Mad Girls In Love (18 page)

In mid-June Dorothy McDougal was certified sane by the State of Tennessee. “Well, this is the day,” the psychiatric nurse said. “You are finally getting to go home. Aren't you excited?”

“Nobody told me.” Dorothy threw up her hands in disgust.

“You knew,” said the nurse.

“I didn't either,” Dorothy said, starting to get huffy.

“You've known for weeks,” said the nurse. “If you're not ready to go, you can always stay another night.”

Dorothy really had forgotten, but she was in no mood to argue. She hurried over to the phone booth to call her son, but he wasn't home. Neither was Bitsy or Clancy Jane. So she took a Greyhound bus back to Crystal Falls. A big mistake. The other passengers were scary-looking, and she was afraid to make eye contact. She caught a glimpse of herself in the window as she ran her fingers through her hair. Lord, she looked awful. Wrinkled and haggard, with bags under her eyes. Worse, every hair on her head was white and frizzed. Why, she was a dead ringer for Albert Einstein. And she was only forty-two years old. It wasn't fair to be young and look elderly. She brushed the frayed curls from her face. She used to be blond and pretty, a little on the heavy side, but stylish and pleasing to the eye. Once she got home, the first thing she planned to do was make an appointment at the Utopian.

Gazing out the bus window, she started to feel sorry for herself. If her family cared, they'd have been home when she'd called. The bus station was in a dangerous part of town. But that wasn't a healthy way to look at life. You had to overlook thoughtless behavior. “I don't forgive and forget,” she had told her latest therapist, a bald-headed man with little John Lennon glasses. Underneath his starched white jacket, he wore normal clothes, Arrow shirts and Haggar slacks. “Do you want to be long-suffering and miserable, or lighthearted and compassionate?” the doctor asked, forming a steeple with his index fingers.

“Why can't I be long-suffering and lighthearted?” she'd asked, wondering if he was really a Pentacostal preacher.

“You can.” He nodded. “But then I'd have to keep you here at Central State.”

She'd tried her best to forgive, but it was the hardest damn thing she'd ever done. Breathing underwater would be easier than excusing the ones who'd put her here. And it wasn't just her family, either. Oh, she knew what people in Crystal Falls thought. If crazy old Dorothy ever gets released, she'll open a can of worms. Night crawlers, her daddy used to call them. They made good bait.

At the bus station, she bought an ice-cold grape soda and took a dainty sip. The man at the cash register was complaining about the weather. He said it hadn't rained in twelve days, and the five-day forecast promised nothing but hot, dry days. “I ain't seen you around here,” the man told Dorothy. “Are you new?”

She had been ready for this; she'd planned to tell everyone that she'd been to a fat farm, only she wouldn't call it that, no indeed, she'd call it a rejuvenation spa. “Yes,” she told the man. “I'm brand-new.”

She walked outside, onto the bus station porch, and tried to get orientated. The streets in Crystal Falls had been named for the continents. A green metal sign said Africa Road. It was the old part of town.

Dorothy picked up her suitcase and began walking. She passed by Reggie Swain's junk lot, which was filled with wrecked cars. She saw a blue Mustang with Queen Anne's lace growing out of the hood, and she wondered if it was her daughter's. Bitsy had told her last September how she'd gotten hiccups and then totaled her car; with Violet in it, too. Dorothy had cringed when she'd heard about her niece's injuries, but the girl possessed those resilient Jones' genes, and she'd recovered with only a few scars.

Dorothy pressed on, her shoes scuffing in the gravel. She felt as if she were traveling into the deep heart of the Congo. The shade trees closed in around her, full of shrieking monkeys—hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. (But who really knew?)
In the valley of the shadow of evil
sprang to mind. Whoever wrote that wasn't joking, Dorothy thought. Why, they probably had lived in Crystal Falls. She wished that her house was located near Europe Street. Well, you couldn't have everything.

