferns die. If you don’t snap out of it, the next thing I know you’ll be off on a killing spree.”

A slight smile began to form on the right side of Tot’s mouth, which made Mrs. Noblitt’s tic act up.

Mrs. Noblitt stood erect. “All I can say is this, and then I am leaving.” After searching around for a moment for something to say that might leave an impact, she said, “Pretty is as pretty does,” and marched out the door.

Verbena was the next to take a shot at trying to help. “You know, Tot,” she said, “whenever I get to feeling sorry for myself I always think of that poor little Frieda Pushnik.”

“Who?”

“Frieda Pushnik, she was born without any arms or legs. I saw her in 1933 at the World’s Fair in Chicago. They brought her out on a big red velvet pillow and here she was nothing more than just a stump with a head and she was just as cheerful and pleasant as can be. She just chatted away like a little magpie. She said she could thread a needle and told us all about how she had won a national award for penmanship. I bought an autographed photo of her that I still have today and she signed it right there before my very eyes. She held the pen between her chin and her shoulder and she signed it Good luck, Frieda Pushnik. I still have it. Whenever I get to feeling sorry for myself I take that picture out and look at it and it makes me feel ashamed to ever be upset over anything. I can tell you that with all her missing parts little Frieda Pushnik never felt sorry for herself. Never complained and she certainly had good reason to if anybody in this world did. Just imagine, Tot, if you had to be carried around on a pillow night and day, how would you feel?”

Tot answered truthfully, “Sounds good to me.”

Verbena had failed. Because Tot was her closest neighbor she felt that she and she alone had a civic duty to single-handedly pull Tot back out of this malaise, or whatever it was, and two days later, after much soul-searching, she made the supreme sacrifice and slipped her prized, personally autographed photo of Frieda Pushnik under Tot’s kitchen door. But even Frieda Pushnik’s smiling face, with a ribbon in her hair, sitting on a velvet pillow, did not help poor Tot. She put the picture facedown under her one good set of silverware in the dining room and forgot about it.

Then, as these things sometimes happen, one Monday morning Tot woke up and looked out the window and watched Verbena out in the backyard hanging her laundry on the clothesline when all of a sudden what looked like a bumblebee flew up Verbena’s dress. Verbena immediately dropped her basket and whooped and high-stepped around the yard, holding her dress up in the air as if she were dancing a jig, all the time hollering “Whooo! Whooo!”

After a moment, when the bee had finally found its way out of her skirt and flown away to safety, Verbena calmed down, regained her composure, and looked around to see if anyone had witnessed the event. Satisfied that nobody had seen her flying around her yard in broad daylight with her dress over her head, she went over and finished her task. But in the next house Tot was laughing so hard that tears ran down her cheeks and she had to put a pillow over her face to keep Verbena from hearing her. She had never laughed so hard in all her life and she couldn’t stop. All alone in the bed, the minute she would start to quiet down, the vision of Verbena would reappear and she would be screaming with another fit of laughter. She laughed so hard and for so long that she could not get out of bed and finally went back to sleep, but the moment she opened her eyes she thought of Verbena doing the jig and had another laughing fit.

Later she had to get up to go to the bathroom and when she looked at herself in the mirror that started her laughing again. She laughed so hard all that day that her upper plate came loose, and even that made her laugh. The next day she woke up feeling sore all over but very calm and rested, and for the first time in months she felt like she might get up for good.

After all of Verbena’s trying so hard to pep her up, Verbena never knew that a bee up her dress had finally done the trick. From that day forward, Verbena was convinced that it had been little Frieda Pushnik who had done the trick and Tot never told her any different.

Soon everyone in town knew Tot was going to recover from her terrible ordeal. For the first time in weeks she pulled up the shades in the living room, and week after week the shades came up room by room until one day Tot got dressed and went back to work with a new outlook on life. “Norma,” she said, “I’ve been on the verge of a nervous breakdown all my life and now that I’ve had it, I feel a whole lot better.”

