Previously: Retired teacher Lucinda remembers her favorite student Vernon. Reality interrupts when another boarder Nancy scolds her for talking to her daughter Shirley. Lucinda remembers Vernon decided to marry Nancy but instead was drafted. Her last advice to him was less than kind.
Lucinda opened the door, and Cassie breezed into the room and plopped into the rocking chair. When Lucinda looked around, she saw that Vernon had quickly disappeared, just like he had done on that day in her classroom ten years earlier.
“Oh goody. A rockin’ chair. I jest love rockin’ chairs.”
“What’s the matter, Cassie?” Lucinda asked as she sat on the edge of her bed.
“I jest can’t stand it when Aunt Bertha’s havin’ one of her fits and mommy gits on to her.” The more Cassie talked, the harder Cassie rocked.
“So you’re seeking refuge?”
“Yep.” The rocking became faster and faster.
“From my observations, I’d say Mrs. Godwin is a hysteric.” Lucinda did not mean this in a mean, gossiping way but rather as a cool, detached opinion, as teachers prone to do when they meet new students at the beginning of a school year.
“Yep. Mommy has to slap her to calm her down sometimes. I git mad at mommy all the time, but I don’t git carried away like Aunt Bertha does.”
“Cassie, dear, I know it isn’t any of my business, but what’s going to happen to you after your mother passes away?” Again, she did not mean her question as presumptuous intrusion into another person’s private life but as a means to offer the best, well-considered advice, which is one of the many duties teachers are not taught in college but develop on their own after years of practice.
Cassie stopped in the middle of going backwards and looked at Lucinda without emotion. “Oh, she thinks she’s goin’ to have me put away in some mental hospital somewhere after she dies, but it’s not goin’ to happen.”
“Is that so?”
“Yep. I’ve been to daddy’s lawyer, and he says mommy can’t do that.”
Lucinda wrinkled her brow. “But—“.
“You see, I let the lawyer set up all these tests with psychologists and teachers and stuff to see if there was anythin’ wrong with me, up here,” she said, pointing to her head, “and they all said no.”
“And you haven’t told your mother the results of the tests?”
“Why bother?” Cassie shrugged. “She wouldn’t believe them anyway.”
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “I’m confused.”
“You thought I was crazy too.” Cassie smiled and nodded.
“Crazy isn’t the word for it.” Lucinda slipped into teacher mode, as though helping a student find a more appropriate word for an essay. “How can I explain it?”
“Jest spit it out. I’ve heard worse from mommy.”
“Well, for instance, you sometimes act so silly, so much like a small child, you know, about the soup. Not at all like a woman would act.”
“Thirty-seven-year-old woman,” Cassie added. “I talk about silly things like chicken with stars soup because mommy won’t give me a fight over it.”
“Then why don’t you just leave?” Lucinda felt she had lived her life bound by a code of ethics and common sense, and she could not understand Cassie’s apparent insistence in wallowing in her mother’s domination.
“Daddy begged me to stay when he was alive. He said mommy was jest unbearable to be around without me to take up most of her time.”
“Then your father knew—“
“That I wasn’t crazy?” She started rocking again. “Oh sure. Daddy was smart.”
“Then why didn’t you leave after your father died?”
“It would’ve been just too hard to fight mommy over it. I guess she’s a whole lot like Aunt Bertha. She’s a hysteric too.”
“I don’t mean to sound cruel, but doesn’t it make you feel sad, knowing you’ve wasted your life like this?” She told Cassie she did not mean to sound cruel, but, of course, she knew very well it was a cruel question.
“Oh no. I haven’t wasted my life. I made daddy happy. That ain’t no waste. And, in a way, it’s made mommy happy to have me around to fuss and bother with.” She stopped the rocker to beam with pride. “And Nancy lets me baby-sit her little girl while she works. Isn’t Shirley jest a livin’ doll? It’s almost like havin’ my own little girl.”
“I suppose.” Lucinda gazed out the window, at a loss for offering words of insight.
“Mommy won’t live that much longer anyway, and I’ll still have my life to do with as I please.”
“For your sake, I hope you’re right,” she replied with a sigh.
“Oh, I know. I take after mommy’s side of the family, and they all live a long time. Grandma died when she was eighty-eight. Why, mommy and daddy didn’t have me until they were a little bit older than me now.”
“Oh.”
“Of course, mommy ain’t goin’ to live that long because of them cigarettes. And I think all that hate built up inside her is goin’ to cut some years off her life. That’s what her doctor told me, anyway.”
Lucinda considered whether it was proper for her to ask another deeply personal question. She did not pause long enough to consider it as much as she should have. “Why does your mother have all that hatred?”
“Gosh, I don’t know.” Cassie laughed. “She’s been mad about somethin’ ever since I was born.”
“I thought it had to do with your father’s death.”
“Oh no. She fussed daddy into his grave.” She laughed again and slapped the arm of the rocking chair. “Then he became a saint.”
“Did she have unfulfilled ambitions?” Lucinda wished she still had a blackboard on which to write her questions.
“I don’t know.” By her tone, Cassie did not care either.
“She never talks about anything she wished she could have done?”
“No.” Cassie paused to ruminate over the enigma that was her mother. “I always just thought of it as jest the way mommy was. You know, daddy was always a kind of bigger than life man who talked too loud and slapped you on the back too hard and got mad fast but felt guilty longer. And you’re the way you are because that’s jest the way you are.”