Author's Note, 5-17-03: Wow, I finally finished chapter 14. Go me. Am I
boring you guys? If so, lemme know and I'll wrap it up. I'm dedicating this
chapter to my brand new niece, Abbigail Sierra (that's right. I've got my
own Abby now :). And special thanks to my Southern Technical Consultant
(and fellow Sybil fan), Dorothy.
Chapter 14
BELLS WILL BE RINGING
*
Watching Eric being rolled away in his wheelchair was a hard thing to do. He kept leaning over as far as he could, stretching his neck out to see around Bridget, who steered while Jimmy walked mechanically alongside them with Eric's crutches in one hand, suitcase in the other. I expected Maggie to cry, but she didn't. I thought my heart might stop beating, but it didn't. I hoped Eric might change his mind right at the last second, right as he was being wheeled out of view, and demand that Bridget turn in the opposite direction. We would have a movie-perfect ending - the family reunited on Christmas day. Maybe Jimmy would even feel differently about us. I sugarcoated the truth with a bunch more sappy wishes, none of which materialized, and forgot to wave goodbye as my brother took a final look back.
Maggie had stuck to her word. There was no arguing. No big scene. She was civil to my father, he had pretended to be glad to see her. Everyone seemed to be in a daze, caught in the middle of an alien experience where we were all together and nobody cursed or cried or acted smug because one of "the kids" liked them better. Even Bridget must have sensed it. She'd snuck a few encouraging winks and grins at me but remained strangely quiet as my parents conversed in stiff uneasy tones. I wanted to shake her and tell her to laugh or jabber on about some nutty thing she had done to pass the time in boringsville Ohio.
"Why aren't you coming, Abby?" Eric had asked repeatedly, holding onto the sleeve of my sweater and keeping his voice low so the adults wouldn't hear. When I'd brushed his hand away to keep him from exposing the pink streaks that decorated my arm, he looked like he didn't recognize me anymore.
Why aren't you staying? was the only reply I could think of, but I'd just bunched my shoulders up in a half-hearted shrug instead. He's little, he doesn't understand, I told myself, the same reasoning I'd offered to our mother earlier that day.
Maggie's arm curved around my back, her fingers holding onto the scruff of my neck the way a person does when they pick up a cat. She probably could have lifted me right off the ground with that iron grip. It was reassuring to feel the strength there in her hand, even though I knew what it could be used for. She reminded me of a loaded gun that injured and protected, depending on where it was pointed. I huddled against her and slipped my arm around her trim waist, getting closer to her rigid body that told of something dangerous and steely layered beneath all that creamy, baby-smooth skin. I tried to harden myself up inside too.
"Let's go home."
There was a lengthy pause before Maggie responded. I peered up into her face anxiously. It was empty until she caught me looking and flashed a smile, showing too many teeth. She wasn't really that happy. "Don't frown so." She put a fingertip to her cheek and twisted her wrist from side to side like she was a dimpled Shirley Temple, using charm to get a laugh. "Didn't your mother ever tell you your face could stick that way?"
I managed an artificial grin of my own to please her, but I wasn't ready to act silly. I might not be for a long, long time. Being silly wouldn't feel the same if Eric wasn't around to join in. "Let's go," I requested again, getting antsier the longer we stood in the hospital corridor, passed by doctors and nurses who paid no more heed to us than if we were a couple of saintly statues that had graced the hall for years. It didn't feel like a safe environment anymore. Maybe I expected Dr. Blake or Maxine to pop up suddenly and steal me from Maggie's grasp. Maybe I was afraid to be there when Bridget returned without my brother. For a moment, unreasonable as it was, I hated her for helping to take him away, hated Scott for urging me to telephone Jimmy. And most of all, I hated myself for going along with it. I never did anything right. Ever. Behind Maggie's back I made a fist and sunk my fingernails deep into my palm, smile still fixed neatly in place. Oh yes, I could wear masks with the best of them.
*
The phone was ringing off the hook when we got home. Maggie fooled around with the keys, making a racket as she tried to wrestle them out of the lock. "Slow down, girl," she called as I pushed past, nearly knocking her over, and banged my knee against the table in a mad dash to intercept the call before the other person on the line gave up.
"Hello?" I held my knee, panting a little. My mother just shook her head and unbuttoned her coat, flapping each arm until the sleeves slid off.
