Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Fannie Flagg
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Elmwood Springs, Missouri, Monday, April 1
The Nervous Niece
The Eyewitness
Norma Hits the Road
Verbena Gets the News
To Believe or Not to Believe
The Newspaper Woman
Oh No, Not That Robe!
The Waiting Room
Yoo Hoo!
The Doctor’s Report
Bad News Travels Fast
Linda Gets the Call
Going Over to Elner’s
Irene Goodnight
The Elevator Ride
Verbena Wheeler Spreads the News
Making Arrangements with Neva
A Surprise
The Cause of Death
A Sad Business
Macky Goes to See Elner
Where She Had Gone
Verbena Tells Cathy
A Heavenly Walk
Calling Dena, Palo Alto, California
Meeting the Husband
Norma’s Lady Minister
Telling Lies
Chatting with Raymond
Mrs. Franks, an Old Friend
What a Surprise, Huh?
A Comforting Message
Eating Cake
Saying a Final Good-bye
Nurse Calls Ruby Back
A Happier Time
She Did What?
After the MRI
A Doctor’s Dilemma
The Quiz
Where’s Elner?
The Arrangements
A Disturbing Call
Oh Dear …
A New Kitty
Nurse Boots
Welcome Home
Another New Day
The Visitors
Still Confused
The Jerk
A Troubled Sleep
The Report
The Unexplained
The Recipe
Going Home
Luther Comes Home
The Nose Has It!
Ask Me No Questions
Beauty Shop
Thank-You from Cathy
Easter at Elner’s
Falling in Love Again
The Letter
A Surprise for Linda
Going on a Trip
Norma Puts Her Foot Down
Back in Kansas City
Norma Gives Up
The Sunset Club
Learning the Ropes
A Visitor for Elner
Going Professional
Tot Still Telling It Like It Is
A Very Nice Cat
Something’s Wrong
Getting Ready
A Final Good-bye
The Family Bible
What Had Happened
The Repercussions
Another Easter
Gone Native!
Epilogue
Copyright
About the Author
Fannie Flagg, stage, TV and film actress (with film credits including Grease and Crazy in Alabama), writer, producer and performer, is the bestselling author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (filmed with her own award-winning screenplay), Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Standing in the Rainbow and A Redbird Christmas. She lives in California and Alabama.
About the Book
Life is the strangest thing. One minute, Mrs Elner Shimfissle is up a tree, picking figs to make jam, and the next thing she knows, she is off on a strange adventure, running into people she never expected to see again, in the unlikeliest of places. Meanwhile, Elner’s highly strung niece Norma takes to her bed, before embarking on a brand new career; Elner’s neighbour Verbena turns to the Bible; her truck-driver friend, Luther Griggs, runs his eighteen-wheeler into a ditch; a dark secret emerges from the past – and the entire town is left wondering, ‘What’s life all about anyway?’ Except for Tot Whooten, whose main concern is that the end of the world might come before she can collect her social security.
A plea for honest doubt and humanity in an over-certain world, Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven is further proof that Fannie Flagg was put on this earth to write.
Also by Fannie Flagg
Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man
(originally published as Coming Attractions)
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
Fannie Flagg’s Original Whistle Stop Café Cookbook
Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!
Standing in the Rainbow
A Redbird Christmas
TO MY GOOD FRIEND PEGGY HADLEY
Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven
There are two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Elmwood
Springs, Missouri,
Monday, April 1
9:28 AM, 74 degrees and sunny
AFTER ELNER SHIMFISSLE accidentally poked that wasps’ nest up in her fig tree, the last thing she remembered was thinking “Uh-oh.” Then, the next thing she knew, she was lying flat on her back in some hospital emergency room, wondering how in the world she had gotten there. There was no emergency room at the walk-in clinic at home, so she figured she had to be at least as far away as Kansas City. “Good Lord,” she thought. “Of all the crazy things to have happen this morning.” She had just wanted to pick a few figs and make a jar of fig preserves for that nice woman who had brought her a basket of tomatoes. And now here she was with some boy wearing a green shower cap and a green smock, looking down at her, all excited, talking a mile a minute to five other people running around the room, also in green shower caps, green smocks, and little green paper booties on their feet. Elner suddenly wondered why they weren’t wearing white anymore. When had they changed that rule? The last time she had been to a hospital was thirty-four years ago, when her niece, Norma, had given birth to Linda; they had all worn white then. Her next-door neighbor Ruby Robinson, a bona fide professional registered nurse, still wore white, with white shoes and stockings and her snappy little cap with the wing tips. Elner thought white looked more professional and doctorlike than the wrinkly, baggy green things these people had on, and it wasn’t even a pretty green to boot.
