Trying to sympathize with her, the women on her bowling team offer their confessions. Nancy has such severe monthly cramps that even the new miracle pills on the market don’t work. Linda had a miscarriage when she was in high school. Betty admits her secret, something Ruby suspected anyway: Betty shaves her face every morning with a Lady Sunbeam. Her birth-control pills had stimulated facial hair. She stopped taking the pills years ago but still has the beard.
Ruby’s mother calls these problems “female trouble.” It is Mom’s theory that Ruby injured her breasts by lifting too many heavy boxes in her job with a wholesale grocer. Several of her friends have tipped or fallen wombs caused by lifting heavy objects, Mom says.
“I don’t see the connection,” says Ruby. It hurts her chest when she laughs, and her mother looks offended. Mom, who has been keeping Ruby company in the afternoons since she came home from the hospital, today is making Ruby some curtains to match the new bedspread on her double bed.
“When you have a weakness, disease can take hold,” Mom explains. “When you abuse the body, it shows up in all kinds of ways. And women just weren’t built to do man’s work. You were always so independent you ended up doing man’s work and woman’s work both.”
“Let’s not get into why I never married,” says Ruby.
Mom’s sewing is meticulous and definite, work that would burn about two calories an hour. She creases a hem with her thumb and folds the curtain neatly. Then she stands up and embraces Ruby carefully, favoring her daughter’s right side. She says, “Honey, if there was such of a thing as a transplant, I’d give you one of mine.”
“That’s O.K., Mom. Your big hooters wouldn’t fit me.”
—
At the bowling alley, Ruby watches while her team, Garrison Life Insurance, bowls against Thomas & Sons Plumbing. Her team is getting smacked.
“We’re pitiful without you and Linda,” Betty tells her. “Linda’s got too big to bowl. I told her to come anyway and watch, but she wouldn’t listen. I think maybe she is embarrassed to be seen in public, despite what she said.”
“She doesn’t give a damn what people think,” says Ruby, as eight pins crash for Thomas & Sons. “Me neither,” she adds, tilting her can of Coke.
“Did you hear she’s getting a heavy-duty washer? She says a heavy-duty holds forty-five diapers.”
Ruby lets a giggle escape. “She’s not going to any more laundromats and get knocked up again.”
“Are you still going with that guy you met at Third Monday?”
“I’ll see him Monday. He’s supposed to take me home with him to Tennessee, but the doctor said I can’t go yet.”
“I heard he didn’t know about your operation,” says Betty, giving her bowling ball a little hug.
Ruby takes a drink of Coke and belches. “He’ll find out soon enough.”
“Well, you stand your ground, Ruby Jane. If he can’t love you for yourself, then to heck with him.”
“But people always love each other for the wrong reasons!” Ruby says. “Don’t you know that?”
Betty stands up, ignoring Ruby. It’s her turn to bowl. She says, “Just be thankful, Ruby. I like the way you get out and go. Later on, bowling will be just the right thing to build back your strength.”
“I can already reach to here,” says Ruby, lifting her right hand to touch Betty’s arm. Ruby smiles. Betty has five-o’clock shadow.
—
The familiar crying of the dogs at Third Monday makes Ruby anxious and jumpy. They howl and yelp and jerk their chains—sound effects in a horror movie. As Ruby walks through the oak grove, the dogs lunge toward her, begging recognition. A black Lab in a tiny cage glares at her savagely. She notices dozens of blueticks and beagles, but she doesn’t see Buddy’s truck. As she hurries past some crates of ducks and rabbits and pullets, a man in overalls stops her. He is holding a pocket knife and, in one hand, an apple cut so precisely that the core is a perfect rectangle.
“I can’t ’call your name,” he says to her. “But I know I know you.”
“I don’t know you,” says Ruby. Embarrassed, the man backs away.
The day is already growing hot. Ruby buys a Coke from a man with a washtub of ice and holds it with her right hand, testing the tension on her right side. The Coke seems extremely heavy. She lifts it to her lips with her left hand. Buddy’s truck is not there.
