Let her kids get upset. Let the shop go to hell in a handbasket. Let the church committees wonder about why she wasn't there. Let the world go to hell, she no longer cared.
She made herself some Campbell's tomato soup, drank a Coke, ate some crackers and a piece of cheese, and went back to bed. The dishes were still on the table. She didn't care. She dreamed of that one day, that one afternoon when she was seven. It had been a warm day and her schoolmate had invited her to a birthday party and she had been allowed to go. For one afternoon in 1928 she had been allowed to go to a party alone. Not having to take her brother or sister, not having to do anything but attend a party. They had played games and eaten ice cream and afterward she had been allowed to run in the large meadow behind the girl's house and run without her mother yelling at her to be careful, without having to watch out for her brothers and sisters. She had been happy for a while, for one afternoon when she was seven.
She wondered what her life would have been like if she had not had that one hour that one day.
Everybody in town was concerned about Tot Whooten. Norma was speaking to Aunt Elner on the phone about it. "I am just worried sick. I drove by and there was poor Tot out in the back of her house, wandering around in the fields all by herself like she didn't have a thing in the world to do. You know, she's quit the church and she told Darlene not to drop the kids by anymore. She's stopped going to Bingo altogether.
Her yard is a mess and you know that's not right. She never let her yard get out of hand. She always kept her lawn cut and those hedges neat and trimmed. Why, you could set a place setting on her hedges and serve dinner on them. That's how right and neat she kept them."
"Why would you want to eat on a hedge?" asked Aunt Elner.
"That's not the point; I am afraid she's flipped. I always thought I would be the first one in town to flip out and it's turned out to be Poor Tot. Poor Tot, she has just gone around the bend. Just like her mother did."
Aunt Elner said, "I don't think so, Norma. I went over to see her the other day and she made perfect sense to me. She's tired, Norma, that's all that's the matter with her, and she'll either come around or she won't."
"Well, that's a comfort, Aunt Elner. What do we tell Darlene and Dwayne Junioryour mother is either going to get back to her old self or she isn't?"
"That's the truth, Norma. What else can you say?"
Norma thought about it. "I guess you're right. We can't do it for her, she's going to have to pull herself out of this one all we can do is be there for her when and if she needs us. Isn't that right?"
"As far as I can see, that's the only thing we can do," said Aunt Elner.
But other people in town took a different view. Mrs. Mildred Noblitt, a thin woman with a tic in her right eye, marched over to Tot's house and banged on the door so long Tot finally had to open it and let her in. Tot was in her aqua chenille bathrobe with the pink flamingo on the back, and as Mrs. Noblitt marched in the house and sat down in the living room, she said, "Tot, are you aware that it is already ten o'clock and you are still in your robe?"
"Yes," said Tot.
"Tot, everybody is very concerned about you. You are just going to have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get back into life and put your phone back on the hook. You can't just sit around in your house all day with the shades down and your yard going to pot. What are people going to think?"
"I don't care."
"Well, you have to care what people think. Your yard has always been just lovely you don't want it to just go wild, do you?"
"It can if it wants to," said Tot.
"Oh, Tot, now that's not like you, you know you're not like that."
"No, I don't. I haven't any idea of what I'm like."
"Well, I can tell you, you are a neat person. That's why we are all so worried about you; you're not being yourself."
"How do you know?" Tot said.
"Because you have been the example of grace under pressure, a figure to be admired. You don't want all of us to be disappointed, do you? We all look to you when anything bad happens, we always say, Yes, but look at what Poor Tot has had to put up with, and it always made us feel better… do better. If you fall apart, who can we look up to? "
Tot shrugged.
"All right, I'm going to tell you something that you don't know. Do you know what people call you? They call you a Christian martyr. If I've heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times: Poor Tot, she's just a Christian martyr. There now, doesn't that make you feel good to know how highly people regard you?"
Tot considered this for a moment. "Not really," she said.
"Well, the point is. Oh, I don't know what the point is, except life is not worth living if you're not going to enjoy it."
Tot looked at her. "Bingo!"
"Listen, Tot, I just don't like the way you are sounding, and you've let all your ferns die. If you don't snap out of it, the next thing I know you'll be off on a killing spree."
A slight smile began to form on the right side of Tot's mouth, which made Mrs. Noblitt's tic act up.
Mrs. Noblitt stood erect. "All I can say is this, and then I am leaving." After searching around for a moment for something to say that might leave an impact, she said, "Pretty is as pretty does," and marched out the door.
Verbena was the next to take a shot at trying to help. "You know, Tot," she said, "whenever I get to feeling sorry for myself I always think of that poor little Frieda Pushnik."
"Who?"