When she reached the intersection of Africa and Asia, she began to worry. Here, the shotgun houses began, with crooked picket fences and weedy gardens. The lack of rain had turned everything crisp and yellow. Several redneck teens loitered at the stop sign. They looked dangerous. Dorothy picked up her pace, moving through sunlight and shade. To scare away the teens, or any other potential muggers, she began singing hymns.
This is my sto-ry, this is my song, Praising my Savior all the day long.
She stepped over cracks in the sidewalk,
step on a crack, break your mother's back
. Well, her mother dear was already dead—Miss Gussie had been eaten up with leukemia and no one, not even Clancy Jane, had bothered to tell Dorothy. Miss Gussie had died before she could make amends.
I won't let that happen to me and Bitsy
, she thought.

She stopped walking, set down her suitcase, and wiped her face against her dress. It was boiling hot, even in the shade, and the crickets shrilled frantically from the trees. She puffed hard, sucking in the humid air. She hoped she wasn't walking her way into a heart attack. At the asylum, the doctor had said that exercise was good for crazy people—not in those words, of course, but Dorothy knew what he meant. Personally, she thought physical exertion was dangerous. She hoped her refrigerator wasn't empty, because she could use an ice-cold Coca-Cola, and maybe a can of mixed nuts, too. Over to the left, she saw hand-painted signs that said
NO DUMPING
! and
MUSH MELLONS
4
SAIL
. She reached for her suitcase and turned down a paved road that led up to the Square. Through the haze, she could see the faint outline of the courthouse and the statue of a fallen Civil War hero.

When she reached the Square, she passed a gray-headed man. Before she could stop herself, she winked three times. The man cringed, then sped off. His shoes clapped against the sidewalk. Dorothy turned around, the Nehi sloshing in the bottle.

“I wasn't
flirting
with you!” she hollered. “I've got a tic! And not the kind that bites!”

The man broke into a run, disappearing around a magnolia tree.

“Cracker,” Dorothy said and heaved a sigh. She didn't know that gray-headed man, and even if she did, she wouldn't have winked on purpose. Her face had a mind of its own. She tried to stop it, but the harder she tried, the worse the winks got. At Central State, the doctors had given her some Psycho-Drano that ate away the nerves in her face. Unhappy with the results, the doctors had prescribed a different pill, but she kept on winking. “It may lessen in time,” the psychiatrist had told her. “Then again, it might be permanent.”

“I'll wink like this forever?” she'd asked, horrified.

“It's possible,” the doctor admitted, “but it's a small price to pay for sanity.”

Dorothy called it her winky-tinky smirk, but it manifested itself only when she was tired or jittery. As she walked around the Square, she winked three more times—the tics usually came in waves. When she finally turned down Dixie Avenue, her muscles began to relax. She lived four blocks from here. After being cooped up with lunatics, she longed for the privacy of her own house, where she could twitch and wink and watch her soap operas in solitude.

I am a lone woman
, Dorothy thought. Alone and lonely. She was no longer Mrs. Albert McDougal. After he'd married his cashier—a winkless lady, no doubt—they'd moved away. Dorothy pictured her former husband, good old Albert with his sagging stomach and graying temples. Damn his soul, she'd been a good wife. But even in the Bible wives weren't appreciated. She often wondered how Lot had described his wife. “What a terrific woman. Why, she's a pillar in the community.”

Every night at five-thirty sharp, Dorothy would set the kitchen table with her rooster dishes. She set out pork chops, mashed potatoes, lima beans, corn bread, and a chess pie for dessert. Oh, she could cook like nobody's business. She was a catch for any man. On Sunday nights she served Albert's favorite dish, hoppin' John, with a big pan of corn bread, and lots of sweet tea. She had kept a pretty house, a little messy in the closets, but you had to live. It just wasn't
fair
to lose so much, Dorothy thought. But she was beginning to understand that fair had never been part of the bargain. Life was tough, and you just had to hang with it.

Dorothy couldn't wait to see her avocado-green kitchen. She and Albert had built the house in 1951. It was a two-story red brick, ugly but interesting, with Gothic arches and butter-colored shutters. The house was next door to her mother's, who had died the very same day that Dorothy allegedly jumped off the roof of Albert's dime store. Well, you couldn't believe everything you heard.

By the time she reached her block, her dress was stuck to her skin, as if the cloth had melted.

