Beaming Sonny Home Read online

  “What is it, Sonny? What is it, sweetheart?”

  “I don’t want you to worry a nickel over this. You hear me? You worried enough in your life. And I bet them sisters of mine, them three Pac Monsters, are going at you tooth and nail. You keep your door locked, Mama, you hear me? You know darn well they’re gonna come down on you like cops on a doughnut if you let them.”

  “Sonny,” Mattie said. But no other words rose up in her throat. There was nothing she could say. A sense of motherly helplessness overtook her. She felt tears forming.

  “Now, it’s just a matter of time until they find this other line,” said Sonny, “so I won’t be phoning you no more. But I want you to give your best dress to the dry cleaner’s truck and then put your teeth to soak. The minute I get to Mattagash, I’m taking my favorite girlfriend dancing.” Mattie smiled. Sonny knew darn well how proud she was that her teeth were all still her own, especially since that awful dentist down in Bixley had plucked out most of the teeth belonging to Mattie’s generation. Some people would do anything for a buck. Sonny wasn’t like that, though, and this was what Mattie wished the whole world knew about her son. He was good and kind, the sort of kid who steered his bicycle around snakes crossing the road when other boys rode right over the bodies. If there had been a traffic light in Mattagash, Sonny would’ve spent each afternoon down there helping old ladies cross the street. If there had been an animal shelter, he’d have passed his idle hours finding homes for cats and dogs. He dragged home every stray animal he ever saw as it was. And all during his three bumpy years of high school, Sonny sent valentines to every single homely girl in Mattagash, girls who didn’t have a prayer of getting one otherwise. And he always signed them “A Secret Admirer” so that no one would know. Mattie even helped him lick the stamps one year. This was her boy. She saw the front doorknob turning, imagined Rita’s chubby fingers on the other side of the knob.

  “I love you, Sonny Gifford,” Mattie whispered, and she hoped Sonny heard her, hoped the words were loud enough. “I’m putting my teeth to soak.”

  “I love you, too, Mama,” Sonny was saying as Mattie saw one of her own fingers reach down to the cradle and disconnect her son, cut the cord, the way the doctor had done thirty-six years ago. Now Sonny Gifford was in some kind of limbo, way down there in Bangor, Maine, where Mattie could never reach him, where other women would now have to help him.

  6

  From the road, it looked as though Elmer Fennelson had put in another doozy of a garden. Mattie stood in front of Elmer’s mailbox and gazed across the rows and rows of what would be wonderful vegetables come late summer. She had needed to get out of the house, to replay Sonny’s words in her head, someplace where the girls couldn’t look into her eyes and read her thoughts. It would be another two hours until the six o’clock news was on. And it was possible that Elmer would be out on his porch and would invite her up for a cup of tea. They could sit and complain about the changes that had swept them along since they were children, changes in the landscape, changes in the faces they met each day in Mattagash, changes in the weather. Everyone knew the winters were nothing like they used to be. And neither were the people. There was once a time when Mattagash folks considered it high entertainment to sit on summer porches, the workday done, the men home from the woods. And some kid would make a little fire with kindling and wood chips in the bottom of a discarded water pail. Then he’d cover the fire with green grass to make it smoke, and that smoke would fight off the blackflies and mosquitoes. And with evening drawing itself in close, Mattagashers told the stories that had passed around town for generations, stories that were tattered as old coats. And in the winter, a hardwood fire in the cookstove was the magnet folks drew up to in someone’s kitchen, as they listened to the summer stories being told again, this time a little better than the previous telling, a little more cheese in the beginnings, a little more spice in the endings. Old stories. Stories Mattie’s father had heard as a boy. Stories Elmer’s mother thought old in her day. But in the here and now, all Mattagash women tended to do was watch TV and jump up and down to exercise videos. They didn’t even have to drive to Watertown to shop for odds and ends anymore. They could order off those crazy shopping networks. Mattie remembered the first time she ever saw a human being running when there didn’t seem to be a good reason for it. “Why is Marilou Fennelson running along the road?” Mattie had asked Gracie as they drove past in Gracie’s car. There didn’t seem to be a house fire. There wasn’t a black bear chasing Marilou. Her husband, Stewart, wasn’t running after her with a garter snake or anything. “Exercise,” Gracie had muttered. Mattie had turned and looked back at Marilou for a long, long time. Exercise. “But what’s she running for?” Mattie was still asking Gracie long after Marilou had disappeared behind a turn in the road. Then, suddenly, a whole lot of people were running and jogging and walking and bouncing all over the place. All things Mattie’s generation had done during the course of a regular workday.

