Delphine Moses made us meatball heroes. Iva Lou peels the tin foil down the sides of the long bun like a banana.
“Aren’t you gonna eat?” Iva Lou asks me as she takes a bite.
“I’m not hungry.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Jack and me.”
“What happened?”
“He’s mad at me because I took on managing the Pharmacy without asking him.”
“Why didn’t you ask him?” Iva Lou takes a swig of Coke.
Iva Lou asks me this so matter-of-factly, you’d think I’d have an equally easy, off-the-cuff answer. But I don’t.
“You know, men got to feel in charge. Even if they’re not. You got to let them think they are.”
“Iva Lou, I’m too old for those games.”
“Well, I hate to tell you, but the games go on until you’re in the grave. I never met a man who didn’t think he was the center of the universe.”
“Do you think Jack Mac is tired of me?”
“Nope. It sounds like he’s mad at you.”
“Good.”
“No. That’s actually worse. When men get mad, they don’t sit with it, they do something. They act out. You know. They go out looking for … I don’t know. Diversions.”
“Other women?”
Iva Lou nods. “And I know that for sure because once upon a time, I was the best diversion in Wise County. Now I’m just another old murried woman who’s kept her shape.” She sits up and breathes deeply, pinching in her small waist.
“Do I need to be worried about other women?” I lean back on the bench casually, yet my spine is so rigid, it’s as though there is a steel pipe in place of the bone.
“If you’re a woman, you always need to be worried about that. You got a good-looking husband. And there are women out there who look for, well, they’re looking for company.”
“I’m not going to follow him around.”
“You shouldn’t! No, you have to act like nothing’s wrong and gently move things back in a positive direction. You have to act like you have a good marriage, and then, as time goes on, if you act like it’s good, it becomes good.”
“How do you do that?” I want to know.
Iva Lou continues, “In little ways. Make him comfortable. Kiss him when you pass him while he’s watching TV. Even if he don’t kiss you back, mind you.”
“Okay. I can do that.”
“How’s the sex?”
“God, Iva Lou.”
“Are you having sex?”
“Sometimes.”
“Regular?”
“Not as regular as it used to be.”
“Well, girl, get on it. Make it your idea. That’ll keep you two connected until he comes around.”
“You’re serious?”
“Hell, yes. A man would rather saw off his arm as live without sex. We women, well, we’re camels. We can go months and months without, though I don’t recommend it. We like to think about sex, and sometimes thinkin’ about it’s enough. Why do you think women get married to men in prison and not vice versa? We’re fine just having a man sayin’ he loves us, even if he’s locked up with a life sentence. We don’t need him home in the flesh tellin’ us. A man is different; he needs a woman to be there, present, takin’ care of him.” Iva Lou looks at me, her left eyebrow rising up to make her point. “And I mean takin’ care of him.”
“Does everything come down to sex?”
“Yes.” Iva Lou sets her hero down on the bench. “A man looks at sex like a health issue. If it’s workin’, then he’s workin’. You got it?” I nod. “Drop by the church. They’re still fixin’ the Fellowship Hall kitchen, right? Surprise ole Jack Mac. Bring him a slice of pie or a thermos of coffee. And look good doin’ it. Be sweet. Understand?” I nod again, but part of me resents hearing this. Why do I have to do all the work?
A squirrel, his brown coat the color of the bare ground below, shimmies down the thick trunk of the poplar tree behind Iva Lou. He stops and chatters, snapping his neck, looking all around. Then the branches rustle from above, and down the trunk, like a gumball swirling down a chute, comes another squirrel. The first squirrel waits for the second to join him. When she gets within an inch of his tail, he runs away. This reminds me of something Otto told me so many years ago. He said, “Ave, you gots to decide three things in life: what you’re running from and what you’re running to, and why.” What Otto didn’t tell me and should have: no fair running in place.
Fleeta leans against the new fountain at Mutual’s. “Here I stand at the gates of hell.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, you don’t have to work in here.”
