Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “You don’t have any choice,” says Nancy.

  “The government will pay you to break up your family,” he says. “If I get like your granny, I want you to just take me out in the woods and shoot me.”

  “She told me she wasn’t going,” Nancy says.

  “They’ve got a big recreation room for the ones that can get around,” Daddy says. “They’ve even got disco dancing.”

  When Daddy laughs, his voice catches, and he has to clear his throat. Nancy laughs with him. “I can just see Granny disco dancing. Are you sure you want me to shoot you? That place sounds like fun.”

  They go outside, where Nancy’s mother is cleaning out a patch of weed-choked perennials. “I planted these iris the year we moved,” she says.

  “They’re pretty,” says Nancy. “I haven’t seen that color up North.”

  Mom stands up and shakes her foot awake. “I sure hope y’all can move down here,” she says. “It’s a shame you have to be so far away. Robert grows so fast I don’t know him.”

  “We might someday. I don’t know if we can.”

  “Looks like Jack could make good money if he set up a studio in town. Nowadays people want fancy pictures.”

  “Even the school pictures cost a fortune,” Daddy says.

  “Jack wants to free-lance for publications,” says Nancy. “And there aren’t any here. There’s not even a camera shop within fifty miles.”

  “But people want pictures,” Mom says. “They’ve gone back to decorating living rooms with family pictures. In antique frames.”

  Daddy smokes a cigarette on the porch, while Nancy circles the house. A beetle has infested the oak trees, causing clusters of leaves to turn brown. Nancy stands on the concrete lid of an old cistern and watches crows fly across a cornfield. In the distance a series of towers slings power lines across a flat sea of soybeans. Her mother is talking about Granny. Nancy thinks of Granny on the telephone, the day of her wedding, innocently asking, “What are you going to cook for your wedding breakfast?” Later, seized with laughter, Nancy told Jack what Granny had said.

  “I almost said to her, ‘We usually don’t eat breakfast, we sleep so late!’ ”

  Jack was busy blowing up balloons. When he didn’t laugh, Nancy said, “Isn’t that hilarious? She’s really out of the nineteenth century.”

  “You don’t have to make me breakfast,” said Jack.

  “In her time, it meant something really big,” Nancy said helplessly. “Don’t you see?”

  Now Nancy’s mother is saying, “The way she has to have that milk of magnesia every night, when I know good and well she don’t need it. She thinks she can’t live without it.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” asks Nancy.

  “She thinks she’s got a knot in her bowels. But ain’t nothing wrong with her but that head-swimming and arthritis.” Mom jerks a long morning glory vine out of the marigolds. “Hardening of the arteries is what makes her head swim,” she says.

  “We better get back and see about her,” Daddy says, but he does not get up immediately. The crows are racing above the power lines.

  Later, Nancy spreads a Texaco map of the United States out on Granny’s quilt. “I want to show you where I live,” she says. “Philadelphia’s nearly a thousand miles from here.”

  “Reach me my specs,” says Granny, as she struggles to sit up. “How did you get here?”

  “Flew. Daddy picked me up at the airport in Paducah.”

  “Did you come by the bypass or through town?”

  “The bypass,” says Nancy. Nancy shows her where Pennsylvania is on the map. “I flew from Philadelphia to Louisville to Paducah. There’s California. That’s where Robert was born.”

  “I haven’t seen a geography since I was twenty years old,” Granny says. She studies the map, running her fingers over it as though she were caressing fine material. “Law, I didn’t know where Floridy was. It’s way down there.”

  “I’ve been to Florida,” Nancy says.

  Granny lies back, holding her head as if it were a delicate china bowl. In a moment she says, “Tell your mama to thaw me up some of them strawberries I picked.”

  “When were you out picking strawberries, Granny?”

  “They’re in the freezer of my refrigerator. Back in the back. In a little milk carton.” Granny removes her glasses and waves them in the air.

  “Larry was going to come and play with me, but he couldn’t come,” Robert says to Nancy on the telephone that evening. “He had a stomachache.”

  “That’s too bad. What did you do today?”

