LaVyrle Spencer: Small Town Girl

Tess turned to Mary. "Judy wants to know how you're feeling, Momma."

"Tell her I'm just fine. Nurse says my hemoglobin's normal and my lung capacity's good, so everything's set for tomorrow."

Tess repeated the message and Judy said, "Well, give her my love. Tell her I can't come over tonight but I'll be at the hospital before she goes into surgery in the morning. You have to have her there by six o'clock. Her surgery's at six-thirty. Did she tell you that?" Judy's voice snapped out the question.

"Don't worry, she'll be there."

"All right, then. Guess I'll see you there, too."

Mary began pushing off her chair again. "Just a minute, let me talk to her."

"Just a minute, Momma wants to talk to you."

Mary got up with great effort and made her way to the telephone. While she was speaking Tess moved away and stared out the double window beside the kitchen table. It looked out on the side yard, where some overgrown rhododendron bushes divided the property from the Anderson place next door.

"Hey, dear. Listen, thank you for picking up those groceries for me. I'll pay you when I see you… No, no, no, you're not going to pay for my groceries! I'm fixin' to pay you back. I just appreciate your picking them up for me. How did Nicky do at his track meet?… Oh, isn't that wonderful… And did Tricia find a dress for the prom?… Clear down there! Couldn't she find nothing in town?… Well, she'll look darling, I'm sure. You tell her I said to have a real good time and I'll be thinking of her Saturday night… Okay, I will… yeah… yeah, 'bye."

Listening to Mary's end of the conversation, Tess felt light-years removed from her family. They shared a day-to-day flow of relationships and concerns that she had given up when she left home. Phone calls from Houston and Oklahoma City were not the same as groceries dropped off and put in a refrigerator, or grandchildren's lives bumping up against their grandmother's on a daily basis.

On the other hand the scope of their concerns seemed almost trivial to Tess when compared to her own. Had they sung at governors' mansions, or accepted awards on prime-time TV? Had they filled an auditorium with thirty thousand fans whose ticket fees meant the livelihoods of dozens of people, from studio technicians to DJs, stage hands to producers, all the way from L.A. to New York? Had they worried about meeting a deadline for delivering a finished album whose advertising, promo and shipping date had been determined even before all its songs were written?

Prom dresses, track meets and groceries-none of them touched Tess's life anymore. And she wanted it that way.

Mary hung up and said, "I swear… Judy's got her hands full this week. She gave a wedding shower for Rachel on Tuesday, and prom is coming up this Saturday and every girl in school has made an appointment to have her hair fixed, so she's awful busy at the shop. Seems like Nicky's got some sporting event every night after school that she's got to try to run to, then on top of all that, Tricia insisted on drivin' clear over to Cape Girardeau to look for a prom dress. I keep telling Judy that sometimes she should just say no to those kids."

"Like you said no to us?" Tess replied.

Mary looked surprised. "Didn't I say no to you?"

"Couple of times that I can remember. Once when I wanted to get me a padded bra 'cause I had this huge crush on Kelvin Hazlitt, who was two years older than me and didn't know I was alive. I thought if I had some breasts like… well, you know"-Tess made two slings of her hands and bounced them at breast level-"like a pregnant rhinoceros, then Kelvin would ask me out. I'm still blamin' you 'cause he didn't."

Mary chortled and hobbled toward her coffee cup. "Kelvin Hazlitt's been married three times already. Good thing I said no."

"One other time you said no was when I wanted to get a tattoo."

"A tattoo! Lord, I don't remember that."

"Sure you do. Mindy got one, and I thought I needed everything Mindy had. By the way, what do you know about Mindy? I drove by her momma and daddy's house and couldn't help wondering where she is now."

"Mindy's back. She and her husband have an appliance store here, and they've got two or three kids in school. One of 'em's in the same grade as one of Renee's, I think."

While Mary went on talking, Tess put away her peaches in the fridge and dropped her fork into the sink. Through the window above it she had a clear view of Mrs. Kronek's backyard, across the alley. The block was dissected by that unpaved alley, and the two lots were laid out like mirror images of each other, one on each side. Houses, sidewalks, clotheslines, gardens and garages matched as perfectly as spots on a butterfly's wings. The garages were old, and single, and sat snugged up against the alley so tightly that their doors were perpendicular to it. While Tess was looking out, the garage door across the alley began to rise, then a car nosed up the alley, veered off and pulled into Mrs. Kronek's garage. A moment later a tall man in a business suit emerged, carrying a briefcase. He left the garage door open, glanced this way, then went up the sidewalk to Mrs. Kronek's back door.

"Who's that?" Tess asked.

Mary came over and took a look. "Why, that's Kenny Kronek, you remember him."

"Kenny Kronek?" Tess watched him climb the steps and enter the glassed-in back porch. He was tall and lean and dark-haired, and the wind blew his tie sideways as he glanced over this way once more before the door slammed behind him. "You mean that dork who used to get the nosebleeds in school all the time?"

"Tess, shame on you. Kenny Kronek is a nice boy."

"Oh, Momma, that's what you always said, because he was Lucille's boy, and she was your best friend. But you know as well as I do that he was a dork of the highest magnitude. Why, he couldn't walk a chalk line without tripping on it. And all those pimples! I can still smell the acne medication on him."

"Kenny took care of his mother till her dying day, and not every nice person in this world is coordinated, Tess. Besides that, he's a real good father and he takes real good care of the property since Lucille died, so I don't have a complaint in the world about him."

"You mean somebody actually married him?"

"Well, of course somebody married him. A girl he met in college. Stephanie. But they're divorced now."

"No wonder," Tess mumbled under her breath, turning away from the window.

"Tess," her mother scolded with a gentle glower.

"Well, he was always"-Tess's hands stirred the air as if to turn up the right word-" looking at me. You know what I mean?" She faked a shudder. "He was such a creep."

"I never thought so."

"Not you, but every girl in school, that's for sure."

"Oh, Tess, come on."

"Well, it's true. The only class we were ever in together was choir when I was a junior and he was a senior, and remember when we went to Choir Festival in St. Louis? We went on the bus, and Kenny came over and sat with me and I couldn't get rid of him. There he sat, with his pimples and his long, gawky neck with that Adam's apple that looked like a grapefruit in a sock, blushing so hard I thought he was going to have a nosebleed right on the spot. And his hair-mercy, Mother, remember how he used to comb his hair! So we're on this bus trip, and he comes over and sits with me and he tries to hold my hand!"

"Well, what's so wrong with that?"

"Mother, it was the seventies! Half the girls I knew were already sleeping with their boyfriends and Kenny Kronek-the nerd of all nerds-comes over and tries to work up the courage to hold my hand! I swear, all my friends teased me so bad I thought I'd die."

"You kids were so mean to him."

"Mom, there were kids you hung out with and kids you didn't, and Kenny Kronek was definitely in the latter group."