“We’ll see. This is just like when I was told I wouldn’t have to handle stock reorders. Now I’m the only one who handles stock reorders.”
“It came out nice, didn’t it?” I ask Fleeta as I spin on one of the fountain stools. Pearl found antique etched mirrors, which she framed in white and hung behind the fountain. She copied the marbleized green linoleum countertops from the original pictures. Gaslight wall sconces with brass accents throw a soft golden light on the pale green booths with white Formica tabletops.
“Yeah, it come out good. But I don’t know how it did, with Pearl’s attention everywhere else in Wise County but here.”
“Do you have a problem with expansion?”
“I ain’t talkin’ about that. Pearl’s in loo-ve.” Fleeta rolls her eyes when she says “love.” “You know ’im too. The Indian doctor up at Saint Agnes. Bakagese. Good-lookin’ sucker. He’s as dark as mahogany, honey. Black.”
“He was Joe’s doctor.”
Fleeta thinks for a moment. “Right. Right. I bet they met up your place. He’s dark. But tain’t nothin’ wrong with it. Pearl’s Melungeon herself, so she’s mixed. So in a way, they match. Though lots of Melungeons don’t like me saying they’re mixed.”
“I thought you were Melungeon.”
“Part.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I point out.
“No, there ain’t.”
“His color doesn’t matter.”
“You say ’at, ’course you’re Eye-talian. And Eye-talians are the great mixers of the world. Ain’t no country that ain’t been in yorn. And everybody knows It-lee is nothin’ more than a rowboat away from Africa.”
“You know your geography. Maybe they ought to put you on Club Quiz next time we send a team out.” I hand Fleeta a note regarding a prescription. “I can’t read your writing.”
“It was a call-in prescription. For a delivery. To … Alice Lambert.”
“Oh.”
“I know.” Fleeta clucks. “She oughtn’t buy her pills from here, after all the trouble she caused you.” Fleeta’s right. Alice Lambert is Fred Mulligan’s sister. When I found out that he wasn’t really my father, she claimed I was a bastard and therefore not entitled to his estate; she even tried to take me to court. That was nearly ten years ago, and I haven’t seen her since.
“When you’re sick, you probably don’t care where the pills come from.”
“What kind of pills does she need?”
“They’re for nerves.”
“Uh-huh. I’d say she has nerve tryin’ to trade in here.”
Otto comes in with his tool chest. “Hey, Otto. Can you make a delivery over to Alice Lambert’s?”
“I don’t see why not. But I need to hook up the stove back ’ere. Do you think Jack Mac could help me?”
“I’ll ask him.” Good. Just what I needed: an excuse to pop in on my husband. Iva Lou would definitely approve.
The parking spots outside the Methodist Church are filled, so I double-park behind Jack’s truck, filled with plywood sheets. I check my lipstick, which I’ve eaten off, and reapply it. I run a comb through my hair and fluff it. I look pretty good today, I think as I climb out of the Jeep.
The tension has eased between Jack and me, and I see this truce time as an opportunity to bring us together again. There have
been small signs that he’s trying too. He took my hand helping me up the attic stairs to get the Christmas ornaments. He hugged and kissed me when I made ravioli from scratch. And he rubbed my neck when I was working on the bills after Etta went to sleep last night.
The door to the church basement is propped open with a barrel trash can full of shards of old Sheetrock. I should’ve brought Jack something to eat, I’m thinking as I go down the familiar steps; Iva Lou would give me a demerit for not planning ahead. I hear laughter and note that the new yellow paint they chose for the stairwell really brightens up the place.
“Hello?”
“In here,” my husband’s familiar voice says.
I walk carefully into the hall; the floor has been removed, and new Sheetrock is being applied to the walls. Jack is measuring a large flat of wood on two horses as Mousey hammers a corner of Sheetrock to the wall.
“Hi!” I say brightly, with a big smile.
“Hi, honey,” Jack answers warmly.
