The Painted Table(36)
Movies! Perhaps she will never go to another one. By extension, tonight’s experience has eclipsed her fantasy. Phooey on Southern plantations. Phooey on make-believe that has nothing to do with her. For years she has wasted her time being amused, amazed, and aroused by what is not real. She has foolishly built her own dreams around adventures in books and spectacles of Hollywood that will never come true for her.
Real life is the icy sting of cold glass on a bare hand, the lonely darkness of a theater’s middle section, a ridiculous movie poster swinging by its frame, and, most of all, a peculiar, tormented mother, crumpled on the floor.
No wonder Joann scolded her last summer. After an engaging matinee of Daddy Long Legs, Saffee had parroted Leslie Caron all the way home and neglected to drop the impersonation when she walked in the door.
“And why are you acting so uppity?” Joann demanded. “Don’t you come home from a movie and be a smarty. What kinds of things are you seeing there, anyway? That’s not how we act in this family, and don’t you forget it.” Evidently an imaginary life was only for Joann, not for others over whom she might lose control.
Tonight, Saffee sees that her mother was right, and maybe it doesn’t matter. When they move to Cottonwood Point, they will live too far from the theater to walk. She sees herself as too old to be driven.
However, when it comes to Saffee’s love for movies, tomorrow is another day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
COTTONWOOD POINT
As the snow melts and the ground thaws, Joann frets about how she will get to the construction site to keep an eye on daily progress of the new house, as she had the remodeling on Second Street. She decides she must learn to drive, something she has previously refused to do.
“Well, Muzzy.” When Nels is pleased, he calls Joann by the pet name he gave her years ago. “I been expectin’ that ever since I seen you drawed plans for a two-car garage!”
It’s no secret that Nels hopes the new house project will help Joann shed some of her other idiosyncrasies as well and “become more like other women.”
“Mom? Learn to drive? Good,” Saffee says. “Then maybe she’ll take me to chorus practice. There’s no other way I can get there by seven thirty when we move out to the sticks and I have to ride the bus!”
April rattles off her list of activities that will also require transportation, including after-school tumbling. Joann reminds her there will be no such dangerous endeavor for her. “You might fall and absolutely ruin your kidneys,” she warns.
On Saturdays and Sundays, with Nels at her side, Joann nervously nudges a new maroon Ford along nearby country roads. When she ventures onto the streets of town, she traces over and over the route from Second Street to the Cottonwood Point subdivision. The day she returns from her first solo outing, it would be hard to say whether she or Nels is more proud.
Building the new house facilitates a recovery of something that had been stolen from Joann. A driving back of evil gives her renewed vigor for life, at least temporarily. In spite of cold weather, excavation is completed by mid-April. For a few hours each day, Joann, wrapped in a long parka, stands like a sentinel, watching the construction crew lay the cement block walls of the basement. Under a cheerless sky, with the wind wrapping her in its arms, she has plenty of time to think about things—past as well as present.
Receiving compliments from the contractor for her precise drawings and learning to drive have done more to boost her well-being and perspective on life than anything for a long time. So when she remembers her childhood days, when life was observed from under a table, she evaluates the memories more circumspectly than in the past. She remembers the nights her brother Rolf trespassed her shelter, had not molested her but touched her, scaring her. Screams had brought her father, and in the morning, Rolf felt his leather strap. The brothers, both of them, were ignorant and overworked. Now she feels sorry for them.
She thinks about Maxine, the large and bony sister. Maxine, who often hurled scathing and hurtful words and jeered at Joann after incidents with Rolf. In the bed they shared, Maxine, likely troubled, thrashed around in her sleep so much that Joann often had no recourse but to leave it. Today, Joann sees Maxine, in fact all her motherless siblings, as bereft as herself.
Most vivid in her mind is her mother, feeding, clothing, and trying to placate her demanding brood. Joann’s pain of neglect had been real but, she decides, it had not been unreasonable to ache for her mother’s attention. It is a need she has carried into adulthood. Today, she aches for Nels. He gives her hugs before he heads out the door and again when he returns. She knows he loves her, but at night, nothing, depriving her of one last baby. Her mother too had been deprived of her last baby . . . Joann stamps her cold feet and swings her arms not only to keep warm but also to make sure her presence is recognized by the workmen, who probably would take off for a smoke if she weren’t around.