Original Sins (82 page)

As she sat under the dryer at the beauty shop later that afternoon, she read an article in
Cosmopolitan
called “How to Sleep Around Without Feeling Promiscuous.” The idea of cheating on Jed had never seriously occurred to her until this afternoon. Mr. Hitchcock was so exciting running that TV station and deciding on all the programming. She really liked the idea of him needing something from her. She pictured him kneeling naked over her with a big old erection, and her trying to decide whether or not he could put it in her. While he begged and pleaded and offered her a daily show for life. And Jed … well, poor old Jed was just such a sad sack these days. Always moaning about her not having time for him and the kids anymore. And the more he moaned, the farther away from him she wanted to be.

The article said, “… a healthy self-respect for one's needs is essential to the sound functioning of the total personality.” Well, she needed someone who appreciated what she was doing. And let's face it, Jed didn't now, and never had. Mr. Hitchcock, on the other hand …

She glanced up at the Castle Tree as she drove home. Seemed to her like she was the only one of The Five who'd actually gone right ahead and fulfilled the dreams they'd all had for themselves in its branches. Raymond was running around barefoot in Kentucky. Emily had gotten herself to New York City, but, big deal, that was about all she could say for herself. An ordinary job, an ordinary child, a repulsive husband. Donny was parking cars up there. And Jed—well, just poor old Jed, was all she could say.

As she drove up to the house, Jed and the kids and half a dozen women in suits and flowered hats stood outside. A Torino sat by the curb. Jed was wearing his beer can hat for the first time ever. He and the kids had apparently just returned from a boat ride.

“… now are
you
Sally Tatro's husband?” a woman was demanding. Another was snapping his picture. The cat stalked across the yard. A woman shrieked, “Look! There's her cat!” They all grabbed their cameras and began snapping. The cat froze, then bolted into the shrubbery.

Sally parked the Dodge in the driveway and got out. A woman screamed, “There she is! It's Sally Tatro!” Sally chatted with them while Jed and the kids went in the house. They'd driven up from Chattanooga in hopes of catching a glimpse of her. They asked for her autograph, but had left their copies of her book at the motel, so she autographed their forearms.

Jed lay in his La-Z-Boy Lounger with his eyes closed. Sally had forgotten she'd given the babysitter the day off, so there was no supper. As she pulled TV dinners from the freezer, she heard Jed on the phone: “Yeah, well, just be on the alert, in case you get a call, OK?”

“Who was that, honey?”

“The cops.”

“The
cops
?”

“Yeah, I don't want a bunch of nuts hanging around my house, see?”

“Those weren't nuts, Jed. They were fans.”

“Nuts, fans, who can tell the difference?”

“I don't want any police harassing my fans.”

“Today they were fans. Tomorrow it might be some lunatic wanting to kill you.”

“Why would anyone want to kill me?”

“Don't be a jerk, Sally. Lunatics always want to kill stars. I told the neighbors to call the cops if they see anyone prowling around the house.”

“Don't you think you're being a little melodramatic? It's not like I'm Bobby Kennedy or something.” She was annoyed at being called a jerk. Thousands of people around the area thought otherwise.

“It ain't right, Sally. It's getting all out of hand.”

“Nonsense! It's just beginning.”

“All I wanted was a wife, not some goddam celebrity.”

“I thought it was
me
you wanted,” she snapped.

“You like you was. Not you like you is.”

“When you take someone on, you take your chances.” She was through apologizing for being herself. To her amazement, he said nothing else. He gave up so easily these days. If she was different, well, so was he.

That night in bed it occurred to her that she didn't have to open her legs to him if she didn't want to, which she didn't. “I'm too tired,” she announced.

“You what?”

“Tired. I'm tired.” She felt panic. If she didn't do exactly as he wished, what would happen? She held her breath.

Nothing happened. He turned over, wrapped his arms around himself and fell asleep.

