I Still Dream About You: A Novel (3 page)

She usually added a little smiley face to her signature, but she didn’t think it would be appropriate here, so she just left it plain. She then looked it over for any spelling mistakes, because you couldn’t be sure where it might eventually end up. After rereading it a few more times, she felt she had made her points; she had offered some information, but not too much. It wasn’t her intention to be mysterious, but in her case, some things were best left unsaid. She was sorry the letter had to be so generic and impersonal, but she couldn’t address it to either Brenda or Ethel and tell them not to open it until a certain date without having them become suspicious. And she certainly couldn’t trust Brenda not to open it. Her sister Robbie said that last year, Brenda had opened all her Christmas presents even before Robbie had a chance to wrap them. Also, Maggie knew that if, for any reason, they found out what she was planning, they would try to talk her out of it. It was sweet of them, of course, but often, well-meaning friends try to stop people from doing things that in the long run are really best for everyone.

Although she wasn’t particularly pleased with all the wording, she did feel the overall message was clear. “I’m leaving. I have my reasons. Don’t look for me.” But she wasn’t a fool. She knew, no matter how hard she tried to make it easy on everybody, some people were still going to be shocked. They would wonder, “Why? When she seemed so happy?” Which was true. She had always tried to appear happy. Some might ask, “Why? When she could have had any man she wanted?” Not quite true. And besides, after Richard, she didn’t want anyone else. Or “Why? When she was so pretty?” And no question about it, being pretty is grand while it lasts, but good looks alone don’t bring you happiness; an awful lot of perks, yes, but not a good enough reason to go on. And some would be disappointed that she hadn’t gone into greater detail about her reasons, but she had them. Just last week, she had jotted down sixteen perfectly good reasons, and she was sure there were many more she hadn’t thought of yet.

Still, she hated leaving people up in the air. But what could she possibly have said? She couldn’t tell them the truth. So, it was best to just bow out gracefully and be grateful she had at least accomplished
a few of her goals. She had never smoked, cursed, raised her voice in public, or received a traffic citation or a parking ticket—no mean feat, considering she still couldn’t parallel park after years of trying. But now, at age sixty, too young to retire and not smart enough to learn a new profession, what was the point? It was obvious that the best of her life was behind her. So, why continue to struggle? Toward
what
?

Without Hazel, life had become as hard as trying to balance a stick on her nose and juggle six rings in the air while standing on one leg on a big rubber ball. There were times she just wanted to go stark raving mad and run down the street naked, screaming at the top of her lungs, but of course, she couldn’t do that. Not in this day and age, when everybody and his brother had a camera on his phone. There was no privacy left in the world anymore. Somebody was sure to get a photograph of her and put it on YouTube, and something like that could wind up on the Internet for years.

Brenda was lucky. She still had a lot of goals left. Just last week, she announced she wanted to run for mayor of Birmingham and fire the entire city council. Brenda had ambition and a family who cared about her. Even Ethel Clipp, who they said was at least eighty (nobody knew for sure), had her handbell choir and her two white Persian cats, Eva and Zsa Zsa, that she adored. Brenda and Ethel wanted to keep going and, evidently, so did the world, but she didn’t. So really, it was best that she just step aside and let them go on their merry way.

She was simply, quietly and discreetly, and with as little fanfare as possible, leaving life a little earlier than expected, that’s all. An extreme avoidance tactic (perhaps), an inability to face reality (of course), a preemptive blow against old age (most certainly). But on the positive side, by leaving now, she would be saving the government an awful lot of Social Security money down the line; making much less of a carbon footprint; using less oxygen, gas, water, food, plastics, and paper goods; and there would be fewer used coffee grounds in the garbage. Al Gore should certainly appreciate it.

She put the letter in the envelope and placed it in the drawer, underneath the stack of old telephone bills, and was reminded that
she had to make sure the rest of her bills and credit cards were paid off before she left. She never wanted to give anyone the chance to say that a former Miss Alabama was a deadbeat. She sat up and glanced around the room. Although none of the furniture was hers, she still had a few little personal items to get rid of, but that was about it.

Dear God, from where she had started out, after all she had aspired to be, where she had actually ended up had come to Maggie as a complete surprise. It was clear now that she had seen far too many movies as a child … and had just naturally expected a happy ending.

