Some Wildflower In My Heart (40 page)

“This is Margaret speaking,” I said. I heard Thomas step out the back door to the washing machine, which had just begun to thump clamorously—its signal that the weight of the clothes was unevenly distributed or “out of whack,” as Thomas called it.

And then instead of Norman Lang's voice, I heard Birdie's. “That husband of yours is the biggest tease,” she said. “I couldn't stop laughing!” To illustrate her point, she broke off to laugh breathlessly, apparently remembering something foolish he had said. I did not reply, and she soon stopped laughing and stated her business. “I was just thinking,” she said. “Why don't you and Thomas come over around five o'clock this afternoon? You can have your piano lesson then, and after that you and Thomas could stay and eat supper with us.”

I objected to the thought of our husbands' presence at my piano lesson, and I said so.

“Oh no, they wouldn't be up here with us,” Birdie said. “Mickey's going to take Thomas downstairs to the basement and show him his workshop and all his little trinkets and things. They won't bother us one bit. The fact is, they won't even be able to hear us down there.” Thomas returned to the kitchen, and I heard a brief gush of water from the sink faucet.

I paused. Birdie's plan did not suit me, yet I did not care to voice my protest within Thomas's earshot.

“I'm not going to go to a lot of trouble for supper,” Birdie added, as if this additional information might win me over.

“I have just made a gelatin salad for our supper tonight,” I said. I meant this as an introduction for the declining of her invitation.

As in past instances, however, she misunderstood my meaning. “Oh, that'll be fine!” she said brightly. “Bring it along! I was going to have ham and macaroni and cheese. A Jell-O salad will be just the thing!”

I wondered in the brief moment that followed whether she had intentionally turned my words, whether she did so regularly, reading their true meaning but quickly manipulating them to her purpose. Was Birdie Freeman capable, I wondered, of manipulation? Or was she so guileless that she attributed to the speech of others her own innocent motives? Was her blindness due to deficiency or design? Could it be that she
chose
to think only the best of others, or was it an unconscious act?

Even as I pondered these questions, I heard myself say, though somewhat flatly, in a tone of resignation, “I will bring corn bread also.”

Like our dinner at the Field Pea, the evening at Birdie and Mickey's home does not remain in my memory as a neatly sequenced occasion. I cannot understand why this is so, for it seems that such out-of-the-ordinary experiences should be recalled with great clarity of detail, in thorough and well-ordered outline form, rather than as a vast honeycomb of disparate images. For aside from the occasional one-day family reunions with Thomas's relatives in North Carolina, we had not been invited to someone's home for supper during the entire fifteen years of our marriage. Likewise, we never invited guests to our home.

The evening with Birdie and Mickey consisted of a variety of activities, my piano lesson occurring at the outset, followed at some point by the meal, which we took in the kitchen at a white enamel table such as those associated with Depression-era diners. The chairs, though similar in style, were unmatched. They were all painted glossy black, however.

Birdie was a proficient cook, though her dishes were unpretentious. Besides ham, macaroni and cheese, gelatin salad, and corn bread, our supper also included speckled butter beans, baked squash, iced tea, and a custard pie. Birdie informed us that Mickey had made the piecrust. He had learned the art early in their marriage and by now “could do it blindfolded,” Birdie told us fondly. We did not eat the pie, however, immediately following the meal but rather waited, as Mickey put it, “for the sediment to settle.” Birdie praised my corn bread and gelatin salad, declaring them to be “the finishing touches” to the meal, and at great length she admired the serving dish that held the gelatin.

Before leaving home, I had transferred the salad from its mold into a large round ceramic dish with a lid, which was actually intended as a vegetable casserole, so that it could be easily transported. Though the full effect of the molded design could not be seen, concealed as it was within an enclosed dish, I preferred this arrangement to the prospect of an accident such as the one Francine had reported at work one day several years ago.