The headline in the women's section of the
News
was “Sally Tatro, Authoress, Artist, and TV Star, Favors Sewage Bond.” Jed glanced at it and threw it in the garbage. After he left and after she retrieved the
News
, she found a copy of
Modern Wife
lying on the dinner table open to an article called “100 Ways to Lose Your Man.” Someone, Jed presumably, had underlined and starred various sentences. “Let your house turn into a wasteland…. Give him the cold shoulder in bed…. Serve TV dinners when he comes home from work…. Put your own interests ahead of him…. Leave him to babysit the kids while you go out…. If you earn more money than he does, flaunt it.”

She tossed the magazine into the trash. After a few minutes she retrieved it. Maybe this was Jed's way of trying to tell her something?

Lately, the girls in the group had started declining her invitations to be on the show. Sally couldn't figure out why. She went to the next meeting to find out what was the matter. When she walked into Bonnie's house, the whole group fell silent. She felt them studying her with critical eyes from where they sat around a table holding scissors and paint brushes.

“Well, long time no see!” said Loretta.

“Hi!” said Sally, smiling brightly.

No one responded. Sally sat down and picked up an
egg
carton and handled it with unfamiliarity. She looked at what they were working on—a large American flag made from
egg
cartons, each star a cup, rows of painted cups as stripes. “Why, that's a real nice idea. We'll have to use it on the show!”

“We?” inquired someone.

“OK, Sally,” said Bonnie. “We'll give it to you straight: We feel you've used us.”

“Used you?”

“Used us and our ideas to become a star and make a lot of money.”

Sally was stunned. “But I've had each of you on the show as Guest Artists, and paid you for it.”

“Yeah. Twenty-five dollars each. While you was making ten times that.”

“And what about paperback royalties?”

“And all them interviews?”

A barrage of complaints assaulted her. It was like being the subject of an Ingenue Lemon Squeeze, only nobody said anything nice. Sally thought about crying, but instead sat in stony silence. Finally she stood up and announced, “I don't have to put up with this.”

“Let's face it, honey,” said Bonnie. “It's all gone to your head. And if your friends don't tell you, who will?”

Sally flounced out. After all she was Sally Tatro, and they were just a bunch of dinky old homemakers sitting around a kitchen table with paring knives. The nerve! She'd used her concepts and her daddy's money to try to give them all an outlet from the tedium of their dreary housebound lives, and now they were turning on her.

In the upcoming weeks they refused to appear on the show. And since Sally herself had been too busy giving interviews and answering fan mail to come up with any new ideas, she had to repeat some of her old ones, like the necklace of dried beans and pumpkin seeds. When viewers wrote in complaining about the lack of new material, she realized she had no choice but to offer the group whatever it would take to gain their cooperation. This turned out to be equal shares in the royalties and fees. Sally was horrified. There was just no justice left in this world.

“And we want to take turns being hostess on the show,” Bonnie insisted relentlessly.

“But it's called ‘The Sally Tatro Kitchen Craft Show'!”

“Well, we'll just have to think of a new name, won't we?”

Sally saw her life collapsing around her like a house of cards. No longer would she be able to afford the babysitter and cleaning lady—or a new ranch house to put them in. Or the weekly hairdos at the beauty parlor. But she wouldn't need any of these any longer either because she wouldn't be a star. The flow of fan letters would dry up, reporters would no longer besiege the house. Check-out girls and telephone operators would cease to recognize her name. It was too awful. But she had no choice. She'd run out of material.

Jed was already in bed when she got home. She began weeping. He held her with reluctance. “It's all over, Jed,” she wailed. “I'm finished.”

A look of suspicious hope came into his eyes. “Whadaya mean?”

“I've given up the show, Jed. For you and the children. I know I haven't been doing right by you. But I'll make it up to you, honey.”

“No kidding?” He rolled on top of her and pumped her full of semen, while she renounced all thoughts of Mr. Hitchcock, station manager.

She sat in her tiny living room watching on TV as Bonnie showed how to make mock cattails from corncobs. Mr. Hitchcock had reluctantly agreed to the new plan, once he grasped that the alternative was no kitchen craft show at all. Sally would be hostess a week every other month, but in between—nothing. She felt like the character in the kids' fairy tale when the genie arrived and removed all the riches he'd previously bestowed. But over the long painful weeks she'd come to see that this was how it had to be. It
had
gone to her head. She'd betrayed the group. She'd neglected Jed, Joey, and Laura. The star she'd followed had turned to cinders. There was more to life than money and fame. She wasn't sure what.

