Authors: John Yount
“Well,” her mother said after a while, “do you need anything, child?”
“No Momma,” Madeline said.
Leslie didn't return Tuesday, but he called, wanting to know if there was anything he could do. She didn't talk to him. She didn't dare. There were things she had to do that had to be done before she lived another day, and certainly before she talked to Leslie.
Telling James she'd asked for a divorce made him turn so pale his lips looked blue. But he didn't say anything, and he didn't cry. He just listened and looked at her with his dark eyes, as though he'd known all along and was just waiting to have it spoken. Somehow telling him was like telling her own heart, as though she hadn't quite known what she was proposing until she heard what she was saying and saw the blood seem to drain out of him, so that his lips and even his fingernails began to look as if they'd been stained with pale blue ink. It was, she felt, the most intimate thing she had ever done and the most horrible. With all her heart she vowed she'd be the best mother she could be in order to make it up to him, even as she knew, absolutely, that she could never make it up. As for him, he looked at her and listened and allowed himself to be held, and then he told her in a small steady voice that he had to change his clothes and do his chores.
When he left the trailer, all that he had not said seemed to grow enormous and very cold and seemed to haunt the caverns of her heart. But she had done it, and in the awful silence that remained, she found she still had some strength. Maybe it was only a thimbleful, and maybe it felt surrounded by shame and fear, but it was there, asking to be spent. She would tell her mother and father, she decided, at once.
If telling James had been as awful and intimate as informing her own heart, telling her mother and father was like notifying God.
“I need to talk to you and Poppa,” she told her mother, who was cutting out biscuits on the counter with movements as precise as a machine.
“Chile, you know Harley don't shut the post office till four o'clock, and I ain't got a minute to spare,” she said, flinging down a handful of flour on the counter, dusting her rolling pin with it, gathering up scraps of biscuit dough, pounding them together, and rolling them out again without even looking at Madeline. She had, after all, seven mouths to feed. Not that it ever soured her temper or bothered her in the least. She had been doing more or less the same thing for as long as Madeline could remember, for longer than she had been alive to remember, Madeline thought with shame.
“Momma,” she said, “I've got to tell you and Poppa something if it kills me.”
“No you don't,” Bertha Marshall said, cutting out biscuits with precise, mechanical twists of her wrist and without even looking up.
“Come with me to the post office. I've got to talk.”
“I don't have a minute to spare,” Bertha Marshall said, but she had stopped working and was leaning forward with both hands braced on the counter.
“Momma, please,” Madeline said.
Without looking at her but with her eyes brimming, her mother walked past her and out the kitchen door as though she were taking the first steps of a long journey. Madeline followed her down the flagstone walk to the little white post office across the dirt driveway. Her mother didn't even acknowledge Ida Triplett, who had just come out of the post office with a package. “Why Bertha?” Ida said with a broad, friendly smile, “how nice to see you.”
Up the wooden steps and through the door Bertha Marshall went, making the little bell atop the door jingle and making Madeline, who followed behind, feel like a small child, scolded in public.
Inside, her mother stopped stock still and fixed her eyes just below the counter at nothing. She looked very strange standing there with smudges of flour to her elbows, her hands not rolled into her apron as usual, but curled into fists held rigidly at her sides. Harley Marshall clearly didn't know what to make of her. He was in his traditional post office uniform: a green plastic eyeshade held on his head by an elastic band and two sleeve garters, which he wore just below his elbows around his forearms. “Why woman?” he said, “what ails ye?”
Bertha said not a word.
He opened his mouth to say something else but closed it again in confusion, his big nose and broad chin coming close to meeting without the intervening superstructure of teeth to hold them apart. Since his wife wasn't talking, he turned to Madeline, who had stopped just inside the threshold with every cell in her body electrified and her mouth dry. “What's this here?” he asked her, his eyes turning hard either to brace himself for bad news or with a ready-made anger to greet it, she couldn't tell which.