She had always loved a good neat uniform, but the last time her niece and her niece’s husband had taken her to the picture show, she had been disappointed to see that the movie ushers no longer wore uniforms. In fact, they didn’t even have ushers anymore; you had to find your own seat. “Oh well,” thought Elner, “they must have their reasons.”
Then she suddenly began to wonder if she had turned off her oven before she had gone out in the yard to pick figs; or if she had fed her cat, Sonny, his breakfast yet. She also wondered what that boy in the ugly green shower cap and those other people leaning over, busy poking at her, were saying. She could see their lips moving all right, but she had not put her hearing aid on this morning, and all she could hear was a faint beeping noise, so she decided to try to take a little nap and wait for her niece Norma to come get her. She needed to get back home to check on Sonny and her stove, but she was not particularly looking forward to seeing her niece, because she knew she was going to get fussed at, but good. Norma was a highly nervous sort of a person and, after Elner’s last fall, had told her time and time again not to get up on that ladder and pick figs. Norma had made her promise to wait and let Macky, Norma’s husband, come over and do it for her; and now not only had Elner broken a promise, this trip to the emergency room was sure to cost her a pretty penny.
A few years ago, when her neighbor Tot Whooten had gotten that needle-nosed hound fish stuck in her leg and wound up in the emergency room, Tot said they had charged her a small fortune. On reflection, Elner now realized that she probably should have called Norma; she had thought about calling, but she hadn’t wanted to bother poor Macky for just a few figs. Besides, how could she know there was a wasps’ nest up in her tree? If it weren’t for them, she would have been up and down that ladder with her figs, making fig preserves by now, and Norma would have been none the wiser. It was the wasps’ fault; they had no business being up there in the first place. But at this point she knew that all the excuses in the world would not hold much water with Norma. “I’m in big trouble now,” she thought, before she drifted off. “I may have just lost ladder privileges for life.”
The Nervous Niece
8:11 AM
EARLIER THAT MORNING Norma Warren, a still pretty brunette woman in her sixties, had been at home thumbing through her Linens for Less catalog, trying to decide whether or not to order the yellow tone-on-tone floral design chenille bedspread, or the cool seersucker 100-percent-cotton-with-plenty-of-pucker in sea foam green with ribbon stripes on a crisp white background, when her aunt’s neighbor, and Norma’s beautician, Tot Whooten, had called and informed her that her Aunt Elner had fallen off the ladder again. Norma had hung up the phone and immediately run to the kitchen sink and thrown cold water in her face to keep herself from fainting. She had a tendency to faint when she was upset. Then she quickly picked up the wall phone and dialed her husband Macky’s cell phone number at work.
Macky, who was the manager of the hardware department at The Home Depot out at the mall, glanced at the readout of the number calling and answered.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Aunt Elner’s fallen off the ladder again!” said Norma frantically. “You’d better get over there right now. God knows what she’s broken. She could be lying over in her yard, dead for all I know. I told you we should have taken that ladder away from her!”
Macky, who had been married to Norma for forty-three years and was used to her fits of hysteria, particularly where Aunt Elner was concerned, said, “All right, Norma, just calm down, I’m sure she’s fine. She hasn’t killed herself yet, has she?”
“I told her not to get on that ladder again, but does she listen to me?”
Macky started walking toward the door, past plumbing supplies, and spoke to a man on the way out. “Hey, Jake, take over for me. I’ll be right back.”
Norma continued talking a mile a minute in his ear. “Macky, call me the minute you get there, and let me know, but if she’s dead, don’t even tell me, I can’t handle a tragedy right now.... Oh, I could just kill her. I knew something like this was going to happen.”
“Norma, just hang up and try to relax, go sit in the living room, and I’ll call you in a few minutes.”
“This is it, I am taking that ladder away from her as of today. The very idea of an old woman like her ...”
“Hang up, Norma.”
“She could have broken every bone in her body.”
“I’ll call you,” he said, and hung up.
Macky walked out to the back parking lot, got in his Ford SUV and headed over to Elner’s house. He had learned the hard way; whenever there was a problem with Aunt Elner, having Norma there only made matters worse, so he made Norma stay at home until he could get to Elner’s and size up the situation.
