Nancy Culpepper (10 page)

In the Wal-Mart parking lot, he has a sudden queasy feeling. He can’t remember where he is. He sees rows and rows of cars. His brain reels. He must have a car here, but he can’t remember what car. He sees a Camaro, an Oldsmobile, rows of shiny silver and white cars, lined up like teeth. The vertical lines of street lamps tower in the landscape like defoliated trees. The parking lot seems slightly familiar, but he can’t place it. He may be thinking of one he has seen on TV. He stumbles onward and suddenly spots his car—the Rabbit that needs a tune-up. The little car seems to have aged ten years overnight. It is parked next to a black van with round windows and a pink-and-blue mural of an angel and a Jesus with a halo. Spence wonders what loony drives such a vehicle. Spence has never been comfortable in church. He is suspicious of most preachers and believes all the evangelists on the radio and TV are con artists. The night before, when Lila came out of the recovery room and was wheeled back into Room 301, she said to him, “Did you pray for me?” Her question startled him. They never spoke of prayer, or heaven, but Spence knew she prayed for him, frequently, because she went to church and was afraid that because he didn’t they wouldn’t end up in heaven together. When he answered her, he felt a chill up his spine. “Sure,” he said, joking. “You know how good I am at saying grace.” She got tickled at him then but had to stop laughing because she hurt. “I’ve got a long row to hoe,” she said. She wasn’t fully awake.

8

Lila feels as though she has been left out in a field for the buzzards. The nurses are in at all hours, making no special effort to be quiet— a nurse who checks dressings, another one who changes dressings, a nurse with blood-thinner shots three times a day, a nurse with breathing-machine treatments, various nurse’s aides who check temperature and blood pressure, the cleaning woman, the mail lady, the priest and nuns from the hospital, the girls who fill the water jugs, the woman who brings the meal trays, the candy stripers selling toiletries and candy and magazines from a cart. Lila can’t keep track of all the nurses who come to check her drainage tube—squirting the murky fluid out of the plastic collection bottle, measuring the fluid intake and output, writing on charts. The nurses walk her around the entire third floor twice a day, accompanied by her I.V. bag, wheeling on a stand. Spence is nervous, bursting in anxiously, unable to stick around. And the girls are in and out, bringing her little things—a basket of flowers from the gift shop downstairs and some perfume. Lee and Joy brought a rose in a milk-glass bud vase. The church sent pink daisies. The old woman in the other bed has no flowers.

The surgeon told Lila she could live without a breast. “You couldn’t live without a head, or a liver, or a heart,” he said when he informed her in the recovery room that he had removed her breast. “But you can live without a breast. You’ll be surprised.”

“It would be like living without balls,” Lila replied. “You’d find that surprising too, but you could probably get along without them.”

Lila is not sure she said that aloud, and remembering it now, she is embarrassed that she might have, under the influence of the drugs. She’s surprised Nancy hasn’t said the same thing to the doctor’s face.

Lila hears the old woman in the other bed grunting and complaining. “I’ll not leave here alive!” she shouted when a nurse gave her a bath. “You’re wasting your time fooling with me.”

By the second day after her surgery, Lila is no longer hooked to the I.V. She plucks at the hospital gown in front where her bandage itches. The drainage tubes irritate her skin. She feels weak, but restless. “I’m afraid my blood’s too thin already,” she tells the nurse who comes with the blood-thinner shot.

“No, this is what the doctor wanted,” the nurse says.

“I’m getting poked so full of holes I’m like a sifter bottom.”

Besides the shots, there are the tests. They have wheeled her into the cold basement three times to run her through their machines. They have scanned her bones, her liver, her whole body, looking for loose cancer cells. Now the cancer doctor comes in to tell Lila the results of the tests: The cancer has spread to two out of the seventeen lymph nodes that were removed. Spence isn’t there yet, but Cat and Nancy fire questions at him. Lila’s head spins as the doctor explains that once the cancer has reached the lymph nodes, it has gone into the bloodstream, and then it can end up anywhere. The news doesn’t quite register.

“I’m recommending chemotherapy,” the doctor says.

“Is that cobalt?” Lila asks weakly. The doctor is young and reminds her of the odd-looking preacher who led the revival at church last year. The preacher had a long nose and wore a gold shiny suit.