  “We went to the Taco Bell and then we went to the woods so Daddy could take pictures of Indian pipes.”

  “What are those?”

  “I don’t know. Daddy knows.”

  “We didn’t find any,” Jack says on the extension. “I think it’s the wrong time of year. How’s Kentucky?”

  Nancy tells Jack about helping her parents move. “My bed is gone, so tonight I’ll have to sleep on a couch in the hallway,” she says. “It’s really dreary here in this old house. Everything looks so bare.”

  “How’s your grandmother?”

  “The same. She’s dead set against that rest home, but what can they do?”

  “Do you still want to move down there?” Jack asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know how we could take the chickens to Kentucky,” says Robert in an excited burst.

  “How?”

  “We could give them sleeping pills and then put them in the trunk so they’d be quiet.”

  “That sounds gruesome,” Jack says.

  Nancy tells Robert not to think about moving. There is static on the line. Nancy has trouble hearing Jack. “We’re your family too,” he is saying.

  “I didn’t mean to abandon you,” she says.

  “Have you seen the pictures yet?”

  “No. I’m working up to that.”

  “Nancy Culpepper, the original?”

  “You bet,” says Nancy, a little too quickly. She hears Robert hang up. “Is Robert O.K.?” she asks through the static.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “He doesn’t think I moved without him?”

  “He’ll be all right.”

  “He didn’t tell me goodbye.”

  “Don’t worry,” says Jack.

  “She’s been after me about those strawberries till I could wring her neck,” says Mom as she and Nancy are getting ready for bed. “She’s talking about some strawberries she put up in nineteen seventy-one. I’ve told her and told her that she eat them strawberries back then, but won’t nothing do but for her to have them strawberries.”

  “Give her some others,” Nancy says.

  “She’d know the difference. She don’t miss a thing when it comes to what’s hers. But sometimes she’s just as liable to forget her name.”

  Mom is trembling, and then she is crying. Nancy pats her mother’s hair, which is gray and wiry and sticks out in sprigs. Wiping her eyes, Mom says, “All the kinfolks will talk. ‘Look what they done to her, poor helpless thing.’ It’ll probably kill her, to move her to that place.”

  “When you move back home you can get all your antiques out of the barn,” Nancy says. “You’ll be in your own house again. Won’t that be nice?”

  Mom does not answer. She takes some sheets and quilts from a closet and hands them to Nancy. “That couch lays good,” she says.

  When Nancy wakes up, the covers are on the floor, and for a moment she does not remember where she is. Her digital watch says 2:43. Then it tells the date. In the darkness she has no sense of distance, and it seems to her that the lighted numerals could be the size of a billboard, only seen from far away.

  Jack has told her that this kind of insomnia is a sign of depression, while the other kind—inability to fall asleep at bedtime—is a sign of anxiety. Nancy always thought he had it backwards, but now she thinks he may be right. A flicker of distant sheet lightning exposes the bleak walls wi
th the suddenness of a flashbulb. The angles of the hall seem unfamiliar, and the narrow couch makes Nancy feel small and alone. When Jack and Robert come to Kentucky with her, they all sleep in the living room, and in the early morning Nancy’s parents pass through to get to the bathroom. “We’re just one big happy family,” Daddy announces, to disguise his embarrassment when he awakens them. Now, for some reason, Nancy recalls Jack’s strange still lifes, and she thinks of the black irises and the polished skulls of cattle suspended in the skies of O’Keeffe paintings. The irises are like thunderheads. The night they were married, Nancy and Jack collapsed into bed, falling asleep immediately, their heads swirling. The party was still going on, and friends from New York were staying over. Nancy woke up the next day saying her new name, and feeling that once again, in another way, she had betrayed her parents. “The one time they really thought they knew what I was doing, they didn’t at all,” she told Jack, who was barely awake. The visitors had gone out for the Sunday newspapers, and they brought back doughnuts. They had doughnuts and wine for breakfast. Someone made coffee later.

