Nancy Culpepper (14 page)

“I told you how it was.” Lee takes his time lighting a cigarette. “Cat said I could have the air conditioner, so I went and got it and installed it, and then she changed her mind and wanted it back, but I already had it in the window. I had to rework the frame to get it set right. It would have been easier for her to get a secondhand air conditioner than to fool with this one. She got mad because I wouldn’t let her have it back.”

“She claims she just meant to let you borrow it.”

“She said I could have it, and I took her at her word.”

Words. Lila’s kinfolks deliberately tried to hurt her with words. They put him in a sour mood. And her friends chattered about diseases. Lila ate it up. His daughters embarrassed him. They even complained to the doctors about the hospital food, but the doctors had nothing to do with it. When Lila’s first meal after surgery was a hamburger with pickles and potato chips, Nancy said it wasn’t nutritious, especially for someone with carotid-artery disease. “A greasy old hamburger!” Nancy snapped at the doctor. Spence wanted to spank her. He can remember when he and Lila were courting, and they went out for hamburgers. A hamburger and Coke at Fred and Sue’s Drive-in was the most delicious meal they had ever had. Even after they were married, they looked forward to going out for hamburgers almost as much as they looked forward to making love. His mother was stingy with meat and cooked the same plain grub day in and day out.

Lee is speaking to him about subdivisions. Lee brings up subdivisions about once a month, trying to convince Spence that since his land is close to town it will be worth something someday.

“Why don’t you sell off some frontage and get a start on a development?” Lee asks.

“What would I want to do that for?”

“You’re setting on a gold mine.”

“Good. You can come over and dig in it.”

“You could sell one lot and get enough to build a house on another lot and then sell it at a profit.”

“Why didn’t Joy come today?” Spence asks.

“She went to Mister Sun. Her and her sister go to the tanning booth every chance they get. I gave her a membership for her birthday.” Lee stands to go, as Jennifer and Greg appear in the lounge. “I have to get home and finish paneling the den. The wallpaper’s peeling off, and Joy’s having a fit.”

“You’re going to do that on Sunday?” asks Spence, surprised. “I thought your mama taught you not to work on Sunday.”

“I don’t have time during the week, with overtime.”

“Why don’t you repaper? Ain’t that cheaper?”

“No. I’d have to put up some new gypsum board, and by the time you get gypsum board and tape it and paint an undercoat, it’s cheaper to panel.” Lee clutches his Sprite can, crumpling it, left-handed.

“Paneling’s got formaldehyde in it,” says Spence. “It causes cancer. Ask Nancy. Nancy can explain it to you.”

“Nancy’s got an explanation for everything,” Lee says with a laugh. “What does she say caused Mom to get cancer?”

“Bacon grease. She says them veins in her neck is stopped up with bacon grease.”

“Bacon grease in her neck?” asks Jennifer, Lee’s seven-year-old.

“Come on, Goofus,” says Lee to Greg, who is punching on Lee, trying to get his attention. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” Lee says to Spence.

After Lee leaves, Spence goes to check on Lila one more time before he heads home for the evening. He runs into Cat in the hall. She’s wearing some kind of pink getup with a green-flowered ruffle at the bottom.

“Hi, kid,” he says. “Where you been all day?”

“I went to the River Days Festival. They had a flea market and a fiddle contest.”

“Fiddles ought to be outlawed.”

“Why?”

“They make too much noise. The way they screak gives me a rigor.”

She ignores him. “Did you see how pretty Mom looked? I fixed her hair and painted her fingernails this morning before her company came.”

He nods. “You look pretty too. Except your ears look like some tobacco worms are sucking on ’em.” Her earrings are fat and pale green and hang down past her chin line.

Cat slaps at his arm playfully. “I don’t know how Mom put up with you all these years,” she says.

“Where are you going?” he asks when Cat turns toward the elevator.

“I have a date to go out to eat.”

“With that guy that took you up to Carbondale and left you that time?”

“No. He was a jerk.”

“I thought you had more sense than that.”

“Well, sometimes you just get in a fix and you don’t know how you got there.”

