This was supposed to be my Christmas story, but I never finished it...
My roommate, Marybeth, worked at the Oak Grove Plantation Historical Site five miles west of the center of Poquoson, Virginia as a tour guide, ushering tourist groups through the expansive house and grounds, reciting a litany of facts and trivia about the Peninsular campaign of the Civil War. Marybeth swore that she would die at the age of one hundred droning, “…we are now entering the Palmetto Room where Mr. and Mrs. Hembree would have held their more formal social engagements…” Two years before, when she had first started, Oak Grove had been a living history museum run from March to November, a haven for rowdy school groups and senior living facility day trips. You paid ten dollars at the estate gates and entered 1859 (or so the big wooden sign above the entrance claimed). Mr. and Mrs. George Mason Hembree and their four strapping sons and three Scarlett O’Hara daughters greeted visitors from the white porch, while the house was run primarily by black students from the neighboring colleges and tech schools.
But there had been a slave uprising and two of the house slaves filed and won a sexual harassment lawsuit against the owner, Jim Brodie. He was forced to downsize the expensive living history operation into a milder, albeit less profitable year round historical site. The seniors and school kids still came, they just didn’t stay as long. Marybeth certainly didn’t miss the costumes or carrying trays of lemonade for predominantly white visitors. “Orly, let me tell you. Black folk don’t wanna relive history...especially not that one. We got enough trouble as is,” she had told me. Jim with the roving hands had opened up the plantation grounds several years earlier for the now annual Christmas in the Field Civil War Reenactment.
It was Christmas in the Field that brought Dervane Magruder to Poquoson the first Christmas after the death of my husband, Travis, a man, no, a boy who had scarcely been my husband long enough for the word to come freely off my tongue. Travis had been a whirlwind who had swept me off my feet and dropped me unceremoniously on the gravel in a period just under three years, who loved me and hurt me fiercely. Travis had been killed in January, and I had left my hometown of well-wishers and overly sympathetic, gossiping relations by the beginning of February.
I went to see a psychic reader recommended to me by a cousin, who told me that I was supposed to go to Virginia and that it was there I would find peace. She told me that I would meet three angels, who would deliver me back into the arms of Jesus. I informed her that I had already been saved twice, once as a Presbyterian, and then as a Baptist when I had first met Travis. She said that there was more than one kind of salvation. I asked her if she was the first angel. She said no.
I felt pretty sinful after leaving her house, mainly because I had believed her. I felt even worse pulling out my dad’s old road atlas when I got home. I faltered only slightly when I found that Western Virginia was actually located on a different page from the rest of Virginia adjacent to Vermont, and then turned to the two page spread of the rest of the state. I closed my eyes, held my breath, raised my whole hand into the air, and slammed a finger down onto Newport News, Virginia. After a few hours of research on Newport News housing, I shifted my finger ten miles east to Poquoson where rent was cheaper. Fate only takes you so far. Sometimes you have to step in and rearrange your own stars.
But fate must have had a hand in bringing Dervane Magruder to my doorstep, because never in a million years would I have thought Marybeth had it in her to bring home a scraggly, middle-aged Confederate soldier. Granted he did have a certain ruggedly handsome quality for a man his age, and practically impeccable, almost unbelievable, old Southern manners. But I get ahead of myself.
“Orly, would you listen to this! You listening?” Marybeth was in our pitiful excuse for a living room reading the morning paper. The Newport News News had given us a six-week trial, and ever since, Marybeth had been keeping me updated on all the sad and disturbing events of Queen Anne County. Every day brought us tales of violence and heartbreak, as if we didn’t have enough of our own.
“I’m leaving you some coffee, okay. Don’t forget to turn it off when you head out.” I poured the thick sludge that kept me functional at six a.m. into the baby blue thermos that said “It’s a Boy!” on the side. It was one of Marybeth’s Goodwill finds. For twenty cents each, we had several cups and mugs that made Marybeth laugh and me shake my head: “Happy Birthday, Peg,” “Greatest Dad in the World,” “Forty is the new Thirty,” “Bitchy and Proud of It,” and the like. I ran cold water onto the dregs in the coffee pot until it was a suitable dark brown instead of bluish black, swished it around, and placed it back on the machine’s burner.
“Fine. Listen to this. You just won’t believe this,” Marybeth said. I poked my head around kitchen doorway. There were all sorts of things that Marybeth thought I wouldn’t believe.
“Try me,” I said, playing along as usual.
“Newport News resident, Sandra Kronsky, 29, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with first degree child abuse after beating her three-year-old unconscious, unconscious is spelled wrong believe it or not, with a two foot rope of cherry licorice. She had bought the candy as a stocking stuffer. Bond was set at three thousand dollars.”
“My god!” I said. This one definitely took the cake. I had been expecting a gruesome spousal murder or a bad case of road rage. “A Twizzler?”
“A big ass Twizzler. That’s a white woman too. Kronsky. I thought white people believed in time outs and stuff.” She knew that this wasn’t true around here, but Marybeth loved making snide remarks about crazy white people. I had long since stopped letting it make me uncomfortable in my own white skin.
“That’s just terrible,” I said, trying not to imagine.
“Merry Fucking Christmas.”
“Marybeth, you gotta quit reading that stuff,” I said, plopping down on the couch beside her.
