Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “I’ve had so much champagne,” she said. “And I’ve barely seen Ed since the ceremony. Is this what marriage is like?”

  “It’s a lovely wedding,” said Nancy.

  “Jack was so sweet to take those pictures.”

  “Are you going on a trip?”

  “No. We took our honeymoon last week. But next week I’m going to Mexico with my brother. He’s an archaeologist, and I have this fabulous chance to go on a dig. Ed can’t go because he has to work.”

  Nancy felt like confiding in Laurie, the way she used to when they studied together for exams. She found herself blurting out the news about her grandmother. It seemed improper to mar the wedding, and when Laurie made sympathetic remarks, Nancy said hastily, “It was expected. And she was old as Methuselah.”

  “It feels strange not going home, but I’m glad I’m here,” she added. “And I’m glad you’re doing something affirmative.”

  “That’s the way we looked at it,” Laurie said. “Ed’s best friend died this summer, and that led to our decision to get married. We realized how little time there is.”

  Laurie was holding Nancy’s hand. Her flowers were askew.

  Nancy said, “I’m sure my mother will flip out when it hits her that she’s free at last. They’ve been tied down on the farm for years, taking care of my grandmother. They’ve never even left Kentucky to visit me.”

  “Did you say your grandmother was your dad’s mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Laurie said, “If Ed’s dad were to die and his mother had to move in with us, I’d divorce him in a minute. I wouldn’t take care of my mother-in-law like that. I’m not even sure I could do it for my own mother.” Laurie was looking around cautiously as she spoke. Her mother-in-law was eating cake on the far side of the room, and her mother was out of sight.

  “Do you know what my mother said on the phone?” Nancy said. “She said last night was the first night in forty years that she and my father had spent alone together.”

  Laurie’s look of astonishment pleased Nancy. It was the best gesture of sympathy: to be amazed.

  “Are you O.K., Nancy?” It was Jack, standing close, touching her. “You look off-balance.”

  “It’s the champagne. I was O.K. until Mom started talking about how pretty Granny looked and telling about the dress. Now all I can think is this doll shut in a box in the ground with flowers in her face.”

  “You’re not supposed to think about things like that.”

  “They really expected me to come home.”

  “I’m sorry I urged you not to go,” Jack said.

  Nancy drank some more champagne. “I couldn’t go anyway in the fog,” she said.

  “You can go to Kentucky next week,” Jack said.

  “Yes. Oh, look! The musicians are packing up. I wish they wouldn’t go. I loved that Gypsy violin.”

  On Sunday the ocean was calm and the sky was a transparent blue, reflecting in the water. Nancy and Jack were on a sightseeing boat, heading out from shore. About five times Jack said he wished Robert was along. When he saw whales on TV, Robert would yell out with breathless excitement. Nancy kept thinking of the time her mother mentioned in a letter a traveling exhibition that had come to the shopping center—a whale in a tank in a trailer truck. The whale couldn’t even turn around.

  “What do you feel?” Jack asked her as the shore disappeared.

  “Confused,” said Nancy, looking forward to the horizon. A barge lay in line with it.

  “You’ve got to get your mom and dad up to visit us.”

  “Somehow I can’t picture it. It would freak them out. They never went anywhere. I was the one who left, but they always expected me to keep running back.”

  The boat was passing close to a buoy, bobbing casually on the water. A seabird landed on it, like a spacecraft docking.

  “They sent me out as an explorer,” Nancy said. “Like Columbus.”

  “I read that Columbus brought syphilis back to Europe.”

  “That’s what happens when you go out adventuring,” Nancy said. “It’s the nature of the game.”

  Jack tied the drawstring of her hood under her chin. She said, “I didn’t wear my watch because I didn’t want to get it wet. Do you have your pocket calculator?”

  Jack patted his breast pocket and nodded.

  “I want you to tell me when it’s three o’clock,” she said. “The funeral’s at two. That’s three, Eastern time. I want to know when it is, so I can think about it happening. At least I can be there in my imagination.”

  Jack punched tiny buttons on his calculator so that a beeper would sound at three. “I’m sorry I urged you not to go to Kentucky,” he said. “It was selfish.”