"I doubt it's Ed McMahon," she said.
I shushed her with a dismissive wave of my hand.
"Hello. Is this Abby?"
Immediately I recognized the feminine voice with it's faint but unmistakable southern drawl that lingered despite decades of separation from a girlhood home deep in the heart of Georgia. It was a unique sound that stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise "nothin' but Yankee" family. Eric and I would giggle and try to imitate certain words - "hanker" and "reckon" - in that same dancing tone that rose and fell as lightly as a feather on the wind, until Grandma Corrie Jo laughed at what atrocious accents her Yankee grandchildren had and told us to stop making fun of hers. But I never considered it making fun. I loved the way she said everything, pretty as music.
"Yes, ma'am."
Maggie froze in the middle of hanging her coat in the closet; her head shot up so quickly it caused her hair to fan about her shoulders. She watched me suspiciously, pointed and mouthed, "Ma'am?"
"So polite! Now I know I'm speaking with my favorite grandchild."
Gran-chy-ld. I grinned into the phone, ignoring Maggie's frantic hand charades. "Yes, ma'am. How are you?" I dodged my mother when she tried to get her ear in to listen.
"Oh, fair ta middlin'. I'd be even better if my daughter and grandbabies were here to celebrate Christmas with me." Grandma's whispery sigh wasn't accusing, but I knew she meant what she said. Every year she invited us to spend the holidays in the cozy two-bedroom house she had lived in for about as long as I could remember. Maggie only accepted a handful of times, claiming it was too far of a drive. What she really wanted was an excuse not to see her stepfather, the man Corrie Jo had married before I was even born and only a short while after her first husband, Maggie's real dad, had died from a heart attack. Maggie grew up a daddy's girl and resented what she viewed as the disloyalty her mother showed by remarrying so quickly. I loved Grandad Wilbur though. He liked to sneak me and Eric candy when Maggie wasn't looking, sometimes literally spoiling our supper. He was a prankster too, constantly keeping you on your toes when you were around him, and his favorite target was Grandma Corrie Jo because she had a high- pitched scream that could "peel paint off the walls" and startled everyone else as well. Between Grandad's mischief, Grandma's sweetness, and the huge gourmet meals they both loved to prepare, it was always a pleasant visit at their house. Almost.
Then there were the times Maggie would get in a mood to argue and dredge up childhood memories that seemed to me nothing more than mixed-up fairy tales that put Grandma in the role of the evil witch. Maggie was the enslaved, unloved princess who finally escaped only to be trapped again when her knight in shining armor knocked her up. Grandpa Newman - now a ghost existing in faded pictures and an unknown haunted corner of Grandma's eyes - couldn't accept that his baby girl was pregnant out of wedlock. Maggie swore it was Corrie Jo's old school beliefs that poisoned the man against her, brought on the fight that estranged them and killed Grandpa Newman before he learned his granddaughter wouldn't be born a bastard, but I knew differently. When the storm had passed, or at least after Maggie was out of the room, Grandma Corrie Jo would pull me aside and tell me it had never mattered to her whether I came into this world a Wyczenski or a Newman, she would have loved me just the same. Still, I was full of questions. What would have happened if my parents hadn't married before my birth? Did Maggie place part of the blame for Grandpa Newman's death on me? Would he be alive now if I hadn't stirred up trouble? Had I killed him? I wondered.
I wanted to ask, but the hurt that mapped its way along the tiny crow's- feet etched on Grandma Corrie Jo's face silenced me. She was young for a grandmother; nary a gray strand sabotaging her naturally red hair and still in possession of all her own teeth, she would brag while skipping or doing some other girlish thing that made me wish I had known her when she was even more youthful and wild, rollicking around the neighborhood with an army of cousins, her copper colored penny loafers and white knee socks stained rusty-red by those Georgia clay back roads. But a row with Maggie could wear even the most spirited down, and Corrie Jo was no exception. "Just like my mama," she would sigh when Maggie disrupted family gatherings to bicker with Aunt Shelia or tell me and Eric to get our asses in the car because we were leaving. I pitied my grandma then. "Just like my mama."
"Is everything all right, darlin'?" Grandma Corrie Jo sounded concerned. I nodded, as if she could see me through the holes in the mouthpiece of the phone.