The elevator doors open and she steps on, waving goodbye. As the doors close, he remembers the time Cat was coming down the lane to meet him in the field. She was only about three. She crawled under the fence and started across the pasture toward him when a bull saw her and headed her way. “Go back, Cathy,” he cried. “Get under the fence!” He never saw such a calm, smart child. She purposefully turned and sped toward the fence and crawled under. He was always proud of that, of how smart she was.

14

A woman from the mastectomy support group arrives the next afternoon, bringing Lila a temporary pad to stuff in her brassiere until she can be measured for a permanent one. Lila feels embarrassed because both her daughters and Spence are right there. Spence is reading the newspaper noisily, rattling the pages and jerking them out smooth. Lila worries about his nerves.

“It’s called a prosthesis,” the woman explains. Lila did not catch her name. Cheerful and little, pert as a wren, she stands beside the bed, speaking to Lila like a schoolteacher. She presents Lila with the object, which is in a plastic bag.

“Law,” says Lila. “That weighs a ton.” It reminds her of those sandbags used to hold down temporary signs on the highway.

“I can tell you’re surprised,” the woman chirps. “We don’t realize the weight we’re carrying around. You can put a strain on your back if you don’t get properly fitted. So don’t just stuff your bra with any old thing to make it look right. It’s got to feel right and it’s got to be the right weight, or you can run into serious problems.”

The woman says she has had a mastectomy herself, and presumably she is wearing one of these sandbags in her brassiere. Lila notices Spence squirming. Nancy and Cat don’t jump on this woman the way they did on the doctors. Cat is playing solitaire and Nancy is reading a book. Mrs. Wright is asleep.

The woman tells a long tale about her own mastectomy. “I was worried about recurrence,” she says. “And I did have a lump to come in the other breast. It was tested and it was benign, but I made the decision to have the second breast removed too. I just didn’t want to take the chance of having cancer again. Now, that may sound extreme to you, but it was just the way I felt. So I’m free from worry, and the prosthesis works just fine.”

The woman’s little points are as perky as her personality. If the originals were that small, she probably doesn’t miss them, Lila thinks. The woman talks awhile about balance, and then she talks about understanding. She has a packet of materials for Lila to read. “You may get depressed over losing part of your femininity,” she says. “And we want you to know we’re available to help.” Lila listens carefully, but she can’t think of anything to say.

“The doctors were skeptical when we started our organization,” the woman says, leaning toward Lila and speaking in a confidential half-whisper. “But after we advertised, we had fifty women come to the first meeting. There was a great need for this, and we want you to know that we’re there to serve you.”

“Would I have to come all the way to Paducah?”

“Yes. That’s where we hold our meetings, on the first Monday night of each month.”

“Well, I don’t get out much at night. And I don’t like to drive on that Paducah highway.”

“Let me urge you just to try it and see what it does for you. I’ll give you the names of some people to contact.” She talks on and on, about how the family should be understanding. In the packet are letters to daughters and sons and husbands. Spence and the girls are pretending they aren’t there. “The letters say things that you may be uncomfortable saying, things you might be afraid to say, but they will explain your feelings at this delicate time when you need emotional support. All you have to do is send the appropriate letter to your daughters and your husband and to your sons, if you have any. It will be a nice surprise for them if you just send them in the mail. It’s a much easier way for you to communicate your feelings.”

“My girls have stood by me,” Lila says, nodding proudly at Cat and Nancy. “And my boy works long hours and can’t come as often, but he does when he can. Nancy flew all the way down here from New York.”

“Boston,” Nancy says, peering over her reading glasses.

“That’s the same thing to us down here,” the woman says with an apologetic smile.

“How much will this thing cost?” Lila asks. “If you charge by the pound, it might be high.” She laughs at herself. She wonders why the woman didn’t replace her breasts with big ones. Small-breasted women were always envious of Lila.

“The important thing is to get the proper fitting. With your fitting, and the bra and the prosthesis, the package comes to about a hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Good night!” Lila and Spence cry simultaneously.

“But it’s an important investment.”

After the woman has gone, Spence says, “Will insurance cover that?”

“I doubt it,” Lila says. “I failed to ask her. Law, I hope I don’t have to have false teeth anytime soon! I won’t be able to keep track of that much stuff.”

“You don’t need that thing. We can rig you up something.”

“Why, shoot, yes,” Lila says. “I ain’t spending a hundred and fifty dollars for a falsie.”