“I love the yellow. It’s pretty. This room is really coming along,” I tell them, surveying the changes. And then, as if in a dream, I see a woman emerge from the hallway that leads up the back stairs to the sacristy. It’s that woman. That tanned woman from the Halloween Carnival!
“Honey, this is Karen Bell from Coeburn. This is my wife, Ave Maria,” Jack says to her matter-of-factly.
“What a pretty name.”
“Thank you.”
“She’s Italian,” my husband tells her. I guess he’s explaining my name.
“Yeah, I’m just plain old Karen. There’s a million of them out there,” she says, and shrugs.
My mind races: the name Karen. I’ve heard that before. The Pharmacy? A Karen called Jack at the Pharmacy, before I went to Knoxville! Why do I feel as though I’ve caught my husband doing something wrong?
Karen Bell wears a blue-and-tan-plaid pleated skirt and a sweater set in soft blue, a shell with a cardigan over it. She is carrying a clipboard and has a pencil tucked behind her ear (all business). She is much smaller than she appeared to be at the carnival. She’s one of those women a man could carry around like a doll. And the way she moves, she comes at you one piece at a time, reminding me of the goatherd girl marionette my father sent Etta from Italy. Every movement is deliberate.
“Karen’s our supplier.”
“Supplier?” I guess I say this in a funny way because she laughs.
“I supply the aggravation,” she says.
“That must be expensive.”
“Depends.” She looks at me for the first time. Or maybe she just sees me for the first time. She slides one hip onto one of the horses and perches there. Then she rubs a pencil between her palms; it clacks against her rings. (But not one of them is a wedding band.)
“Karen is a salesperson for Luck’s Lumber,” Jack tells me.
“Yeah, that’s how we met,” she says.
How we met? What an odd phrase for a salesperson to use. “Did Jack ever tell you how we met?” I say, wrapping my arms around him.
“No, he didn’t.”
“In kindergarten.”
“That’s so cute. Childhood sweethearts,” Karen says, not meaning it.
“Not really,” I tell her.
“Let’s say we got together later in life,” Jack adds.
“Not too late, though.” I pick up a hammer and hit my open palm with it. I do this a few times before Jack takes it away from me.
“Jack, do you want to take one last look at these blueprints?” Karen is asking him the question, but she’s looking at me politely, like “Could you get out of the way? We’ve got business here.”
“Sorry. I interrupted. You guys go ahead. Do your business thing,” I say nicely, and go off to the far wall to examine my husband’s Sheetrock technique. I lean against the radiator to get a closer look, placing my hand on it—it’s actually very hot, and I think I now have third-degree burns on my palm. But I don’t scream, I just shove my hot hand into my pocket.
Karen unrolls the blueprints, which, out of the corner of my eye, look like complicated geometry to me. How hard is it to take down walls and put them back up again to reconfigure a kitchen? From the size of the blue paper and the series of complicated intersecting chalk lines: very. I watch as Karen, capable and professional, shows Jack and Mousey how things are to be done. What they need. How they can save on insulation. What size wood they need to lengthen the counter space in the kitchen. My husband listens carefully to what she is saying. She makes sense when he challenges her with a good question. Respect washes across his face when she comes up with a solution to a problem he couldn’t solve until she stepped in. She taps her foot and continues to roll a pencil between her hands. She has given this project a lot of thought. This is a woman with follow-through. She always has a plan.
“Well, I guess I’d better get back to the office.” Karen rolls up the blueprints. She looks over at me as if to say, “Okay, he’s all yours. You can talk about what he wants for dinner, what time the PTA meeting starts, and does he need new underwear.” The boring stuff that wives do, not the fascinating stuff of blueprints, raw materials, architecture, and construction—the stuff of Karen Bell.
She tucks the prints under her arm like a baton and walks across the room to her coat, dangling on a nail. Mousey watches her as she goes. She’s got one of those walks where her rear end makes a complete circle as she moves. Smart and Sexy, just like Redbook magazine says, I think as she walks. Just what I should be, I tell myself. Jack keeps his eyes on the wall.
