Another Unexpected Perk

WHEN MAGGIE GOT HOME FROM WORK, SHE WALKED IN AND picked up the mail. It was mostly junk and another reminder of the annual Halloween night Boo at the Zoo gala. When Hazel was alive, they usually went. Hazel loved any excuse to dress up in a costume, but now Maggie hardly went anywhere anymore. She had lost touch with most of her old friends, and it had been her own doing. It was easier not to see them. She knew they were probably as disappointed in her as she was in herself, but they were just too nice to say so. Besides, she wanted to have all her good clothes packed in boxes by Friday, so she wouldn’t have anything to wear anyway. She would just send a donation.

She went into the bedroom and was putting on her workout clothes for her Tuesday night aerobics class at the gym when it hit her: What was the point of working out now? Why get in shape now? For what? She hated exercise; and no matter what they said about endorphins, exercise never made her feel better, just glad to get it over with. She now realized she would never have to exercise again. What an unexpected perk that was. No more worry about her upper arms or thighs. If cellulite wanted to form, let it. Have a ball. She then took off her clothes, put on a robe, then gathered the rest of her workout clothes, tennis shoes, sweats, socks, etc., and threw them into a big plastic bag for the Salvation Army and promptly called the gym and canceled her membership, and that felt good.

Unfortunately, as hard as she was trying to forget it, the subject of Crestview was still stuck in the back of her mind. But what could she do? She had no way of finding out if it was even true. Of course, she did know one person who would know and might even be able to help, but she really couldn’t impose on a friendship like that. Oh Lord, she wished she hadn’t gone to the beauty parlor today.

She fixed herself a glass of iced tea and went into the closet and had started pulling out boxes of stuff she had stacked up in the back. She began going through her old papers again when she came across her sixth-grade report card. Her teacher had written across the bottom, “Maggie is a quiet, well-behaved, pleasant child.”

Dear God, how perfectly sad. She had not progressed since the sixth grade. Lately, she had begun to suspect that underneath that pleasant exterior was just another pleasant exterior. She had gotten older, but not wiser. She’d always thought she would be so much smarter by now, but she wasn’t. If anything, she was losing ground.

Then she opened a new box and came across a few notes and cards from Hazel she had saved. Reading them again made her smile.

Sweetie Pie,
Happy Birthday. Get yourself a good piece of jewelry!
H.

Baby Cakes,
Keep on keeping on, you are the best!
H.

Miss Maggie Pie,
Let’s go roaming on Sunday … okay?
H.

Hazel had always been so generous. The first Easter after Maggie’s parents died, when Maggie was so in debt, Hazel had given her a big white chocolate Easter dove and later, when she was eating it, she found five one-hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside. When Maggie called and asked her about it, Hazel feigned surprise. “I have no idea how it got there; it must have been an Easter miracle,” she said.

Every year after that, Hazel gave her a white dove with money inside, and every year, Hazel pretended not to know how the money got there. Now, without Hazel, Easter was just another Sunday.

She pulled out another box and found it was full of old photos. She picked up the only photograph she had of Richard and wondered why she had ever thought he looked just like Eddie Fisher. She must have been delusional. He didn’t look a thing like Eddie Fisher. Had it just been a case of wishful thinking? Had she been so in love with Eddie Fisher just because Debbie Reynolds had married him? Lord, what had she been thinking? That was the problem; she hadn’t been thinking. But after Charles, Richard was the only other man she had been attracted to. To this day, she still wondered how she could have ever done such a thing. Even though she’d been as far away as Dallas, she had still lived in constant terror that someone would find out. The very idea of a former Miss Alabama being involved with a married man was shocking, even to her, and she’d been the one who was doing it! If you had asked anyone, they would have said that Maggie Fortenberry was the last person on earth they would ever suspect of doing something like that, and she would have agreed with them. Having the affair was bad enough, but how could she have done something like that to another woman? She would never forgive herself for that.

