Miss
Mavis Meeker was a flappy-clothes, tall lank lady who loved gossip, and she could insert her beanpole self into the tiniest niches---for hiding and overhearing, or for barging in and asking. It seemed as if carrying around all those rumors kept her thin as jogging, for she was the one
who “sold out” from the Fund-Raiser Tea before scones, to get home to the phone when she heard that
old Mr. Halliburton got caught retrieving his hearing aid from the back seat of
a married lady’s car.
She
had a need-to-know like no one else in Paxton, and her curiosity grew with each
year of her inquiring life. She’d drive
out through the country roads, looking and scanning and taking note of who had
nice yards and who’d just had a dish installed and if the Covington
She
traded in “good works” in her information quest, walking an apronful of
tomatoes from her garden down the street to the house where a strange car had
been parked for several days, trying to peer around the door when it was
opened, to see if the Boyette girl had left her husband again and come back to stay with her Mama 'n'em. If ever a stranger or anyone in law
enforcement knocked on a neighbor’s door, she’d make sure
she was outside with some little chore so that she could hear or see whatever
happened, or she’d grab up a few flowers and take them innocently over just for
an excuse to hang around.
She
was the first to take a dish by the home of the bereaved, and also took pains to be
the first to view a corpse. She’d been
known to wait outside the funeral home in her car til they opened the doors. She’d stand right by the casket, looking her
eyes full, and then would circle the
room like a name-dropper at a cocktail party, pronouncing how the departed
looked---from Natchrul to Peekid to They Did All They Could, with a sly peek at
the listeners for their reactions.
Closed casket funerals put her off kilter for a week, not being able to
assess the make-up, or if they were wasted away, and all.
Being
first at the house after the news spread of the death was important,
so she could see “how they took it.” Folks in town swore that she had four cakes, two casseroles and a banana puddin’ on
hand at all times---no WAY she could whip up a dish that fast.
If
Evelyn Couch, inquiring after Ont Vesta in the nursing home, were as nosy as all get-out, and a tee-nincey bit on the obnoxious side, she’d have sounded
like Mavis Meeker.
Miss
Mavis would approach a lady, dozing in her wheelchair in the hall---the fact of
the lady’s being in Golden Years had, in Mavis’s mind, conferred an immediate
mantle of senility upon check-in. She
thought of them all as having been “committed,” as one would have been to
Whitfield, the moment they left their own abodes to live at “The Home.”
But
she visited them just the same, thinking that if any geriatric mind-mishap
might have dampened their filters, she could just ask anything about anybody,
and they’d give her the answer. If they
remembered it. Like where DID the Finch
girl go that time when she left school to travel Europe with her Aunt, or who
WAS it that Harliss McIntire was with up at Clarksdale that time Mac shot the tires
out on her Cadillac?
She’d arrive at
Golden Years, look up and down the halls for a likely victim, and home in. She wasn’t above going right in a door where
someone was sleeping, making herself at home, and rustling about a bit to wake
the unwary soul, and had no qualms about asking prying, pointed questions. Until Miss Martha Bridger, that is, who had never
had much of a filter to start with, and had taught sixth grade boys for enough
years to inure her to any inquiry, expletive, observation, or gesture.
“Miss
Marthy!!” Mavis trumpeted, apparently also convinced that passing eighty rendered her victim deaf, “Do ye know who Aaah ayum?”
A
long, testy no-nonsense teacher-look from Miss Martha, and a little
complete-circle-like-clock-hands of her tight-pursed lips before she spoke.
“AA’ve
known ye all yeh lahfe, Mavis, and ye habm’t improved.”
Hello Rachel:
ReplyDeleteWhat an absolute joy and delight this is to read.
Miss Mavis Meeker, who has not known a similar person at some point? She simply leaps from the page in all her prying, gossipy ways. We see her, we hear her speak, we watch her move, we sense her presence and we, wherever and whenever possible, avoid her much in the same way as her 'victims', given the possibility, do the same. And whilst the dead, lying in their coffins, are unable to respond, there is always, or so it is to be hoped, a retired Martha Bridger who has the full measure of her and can treat with her in kind.
This is, Rachel, such an engaging piece of writing containing so much in the way of detail and close observation. But what appeals to us most is the way in which so much is suggested and yet we are left to fill in with our own imaginations to complete the fuller picture. We have loved every word! Thank you so much for such a refreshing and entertaining start to the day.
Kellemes húsvéti únnepeket!
Loved this, Rachel! I, too, know somone who is just like that! I bet we all do. How do they get to the home so fast? And, how can they be everywhere and see everything that happens? Loved the ending...school teachers are always school teachers!
ReplyDeleteOh, dear. I cannot improve at ALL on the wonderful comment from the Hattatts! They said everything I didn't even KNOW I wanted to say. To think that I can, at any time I like, and at no cost to me read your thoughts AND theirs is just a remarkable blessing in my life.
ReplyDeleteThat said...Miss Meeker gives me the shivers, but almost as bad are the folks who have so little interest in others that they don't even have a little gossip to pass on. Not through goodness, but through an almost inhuman lack of interest and empathy. Both are shivery!