I Still Dream About You: A Novel (5 page)

A
LTHOUGH MAGGIE WAS CERTAIN SHE HAD MADE THE RIGHT DECISION
, she still wondered, Why today? Something must have triggered it. She thought back on a conversation she had had with Ethel earlier that afternoon.

W
HEN
M
AGGIE HAD
come back from lunch, Ethel had said, “God, I miss Hazel. After all this time, I still can’t believe she’s gone.”

Maggie agreed. “Me neither … every Sunday, I still expect her to call me up and say, ‘Hey, Mags, let’s go roaming.’ She loved to drive that big old car of hers all over town, doing things, and enjoying every minute of it.”

“Oh yes, no matter what she drug us through, she always had a good time.”

Maggie said, “Ethel, you knew her better than anybody. Do you think she ever got tired of being so cheerful and always on the go?”

Ethel shook her head. “Not for one minute
 … we
got tired, but she didn’t, and it was exhausting. Remember all the things she got us into? The softball team, all the parties, the Easter egg hunts, the crazy trips. That woman kept me so busy, I had to get my divorce over the phone.”

“How did she keep it up, I wonder?”

“I don’t know, but she wore me out trying to keep up with her. We got older, but she didn’t. Do you remember when she made us all take hula lessons and march in the Do Dah Parade? My hips were sore for two months.”

Maggie had to be careful how she worded her next question. Ethel was very sensitive about her age. “Ethel … what’s the worst part of … uh … getting older … for you?”

“The worst part?”

“Yes.”

Ethel thought for a moment. “Oh, I guess the older you get, the less you have to look forward to. When you’re young, you look forward to growing up and getting married and having children, and then you look forward to having them move out.”

M
AGGIE SUDDENLY REALIZED
that was it. Ethel had hit the nail right on the head. She had absolutely
nothing
to look forward to. Other than missing spring (the flowers and the dogwoods in Mountain Brook were so beautiful) and fall, when the leaves turned such pretty colors, she didn’t have a single reason to hang around.

Maggie looked down at her watch. It was already nine-fifteen. She figured she’d better eat something or else she would get a headache. She still had to work tomorrow, so she got up and went into the kitchen and pulled out a Stouffer’s frozen dinner, baked chicken breast, mashed potatoes, and vegetables, and stuck it in the oven. She never fixed anything at home except frozen dinners or pop-up waffles because (A) she didn’t want to have to clean up the kitchen and (B) although she could set a beautiful table and fold a napkin in over forty-eight different and interesting ways, she had never been very good at cooking. Not that she hadn’t tried. The first year she went to work for Hazel, she had attempted a small dinner party for the girls in the office, but the yeast rolls she served had not been fully cooked, and after the girls went home, the yeast in the rolls continued to rise, and later that night, all of them wound up at the University Hospital emergency room, except for Brenda, who felt
fine. After that, Maggie just stopped cooking all together. But like everything, you paid a price. All the sodium in the frozen dinners made her hands swell.

As she sat and waited for her dinner to heat up, she picked up the New Age magazine Dottie had left for her with a Post-it note that said, “Great Stuff!!” She leafed through, but all she saw were pages of advertisements for yoga mats, meditation candles, and numerous self-help books:
The Wisdom of Menopause, The Orgasmic Diet, How to Nurture Your Body and Your Libido at the Same Time
, and one entitled
100 Secret Sexual Positions from Ancient Cultures Around the World
. Good Lord. She didn’t want to hurt Dottie’s feelings, but this was not anything she was interested in, certainly not now, so she threw it in the trash can and picked up today’s newspaper.

Just as Brenda had said, on the front page of the Entertainment section was a large photograph of the Whirling Dervishes twirling in circles, and they looked exactly like something right out of a movie … but then, to Maggie, almost everybody
did
. Richard had looked exactly like Eddie Fisher.

When she first met Ethel Clipp, their office manager, with her thin purple hair that stood straight up on her head and her large purple-tinted glasses that made her eyes look twice as large, she had looked to Maggie exactly like an alien bug right out of a bad science fiction movie. In 1976, Ethel had had her colors done by a colorist out at the mall and had been told her best colors were purple and lavender, and she had worn nothing else since. Hazel had nicknamed Ethel “the Purple Flash.” She called Brenda “Thunderfoot,” because she said she could always hear her coming, and Maggie was “Magic City Girl.”

After Maggie finished dinner, she cleaned up after herself, put the glass and silverware in the dishwasher, and turned it on. She then went to the bedroom, undressed, took a hot bath, brushed her teeth, got into bed, and clicked on the television set to watch the news. As usual, it was all about the upcoming presidential election. Lately, people just said the ugliest things about one another. Then something dawned on her. She wouldn’t be here on November 4 to find out who won. So why watch? The news just upset her. It was always
bad. And she had never cared much for politics. She wasn’t like Brenda, who was very involved in politics, or Ethel who was addicted to twenty-four-hour news. Ethel wanted all the news all the time. Not Maggie. She only watched so she could carry on a halfway intelligent conversation with her clients. But now, the idea of not having to watch seemed wonderful. So, she turned it off. And if anybody did ask her something in the next few days, she would just say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

In truth, there were a lot of things Maggie wished she hadn’t known. Maggie was stunned at what people you just met would tell you about their personal lives. She had never discussed Richard with a living soul, much less a stranger. Maybe she was a prude, but to her, there had always been something so lovely, so civilized about
not
knowing the graphic details. She really preferred people to be a little more vague, but now, especially in real estate, you couldn’t afford to be vague or the least bit sensitive about anything. Today, in order to even stay in the game, you had to be tough, and in Babs’s case, ruthless. Maggie had tried her best to be tough, but she simply couldn’t do it.