“Momma,” she began. “Poppa ⦔ For a second she thought she would surely faint, but that tiny thimbleful of strength insisted, having come thus far, she had to go on no matter the damage it would cause. “I just told James, and I've got to tell you too. Last Sunday ⦔ She tried to find some moisture in her mouth to go on, but there wasn't any, and her tongue seemed to click. “Last Sunday, I told Edward I just couldn't stand our marriage anymore, and I had to have a divorce. He agreed to give me one.”
“Oh can't you try just a little longer, chile?” her mother said, not looking at anyone or anything but staring just the same.
“Momma,” Madeline said, “that's all I've ever done. That's all I've done since we first married.”
“I've never heard of such nonsense!” her father said with deep color rising into his face. “You told your husband you had to have a divorce?”
“Oh, baby, can't you try a little more?” her mother pleaded.
“What crimes did he commit?” her father asked. “What terrible things did he do?”
Somehow she'd thought that was obvious. Always moving from place to place. Living in nasty little trailer parks. Coming home drunk or not coming home at all. And worst of all and behind it all, never, never taking her into consideration. But somehow she could say none of that. It was humiliating. And she knew suddenly that it wouldn't sound right. It wouldn't sound serious enough. Not the way it felt to her. “I'm unhappy,” she whispered at last.
“Horseshit!” her father said. “Who told you life was supposed to be happy? You've forgot your upbringing, young'n. You've forgot the Bible and your vows. âWhat God has joined together let' ⦔
“Hush up,” Bertha Marshall said. “Hush your mouth!”
Bertha seemed to shock not only her husband but herself into silence, and for a long moment no one seemed to breathe. But at last Madeline whispered, “I'm sorry. Momma ⦠Poppa ⦠I'm just so sorry.”
JAMES TALLY
It was just that he felt numb, as though inside his head and inside his heart there were cavernous spaces where his feelings were supposed to be. He searched for acceptable emotions, acceptable thoughts to put in all that emptiness. He decided it wasn't so much his actual father he missed as the idea of having a father. The whole idea of fatherhood. Anyway he hadn't been a good son to the father he'd had. When had he ever even been able to follow his advice? So.
And he'd betrayed, no less, the advice he had given himself. He was, after all, nothing whatever like Osceola. But he was free to invent himself, was he not? Now more than ever. There was no one else around to help him do it.
MADELINE TALLY
Wednesday, feeling fragile but also somehow purified and rare, she went back to work, and Leslie was there on the dot of twelve to take her to lunch, looking as pale and haggard as if he himself had been ill. And fifteen minutes before quitting time, she spotted him from her glassed-in office on the second-floor balcony, wandering around the men's department, fingering shirts and ties he would never think of buying.
That evening he took her to the Gateway Restaurant in Cedar Hill, where she told him how awful it had been to talk to Edward and how awful to tell James and her mother and father, and she nearly talked herself into sadness again. But Leslie's hand kept seeking hers across the table, and his eyes never left her face, and all at once she understood that this sadness belonged to the old life she had given up and must not be carried, like a keepsake, into her new one. It was such a compelling thought that, after a while, she was able to retrieve the frail, purified new person she had been that morning and notice the lovely man doting on her. Slowly she found herself able to give his hand hopeful, answering squeezes and to look into his eyes and be healed by them.
After dinner. After dark. Snug in his car. She allowed him to hold her close and kiss her.
“Maidy,” he said, his voice wonderfully hoarse, “come home with me. Do. Just for a little while.”
She could do that, she realized. This frail new person she was could do as he proposed, and it was easy to look at him as long and fondly as he was looking at her. She gathered herself as close to him as possible and kissed him. But at last she wagged her forehead gently against his cheek and whispered against his flesh, “No, not just yet.”
Perhaps she said it precisely because she might, so easily, have gone, or because he so much wanted her to, or perhaps she said it only because she could. She didn't know exactly, but she knew it gratified the new person she was. And when, at last, she got home, she felt virtuous for wanting to make love to Leslie, for telling Edward she wanted a divorce, for having her talk with James and her parents, for surviving three awful days of illness, and for knowing that she might make love to a man, not her husband, at a time of her own choosing.
