Free Tending to Virginia by Jill McCorkle Page A

for a Halloween suit.
    “I started painting a lot when I was depressed,” Ginny Sue had said, like Cindy is depressed. Of course, that was before Ginny Sue knew that Mark had knocked up his first wife. “That’s what you need, Cindy. Something that you do for yourself, something that you do for yourself and enjoy.” Ha! A lot of good all that therapy is doing Miss Ginny Sue now.
    “Yeah, well I’d like to fly to Greece and buy a string bikini,” Cindy said, as if she has the time between a nine-to-five and a girl-crazy adolescent and a slut sister. And why does Ginny Sue think that Cindy doesn’t have something she does that is as good as coloringpictures and messing in wheat paste? Cindy has ideas; she has the idea that she could write some books, not for godssakes the kind Ginny Sue reads, but the kind you hear about, the kind you see in every grocery store and the lobby of Ramada. She’s got all the titles already figured out, a medical series: How An Anesthesiologist Put Me To Bed, The Virgin Meets a Surgeon, and The Series of G.I.s That Led to My GI Series. She could do it, make big bucks, get up from her VDT (Video Display Terminal) and say she’s going to lunch and never come back just like she did at the loan office of Southern Trust one day during the second divorce. She could write country songs, too.
    Ginny Sue ought to do that kind of thinking for a change instead of trying to figure out whose eyes she’s got, whose nose? She’ll sit for hours and ask Emily and Lena questions like that, or questions about people who have been dead so long that there’s probably a motel built over their graves. Both of those women are senile as hell but Ginny Sue believes whatever they tell her. Ginny Sue will drive her baby crazy, twisting its head all around to see whose neck it has or whose ears. It has always reminded Cindy of that story she heard in school once about that god man who had all kinds of nekked women, little tiny nekked women which have a name that Cindy can’t think of, chasing after his bod but he wouldn’t touch one with a ten-foot pole because he was so taken with himself that he just sat and stared at himself in some water until his mind was completely eaten up. Now that’s disease of the mind. Ginny Sue is not in love with herself ; she’s in love with everybody that’s lived, died, and been related since Columbus.
    Cindy told Ginny Sue the god man story once, hoping to make a point. She told it good, too, as good as old Miss Harris had told it in P.E. class so that the girls wouldn’t sit and stare at themselves and boobs, whatever, while dressing out. “Vanity is the root of all evil,” Miss Harris said, but of course she had nothing to be vain about; Cindy’s mama would probably say the same thing.
    “That’s because she’s never had a root,” Cindy had whispered to Constance Ann. They shared a gym locker. They laughed so hard that Cindy popped a snap on her gym suit and when Miss Harrissaid, “what’s so funny?” for the third time, Cindy spoke up and said, “I said that I’d rather have lots of little nekked men chasing me through the woods than to stare at myself.” Miss Harris didn’t laugh but everybody else did. School was fun that way; she didn’t learn much but she sure had some fun.
    Ginny Sue was going to therapy that time, sitting and thinking over useless things, when she should have been doing something. She should have been shaving her legs and rolling her hair and going on dates. The Lord helps those that get off their asses and do something. When Cindy left Buzz Biggers, she did all sorts of things that made her feel good. She went in the bathroom of the loan office on that day that she went to lunch and never came back, and she wrote “Fuck Buzz Biggers in the nose” right there beside where she had written “Fuck Charles Snipes in the ear.”
    Cindy mousses her bangs and pulls them straight just like that woman on “Knots Landing”; only a petite