En route to her mother's apartment for supper one night, Francine had swerved suddenly to miss an animal—“I
think
it was a dog,” she had said, “but it sure was movin' slow, and Watts and Gala both said it looked to them like a raccoon”—and the cherry Jell-O salad that Champ was holding in his lap had slid right off the plate onto the front seat of the car. “It scooted across the seat like it was
waxed
,” Francine had said, “and it landed right smack up against me.” She had acted out the rest of the story, balancing her bulk upon one of the kitchen stools, her hands clutching an imaginary steering wheel. “When I looked down and saw that big red quivering blob of I-didn't-know-what up aside of me, I
screamed
. It looked like a blood clot! All I heard was Champ yellin', ‘I didn't do it, Mama! I didn't do it!' Anyway, I jerked that steering wheel so hard the other way that we left the road and plowed through a bob-wire fence, then took off across that piece of farmland out there past the Sunny Dale Feed and Seed. By the time it was over, the ones of us that wasn't screaming was crying.” At the telling of it, of course, she was laughing and gasping for air as if floridly maniacal, and she ended the tale with her customary summation: “That was sure something else!”

“What's that pattern called?” Birdie asked now, gesturing toward the serving dish.

“I believe the name printed on the bottom of the dish is Morning Glory,” I said.

“Well, it's just beautiful,” she said, then asked, “Do you have a whole set of dishes like that?”

“No.”

“She oughta,” Thomas said. “I keep tellin' her we need us a new set. Those old white ones we got has missin' pieces and some of 'em's chipped. They—”

“They do not seem to affect your appetite,” I said.

Mickey laughed and pointed a finger at Thomas as if shooting a gun. “She got you!” he cried. To me he said, “I know what you're saying, Margaret. I don't like to spend money on things like that, either. It's the same with our silverware here. See, they don't all quite match, but they're decent and clean—well, at least they
were
.” He held up his knife, which was coated with butter and corn bread crumbs.

Birdie had lifted the gelatin dish above her head and was looking at its underside. “I don't think I've ever seen this pattern in the stores,” she said.

“They probably don't carry it at Wal-Mart, puddin',” Mickey said.

“Oh, stop it,” she said, laughing. “I don't do all my shopping there, and you know it.”

“Oh, that's right, I forgot,” Mickey said. “You go to Big Lots, too.”

“I told you to behave tonight,” she told him. Setting the dish down, she leaned forward and addressed Thomas, tilting her face up at him. “I think it's real sweet of you to want to get Margaret a new set of dishes.” She smiled approvingly.

“I'm kinda afraid to,” Thomas said, winking at me. “She might throw 'em at me, one at a time.” He never would have spoken to me in this manner a month ago, I thought, and I could not recall his ever
winking
at me before.

I recount this portion of our dinner conversation only because it touches upon what happened later, in December, at the metamorphosis of my relationship with Birdie from acquaintance to friendship.

At some point during the evening all four of us descended to the basement. Since my years in Marshland, I have always felt unsettled in basement rooms. I once rented a basement apartment in Vincennes, Indiana, but moved after only three days, forfeiting a month's rent. I have no doubt as to the source of my unease concerning basements. Had Mickey and Birdie Freeman had a darkroom in their basement, I may very well have become physically ill. Birdie and Mickey's basement, however, was full of light and color. It would most likely be possible for the average person to forget that he was in a basement.

Mickey had converted the area into a multipurpose room—a study, a den, a laundry and sewing room, a walk-in pantry, a workshop, and what he called his “recreation corner,” which was merely a card table and Ping-Pong table both pushed against the wall. Though the room was not divided in any way by partitions, the effect was not one of chaos. Everything was in its place. The visual impact, though powerful in its diversity, was what some might call “domestically cheerful.”

In his workshop area Mickey created “little nut people,” as Birdie referred to them, from the shells of pecans, black walnuts, acorns, peanuts, and chestnuts. Eyes, noses, and mouths were painted onto the tiny faces, and hair was simulated with a variety of botanical materials from pine needles to dried grass to strings of pollen, all of which were trimmed, sprayed with preservative, and glued upon the little heads of the nut folk. The bodies were also made of shells; an acorn head, for example, might have a pecan shell for its body. Each finished figure was glued onto a thick strip of bark. Samples of his workmanship were displayed upon a long shelf.

