The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas (12 page)

“Yes, but I’ve had him for fifty-five years now. If that doesn’t put the pounds on you, what will?” Again she cackled, and the rest of us joined her.

Except Gloria, who moved to prop the full-length mirror against the wall. “
I’ve
had him for thirty-six of those fifty-five years. If either of us was going to gain weight from babying that man, it should have been me.”

“You got married when you were…” Chloe started to scratch her head, then froze when her pink-painted fingernails brushed a stiff curl. “Um, when you were that young?”

“We were both nineteen,” Gloria said, shaking her head.

“Wow,” Chloe whispered.

“Twenty-one,” Maxine said, raising her hand.

My hand went up too. “Twenty-two.”

“The day after my eighteenth birthday.”

“Really?” Being young herself, Chloe did not hide the surprise we all felt at Jan’s disclosure.

I guess the others had probably felt, like me, that Jan Bishop Belmont had always done everything in perfect order for Texas girls of that day. High school cheerleader, pledge the right sorority, graduate with honors and marry your college sweetheart.

“My parents didn’t like Morty.” She sighed and gazed toward the doorway and the room near the unseen bottom of the stairs. The TV roared. She chewed her lower lip, and for a moment I thought she might add some other ob
servation about what she or others thought of the man now. Then she shook her head, blinked and fiddled with her bangs. “He’s almost a decade older than me, you know. He was a football coach, and we met the summer after I graduated high school. They wouldn’t let us get married, so as soon as I reached legal age…”

“So you just…ran off together?”

“Actually, yes. We eloped.”

“Was it romantic?” Only Chloe would ask that. The rest of us—and I know this isn’t the best of Christian behavior—were trying to wrap our minds around the idea of a football coach and a cheerleader running off together. What bitter feelings it must have engendered. What scandal. What…are the odds they really didn’t date one another until
after
she graduated?

“I thought it was romantic.” Jan looked to the mantel again, leading the rest of us to do the same. I don’t know what she had expected to see there, but I had thought we’d find a wedding photo or some evidence of the connection between Jan and Morty. There was none. She exhaled in one hard rush, her shoulders slumping. “But then, I was young and in love.”

“And you’re still in love, all these years later.” Chloe didn’t ask it, she declared it, in that hopeful way young people have of speaking their fondest wishes, then looking to others for confirmation.

Jan smiled weakly.

Chloe turned away from our hostess then, her face ever bright, and addressed the rest of us. Her eyes pleaded for someone to salvage the conversation. “How did you all know so young that your marriages would last?”

“I listened to my heart,” I blurted out, without really giving it much thought.

“I listened to the Lord,” Maxine added, and it could have sounded all snooty and like a bad case of one-upmanship, but it didn’t.

“Gloria listened to me!” Gallina Roja said, shaking her carrot-topped head.

We all looked from the older woman to Gloria, either for confirmation or to see if there was going to be an argument. Which—I confess it did cross my mind—would have been a really good way to get us off of feeling sorry for Jan and trying to tiptoe around the situation with Morty. Nothing detracts from one person’s obvious unhappiness like another person’s petty squabbles.

“Tell them, Gloria. You knew you that if you married my son you would have to work to make it last forever, because you listened to me.” The old woman made repeated staccato motions with her index finger. “Tell them.”

“I listened to my mother-in-law,” Gloria conceded, spreading her hands open. “How could I not? She talks to the Lord.”

That broke the tension just enough for all of us to catch our breath.

Maxine sat back on the sofa.

I went to Chloe and peered at her image over her shoulder in the mirror.

The young girl tipped her head. “Well, I hope you won’t be mad at me for saying this, but I don’t see how any of that could make you sure you were doing the right thing. That your relationships would last.”

Gloria gestured with one hand open and out, flipping
from palm up to palm down and back again. Her thin, dark eyebrows crimped down, and she pursed her lips.

Though she didn’t say a word, I knew exactly what she meant. “There aren’t any guarantees in romantic love, Chloe, no matter how old you are.”

“You can say that again.” Jan stared blankly at the doorway again. We couldn’t see into the hallway to the stairway or the door with Morty and the TV behind it.

“But it helps if you have faith, if you share the same beliefs and if, when you take your vows, you really mean them.” I brushed some lint from Chloe’s shoulder, then rested my hand there as I leaned in to add, “You really have to understand their importance, and do everything within your power to honor them.”