In her defense, Richard had not been married when she first started going out with him; he had simply failed to mention that he was engaged to another girl, one his parents (or so he said later) had picked out for him. “It was more of a business merger between two wealthy families than a romance,” he said. Of course, he hadn’t told Maggie about the other girl until Maggie had fallen hopelessly in love with him. And in all fairness, he tried to break the engagement off. He decided to tell his parents he was in love with someone else and wanted to marry her. The night he was to break the news, Maggie sat waiting at her apartment, expecting him to come rushing through the door any minute with his parents’ blessing and an engagement ring. Richard’s father owned department stores across the South, and Richard said that after they were married, they could live in Birmingham. As she sat and waited, she began envisioning their future life together. First the big wedding, then the beautiful home atop Red Mountain, with an entire wing just for her parents. She would furnish the house with rugs, antiques, paintings, and dishes and silver she would pick up at one of the many shops in Mountain Brook or English Village. She imagined all the Junior League luncheons and Miss Alabama reunion parties she would give, all the small dinner-dance parties under the stars on their lovely terrace overlooking the city. She could just see the large but tastefully decorated Christmas tree she would display in the living room window, oil portraits of her children over the fireplace. It was a perfect scenario for her Miss Alabama bio.

Maggie sat waiting for Richard all night, but he never showed up. The next day, he came over, looking terrible. When he’d told his parents he wanted to marry someone else, his father had threatened to disown him, his mother had fallen to the floor in a heap, shrieking, and his sister had collapsed beside their mother, screaming, “You’re killing our parents!”

So, as much as he loved her and wanted to marry her, he just couldn’t upset his family. Tearful goodbye, miserable days, sleepless nights.

A year later, just as she was beginning to get over him, a midnight call came from a desperate Richard. “The marriage has been a terrible mistake,” he said. “I’m in love with you; I can’t go on without you. I have to see you.” After months of his begging and pleading, she finally said, “All right. But promise me you won’t let me wind up in some clichéd relationship where the man promises to leave his wife but never does.”

“Oh, no!” he said. “Never.”

Of course, she should have left sooner. Not that she didn’t try. Three years into the relationship, when she could see it was never going to change, she told him she was leaving; he panicked and told his wife. She said she could care less about his affair, but as far as she was concerned, they had made a business deal, so no divorce. What could Maggie do? He stayed in a miserable marriage, and she stayed with him. It had been humiliating to have to hide and sneak around all those years, but at least she had never been a “kept woman.” She had made it a point to pay her own way. He had tried to buy her things; in the first year, as a birthday gift, he had surprised her with a down payment on a condo, but she had insisted on making the monthly payments and had bought all the furniture. Looking back, she could see now, that entire section of her life had been just like the plot of the movie Backstreet, starring Susan Hayward: the wife doesn’t really love the husband but won’t give him a divorce. When it was going on, her love affair with Richard had seemed like a great tragic romance, but in reality, she had been just another dumb fool involved in just another ordinary, dime-a-dozen extramarital affair. Now, thanks to her wasting all those childbearing years, years she could never get back, her official 2008 Miss Alabama bio now read, “Margaret never married and is presently involved in real estate.” Dear God, how perfectly pitiful.

In retrospect, considering her lack of gardening skills, she wondered if she would have made a good parent. She dearly loved flowers, but her garden had never been a success. Every spring, Hazel had sent over Easter lily bulbs, and every spring, she had planted them; she watered them, she waited; but every year, Easter came and went, with no Easter lilies. She didn’t understand it. Hazel planted the exact same bulbs, and every year, without fail on Easter morning, she had hundreds of lilies blooming all over her yard. Maggie had wanted to give up, but Hazel had insisted she keep trying. She said, “You just wait, Mags, one of these years, they will bloom when you least expect it.” When the cactus she planted died (how can you kill a cactus?), she just gave up and had the entire garden covered over with decorative rocks and stuck a birdbath in the middle. If children didn’t turn out right, you couldn’t just throw rocks over them and go on; you were stuck for life, so maybe things had worked out for the best. Brenda, who volunteered with Planned Parenthood, said each person who did not breed was doing the planet a big favor in the long run. Brenda said it was not going to be nuclear war that destroyed the world, it would be overpopulation; and she was probably right. Still, Maggie couldn’t help but wonder what she had missed. To this day, she couldn’t pass by a children’s clothing store without mentally shopping for the little girl she might have had.