Just another reason she should have married Charles when he’d asked her, but she had been determined to go to New York and become rich and famous and make her state proud. The only problem: she hadn’t thought about
how
she would become rich and famous. She couldn’t sing, act, or dance, and with her obvious lack of musical talent, all she could really do was look good in clothes. But as she found out, in New York, at only five foot seven and a half, she was not tall enough to be a professional runway model. And after a year, the only modeling job she had been able to get was in the mezzanine tearoom at Neiman Marcus’s department store in Dallas. The other career she might have pursued was that of an airline stewardess, but back then, ex–Miss Alabamas did not become stewardesses; they married well and had 2.5 children.

Maggie could have married well. Most of the kids she had gone to high school with were from the old iron, coal, and steel families, and even though her parents were quite poor, there had been quite
a few wealthy “over the mountain” boys who had tried to date her, but the only one she had liked was Charles.

When she had turned him down, he had been a complete gentleman and had not acted very upset, but she heard later that he had been to the point of almost drinking himself to death after she left for New York City. Why hadn’t he fought for her? Why hadn’t he insisted that she stay home? Why hadn’t he come after her? There was that moment in time, before she left New York City for Dallas, when, if he had come, she would have gladly headed for home. If he had, she would never have met Richard. Lord … why had Charles been so noble? Why had he been such a gentleman? Both their lives could have turned out so differently. But she guessed he couldn’t help being what he was any more than she could help being who she was: so incredibly stupid.

After she’d moved home from Dallas, she’d lived in fear and dread of running into Charles again, but thankfully, she hadn’t. Most people had been kind and not mentioned him at all. Only once had a girl she hardly knew, who had married a mutual friend of theirs, asked, “Do you ever hear from Charles Hodges?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Oh, we don’t either. All we know is that he married some Swiss banker’s daughter and moved there for good, I hear.”

She hoped Charles was happy. He deserved to be happy, just like she deserved to be as unhappy as she was. She had, after all, brought it all on herself.

T
HERE WERE A LOT OF PRETTY GIRLS IN BIRMINGHAM, BUT MAGGIE
Fortenberry was one of those rare pretty girls who grew more beautiful the longer you looked at her, and Charles Hodges III, who could stare at her for hours, tried to figure out what set her apart from the others. He finally came to the conclusion that it was her eyes. There was an expression deep down in her brown eyes, something so sweet, so shy and vulnerable; it made him want to protect her from the whole world.

He had come from quite a social background and was able to converse with everyone, young and old, but around Maggie, he often found himself at a loss for words and, to his embarrassment, kept repeating, “God … you’re pretty.” But she was. Charles was an amateur photographer, and he had taken photograph after photograph of Maggie and found that no matter what angle he shot, it was impossible to get a bad picture of her. She didn’t have a bad side as far as he could see. But he was in love.

He must have been. That summer, he had driven Maggie and her harp from one event to the other, had gone to all the Miss Alabama affairs, and had stood in the back as people fluttered all around her. He didn’t mind; he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. And after a private talk with her father to get his blessing, he had
spent hours selecting just the right ring for her. An entire evening was planned: dinner, dancing, and, later, the proposal.

Maggie didn’t know it, but his parents had already made a down payment on a house for them. After she said yes, he was planning to drive her up the mountain the next day and surprise her. His parents would be waiting inside with champagne to celebrate. But she had said no.

She had decided to go to New York first. He had been so torn about what to do. He didn’t want to stand in her way, but he also knew that if she went, she was sure to become famous, and he would never see her again.

The day she left for New York, he stood with her parents and smiled and waved, but as the train pulled out of the station, he knew he was losing her. He couldn’t blame her; she couldn’t help being who she was. But he didn’t think he would ever get over her. No wonder he stayed drunk for the next five years.

L
ONG AFTER MAGGIE HAD TURNED OFF HER LIGHT, ETHEL CLIPP WAS
Still sitting up in bed in her purple flannel nightgown with the cats on it, rolling up her thin purple hair in bobby pins, busy clicking from local news to CNN and Fox TV and back. At this point, Ethel didn’t care who won the presidential election. She didn’t like either candidate. Still, she wanted to know what was going on, so she could have something to complain about in the morning. Of course, Brenda was all hoo-ha for Barack Obama, and Maggie never discussed politics, so she didn’t know who Maggie was voting for. She herself hadn’t liked anybody since Harry Truman. In fact, she hadn’t liked much of anything since 1948 and was quick to tell you about it. Ethel could be a little blunt at times. She was quite a bit older than she cared to admit (eighty-eight last May), was deaf in one ear, and had terrible arthritis in both knees, but regardless of her age, she never missed a day of work at Red Mountain Realty. She liked work. It kept her heart going. She supposed some people looked forward to retiring and traveling, but not her. There was a time when people traveled for pleasure, but as far as Ethel was concerned, there was nothing pleasurable about it anymore.