The elder Mrs. Alvarez nodded her head slowly. “It takes a lot of hard work.”

“And it doesn’t hurt if you laugh together,” Maxine said to the room in general, not just aiming her remark at Chloe.

“And pray together,” I whispered.

“And even then…” Jan sighed.

“A man must love his wife the way Christ loves the church. That’s what we believe. No compromise there. If the fellow you are with hurts you or manipulates you or…” Maxine struggled to find the right word. I couldn’t help thinking she wanted to find something that could do double duty and apply both to Chloe and her smarmy charmer and to Jan and whatever had gone awry with Morty. “If a man disrespects you…”

“Then you shouldn’t marry him.” I gave Chloe’s shoulders a squeeze. While I understood Maxine’s desire to reach out to Jan, a part of me wanted to remind her that we had
already taken on two women’s love lives and helped get Jan a job and some money and respite. Were we really ready to tackle Morty, as well? “I hope you aren’t really considering anything that serious with Sammy, Chloe.”

The young woman met my gaze over her shoulder, then turned to study her image in the mirror still leaning against the wall.

“Sammy’s the one you’re not sure of, isn’t he?” Maxine asked, scooting to the edge of the sofa now.

“Has he hurt you, Chloe?” I looked directly into the mirror and met her eyes. “The Reverend Cordell said he thought he saw Sammy squeeze your arm, that he was trying to force you to do or say something…”

“I didn’t ask for your advice.” Chloe twisted away from my touch and stuck her fingers in her hair to work them through and free some of the stiffness of her curls. “And if Jake has something to say to me, then he knows how to get ahold of me. He can tell me to my face.”

Okay, a little part of me wanted to ask when she had started calling the Reverend by his first name and whether he had suggested it and under what circumstances. And also how would he know how to get ahold of her and when would he have occasion to tell things to her face? But the fact that the window of opportunity to get Chloe to listen me was closing made me focus on what I had to say to her. “I don’t think you need our advice. I think, deep down, you know that a man who doesn’t cherish you is only going to hurt you more and more as the years go on. Deep down, you know the truth.”

At that exact moment, Jan Belmont burst into tears.

“Jan, honey!” When I focus, I focus, and so I hadn’t even
thought of how anyone else in the room might take my words. And even now that they were out there and I had seen Jan’s reaction, I couldn’t quite believe it. So I had to ask, “Are you okay?”

“Of course she’s not okay, Odessa, she’s bawling like a baby.” Maxine slid across the couch as best she could, stretching her arms out toward the woman who looked absolutely flawless except for her big red nose and the streaks of mascara under her eyes.

Jan bolted up from her chair. “No. No, I’m fine.”

I suppose I should have felt vindicated by her claim, but I didn’t. I stepped up to put my arm around the woman.

Jan squirmed out of reach. “Uh…oh…I’m just…I get emotional ever since the…my husband’s…” She glanced around, most pointedly at the hallway where she had disappeared with Morty an hour earlier. “In fact, I should go check on him. I don’t usually leave him to his own devices for this long.”

And she rushed off, leaving all of us standing—or sitting—there staring at one an other.

We might have stayed in awkward, awful silence until Jan returned—which, given her ashen color and the absolute anguish in her eyes, might have been hours—but Chloe came to the rescue.

“I hope I didn’t sound ungrateful, Ms. Pepperdine and y’all.” She gave a twirl to draw our attention. She stared into the mirror and tipped her head to the right, then to the left. “I
do
like my new look, and I thank you for being so nice, doing this for me and all. But…”

“But?” I asked, trying not to seem so obvious about keeping one eye on the doorway where Jan had disappeared.

Chloe smiled. “I have to say, I
do
miss my barrettes.”

“They were sparkly,” I said softly, wiggling a few fingers to indicate to Gloria and her mother-in-law how the light played off the faux stones.

“Not as sparkly as what you two had on the other day,” Chloe used all ten fingers and waggled them like crazy on top of her head.

Gloria frowned.

“Tiaras,” Maxine explained. “From Bernadette’s booth. We wore them to bring in customers the other day.”

“I thought you wore them because you call yourselves the Tiara Madres.” Chloe dropped her hands to her sides.

“Tiara Madres? Very nice!” Gallina Roja clapped her hands and fixed her eyes on Gloria. “Can I have a tiara, too?”

Gloria shot Maxine and me a “you have really done it now” look.

