When I asked about her school experience, Meda said, “I think what you said is true. No one was ever nice enough. But I bet they were nicer to you than they were to me.”
“Were they really mean to you?”
“You’ve met my mom and she’s always been that crazy. What do you think? The worst thing is how people say things to you that aren’t very important to them, but that ruin the way you think about the world. It even screws up the nice things people say to you, because you remember the bad things, even while people are saying the good things. So I get dressed up for this date, and you tell me how ‘lovely’ I look, but what I remember is Aunt Bryant telling me I looked like a tramp when I was dressed up for a date. And that was years ago.”
Meda took a deep breath and seemed embarrassed to have said so much on such a personal topic, so I asked her to dance again.
“You do look lovely,” I said while we were dancing. The compliment was inadequate.
“In a trampy kind of way.” She laughed darkly. “My sister does it, too, that poisoning thing. She likes to remind me of how fat I am. Stop. Not fishing for a compliment there. I am a little heavy since I had Annadore. Loren says it to make herself feel better, but when she does it, I don’t think about why she’s saying it. It poisons the way I think about myself. I bet girls like your brother’s fiancée have this about their whole lives. I wonder if the rest of their life is poisoned by the first time they found out they weren’t pretty, even if they find someone who thinks they’re pretty. I mean, your brother must have thought she was pretty.”
“Why do you think your sister does that to you?”
“I don’t blame Loren, because she’s been poisoned, too. Aunt M. had made a dress for me and dressed me all up for this stupid thing. My mom and Aunt Rachel were telling me how beautiful I looked, and Loren—she was only five or six—said, ‘What about me?’ Mom said, ‘Oh, sure, baby, you’re pretty, too.’ But she was just dismissing Loren, and little kids aren’t stupid. Loren knew what she meant. That’s why she hates me.”
It was why I always hesitated to judge my mother. The very idea of her had been poisoned for me.
We didn’t actually manage to have the entire conversation at once, because when we weren’t dancing, a dozen different people stopped at our table, ostensibly to say hello to Meda, but they always expected to be introduced to me. After an hour of that, Meda and I were both ready to go.
As I was driving her home, Meda said, “Can we stop somewhere? I need to get milk.” We stopped at a convenience store on the highway and while we were waiting for the cashier to quit talking to her boyfriend on the phone, a man and a woman came in.
“Hey, Meda. Haven’t seen you in a while,” the man said. The woman with him gave Meda a look of pure hatred.
“Travis. Connie,” Meda said flatly and turned back to the cashier.
“Well, how are you? How have you been?”
“I’m fine.” To the cashier: “Could I pay now?”
Without putting the phone down, the girl rang Meda up.
“Where have you been keeping yourself?” Travis said.
Connie glared at him harder.
Without waiting for a bag, Meda picked up the carton of milk and headed toward the door.
“It was good to see you,” Travis said, mostly to my back by then, as I followed Meda outside.
Only as I pulled up in front of her house did Meda grudgingly say, “I used to date him. Before he got married.”
“Didn’t end well?” I didn’t think I had any ex-girlfriends to whom I wouldn’t have made at least some effort to be polite, but then I’d never had a girlfriend with whom I had anything I would describe as chemistry, which Meda and Travis had.
“He wouldn’t even help me get money for an abortion, and now he acts like Annadore doesn’t exist.” Meda didn’t say anything else, and I tried to fill in the blanks for the two dozen other questions I wanted to ask.
The Whole Stupid Story (Condensed)
Meda
I didn’t want to have tell him the whole stupid story about me and Travis, so when Bernie looked at me like he was waiting for me to explain, I said, “His family didn’t like me and that goes a long way toward screwing up a relationship. His mother hated me.” I didn’t mention what a jerk Travis had been and how he’d broken up with me, it seemed like a hundred times, and come crawling back.
