Kay Sloan
Writing
from The Hermitite
The Southern Review
It is one of those deep summer nights in mid-July when people in Libertyburg, Mississippi wonder how they survived before they had air conditioning.
Sometimes that is all people talk about, what it was like when all they had were fans, and how these young people today can't possibly imagine it, here with all the modern conveniences in 1965. It is the sort of conversation that Winnie and Virginia Bloomer, two women with the accidental relationship of having married brothers, often have. Virginia visits Winnie several times a week to talk aimlessly to her, to take her mind off things, off the terrible “accident” that Winnie’s husband, Fred, had three months ago.
Those long conversations annoy Sheridan, Winnie’s only daughter. All that talk about fans and ninety-degree heat “bugs” her, she tells them, and her Aunt Virginia gives her a pitying look. Bugs the everlovin’ hell out of her, she tells herself, especially when the sky finally grows dark after the long July days, and the night looms ahead, emptily, with only her mother for company.
This is one of those deep summer nights. Except that tonight Winnie isn’t talking about anything.
The fireflies are just beginning to flash outside on the lawn when Winnie begins to close up the living room in preparation for bed. She has the blues again, Sheridan can tell by the way she walks. Sleepwalking, it looks like, with Winnie drifting around in a dream that Fred haunts. Sometimes she looks like a ghost, too, aimless and pale, her shoulders stooped. Mostly, she has slept off the weeks since she and Sheridan found Fred in the closed garage, slumped over the steering wheel of the station wagon, the motor still running. She refuses to drive the car now, even to the grocery store or to church.
“Sheridan,” she will say, fumbling in her purse for a couple of dollars and her key ring. “Run over to the Piggy Wiggly and get yourself something for supper.” But most of the time Winnie doesn’t even think about errands like grocery shopping or doing the laundry.
She hands Fred's car keys over to Sheridan, in a gesture that gives her daughter freedom from her own world, a world she disappears into when she goes back to her bedroom around eight o’clock, as soon as it starts to get dark. It is a world filled with Fred’s half-empty bottles of Old Spice in the medicine cabinet, with his orange hunting vest, flannel shirts, and his blue Sunday suit hanging in the closet. Often, when Winnie opens the closet door to get dressed, she lingers there, holding one of Fred’s loose shirt sleeves to her cheek, smelling its familiar spicy scent.
In the mornings, the first thing she sees is his key chain without the car key, still lying with some loose coins in the oval pewter tray on the chest of drawers where he would empty his pockets at night, and sometimes her first thought is, where is Fred? Has he already taken the car to work? And then the events of the past several weeks tumble in on her, so quickly that she sags back onto the bed, feeling as if the breath has been knocked out of her. Not even the sound of Sheridan making her own breakfast is enough to get her back out of bed.
In the evenings after Winnie retreats to her bedroom, Sheridan doesn’t see her mother again until Winnie begins shuffling around the kitchen making her coffee twelve hours later, the pockets of her robe bulging with kleenex, her eyes swollen.
Sheridan is glad to see her pulling the blinds already tonight. They slap against the window sills with a shush, signalling that she can slip out early in the station wagon. Six weeks ago, in the days just after her father died, her steady boyfriend, Ernie Crenshaw, came to the last day of school with passion marks on his neck that a cheerleader gave him after a baseball game, and now there is little to do on these long summer nights. But most of the time Sheridan tells herself that she is glad to be alone. She doesn’t even want another boy calling her, giving her his oversized ring to wear just so he can unbutton her blouse at the drive-in.