"Uh-huh. I'm sorry we didn't make it this year. We really wanted to." I lowered my head and voice a little. "I miss you. And Grandad."
"We miss you somethin' fierce too, pun'kin."
"Pum-p-kin," Maggie would have corrected. I liked it better Grandma's way.
"Tell her she should hitch a ride if Maggie won't bring her," Grandad Wilbur hollered in the background.
"I will do no such thing!" Grandma Corrie Jo scolded, her accent thickening as she half shouted and nearly broke my eardrum. "Don't you dare listen to that man," she said to me. "He's crazier'n a bedbug. Young ladies have no business hitchhikin'. Fine way to end up dead in a ditch. When I was your age I knew a girl - Vanessa Maines. We called her Nessie May; and, Lord, she was a pretty thing. All those springy yellow curls... Well, one afternoon Nessie May up and decides to thumb a ride into town to get herself a soda pop. Few days later Forrest Sutton went down fishin' in the river and found a cluster of them beautiful ringlets all scattered in the grass. Poor Mrs. Maines never saw her child again. Never was right after that."
I heard Grandad Wilbur roar with laughter, and I pressed my lips together to trap my own giggles. Grandma Corrie Jo always knew of someone that something tragic had happened to, especially naughty children who let their curiosity get the better of them. I used to scoot in beside her in the big easy chair at her house, wedging myself securely between her hip and the armrest, my head propped against her talcum-powdered, dish soap-scented arm, and beg to hear every gruesome detail of what sorts of things befell bad girls and boys that did not obey their parents. I had a morbid fascination, she'd say. Then a story would follow containing some moral at the end as a warning of what could happen to children with morbid fascinations. My favorites were the misbehaving kids who died a gory death, the grief-stricken parents left behind to wonder where they had gone wrong.
Afterwards I'd lie awake on the squeaky stiff mattress in Grandma's spare bedroom and imagine I was one of those kids. I'd be the girl that took the forbidden shortcut through the woods and got chopped all to pieces by a raving lunatic, or went skinny-dipping with a boy only to drown in the powerful undertow I'd swam too close to. I usually nodded off right before the axe split my skull, before my hands gave a few last thrashes as I inhaled green slimy stuff and river sludge into my searing lungs. I never got to finish my fantasies so I could find out how Maggie reacted to the news of my demise. Did she throw herself on top my coffin, wailing like a banshee, same as the mother in one of Grandma's juicier parables did at the funeral for a daughter that had been kidnapped, "ruined", and suffocated with a garbage bag by a drifter she was warned to avoid? Did my classmates get a day out of school to attend my burial? Did they brag later on because they had known the dead girl? Would me dying soften everybody's hearts and maybe fix my family? I never did make it that far, even in my dreams.
"Don't worry, Grandma." I noticed Maggie's color drain when I said it. She paced nervously. "I'm smarter than Nessie May. I only hitchhike when I'm armed."
"Shame on you." Corrie Jo chuckled. "You and Wilbur are two peas in a pod. Person tries to talk serious and y'all crack jokes. Wouldn't be near as funny if you had known Nessie May."
"No, I reckon not."
"Oh, dear God," Maggie groaned, her eyes pointed heavenward like she was pleading for a lightning rod to tear through the ceiling and strike her dead. She loathed hearing Grandma's expressions come out of my mouth. Hillbilly talk, Mom called it. But more than once I'd caught her using the same "awful slang" she ragged on Aunt Shelia for not banishing from her vocabulary. What was there to be ashamed of? Shelia wanted to know. My pretty aunt was just as outspoken and fiery tempered as her little sister, and she never tolerated Maggie's critiquing of their mother. In fact, most of their arguments were about Grandma. Maggie firmly believed Shelia was Corrie Jo's favorite daughter, and I didn't doubt it. Shelia had become Grandma's talisman, her gypsy, dubbed so because she had a blanket of silky tar-black hair and eyes the shade of midnight, unlike anyone else in our family. "An ol' gypsy woman conjured that girl up with shadows, black onyx and raven feathers," Grandma claimed. "Sent her to bewitch us all."
"Maggie," she'd add, "is the only one immune to the spell."