  The door to Elmer’s mailbox was open, so Mattie closed it before some bird with notions of having more babies starting filling the box up with grass and twigs, some bird ready to raise its second brood of the year. She was hoping that Elmer might have been working on something in his garage, or in his garden, or sitting on his porch keeping a vigil on his hummingbird feeder. Mattie didn’t want to knock on the door in case she might disturb him. She knew Elmer liked to read the Bible now and then as his day unfolded. He was always finding something in the Good Book to pertain to modern life. If Elmer had been on his porch, Mattie could have ambled across his lawn, climbed the four or five steps to the spare rocker, and the two could have taken the opportunity to gripe about the river of time that had washed through their lives, a river that had swept them up against their will, had tumbled them along as toddlers and had tossed them to shore as old-timers. But Elmer was nowhere to be seen. Nor was his dog, Skunk, with the narrow white stripe running halfway down his back. Chances were that Elmer and Skunk had gone for a little ride, maybe out on the back mountain now that the wild cherry trees had long ago dropped their fuzzy flowers and were covered with tiny red cherries.

  Elmer’s garden was going to be more than a doozy. As she walked, Mattie could see row after planted row of Elmer’s work unfurl before her eyes. She had no doubt that Martha Monihan, whose house sat on the little knoll across the road from Elmer’s, had torn herself away from her Ouija board to spy through the crack in her curtains. Mattie could almost feel the weight of Martha’s big, brown, cocker spaniel eyes—Craft eyes, which was what Martha was before marrying Thomas Monihan—burning little eyeholes into her back. No doubt Martha was wondering why Mattie wasn’t down in Bangor with a megaphone stuck to her face, trying to talk her only son into coming out of a pin-striped house trailer with his two hostages. And this was probably true of Dorrie Mullins and Lola Monihan. Mattie could see Dorrie’s big Jeep Cherokee driven snugly up to Lola’s front door. Lola lived just beyond Martha Monihan’s house, well within spying distance of Elmer’s garden and yard. Mattie knew that Dorrie and Lola, who had been a couple years ahead of Rita at school, had dedicated their lives to snooping and gossiping. Scandalmongers, Sonny called them. It was common knowledge that Lola considered this daily activity as a kind of full-time job. And her territory expanded mightily when she bought herself a satellite dish, the first ever in Mattagash. Now the names of movie stars were turning up in Lola’s conversations as often as Mattagashers. Sometimes Lola would say, “Well, look what happened to Burt,” and you wouldn’t know if she meant Burt Gifford or Burt Reynolds. Sonny had once said that Lola could probably list the cost of installing the huge window and the satellite dish as a deduction on her yearly taxes. “As a business expense,” Sonny had noted. “Just like them Hollywood gossip columnists do.” Mattie wouldn’t be surprised if one day a giant telescope, like the one they have out in California to look at planets and stars, appeared on the top of Lola’s house, next to her chimney. Today, how
ever, all was still behind the curtains. Lola and Dorrie were probably glued to the television set, a barrel of nachos between them.