“In a few years, this is gonna be my job, hon.” Marybeth was in the first year of her social work masters, having recently finished up her bachelors in psychology. Marybeth was no stranger to that world. She grew up in and out of foster care and children’s homes. She was one of those rare creatures who beat the system only to return back to it in a different role. She was the kind of person the Lifetime Original Movie people picked out as movie subjects. She put the paper down.
“How you holding up?” she asked, as she had practically every day of my life for the last nine months, ever since I had told her my own story, the answer to the “so what brought you all the way up here, anyway?” question. I found I couldn’t lie to Marybeth, even if I had wanted to. So I told her what I was running from. What I had always been running from.
“Eh, you know,” I shrugged. This was my usual response to this question. Some days I wanted to throttle her and tell her to mind her own business, and some days I wanted to burst into tears. But most days, it was just a small comfort. A moment of blessed connection.
“Yeah, I know. You’re gonna be late,” she said, after a pause.
“I know. It’s so cold out there. I wish had one of those automatic car starters.”
“I’ll get you one for Christmas.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’d instantly double the value of that car.” This was true enough. The beat up Datsun wagon that had gotten me from Snelda, South Carolina, now just barely got me back and forth to work. Each day was a gift from God. Since I had quit going to church, about the only praying I did in my life was for that car to make it into the parking lot of Val’s Diner and Motel, my place of not-so-gainful employment.
“I just want to crawl back in bed. Don’t make me go,” I whined. Our local weather team had been going crazy all week, talking about record lows, predicting ice and snow and all sorts of things that had no business going on around here.
“You got three seconds to get up off that couch, or I’m gonna find me a Twizzler. One, two—“
“Alright, you win,” I said, pulling myself up off the couch. I found my bag by the door, stuffed under a few jackets, and fumbled around for my keys.
“That’s what I thought,” Marybeth said, picking up her paper. “Hey, you should drop by Oak Grove today after you get off, come see a bunch of crazy white guys pretending to kill eachother. It’s really something to see. There’s a cool little craft fair too. They sell these cool wooden ducks that have little leather feet that flap around when you pull it behind you. And cork guns. Stuff like that.”
“I’m working a double today. Anyway, I don’t think Civil War reenactments are my thing. “
“Well, I should hope not. “
Val’s Diner was your typical small-town grease-pit. Everything from the triple chili cheeseburgers to the green and yellow linoleum floor was saturated in saturated fats. Sometimes I thought that even the spray-bottles of lemon-scented industrial cleaner had been spiked with the dregs of French fryer oil. While the diner and the six-room strip motel were owned by the same person, they performed independently. Though to say that the motel performed at all would be mostly a lie. Rarely had two out of the six rooms been occupied at the same time. I had opted for Val’s after a few days at the local telemarketing firm. The pay was about the same, and you didn’t get yelled at as much. Mr. Feivel Arbejewski, the owner, had an ill disposition, to be sure, but there was only one of him to contend with, and truth be told, I didn’t mind him all that much, and he seemed to be as fond of me as he was of anyone, meaning slightly left of indifferent.
Mr. Arbejewski was a Polish Jew who had immigrated to New York as a small child in 1949. I had never bothered to ask the “what brought you here” question to him. It seemed beside the point. Mr. Arbejewski was as out of place in Poquoson as a Simpson’s episode in the midst of the Massechusets Bay puritans. No one knew what a Polish Jew was doing in backwater Virginia, much less running the most un-Kosher diner in history. Pork chops with white gravy and the triple-chili-cheeseburger were Val’s claim to fame.
The name of the diner itself had raised several eyebrows in town. It became a favorite pastime to imagine the story behind it. Most were scandalous. None were accurate. When anyone asked, he would grunt and mutter, “Just a name, you gonna order or what?” But for some reason, when I had asked after about a month of employment, he just shrugged and said. “My brother. His name was Walenty. Val’s easier.” I hadn’t pressed further, understanding that the name had outlived the actual person. I knew what it was like to only be left with a name to poorly fill in the space left behind.
That day, when I pulled my car into the lot, I noticed several tattered-looking cars parked in front of the motel behind the diner. I lingered in the remants of warmth in the car, watching the wind sweeping though the street, carrying sand and bits of trash and a church car wash sign from almost half a mile down the road. The weather was behaving like it did when we got the remnants of the big hurricanes that always hit Cape Hatteras to the South, except the wind chill was around 10 degrees. I turned back and saw Mr. Arbejewski standing by the window, tapping his watch.
“No room in the inn today. Ha Ha Ha,” he said, mechanically.
“What?” I asked.
“What? You don’t know your own Christmas story. I know your story better than you do?”
“I know the story. But…”
“Yeah we are all full. First time in twenty years, since the body of this missing man washed up on Bindy Beach and all these TV people came. No Vacancy. Except I don’t even have a No Vacancy sign. I used to have one, but I don’t know what happened to it.” This, I thought, was probably a good thing. A Vacancy sign would seem like a bad joke. As if the place could be anything but vacant.
“So who washed up this time?” I said, washing my hands in the basin by the flat ranges.
“Confederates,” he said.
“I thought they camped out at Oak Hill.”
“Me too. But I hear that the hotels in Newport News are all full too. Maybe it’s some special anniversary.”