After Macky hung up, Norma ran into the living room like he had said to do, but she certainly could not calm down or even sit down until he called to tell her everything was all right. “I swear to God,” she thought, “if she hasn’t killed herself this time, not only am I taking that ladder away from her, I’m going over and personally chopping down that damn fig tree, once and for all.” As she paced up and down the living room, wringing her hands, she suddenly remembered she should be practicing the positive self-talk exercises she had just learned in a program she was doing, designed to help people, like herself, who suffered from panic attacks and anxiety. Her daughter, Linda, had seen it advertised on TV and had sent it to her for her birthday. She had finished step nine, “Put an End to ‘What If’ Thinking,” and was now on step ten, “How to Stop Obsessive, Scary Thoughts.” She also tried to do her biofeedback deep breathing technique that she had been learning from a woman in her yoga class. As she paced, she breathed deeply and repeated a list of positive affirmations to herself: “It’s nothing to worry about,” “She has fallen out of the tree twice before and it has always been all right,” “She’s going to be fine,” “It’s just catastrophic thinking, it is not real,” “You will laugh about this later,” “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” “Ninety-nine percent of the things you worry about never happen,” “You are not having a heart attack,” “It’s just anxiety, it’s not going to hurt you.”
But as hard as she tried, she couldn’t help but be anxious. Aunt Elner was the closest living relative she had left in the world, besides Macky and their daughter, Linda, of course. After her own mother had died, her aunt’s well-being had become the main focus of most of her worries, and it had not been easy. As she passed by the photograph of a smiling Aunt Elner she kept on the mantel, she sighed. Who would have thought that this sweet, innocent-looking, rosy-cheeked old lady, with her white hair pulled back in a bun, could cause so much trouble? But then, Aunt Elner had always been stubborn; years ago when Aunt Elner’s husband, Uncle Will, had died, it had taken Norma forever to get her to move into town so she could keep a better eye on her.
Finally, after years of begging her, Aunt Elner had agreed to sell the farm and move into a small house in town, but she still was hard to handle. Norma dearly loved Aunt Elner, and hated to have to nag at her all the time, but she was forced to; Aunt Elner was deaf as a post and would not have gotten a hearing aid if Norma hadn’t nagged at her. Aunt Elner never locked her doors, she didn’t eat right, she would not go to the doctor, and worst of all, she wouldn’t let Norma straighten up her house for her, something Norma was just dying to do. Aunt Elner’s house was a disaster, with pictures hung all over the wall helter-skelter, in no particular order, and her front porch was a mess. She had all kinds of things strewn everywhere: rocks, pinecones, shells, birds’ nests, wooden chickens, old plants, and four or five old rusty metal bulldog doorstoppers that her neighbor Ruby Robinson had given her. It was appalling to Norma, whose house and porch were always kept as neat as a pin. And it was only getting worse; just yesterday when Norma had gone over, there had been yet another new addition to the clutter: a hideously ugly jar of plastic sunflowers. Norma had cringed when she first saw it, but had asked sweetly, “Where did these come from, honey?”
As if she didn’t know. It was Aunt Elner’s neighbor across the street, Merle Wheeler, who was always bringing over the most horrendous-looking objects. Merle was the one who had brought that ratty, old fake brown leather office chair with the wheels, a chair that Elner had put on the front porch for all the world to see. At the time Norma had been head of the Beautify Elmwood Springs Committee and had tried every way possible to make her aunt get rid of it, but Elner had said she liked to roll around in it and water all her plants. Norma had even tried to talk Macky into going over there in the middle of the night and stealing it off Elner’s porch, but he wouldn’t do it. As usual, he stuck up for Aunt Elner, and told Norma that she was making a mountain out of a molehill, and that she was beginning to act just like her mother, which had not been true! Wanting to get rid of that chair had not been snobbism on her part, simply a matter of civic pride. Or at least she had hoped so.
Norma had a complete horror of being anything like her mother. Ida Shimfissle, Elner’s younger and prettier sister, had married well and had never been very nice to Elner. She had refused even to visit Elner after she’d moved to town, as long as Elner kept chickens in her backyard. “It’s so country,” she had said. But yesterday when Aunt Elner pointed at the sunflowers and announced with pride, “Aren’t they pretty, Merle brought them over, and you don’t even have to water them either,” it had been all Norma could do not to grab them and run screaming to the nearest trash can. Instead, she had just nodded pleasantly. Norma also knew where Merle had gotten the flowers. She had seen some exactly like them at Tuesday Mornings. Unfortunately, the local cemetery was just full of similar arrangements. Norma had always been appalled that people would actually put plastic flowers on a grave; to her, they seemed as cheap-looking as black velvet paintings of the Last Supper, but then, she never understood why anyone would want aluminum sliding glass windows, or keep a television set in the dining room either.
