Read Tending to Virginia for Free Online

loosens her grip on that rocking chair, a red Kennedy rocker which she has painted so many times that she can’t count. For years she has painted that chair. If she felt good, she painted it red or blue or pink; if she felt bad she painted it black. Now, she doesn’t give a damn. She’d like to toss it to the side with a lot of other junk and forget about it. She’d like to be able to do the same with her brain, pick and choose what she wanted to know and toss the rest aside, to feel that everything was clean like that yellow room the day it was painted, like a fresh canvas, and then she could start over, carefully applying what would someday be observed by someone who would say, “this is my mom.” She doesn’t even know what time it is; cars still parked in driveways down the street, some people probably still sleeping. If she tried to paint something representative of herself for the sake of posterity right now it would be a smeary blob of nothing, scene after scene carved on top of another with nothing unique about any of it. It would be nothing like the soft pastels, soft as baby powder, that Gram would have, a strong dark background that holds the softness in place. Or Lena who would be a bright splash of color that, though opposite, would blend with Gram, or her mother who would be strong sharp lines that all connect and round at the corners. Even Cindy, though wildly abstract, would be appealing in the same way that someone says, “It’s really interesting but I wouldn’t want it on my wall.” If somebody did her it would be so typical like a bed of jonquils, sunny yellow jonquils on stiff stems, so stiff they’d stand as long as they could and then crack off to one side and she hates yellow right now, that jaundiced jealousy.
    “We painted the chair the university color,” Madge had said the day before Virginia was to leave for college. “Cindy bought the university symbol decal for me to put on the back there.”
    “I love it,” Virginia lied, her eyes still focused on the chair so as not to meet eyes with Cindy. “But you’ve done too much. You already gave me sheets and towels.”
    “Well, it’s special,” Madge said, somehow lighter than her usual deep sighs. “Not everybody goes to college. Not everybody comes out second in the class.” It was obvious that Madge was avoiding Cindy who was standing there in cutoffs with Chuckie perched on her hip like a grocery bag. “Not everybody gets to graduate,” Madge said and Cindy sighed and shifted Chuckie.
    “You hate it don’t you?” Cindy asked later when they were alone in the yard, Chuckie inside with Virginia’s mother and Madge. “I told her you’d think it was tacky.”
    “I don’t hate it, though,” Virginia said and finally looked at Cindy who was perched on the hood of Madge’s car and they both laughed. Cindy laughed until she started crying and then she sat staring down at her key ring, which was shaped like a Coke bottle.
    “Oh shit,” she mumbled and shook her head, those pale eyes filling with tears. “This makes me so goddamned mad.”
    “What is it?” Virginia asked, surprised to see Cindy that way, her shoulders shaking and those long-nailed fingers spread over her eyes. “Cindy?” Virginia stepped closer expecting Cindy to turn on her any minute, to burst into that raucous laugh of hers.
    “Hate to see you leave,” she said, wiped her eyes and then looked up with the most serious expression that Virginia had ever seen on her face. “You’ll never be back,” she said. “I mean for good. I’m stuck here, me and my one friend, Constance Ann Henshaw, and Charles Snipes and Chuckie the snot factory and Earl Conners.” She stopped and laughed quietly after saying Earl Conners, who was a man that for years sat out in front of Endicott Johnson’s and sold boiled peanuts, a man with one eye and no teeth who was given clothes by the Jaycees; for years, it had made Virginia cryevery time she bought peanuts from