Fannie Flagg: I Still Dream About You

She looked up at the clock. It was already a quarter after eight. She had to get that ice cream back in the freezer by nine, and if that boy working behind the counter didn’t hurry up, she would have to leave before she got her cone. She just hoped Robbie wouldn’t come home early and decide to have some ice cream tonight of all nights. Chances were she wouldn’t, but with the way Brenda’s luck was running lately, you never knew. The minute the boy started ringing the bell on the counter, Brenda knew, she should have turned around and left right then and there. He was calling someone from the back to come out and help him, because the woman in front of her had just ordered ice cream for the entire sixth-grade girls soccer team, who had won their game and were outside waiting in a van. Wouldn’t you know it? Just when she was in a hurry. By the time Brenda finally did get up to the counter, the machine was malfunctioning, and she had to wait another ten minutes.

Later, as Brenda drove into the garage, she saw Robbie’s car. Thank heavens she had hedged her bet and had the sack with the milk, cereal, and bananas with her so she could tell Robbie that’s why she had gone to the store. She put the pint of ice cream in her purse. She would stick that in the freezer later, after Robbie went to bed. When Brenda walked into the kitchen carrying the sack, Robbie, who was still in her scrubs, looked surprised.

“Hey, where did you go?”

“Oh, we needed a few things from the store, so I just ran out and picked them up.”

“Oh, what did we need?”

“Bananas, milk, and Cheerios,” she said as she put the things back where they had been earlier this evening.

Robbie looked puzzled. “That’s weird. I thought we had a bunch of bananas this morning. Didn’t we?”

Brenda didn’t want to be caught in a lie, and she remembered something Hazel had once said: “If you don’t want to answer a question, change the subject with great enthusiasm.” So, she immediately turned to Robbie and said with great enthusiasm, “Guess what? The Whirling Dervishes are coming to Birmingham!”

“The who?” asked Robbie.

Brenda quickly grabbed the paper and showed her the article, and to her relief, Robbie forgot about the bananas. God bless Hazel, gone five years and still saving the day.

A LTHOUGH MAGGIE WAS CERTAIN SHE HAD MADE THE RIGHT DECISION, she still wondered, Why today? Something must have triggered it. She thought back on a conversation she had had with Ethel earlier that afternoon.

WHEN MAGGIE HAD come back from lunch, Ethel had said, “God, I miss Hazel. After all this time, I still can’t believe she’s gone.”

Maggie agreed. “Me neither… every Sunday, I still expect her to call me up and say, ‘Hey, Mags, let’s go roaming.’ She loved to drive that big old car of hers all over town, doing things, and enjoying every minute of it.”

“Oh yes, no matter what she drug us through, she always had a good time.”

Maggie said, “Ethel, you knew her better than anybody. Do you think she ever got tired of being so cheerful and always on the go?”

Ethel shook her head. “Not for one minute …we got tired, but she didn’t, and it was exhausting. Remember all the things she got us into? The softball team, all the parties, the Easter egg hunts, the crazy trips. That woman kept me so busy, I had to get my divorce over the phone.”

“How did she keep it up, I wonder?”

“I don’t know, but she wore me out trying to keep up with her. We got older, but she didn’t. Do you remember when she made us all take hula lessons and march in the Do Dah Parade? My hips were sore for two months.”

Maggie had to be careful how she worded her next question. Ethel was very sensitive about her age. “Ethel… what’s the worst part of… uh… getting older… for you?”

“The worst part?”

“Yes.”

Ethel thought for a moment. “Oh, I guess the older you get, the less you have to look forward to. When you’re young, you look forward to growing up and getting married and having children, and then you look forward to having them move out.”

MAGGIE SUDDENLY REALIZED that was it. Ethel had hit the nail right on the head. She had absolutely nothing to look forward to. Other than missing spring (the flowers and the dogwoods in Mountain Brook were so beautiful) and fall, when the leaves turned such pretty colors, she didn’t have a single reason to hang around.

Maggie looked down at her watch. It was already nine-fifteen. She figured she’d better eat something or else she would get a headache. She still had to work tomorrow, so she got up and went into the kitchen and pulled out a Stouffer’s frozen dinner, baked chicken breast, mashed potatoes, and vegetables, and stuck it in the oven. She never fixed anything at home except frozen dinners or pop-up waffles because (A) she didn’t want to have to clean up the kitchen and (B) although she could set a beautiful table and fold a napkin in over forty-eight different and interesting ways, she had never been very good at cooking. Not that she hadn’t tried. The first year she went to work for Hazel, she had attempted a small dinner party for the girls in the office, but the yeast rolls she served had not been fully cooked, and after the girls went home, the yeast in the rolls continued to rise, and later that night, all of them wound up at the University Hospital emergency room, except for Brenda, who felt fine. After that, Maggie just stopped cooking all together. But like everything, you paid a price. All the sodium in the frozen dinners made her hands swell.

As she sat and waited for her dinner to heat up, she picked up the New Age magazine Dottie had left for her with a Post-it note that said, “Great Stuff!!” She leafed through, but all she saw were pages of advertisements for yoga mats, meditation candles, and numerous self-help books: The Wisdom of Menopause, The Orgasmic Diet, How to Nurture Your Body and Your Libido at the Same Time , and one entitled 100 Secret Sexual Positions from Ancient Cultures Around the World . Good Lord. She didn’t want to hurt Dottie’s feelings, but this was not anything she was interested in, certainly not now, so she threw it in the trash can and picked up today’s newspaper.

Just as Brenda had said, on the front page of the Entertainment section was a large photograph of the Whirling Dervishes twirling in circles, and they looked exactly like something right out of a movie… but then, to Maggie, almost everybody did . Richard had looked exactly like Eddie Fisher.

When she first met Ethel Clipp, their office manager, with her thin purple hair that stood straight up on her head and her large purple-tinted glasses that made her eyes look twice as large, she had looked to Maggie exactly like an alien bug right out of a bad science fiction movie. In 1976, Ethel had had her colors done by a colorist out at the mall and had been told her best colors were purple and lavender, and she had worn nothing else since. Hazel had nicknamed Ethel “the Purple Flash.” She called Brenda “Thunderfoot,” because she said she could always hear her coming, and Maggie was “Magic City Girl.”

After Maggie finished dinner, she cleaned up after herself, put the glass and silverware in the dishwasher, and turned it on. She then went to the bedroom, undressed, took a hot bath, brushed her teeth, got into bed, and clicked on the television set to watch the news. As usual, it was all about the upcoming presidential election. Lately, people just said the ugliest things about one another. Then something dawned on her. She wouldn’t be here on November 4 to find out who won. So why watch? The news just upset her. It was always bad. And she had never cared much for politics. She wasn’t like Brenda, who was very involved in politics, or Ethel who was addicted to twenty-four-hour news. Ethel wanted all the news all the time. Not Maggie. She only watched so she could carry on a halfway intelligent conversation with her clients. But now, the idea of not having to watch seemed wonderful. So, she turned it off. And if anybody did ask her something in the next few days, she would just say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”