As far as Norma was concerned there was no excuse for having bad taste anymore, or at least, none that she could think of, when all you had to do was look in magazines and simply copy what you saw, or watch the design shows on the Home & Garden Channel. Thank God that Martha Stewart had come along when she had and introduced a little style to the American public. Granted, she was a jailbird now, but she had done a lot of good before she went. But it wasn’t only home and entertainment matters that bothered Norma, she was constantly dismayed at the way people dressed out in public. “You owe it to your fellow human beings to try and look as nice as you can, it’s just common courtesy,” her mother had always said. But now all anybody ever wore, even on planes, were tennis shoes, sweat suits, and baseball caps. Not that Norma dressed up all the time like she used to. She had been known to run out to the mall in her orange velour jogging outfit, but she never went anywhere without earrings and makeup. On those two points, she could never compromise. When Norma looked up at the clock again it was almost eight-thirty! Why wasn’t Macky calling? He had had plenty of time to get there. “Oh, God,” she thought. “Don’t tell me Macky has had a wreck and been killed in an accident on the way over there, that’s all I need this morning. Aunt Elner falls out of a tree and breaks her hip, and I become a widow on the same day!” At 8:31 she could not stand it another second, and was just about ready to dial Macky’s number, when the phone rang, and she almost jumped out of her skin.
Macky began by saying, “Norma, now listen to me. I don’t want you to get excited.” She could tell something was terribly wrong by the tone in his voice. He had always started conversations with “She’s fine, I told you not to worry,” but not this time. Norma held her breath. “This is it,” she thought. The call she had been so terrified of receiving was actually taking place. She felt her heart begin to pound even harder than before and her mouth go dry as she tried to remain calm and brace herself for the news.
Macky continued, “I don’t want you to panic, but they’ve called an ambulance.”
“AN AMBULANCE!” she screamed. “Oh my God! Has she broken something? I knew it! Is she badly hurt?”
“I don’t know, but you better come over here and go with us, you’ll probably need to sign some papers.”
“Oh my God. Is she in pain?”
There was a pause, then Macky answered, “No. She’s not in pain, just get on over here as soon as you can.”
“She’s broken her hip, hasn’t she? You don’t have to tell me, I know she has. I knew it. I’ve told her a thousand times not to get on that ladder!”
Macky cut her off, saying again, “Norma, just come on over here as soon as you can.” He had not wanted to be rude to Norma, and hated to hang up on her again, but he also did not want to tell her that Aunt Elner had knocked herself out cold and was still out like a light. At this point, he really had no idea what was broken, or even how badly she was hurt. When he had arrived at her house a few minutes before, Aunt Elner had been lying on the ground under her fig tree, with Ruby Robinson sitting beside her, taking her pulse, while her other neighbor, Tot, was standing there beside them engaged in a running commentary.
The Eyewitness
8:02 AM
EARLIER, AT EXACTLY 8:02 AM, Tot Whooten, a thin and wiry redhead who always wore pale blue eye shadow, even though it had been out of style since the seventies, had been on her way to work at the beauty shop because her client Beverly Cortwright was coming in for a dye job today, and she needed to get to the shop a little early and do some mixing. As she walked by Elner Shimfissle’s house, she just happened to look up, in time to see her neighbor topple backward off an eight-foot ladder, with what looked like a hundred wasps buzzing all around her and following her right down to the ground. After poor Elner landed with a thud, Tot yelled at her, “Don’t move, Elner!” and ran up her other neighbor’s front porch steps, screaming at the top of her lungs, “Ruby! Ruby! Get out here quick! Elner’s fallen out of the tree again!” Ruby Robinson, a diminutive woman of about five-foot-one, in clear bifocals that made her eyes look twice as big, was having her breakfast, but the instant she heard Tot, she jumped up, grabbed her small black leather doctor’s bag from the hall table, and ran as fast as she could. By the time the two of them reached the side yard, about twenty angry and upset wasps were still flying all around the tree, and Elner Shimfissle was lying on the ground, unconscious. Ruby immediately reached in her bag, pulled out the smelling salts, and snapped it under Elner’s nose, while Tot relayed what she had just witnessed to the other neighbors, who had started to come out of their houses and gather around the fig tree. “I was headed off to work,” she said, “when I heard this loud buzzing noise … buzz … buzz … buzzzzz, so I looked up, and saw Elner hurl herself backward off the top of the ladder, and then … Whamo! Bang! She hit the ground, and it’s a good thing she’s so bottom heavy, because when she fell, she didn’t flip or anything; just went straight down like a ton of bricks.” Ruby quickly popped another smelling salts under Elner’s nose, but still she did not come around. Never taking her eyes off of her patient for a second, Ruby suddenly started barking orders. “Somebody call an ambulance! Merle, bring me a couple of blankets. Tot, go call Norma and tell her what’s happened.” Ruby, who at one time had been head nurse at a major hospital, knew how to give orders, and everybody scattered and did exactly what she said.
