“Fuck, why didn’t you tell me?”
“At first, ’cause I was ashamed,” he said, “but then I didn’t want to worry you. You seemed pretty ... uh ... uh—”
“Spit it out.”
“Wound up. So I decided I wouldn’t tell you till you got home. That’s why I brought the Betsy Rosses in the car to the airport—visual aid, you know?—but you didn’t seem to take too well to seeing them. So I just started wearing the gymsuit to the plant everyday, then changing in my car. I was gonna tell you eventually.
“And it’s different there, Patsy, I swear! The Betsy Ross factory isn’t the diabolical place we once believed it to be,” he insisted.
She looked down at her husband. She was still straddled across his green and gold gymsuit-clad stomach. He had red finger prints on his neck from where she’d been grabbing him. He was looking up at her with something like hope.
She sighed. She could tell he felt bad about what he had done. She could also tell that he needed her to act like this was OK. And it wasn’t like she wasn’t a glass-house dweller herself. “So the old girl’s changed?” she asked. “Tell me about it.”
He smiled at her, and in that smile she could see what he must have looked like as a toothless little baby and what he would look like as a senile old man. “When I started there, Patsy, I had my doubts, too. But, I tell you, the company’s changing for the better. Business hadn’t been so good there for a while. What with people becoming more health conscious and stuff. That means there’re advancement opportunities for people with good ideas. People like myself. My minor in college was in marketing, Patsy. Remember?”
She did.
“So there’s this employee suggestion box, right? And they wanted people to submit ideas for promoting and extending the Betsy Ross brand. You know me, Patsy. I’m always coming up with ideas. I put, like, six things in the box and just about two months ago, they called me into the main office. And you’ll never guess what they said?”
She could.
“They picked one of mine!”
It wouldn’t have been much of a yarn if they hadn’t.
Magnum’s winning idea had been that Betsy Ross should try to get itself in the Guinness Book of World Records by creating the world’s largest cupcake. Magnum had been named the head of the cupcake-building exploration and implementation committee.
“You know what that means, Patsy? It means more money! Eventually. They’re hoping to do it before Christmas, and if it goes well, they might make me assistant director of marketing for all of Betsy Ross, Tennessee!” Magnum sat up, and she slid into his lap. He hugged her tightly, squishing her swollen breasts. “I’m sorry it had to come out this way, but I’m glad it come out, you know?
“And Patsy, I know I had to dip into our funds a little, but I swear to God, I’m gonna get you a new car, a better car, and replace all your money ASAP. I didn’t want to tell you ’cause I just wanted to fix everything without you knowing. Probably kind of naive on my part, but I didn’t want you to have to worry, babe. I know you got troubles of your own. Things you don’t even tell me about.”
She unstraddled her husband and sat back down on the couch. She felt heavy, and it wasn’t just the unborn inside of her. It was the kind of heaviness that comes from knowing all your hopes are pinned on a cupcake contest, the kind of heaviness that comes from suspecting your husband is hanging on by a strand of spider web. If hope was the thing with feathers, she reckoned despair was the thing in armor.
She figured she was still owed a couple more beer vouchers from Uncle Sam, maybe totaling around $4500—the last bit of her tour extension bonus and regular salary. If she was really careful, she could use that (plus the meager GI bill money) to pay for her first semester back at Chattanooga, but it wouldn’t cover anything else. She’d been planning to use all her savings to pay for college so she wouldn’t have to take some shit job while she was off bettering herself. She kept turning the math over in her head, but no matter what she did, the numbers would not resolve themselves to her satisfaction.
And, that wasn’t even factoring the baby-or-abortion she was lugging around.
“Patsy? You been quiet a real long time.”
“I’m just thinking ... I got to call the VA office tomorrow,” she said. “I’m still owed some money.”
“Doubt anyone will be there,” he said. “Tomorrow’s Turkey Day. Besides, I don’t want you to have to worry, hon.”