She meant to make it all up to everybody. The house was now neat and clean, her meals were exciting again, the children's clothes were ironed. Every day she did her hair and changed her clothes and put on makeup before Jed got home. Christmas was three months away, but she'd already finished her shopping and wrapping. And as penance for her folly, she was making a nativity scene. The stable was a large plastic Clorox bottle with one side cut out, and straw pasted all over it. The animals were made of corncobs and painted rocks. The manger was cups from an egg carton, and the baby Jesus was peanut shells wired together. Mary and Joseph and the wise men and shepherds were to be applehead dolls.

But she had to confess that there was a hollowness to her life now, after those months of glamour. She looked around for her reflection larger than life in the eyes of others and found—nothing. Already they'd forgotten her. Once again she was just Jed's wife. Laura's and Joey's mother. She'd tried so hard and come so far, and here she was right back where she'd started from.

She sighed and carved on the apple that was to be Mary's head. She'd never done a halo before and was managing to find some challenge in that. It could maybe be the topic of her next show.

After Bonnie signed off, there was an announcement on the Homemakers' News that nominations were being taken for the Mrs. Tennessee contest, which the General Appliance Housewares Division was sponsoring. Sally gathered it was similar to the Miss Tennessee contest but was for homemakers. The notice said that General Appliance, Inc., wanted to give recognition to the values of home and family, which had made America great and which were now under assault from within this great nation as well as from without. Sally had to admit that she herself had been a little lax about upholding these values in recent months. But she'd realized it and was reforming. Surely that counted for something?”

“… volunteer work, motherhood, hobbies, hostessing … If you have a neighbor of outstanding ability in these fields, who you think should be considered for our contest, please write for information on how to nominate her—”

Sally memorized the box number, then jumped up and wrote it down. After thinking it over, she wrote off for the information.

Jed and the kids seemed to be flourishing under her efforts to atone for her neglect. Jed talked about maybe joining the Elks Club, and was speculating on the likelihood of being supervisor at the mill in a few years. At supper that night he was describing the machinations of his rivals. Joey and Laura explained their struggles on the playground. Sally listened to this with half an ear, the rest of her brain busy with the Mrs. Tennessee contest. If she was already functioning as an outstanding wife and mother and citizen, why not get recognition for these things? The trouble was, she hadn't been able to think of how to go about asking someone to nominate her.

For several days only a few fan letters straggled in. “Dear Sally, My son sleeps under an electric blanket. As he wets the bed, I'm scared to death he'll electrocute himself. Any suggestions?” She threw them away without responding. She had to wean herself from the life of a celebrity. Sally Tatro was just an ordinary old homemaker again.

Finally the brochure arrived. Mrs. Tennessee contestants competed in six categories: hostess, homemaker, church member, mother, community volunteer, and hobbyist. Sally decided she was weakest in the church member category. She went every week, but to Jed's church, the Methodist one in the mill village. She'd never felt real involved. But she'd join the choir right away. The winner would go to the Mrs. America contest in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There was a picture of last year's Mrs. America, Brenda Gill of Des Moines, Iowa. Smiling tightly, she looked as though she had no upper lip and unusually long teeth. She said winning the contest had changed her life. She didn't say how.

That settled it. Sally took up a pen and filled in the nomination form for herself, signing it Dolores Lee Whittaker, a name that just popped into her head. She gave her parents' address and warned her mother that any mail arriving for Dolores Lee Whittaker should be directed to her. Her mother was confused. “It has to do with a surprise for Jed. For Christmas,” Sally improvised. Dolores received a letter asking her to write an essay on why Sally Tatro should be Mrs. Tennessee, with reference to the six categories. Dolores wrote about Sally's creative approach to homemaking, her devotion to her husband and children, her self-sacrifice on behalf of her community as Scheduling Chairman for the Candy Stripers, her original use of her free time in making a nativity scene from materials found around the house.