  In the morning, a slow rain blackens the fallen oak branches in the yard. In Granny’s room the curtains are gray with shadows. Nancy places an old photograph album in Granny’s lap. Silently, Granny turns pages of blank-faced babies in long white dresses like wedding gowns. Nancy’s father is a boy in a sailor suit. Men and women in pictures the color of café au lait stand around picnic tables. The immense trees in these settings are shaggy and dark. Granny cannot find Nancy Culpepper in the album. Quickly, she flips past a picture of her husband. Then she almost giggles as she points to a girl. “That’s me.”

  “I wouldn’t have recognized you, Granny.”

  “Why, it looks just like me.” Granny strokes the picture, as though she were trying to feel the dress. “That was my favorite dress,” she says. “It was brown poplin, with grosgrain ribbon and self-covered buttons. Thirty-two of them. And all those tucks. It took me three weeks to work up that dress.”

  Nancy points to the pictures one by one, asking Granny to identify them. Granny does not notice Nancy writing the names in a notebook. Aunt Sass, Uncle Joe, Dove and Pear Culpepper, Hortense Culpepper.

  “Hort Culpepper went to Texas,” says Granny. “She had TB.”

  “Tell me about that,” Nancy urges her.

  “There wasn’t anything to tell. She got homesick for her mammy’s cooking.” Granny closes the album and falls back against her pillows, saying, “All those people are gone.”

  While Granny sleeps, Nancy gets a flashlight and opens the closet. The inside is crammed with the accumulation of decades—yellowed newspapers, boxes of greeting cards, bags of string, and worn-out stockings. Granny’s best dress, a blue bonded knit she has hardly worn, is in plastic wrapping. Nancy pushes the clothing aside and examines the wall. To her right, a metal pipe runs vertically through the closet. Backing up against the dresses, Nancy shines the light on the corner and discovers a large framed picture wedged behind the pipe. By tugging at the frame, she is able to work it gradually through the narrow space between the wall and the pipe. In the picture a man and woman, whose features are sharp and clear, are sitting expectantly on a brocaded love seat. Nancy imagines that this is a wedding portrait.

  In the living room, a TV evangelist is urging viewers to call him, toll-free. Mom turns the TV off when Nancy appears with the picture, and Daddy stands up and helps her hold it near a window.

  “I think that’s Uncle John!” he says excitedly. “He was my favorite uncle.”

  “They’re none of my people,” says Mom, studying the picture through her bifocals.

  “He died when I was little, but I think that’s him,” says Daddy. “Him and Aunt Lucy Culpepper.”

  “Who was she?” Nancy asks.

  “Uncle John’s wife.”

  “I figured that,” says Nancy impatiently. “But who was she?”

  “I don’t know.” He is still looking at the picture, running his fingers over the man’s face.

  Back in Granny’s room, Nancy pulls the string that turns on the ceiling light, so that Granny can examine the picture. Granny shakes her head slowly. “I never saw them folks before in all my life.”

  Mom comes in with a dish of strawberries.

  “Did I pick these?” Granny asks.

  “No. You eat yours about ten years ago,” Mom says.

  Granny puts in her teeth and eats the strawberries in slurps, missing her mouth twice. “Let me see them people again,” she says, waving her spoon. Her teeth make the sound of a baby rattle.

  “Nancy Hollins,” says Granny. “She was a Culpepper.”

  “That’s Nancy Culpepper?” cries Nancy.

  “That’s not Nancy Culpepper,” Mom says. “That woman’s got a rat in her hair. They wasn’t in style back when Nancy Culpepper was alive.”

  Granny’s face is flushed and she is breathing heavily. “She was a real little-bitty old thing,” she says in a high, squeaky voice. “She never would talk. Everybody thought she was curious. Plumb curious.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?” Nancy says.

  “If I’m not mistaken.”

  “She don’t remember,” Mom says to Nancy. “Her mind gets confused.”

  Granny removes her teeth and lies back, her bones grinding. Her chest heaves with exhaustion. Nancy sits down in the rocking chair, and as she rocks back and forth she searches the photograph, exploring the features of the young woman, who is wearing an embroidered white dress, and the young man, in a curly beard that starts below his chin, framing his face like a ruffle. The woman looks frightened—of the camera perhaps—but nevertheless her deep-set eyes sparkle like shards of glass. This young woman would be glad to dance to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on her wedding day, Nancy thinks. The man seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away.