“Bernadette could really use the business,” I blurted out. “Not that her business isn’t doing just fine. I mean, the advertising. She could really use the publicity. You know, to attract—”

“A husband?” Gallina Roja asked hopefully.

“Morty, no! Not today.” Jan’s voice came not from the room, but from the hallway, followed by footsteps pounding up the stairs. Upstairs there was nothing but two bedrooms used by the kids and, of course, the windows that led outside, to the roof. “Please tell me you have not done this again to me with all these people here!”

“Maybe she’s better off without one.” Chloe mastered a mix of anxious kid overhearing grown-up arguments and sarcastic young woman with multiple holes in her head making a contemptuous observation. “A husband, that is.
Having one doesn’t seem to be working out all that great for Mrs. Belmont.”

Maxine again, trying to finish what I began. But then, when I began all this, it was like another lifetime ago. Things were fun and light and hopeful. And now…

I don’t know what to say. What is the big attraction for the Belmonts in going out on that roof? I almost want to try it myself, just to see. I suspect it has something to do with the theme I came up with at the start of all this. Some people, when pushed, will rise to the occasion. Unfortunately, other people, put under pressure, will break.

I guess in this case that if enough loving people pitch in, we can make like hair spray and hold everything together.

E
veryone looks at the man on the ledge. Every eye is trained on his slightest move. Every ear strains to hear the whys and the hows and listen for some sign of what will happen next. Every pulse beats fast, then faster, knowing that should the most unimaginable occur, every heart will leap, then stop, then…break.

Everyone wants to help the man on the ledge. Some want to help him come inside and get his feet on the ground. Others, I suppose, want to help him take that last awful step, and thrill to the idea of seeing his body hit the ground. But what about the people behind the man on the ledge?

Who sees their pain? Their struggle? Their own lives, teetering between the heavens and the earth?

What do you say to them? How do you reach out to the ones not obviously in immediate danger and let them know that they are not alone? It was a question I grappled with even as we all rushed upstairs behind Jan to see if we could
help her help her husband and realized even before the last one of us hit the steps that Morty wasn’t the only one in peril there.

“You go out there and tell that man to come inside right now.” Gallina Roja shook her bony finger in Jan’s direction.

Life sure seemed easy for a woman who talked to God and held on to her only baby for over fifty years.

“I can’t,” Jan said.

Her meekness, the soft anguish of her reply, created a small ache in my chest. I wanted to reach out to her, to grab her arm and pull her in from wherever she had gone in that moment of quiet despair.

“You
can.
” The determined grandmother brought her fist downward, against nothing and yet with all the impact of Khrushchev pounding the podium with his shoe.

And if you’re too young to know what that means, then you may be too young to fully understand the raw emotion in that perfectly appointed bedroom that afternoon. Not because it has anything to do with the Cold War, unless of course you mean the cold war that has raged between men and women ever since Adam and Eve. But you have to have lived awhile to have known what was at stake for Jan and her husband on that summer afternoon in that seeming perfectly ordinary split-level.

I am not apologizing for that. Young people have a lot going for them. There are certainly a lot of wonderful perks in being young, so let us old gals have this thing, this way of knowing just how precarious the whole world seems when a man crawls out on a roof and his wife no
longer has the words to draw him back inside. And why she has to try anyway.

“You can do it, Jan.” Maxine put her arm around Chloe, who looked about ready to charge the window and give the man a piece of her mind her own self.

“I can’t.” Jan’s focus swung from the group to the window. She bit her lip. “I’m the reason he crawled out there to begin with.”

“I knew it,” I murmured. Honestly. I did not shout it or sound all gloaty, like she’d just proved every piece of malicious gossip I’d ever heard concerning the Belmonts. But still, I said it. Out loud. And I could tell it stung poor Jan’s pride something fierce. “I just meant, well, it came to my mind more than once that…”

I glanced around what must have once been a boy’s bedroom but now looked like something from a decorating magazine. Not a fancy decorating magazine, nothing fussy or filled with finery, but perfect all the same. Too perfect. Too perfect was just the right backdrop, I supposed, for this moment. This time when all the pretenses that Jan had clung to for so long could not protect her from the reality of what people really thought and felt.

I took a deep breath and folded my arms. In for a penny, in for a pound, and I was in for a whole lot more than a penny already. “It says in the Bible that it’s better for a man to live on the corner of a roof than to share a house with a…”

“With a what?” Jan asked when I hesitated.