The doctor says, “No. This will be a combination of three drugs— Cytoxan, methotrexate and 5FU.” He explains that she will have a chart showing two weeks of treatments, then a three-week rest period, then two weeks of treatments, and so on. She will get both pills and shots. Like dogs teaming up on a rabbit, Cat and Nancy jump on him about side effects.

“This particular treatment is tolerated very well,” he says. “That’s not to say there won’t be side effects. A little hair loss, a little nausea. Some people react more adversely than others.”

Lila can’t keep her mind on what he’s saying. “I’ve got plenty of hair,” she says, tugging at her curls. “And it’s coarse, like horse hair.” The last permanent she got didn’t take on top.

“You’re going to have to lay off the smoking too,” the doctor says, consulting his clipboard.

“They won’t let me smoke here,” Lila says. She bummed a cigarette from a visitor in the lounge the night before, but it burned her lungs and tasted bitter. She couldn’t finish it.

The cancer doctor says now, “Cigarettes will interfere with the chemotherapy.”

“See!” Nancy says triumphantly. “Doctor’s orders. And you wouldn’t listen to us.”

“These girls snitched my cigarettes,” Lila says to the doctor. “Is that any way to treat an old woman that’s stove up in the hospital?”

“Best thing for you,” the doctor says with a slight grin.

“And they’re telling me I can’t eat what I’m used to,” Lila goes on.

“She eats a high-fat diet,” Nancy says.

“Don’t listen to them,” the doctor says to Lila. “You eat anything you want to. If I was your age, I’d eat anything I wanted to.”

Lila sees Nancy bristle. Nancy says, “She’s eaten bacon and eggs every morning of her life and she has clogged arteries. What are you saying?”

“It’s too late for her to do anything about her diet. Cutting back on cholesterol won’t help at all. It’s simply too late. And it’s too late for you too,” he says. “How old are you?”

“Forty-two.”

“Too late.” He nods at Cat. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-four.”

“It might help you a little, but not much. They did autopsies on the soldiers who died in Vietnam, and those young boys—nineteen years old—already had plaque in their arteries.”

“Not all doctors agree with you about cholesterol,” Nancy says, shooting him a mean look.

As he scribbles on his chart, the doctor tells a complicated story about some experiments on Italian women conducted with the drugs he is prescribing. Nancy and Cat follow him out into the hall. Lila suspects they are keeping something from her. She doesn’t know what to think. The doctor didn’t say if she would be cured, and she was afraid to ask.

She can feel the wound draining, little drips that tickle. The nurses don’t use any kind of ointment on it. When she was a child, she had an infected place where she had stuck a stob in her shin. Her aunt Dove bought some Rosebud salve from a peddler and it healed the sore. Lila remembers when they used to rub dirt in wounds; dirt was pure, what grew things. Good dirt was precious.

In the other bed, the old woman yells at the nurse bringing her lunch tray.

“You can just take that right back, because I don’t want it.”

“If you don’t start eating for us, we’ll have to put you back on the I.V., Mrs. Wright,” the nurse says in a tone one would use to a child.

The nurse disappears into the hall and comes back with Lila’s dinner.

“Oh, no, not more food,” Lila says.

Spence, looking tired and cold, comes in a little later. She is still picking at her dinner.

“The doctor said it spread to two out of seventeen lymp’ nodes,” Lila tells him. Before she can respond to Spence’s shocked expression, Cat and Nancy return and tell him what the doctor said.

“He’s going to try chemotherapy,” Cat says.

“Cobalt?”

“No.”

Spence grins, the worry on his face lifting. “I was afraid they were going to do cobalt. I couldn’t sleep none all night, thinking about it.”

“No. Just shots and pills.”

Spence says, “What’ll it do?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“He was optimistic,” Nancy assures Spence.

Cat repeats what the doctor said about the treatment. Lila, amazed that anyone can remember all that, notices that Cat doesn’t go into detail about the discussion on fat. Spence listens without comment.

Lila shoves her tray at Spence. “Here, does anybody want some of this turkey? I can’t go another bite.”

“That mess looks awful.” He turns up his nose.

“We’re going to the cafeteria,” Nancy says. “Why don’t you come with us, Daddy?”

He shakes his head. “I found this place with baked taters four for a dollar.”

“
Four
baked potatoes?” Cat asks.

“I just get two,” he says. “And a Coke and some peanuts.”

“You better go down to the cafeteria,” Lila says to him, “and get you some meat and vegetables. I can’t say much for their cooking, though.”