Daughters

MACKY AND NORMA’S DAUGHTER, Linda, had married but continued to work to help put her husband through law school, a fact that irritated Macky to no end. “If he can’t support a wife on his salary, then he shouldn’t have gotten married,” he said. However, at the time Norma thought it was a good idea for Linda not to quit her job. “I wish I had a job,” Norma added wistfully.

Several months later, when the Pancake House opened, Norma applied for the job of hostess and, to her surprise, was hired but her mother, Ida, now an imposing dowager of seventy-five who wore six strands of pearls around her ample bosom and carried a black cane, talked her out of it. “Norma, for God’s sake, how would it look to people? The daughter of the president of the National Federated Women’s Club of Missouri being a hostess at a pancake house. If you will not think of your own social position, then think of mine!” And so Norma continued to be, as she put it, just a housewife. Her hopes of becoming a grandmother had been dashed when Linda had had a miscarriage in her third month. After the miscarriage, Linda and her husband had begun having problems. Linda had wanted to try again but he was against it until he finished school. Macky said it was because the husband was afraid he would lose his meal ticket but as Norma pointed out, he’d never liked him in the first place.

One afternoon a year later, when Macky walked in the door from work, Norma met him in the living room. “Linda called and said she is calling back at six because she wants to talk to both of us.” They looked at each other wide-eyed. “What do you think?”

Macky said, “I hope it’s what we think.”

“Do you think it could be?” Norma asked.

“I’m hoping it is.”

“Do you want anything to eat now or do you want to wait?”

Macky looked at his watch. “We only have forty-five minutes. Let’s just wait.”

“All right, but what are we going to do for forty-five minutes?”

“Should we call her?”

“No, she’s on the road and said she had a meeting and would call us when she finished.”

“I hope it’s what I think it is,” Macky said.

“I know you do, but you never know, and if it is what we think, don’t offer any advice. Just say it’s your decision and whatever you decide to do about it we will support you.”

“Norma, I know how to talk to my own daughter. She knows how I feel.”

“I know she knows how you feel. Especially about her husband—you certainly made that clear, nobody can accuse you of being subtle.” Norma shook her head. “Making a complete spectacle of you. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my entire life.”

“All right, Norma,” said Macky.

“You could have at least said something in private and not waited till her wedding day to pull a stunt like that.”

Macky got up and went into the den but Norma continued. “Imagine such a thing. It’s part of the ceremony. Everyone knows when they say who gives this woman in marriage, you are supposed to say ‘I do’ and step back.” Norma got up and started rearranging the pillows on the sofa. “But no, you had to say right out loud, ‘I’m not giving her—I’m just loaning her.’ ”

“O.K., Norma,” he said from the den.

“And then to glare at the groom like that . . . no wonder they’re having trouble. I could hardly face his parents. They thought you were a drunk, or at least I hoped that’s what they thought. I didn’t want them to think you would do something like that sober. And then to have Aunt Elner laugh out loud like that, it’s a wonder that our daughter even speaks to us.”

Macky came back in. “Linda knows what I meant. I was not going to stand up anyplace, church or not, and say I’m giving my daughter away . . . like she was something that we had sitting around the house. And no matter what you and Linda think, I still say it was a rash decision.”

“Macky, she had dated him on and off for six years, how rash can that be? You knew she was going to get married sometime, and then to sit there and carry on like that, everybody heard you. I was the mother of the bride, I was the one who was supposed to cry, not you.”

“Norma, why are you dredging up all this old stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t know, just nervous I guess. Do you want some crackers or something? I have some pimento cheese.”

“No, I’ll just wait until after she calls.”

“But now, Macky, don’t get your hopes up, we’ve had false alarms before.”

“I’m not. I just hope it’s good news, that’s all.”

They sat across from each other, waiting, and said nothing until the phone rang and then he got on the extension in the den and she picked up in the kitchen. After they hung up Macky came strolling into the kitchen all smiles but Norma was not smiling. “Well, I hope you’re satisfied now.”