Norma Hits the Road
8:33 AM
THE SECOND SHE hung up with Macky, Norma ran to the kitchen again and threw cold water in her face, then flew through the house frantically gathering up her purse, Aunt Elner’s insurance papers and Medicaid information, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and anything else she thought her aunt would need for the hospital. Norma had been waiting for years for something like this to happen, and now that it had, she was glad she’d had the foresight to plan for it. Ten years ago she had prepared a file marked HOSPITAL EMERGENCY, AUNT ELNER.
She also had an earthquake kit in the garage, where she kept bottled water, matches, six cans of Del Monte chili, a small supply of her hormones, thyroid medicine, aspirin, a jar of Merle Norman cold cream, and fingernail polish remover and an extra pair of earrings. Although it was not very likely that an earthquake would hit Elmwood Springs, Missouri, she felt it was better to be safe than sorry.
After Norma had gathered all the things for Aunt Elner, she ran out of the house and yelled to a woman in the yard next door, “I’m on my way to the hospital, my aunt’s fallen out of a tree again,” and jumped in the car and took off. The woman, who did not know Norma very well, stood there and watched her leave, wondering what in the world Norma’s aunt was doing up in a tree. After Norma rounded the steep corner and steered out of the complex, she drove across town as fast as she possibly could without breaking the law. The last time Aunt Elner had fallen and Norma had rushed over, she had been pulled over by the highway patrol and given a speeding ticket, the first one in her life, and to make matters worse, when she had driven away, she had backed up over the officer’s foot. Thank God he had been a friend of Macky’s or she might have wound up in jail for life. She knew she had to be careful not to get another ticket: she was obeying the speed limit, but as she drove, her thoughts were racing a hundred miles a minute. The more Norma thought about the events of the past six months, the madder she got and the more she began to blame Macky for Aunt Elner’s present situation. If they had stayed in Florida instead of coming back home, this would not have happened. When Norma reached the intersection out on the interstate and had to wait for the longest red light in the history of man to change to green, her mind flashed back to that fateful day just six months ago …
It had been a Tuesday afternoon and Aunt Elner had been at her bingo game over at the community center. Norma had just come home from her Weight Watchers meeting, and had been in such a good mood because she had lost another two pounds and received a happy-face sticker from the leader, when Macky had dropped the bomb. When she opened the front door, he was in the living room waiting for her, and had that funny look on his face, the one he always had when he had made up his mind about something, and sure enough, he told her to sit down; he wanted to tell her something. “Oh God, what now?” she thought, and when he told her, Norma could hardly believe her ears. After Macky had gone through what she had dubbed his “middle age crazy period, ten years too late” and they had already sold the hardware store, their house, and most of their furniture, and had all moved, including Aunt Elner and her cat, Sonny, lock, stock, and barrel, all the way down to Vero Beach, Florida, he was now sitting there telling her that he wanted to move back home again! After only two years of living in their mint green concrete-block three-bedroom citrus view patio home in “Leisure Village Central,” he now said that he had had it with Florida—with the hurricanes and the traffic and the old people who drove thirty miles an hour. She had looked at him in total disbelief. “Are you going to sit there and tell me that after we have sold practically everything we own and spent the last two years fixing this place up, now you want to move back home?”
“Yes.”
“When for years all I heard out of you was, ‘I can’t wait until we move to Florida.’”
“I know that, but—”
She cut him off again. “Before we moved, I asked you, ‘Are you sure you want to do this now?’ ‘Oh yes,’ you said. ‘Why wait, let’s go early and beat the baby boomers.’”
“I know I did, but—”
“Do you also recall that it was at your behest that I gave away all our winter clothes to the Goodwill? ‘Why take all those old coats and sweaters to Florida,’ you said. ‘I’ll never have to rake another leaf or shovel another sidewalk of snow, who needs heavy coats?’ you said.”
Macky squirmed a little in his chair as she continued. “But beside the fact that we now have no home, and no winter clothes, we can’t go back.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? What will people think?”
“About what?”
“About what? They will think we are a bunch of flibbertigibbets, that’s what, moving here and there, like a caravan of gypsies.”
“Norma, we’ve moved once in forty years. I don’t think that qualifies us as flibbertigibbets or gypsies.”
“What will Linda think?”
“She doesn’t care, it’s perfectly normal for people our age to want to be around familiar settings and old friends.”
“Then, Macky, why in God’s name did we leave in the first place?”
This was an answer he had thought about and rehearsed. “I think that it was a good learning experience,” he said.
“A good learning experience? I see. We now have no home, no winter clothes, no furniture, but it’s been a good learning experience. Macky, if you weren’t going to be happy here, why did we come?”