Most recently he had been experimenting with what he called a “career line,” and he pointed to these with particular fondness. “This little guy here's a doctor—see what he's got around his neck?” Around the shell man's neck hung what could have been taken for a wire necklace, some sort of tribal talisman perhaps, but apparently was intended by Mickey to be a stethoscope. The figure wore a tiny white lab coat, which, Birdie interjected, Mickey had made out of some scraps from old pillowcases.

One shell man in a black robe had a beard and wore a mortar board upon his head. He was a professor, Mickey explained. He had also made a figure skater with paper clip skates and a blue velvet costume, this one mounted upon a small hand mirror to signify an ice rink, and a butcher, who wore a white apron smeared with small streaks of blood. Mickey had pricked his own finger to achieve the effect, Birdie told us.

After Mickey showed us his miniature handicrafts, he urged us to sit down on the couch and watch a video of
Funniest Football Fumbles
, which Birdie had bought him for his last birthday. As the video played, he and Thomas held their sides and hooted as if they had lost their senses. Birdie, seated upon the arm of the sofa beside Mickey, joined in also, laughing freely and adding comments such as “Oh, this is one of my favorites coming up!” Above the vivid green of her blouse, her small face glowed. Aside from her white uniforms and the brown dress she had worn the first time I saw her, at Mayfield's funeral, Birdie's closet must have irradiated with the hues of tropical birds. Francine had reported having seen Birdie one weekend at the BP gas station “wearin' a dress the color of a tangerine!”

As I consider the sport of football to be on an even lower plane than that of boxing and of World Federation Wrestling matches between outlandish, moronic men—which Thomas watches from time to time, claiming to find them funnier than
Hee Haw
reruns—I chose instead to look about the basement room, taking in the details of its furnishings. Of special interest to me was a bookcase beside an old oak desk. By squinting I could make out several titles:
Adam Bede, Middlemarch, The Three Musketeers
, and
The Robe
. I could not help wondering if Birdie had read all, or any, of them.

“Did you see that one, Margaret?” Mickey asked, leaning forward and grinning at me from the opposite end of the couch. “Here, let me rewind it. You don't want to miss this one. It's a real doozy, as they say in Madagascar.” He replayed the fumble.

Thomas slapped both knees and laughed as though demented. “Did you see that?” he asked me.

“Yes, I saw it,” I replied. There are rare times when, with only the barest of motivations, I feel myself propelled headlong into a speech. This was one of those times. It was as if I were observing the launching of a rocket, knowing that I possessed no power to recall it. My lips parted, and once begun, the words flowed with a forceful freedom, as if from an arterial wound. “Yes, I saw it. I saw an adult man in a padded suit move backward and sideways down a rain-slicked field, stretch out his arms to catch a slippery ball, seize the ball, and tuck it under his arm. I then saw him reverse the direction in which he was running, plunge mindlessly past seven or eight opposing players—all of whom failed to halt his progress—and raise the ball above his head in an immature taunting fashion as he neared the end line, at which point I saw him, as I could have predicted, lose his balance on the wet ground and flail about in an awkward dance before dropping the ball and collapsing upon one of his own teammates, another man whose IQ most likely does not exceed the speed limit.”

The laughter had died midway through my speech, and no one spoke for a moment when I finished. Then Mickey sat forward farther and said to me seriously, “You talking about the speed limit in town or on the freeway?”

Birdie swatted at his arm and said, “Oh, hush, you silly thing,” and the three of them erupted again into laughter.

“I'll have to say you summed it up pretty well, Margaret,” Mickey said, wiping his eyes. Turning to Thomas, he asked, “Your wife can sure tell it like it is, can't she?” Thomas raised his eyebrows and emitted a low whistle, but said nothing. Perhaps I had embarrassed him by my speech.

“She's a walking dictionary,” Birdie said, shaking her head. “Didn't I tell you she had a way with words, Mickey? Didn't I?”