  Mattie took one last surveillance of Elmer’s new garden before turning back toward home. It was laid out with exact care, all perfectly even rows. And six beds! What was a bachelor like Elmer going to do with all those cucumbers? Well, Mattie knew now where the cucumbers for her mustard pickles would be coming from. She even wondered if Elmer might have planted a few extra beds after learning that Mattie had decided not to sow her usual garden. It was almost common knowledge that Elmer Fennelson had what is known as “a crush” on Mattie. Although crush sounded painful. Downright deadly. In Mattie’s day it was known as “being sweet on someone.” But that was just another reminder that the world was no longer such a merciful place in which to live, such a friendly place. It was a planet where folks no longer got sweet on a lover. They crushed them instead. Elmer Fennelson had been sweet on Mattie since the day they started kindergarten together. And Elmer had kept his crush intact, kept it at a safe distance, like something he carried in his pocket, even after Mattie had gone ahead and married Lester Gifford on that fiery August day almost fifty years earlier. Two things had happened during that hot month of August, when it seemed that the dog days would never end. When it seemed that the Mattagash River was simply going to suck its way down into riverbed mud and never appear again. No one could remember it ever being so hot so far north. Old-timers made mention of a memory when they were young-timers, when even the farm animals had suffered sunstrokes. Two memorable things had happened that hot, dragging month of August in 1945: The U.S. of A. had bombed the bejesus out of two cities way over in Japan, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Mattie supposed that it was still raining debris out of the Japanese sky by the time the second thing happened. That was when she had stood stiff and still as a pole in Mattagash’s Catholic church to marry Lester Gifford. And all the time the priest was talking, all the time she could smell Lester sweating beside her in the deep heat of August, the wet aroma of her future husband, Mattie had said over and over again, “I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy.” But when she turned around as a married woman, her back to the priest, and looked down the aisle to the open door through which she would walk into a shower of rice and happy faces, she knew she was looking straight into the mouth of a brightly lighted cave, a tunnel of luminous despair. And she walked toward the light, just like people are told to do when they’re dying. Go to the light. Mattie had walked toward the stifling August sun, where she could see hands reaching out to her, the older married folks who had gone on ahead down the marital path. Go to the light. Folks who were there to show Mattie the way. But Mattie sensed even then, as she felt her feet moving her body down the aisle, next to Lester, who seemed to be a stream of sweat in his itchy suit, that all those nice, kind folks had lied to her. Not one of them had leaned forward, a pale face arriving out of the sunlight, not one of them had shouted, “Turn back, honey, before it’s too late. This bright light ain’t nothing but a fireball from hell.”

  Elmer Fennelson had even turned up for the wedding. Sweat was running in everyone’s eyes by the time the preacher pronounced Mattie and Lester man and wife. Dresses and shirts had stuck to shoulder blades, leaving a darkened spot on each and every back, like wounds drenched in blood. Curls had gone straight, unable to hold such heavy balls of perspiration. Men flaunted dark rings under their arms, wet half-moons. Babies were too fatigued to cry. They burped, and sucked on bottles, and passed wind, and every now and then a baby’s rattle dropped to the floor in an eruption of noise, causing jittery old Mrs. Bell, a Holy Roller, to cry out, “Praise Jesus!” Heat rose in ringlets from the road outside, which Mattie could see through the little window beyond where the organ player sat fidgeting with the sheet music. Mattie could see the road lying out there like a dare. “Run,” the road was crying out, amidst all that rising heat vapor. Amidst the smell of baby vomit. Mattie could hear it hissing. “Throw off them pointy-heeled shoes and run like hell.” And in the heart of all that excitement, in the core of that episode in time, she had turned to catch Elmer Fennelson’s two sad eyes. And that’s when she knew for sure she was making a grisly mistake. It was true that Elmer was no Clark Gable and Lester Gifford was the spitting image. It was true that Elmer had been born with the yoke of shyness about his neck so that it was almost impossible for him to talk to clerks and salespersons and long-distance operators. But he and Mattie talked together just fine. And while catching a glimpse of Elmer’s back and narrow buttocks as he ambled down some road, or pumped gasoline into his old Plymouth, had never made butterflies swarm about in her interior, Mattie couldn’t help but remember something Grannie had told her about love. And it was true that the first time Mattie saw Lester Gifford as a possible suitor, the day he came home from the army in his dress uniform, walking with a stiff leg from the shrapnel he took over in France, so many butterflies opened their wings in her stomach that she vomited a half bottle of Moxie out behind the Mattagash Filling Station and felt quite sure that it was the true mark of love. Still. Love shouldn’t make you sick, it took Mattie years to realize. It should make you smile. And seeing Elmer Fennelson standing off in the shadows of her wedding to Lester, Mattie had come to know a truth about life a little too late, Grannie’s truth. “I’ll tell you the key to a happy marriage and a successful life,” Grannie had said. “You gotta marry your best friend. And you better love your job, no matter what it is.” And Mattie knew right there, in the heat of her heated marriage to Lester, that he wasn’t going to be her best friend. She had seen Lester eyeing Eliza Fennelson, who was strapped out in a sexy dress and perched in the front row, even as he slipped the ring onto Mattie’s finger. Lester wasn’t going to be her best friend. He wasn’t even going to be around enough to be her enemy. And Mattie’s job would involve the art of finding out where Lester might be. That’s what Mattie had seen in Elmer’s eyes, in the eyes of her best friend as he lurked about at the back of the church, taking up just enough space to accommodate his big feet. Elmer Fennelson never wanted more than what was his, and he applied that philosophy to foot space as well as everything else he encountered in life. Folks referred to this habit of his as “hanging back.” Mattie supposed he had come to the wedding just in case she passed out in the shower of excitement pouring down on her, or needed a hand descending the church steps in those god-awful high-heeled shoes, things she had never again placed upon her defenseless feet. But Lester’s arm had been there that day, to help steady his wife, to open the door of the 1941 gray Pontiac for her. And for a while there, amidst all that rice flying like grainy snow against her warm face, amidst all those well-wishers pressing their hot lips upon her, Mattie forgot what she saw in the shadows inside the church, what was lying in the garden beds of Elmer’s eyes. She saw only the halo around Lester’s handsome head, that burnishing sheen of a soldier, come home from fighting Hitler, come back alive from battling with the Hun. She saw the shiny chrome of the Pontiac, the newest car in Mattagash, and it was a light that blinded her for almost ten years. Yet during all those blind days, those sightless months and unseeing years, it was Elmer Fennelson who came by to start the water pump for her, to drive a sick child to the doctor, to coax up the car engine on a cold December morning. And where was her best friend? Where was her husband in all those blind years during which Elmer had become her Seeing Eye dog? Who knew? Who the hell knew?