“I didn’t know I wouldn’t like it, and tell the truth, Norma, you don’t like it here any more than I do.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t, but unlike you, Macky, I’ve worked very hard trying to adjust, and I would hate to think I wasted two years of my life adjusting for nothing.”
Macky sighed. “OK, OK, we won’t go, I don’t want to do anything to make you unhappy.”
Then Norma sighed and looked at him. “Macky, you know I love you … and I’ll do what you want, but my God, I just wish you had thought this thing through. After they gave us that big going away party and all, then to crawl back home and say, ‘Surprise, we’re back.’ It will just be so embarrassing.”
Macky leaned over and took her hand. “Sweetheart, nobody cares. A lot of people have moved somewhere and then moved back again.”
“Well, I haven’t! And what does Aunt Elner think, I’m sure you two have discussed it.”
“She said she’s happy to go back home, but that it’s up to you, she’ll do whatever you want.”
“Oh great, as usual it’s two against one, and if I don’t say yes, I’m the dirty shirt.”
She sat and stared at him, blinked her eyes a few times, then said, “All right, Macky, we’ll go, but promise me that a couple of years from now, you won’t get another wild hair and move us again. I can’t take another move.”
“I promise,” said Macky.
“What a mess. Now you’ve got me so upset I’m going to have to have some ice cream.”
Macky jumped up, happy the thing was settled. “Don’t get up, honey,” he said. “I’ll get it. Two scoops or three?”
She opened her purse and felt around for a Kleenex. “Oh … make it three, I guess, there’s no point in me going back to Weight Watchers if we are leaving.”
Thankfully they sold the citrus view patio home in three days, with a thirty-day escrow. But still, it had been very upsetting to move again, and thank God she had not sold all of her knickknacks. She had kept her ceramic dancing storks music box, and her milk-glass top hat. They had been such a comfort to her in her time of need.
Driving back home to Missouri, with Sonny the cat yowling all the way, she’d tried not to continue to complain like her mother used to do, but when Aunt Elner quipped from the backseat, “Norma, look at the bright side, at least you didn’t sell off your cemetery lots,” it set her off again. “Just when I was starting a new life, here we are going back home to die, like a bunch of old elephants headed back to the burial grounds,” she’d said. And to make matters worse, in the two years they had been in Florida, with the new software companies opening up and all the new people moving in, the price of real estate in Elmwood Springs had almost doubled. What had once been a small town, with only two blocks of downtown, was now experiencing suburban sprawl. And with another huge shopping center opening up out on the four lane, most of the town had moved to the outskirts, and their pretty four-bedroom brick house that had sat on an acre had been torn down to make room for an apartment complex.
Elner had been the smart one. She had not sold her house but had rented it to friends of Ruby’s, who were gone now, so she could go back to her old house. But when they got back, all Norma and Macky could afford to buy was a two-bedroom two-story town home in a new development called Arbor Springs, and even then, Macky had to go to work at The Home Depot to help pay for that. At the time, Norma had begged Aunt Elner to move in with them, or to at least consider moving to an assisted living facility, but she had wanted to move back to her own house, and as usual, Macky took her side. And thanks to him, Norma was now headed over to see her oldest living relative, who had probably just broken a hip, an arm, or a leg, or worse. For all Norma knew, her aunt could have broken her neck and could be completely paralyzed, and she was probably going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
“Oh no!” she thought. “Poor Aunt Elner will be miserable not being able to move around.” Hopefully, they would be able to get her one of those new motorized chairs, and of course, this would have to happen now, when they had just moved into a house with stairs with no wheelchair access. Well, she guessed Macky was just going to have to build a ramp, because the three of them could not possibly live in Aunt Elner’s small one-bathroom house, not with Linda and the baby coming to visit all the time.
“I hope you’re happy now, Macky!” she said. “If you had listened to me, this would never have happened!”
The three people in the car that waited next to her at the red light looked over at Norma, who was now talking out loud to herself, and wondered if she was a crazy person. By the time she reached the next red light, and as her mind continued to race, Norma wondered if maybe Macky was not entirely to blame. Maybe this whole thing could have been avoided if she had just put her foot down and had not agreed to move to Florida in the first place. At the time she had told Macky that she’d had a bad omen about them moving, but then, she had bad omens about so many things, she couldn’t be sure if it was really a bad omen, or just another symptom of her anxiety disorder. It was very frustrating, to not know when she should put her foot down and when she should not. The result was that she never really put her foot down about anything. By the time Norma was a block away from Aunt Elner’s house, Macky was completely off the hook, and now she was blaming herself entirely for Aunt Elner’s fall. “It’s all my fault,” she wailed. “I should never have let her move back into that old house!”
