Beaming Sonny Home Page 5

  With Jesus tucked safely away, Mattie went into her little kitchen. If she let the girls make their own breakfasts, there would be grease splatters all over her stove, dirty dishes in the wrong basin of the sink, utensils stuck in places where she’d never find them, pancake batter all over her pot holders. Although Mattie doubted that today’s woman knew what batter was, not unless you could whip it up in a microwave. That was one gift she’d made the girls take back to Service Merchandise, the microwave they’d chipped in and bought her for Mother’s Day. “The electric burners on my stove are still pretty remarkable to me,” Mattie had told them. “I don’t have to cut and tote firewood to make them work. I don’t have to tear the house down looking for a match. I ain’t worried about a good strong wind coming along and putting them out. No, I’m still pretty amazed with my old stove, and if you don’t mind, I’ll keep it until the wonder of it wears off.” They hadn’t liked that response one bit. Marlene had gone so far as to call her mother old-fashioned, which was fine with Mattie. When it came to her new-fashioned daughters, she had no qualms whatsoever at being on the opposite side of the fence from them. She had tried at one period in her life, when her girls were still in high school, to determine what had gone wrong in the mother-daughter plan. Most of the women she had known had at least one good daughter out of the litter, one girl she could shop peacefully with, confide in truthfully, sit down and watch an old black-and-white movie with. But not her girls. And there didn’t seem to be anything Mattie could do to turn the spinning ball of their relationship around. There weren’t enough dresses she could iron, enough petticoats she could wash and then spread out like big white flowers to dry, not enough doughnuts she could bake to get a little appreciation from her daughters. And then one morning, she got up and looked at the three of them and it seemed as if surely some other woman had borne them, had nursed them, had wiped the snot from their noses, had braided all that snarly hair. How many ponytails had Mattie created in all those years of their growing up? How many bottles of baby aspirins had she pried open in the dark of night, how many little tangerine pills had she tapped into the palm of her hand? How many times had she leaned over in the shadows, her chest hurting, her breasts aching physically from the pain of Lester not being there, and how many times had she whispered, “There now, sweetie, Mama’s here”? For a long time she blamed herself for taking a wrong turn somewhere on the parental path. There was probably a day, back in the history of her relationship with Rita, that Rita had back-talked, and it was that day that Mattie probably should’ve said, “Listen here, little girl. This is your mother standing before you. Shuffle me out a little respect or spend the rest of the weekend in that hatbox of a bedroom with both your door and your mouth shut tight.” But she hadn’t, and the snowball of misbehavior, that big cold avalanche of rudeness, had started its run downhill. Nowadays, it always surprised Mattie to find those three women in her house. Sometimes, in the middle of a holiday dinner, her mind wandering back to her own childhood of Thanksgivings and Santa Clauses, she would look up, startled to see three strangers breaking bread at her table. Only Sonny, only her boy, had been worth the pain of childbirth, worth the trouble of boyhood bandages and bloody noses and slingshots that sometimes broke a window. For every bandage there had been a bouquet of those blue flags from the swamp, for every broken window there had been a crayon picture, for every bloody nose, a soft hug about one of her legs while she stirred a pot on the stove. Even as a grown man, he still did this, still crept up behind her and encircled her with his strong arms, a son showing his mother some affection. She should’ve had all boys.

  Mattie reached for the receiver of the wall phone in the kitchen. She squinted at the names on the piece of cardboard she had taped next to the phone, and then dialed Pauline Plunkett’s number. It had only rung twice when she heard scuffling behind her, slippers scraping across the floor.

  “Anything new from Butch Cassidy?” Marlene asked, tottering in the doorway of the kitchen. Mattie put the phone back onto its cradle. Her percolator had just stopped its rhythmic perking and had quieted.

  “Nothing,” said Mattie. “But the local news ain’t on until six o’clock tonight. Unless they have another news bulletin.”

  “Why don’t you get yourself a Mr. Coffee?” Marlene asked. She groped a hand about on the bottom shelf of the cupboard and it emerged with a cup. “It’ll save you loads of time.” Mattie thought about this. It took her maybe thirty seconds to ready her percolator, forty-five seconds if she had a bit of trouble finding the strainer. Yes, she supposed a Mr. Coffee could add eons of valuable time to her morning breakfast experience, could broaden her life in many ways. Pity for her that she would miss it.