I didn’t want to finish. I racked my brain for a translation that might fall more easily on the ear. But I couldn’t come up with anything, and so I completed the verse as I knew it from the Book of Proverbs. “With a contentious woman.”

“There you have it, ladies.” Jan motioned toward me. I had more to say, but she did not allow me to follow up on my thought. “It’s my fault. I accept that. It’s my problem. You should probably all go now.”

Probably.
That single word kept us from turning then and walking out one by one.
Probably.
It meant “No one would blame you if you did this” and “any reasonable person would take the out I’m offering and run.” It also implored, “Please. Please, please, don’t desert me now.”

I don’t know if you have to be old enough to grasp the scariness and subtleties of Cold War diplomacy to know the real weight of the word
probably.
But it doesn’t hurt.

“Let’s go make some coffee and talk.” I waved my hands gently, the way you do when you’re herding a class of Sunday school kids, or maybe shooing birds into flight.

“You can’t just leave the poor guy out there.” Chloe bent at the knees to peer out the window.

I had been avoiding doing just that, much as I wanted to take a peek and see exactly what was going on. It felt like such an invasion of privacy, both Jan’s and Morty’s, for us to even be there, much less staring and gaping.

Yes, you think I’d have the poise and good manners not to gape, but I have to say, seeing a grown man in his pajamas with his hair all mashed to the side of his head clutching a TV remote in one hand and sitting on a roof staring at an old drive-in, well, I think it would be almost impossible
not
to gape. But Chloe started it.

Yeah, I know. I would never have accepted that kind of excuse from my sons, but this was just going to be one of those do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do moments. I have to say,
I am not a perfect person. I am one of those folks who is ever in need of the forgiveness of the Lord and grateful for it and that is why—even though I tried to tell myself not to do it—I bent down in front of the bedroom window and looked.

“Odessa,” Maxine whispered in admonishment.

I winced. Instantly I wished I hadn’t given in to the temptation to gawk, even if it was only a little bit. Not just because it was rude and intrusive, but because I knew that from that moment on I would never look at Jan again and not see this image. Before, when I saw Morty looking like a zombie from a bad B-movie circa the nineteen-fifties, it hadn’t bothered me, because I could put that vision in context. The man had suffered a trauma. He wasn’t himself. He would get better with time.

Well, time had passed.

So this? This climbing out onto the roof to sit and stare into the distance, ignoring all pleas from his wife to come back inside? This deliberate deed, one that predated his injuries and had also caused them, was a choice. Electing to act on that choice when Jan had a houseful of people to witness it was his way of striking out at her. I don’t know if, after hearing both sides of the story, I’d blame him for his decisions, but right now I knew one thing. Jan needed her husband to cherish her in the way we had told Chloe all men should. And she wasn’t going to get that.

As her friends, we could not abandon her.

Yes, that’s right. With that glimpse out of a spare bedroom window and into Jan Belmont’s life, I made up my mind. We had to do more than just try to distract and pla
cate Jan—we had to love her like the sisters in Christ we went around claiming to be.

We,
of course, being me and Maxine. I couldn’t speak for the others here. Okay, I can’t speak for Maxine, either. That had never stopped me from doing it before, though, or for hoping and believing that my friend would feel as I felt, or at least not feel that I was so far-fetched that she would turn her back on me entirely.

I straightened up and backed off from the window and nudged Chloe to shepherd her away with me.

She blinked at me, then at the other women, then at Jan. Finally, she fixed her eyes out the window, on Morty, who had his back to us and his knees drawn up, hugging them to his body. And then she stepped back, too.

I put my hand on her shoulder in a tender show of gratitude, she followed my earlier edict and did not push. She might seem too young to appreciate the precariousness of poking your nose into another woman’s marriage, but she had grace enough to trust that the rest of us would do the right thing.

Just as I trusted that Maxine would do the same. And I told her as much with a look and jerk of my head toward the door.

“Coffee it is then.” Maxine clapped her hands together, then opened them wide and motioned for everyone to move along. “In the kitchen. All of us. Now.”

No one said another word. Everyone just moved into the hallway, one by one, until only Jan remained in the sparse and spotless bedroom with the summer breeze flowing through the open window.

“We’ll keep the coffee warm for you, Jan,” I said as I reached to close the door. “Take your time.”

“Don’t bother.” Jan pushed up from the bed where she had been sitting, strode the length of the room, brushed my hand from the knob and replaced it with her own firm grip.