Just then, Norma happened to look over and see the same three people in the car who had been at the last stoplight staring at her. She put the window down and said, “My aunt fell out of her fig tree” just as the light changed and they took off as fast as they could.
Verbena Gets the News
8:41 AM
VERBENA WHEELER WAS already at work down at the Blue Ribbon Cleaners and Fluff and Fold Laundromat when her husband, Merle, called and told her that Elner had fallen off the ladder again and this time had knocked herself out cold.
“They are waiting on the ambulance right this very minute,” he said.
“Ohhhh, Norma is going to have a fit, you know how she worries about Elner. Call me back and tell me as soon as you know something.”
Verbena, a tight-lipped woman with a tight little gray permanent, was a Church of God, no-nonsense, strict Pentecostal, “I’m a Bible-beater and proud of it” kind of person who could quote from Scripture to fit any occasion. She had also been very worried about her neighbor, not only about her falling off a ladder, but about her rapidly changing belief systems as well. In her opinion, Elner Shimfissle had gone quite radical as of late, and Verbena was convinced she could trace the changes right back to the day Elner had gotten cable television, and had started watching the Discovery Channel. Verbena, who only watched TBS and religious channels, had been extremely concerned.
“Too much science, too little religion,” if you asked her. To prove her point, only about a week after it had been hooked up, she had received an alarming phone call from Elner.
“Verbena,” Elner said, “I’m just not so sure about the Adam and Eve story anymore.”
Verbena had been stunned upon hearing such a thing coming from a lifelong Methodist in good standing.
“Oh, Elner,” Verbena said, while holding on to the counter for support, “that’s a terrible thing to say … Next you’ll be telling me you have become an atheist!”
“Oh no, honey, I still believe in God, it’s just the Adam and Eve part I have a question about.”
An alarm bell went off as Verbena suddenly grasped the real implications and the dire consequences of the word “question.” She gasped, “Don’t tell me that you’re thinking of throwing in with the evolutionists, not at this late date, I’m just shocked, you of all people.” Elner agreed, “Well, I’m kind of shocked at myself, Verbena, but if you ever doubted that we didn’t come from monkeys, then you need to see the show I saw on television last night, about those little snow monkeys they have over in Japan. They sit around all winter in hot tubs, and I swear to you, there was one that looked so much like Tot Whooten, I half expected it to talk. I’m telling you, honey, if you put a dress on it, put a comb in its hand, you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart. The thing even had on blue eye shadow just like Tot’s … had her expression and everything!”
Verbena had been very upset by the phone call. She knew that once a person had even the slightest doubt about Adam and Eve, the stories that followed—Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, on down the line—began to fall apart like a stack of dominoes. She had wanted to call Norma immediately and tell her that her aunt was being dangerously influenced by those so-called educational shows, and if she wasn’t careful, the next thing you know, she might wind up subscribing to The New York Times or joining the ACLU! Verbena knew it was just this kind of thinking that had led to taking prayer out of the school, and Christ out of Christmas. Verbena would have called, but was not quite sure just where Norma stood on the creation issue anymore.
Norma’s mother, Ida, had been a strict Presbyterian, but after her mother died, Norma had joined one of those new age, nondenominational, one-size-fits-all, do-it-yourself churches that had moved so far away from the Bible that they hardly ever read it. And even when they did, their interpretation of the Scripture was far too loose to suit Verbena. She tried to warn Norma that joining that new age church was taking a mighty big chance with her immortal soul. Norma had not been rude, she had listened, and thanked her for her call, but she hadn’t gone back to a good Bible-based church either. A lot of the new people in town whom she tried to guide back to the Bible had been very rude, had even gone so far as to tell her to mind her own business. Some had even canceled their charge account down at the cleaners. She had taken a hit in her pocketbook and learned the hard way, it was best not to tinker around with matters of religion, not if you want to get along with your neighbors. But another reason she had not called Norma was that shortly after talking to Elner, Verbena had gone on the Internet. There was just no two ways of getting around it; Tot Whooten did look exactly like a snow monkey. It had surprised her at the time, but it had not shaken her faith; it stated quite clearly in Genesis 1:27, “So God created humankind in his image,” and there was just no way in this world Verbena would ever believe that God looked anything like Tot Whooten, or any of the Whootens, for that matter!
Verbena had not been aware of it at the time, but the snow monkey incident was not the first question Elner had concerning Adam and Eve. Years ago, when Elner still lived out in the country, long before she had watched the Discovery Channel, she had been listening to the Bud and Jay early morning farm report on the radio, when Bud had announced the question of the day. “Which came first,” he asked, “the chicken or the egg?” After the show, Elner had gone on about her chores for a little while, then right in the middle of feeding her chickens, she stopped dead in her tracks, put the pan down, and went inside and called Norma.