“My mother hasn’t ever been interested in whom I was dating,” Bernie said. Whom. I went to put the milk in the refrigerator and checked on Annadore and Gramma. They were both sleeping. When I came back, Bernie was sitting on the sofa with his coat off. He looked too comfortable for me to let that ride.
“Does that mean you think your mother wouldn’t approve of me?” I said.
He laughed. “I don’t have a clue what my mother would think of you. Like I said, though, she’s never been interested in my girlfriends.”
“She’d get interested real fast if you were going to marry one of them.” Travis’ mother didn’t hate me until after I got pregnant and he decided he wanted to get married.
“I doubt it,” Bernie said.
“You don’t know your mother very well, if you think that.”
“That’s true, I don’t. So, does he ever see Annadore?”
“He may have seen her from a distance, but he’s never met her.” The worst part wasn’t that he broke my heart, but that he didn’t have any interest in her.
“Aren’t you glad, though, that he didn’t help you get an abortion?” Bernie said. “You wouldn’t have Annadore, then.”
“No, I wouldn’t.” I was ready for him to get pissed off, because people get so crazy about abortion. He frowned, but I couldn’t tell if he was upset or if he was just thinking. I didn’t want to have to tiptoe around with him, so I said, “Would it matter? If I hadn’t had her, would it matter?”
“I think it would.”
“I’m not saying I don’t love her. I’m not saying she doesn’t matter. But would it matter if she hadn’t been born? I wouldn’t know, would I? I know what those religious nuts say, ‘How would you feel if your mother had had an abortion?’ And no offense, I know you’re Catholic, but I guess I wouldn’t feel any way about it. I wouldn’t be here to mind.”
“I’m not all that Catholic. And I suppose you’re right. You can’t know what you’d do if the situation were different. Anyway, I’m glad you had Annadore.”
“So am I.” Most guys I dated weren’t even a little interested in her. Jeff pretty much pretended she didn’t exist.
“I confess I’m surprised that Travis picked, um, Connie, over you, regardless of his mother,” Bernie said.
“Why? Because his wife’s not very good-looking? That’s what everybody says, ‘he picked her over you?’“
“Well, because you seem like a kind and interesting person to me, and that you’re the mother of his child. Okay, and yes, that you’re astronomically more beautiful than his wife.”
“You know, that’s just—it’s the kind of thing that’s a bigger problem than it is a help.”
He laughed, because nobody ever thinks about what it’s like to go through life being ‘astronomically’ better looking than other people. It’s an idea, not something real. It’s not like being astronomically richer than everyone else. Also guys always end up being bothered by my scars. A guy asks me out and we date and he thinks I’m still pretty even though I have them, but then they start to bother him and that’s when the relationship is over. He can’t stand to look at me anymore. If I dated a guy long enough that always happened.
After a while Bernie stood up and said he ought to go, since it was late. I guess that was to keep me from making another stupid invitation to spend the night.
“Would you like to go out again next week? Saturday night, maybe?” he said, like he thought I was going to say no.
“I can’t on Saturday night, but if you want, we could do something Saturday afternoon. Like a movie or something.”
He leaned down from way up high and gave me a little peck on the cheek.
Poker Face
There was no excuse for it, but at the end of our date, I kissed Meda on the cheek and fled. Days later I imagined I could still feel the softness of her cheek against my lips. When I went to dinner with my aunt I was strangely aware of kissing her the same way I had kissed Meda and with the same restraint of feeling. I was a coward.
When I asked Aunt Ginny if she remembered Tilda, she said, “Oh, of course. She’s such a nice girl. She married one of the Bierchen boys, you know, who own the German restaurant.” Then she went on about the Bierchen family for ten minutes.
“I saw her when Meda and I went out to dinner and it made me think about Robby. About what an odd couple they were.”
“I think they have two children, Tilda and her husband. I can’t remember which one he is, Karl or Rex,” Aunt Ginny said, as though I hadn’t interrupted.
“Doesn’t it seem strange that Robby was engaged to her? Not that I don’t like Tilda, but I hadn’t really thought about how odd it was that he went after a lot of girls who were kind of chubby and homely.”