Nancy laughs. “I read about a woman who stuffed her bra with buckshot, and she got stopped at the airport by the metal detector.”

Cat says, “I heard about a woman who had an inflatable bra, and she went up in an airplane, and with the change in air pressure they exploded!”

They’re all laughing, and Lila spontaneously tosses the prosthesis to Spence. “Catch!” she cries. Spence snatches it out of the air and flings it to Nancy and Nancy tosses it to Cat. Cat starts to throw it to Lila but stops herself, probably realizing Lila’s right arm is weak. Lila is laughing so much her stitches hurt. Cat hands her the little sandbag and Lila says, “Well, it’ll make a good pincushion.”

They all laugh even harder then because Lila is in the habit of keeping stray straight pins and safety pins fastened to her blouse, and more than once in her life she has accidentally jabbed her breast with a pin.

15

“Well, so long,” says Lila to Mrs. Wright, who is riding out the door in a wheelchair. She’s going home.

The old woman crouches, her eyes aimed at her belly. She’s in a print dress, lavender and green. She doesn’t look up, but grunts faintly. Lila hopes she never develops such an attitude.

“I bet she can’t wait till she gets back to her trailer so she can fix her up a mess of hog jaws and turnip greens,” she says to her friends Mattie and Eunice, who are visiting. “She wouldn’t eat a bite here.”

Mattie and Eunice are in Lila’s card-playing group. Last year, Reba was the fourth, and this year the fourth is Addie Mae Smith. But now Addie Mae is visiting her daughter in Florida and doesn’t know Lila is in the hospital. “The flowers are from all of us, though,” Mattie says, giving Lila a bowl of houseplants. “Addie Mae can go in on them when she gets back.”

“I had a big crowd Sunday,” says Lila. “Cat fixed my hair, but the curl’s fell out now.” She tugs at some stray sprigs. Cat took such care with her, fluffing her hair expertly with the plastic pick, like a hen pecking fondly at her chicks. When Cat was fussing with her, she said, out of the blue, “Mom, I know I didn’t do the right things the right way. I should have gone to college and not married so young. But everything’s different now, and you don’t know how hard it is to work it all out. Things aren’t the way they used to be—if they ever
were.
” She sounded bitter, but then she said, “It’s not your fault I didn’t turn out right. You’re the sweetest mother in the world, and I’ll never be as good as you.” They had cried together for a moment, until they were interrupted by a nurse with a blood-thinner shot.

Mattie and Eunice won’t let Lila say anything bad about herself. They tell her how good she looks. They chatter about their families and events at church. The conversation works around to the weather occasionally, and that prompts them to tell her again how good she’s looking. They bring her a nightgown—store-wrapped in pink flowered paper. Lila can tell that it won’t hang right over her new bustline, but it’s the thought that counts. Mattie and Eunice haven’t mentioned her breast. No one mentions Reba and her months of suffering. It’s as though Reba never existed. Lila folds the gown and places it inside the tissue in the box. She smooths out the wrapping paper and folds it to save.

“It’s freezing in here,” Mattie says.

“I’ve been cold as a frog,” Lila says. “Nancy and Cat had to bring me an undershirt and this sweater.” She has on a blue cardigan of Cat’s. “In here, I can’t tell what the weather is.”

Mattie has to get up and stir for her circulation. She sets the gift box on a shelf in the closet. Restlessly, she pokes in Lila’s things, while Eunice flips through one of Cat’s magazines. Mattie pats her little gray curls, flashing her rainbow of rings. Her rings and brooches and beads overwhelm her small frame. She has a whole houseful of doodads she collects from yard sales, and she spends half her time dusting. Lila wouldn’t have the patience.

Eunice is sitting close to the bed so Lila can see the pictures in the magazine. Eunice pauses over a picture of a handsome young man in his underwear.

“Look at all that going to waste,” Lila says to Eunice.

“Are you sure that ain’t stuffing?” says Eunice, examining the picture carefully.

“No, that ain’t stuffing! That’s the real thing!”

Eunice begins giggling and then Lila starts. Her breast jiggles and pulls across at her stitches. Eunice’s face is red.

“I’m liable to say anything,” Lila says. “This place is making me goofy. The nurses think I’m nuts.”