A
FEW MINUTES LATER, BRENDA WAS ACROSS TOWN WITH A SPOON
, eating out of the pint of her sister Robbie’s mint chocolate chip ice cream, ice cream she was not supposed to be eating, having been diagnosed as prediabetic, but she needed to celebrate. Besides, Robbie, an emergency room nurse, was working at the hospital and wouldn’t be home until nine. She was only going to eat a little around the edges of the carton, then mash it around, and Robbie would never know the difference anyway. Brenda was deep in thought. Surely, when the Whirling Dervishes were not whirling, they had to wear regular clothes, at least when they traveled. They couldn’t fit on a plane in those tall cone hats, particularly not on the small jets where the ceilings were so low, but maybe they traveled in buses like the country-western stars did. Buses had tall ceilings. But then, she realized, they couldn’t take a bus all the way from Turkey, and so they had to fly sometimes or maybe they took a boat. She glanced over at the photograph in the newspaper again, and those tall hats looked very heavy to her. She began to wonder how much they weighed or if the Dervishes ever got headaches from wearing them, and before she knew it, Brenda looked down and saw that she had gone through half the pint of Robbie’s ice cream.

Oh, damn it! There was no way she could hide that now. She
was going to have to run out to the convenience store and buy a new pint to replace it. The last time she had done this, she’d filled the carton with water, but when Robbie had opened it and seen that it was mostly ice, she had suspected something. Brenda turned the carton over and looked to see if Robbie had put a mark on the bottom. Robbie was on to all her ice cream tricks and sometimes put an X on the bottom to try to catch her, but there was no mark on this one. Good. She couldn’t afford to get caught cheating on her diet again.

She had been caught red-handed just three months ago, and with Robbie being a nurse and worried about Brenda’s health, it had not been a pretty scene. Even though Robbie was her younger sister by seven years, she was very bossy. She was also much taller than Brenda was and as skinny as a rail. Unfortunately, Brenda had taken after their mother’s side of the family and was only five foot five, and at the moment, she was at her medium weight of around 166 pounds. Her good weight was 150 pounds, and 178 pounds was her top. Consequently, Brenda had three different sets of clothes hanging in her closet, labeled
GOOD, MEDIUM
, and
FAT AS A HOG
. She had not been in her
GOOD
range since Hazel Whisenknott had died, over five years ago. “I eat out of stress,” she told Robbie, and now, between work and nephews driving her crazy, she was just on the verge of having to switch from her
MEDIUM
to her
FAT AS A HOG
wardrobe again, which meant she was going to have to switch shoe sizes as well. Robbie said she was the only person in America who gained weight in her feet.

Brenda went ahead and finished the last of the ice cream and wrapped the empty carton in tin foil and hid it at the bottom of the garbage can under the sink. She rinsed off the spoon, dried it, and put it back in the silverware drawer, then picked up the stalk of bananas in the bowl on the counter. She took a carton of milk out of the refrigerator and grabbed the new box of Cheerios from under the counter and put them in a paper bag, put her new Tina Turner wig back on, grabbed her purse, and headed out the door. She didn’t want to go out, but if she got caught eating ice cream again, there would be all hell to pay, especially after what had happened just three months ago.

When she and Maggie had found out that the house they had in escrow and had worked long and hard to sell had major structural problems and the buyer had backed out, Brenda had been very upset. Not only had they lost the sale, but she was hoping to buy that new fifty-inch television set with her part of the commission. Brenda knew darn well she shouldn’t have done it, but that afternoon, she had driven over to a part of town where no one knew her (and Robbie was unlikely to see her) and stopped at an ice cream place. She went in and ordered a large hot fudge sundae with whipped cream, three cherries, and nuts on top. She was heading back to her car with it when, suddenly, a boy ran up and tried to snatch her purse right off her arm. The good news was that he didn’t get her purse, but the bad news was that the next morning, the entire incident wound up being reported in the
Birmingham News
.

Everyone who read the article thought it was the funniest thing that had happened since a man tried to hold up the Alabama First National Bank with a live lobster, but Brenda had been furious that they had printed her name in the paper. Not only had Robbie found out that she was cheating, but also, she had been attending Weight Watchers at the time, and thanks to that nosy reporter, everyone in her group found out, so she never went back. She told Maggie that if she had known they were going to put her name in the papers, she
would have just given the fool her purse and finished her hot fudge sundae in peace.

The only consolation she had was that after the attempted purse snatching, the ice cream people made her a new sundae, free of charge, to replace the one she had used as a weapon. Of course, this was something she did not mention to Robbie.

T
HE MORE MAGGIE THOUGHT ABOUT IT, THE MORE SHE GUESSED
she shouldn’t have been so surprised how her life had turned out, considering all the really bad decisions she had made. Oh Lord, why hadn’t she married Charles Hodges III when he’d asked her? His parents had adored her, and she had liked them. They had been wonderful to her. On her birthday, they had taken her to the Birmingham Club, atop Red Mountain, and she had been enthralled with its rotating glass dance floor of colored lights, where beautifully dressed people sat at ringside tables and drank exotic cocktails, and Miss Margo played piano every evening in the Gold Room, overlooking the city. Charles was a tall blond boy with blue eyes and skin as pretty as a girl’s.