Norma picked up. “Hello.”
“Norma, I think there is a mistake in the Bible, who do I tell, Bud and Jay or Reverend Jenkins?”
Norma looked over at the clock. It was five-forty-five and still dark outside. “Hold on a minute, Aunt Elner. Let me go and pick this up in the kitchen, Macky’s still asleep.”
“Oh, did I wake you up?”
“That’s all right, hold on.” Norma got up out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen, put the light on, and plugged in her percolator. Now that she was awake, she might as well fix the coffee. She picked up the phone. “Here I am, Aunt Elner. Now what?”
“I think I may have discovered a serious error in the Bible. I don’t know why I hadn’t figured it out before.”
“What error?”
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“What? That’s not in the Bible.”
“I know that, but just answer me this, which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“I have no idea,” Norma said.
“Well, don’t feel bad, they say it’s the age-old question that nobody’s been able to figure out, but the answer just came to me a minute ago, just as clear as a bell and here it is … Are you ready?”
“Yes.” Norma yawned.
“The chicken came first, no doubt about it.”
“Ahh … and how did you come up with that?”
“Simple! Where does an egg come from? A chicken; so the egg had to come after the chicken, the egg couldn’t lay itself. But then I got to thinking, if the chicken came before the egg … then how could Adam get here first, when Eve was the only one who could give birth?”
Norma reached for a cup out of the cabinet. “Aunt Elner, I think you may have forgotten that according to the Bible, nobody gave birth, God made Adam, then took a rib from Adam, and made Eve.”
“I know it says that, Norma, but the sequence is off … It’s the hen that lays the egg with the rooster inside … the rooster doesn’t even lay eggs.”
Norma said, “Yes, honey, but there has to be a rooster to fertilize the egg.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Then Elner said, “Well, you’ve got me there. I guess I need to do some more thinking about it. Oh, shoot. Here I was thinking I’d just solved one of the great mysteries of the world, but I still think there’s a chance that Eve came first and the men who wrote the Bible changed it around at the last minute so they could be first, and if that’s so, we may have to rethink the entire Bible.”
At around seven-thirty, when Macky had come into the kitchen, he found Norma sitting at the kitchen table wide awake.
“What are you doing up so early, couldn’t you sleep?”
She looked at him. “I could have … if the phone hadn’t rung before the crack of dawn and woke me up.”
“Oh,” said Macky, getting his cup. “What did she want to know this morning?”
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg.”
Macky laughed as Norma went over to get the cream out of the refrigerator.
“You can laugh, Macky, but she was just about to call the radio station and tell them that there was a mistake in the Bible, thank God I stopped her.”
“What does she think is a mistake?”
“She’s convinced Eve was created before Adam. Can you imagine the uproar that would have caused?”
Macky smiled. “Well, at least she has an open mind, you can say that for her.”
“Oh, it’s open all right,” Norma said. “I just wish it would open a little later in the day. Last week she woke me up wanting to know if I knew how much the moon weighed.”
“Why did she want to know that?”
“Who can tell? All I know is, she can ask more questions in one day than most people do in a year.”
“Yeah, she can.”
“And you wait, once she’s off and running with this Adam and Eve thing she’s going to be calling me all day.”
As predicted, around ten AM, just as Norma had finished applying her special Merle Norman facial mask for dry sensitive skin, the phone rang for the fourth time that morning. “Norma, if Adam and Eve were the only two people on earth, then where did Cain and Abel meet their wives?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Aunt Elner … at Club Med? Don’t ask me. I don’t even know why the chicken crossed the road.”
“You don’t? Well I do!” said Aunt Elner. “Do you want me to tell you?”
Norma gave up and sat down. “Sure,” she said. “I’m just dying to know.”
“To show the possum it can be done.”
“Aunt Elner, where do you hear these silly things?”
“From Bud and Jay. Did you know that another name for the potato bug is the Jerusalem grasshopper?”
“No.”
“Did you know there are forty-seven trillion cells in the human body?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, that was the correct answer yesterday. It won somebody an electric knife.”
Norma had just put the phone down and was headed to the bathroom when the phone rang again.
“Hey, Norma, you just wonder who had the time to count all those cells, don’t you?”
To Believe or Not to Believe
8:49 AM
NORMA WAS DRIVING as fast as she could, and just missed the last red light by a second and had to slam on her brakes, causing Aunt Elner’s insurance files to spill all over the floor of the car. She was so upset by this time, and wanted to pray for help with her nerves, but she knew she either had to pray or drive carefully; she couldn’t do both, so she decided to pay attention to the road.
think