  “I want to go to Bangor,” said Mattie. “And I want you to drive me, Marlene, because as far as I know, you ain’t breathed a word about that money I sent Sonny the time you drove me to Watertown to take it out of the bank. That’s been one of the pleasant surprises of my life, and I wouldn’t mind enjoying a second one. What do you say?” Marlene quit drinking her coffee to stare fully into Mattie’s eyes. Then she ran a sleepy hand through a head of drowsy hair, yawned, and stretched an arm up behind her neck. Mattie would like to believe that this was Marlene’s morning stance, but she’d seen her do the same thing at noon and at supper time. She’d seen her do it just before bedtime. She had the three laziest girls in Mattagash, Maine, and there was no doubt about it.

  “You need to head straight for Plan B, Mama,” said Marlene. “Because Plan A sucks. There’s no way in hell I’m getting caught up in Sonny’s latest shenanigans. It’s bad enough folks here in Mattagash know I’m his sister, but I have no intentions of letting the state of Maine know it.” Mattie put a plate on the table in front of Marlene, four strips of bacon and a fried egg. She took the newly popped toast from the toaster.

  “You shouldn’t fry things anymore, Mama,” said Marlene, poking at the egg with her fork. “You should watch your intake of fat. Why don’t you at least get yourself some of that low cholesterol spray?”

  “I used the bacon grease to fry the egg,” said Mattie.

  “I know, but that’s not smart,” Marlene announced.

  “I don’t suppose that pepperoni pizza you ate last night was the mark of a genius,” said Mattie, “but you ate it anyway.” She saw Marlene frown, shake her head a bit, the way all three daughters liked to do in sync whenever Mattie said something that displeased them.

  “I only had two pieces,” said Marlene. “It’s not my fault that Rita got regular pizza instead of picking up some Weight Watcher’s.” She ate around the yolk of her egg, leaving it lie like a yellow sun on her plate.

  “Will you drive me?” asked Mattie. “I’ll spit in the pan and fry you a brand-new egg. What do you say to that?” Marlene went to the percolator and poured herself a second cup of coffee. At the kitchen door, she paused to look back at Mattie, who was standing by the stove with an egg in her hand.

  “You’re getting as bad as Sonny, you know that?” Marlene asked. “I swear he inherits his craziness from you.” She went on down the hall and disappeared again into her old bedroom. Mattie heard the bedsprings squeak. Marlene flopping back down. Having breakfast had obviously exhausted her.