“You said you went to dinner with—what was her name?”
“Meda Amos, you met her. She and her aunt took over for Mrs. Bryant at the house.” I wasn’t sure what was the best way to describe our relationship.
“Oh, my, the pretty one with all that black hair? But so sad, about what happened to her. Was it a date that you went to dinner with her?”
“I guess so.” Waiting for her reaction made me nervous.
“Oh, Bernie, dear. I don’t suppose you stood a chance at resisting her.”
It was done nicely, but there was a barb in it, for me and for men in general. Aunt Ginny shifted the conversation several more times and I began to realize my aunt was purposefully avoiding the topic. It confused me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted from her, but she seemed intent on denying me.
I think I just wanted to talk about Robby, to hear my own memories of him confirmed. He was such a stranger to everyone; I was closest to him and barely knew him. Not that he couldn’t talk. He could keep a conversation going on anything. The pride and joy of the high school debate team, he could discourse on any topic from any perspective, never once being held up by his personal convictions, whatever they were. If he had lived, he might have been the president. Not just of Raleigh Industries, but of the country.
It was not just seeing Tilda that made me think about Robby, but what Meda had said about them. I agreed with her that the little things people say poison you, but she was wrong about Robby and Tilda. Robby never thought Tilda was pretty. He loved her because she wasn’t.
His idea was that a shy ugly girl, especially a fat one, will never try to get inside your head. She is so grateful to be on a date with you that she will never have any expectations of where that date is going to go. If you never call her again, she’ll consider herself lucky to have had the one date. That kind of girl is going to be happy to sit next to you in the movie and hold your hand and talk about trivial things. An ugly girl isn’t going to ask, “What are you thinking?” After a lifetime of being the butt of cruel jokes, she doesn’t want to know what you’re thinking.
Tilda was the perfect girl for Robby: chubby, heading to fat on good German food, middle-aged homeliness already settling into her sixteen-year old face. She had two older sisters who offered proof that she wasn’t going to bloom into a swan someday. Her hair was in a frazzled page-boy and she always wore heavy wool sweaters that looked hand-knit. When people spoke to her, she looked down shyly at her enormous, sweater-encased bosom. She had no confidence in the reasons Robby wanted to date her, that was clear from the awkward way she spoke to my parents, like an uninvited guest.
After he proposed to her, he later confessed to me, she shook her head. So he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her until she stopped shaking her head. According to Robby, that was how they got engaged. He put the ring on her finger, and she didn’t take it off, but she never agreed to marry him. She didn’t know why he’d chosen her, and if Robby was right, she didn’t want to know. I wondered if her sisters ever spoke to her about him, warned her against getting her heart broken.
He did break her heart, through no fault of his own. About three months after Robby and Tilda got engaged, he and my father were coming back from the city, heading home for dinner. The roads were icy and the car slid across the center lane and under a cattle truck. My father was three days dying from his injuries, but Robby was dead before anyone could get down the road from the house.
Almost everything I knew about Robby I knew from the letters he sent me while I was away at school. Mostly he filled his letters with trivial things, but he also wrote to me about my mother’s frustration with my lack of progress in therapy. His letters like negative images of my mother’s, he wrote, “You’re right not to tell them anything. They don’t have any business trying to get inside your head. Neither does she.”
I vacillate between two notions about Robby. Sometimes I imagine his distance as a profound shallowness. He never revealed his inner self, because there was no inner Robby. At other times I imagine there must have been something incredibly deep, perhaps dark, within Robby that he held it all so close to himself. I suppose it doesn’t matter. The point behind a poker face is to keep others from guessing which kind of hand you’re holding. Robby loved to drive around in the car at night, looking at lights in the windows of houses from a distance. Or I’ve misremembered and I was the one who loved that.
When I made a final attempt at the conversation I wanted to have, Aunt Ginny said, “Robby was afraid of women, that’s why he liked shy, homely girls like Tilda.”
