Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “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.”

  Mattie looks disapproving, but Lila loves to watch Eunice laugh at a sexy joke. Eunice is a widow. Her husband, Herbert Wall, was big and fat, and Eunice once said he had such a load of “equipment” that it gave him a hernia. That remark made Lila think of a sheep, its swinging sack the size of a mushmelon. The boy in the underwear ad is young enough to be Lila’s grandson, but he makes her feel a twinge of desire. She wishes she could go home right now and get in bed with Spence. One of the magazines Cat brought mentioned that men lose their desire for women who have had mastectomies. The thought hurt her and made her feel an anxiety like the urges she used to feel when she was working tobacco and she first knew Spence. He lived five miles down the road, and he would walk past the field where she worked after school and dawdle there. Lila’s uncle found out he was hanging around and tried to scare him away, but Spence was daresome and he flirted openly with her, slowing down her work. Whenever she broke a tobacco plant by mistake she buried it so Uncle Mose wouldn’t find out. She used to meet Spence at the edge of the tobacco field, down in the creek. They chewed gum from the black gum tree. It made their teeth black and their breath fresh, and when they kissed it was like a cool, sweet breeze.

  Mattie walks over to the bed and stares closely at Lila. “When are they going to operate on your neck?”

  “I have that test tomorrow, and they’ll operate a-Thursday, depending on what they find out.” She closes her fist and opens it. It feels slightly numb.

  “Are you scared, de
ar?” Eunice asks.

  “I didn’t have time to get scared the first operation, and now there’s so much going on I can’t think. My brain was addled anyway.” Lila laughs. “Probably from being out in the hot sun.”

  “All that gardening you do, Lila,” says Mattie kindly.

  “I’ve never seen anybody do as much yard work as you do,” says Eunice. “You’ve got a lot to be proud of. You’ve got the prettiest yard.”

  “Well, I sure am lucky, with my children, my family, the things I’ve done. All the trips I got to go on.” Lila is growing sleepy. Her arm feels numb, the way it did in Florida.

  “That’s something to be thankful for, Lila,” says Mattie, and Eunice nods.

  “Spence would hate all the noise and waiting in line. He’d rather be home digging taters!” Lila laughs at the thought of Spence on a bus tour with the senior citizens. Abruptly, she says, “The doctor said I could live without a breast. He said I’d be surprised.”

  “My sister told me about a woman she works with who had her breast takened out,” says Mattie, who has been standing by the crucifix on the wall, studying it as if it were for sale. “She was a terminal case. The cancer had spread to ninety percent of her lymp’ nodes.”

  “It just spread to two of mine, but they takened them out,” Lila says, touching her right armpit.

  Mattie doesn’t seem to hear Lila. She’s wound up, like the musical doll Cat gave Lila once for Mother’s Day. “But come to find out—this woman lived!” Mattie continues. “She had chemotherapy five years and she had cobalt, but the cobalt burned a hole in her heart and gave her heart trouble, and so she had to have her chest wall replaced. She waited too late to sue, because her husband thought she was going to die and he didn’t think they could do anything. But she got better and then all of a sudden her husband died of a brain tumor, and then six months after that her son was killed in a car wreck! But she’s still a-kicking.”

  “I never heard of so many things happening to one woman,” says Eunice.

  “It’s a miracle she bore up under all that,” Lila says.

  “Well, Lila, the Lord never gives us more than we can bear,” says Mattie.

  “Yes,” Lila says, gazing at the underwear ad.

  One summer night shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she ran away with Spence and they were married. She brought her few possessions in a bag she had sewed out of sacking. She didn’t even have a Bible. They drove across the state line, not really knowing if they would go through with the plan. It seemed outrageous, like something the old folks told about in one of their stories of the pioneers. Spence promised her a good life. He already had a start, on his father’s farm. “I don’t ask for much,” he said. “Just to have my clothes kept up and food on the table.” He drove an old Ford with a door that rattled and headlights that sometimes blinked out. While searching for the justice of the peace, they got lost on a back road, which ended in a woods across from a cornfield. Spence persuaded her to have the honeymoon first and then look for the justice of the peace later, arguing that they’d never find this perfect, peaceful place again. Lila was always a practical person and she could see his line of reasoning. When they finally arrived at the justice of the peace, the man had already gone to bed, but he obligingly got up, tied his barking dog, and performed the service for them on his front porch. In the dim porch light, neither he nor his wife, who acted as the witness, in her curlers and housecoat, could tell how wrinkled Lila’s clothes were. She had on a new suit she had made, with shoulder pads, and Spence told her she was the most beautiful girl in the world. They sneaked into his house before daylight, and at milking time he brought her out of his room to meet his astonished parents. She was tall and thin, but even then her breasts were large, and they jutted forward into the surprised line of sight of her new mother-in-law.

  The artificial breast is in the drawer. The pamphlets are hard to read, and the letters don’t say the right things—not the things she would say to her husband, her daughters, her son. The girls have read through the packet, and Lila thinks it would be even more embarrassing to send letters than to say what she felt. The letters wouldn’t sound like her. One of the pamphlets says, “Women usually go through periods of depression after a mastectomy. They equate their femininity and their sexuality with the lost breast.” Lila is so confused, with so many people telling her what to think, that she can’t quite grasp her own thoughts.