  Mattie knelt again in front of the sofa and pulled Easter Rising out of its hiding place, lifted the cardboard sheet up onto the coffee table. She stared at the pieces of puzzle, hoping to concentrate on finding the eye. But it was true. Sonny did take after her. And the girls took after their father, Lester. They even walked like him, with a tendency to lean too much to the right, a bit short-legged on that side. Mattie wouldn’t have been at all surprised to wake up one morning and find that her daughters had all grown mustaches, the way Lester liked to keep his, full all the way up to his nose, his upper lip disappeared. And if the girls were all to go bald one day, as Lester had gone bald, the top of his head coming at the last of it to shine like a pinkish-colored hen egg, well,
then, it would be further evidence that they were his girls. He inherits his craziness from you, Marlene had said. This had given Mattie great pause over the years, this notion, even though Marlene had been the only daughter to mention it. And that was just because Marlene was the smartest one. Had the other two made the connection earlier, they’d have been waving flags in Mattie’s face about it. The truth was that their grandmother, Mattie’s own mother, hadn’t died of stomach cancer down in Bangor, as Mattie had always told them. Only a handful of people knew the truth, knew that Maybeline had awakened one night, took a butcher knife out of a kitchen drawer, and started up the stairs with it raised high in her hand. “Because God told me the time has come to kill my babies,” she’d informed her husband as he struggled to wrest the knife from her hand. Mattie had been eight years old, the eldest child, and she had cowered at the top of the stairs, staring down at the strange sight of her parents wrestling for a butcher knife, her mother dressed in her Sunday finest, her father in his underwear. And then she had gone to calm the other children, the four other lambs who had wakened in the shadows of night to strange noises, never knowing they’d just been saved from a motherly slaughter. They had whisked Maybeline to Bangor that very night, her family telling the townsfolk—telling even Mattie, who knew better, who had heard—that the problem was a rare disorder that would be treated by specialists unknown in Watertown. Finally, two years later Maybeline had died, sitting in her bed and peering through the bars of her hospital window as though they were the rails of a baby’s crib. Mattagash was told stomach cancer. But Maybeline’s sisters, Mattie’s aunts, whispered of suicide when they came to tend the children, to help Mattie with the washings, to bake fruit pies and plain white cakes. And since grown-up words like suicide and adultery are such ponderous, heavy words, Mattie sat cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen and waited for them to drop down to her ears, which they did. She heard all, and she carried all in her heart for years. The sisters seemed to feel that something called adultery had driven Maybeline to attempt unforgivable things. Maybe it had, maybe it hadn’t. No one wanted to own up to even a sprinkle of insanity in those days. When her father finally told her that her mother had died and would not be coming home, Mattie had gone up to her bedroom, pried open the window, and tossed the valentine she’d made for Maybeline out to the northeasterly winds. And the winds had carried the valentine, as though it were Mattie’s own red heart, up into the air on fingers of breeze, had rocked it sweetly, then dashed it to earth behind a swell of chokecherry bushes. Happy Valentine’s Day to my mother. A mother’s heart is always true, even if her heart is blue. Mattie’s first and last attempt at poetry. A real Shakespeare down the drain. And it wasn’t until that word adultery came to have its own personal meaning for her that Mattie began to reconsider her mother’s life. When Lester had his first flings but still kept that glint in his eye which suggested his Casanova days were far from over, Mattie came to feel a genuine pity for her mother, and for the innocent babies she had wanted to murder. If God was gonna tell Maybeline to kill someone, Mattie found herself thinking as the years of her own life unwound, then it should’ve been her husband. But she knew God wouldn’t do that. When it came down to brass tacks, God was just another man.

  5

  The next tidings about Sonny came with the Bangor Daily News, delivered after lunch by old Simon Craft, the mailman. Mattie watched through the curtains as Simon fidgeted about in his mail car, hoping she would come out to fetch her mail so that he could harvest some news from her. Simon didn’t just deliver mail. He delivered gossip. And he seemed to think the letters he carried were for him, too, and not just those names on the envelopes. Gracie once said that Simon Craft thought he was mailman by “divine right,” but Mattie didn’t know what that meant. She only knew that she had no intention of being cornered at her mailbox by Simon Craft on such a newsworthy day. After sorting his meager handful of envelopes a dozen times and staring forlornly at the house, Simon finally left his and Mattie’s personal mail in the mailbox and drove away in a spurt of road dust. Now Mattie could finally read her newspaper in peace, around on the back porch, where the girls wouldn’t be peering like monkeys over her shoulder.

  Sonny had made the front page. After all, a hostage incident in Bangor, Maine, was almost as rare as one of those comets that spin past the earth once in a great while. But since not much was known about the situation, the story was short. BANGOR MAN TAKES HOSTAGES, it announced, along with a brief sketching of events. Nothing new, Mattie realized as she read. There was a description from witnesses at the Bangor Savings and Loan. Two women, still unnamed until their families were notified, had been standing in line at the bank when Sonny appeared out of nowhere and pointed a gun at them. They were told to go with him and no one would be harmed. One of the witnesses, an elderly retired game warden, didn’t believe the gun Sonny was holding was a real gun. “It looked like a black water pistol to me,” this witness said. The poodle, which had also been taken, belonged to one of the hostages. She had been holding the dog in her arms while she stood in line at the bank. Then Sonny and his captives had driven away in his blue pickup, to Marigold Drive Trailer Park, to a house trailer that belonged to his estranged wife, Sheila Bumphrey Gifford, who could not be reached for comment. When the newspaper went to press, police were in the process of setting up communication with Mr. Gifford. There was a good photo of the trailer. And there was also a description of Sonny, given by a Marigold Drive neighbor. “He was a one-man party in full swing,” the neighbor said.