“I’m not worrying. I’m just ...” She decided to change the subject. “So, the Pharm don’t have a girlfriend who works at Betsy Ross? Other than you, I reckon.”
Magnum laughed and then he put his arm around her. She let it stay there, though it was damp and heavy on her shoulder. She was already so heavy, it really didn’t add much additional burden.
To keep from thinking too much, she chattered about nothing and, in so doing, mentioned that she had missed the end of Maury.
Magnum exclaimed, “The eleven AM Maury rebroadcasts at two AM!” He had gotten familiar with the Maury schedule during his own time of troubles.
They stayed up until three watching Maury.
Anfernee was.
Not.
The father.
Patsy Attends Church
MAGNUM DIDN’T COME with her to see Minnie’s Christmas play. Although he had once been a faithful enough churchgoer, he felt unwelcome since getting fired from the Academy and volunteered to spend the morning grocery shopping instead. Patsy had little interest in forcing her husband (or anyone else) to worship against his will, so she hitched a ride with the Pharm. Before they had even pulled out of the driveway, she informed him that she would be staying in the car for all parts of the service except Minnie’s sketch.
They arrived early, which allowed ample time for watching the procession of God-fearers into the church: all the floral prints and white patent leather shoes and poly-blend light gray suits and baby girls dressed up like Shirley Temple and JonBenét and short-sleeved sky blue dress shirts with hopeless pasty arms sticking out and the strong gasoline scent of Brut and Old Spice and other colognes you could buy at the drugstore and old, fat women with swollen ankles and haircuts that looked like bad wigs.
She saw her mother, who had become one of those old, fat women, and Minnie a bit after that. Her father must have gotten there earlier, because she never saw him enter.
She could hear the service begin and the scuff of chairs as the parishioners rose. The Pharm thought the skit would happen approximately thirty-five to forty minutes in, so she closed her eyes and tried to take a nap.
Not long after joining the reserves, she had been excommunicated. The Sabbath Dayers believed in conscientious objection, though they still voted pro-life candidates as a matter of course.
Roger had said he was sorry, but that he had to do it to set an example for the flock. She was his daughter, and it was his church, and he’d only just become the pastor there. Of course, they would take her back if she gave a testimonial before the congregation, admitting that she had been wrong to join the military and reaffirming her belief in Jesus Christ and the Sabbath Day Adventists.
She sometimes found it hard to remember how it was that she had come to join the reserves in the first place. Not wanting to go to a Sabbath Day college—that had certainly been part of it. Pissing off her father had probably been an even more compelling reason.
The Pharm slipped out the front door and gave the agreed-upon hand gesture that meant it was time for the prodigal daughter to make her return.
She and Pharm snuck into the back pew. If her father saw them, he didn’t acknowledge it. He just continued on with the introduction of a skit he called “a little something to remind us all about the true meaning of Christmas.”
When the cast came out, Patsy had to stop herself from laughing. Someone had bought their costumes from the Slickmart, and it was clearly overstock from the Halloween just past. Minnie’s Mary costume was Princess Leia’s long white dress recreated i
n white polyester. Joseph, she was reasonably sure, was wearing Frodo Baggins’s cloak. The three wisemen had on matching striped wool ponchos that made them look like a mariachi band that had lost their instruments. Every one of them was perspiring. It was one of those eighty-degrees-in-November Southern days. The AC in church was reserved for special occasions, and a Christmas skit was not considered one of them.
She knew that the actors were not necessarily aware of the costumes’ derivations. Their religion frowned upon them seeing movies or watching television. The only people getting the joke were “bad” Adventists like Patsy and the Pharm.
She whispered to the Pharm, “When you think Yoda’s gonna show up?”
He ignored her. The Pharm was very serious about his church attendance.
She had seen the play before and knew exactly how it would end. This gave her time to focus on Minnie.
