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 i
t 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 Fr
ieda 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.