"Frieda Pushnik, she was born without any arms or legs. I saw her in 1933 at the World's Fair in Chicago. They brought her out on a big red velvet pillow and here she was nothing more than just a stump with a head and she was just as cheerful and pleasant as can be. She just chatted away like a little magpie. She said she could thread a needle and told us all about how she had won a national award for penmanship. I bought an autographed photo of her that I still have today and she signed it right there before my very eyes. She held the pen between her chin and her shoulder and she signed it Good luck, Frieda Pushnik. I still have it. Whenever I get to feeling sorry for myself I take that picture out and look at it and it makes me feel ashamed to ever be upset over anything. I can tell you that with all her missing parts little Frieda Pushnik never felt sorry for herself. Never complained and she certainly had good reason to if anybody in this world did. Just imagine, Tot, if you had to be carried around on a pillow night and day, how would you feel?"
Tot answered truthfully, "Sounds good to me."
Verbena had failed. Because Tot was her closest neighbor she felt that she and she alone had a civic duty to single-handedly pull Tot back out of this malaise, or whatever it was, and two days later, after much soul searching she made the supreme sacrifice and slipped her prized, personally autographed photo of Frieda Pushnik under Tot's kitchen door. But even Frieda Pushnik's smiling face, with a ribbon in her hair, sitting on a velvet pillow, did not help poor Tot. She put the picture facedown under her one good set of silverware in the dining room and forgot about it.
Then, as these things sometimes happen, one Monday morning Tot woke up and looked out the window and watched Verbena out in the backyard hanging her laundry on the clothesline when all of a sudden what looked like a bumblebee flew up Verbena's dress. Verbena immediately dropped her basket and whooped and high-stepped around the yard, holding her dress up in the air as if she were dancing a jig, all the time hollering "Whooo! Whooo!"
After a moment, when the bee had finally found its way out of her skirt and flown away to safety, Verbena calmed down, regained her composure, and looked around to see if anyone had witnessed the event. Satisfied that nobody had seen her flying around her yard in broad daylight with her dress over her head, she went over and finished her task. But in the next house Tot was laughing so hard that tears ran down her cheeks and she had to put a pillow over her face to keep Verbena from hearing her. She had never laughed so hard in all her life and she couldn't stop. All alone in the bed, the minute she would start to quiet down, the vision of Verbena would reappear and she would be screaming with another fit of laughter. She laughed so hard and for so long that she could not get out of bed and finally went back to sleep, but the moment she opened her eyes she thought of Verbena doing the jig and had another laughing fit.
Later she had to get up to go to the bathroom and when she looked at herself in the mirror that started her laughing again. She laughed so hard all that day that her upper plate came loose, and even that made her laugh. The next day she woke up feeling sore all over but very calm and rested, and for the first time in months she felt like she might get up for good.
After all of Verbena's trying so hard to pep her up, Verbena never knew that a bee up her dress had finally done the trick. From that day forward, Verbena was convinced that it had been little Frieda Pushnik who had done the trick and Tot never told her any different.
Soon everyone in town knew Tot was going to recover from her terrible ordeal. For the first time in weeks she pulled up the shades in the living room, and week after week the shades came up room by room until one day Tot got dressed and went back to work with a new outlook on life. "Norma," she said, "I've been on the verge of a nervous breakdown all my life and now that I've had it, I feel a whole lot better."
Macky and Norma's daughter, Linda, had married but continued to work to help put her husband through law school, a fact that irritated Macky to no end. "If he can't support a wife on his salary, then he shouldn't have gotten married," he said. However, at the time Norma thought it was a good idea for Linda not to quit her job. "I wish I had a job," Norma added wistfully.
Several months later, when the Pancake House opened, Norma applied for the job of hostess and, to her surprise, was hired but her mother, Ida, now an imposing dowager of seventy-five who wore six strands of pearls around her ample bosom and carried a black cane, talked her out of it.
"Norma, for God's sake, how would it look to people? The daughter of the president of the National Federated Women's Club of Missouri being a hostess at a pancake house. If you will not think of your own social position, then think of mine!" And so Norma continued to be, as she put it, just a housewife. Her hopes of becoming a grandmother had been dashed when Linda had had a miscarriage in her third month. After the miscarriage, Linda and her husband had begun having problems. Linda had wanted to try again but he was against it until he finished school.
Macky said it was because the husband was afraid he would lose his meal ticket but as Norma pointed out, he'd never liked him in the first place.
One afternoon a year later, when Macky walked in the door from work, Norma met him in the living room. "Linda called and said she is calling back at six because she wants to talk to both of us." They looked at each other wide-eyed. "What do you think?"
Macky said, "I hope it's what we think."
"Do you think it could be?" Norma asked.
"I'm hoping it is."