  Mattie closed the paper and put it on the porch next to her chair. There was nothing she could do, nothing at that point in time, anyway. So she turned her attention to the mountain ridge across the road, hoping it would clear her head. The ridge had grown into a beauteous thing, green now with summer. Mattie thought she had lost it forever, but it had managed to bounce back after that outbreak of spruce budworms, years earlier, and now it rolled along the horizon like a mossy log. When autumn came, her favorite time of year, the tamarack’s needles would turn yellow as hay, golden almost, a show-off among the conifers. And then those spots of birches would rattle their yellow leaves, if you were close enough to listen. Then the oak, one of the last trees to turn, would follow suit, its leaves running to brown in those mornings of bright sun. Finally, the aspen, its leaves like dark yellow fruit. When autumn came, surely this trouble with Sonny would be over, and Mattie and Elmer could take that walk along the ridge that they’d been planning for years. Maybe Sonny could come with them. They would make a little fire, using birch bark for kindling so that the natural oils would send up a black tunnel of smoke. And then they would boil tea in an empty Crisco lard can, after Elmer added a little handle made out of haywire. There was no better tea than the kind boiled outside, in autumn, then drunk outside, under that fall rainbow of dying leaves.

  “Mama, get in here!” Gracie opened the door to say. “They just interrupted One Life to Live for a special bulletin.”

  The crowd was now larger. Mattie saw a van in the picture with WNPT News, Portland, Maine written on the side. Donna, that same little chihuahua reporter, was peering intently at the camera. Mattie was taken aback, as though Donna were peering at her. “There she is, everybody,” Mattie expected Donna to announce. “There’s his mother.” But that wasn’t the case.

  “This is an update of the hostage situation that has taken place at Marigold Drive Trailer Park, here in Bangor,” Donna said. Rita laughed at this.

  “Where are the marigolds?” she wanted to know. “I don’t see any marigolds.” Gracie swatted Rita’s arm, and she quieted down to listen.

  “Sonny Gifford,” Donna was saying, “who took two women hostage yesterday afternoon from the Bangor Savings and Loan is still barricaded inside this house trailer. Now that the families of the hostages have been notified, we’re able to release their names. Vera Temple, a salesclerk at Mr. Paperback here in Bangor, and Stephanie Bouchard, a student at the
University of Maine, have been identified as the two women being held inside this house trailer against their will.” The camera had been panning the length of the trailer, slowly following the red pinstripe. Now it found the child’s sand pail and shovel and zoomed in to freeze on the toy.

  “I wish they wouldn’t do stuff like that,” said Rita. “It only makes things worse. Sonny ain’t even got any kids.”

  “If this was a novel, that’d be called foreshadowing,” Gracie announced. Rita rolled her eyes upward.

  “Hush,” said Mattie. It had always bothered her that Sonny had married a woman with two children from another marriage. It wasn’t that Mattie hated youngsters or anything like that. It was just that fatherhood didn’t seem a likely notion for Sonny to entertain just yet, even if he was thirty-six. Sonny still had a bit of stretching out to do in the area of growing up. The camera was back on Donna’s face, the trailer peeping out behind her head in the background.

  “Yesterday, in a telephone conversation, Mr. Gifford told police that the face of former Beatle John Lennon appeared on his television screen and advised him to take a stand against world hunger. According to Mr. Gifford, he decided to apprehend the two women and Stephanie Bouchard’s dog after Mr. Lennon’s face faded into a wine cooler commercial. In a conversation this morning with Bangor Chief of Police Patrick Melon, we were able to learn that Mr. Gifford’s actions may very well be intended to garner attention from his estranged wife, Sheila Bumphrey Gifford. Here, now, is part of that taped conversation.”

  Mattie pressed forward and so did her girls, their three rear ends barely touching the edge of the sofa. She could hear her heart beating out, could feel the quick thump of it in her chest. There had always been something she had done in the past, some word she had chosen to say, that had reversed the spin of Sonny’s actions. There had even been that time she’d made the plate of peanut butter fudge and taken it over to the principal’s office. He was that fat one they had hired from downstate, a Mr. Prentice, or something like that. And she had waited until Mr. Prentice bit deep into his second chunk of fudge before she said, “I ain’t really with the PTA committee like I said. I’m Sonny Gifford’s mother and I come to talk about that broken gym window.” But now what? That’s what her heart kept thumping out in its little Morse code, beneath her dress, beneath the cameo brooch she’d pinned to her lapel that very morning, her good luck brooch. Now what? her heart wanted to know.