Fannie Flagg - Standing in the Rainbow

It was about five when the get-together was over. Before he left to go back to the airport, Bobby decided to take a walk around town. He had not been home since his mother's funeral all those years ago. As he walked down streets where he had once known every face he passed, there were now strangers who had no idea who he was. They thought this was their town. Streets and houses that he had once known as well as the back of his hand had all changed. He walked along his old paper route but there were strangers in the old Whatley house, strangers sitting on the porch where the Nordstroms used to live. He cut down a few alleys, which years ago had seemed twenty feet wide, and was surprised to see that they were just narrow little footpaths, lined with garbage cans.

He had not remembered so much garbage. He walked by his old house. He and Anna Lee had sold it a few years ago and he was glad to see it looked just about the same, only so much smaller than he remembered.

Everything was much smaller. Downtown was just a block long. It had seemed so much bigger, like an entire city, as he remembered it. He stopped in front of the window of the Morgan Brothers department store and wondered how they had managed to get a winter wonderland in that little window. The barber pole was gone. Almost every business on the street was closed for good, except for the hardware store and his dad's old drugstore. The glass doors to the old Elmwood Theater were chained shut, and a poster of the last movie shown there, in '68, was dusty inside the glass frame. He stood outside on the sidewalk and stared up at it. God, he thought, the hours he had spent inside, the theater filled with screaming children and squeaking seats being flipped up and down. The green tin light sconces up the sides of the walls, a place so dark you would be blind for a few minutes as your eyes adjusted, until you could make out those little white lights on the floor by each row of seats and you would head down the aisle, your feet carpeted by some wonderfully soft, multicolored maroon and pink and green stuff leading you deeper into the theater, closer and closer to the big screen, where life was exciting and full of a million possibilities and dreams. He walked over and peered inside the lobby but could not see much. He did not know if it was because of the Jim Beam but as he stood there he could almost hear the large glass machine popping corn.

He could taste the salty, buttery taste of that popcorn in the greasy red-and-white-striped bags. And even though the diner had closed years ago, he could still remember the tangy taste of mustard and chili on the hot dogs, washed down with bottles of ice-cold Orange Crush. And as he went by the drugstore he could taste all the root-beer floats, lemon and strawberry sodas, the banana splits, and the steaming hot-fudge sundaes he had eaten over the years.

So many sounds and smells. He thought, I must be drunk. He walked back to his car and got in and sat there alone. It was fall and the leaves were just beginning to turn and a thousand new memories flooded his mind.

That time. That place. That feeling. What he would not give to get it, to find it again for a day or even an hour, but he knew it was as impossible as trying to catch smoke in your hand. How could anyone know, when he or she was living it, that they would someday look back with longing, that these would be the good old days? No one tells us, "This is the happiest you will ever be in your life." Why had he wasted so much of it dreaming about going to other places? For the first time, Bobby realized the thing he missed most in the world was gone forever and he sat there and cried like a baby. He wanted his childhood back. He wanted to go home, walk down the hall, and climb into his old bed, and wake up with his future laid out before him on a red carpet. He wanted to go back to when a day seemed to last an eternity and the field behind the house was a vast expanse that led to magic places and the swimming pool was as long and as wide as a lake.

When your best friend was your blood brother and all the girls thought you were cute. He wondered whatever had become of the Bubble Gum King of 1949? That boy who was going to fly planes, jump freighters to the Orient, be a cowboy, and do so many wonderful things.

Nothing too terrible. He had just grown up.

A bad childhood followed by a happy adulthood is one thing, and a good childhood followed by an unhappy adulthood is another. But for Tot Whooten, a miserable childhood had followed her like a black dog right into an equally miserable adulthood. She had been so busy she had not noticed until one day when she looked around and it seemed clear to her that life was not a constant struggle for other people. They seemed to actually enjoy it and look forward to the dawning of a new day.

It had suddenly become obvious to her that if you wake up every morning and it takes you almost an hour to talk yourself into just getting out of bed, something is wrong. Every morning for the past twenty-plus years she had been her own mental cheerleader, doing back flips and chanting, "Be happy you are alive, life is great, rah rah rah… sis boom bah! You will be dead soon enough, don't waste your life away, get up, get up, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, it's a new day," and so on. But this morning the cheerleader inside just sat down with her pompoms and flopped back on the bed beside her, saying, "I'm exhausted… I give up, I can't do it anymore." She was like that Old Man River, tired of living, but feared of dying, and this morning she had realized that she could no longer jcs' keep rolling along.

After a lifetime, day after day, of getting up and taking care of first her brothers and sisters, then her own children, a drunken husband, her parents she was like the elephant, so exhausted from carrying such a heavy load that she just fell down and couldn't get up. Poor Tot knew that not only could she not go on but she did not want to go on. Each of her children had been such a disappointment, and she had not had one good holiday in her life. Every Christmas had been the same. James drunk as a coot by ten in the morning, passed out by noon, and Darlene and Dwayne Jr. constantly fighting over something. Darlene was on her fourth marriage and her daughter Tammie Louise seemed to be taking after her only ten and already crazy about the boys with the motorcycles.

The last time Tot had seen Dwayne Jr. he had come to visit and walked off with her good silver candlesticks to buy more dope with, she guessed, or to hand over to that skinny girlfriend of his, the one with the penciled-in black eyebrows who smoked one cigarette after another.

Where he had found her was a mystery that she was afraid to solve.

And neither one of her children would listen to her. They both snapped, "Well, look who you married." Not that she hadn't tried with Darlene. She had sent her to the Dixie Cahill School of Tap and Twirl, but Dixie had sent her back home with a note.

Dear Tot,

Darlene does not know her right from her left and I am afraid she will never make a dancer. You work too hard for your money to waste it on any more lessons.

Sincerely, Dixie

Then, after years of putting up with James and his drinking, and begging and pleading with him to quit, they found him one day passed out in the back of the garage, sick as a dog from one of his long binges. The doctor finally told him, "If you take one more drink it will kill you." After all the years of Tot threatening him, crying, that one sentence did it.

He sobered up and soon was holding down a good job and the next thing she knew he was sitting in the living room telling her about some woman he had met in AA. He looked her right in the eye and said, "Tot, for the first time in my life I am really in love." There she sat, after having borne his two children, put up with his drinking for over thirty-two years, and he had the nerve to tell her he was in love for the first time in his life. At that moment it occurred to her why people are driven to murder and she made a mental note not to support the death penalty.