“Y’all let me know if you need anything else. You know where to find me,” she says as she goes upstairs.
“Nice to meet you!” I call after her.
“You too” is the muffled reply.
“I’ve got a problem, guys.” Jack and Mousey look at me. I guess my tone of voice sounds oddly curt. “Otto and Worley need help installing the oven.” Boy, does that sound like the lamest excuse ever invented by a wife who suddenly had to come up with a cover story when she caught her husband with a mysterious blonde.
“We could take a look at it. Later, though, okay?”
“That would be great. There’s some problem wiring, and the BTUs of the oven. That sort of thing. We may have to open a wall.” What am I saying? I don’t know anything about opening up walls. I’m just repeating a fragment of a conversation I heard Otto having with Worley. Who am I trying to impress? My husband? “Anyway, I don’t know details, guys. All I know is we have a deadline.”
“We’ll stop over later,” Jack promises, and kisses me on the forehead like I’m Shoo the Cat.
As I climb the stairs out to the street, Karen Bell’s perfume lingers in the air. It’s that Charlie cologne that makes Fleeta sneeze. It’s too sweet, even in afterthought. It feels good to get out in the fresh air again.
Christmas in the Gap is a month-long affair. Of course, the kickoff was the opening of the new Mutual Pharmacy Soda Fountain. (Thank you, MR. J’s Construction, for your electrical assistance in the wee hours of November 30.) Pearl wisely featured prices from the original Soda Fountain days for the first week: Cokes for a nickel, sundaes for a dime, and so forth. It has become a real hangout. Even folks just passing through the Gap stop in for a cup of coffee and pie. One man on his way to Bristol from Middlesboro, Kentucky, stopped in for Tayloe’s autograph. He saw her on local TV selling storm windows and was thrilled to meet the Real Thing and leave her a big tip.
Inez Eisenberg heads the committee for Decoration Downtown; she’s asked every business on Main Street to hang a wreath with tiny white lights on our entrances. Everyone complied except Zackie Wakin, who hung his wreath with blue lights (he sells them, so he used them). The Methodist Sewing Circle sponsors a door-decoration contest on private homes. Louise Camblos even decorated her doghouse door, that’s how competitive folks get.
The local garden clubs boost Christmas spirit with their holiday flower shows. The Dogwood Garden Club decorates the Southwest Virginia
Museum; the Intermont Club takes over the John Fox, Jr., house; and the Green Thumb ladies dress up June Tolliver’s House down by the Outdoor Drama Theatre. They ship judges in from eastern Virginia to judge horticulture (you should see Betty Cline’s Christmas cactus), arrangements (Arline Sharpe’s centerpiece of stacked Rome apples on the dining room table at the museum is a wonder), and special creations like a ceramic Madonna and Child placed amid gold gourds.
Iva Lou, Fleeta, and I are spending most of Sunday touring the exhibitions. We’re about to enter the Rooms of Historical Distinction when Joella Reasor stops us in the narrow hallway.
“Hey y’all,” she says in a tone that tells us there’s gossip. She wipes the corners of her mouth, where the orange lipstick bled, with her thumb and forefinger.
“Spill, Joella. We ain’t got all damn day,” Fleeta says impatiently.
“Pearl Grimes is in the Victorian Room with her doctor friend.”
“From here on in, we’ll have to call it the Indian Room.” Fleeta chuckles as she searches the room for Pearl and her man.
A ten-foot blue spruce is decorated with tiny handmade lace fans. The boughs of the tree are filled with hundreds of midnight-blue satin ribbons tied into neat bows. Ropes of miniature pale lavender pearls drizzle down the branches. Moravian stars punched out of old tin nestle near the trunk, throwing oddly shaped beams of light around the room. “That’s a stunner,” Iva Lou says. “I wonder if they’ll sell it to me.”