  Blue Country

  “The Blue Lantern Inn—that’s a name straight out of a Nancy Drew book,” said Nancy.

  “Is Nancy Drew your namesake?” teased Jack.

  Nancy laughed. “Nancy Drew always stopped at some quaint wayside inn for tea, and there would be a mystery to solve. The inns were just like this. I feel I’ve been here before.”

  Nancy and Jack were at the Blue Lantern Inn on the coast above Boston. They had come for the weekend to attend the wedding of a friend from graduate school who was finally getting married to the man she had lived with for five years. Nancy and Jack had driven for six hours from Pennsylvania. On the way Jack had said, “Why couldn’t the wedding be two weeks from now, when the autumn leaves are just right?” They used to live in New England, and Jack was crazy about the fall foliage. He was always critical of autumn in Pennsylvania. He would complain about the brown-and-gold splendor on the mountain ridge near their home. Not a single flaming red sugar maple on the whole mountain, he would point out, like someone judging a parade.

  That evening, in a seafood house on a wharf, Jack and Nancy ripped apart bright lobsters and laughed. They drank a bottle of rosé— to match the lobster, Jack said. But the colors didn’t match at all. Jack acted silly, calling her “Toots,” the way he did to tease her when they were first married. Nancy called him “Mr. Toots” in return and giggled. Jack had been teasing her all day. Going to a wedding made them happy. Water leaked from the boiled lobster into Nancy’s lap. Jack splintered a claw and a tender orange hand slithered out.

  Afterwards, they walked in the dark on the beach in front of the Blue Lantern Inn. The tide had gone so far out they had to hike to meet it. The sand was wet and marshy in places, and it was too dark to see the water. Some birds skittered by quietly.

  “I had forgotten how much I love the ocean,” Jack said. “I can’t wait till Sunday.”

  “I’m not sure I want to go out there in a little boat to watch whales,” Nancy said. “The idea is terrifying.”

  “It won’t be terrifying in the daytime,” Jack
said. “Whales are friendly.”

  “But they’re so big.”

  “They’re like horses. Horses are very careful not to step on cats and chickens.”

  “Tell that to Ahab,” said Nancy, squeezing his hand.

  In the inn during the night, she heard the sea whispering, and toward morning she heard a gurgling sound—rain falling from the drain spouts. Suddenly, there was a sharp tapping on the door and an urgent voice: “Phone call. Phone call.” Nancy was in her jeans and sweat shirt and downstairs in the lobby before she could realize what she had heard. She was afraid something had happened to their child, Robert, who was staying with friends at home.

  It was Nancy’s mother, in Kentucky. “Nancy? Did I get you up? Granny passed away last night, about eleven o’clock.”

  Nancy had expected this phone call for years. But now she was stunned and her mother sounded bewildered. Nancy’s grandmother was ninety-four and had been arthritic and senile for several years. During the past summer her health had deteriorated, and for many months Nancy had not traveled without notifying her parents where to reach her.

  Nancy’s mother said, “She had mass-matter on the brain.”

  “What in the world is mass-matter on the brain?” Nancy cried. A tall man in a blue blazer turned his head in her direction.

  Mom said, “Sometimes the blood vessels running to your brain mat together in a pocket? They call it mass-matter.”

  “You mean she had a stroke.”

  “She was acting wild on us all day,” Mom went on. “Hollering and carrying on. Trying to walk for the first time in a year. I went in about ten-thirty to give her a pill and I thought she was dead. But she wasn’t completely dead yet.”

  While her mother described the funeral plans, Nancy looked out the front window and saw that the ocean was still far away. The tide had come in and gone out again. She should leave for Kentucky immediately, for the funeral was the next day.

  “I don’t know how soon I can get there,” she said. “I’ll have to check with the airlines.” She suddenly looked down, wondering if she had remembered to dress. Guests were entering the dining room for breakfast.