It was true. Even with Aunt Shelia cloaked in a mysterious darkness, my mother had turned into the black sheep of the family. It hadn't always been that way, Shelia told me. Maggie used to get along with everyone, used to have them all wrapped around her pinkie finger. No one would have dreamed she was sick. She'd been the most popular girl in school, a cheerleader with pom-poms and everything. In other words, the antithesis of me. Once in a while I couldn't help but marvel at what God must have been thinking when he pieced together my family like one great big demented jigsaw puzzle.
Grandma Corrie Jo and I chatted a few minutes more, killing time till there was nothing else to do but yield the conversation to Maggie and hope for the best.
"Well, dear heart..." Hem, haw. The phone itself seemed to be holding its breath with us. I heard just about every noise there was to hear between Grandma's house and mine. Somewhere close by, Grandad cleared his throat as if he were speeding things along. Grandma took the hint. "Is she there?"
My grandmother held strong opinions about ladies that used coarse language. She wouldn't even say "ass" when it referred to the animal. For every filthy curse word, there was a far less profane version that could substitute it, she insisted. Darn, not damn. Shoot, not shit. Have relations, not sex. The "she" replacing my mother's name sounded an awful lot like Grandma's Christianized swearing. Hell, I didn't blame her. The taste of "Maggie" was often harsh and bittersweet in my mouth, too.
"Yeah..." I watched Maggie fidget as I glanced her way. She smoothed her hair, fiddled with her birthstone ring, jiggled her legs like she had to pee. I decided nervousness was a good sign. If she were still nursing a grudge towards Corrie Jo because of their most recent apocalyptic battle, I never would have gotten past my overly courteous greeting. "She's here. Hold on." I unwound the spirally phone cord from my arm and waved the receiver at Maggie, but she backed away like I'd offered her a jar full of spiders.
"Who is it?" she blurted unconvincingly. She knew.
"It's your mother," I said, enjoying the feel of that on my tongue. It was nice to know Maggie had been my age once, that she'd had parents to answer to. She didn't have so much over on me. I jabbed the phone at her again, taunting just the tiniest bit. "You have to talk to her. It's Christmas." I spoke softly, my hand cupped around the mouthpiece, soundproofing it.
Hesitant, Maggie reached for the phone and nearly dropped it before she got it to her ear. We stared at each other with such intensity I thought we might start communicating telepathically. Be good, I beseeched her. Don't screw this up.
If she got the message, there was no reply.
Her voice didn't match her expression when she turned away from me and said, "Mama! What a surprise!"
Chapter 14
BELLS WILL BE RINGING
*
Watching Eric being rolled away in his wheelchair was a hard thing to do. He kept leaning over as far as he could, stretching his neck out to see around Bridget, who steered while Jimmy walked mechanically alongside them with Eric's crutches in one hand, suitcase in the other. I expected Maggie to cry, but she didn't. I thought my heart might stop beating, but it didn't. I hoped Eric might change his mind right at the last second, right as he was being wheeled out of view, and demand that Bridget turn in the opposite direction. We would have a movie-perfect ending - the family reunited on Christmas day. Maybe Jimmy would even feel differently about us. I sugarcoated the truth with a bunch more sappy wishes, none of which materialized, and forgot to wave goodbye as my brother took a final look back.
Maggie had stuck to her word. There was no arguing. No big scene. She was civil to my father, he had pretended to be glad to see her. Everyone seemed to be in a daze, caught in the middle of an alien experience where we were all together and nobody cursed or cried or acted smug because one of "the kids" liked them better. Even Bridget must have sensed it. She'd snuck a few encouraging winks and grins at me but remained strangely quiet as my parents conversed in stiff uneasy tones. I wanted to shake her and tell her to laugh or jabber on about some nutty thing she had done to pass the time in boringsville Ohio.
"Why aren't you coming, Abby?" Eric had asked repeatedly, holding onto the sleeve of my sweater and keeping his voice low so the adults wouldn't hear. When I'd brushed his hand away to keep him from exposing the pink streaks that decorated my arm, he looked like he didn't recognize me anymore.
Why aren't you staying? was the only reply I could think of, but I'd just bunched my shoulders up in a half-hearted shrug instead. He's little, he doesn't understand, I told myself, the same reasoning I'd offered to our mother earlier that day.