James was huddled in a corner of the sofa, reading, when she entered the warm, close trailer.
“Hi babe,” she said, almost cheerfully. “Homework?”
“No,” he said, “it's about Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé Indians.”
“Ahh,” she said, caught a tuft of his unruly hair, and gave it a playful tug. “Time you paid another visit to the barber, young man.” He didn't answer or look up, but he seemed more distant than rude.
After she'd changed into her gown and bathrobe, she got a sudden inspiration and melted butter, cut strips of bread to dip into it, got out cinnamon and brown sugar, and, because she knew he loved them, put a tray of cinnamon sticks in the oven. Once or twice, while she worked, she caught his curious, puzzled eyes on her.
“I only made a dozen, and I've got a terrible craving, so you'd better be quick,” she told him and winked, but he only gave her a little scrap of a smile before he returned his attention to his book. Nevertheless, while the trailer filled with warm, sweet spice, she stole glances at him as he read and thought his expression had grown softer and younger.
When the cinnamon sticks were done, she arranged them on a platter and took them over and plopped down beside him on the couch. “Dig in,” she told him, but when he reached out, she poked him playfully in the ribs, and he jerked his hand back empty.
“Hey!” he said, although something in her face made him giggle.
She glanced at her wristwatch. “You want to turn the radio on?” she said. “It's nearly time for
Boston Blackie.”
So he put his book aside, and they listened to the radio and ate cinnamon sticks, and she felt very snug and sly. She didn't want the cinnamon sticks, but she ate two of them and then waited patiently until he reached for the very last one before she attacked. “So what makes you think you can have the last one?” she cried, tickling him furiously while he struggled to protect his ribs, sputtering, “Stop ⦠I give ⦠Stop ⦠you're crazy ⦠Stop ⦠Stop!” And finally she did stop, but not before they were exhausted and the platter was upside down on the floor. Even then, she snatched up the final cinnamon stick and gobbled half of it, although she didn't want it in the least, and mashed the other half against his lips until he opened his mouth and took it. For minutes, weak and flushed, they laughed at each other and caught their breath until, at last, she pinched his cheek and hugged him and told him good night.
And strangely, the good mood that went to bed with her was even stronger when she rose, and it followed her to work, where, all day, problems seemed to fall neatly into their solutions. Mistakes on receipts and sales slips jumped out at her and identified themselves, and putting the books in order had never been half so easy. For almost the first time in her life, she felt bright and capable. And for the first time in years she felt pretty, so much so that she caught herself nearly gloating when, once or twice during the morning, she spied her image flashing across a fitting mirror.
So she was in a wonderful mood when Leslie called at eleven-thirty to say he couldn't take her to lunch.
“I've got a damned meeting with the county court clerk,” he said miserably.
“That's all right,” she told him.
“I can't get out of it,” he said.
“Don't worry,” she said.
“I'm so sorry, honey,” he said. “I'll try not to ⦔
“Hey,” she said, “we'll have a lovely dinner instead.”
“You're not upset?” he asked her, but before she could answer, he took another tack. “Dammit, I look forward to our lunches!”
She laughed into the mouthpiece. “You're so sweet,” she told him. “I look forward to them too, but you just be here at quitting time, and you won't be in any trouble.”
He laughed then himself, his relief wafting through the phone like the first breath of spring. “I've got to go,” he said. “I'm late already.”
When she put the phone back in its cradle, she found she was happy at the prospect of having lunch with the salesladies, or better yet, by herself. Moments later, filled with wonder, her hand still on the telephone, she realized that no matter how smart and successful Leslie was, no matter how sophisticated and assured, he was also vulnerable. It seemed to her that she'd never really noticed anyone else's vulnerability before, as though her own jeopardy, helplessness, and unhappiness were so great, she'd never had a chance at any other perspective. Still later another thought came to her touched with a delicious sense of guilt: love could make a fool of anyone, not merely her, but Leslie too. It was an alien and wonderful thought, and she savored it for the way it bound her to the rest of humanity and for the way it promised at least as much power as it threatened to take away.