Tending to Virginia by Jill McCorkle

better, but he won’t.
    “She was a nice person,” he had explained. “But it was a mistake.”
    “Nice? Nice?” she asked.
    “Yes, but it didn’t work. We weren’t right for each other. That doesn’t make her a bad person.”
    “I was Junior Rotary Honey,” she told him after hearing the list of Sheila’s qualities which she had asked for, not knowing there would be such a list of credits. “I was second in my class. I am pregnant with your baby and my art teacher called me little Monet.” That was all true, all of it, the only details left out being that her high school class was very small and that Mrs. Abbott who had called her little Monet all through high school seemed to barely even remember Virginia now.
    “I’ve moved into string art,” Mrs. Abbott had said when Virginia saw her in the grocery store. “I really love those knots. What did you say your name was again?”
    “Virginia,” she said while Mrs. Abbott gazed at her with a blank stare; thank God, Mark wasn’t there.
    “Virginia,” Mrs. Abbott repeated and shook her head while the woman pushing the chair stared pitifully down on Mrs. Abbott’s head.
    “Turner, Ginny Sue Turner.”
    “Of course,” Mrs. Abbott said and clapped her hands. “Ginny Sue Turner, my little Van Gogh.”
    “I was Monet.”
    “I saw where you got married, too,” Mrs. Abbott said. “It was the second time I saw you were getting married and I told the PTA that my little Van Gogh was married for the second time.”
    “But I only got married once,” Virginia explained. “Two engagements but only one marriage.”
    “I remember your cousin, too. And she’s been married twice I believe, too.”
    “She has but I haven’t.”
    “Try knots little Manet,” Mrs. Abbott called out. “Knots are so knotted.”
    “Monet!” Virginia insisted, heard only by a woman in barefoot sandals reading a Correctol box. Mrs. Abbott had given everyone a name; everybody’s report card had a different name and all that time she thought she was special, thought she was the first, thought she had been given a name because she was good and different from the rest. She probably wouldn’t have even majored in art otherwise. She probably would have majored in something else and been a consultant instead of knotting knots and getting frustrated with sixth graders who always drew pictures that came close enough to resembling body parts so that all class control was lost, frustrated that she can’t seem to get the ideas that she has in her mind onto the canvas; somewhere in midair they get all twisted and dark and ugly and everything changes too fast, Gram and Lena, and her stomach. There were probably hundreds of Monets over the years and Virginia is certain that her waterlilies looked nothing like the real ones though Mrs. Abbott had clapped her hands and said, oh yes they did. “That woman’s so full of shit,” Cindy said when Virginia brought up Mrs. Abbott once. “She called me her little Charles Schultz.”
    Virginia’s waterlilies, a gift to Gram, a small watercolor in a cheap frame is still in Gram’s bedroom, but it looks nothing like the real waterlilies, nothing about it. Mrs. Abbott did not tell the whole truth—a lie, deception. Virginia at that time had never seen the real waterlilies, and ignorantly believed Mrs. Abbott, only to later, on a trip during college, find herself in front of a Monet exhibit. Her face flushed with inadequacy while reality burst forth, you will never in your life do anything that can compare. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” Gram always says.
    The sun is in full view now, hot and hazy, the Corvette door slamming as the thug makes his way to God knows where in his loud orange tank top. It is already nine o’clock and here she sits, having done nothing. Her great-grandmother, the other Virginia Suzanne, at her age would have already cooked a huge breakfast andbe working on lunch. She would have already fed chickens and