Maggie's arm curved around my back, her fingers holding onto the scruff of my neck the way a person does when they pick up a cat. She probably could have lifted me right off the ground with that iron grip. It was reassuring to feel the strength there in her hand, even though I knew what it could be used for. She reminded me of a loaded gun that injured and protected, depending on where it was pointed. I huddled against her and slipped my arm around her trim waist, getting closer to her rigid body that told of something dangerous and steely layered beneath all that creamy, baby-smooth skin. I tried to harden myself up inside too.
"Let's go home."
There was a lengthy pause before Maggie responded. I peered up into her face anxiously. It was empty until she caught me looking and flashed a smile, showing too many teeth. She wasn't really that happy. "Don't frown so." She put a fingertip to her cheek and twisted her wrist from side to side like she was a dimpled Shirley Temple, using charm to get a laugh. "Didn't your mother ever tell you your face could stick that way?"
I managed an artificial grin of my own to please her, but I wasn't ready to act silly. I might not be for a long, long time. Being silly wouldn't feel the same if Eric wasn't around to join in. "Let's go," I requested again, getting antsier the longer we stood in the hospital corridor, passed by doctors and nurses who paid no more heed to us than if we were a couple of saintly statues that had graced the hall for years. It didn't feel like a safe environment anymore. Maybe I expected Dr. Blake or Maxine to pop up suddenly and steal me from Maggie's grasp. Maybe I was afraid to be there when Bridget returned without my brother. For a moment, unreasonable as it was, I hated her for helping to take him away, hated Scott for urging me to telephone Jimmy. And most of all, I hated myself for going along with it. I never did anything right. Ever. Behind Maggie's back I made a fist and sunk my fingernails deep into my palm, smile still fixed neatly in place. Oh yes, I could wear masks with the best of them.
*
The phone was ringing off the hook when we got home. Maggie fooled around with the keys, making a racket as she tried to wrestle them out of the lock. "Slow down, girl," she called as I pushed past, nearly knocking her over, and banged my knee against the table in a mad dash to intercept the call before the other person on the line gave up.
"Hello?" I held my knee, panting a little. My mother just shook her head and unbuttoned her coat, flapping each arm until the sleeves slid off.
"I doubt it's Ed McMahon," she said.
I shushed her with a dismissive wave of my hand.
"Hello. Is this Abby?"
Immediately I recognized the feminine voice with it's faint but unmistakable southern drawl that lingered despite decades of separation from a girlhood home deep in the heart of Georgia. It was a unique sound that stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise "nothin' but Yankee" family. Eric and I would giggle and try to imitate certain words - "hanker" and "reckon" - in that same dancing tone that rose and fell as lightly as a feather on the wind, until Grandma Corrie Jo laughed at what atrocious accents her Yankee grandchildren had and told us to stop making fun of hers. But I never considered it making fun. I loved the way she said everything, pretty as music.
"Yes, ma'am."
Maggie froze in the middle of hanging her coat in the closet; her head shot up so quickly it caused her hair to fan about her shoulders. She watched me suspiciously, pointed and mouthed, "Ma'am?"
"So polite! Now I know I'm speaking with my favorite grandchild."
Gran-chy-ld. I grinned into the phone, ignoring Maggie's frantic hand charades. "Yes, ma'am. How are you?" I dodged my mother when she tried to get her ear in to listen.
"Oh, fair ta middlin'. I'd be even better if my daughter and grandbabies were here to celebrate Christmas with me." Grandma's whispery sigh wasn't accusing, but I knew she meant what she said. Every year she invited us to spend the holidays in the cozy two-bedroom house she had lived in for about as long as I could remember. Maggie only accepted a handful of times, claiming it was too far of a drive. What she really wanted was an excuse not to see her stepfather, the man Corrie Jo had married before I was even born and only a short while after her first husband, Maggie's real dad, had died from a heart attack. Maggie grew up a daddy's girl and resented what she viewed as the disloyalty her mother showed by remarrying so quickly. I loved Grandad Wilbur though. He liked to sneak me and Eric candy when Maggie wasn't looking, sometimes literally spoiling our supper. He was a prankster too, constantly keeping you on your toes when you were around him, and his favorite target was Grandma Corrie Jo because she had a high- pitched scream that could "peel paint off the walls" and startled everyone else as well. Between Grandad's mischief, Grandma's sweetness, and the huge gourmet meals they both loved to prepare, it was always a pleasant visit at their house. Almost.