She took one last sip of the Nehi, then squatted down and hid the bottle in an azalea. Stifling a burp, she walked along the sidewalk. At first everything looked strange yet familiar, and she kept blinking. At the end of the road, she saw a purple clapboard house with pale lilac shutters. Except for those shutters, which had witchy little half moons on them, and the color, of course, the house, her childhood home, looked exactly the same. In the old days her mother used to hire Preacher to repaint the house every few years. She used to say that she planned to leave orders in her will to paint it a different color every summer. Well, the poor thing hadn't been in her right mind when she'd died.

Dorothy hadn't been present at the reading of the will, but Albert had told her all about it. Her mother had left the family homestead to Clancy Jane and Violet. If only Miss Gussie had split it right down the middle, half for Dorothy, half for Clancy Jane. That was the fair thing to do. But she hadn't done it, for whatever reason, and the wishes of the dead had to be respected, dammit.

Shifting her eyes to the left, Dorothy started toward her old house, but it, too, had vanished. In its place was a squat building shaped like a cookie jar. The red bricks had been painted over with bright pink paint. And bottle-green shutters framed every single window. In the flower beds were plastic roses and sweet peas. Her eyes began to twitch, making it difficult to see. Then she realized this
was
her house. While she'd been locked up in the asylum, someone had gone around town painting houses, making it impossible for recently released mental patients to find their way home.

Why had they gone and painted her house pink? It looked like Pepto-Bismol. If someone was driving down Dixie and got heartburn, all they would have to do was stop at this house and lick it. After she'd gone away to Central State, Albert had mumbled something about Mack moving into her old house. He hadn't gone into detail, and she hadn't asked, but Dorothy knew that awful bleached-blond hussy was now married to her son. They had been dating long before Dorothy went bonkers. What was that girl's name—Darlene? Earlene?
Shar
lene? Something with a
lene
in it. Dorothy could just see them laying up in her house, rolling on the sheets she'd hand-embroidered, taking bubble baths in her very own tub and not even bothering to scrub off the ring.

Now, she stared at the house, praying that her son hadn't changed anything inside. Surely Mack hadn't repainted the master bedroom, where she and Albert had kissed good night for the entire length of their marriage. They always kissed the very second that Channel 2 news came on, with Larry Munsen, the weather, and sports (nothing much ever happened in Nashville). Oh Lord, her house had felt huge after everyone had left—first Albert, then Mack went to Vietnam, and Bitsy got married. No sooner had she gotten used to living alone that she went and had a nervous breakdown.

But it wasn't my damn fault!
she thought.
My loving family stuck me in a mental hospital in November of 1971, and then forgot I existed.
Dorothy shut her eyes a minute, swooning in the hot sun. She walked crablike up the driveway. Mack was her darling, even if he had poor taste in women; but a Pepto-Bismol house was more than she could bear. It would draw attention to itself, and Dorothy did not like attention. She knew how people in Crystal Falls loved to put labels onto everything: This one was a cheapskate, that one was crazy, and
that
one lived in the Pink House.

As she stared, the lemon-yellow door opened, and a skinny bleached blonde stuck out her head. “Good God,” said the blonde, shielding her eyes with one hand. “Mrs. McDougal? I don't believe my eyes!”

“Who are you?” Dorothy said. Well, this was a bald-faced lie; she knew exactly who this tart/hussy was, she drove a school bus, but Dorothy couldn't see it anywhere. Unless it was parked in back of the house.

“Don't you remember me?” The hussy was wearing white go-go boots, a red miniskirt with marabou trim, and a silver sequined halter top. And it was the middle of the day.

“Are you the maid?” Dorothy asked in an innocent voice.

“No, I'm Earlene. Mack's wife? Your daughter-in-law?”

“The last daughter-in-law I remember is Sloopy.” Dorothy fixed the girl with an innocent look. Twice now, Mack had married very strange women. It was all so very unsatisfactory. She couldn't choose her children's spouses, but she damn sure didn't have to like them—or acknowledge them, for that matter. Earlene had an unsavory reputation, but it hadn't made one speck of difference to Mack. “She's electrified,” he'd told his mother. “So was the bride of Frankenstein,” Dorothy had replied.

“Mack divorced Sloopy a
long
time ago,” Earlene said. “She and Christopher moved to California. Her sister lives there.”