She was a good actress, Patsy decided. Even in the stupid Princess Leia getup, Patsy found herself thinking that the girl really was Mary somehow. Every time Minnie spoke, the whole place hushed up. Even when Jesus was born and they brought out a genuine live baby, no one paid any attention to Jesus. And eventually God came out, too. (His costume was from The Lord of the Rings: Gandalf.) God was the worst actor ever—Patsy thought he might have been her old supervisor from Betsy Ross, but she couldn’t tell under his fake Middle-earthling beard. No one was paying attention to God anyhow. They were all just looking at Minnie.
Patsy wondered what would have happened if they had all lived somewhere else and been other kinds of folk. Maybe Minnie would have been the lead in all the school plays, and maybe someone would have seen her in those plays and told her she was special. And she would have gone to drama school in New York or London or somewhere. And Patsy would have traveled to see all her plays. And maybe someday Minnie’d be a great actress—not some whore from the movies, either (Patsy’s fantasy was specific on this point), but, like, a great stage actress. Patsy saw what the girl’s whole life might have been, if she’d only been born to different folks.
The Pharm nudged her. “Patsy, show’s over. If you want to slip out without seeing your parents, we best be on our way.”
She was about to agree with him when she had another bout of morning sickness. She ran out the back to the church bathrooms, which were still empty as the service wasn’t quite over.
On her way out of the bathroom, she encountered Mrs. Treadwell, who had once been a friend of her mother’s. Mrs. Treadwell was a big lady with upper arms like fishing nets. She was hard to sneak past.
“As I live and breathe,” Mrs. Treadwell said, “is that who I think it is?”
“That depends,” Patsy replied.
“Well, you’ve not changed a bit, Patsy. Your mama didn’t mention you were back from your travels.”
“I wasn’t traveling, Mrs. Treadwell. I was fighting in a war.”
“Oh, well, of course you were. A million apologies if I said it wrong. You children these days—all of you like to go so far from home. Well, here comes your daddy right now. Oh, Pastor Roger... What a wonderful sermon!”
Patsy could see Roger leaving the sanctuary. He was doing his rock-star-after-the-service strut—he even had a white terry cloth towel draped over his neck like Elvis Presley. Patsy wasn’t ready to talk to him, so she tried to hurry Mrs. Treadwell along. “It was nice seeing you. I should really be on my way.”
But it was too late. She had already been spotted. “Patricia,” he said.
“Pastor Dad.”
Her father paused to nod in her direction, then kept on walking. He didn’t ask her how she was doing. He didn’t say he was glad she’d made it back in one piece. Aside from her name, he said nothing.
George came out of the sanctuary next. Up close, her mother seemed even fatter than she had when viewed from the car. Patsy suspected the woman must have been nearing 250 pounds.
Her mother came up to her with fat tears in her fat blue eyes. She put her arms around her, then whispered in her ear, “I’m glad to see you, but you know you’re not welcome here unless...”
“I know,” said Patsy. “I came to see the show.”
Like her father, her mother nodded and said nothing. Typical response, Patsy thought. The party line.
Minnie wedged herself between Patsy and George. The girl took Patsy by the hand and led her out to the parking lot. “Was I awesome?” she asked.
“I think you could be a real professional actress, if you wanted,” Patsy said.
Minnie laughed and Patsy tried not to kill her.
“I’m serious,” Patsy said.
“Yeah, I always been such a ham.”
“I’m eff’n serious. You should go to school.”
“All right, Patsy, whatever.” Minnie smiled something wicked and asked, “What’d you think of Joseph?”
“Joseph?”
“The boy playing Joseph...”
“I hadn’t rightly noticed anyone but you.”
“Aw, you’re sweet.” Minnie lowered her voice. “Joseph’s my boyfriend. His real name’s Joseph, too, isn’t that funny?”
The Pharm pulled his truck up next to where Patsy and Minnie were standing.
“Are you coming home with us?” Patsy asked.
Minnie shook her head. She had plans with Joseph-called-Joseph.
Patsy hugged Minnie and got into the passenger seat of the Pharm’s car.