“Is she just going to leave him there?” Chloe asked again. This time she whispered it, first to Maxine, then to Gloria. “She’s just going to walk away and close the door? She isn’t going to—”

“To what?” A soft metallic click underscored the cool, crisp quality of Jan’s voice. “Try to talk to him? Do you imagine I haven’t tried? That I haven’t opened up my heart to that man? That I haven’t asked for his forgiveness for whatever I have done wrong? That I haven’t humbled myself in a thousand ways in hopes that something I said, something I offered, would finally reach him?”

She bowed her head, swallowed hard, then retreated from the door, letting her fingers trail over the doorknob for a moment before completely letting go. When she lifted her head, she had masked her pain in serenity and purpose. “Now, did someone say they wanted coffee?”

She headed for the stairs without looking back.

“But what if…” Chloe hung back, even as we all followed Jan’s lead. “What if he falls?”

Jan froze.

I held my breath. It’s that youth thing, I suppose. But I can’t fault Chloe for it. In fact, hearing the concern in her voice totally renewed my confidence in the effect Maxine and me and all of us—and I suppose, as much as I hate to think of him aiming his attentions at anyone but Bernadette just yet, all of us does include Jake Cordell—could eventually have on the girl.

Jan did not seem to share my buoyed-up sense of opti
mism about the young girl, though. Chloe’s question had hardly faded in the air when Jan’s spine went rigid. Not just straight, but rigid, like someone had yanked a rope taut. She pressed her shoulders back in a way that reminded me of a cat laying its ears flat just before it hisses, spits and draws its claws.

All of us tensed right along with her, the way you do when you know something awful just might happen and you don’t have the slightest clue how you should react. Of all the things we should get better at with age that—knowing how not to let people fluster the stuffing out of you—should be one of them.

And apparently, for some people, it
is.

“If the man falls, he falls.” Galina Roja waved one gnarled hand in the air and marched right on down the stairs. When she reached the last step, she turned and rolled her shoulders in a utterly nonchalant shrug. “We should be able to see him when he hits the ground outside the kitchen.”

Chloe gasped.

Gloria groaned.

I opened my mouth to say something, though I cannot tell you what because my mind had gone completely blank.

And then Maxine saved the day by doing the only thing a person really could do in a situation like that. She laughed. Then she put her arm around Jan’s shoulders. “Come on, sweetie. We’ll make coffee and we’ll talk.”

“Not about this, we won’t.” Jan moved out from under Maxine’s warm embrace. I know it was a warm embrace because I know Maxine and I know that in that moment she had done her best to envelop Jan in the special bond of friendship that forms between women and in Christian love.

And Jan had rejected it.

Not out of anger at Maxine or any of us, but because she wasn’t ready. Maybe because there was so much more going on than she felt she could trust us with, or maybe because she thought if she ignored the truth of what had happened here, it would all go back to the way it was before. And even though the way it was before was just awful, it was familiar. Safe, in some sad and desperate way.

“Then we’ll talk about the complaints about the flea market.” I hadn’t lost my mind or my sense of purpose about Jan. This was just a tactic. We couldn’t very well show the woman how much we cared for and supported her if we all found reasons to hightail it out of her presence whenever things got ugly. This was Jan Belmont, after all. You couldn’t avoid things getting ugly around that woman. Which is kind of ironic, given her gorgeous face, good figure, excellent taste in clothes and beautifully-appointed home.

Anyway, all that leads me to believe that loveliness is a natural state for her, and that given the chance and exposure to the gentle ministrations of me and Maxine, Jan would set aside her tendency toward ugliness altogether.

“Perfect.” Jan’s heels clacked over the glazed ceramic tiles in her large, updated kitchen. “Going over those complaints suits me just fine. The faster we deal with them the faster we can shut that horrid rat’s nest of a place down forever.”

Okay, so maybe Jan was a little more attached to ugly than I’d suspected.

“Not everyone wants to close the flea market down, though, Jan.” Gloria helped her mother-in-law into a
chair at the table. “Some people would, in fact, like to see it improved and helped to play a larger role in our community.”

“Well, if any of those people are here right now…?” Jan whizzed by without making eye contact with any of us. She flung open the cabinet above the coffeemaker and pulled out a blue canister. She plunked it on the table, yanked open a drawer, then started rummaging through the silverware. “They can just get out of my house. I became a part of this committee to close that eyesore down.”