And now, just as she’d done with Jimmie, she was beginning to disappear into Matt. She was putting the burden on him that she’d put on Jimmie of being everything and everyone to her. She was staying home, hiding in the kitchen, and expecting Matt to bring the world to her. Bailey was making no effort to create a life of her own. And inside, she was smoldering about furniture she didn’t want and guests she didn’t like.
Bailey put her hands over her face. She didn’t want to remember it, but she’d been very unhappy the last two years with Jimmie.
During her twenties she’d been so enamored of him that anything he did, she saw as wonderful. But when she’d hit thirty, just two years ago, something inside her changed. She had no idea what caused it, but seemingly overnight she grew short-tempered and angry about everything. Jimmie would ask her what was wrong, she’d snap that nothing was; then she’d tell him she wanted to go somewhere, anywhere. “You’ll just take yourself with you,” Jimmie had said once, looking at her hard.
Bailey leaned back against the tree and took a couple of deep, calming breaths. What did she do now that she realized these things about herself? The truth was, she had no idea how to go about doing what the self-help books called “becoming your own person.” Should she say to Matt at dinner tonight, “I’ve decided to become my own person?” Then what? Get up and fetch him a second helping?
No, Matt wasn’t the problem. He was a nice man. She liked him. There wasn’t much fire between them, but it was comfortable, something that she could live with.
The problem was that Bailey had spent a lifetime accommodating herself to others, and she wasn’t sure how to change that. She’d grown up under the rule of her mother and her sister Dolores. Both of them were . . .
For a moment Bailey closed her eyes and remembered her father. Like her, Herbert Bailey had been willing to let others make the decisions and take on the responsibilities. “You and I need people like your mother and Dolores to help us along,” he’d said to Lillian many times. “And, besides, it makes people like them angry when you go against them, so it’s better to let them rule the show.”
And he’d lived by that ethic. He’d gone to work each day, come home at exactly the same time each evening, and on Friday handed his paycheck to his wife. He let his wife do whatever she wanted with the money, with the house, and with their daughters, content to sit in his easy chair and read his daily newspaper.
He died one Sunday afternoon while sitting in that same chair. Lillian had been in the kitchen all day, getting ready for a 4-H competition, and she’d gone from the kitchen up the back stairs to bed. Since the lights had been turned off in the living room, she’d assumed that her parents and her sister had already gone to bed. They weren’t the kind of family that informed each other where they were going or when.
Early the next morning Bailey had gone down the street to baby-sit for a neighbor, and hadn’t returned until after lunch. When she walked into the living room and saw her father sitting in his chair in exactly the same position as the day before, she knew he was gone. When she pressed her lips to his forehead, his body was stiff and cold. The night before, her mother and sister had seen him asleep in his chair, but they hadn’t tried to wake him. Instead, they’d just turned out the lights and gone upstairs to bed. Bailey still remembered the looks of distaste the two policemen had given her mother when one of them said the man had been dead for nearly twenty-four hours before they were called.
Bailey also remembered the way her mother had shrugged. She’d made sure her husband was well insured, so his demise didn’t interrupt her life much. In fact, it seemed that Bailey was the only person on earth who missed him.
But now, today, Bailey knew that she no longer wanted to be the child who had been taught by her father that she was like him, that she was a person who let others control her—and that that’s what she should do. Had her father told her those things because he felt as alone as she had? Had he needed an ally in his no-resistance campaign to make him feel that it was the right way to go?
Bailey tried to clear her thoughts. She’d grown up receiving the only love in her life from her father, but to receive that love, she’d had to constantly take what was handed to her. Whenever she tried to stand up to her mother, she’d glanced at her father, and when she saw his look, which seemed to say that he wouldn’t love her anymore if she became a shrew like her mother, Bailey had backed down.
A mere three years after her father died, Bailey had run away with James Manville, a man even more controlling than her mother.
So, she thought, what did she do now? It was all well and good to figure out the past, but what did she do with this knowledge? She could continue as she was, and disappear into Matthew Longacre, just as she’d become the shadow of her father and Jimmie. Or should she do something radical—kick Matt out of her house and say that she wanted to figure out her own life before she entwined herself with another man? Did she then see if she could make it in the world all by herself?
Not quite. Bailey already knew what was out there in the big, bad world. And she wasn’t so full of this rebellious feeling that she was going to throw away a good man in the hope that another one would appear later, when she was ready. Also, she knew that she wasn’t one of those women who wanted to spend her life without a man. There was a lot of bad about them, but they sure knew how to make you laugh! No, she needed a man in her life, that much she was sure of.
But then, wasn’t it her need of Jimmie that had made her put up with a lot from him?
Put up with, she thought. What was that old saying? Whatever you put up with, that’s what you’ll get. She had “put up with” his affairs and . . . the chocolate, she thought, and
again her nails bit into her already sore palms. In truth, hearing that Jimmie had sent her the chocolate when she was dieting, not his grateful clients, made her more angry than the affairs.
And the man from Heinz! At that memory, her nails dug into her palms so hard that she winced.
All right, she asked herself, what do I want to do with the rest of my life? Do I want to keep it as it is, or do I want to make some changes? Do I want to bury myself in this man, Matthew Longacre, or do I want to try to find out what I can do? Not what I can accomplish while living as the shadow of a man, but on my own?
Changes won out easily. So what changes do I want to make? she asked herself. I want to prove to myself that I can do something, was her answer. She didn’t want to be eighty years old and have to tell her grandkids that although she’d grown up in a time when women were running for president, she’d opted to stay home and fry cheese and onions for a bunch of men she couldn’t really say she liked very much.
So what do I have going for me? she asked herself, then gave a little smile. She’d told Arleen that she’d been involved in Jimmie’s businesses. She’d said that to keep Arleen from thinking she was “a ghost,” as that nasty little Bandy had claimed. But the truth was, that Bailey had learned some things from Jimmie.
So, first of all, she had some knowledge of business. Second, she knew a few women who needed to do something with their lives as much as she did.
All right, she thought. Enough whining. No more poor little Bailey. She knew what she had to do; she just had to figure out how. If Jimmie were in a situation like this—not that he would ever be in something that he couldn’t control totally—what would he do?
“Guerilla warfare,” she could hear Jimmie say. “Underground. Do it, then tell them what you’ve done. When it’s a done deal, they can’t give you ‘advice.’ And make no mistake about it, Frecks, advice is about control—and control is power.”
“Make a battle plan,” Bailey said out loud. “And figure out who my soldiers are.”
Smiling, she went into the house. She had to prepare dinner for Matt.
Thirteen
It was Patsy who gave Bailey the idea.