  “No, I keep telling you, it’s O.K.”

  “If I die, I don’t want you to make a fuss. You can just throw me in the ocean.”

  Nancy could almost see Granny’s face. The last time Nancy saw her, she had taken a kitten in to show her. On TV reports about pet therapy, children took puppies and kittens into nursing homes for old people to pet. Nancy had a vivid memory of an old woman’s chalky face lighting up when she held a puppy in her lap. Nancy had offered the kitten to her grandmother, but Granny wouldn’t touch it. Her face was grim and selfish. She didn’t want the curtains opened either, and she didn’t want a radio. No one read to her. Staring at the ocean, Nancy thought that its vast blankness and mystery were like her grandmother’s mind in those final months—something private and deep she had saved for herself.

  “Whale ahoy!” the captain cried suddenly.

  Nancy did not pay attention when three o’clock came, for they were among the whales. A whale’s back appeared like a large boulder out in the water, and then three or four, like stepping stones. As the boat drew nearer, a whale leaped up like a jack-in-the-box. The passengers were shouting and clumsily aiming their cameras. Water smacked their faces, and Jack and Nancy gasped with laughter. The whales began moving, making deep swirls and waves in the water, and then a humpback whale, barnacled like a circus elephant decorated with sequins, rose completely out of the water and seemed to fly. At that moment Nancy knew that this—not something quaint or cozy—was what she had come so far away from home to see. The engine stopped, and the boat started to rock in the wake of the whales. Jack’s face was charged with delight. His camera hung loose on his chest. Another whale breached, close by, with a force that shot water up to the sky. As it plunged downward, its tail flukes wiggled, like an airplane tipping its wings as a signal to someone below.

  Lying Doggo

  Grover Cleveland is growing feeble. His eyes are cloudy, and his muzzle is specked with white hairs. When he scoots along on the hardwood floors, he makes a sound like brushes on drums. He sleeps in front of the woodstove, and when he gets too hot he creeps across the floor.

  When Nancy married Jack Cleveland, she felt, in a way, that she was marrying a divorced man with a child. Grover was a young dog then. Jack had gotten him at the humane society shelter. He had picked the shyest, most endearing puppy in a boisterous litter. Later, he told Nancy that someone said he should have chosen an energetic one, because quiet puppies often have something wrong with them. That chance remark bothered Nancy; it could have applied to her as well. But that was years ago. Nancy and Jack are still married, and Grover has lived to be old. Now his arthritis stiffens his legs so that on some days he cannot get up. Jack has been talking of having Grover put to sleep.

  “Why do you say ‘put to sleep’?” their son, Robert, asks. “I know what you mean.” Robert is nine. He is a serious boy, quiet, like Nancy.

  “No reason. It’s just the way people say it.”

  “They don’t say they put people to sleep.”

  “It doesn’t usually happen to people,” Jack says.

  “Don’t you dare take him to the vet unless you let me go along. I don’t want any funny stuff behind my back.”

  “Don’t worry, Robert,” Nancy says.

  Later, in Ja
ck’s studio, while developing photographs of broken snow fences on hillsides, Jack says to Nancy, “There’s a first time for everything, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “Death. I never really knew anybody who died.”

  “You’re forgetting my grandmother.”

  “I didn’t really know your grandmother.” Jack looks down at Grover’s face in the developing fluid. Grover looks like a wolf in the snow on the hill. Jack says, “The only people I ever cared about who died were rock heroes.”

  Jack has been buying special foods for the dog—pork chops and liver, vitamin supplements. All the arthritis literature he has been able to find concerns people, but he says the same rules must apply to all mammals. Until Grover’s hind legs gave way, Jack and Robert took Grover out for long, slow walks through the woods. Recently, a neighbor who keeps Alaskan malamutes stopped Nancy in the Super Duper and inquired about Grover. The neighbor wanted to know which kind of arthritis Grover had: osteo- or rheumatoid? The neighbor said he had rheumatoid and held out knobbed fingers. The doctor told him to avoid zucchini and to drink lots of water. Grover doesn’t like zucchini, Nancy said.