Then there were the times Maggie would get in a mood to argue and dredge up childhood memories that seemed to me nothing more than mixed-up fairy tales that put Grandma in the role of the evil witch. Maggie was the enslaved, unloved princess who finally escaped only to be trapped again when her knight in shining armor knocked her up. Grandpa Newman - now a ghost existing in faded pictures and an unknown haunted corner of Grandma's eyes - couldn't accept that his baby girl was pregnant out of wedlock. Maggie swore it was Corrie Jo's old school beliefs that poisoned the man against her, brought on the fight that estranged them and killed Grandpa Newman before he learned his granddaughter wouldn't be born a bastard, but I knew differently. When the storm had passed, or at least after Maggie was out of the room, Grandma Corrie Jo would pull me aside and tell me it had never mattered to her whether I came into this world a Wyczenski or a Newman, she would have loved me just the same. Still, I was full of questions. What would have happened if my parents hadn't married before my birth? Did Maggie place part of the blame for Grandpa Newman's death on me? Would he be alive now if I hadn't stirred up trouble? Had I killed him? I wondered.
I wanted to ask, but the hurt that mapped its way along the tiny crow's- feet etched on Grandma Corrie Jo's face silenced me. She was young for a grandmother; nary a gray strand sabotaging her naturally red hair and still in possession of all her own teeth, she would brag while skipping or doing some other girlish thing that made me wish I had known her when she was even more youthful and wild, rollicking around the neighborhood with an army of cousins, her copper colored penny loafers and white knee socks stained rusty-red by those Georgia clay back roads. But a row with Maggie could wear even the most spirited down, and Corrie Jo was no exception. "Just like my mama," she would sigh when Maggie disrupted family gatherings to bicker with Aunt Shelia or tell me and Eric to get our asses in the car because we were leaving. I pitied my grandma then. "Just like my mama."
"Is everything all right, darlin'?" Grandma Corrie Jo sounded concerned. I nodded, as if she could see me through the holes in the mouthpiece of the phone.
"Uh-huh. I'm sorry we didn't make it this year. We really wanted to." I lowered my head and voice a little. "I miss you. And Grandad."
"We miss you somethin' fierce too, pun'kin."
"Pum-p-kin," Maggie would have corrected. I liked it better Grandma's way.
"Tell her she should hitch a ride if Maggie won't bring her," Grandad Wilbur hollered in the background.
"I will do no such thing!" Grandma Corrie Jo scolded, her accent thickening as she half shouted and nearly broke my eardrum. "Don't you dare listen to that man," she said to me. "He's crazier'n a bedbug. Young ladies have no business hitchhikin'. Fine way to end up dead in a ditch. When I was your age I knew a girl - Vanessa Maines. We called her Nessie May; and, Lord, she was a pretty thing. All those springy yellow curls... Well, one afternoon Nessie May up and decides to thumb a ride into town to get herself a soda pop. Few days later Forrest Sutton went down fishin' in the river and found a cluster of them beautiful ringlets all scattered in the grass. Poor Mrs. Maines never saw her child again. Never was right after that."
I heard Grandad Wilbur roar with laughter, and I pressed my lips together to trap my own giggles. Grandma Corrie Jo always knew of someone that something tragic had happened to, especially naughty children who let their curiosity get the better of them. I used to scoot in beside her in the big easy chair at her house, wedging myself securely between her hip and the armrest, my head propped against her talcum-powdered, dish soap-scented arm, and beg to hear every gruesome detail of what sorts of things befell bad girls and boys that did not obey their parents. I had a morbid fascination, she'd say. Then a story would follow containing some moral at the end as a warning of what could happen to children with morbid fascinations. My favorites were the misbehaving kids who died a gory death, the grief-stricken parents left behind to wonder where they had gone wrong.
Afterwards I'd lie awake on the squeaky stiff mattress in Grandma's spare bedroom and imagine I was one of those kids. I'd be the girl that took the forbidden shortcut through the woods and got chopped all to pieces by a raving lunatic, or went skinny-dipping with a boy only to drown in the powerful undertow I'd swam too close to. I usually nodded off right before the axe split my skull, before my hands gave a few last thrashes as I inhaled green slimy stuff and river sludge into my searing lungs. I never got to finish my fantasies so I could find out how Maggie reacted to the news of my demise. Did she throw herself on top my coffin, wailing like a banshee, same as the mother in one of Grandma's juicier parables did at the funeral for a daughter that had been kidnapped, "ruined", and suffocated with a garbage bag by a drifter she was warned to avoid? Did my classmates get a day out of school to attend my burial? Did they brag later on because they had known the dead girl? Would me dying soften everybody's hearts and maybe fix my family? I never did make it that far, even in my dreams.