“I am,” he said, looking in the refrigerator for the pimento cheese.

Norma opened the cabinet where she kept the crackers. “Honestly, I never saw a man so happy his daughter was getting a divorce in all my life.”

Dr. Robert Smith Tours

AFTER MONROE’S FUNERAL something happened to Bobby. Going back home again had stirred up so many old memories. Being there had made him remember not so much who he was but all the things he had wanted to be. Yes, he had made good money, had enough in the bank, held good stocks, no complaints there. They had two homes, one in Cleveland and one in Florida. His children had gone to the best schools, he had worked hard, been a good provider, but now those old secret longings came creeping back. That boy who had watched the shadows of a fire dancing on the ceiling of the old bunkhouse and dreamed himself to sleep seemed to be waking up inside him again. He found he hated to put on a tie and sit in stuffy corporate offices in every stuffy corporate town. He found himself staring out windows more and more.

After three months of thinking about it, Bobby walked in the door one night and said, “Lois, what would you say if I told you I wanted to go back to school?” Lois said, without a moment’s hesitation, “I would say do it!”

And so Mr. Robert Smith took an early retirement and went back to college and got his doctorate in history and his dissertation, The American West: Dream and Reality, was published and Dr. Robert Smith and his wife went on a lecture tour, and as Lois told their children, “Your father is having the time of his life.”

Darling, We Are Growing Older

MACKY WAS RESTLESS. He walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table across from Norma. “Norma, what do I look like?”

Norma glanced up from her Things to Do Today pad. “What do you mean, what do you look like? You look like yourself.”

“No, I’m serious . . . what do I look like?”

“Macky, I don’t have time to play some silly game. I’m trying to figure out how many sandwiches I need to order.”

“It will only take a second. . . . Look at me . . . and tell me what you see.”

Norma put her pencil down and studied him. “You look just like you always did, Macky, only older.”

“How much older?”

“You look . . . oh, I don’t know, Macky, you look the same to me as you always did. I don’t know what you look like. Go look for yourself in the mirror.”

“I want an objective view. I see myself every day.”

“Well, I see you every day too. How am I supposed to know what you look like?”

“What if I was walking down the street and you saw me coming toward you, what would you say?”

“I’d say, There comes my husband, Macky Warren. What do you think I’d say? Here comes a perfect stranger?”

“Norma.”

“Oh, all right. If I didn’t know you and I saw you coming down the street, I’d say . . . Oh, I don’t know, Macky, I’m no good at these silly games, you sound like Aunt Elner. Go look at a picture of yourself if you want to see what you look like, go look in the yearbook where we were voted Cutest Couple. That’s what you look like now—older but still cute.”

It was not the answer he was looking for.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you think a person can still look cute when they’re older?”

“How old do I look?”

“Well . . . you look your age. You look like you’re supposed to look, Macky. I don’t know what you want me to say anymore. Macky, go ask somebody else. I’ve got to figure out if we should have potato chips or fruit salad. Just as soon as I decide on chips everybody will say they wanted fruit salad.” She went back to her list but said to him as he got up to leave, “I’ve never heard of anything so crazy in my life.”

After Macky left she thought about what he had said. He was obviously worried about getting old, but was he? How about her?

It was hard for her to tell, being with him day after day, year after year. They had never really been separated except for the night she’d stayed in the hospital when she had Linda and the three days she and Aunt Elner had spent in St. Louis visiting Aunt Elner’s niece Mary Grace. But little things had started to happen. She found herself going sound to sleep sitting straight up in the chair at night when they were watching television. Macky would more often than not wake her up to go to bed. Her eyes were bad now; she had to wear her glasses almost all the time if she wanted to read or do any close work. Macky needed reading glasses but he was too stubborn to get them and picked hers up when he read the paper. He had stretched all her glasses.

Maybe he was right, maybe they were getting old. When he came back home she was standing in the bedroom in her panties and bra looking at herself in the full-length mirror. “Macky,” she said, “does my body make me look fat?”

He would not have answered that question for all the tea in China.