  Jack and Nancy and Robert all deal with Grover outside. It doesn’t help that the temperature is dropping below twenty degrees. It feels even colder because they are conscious of the dog’s difficulty. Nancy holds his head and shoulders while Jack supports his hind legs. Robert holds up Grover’s tail.

  Robert says, “I have an idea.”

  “What, sweetheart?” asks Nancy. In her arms, Grover lurches. Nancy squeezes against him and he whimpers.

  “We could put a diaper on him.”

  “How would we clean him up?”

  “They do that with chimpanzees,” says Jack, “but it must be messy.”

  “You mean I didn’t have an original idea?” Robert cries. “Curses, foiled again!” Robert has been reading comic books about masked villains.

  “There aren’t many original ideas,” Jack says, letting go of Grover. “They just look original when you’re young.” Jack lifts Grover’s hind legs again and grasps him under the stomach. “Let’s try one more time, boy.”

  Grover looks at Nancy, pleading.

  Nancy has been feeling that the dying of Grover marks a milestone in her marriage to Jack, a marriage that has somehow lasted almost fifteen years. She is seized with an irrational dread—that when the dog is gone, Jack will be gone too. Whenever Nancy and Jack are apart—during Nancy’s frequent trips to see her family in Kentucky, or when Jack has gone away “to think”—Grover remains with Jack. Actually, Nancy knew Grover before she knew Jack. When Jack and Nancy were students, in Massachusetts, the dog was a familiar figure around campus. Nancy was drawn to the dog long before she noticed the shaggy-haired student in the sheepskin-lined corduroy jacket who was usually with him. Once, in a seminar on the Federalist period that Nancy was auditing, Grover had walked in, circled the room, and then walked out, as if performing some routine investigation, like the man who sprayed Nancy’s apartment building for silverfish. Grover was a beautiful dog, a German shepherd, gray, dusted with a sooty topcoat. After the seminar, Nancy followed the dog out of the building, and she met Jack then. Eventually, when Nancy and Jack made love in his apartment in Amherst, Grover lay sprawled by the bed, both protective and quietly participatory. Later, they moved into a house in the country, and Nancy felt that she had an instant family.

  Once, for almost three months, Jack and Grover were gone. Jack left Nancy in California, pregnant and terrified, and went to stay at an Indian reservation in New Mexico. Nancy lived in a room on a street with palm trees. It was winter. It felt like a Kentucky October. She went to a park every day and watched people with their dogs, their children, and tried to comprehend that she was there, alone, a mile from the San Andreas Fault, reluctant to return to Kentucky. “We need to decide where we stand with each other,” Jack had said when he left. “Just when I start to think I know where you’re at, you seem to disappear.” Jack always seemed to stand back and watch her, as though he expected her to do something excitingly original. He expected her to be herself, not someone she thought people wanted her to be. That was a twist: he expected the unexpected.

  While Jack was away, Nancy indulged in crafts projects. At the Free University, she learned batik and macramé. On her own, she learned to crochet. She had never done anything like that before. She threw away her file folders of history notes for the article she had wanted to write. Suddenly, making things with her hands was the only endeavor that made sense. She crocheted a bulky, shapeless sweater in a shell stitch for Jack. She made baby things, using large hooks. She did not realize that such heavy blankets were unsuitable for a baby until she saw Robert—a tiny, warped-looking creature, like one of her clumsily made crafts. When Jack returned, she was in a sprawling adobe hospital, nursing a baby the color of scalded skin. The old song “In My Adobe Hacienda” was going through her head. Jack stood over her behind an unfamiliar beard, grinning in disbelief, stroking the baby as though he were a new pet. Nancy felt she had fooled Jack into thinking she had done something original at last.

  “Grover’s dying to see you,” he said to her. “They wouldn’t let him in here.”

  “I’ll be glad to see Grover,” said Nancy. “I missed him.”

  She had missed, she realized then, his various expressions: the staccato barks of joy, the forceful, menacing barks at strangers, the eerie howls when he heard cat fights at night.