  Last week, the day she was operated on, she remembers waking up in a fog, wanting to turn over onto her side, but something held her flat. The room was extremely cold. Her feet were numb. And then she felt her habitual cough grab her and shake her out like a dust mop. She wondered, even then, before she was sure they had removed her breast, how they disposed of it: Did it all come out in one hunk, or did they hack it out? She thought about dressing a chicken, the way she cut out the extra fat and pulled out the entrails. She thought of how it was so easy to rip raw chicken breasts.

  16

  Bill Belton’s brick ranch house, just down the road from Spence, is only a few years old, but the plastic shutters are warped and one of the downspouts is crooked. In the backyard, a wash line runs between the house and Bill’s dish antenna. The dish has a happy-face painted on it. Bill’s tobacco barn sags, the paint worn off years ago. Bill hasn’t grown tobacco since the bottom fell out of the burley market. Now he has a hundred acres in soybeans and a crop-dusting plane. Spence often sees Bill’s plane above the countryside—flying low, aggravating cows and horses.

  “Ho, there, Spence,” says Bill, who is down by his dilapidated barn, working on his tractor. The airplane is parked under a makeshift carport shelter on the side of the barn.

  “When do you aim to dust my beans?” asks Spence. “The grasshoppers is eating ’em up. In the middle of the night I can hear ’em gnawing. I’m afraid I’ll wake up one morning and the fields will be bare.”

  “I been meaning to get over there, Spence,” says Bill, picking up an oilcan from a rickety table of rusted tools.

  The outside wall of the barn is decorated with squirrel tails, snake-skins, and a coon skin. Memories of dead animals jam Spence’s mind: a butchered hog, a cat smashed under the car’s tire, a crippled dog slowly dying of a festering wound, a cow that was down and had to be shot, a bird with a wing shot to shreds.

  “How’s Lila doing?” Bill asks.

  “She’s fussing at me, as usual.” Spence grins. “But she’s getting some tests done today, and I’m afraid she’ll have to be operated on again tomorrow—this time on her neck.” He touches his neck and can almost feel it being slashed.

  “The one where they go in and clean out your veins?”

  Spence nods.

  “Seems like everybody and his dog’s having that one. Is your insurance going to cover all that, Spence?”

  Spence shakes his head worriedly. “I doubt it. I heard if it’s cancer they won’t pay it all.”

  “Well, at least you’ve got some benefits from driving that van for the school. Me, I don’t got nothing. I was in a mess here while back when Mozelle had colon trouble.” He toys with the oilcan, as if he has forgotten what he meant to do with it. “They come at me to the tune of three thousand dollars. And I already owed fifty thousand on this machinery.”

  “So how did you manage? How’d you buy that airplane?” A few years ago, Bill had splurged on his combine—soon after building his house.

  Bill just gazes off over the barn roof at some blackbirds wheeling around in the sky. Nothing but blackbirds swarm over anymore, Spence has noticed. Most of the songbirds have disappeared since the industrial park was built. Bill says, “You want some coffee, Spence? Want to come on in the house? Mozelle’s gone to get her hair fixed, but I think I know how to run that coffee machine.”

  “No, I ain’t got time. And coffee jags me out.” Spence doesn’t want to start in on his coffee spiel, about imports versus domestic crops. He thinks the coffee habit is a conspiracy—to get people addicted to
a luxury that comes from a foreign country.

  “Since when do you drink coffee?” asks Spence as they walk toward the car.

  Bill shrugs. “I got to be nearly this old before I found out it can keep you awake when you need to be awake. All that business about how you don’t need as much sleep when you get old ain’t true. It was just a story they told.” He opens the screen to the porch and says, “Come on indoors. I want to show you something.”

  Bill’s den wall is covered with what Spence calls “gimme caps”— caps with ads on them. Massey Ferguson, Budweiser, John Deere, Black & Decker, Strong Feed Co. The wall is full of colors, reminding Spence of a game at a carnival where you throw darts at a wall of balloons. Bill shows Spence a green cap that says, HICKMAN COUNTY STUD. Bill laughs. “A guy had this made up special for me, just for a joke.”

  Bill takes out a coffee can from a cabinet under the TV set. Spence remembers the rusty coffee-can lid that Lee stepped on when he was little. He was running in the grass and cut his foot open. Nancy panicked. She ran to the house packing him in her arms, her words streaming out incoherently, like the blood from Lee’s foot. Nancy panics easily; that’s why she thinks the world is going to be ruined by poisons and nuclear bombs and fat, anything she hears on the news.

  “I don’t want no coffee,” Spence says.

  “Hold your horses, Spence. This ain’t coffee.” Bill removes the plastic top from the can and pulls out a handful of pale, round seeds—like mustard seeds. “I’ll sell you these babies for ten dollars a teaspoon,” he says.

  “Where’d you get those?” Spence knows what they are—marijuana seeds. He recognizes them from something he has seen on TV.

  “A guy gave ’em to me and I planted some of them.” Bill dribbles the seeds back into the can. “You know how many I set out last year?”

  “How would I know? I don’t come over and count your crops.”

  “Twenty. Guess what I made off of ’em.”

  “I don’t know. A thousand dollars?” Spence always exaggerates guesses like this to undercut the other guy’s joke.