There was nothing Ellie could say, and judging from Leslie’s silence, she felt the same way. “And Roger?” Ellie asked softly.
“Good ol’ Roger, the love of my life, returned from college—where he’d gone on a full football scholarship, I might add. His parents are rich, but they have to be the cheapest people on the planet—and he had a fiancée on his arm.”
“A what!?” Ellie said. “Why would any man marry someone other than you?” She didn’t realize that she’d said this quite loudly until an entire line of people turned to look at them in interest.
“Beauty isn’t everything,” Madison said with a little smile.
“I’m not talking about beauty. You gave up your education to stay home and nurse your mother. That’s beauty on the inside!”
Madison looked at Ellie in surprise; then she smiled until her whole face lit up. “I think I like you,” she said, and Ellie smiled back.
“Go on,” Leslie urged. “What did you do? And I agree with Ellie; why would he want someone else?”
Madison took a deep breath. “He said that since he’d graduated from college, he needed someone he could talk to. Someone educated.”
At that, Ellie turned to look at Leslie, then back at Madison. “Castration would have been too good for him,” she said softly.
Madison made a little face of agreement. “I thought so too at the time. Especially considering that all through high school I did most of his homework for him. He used to drive to my house three times a week and he’d always have a box full of schoolwork I was to ‘help’ him with. The truth was that he’d watch football on TV while I worked. Our dates often consisted of my doing his homework while Roger tossed a ball with somebody. And in college if he had a paper to write, he usually sent me the assignment and I wrote it.”
“Could he get away with that?” Leslie asked. “Surely he would have been caught when he took his exams. You couldn’t very well do those for him.”
“No?” Madison asked, an eyebrow arched. “Roger was the best football player his high school had ever seen. He pretty much single-handedly won each and every game. The principal told the teachers that if Roger didn’t get grades good enough to get him into college, then that teacher would stand a chance of losing his or her job, with or without tenure. I wasn’t there, but I think the attitude at college wasn’t much different.”
“Well, that’s fair,” Ellie said, turning to Leslie. “Don’t you agree?”
Leslie laughed. “So you got him into college, then helped him stay there, and all the while you were a saint.”
At that Madison laughed. “A saint for nursing my mother? You know something, I enjoyed it.” When the other two started to speak, Madison put up her hand. “No, no, I didn’t enjoy my mother’s suffering. But I was interested in the medical side of her illness. I even took a part-time job at the hospital. I had to drive seventy-five miles to get there, but—”
“Every day?” Ellie asked.
“Only three days a week. But Montana isn’t like Virginia,” Madison said, smiling. “You can put your foot on the gas peda
l and go to sleep. More or less, anyway. During those four years Roger was away, I learned a lot. In fact, one of the doctors suggested that I go into nursing as a career, but later he . . .”
“Let me guess,” Ellie said with a grimace. “He chased you around the desk.”
Madison looked down at her hands. “Around the bed of a patient in a coma. But he really should have noticed that I had a full bedpan in my hands. I ‘accidentally’ spilled the contents all over the front of him.”
At that Ellie exploded with laughter, causing the people to again turn and look at them. Leslie put her hand over her mouth as she laughed too.
“So if you liked nursing, why didn’t you pursue it?” Leslie asked.
“Because . . .” Madison trailed off. How could she tell them what her life had been like? Maybe it was vain of her to think that she was beautiful, but all her life people had loved to look at her. Her mother said that even as a newborn she’d been extraordinary and people had noticed her. In school Madison had always been chosen to be the princess in the play. In the fifth grade she had begged to be allowed to be the witch, and she was thrilled when her teacher said yes, she could be the witch and wear the pointed hat and cackle. Madison had always loved to cackle. But then her teacher had gone home and rewritten the play so that at the end the witch turned out to be a beautiful princess in disguise. When Madison had protested, she was told that her face would sell tickets, so she had to stop complaining.
As Madison grew older, her beauty stayed with her and she grew to her present five feet eleven and a half inches tall. “I am not six feet tall!” she often said. Her mother had said that half of Madison’s attraction to Roger was that he was taller than she was.
How could Madison tell these two women what it was like being a tourist attraction in her small town? Because during her teen years, that’s what she had been—or at least that’s what the girls who had graduated with her from high school had called her. There wasn’t much going on in Erskine, just a few stores lining the main street. But Erskine’s main street also happened to be part of the route to a major tourist area: winter skiing and summer outdoor sports. About six of the town’s businesses had formed a council to try and come up with a way to get those cars that sped through their town to stop and buy. The council came up with several ideas of how to achieve this. One was to build a big jail and give lots of speeding tickets. They could put the driver in the jail, then, while his family waited for his release, they could shop in Erskine. That idea was discarded because it would probably make the tourists too angry to shop. “Not to mention that it’s probably illegal,” one of the council members had added.
There were more ideas tossed about, such as a couple of carnivals, and a film festival. “Spielberg doesn’t show up just because you invite him,” someone said. “Who wants to come to Erskine?” “We don’t want them to come; we just need them to stop.” At that someone had mumbled, “Too bad we can’t get Madison to stand in the middle of the street. That would stop them.”
From there the idea had taken hold, and the next thing Madison knew, she was being offered the job of handing out advertising brochures to passing motorists. “All I have to do is pass out brochures?” she’d asked. “That’s it,” had been the reply.
So the local businessmen had put up a red light smack in the middle of Erskine’s one major street, and next to it they had erected a little shelter, rather like an old-fashioned bus stop, and when the cars stopped at the red light, Madison was to hand them the brochures.
It had all seemed simple enough and the work was only on weekends, when the traffic was heaviest, so she’d taken the job. But it had all nearly backfired when so many cars stopped in Erskine and so many men, on their way to a weekend of merrymaking, had hit on Madison that the local sheriff had had to assign two deputies to sit near her. In the end, Erskine decided that it was safer to put up a billboard with a picture of Madison on it. She was wearing cutoff denims, a red shirt tied around her waist, and she was inviting people to stop in Erskine and look around.
To Madison, the whole thing had been a great embarrassment, but she needed the money for her mother’s medical bills and what with Roger in college, she was lonely, and it had been nice to talk to the people who were driving through on their way to somewhere else.