Gwen smiled at her friend, then turned to me. “Mindy’s a wonderful mentor.”
I sent a smile back across the table. “Do you do this for everyone, Mindy?”
Mindy started to answer, but Gwen cut her off. “No.” She paused and at a nod from Mindy continued. “It’s odd, but when we first joined the group we thought-this is so great! We’ll have all these new friends to share our problems with. But it didn’t happen that way.”
Mindy shook her head. “No. Gwen and I have been best friends for years. We met at a good, old-fashioned tent revival, didn’t we, Gwennie?”
Gwennie nodded.
“But we’ve never become close with any of the others,” Mindy continued.
“Why?” I asked.
“I think it’s because we sit in these weekly meetings, throwing up our lives, examining each other’s vomit, so to speak. It’s embarrassing. Once I ran into Toni on the street, and we simply ducked our heads and walked on.”
“Why did you invite me here, then?”
“I think we have a lot in common, Hannah, and I want to help.”
“I appreciate it, Mindy,” I said, tucking the card into my shirt pocket. “But as I said, I’m certain I’ve never been abused. I would know if something like that had ever happened.”
Gwen laid a hand on my shoulder. “Just listen to your Little Girl this week. See what she has to say.”
“I’ll do that,” I promised. But as I left them in the parking lot and climbed into my car, I was confident that the only thing my Little Girl was going to tell me this week was that nice as they were, these ladies were freaking nuts.
chapter 11
The following morning, at o’dark-thirty, as they say in the Navy, I got up and drove Ruth to the airport. Ordinarily I would have parked in the short-term garage, shouldered half her luggage, and, after a pit stop at the Starbucks concession, accompanied her to the departure gate. But I was still PO’d with my sister for bailing out on us. Perhaps a little bit jealous, too. She was flying to Paradise, after all, leaving me in… well, the word “hell” came to mind.
Even though she was going halfway around the world, the embrace I gave Ruth was perfunctory. My heart thawed sufficiently to help pile a purse, which was almost as large as her small rolling carry-on, on top of her big suitcase. She smiled, waved, turned, and dragged the precariously teetering tower of bags away. “Bon voyage,” I called after her. I stood by the open trunk of my car and watched until she and her luggage had been swallowed by the automatic doors.
On my way home, I remembered to stop at Hecht’s in the Annapolis Mall to purchase two special bras that hooked in the front, something my plastic surgeon had recommended. At home, I scratched “bras, two” off my To Do list. I brewed a pot of tea and let it steep while I considered the other items on the list. Defrosting the ancient basement refrigerator could definitely wait; there was hamburger in there left over from midshipmen cookouts in 1997. And just the thought of cleaning the hall closet made me sneeze. I laid the list aside.
I decided to write to my Little Girl while last night’s session was still fresh in my mind. I had found a suitable notebook at the mall and nearly bought it, before remembering that Emily had given me a notebook and a matching pen for Christmas several years ago, back when I’d been doing nonstop complaining about my boss and the other oddballs I had to work with at Whitworth & Sullivan. Emily thought it would help if I kept a diary. I recalled stashing the notebook in the living room desk, but when I looked, it wasn’t there. Funny, I could see the darn thing in my mind’s eye almost everyplace in the house. After a thirty-minute scavenger hunt that sent me wandering from my cookbook shelf to the basement office to my bedside table, I finally found it, under some sheet music in the piano bench.
“It needs to be pretty,” Mindy had said. Well, this certainly qualified. Emily’s gift was bound in pink-and-blue flowered cloth, with lace trim printed on. I took the notebook to the kitchen, poured my tea into a large mug, and sat at the kitchen table with the notebook lying open and accusingly blank in front of me.
What the heck was I going to say?
Hello, Little Girl, I finally wrote. How are you?
Fine, she said. But a little hungry.
My Little Girl wanted comfort food. Macaroni and cheese.
Hannah, you are not getting into the proper spirit of things. I tried again, casting my mind back to my childhood. How far back could I remember?
I slouched in my chair, thinking. San Diego, of course, when I was ten. Before that, Italy. Italy remained in my mind like an impressionistic painting, a kaleidoscope of happy, sunny images. The mountains, the sea. Marita, the maid, young and giggly, not many years older than Ruth and me. Her handsome boyfriend, Paolo, who won our hearts with his silly acrobatic tricks. Before Italy had been Pensacola and that wretched boy next door who always called me Hannah Banana. And before Pensacola? I sucked on the end of my pen, pushing the retractable button in and out with the tip of my tongue. Norfolk was a blur, yet some memories bobbed to the surface, clear and sharp. I remembered building a fort with Ruth in the woods behind our house. I remembered sending a dead raccoon out to sea on a makeshift raft, like a Viking funeral.
I shut my eyes. An image materialized behind my lids. An image of a backyard wading pool with me lying in it, my hair floating around my head, my eyes staring up into the bright summer sky. I was swishing my head back and forth, feeling the sticks and lumpy lawn under the thin vinyl bottom of the pool. Ruth on a nearby swing, laughing, her legs, ankles crossed, rhythmically slicing across the trees that framed my view of the Virginia sky. Daddy was nowhere in the picture. I knew he’d been at sea.
I remembered our pets. My mother favored orange tabby cats-Marmalade and Sunshine-and we’d once had a big, galumphing sheepdog named Snowshoes. Had I had a favorite doll? I didn’t remember. Hmmph. If I couldn’t remember my own doll, I doubted I could remember Georgina’s. Besides, I never liked Cabbage Patch dolls; never understood the attraction of those little scrunched-up, withered-apple faces. Emily had been six when the Cabbage Patch mania swept the country. She called me the meanest mother in the world when I refused to scratch and claw my way through the lines at Toys “R” Us or buy a ticket on the Concorde and fly to Europe to buy her a Cabbage Patch Kid like everyone else’s mother.
I sat up straight. Wait a minute! That had been the Christmas of 1983! Georgina had to have been, what, in her twenties? Cabbage Patch Kids had been fairly new then. Georgina couldn’t have owned one much before then! Nobody could.
I padded downstairs to the computer and turned it on, fiddling with the mouse while I waited impatiently for Windows to load. When the desktop appeared, I clicked on the AOL icon and went to Lycos.com on the Internet. “Cabbage Patch Kids,” I typed on the query line.
Almost three thousand hits. People all over the world were collecting the little tykes. One redheaded baby boy doll had been auctioned for three hundred dollars. Holy cow! Seeing stuff like that made me want to turn out the attic. There might be a lucrative market for those old fondue pots and lamps made out of wine bottles that I couldn’t bear to throw away.
I paged down, clicking on various sites maintained by avid Cabbage Patch Kid collectors. Just as I thought. Even if Georgina had owned an original Xavier Roberts doll shipped straight from Babyland General Hospital in Cleveland, Georgia, instead of a later doll by Coleco, Hasbro, or Mattel, she was still way too old. Cabbage Patch Kids had been invented in 1978, when Georgina was twenty.