“You feeling better?” he asked.
“Just the flu, I think.”
The Pharm nodded. “Maybe you ought to have that looked into.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“My stomach...”
“Yeah, but it’s not that kind of quiet.”
She told him that she wanted his sister to go to London to become a great actress.
The Pharm nodded. “Well, she’s still young, Patsy. If she wanted to do something like that, she could.”
“She’s eighteen. By the time I was eighteen, my obituary was writ, you know?”
The Pharm didn’t say anything.
“By the time you’re born, your whole life’s decided already.” She paused. “There’s no escaping the circumstances of your birth.”
“That’s not true.”
“If she was gonna make a move, she’d have to do it now. You’d have to make her do it now.” Then Patsy laughed because she didn’t wish to discuss it anymore. It occurred to her that this might be the reason Minnie was always laughing. “Man, did you see those costumes?”
“I know. Seriously, Magnum should have come. I wished to God I was still smoking me a little Saturday weed.”
“You’re a drug dealer, Pharm. If God don’t care about that, he’s not gonna care about you doing pot on the Sabbath.”
The Pharm shrugged. “I do what I can live with.”
“You know what always kills me about the Nativity story? Like, Mary just tells Joseph she’s a virgin, and he totally believes her. Immaculate conception, my ass. The world’s first cuckold, more like.”
“Well, Patsy. I reckon belief is one of the points of the story.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“You know what always kills me about it?” Pharm asked. “How every inn is booked. Was there some kind of convention going on in Bethlehem or something?”
“I think it was ’cause they were penniless or whatever,” she said.
“Well, not all of the accounts are clear on that point. I prefer to imagine a huge conference of real-estate agents or Trekkies or something,” he said.
“Maybe it’s ’cause it was Christmas Eve?”
The Pharm nodded. “Hotels do book up around then. This is quite true, Patsy my dear. But come on, don’t you prefer my conference theory? The Bethlehem Marriott welcomes the Trekkies. No vacancy. And if they were penniless, why in the world were they going to all these hotels anyway? How about like the Greater Bethlehem Medical Center? Stupid Christians, right? Your mama’s taking antidepressants, b
y the way,” Pharm said. “She don’t want your daddy to know, so she gets them from me.”
She asked him why he was telling her this. Pharm shrugged. “Dunno, Patsy. Thought it might cheer you up.”
Patsy Calls on Her Father and a Sick Friend
HER TELEVISION HABIT cured by the knowledge of her abject poverty, Patsy called the VA office bright and early the Monday after Thanksgiving. Neither the final installment of her additional tour bonus nor her last two paychecks (about $4,500 in total) had been direct-deposited as scheduled. She also needed to determine how the GI bill worked so she could get herself back on the road to Betterment and Personal Growth.
The VA hotline featured an intricate phone tree, and since her questions overlapped multiple categories, she really wasn’t sure if she was pressing the right buttons or not. When she finally came to the end of the line, she was put on hold.
A half hour later, a human. “There’s a problem,” he said.
Alpha. Bravo.
It had to do with her discharge. Her departure from the army had been somewhat abrupt, and there hadn’t been time for her to do everything properly. She thought she had managed things fairly well, but what she had ended up with was a general discharge as opposed to an honorable discharge. A general discharge wasn’t as bad as, say, a dishonorable discharge, but it wasn’t good either. And apparently, or so the man on the phone would have her believe, it was enough to screw her bonus and disqualify her from using the GI bill. The news about the bonus she had anticipated—she had left a week shy of completing her tour and had suspected this could complicate matters—but it was the first she had ever heard about not being able to take advantage of the GI bill.
Charlie. Disco. Echo.
So, this was the situation she found herself in.
Foxtrot.
The man on the line informed her that there would be an investigation into the circumstances of her discharge before the rest of the bonus was paid out and also before they decided if she could take advantage of the free college money that had, of course, been her whole reason for enlisting.