"Don't worry, Grandma." I noticed Maggie's color drain when I said it. She paced nervously. "I'm smarter than Nessie May. I only hitchhike when I'm armed."
"Shame on you." Corrie Jo chuckled. "You and Wilbur are two peas in a pod. Person tries to talk serious and y'all crack jokes. Wouldn't be near as funny if you had known Nessie May."
"No, I reckon not."
"Oh, dear God," Maggie groaned, her eyes pointed heavenward like she was pleading for a lightning rod to tear through the ceiling and strike her dead. She loathed hearing Grandma's expressions come out of my mouth. Hillbilly talk, Mom called it. But more than once I'd caught her using the same "awful slang" she ragged on Aunt Shelia for not banishing from her vocabulary. What was there to be ashamed of? Shelia wanted to know. My pretty aunt was just as outspoken and fiery tempered as her little sister, and she never tolerated Maggie's critiquing of their mother. In fact, most of their arguments were about Grandma. Maggie firmly believed Shelia was Corrie Jo's favorite daughter, and I didn't doubt it. Shelia had become Grandma's talisman, her gypsy, dubbed so because she had a blanket of silky tar-black hair and eyes the shade of midnight, unlike anyone else in our family. "An ol' gypsy woman conjured that girl up with shadows, black onyx and raven feathers," Grandma claimed. "Sent her to bewitch us all."
"Maggie," she'd add, "is the only one immune to the spell."
It was true. Even with Aunt Shelia cloaked in a mysterious darkness, my mother had turned into the black sheep of the family. It hadn't always been that way, Shelia told me. Maggie used to get along with everyone, used to have them all wrapped around her pinkie finger. No one would have dreamed she was sick. She'd been the most popular girl in school, a cheerleader with pom-poms and everything. In other words, the antithesis of me. Once in a while I couldn't help but marvel at what God must have been thinking when he pieced together my family like one great big demented jigsaw puzzle.
Grandma Corrie Jo and I chatted a few minutes more, killing time till there was nothing else to do but yield the conversation to Maggie and hope for the best.
"Well, dear heart..." Hem, haw. The phone itself seemed to be holding its breath with us. I heard just about every noise there was to hear between Grandma's house and mine. Somewhere close by, Grandad cleared his throat as if he were speeding things along. Grandma took the hint. "Is she there?"
My grandmother held strong opinions about ladies that used coarse language. She wouldn't even say "ass" when it referred to the animal. For every filthy curse word, there was a far less profane version that could substitute it, she insisted. Darn, not damn. Shoot, not shit. Have relations, not sex. The "she" replacing my mother's name sounded an awful lot like Grandma's Christianized swearing. Hell, I didn't blame her. The taste of "Maggie" was often harsh and bittersweet in my mouth, too.
"Yeah..." I watched Maggie fidget as I glanced her way. She smoothed her hair, fiddled with her birthstone ring, jiggled her legs like she had to pee. I decided nervousness was a good sign. If she were still nursing a grudge towards Corrie Jo because of their most recent apocalyptic battle, I never would have gotten past my overly courteous greeting. "She's here. Hold on." I unwound the spirally phone cord from my arm and waved the receiver at Maggie, but she backed away like I'd offered her a jar full of spiders.
"Who is it?" she blurted unconvincingly. She knew.
"It's your mother," I said, enjoying the feel of that on my tongue. It was nice to know Maggie had been my age once, that she'd had parents to answer to. She didn't have so much over on me. I jabbed the phone at her again, taunting just the tiniest bit. "You have to talk to her. It's Christmas." I spoke softly, my hand cupped around the mouthpiece, soundproofing it.
Hesitant, Maggie reached for the phone and nearly dropped it before she got it to her ear. We stared at each other with such intensity I thought we might start communicating telepathically. Be good, I beseeched her. Don't screw this up.
If she got the message, there was no reply.
Her voice didn't match her expression when she turned away from me and said, "Mama! What a surprise!"