“You can say that again,” Mrs. Wright in the other bed says, her voice calling through the curtain partition. “They call this turkey and dressing? It ain’t even Thanksgiving. We had better grub at the poor-house when I used to work in the kitchen.”

Lila says, “You better eat it, though, to keep body and soul together.”

“I told ’em I wasn’t eating a bite and I won’t. I’ll not leave this hospital alive anyway.”

Spence and Cat and Nancy grin at each other. Cat whispers to Spence, “She’s been going on like that all morning.”

A nurse says, “I’ll be back to check your drainage when you’re done eating.”

“They never leave you alone,” says Lila. “All night long they come in. ‘Mrs. Culpepper? Time to take your temperature.’ ‘Mrs. Culpepper? Time to check the drainage.’ They come in here and wake me up just to refill the water jug.”

“They go by their rules,” Nancy says. “They don’t care about you as a person.”

“There’s one nurse that’s cute as a bug’s ear,” Lila says. “She tickles me. She’s got a cute disposition and the littlest feet.”

“Isn’t Mom doing great?” Cat says to Spence with a grin.

“She’s got her fire back,” Spence says, beaming at Lila.

“This place ain’t seen nothing yet,” says Lila. “I’m tough as nails and rough as a cob!” She laughs at herself and feels the bandage pull her skin. She wants to be cheerful, for the girls, but she doesn’t feel cheerful.

In the afternoon, when the girls have gone, a nurse draws back the curtain partition, and the sunlight through the window next to Mrs. Wright’s bed floods Lila’s side of the room. The TV is playing a soap opera about a woman whose husband is having an affair with their adopted daughter.

“I hate them old stories,” Mrs. Wright says. “The same thing ever’ day, and it never does come to an end.”

“They just want to keep you going on them,” Lila says. The adopted daughter on TV is pregnant now. She has agreed to be a surrogate mother for her adoptive parents, who can’t have children.

“My belly steeples is itching,” says Mrs. Wright. “I feel like yanking ’em out.”

“Don’t you have any family close by to come and see you?” Lila asks. The woman has had no visitors.

“None except my brother, but he’s in Tennessee. And he don’t care a rat’s behind what happens to me. There’s a bunch of nieces and nephews and their littluns—just little tadpoles.”

Lila says, “I’ve raised three fine younguns.” She fumbles for the remote-control box by the bed and turns down the sound of the soap opera.

Mrs. Wright says, “I’ve farmed all my life except for a year when I went to Detroit and worked during the war. I’ve gone out in the morning when the dew was dried off and cut hay and baled it and got it in before it rained. We’d work till ten or eleven at night.”

“I always helped hay too,” Lila says. “You ain’t got nothing on me.”

“I lifted the bales right into the truck just like a man. Did you lift bales into the truck?”

“Well, I
drove
the truck,” says Lila. “They wouldn’t let me lift like that—in case my insides might drop.”

“That could be the cause of my trouble,” Mrs. Wright says. “I wouldn’t have come to this place, but they bellyached and bellyached till they got me here. I could have got along fine without them cutting me open.”

“Who bellyached?”

“Oh, them people I rent my trailer from.”

The woman rattles on, but Lila pretends to be falling asleep. In the TV story, the adopted daughter is driving over a bridge. The bridge railing breaks. Debris scatters, gray water rolling with bits of wreckage. Then an instant soup is steaming in a cup and a bleached-blond woman in a shiny kitchen is smiling. Lila’s kitchen is not that fancy, even though they remodeled a few years ago, but she remembers how proud she was to get out of Rosie’s miserable, dark kitchen, with the dishwater simmering on the gas stove. By the time Cat was born, Lila and Spence had built their own house, a hundred yards away from his parents’ house, through the woods. They had two dozen cows by then, and the dairy prospered. Rosie churned butter; Lila helped with the milking and bottling; Spence made the deliveries in town; Amp and Spence raised corn and hay. In her new house, a plain four-room square, Lila had her own kitchen, with running water. With her blackberry money, she bought a pressure cooker. Later, they bought a freezer and installed indoor plumbing, and eventually they added more rooms. Lila relaxed and let things go. She didn’t yell at the kids for strewing their clothes and toys everywhere. She spoiled them. Before Easter Sunday, she often found herself staying up past midnight finishing their Easter outfits. And she made so many clothes for Cat over the years she could have stocked a store. Her children were always well fed and wore good clothes.