  ***

  When Mattie finally stepped up onto her own porch, after snapping off a few dandelion heads from around the front steps, she could hear music blasting away. Inside, Gracie was “Sweating to the Oldies” with Richard Simmons, her ankle weights jumping up and down with her.

  “Come on, Mama,” Gracie panted. “Come work out to these old songs.”

  “Are you crazy?” asked Mattie. “I got underwear older than them songs. Besides, that boy gives me the creeps.”

  “Richard?” Gracie asked. She seemed a
stonished. Mattie turned the volume down on the VHS tape. Her teeth were beginning to rattle. “I thought everyone loved Richard.” Gracie did a little dance, what looked to Mattie like a drunken version of the Charleston.

  “I’d take a poll in a lumber camp, if I were you,” Mattie advised.

  “Well,” Gracie puffed, arms and legs flailing, her words now jumping up and down with her. “I for one would be thrilled if Richard was to turn up at my house, in that cute little blue convertible of his.”

  “And that’s another thing,” said Mattie. “What kind of life is there to tracking down fat people and snooping in their refrigerator?”

  “Oh, Richard don’t look in anyone’s refrigerator,” said Marlene, who had appeared in the living room doorway. She had a towel wrapped about her head and was wearing a bathrobe. More hot water money down the drain, that’s what Marlene represented to Mattie. “All he does is sit on a fat person’s sofa and cry with them. He’s saved thousands of lives. Where do you get the notions you get, Mama? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “She watches too many of them so-called news shows,” said Gracie. “This Diamond Ring” had come on, a song Mattie remembered from her daughters’ high school days, and now Gracie seemed to be prancing, a Clydesdale with silver fetlocks. Mattie decided to ignore them both. If Richard Simmons wanted to wade through the old magazines and loaded ashtrays and dirty dishes at Gracie’s house, so be it. Just wait until he opened the refrigerator door over there. That’d teach him to keep his little poodle nose out of other people’s business. Besides, it was Charlie’s dumping her for Sally Fennelson that inspired Gracie to lose those fifty pounds that had sneaked up about her buttocks and thighs over the years of her marriage. And it was sheer despair that had tossed her toward women’s studies courses at the university. Richard Simmons had little to do with it.