The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [89]
It was just the two of them left on the steps. Whaley said, “I believe I hurt Woodrow’s feelings.”
Maggie, characteristically taking any point of view but her sister’s, said, “I’d say you did.”
They spoke no more about it until they were back home, standing in the kitchen, getting ready for bed. Maggie had poured herself some milk. She had her hair down, and it was brown and gray and straggly and it looked a sight stringing all down the T-shirt she wore for a nightgown. Whaley kept hers up, had for years. It was unseemly, wearing your hair down at their age.
“Well, it was a compliment,” said Whaley. “He just took it wrong.”
Maggie put her milk down. She was facing the window over the sink and stared out it for a moment before she turned.
“A compliment?” she said. “How is that a compliment, being too old to change? You’d like to be told you’re too old to do anything?”
“We are old, Mag. It’s a fact.”
She started to add, Wearing your hair all stringy long and sleeping in some ratty T-shirt won’t change that. But she said nothing.
“Everybody likes to believe they can change.”
“Not everybody.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. “Everybody else.”
Whaley scooted a chair out from the kitchen table and sat. She said, “I really do not understand this, Maggie. I want to, though. I want you to explain it to me. What is it you want to change for? How do you want to change?”
“You’re asking me? Don’t ask me, it wasn’t my feelings you hurt. You didn’t tell me I’m too old to change, though I’m sure you believe it.”
“See, that’s what I want to know. You’re not listening. I’m seriously interested in how come y’all want everybody to think you can go around changing all the time.”
She was serious, she was interested. But like most questions she asked of her sister, she felt like she had the answer already, and she knew that she wasn’t going to change her mind. Still, she wanted to hear her sister’s side of it. She was generally curious about this idea of changing, why it meant so much to people like her sister.
“Let me ask you a question, Whaley. You think people are born one way and they die that way? That there’s never any chance they can become, I don’t know, different?”
Whaley pretended to give it some thought. “Yes.”
“So, just for instance let’s take you and me. You think you were born to do the right thing and I was born to fail?”
“That’s not fair and you know it,” Whaley lied.
“What’s not fair about it? When have you failed?”
“More times than I care to count.”
“Name one.”
Whaley thought about Sarah. It shocked her, this thought, for she never let herself entertain it. It was so buried, so wrapped up in justifications and rationalizations, the story so shifted, that she was nearly brought to tears by the way it so quickly surfaced.
“Okay,” she said, swallowing. “I knew you were going across to see him that day. I did nothing to stop you.”
“You knew? How?”
“Woodrow told me.” This was true: Woodrow did tell her, he was worried about his role in the whole affair, he knew or at least suspected there would be trouble over there. She knew how much Maggie trusted Woodrow and she hated to endanger that trust, but it was a far preferable failure to admit than the one that had, seconds earlier, nearly caused her to cry.
Maggie sipped her milk. She tried and failed to look unfazed.
After a pause she said, her bottom lip quivering, “Well, that doesn’t really count as much of a failure. I mean, it’s not really your job to go around stopping me from making a fool out of myself.”
Full-time job, Whaley thought. She said, “I should have done something.”
“Why?”
“I hated to see you hurt like that. I could have done something to help.”
“You can’t stop me from hurting. You surely can’t stop Woodrow from hurting. If you could, well, wouldn’t you be using