  Those early years together were confused and dislocated. After leaving graduate school, at the beginning of the seventies, they lived in a number of places—sometimes on the road, with Grover, in a van— but after Robert was born they settled in Pennsylvania. Their life is orderly. Jack is a free-lance photographer, with his own studio at home. Nancy, unable to find a use for her degree in history, returned to school, taking education and administration courses. Now she is assistant principal of a small private elementary school, which Robert attends. Now and then Jack frets about becoming too middle-class. He has become semipolitical about energy, sometimes attending antinuclear power rallies. He has been building a sun space for his studio and has been insulating the house. “Retrofitting” is the term he uses for making the house energy-efficient.

  “Insulation is his hobby,” Nancy told an old friend from graduate school, Tom Green, who telephoned unexpectedly one day recently. “He insulates on weekends.”

  “Maybe he’ll turn into a butterfly—he could insulate himself into a cocoon,” said Tom, who Nancy always thought was funny. She had not seen him in ten years. He called to say he was sending a novel he had written—“about all the crazy stuff we did back then.”

  The dog is forcing Nancy to think of how Jack has changed in the years since then. He is losing his hair, but he doesn’t seem concerned. Jack was always fanatical about being honest. He used to be insensitive about his directness. “I’m just being honest,” he would say pleasantly, boyishly, when he hurt people’s feelings. He told Nancy she was uptight, that no one ever knew what she thought, that she should be more expressive. He said she “played games” with people, hiding her feelings behind her coy Southern smile. He is more tolerant now, less judgmental. He used to criticize her for drinking Cokes and eating pastries. He didn’t like her lipstick, and she stopped wearing it. But Nancy has changed too. She is too sophisticated now to eat fried foods and rich pies and cakes, indulging in them only when she goes to Kentucky. She uses makeup now—so sparingly that Jack does not notice. Her cool reserve, her shyness, has changed to cool assurance, with only the slightest shift. Inwardly, she has reorganized. “It’s like retrofitting,” she said to Jack once, but he didn’t notice any irony.

  It wasn’t until two years ago that Nancy learned that he had lied to her when he told her he had been at the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert in 1966, just as she had, only two months before they met. When he confessed his lie, he claimed he had wanted to identify with her and impress her because he thought of
her as someone so mysterious and aloof that he could not hold her attention. Nancy, who had in fact been intimidated by Jack’s directness, was troubled to learn about his peculiar deception. It was out of character. She felt a part of her past had been ripped away. More recently, when John Lennon died, Nancy and Jack watched the silent vigil from Central Park on TV and cried in each other’s arms. Everybody that week was saying that they had lost their youth.

  Jack was right. That was the only sort of death they had known.

  Grover lies on his side, stretched out near the fire, his head flat on one ear. His eyes are open, expressionless, and when Nancy speaks to him he doesn’t respond.

  “Come on, Grover!” cries Robert, tugging the dog’s leg. “Are you dead?”

  “Don’t pull at him,” Nancy says.

  “He’s lying doggo,” says Jack.

  “That’s funny,” says Robert. “What does that mean?”

  “Dogs do that in the heat,” Jack explains. “They save energy that way.”

  “But it’s winter,” says Robert. “I’m freezing.” He is wearing a wool pullover and a goose-down vest. Jack has the thermostat set on fifty-five, relying mainly on the woodstove to warm the house.

  “I’m cold too,” says Nancy. “I’ve been freezing since 1965, when I came North.”

  Jack crouches down beside the dog. “Grover, old boy. Please. Just give a little sign.”

  “If you don’t get up, I won’t give you your treat tonight,” says Robert, wagging his finger at Grover.

  “Let him rest,” says Jack, who is twiddling some of Grover’s fur between his fingers.

  “Are you sure he’s not dead?” Robert asks. He runs the zipper of his vest up and down.

  “He’s just pretending,” says Nancy.

  The tip of Grover’s tail twitches, and Jack catches it, the way he might grab at a fluff of milkweed in the air.

  Later, in the kitchen, Jack and Nancy are preparing for a dinner party. Jack is sipping whiskey. The woodstove has been burning all day, and the house is comfortably warm now. In the next room, Robert is lying on the rug in front of the stove with Grover. He is playing with a computer football game and watching Mork and Mindy at the same time. Robert likes to do several things at once, and lately he has included Grover in his multiple activities.