For the first time it occurred to me that my aunt hadn’t liked Robby very much.
An Aunt’s Love
Aunt Ginny
It upset me that Robby was still so important to Bernie after all those years. I’d never thought Robby was particularly good for Bernie. I thought he was a bully. Of course Bernie had been taught to think of Robby as larger than life, because everyone in the Raleigh family was so enamored of him, the first son. Robby was the sort of boy everyone liked right away. He was very handsome and charming, but aloof, and people are often attracted by that perception of distance. You could spend a day with him and come away impressed with his intelligence, with his looks, but not really feel that you knew him. Least of all would you know what he thought about you, and it caused a lot of confusion with the girls he dated. They came away from a single date with him, already in love, and probably he’d never call again.
Bernie was his opposite, very open and affectionate. It was good that he had so much to give, because his mother wasn’t very generous with her affection. Katherine was always pursuing Robby and most of her maternal efforts went toward wooing him. It’s difficult to describe, because it might seem a little odd to someone who didn’t know them well. Oh, it was odd, but not unnatural. Robby wasn’t particularly given to confidences and Katherine wanted to live that old cliché: a boy’s best friend is his mother. All the time I could see how Katherine was taking Bernie’s love, but was too busy giving to his brother to spare much for him. I don’t think she saw the ways in which Robby was like her.
Victim Blaming
Meda
“It wasn’t a date, so before you start in,” I said, as soon as I got to work on Monday. As sure as anything, I knew Aunt M. had already heard about it.
“What does that mean?”
“It wasn’t a date. We just went out to eat and we went to have a beer afterwards.”
“Well, the last I heard, dinner and dancing were a date. Damn it, Cathy, why do you always have to do this?”
“Do what? I don’t do anything.” I knew what she was going to say, and looking at her getting ready to say it, I wished I hadn’t taken the job.
“You know what I mean. You don’t learn. It’s just like what happened with Jim Weaver. At least it took you two mont
hs to lose that job.”
“What did I do? I didn’t do anything. You really think I did something to get that disgusting Jim Weaver to make a pass at me?”
“And what about when you worked at Davenport’s?”
“No, no, this isn’t about Davenport’s. You tell me what I did to make Jim Weaver act that way. You tell me what I did to make that creep come on to me.”
“Whatever you do that causes problems everywhere you work,” she said.
Like it was some one thing. I was just about ready to tell her what Jim Weaver had done, because there was no way I was taking the blame for that slimeball putting his paw down my blouse and pinching my nipple. I was guilty of slapping him, but everything that happened before that was his fault. I didn’t get a chance to tell Aunt M. any of that, though, because Celeste walked into the kitchen like she owned the place.
“I’d like some hot tea, please,” she said.
“Of course,” Aunt M. said. “We’ll bring it right out for you.”
“Thank you.” Celeste went back out, practicing her sexy secretary walk. I wondered if she walked around like that in Bernie’s office, waiting for him to look at her butt when she bent over to pick up something she’d dropped on purpose. While we waited to be sure Celeste was gone, Aunt M. filled the tea kettle and put it on the stove. I got down the tea tray and the tea pot and all the accessories, waiting for her to say something. I didn’t even know if Celeste ever used the stuff, but I filled the creamer and the sugar bowl, and put lemon slices on a side plate, just like Aunt Bryant had taught me.
“I’m not blaming you,” Aunt M. said finally. “I’m just saying, you need to nip this in the bud. You cannot date Mr. Raleigh.”
“I know that, but what am I supposed to do? You want to go in there and tell him I can’t go out with him? Because that would be a huge favor to me.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Why the hell not? You say whatever you want to me.” I reached up to get a second cup and saucer down—in case Bernie wanted tea—but I wasn’t paying attention. I tilted the saucer too much and the cup slid off onto the tiled countertop. It blew apart into tiny pieces. For about fifteen seconds Aunt M. was quiet. Then she started bellowing at me.