Out in the sun, she browses through a box of National Enquirers and paperback romances, then wanders past tables of picture frames, clocks, quilts, dishes. The dishes are dirty and mismatched—odd plates and cups and gravy boats. There is nothing she would want. She skirts a truckload of shock absorbers. The heat is making her dizzy. She is still weak from her operation. “I wouldn’t pay fifteen dollars for a corn sheller,” someone says. The remark seems funny to Ruby, like something she might have heard on Sodium Pentothal. Then a man bumps into her with a wire basket containing two young gray cats. A short, dumpy woman shouts to her, “Don’t listen to him. He’s trying to sell you them cats. Who ever heard of buying cats?”
Gladys has rigged up a canvas canopy extending out from the back of her station wagon. She is sitting in an aluminum folding chair, with her hands crossed in her lap, looking cool. Ruby longs to confide in her. She seems to be a trusty fixture, something stable in the current, like a cypress stump.
“Buy some mushmelons, darling,” says Gladys. Gladys is selling banties, Fiestaware, and mushmelons today.
“Mushmelons give me gas.”
Gladys picks up a newspaper and fans her face. “Them seeds been in my family over a hundred years. We always saved the seed.”
“Is that all the way back to slave times?”
Gladys laughs as though Ruby has told a hilarious joke. “These here’s my roots!” she says. “Honey, we’s in slave times, if you ask me. Slave times ain’t never gone out of style, if you know what I mean.”
Ruby leans forward to catch the breeze from the woman’s newspaper. She says, “Have you seen Buddy, the guy I run around with? He’s usually here in a truck with a bunch of dogs?”
“That pretty boy that bought you that bracelet?”
“I was looking for him.”
“Well, you better look hard, darling, if you want to find him. He got picked up over in Missouri for peddling a hot TV. They caught him on the spot. They’d been watching him. You don’t believe me, but it’s true. Oh, honey, I’m sorry, but he’ll be back! He’ll be back!”
—
In the waiting room at the clinic, the buzz of a tall floor fan sounds like a June bug on a screen door. The fan waves its head wildly from side to side. Ruby has an appointment for her checkup at three o’clock. She is afraid they will give her radiation treatments, or maybe even chemotherapy. No one is saying exactly what will happen next. But she expects to be baptized in a vat of chemicals, burning her skin and sizzling her hair. Ruby recalls an old comedy sketch, in which one of the Smothers Brothers fell into a vat of chocolate. Buddy Landon used to dunk his dogs in a tub of flea dip. She never saw him do it, but she pictures it in her mind—the stifling smell of Happy Jack mange medicine, the surprised dogs shaking themselves afterward, the rippling black water. It’s not hard to imagine Buddy in a jail cell either—thrashing around sleeplessly in a hard bunk, reaching over to squash a cigarette butt on the concrete floor—but the image is so inappropriate it is like something from a bad dream. Ruby keeps imagining different scenes in which he comes back to town and they take off for the Rocky Mountains together. Everyone has always said she had imagination—imagination and a sense of humor.
A pudgy man with fat fists and thick lips sits next to her on the bench at the clinic, humming. With him is a woman in a peach-colored pants suit and with tight white curls. The man grins and points to a child across the room. “That’s my baby,” he says to Ruby. The little girl, squealing with joy, is riding up and down on her mother’s knee. The pudgy man says something unintelligible.
“He loves children,” says the
white-haired woman.
“My baby,” he says, making a cradle with his arms and rocking them.
“He has to have those brain tests once a year,” says the woman to Ruby in a confidential whisper.
The man picks up a magazine and says, “This is my baby.” He hugs the magazine and rocks it in his arms. His broad smile curves like the crescent phase of the moon.
PERMISSIONS CREDITS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
GEAR PUBLISHING: Excerpt from “The Horizontal Bop,” words and music by Bob Seger. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Gear Publishing. Used by permission of Gear Publishing.
PEER INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION: Excerpt from “Mellow Yellow” by Donovan Leitch. Copyright © 1966 by Donovan (Music) Limited. Administered by Peer International Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Peer International Corporation.
STERLING STORM: Excerpt from “Get You Tonight” by Sterling Storm from The Humans LP Happy Hour. Copyright © 1981 by Sterling Storm. Used by permission.
WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS INC.: Excerpt from “Summertime Blues” by Eddie Cochran and Jerry Capehart. Copyright © 1958 (Renewed) by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS INC. AND CHED MUSIC CORPORATION: Excerpt from “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” by Charlie Tobias, Lew Brown and Sam H. Stept. Copyright © 1942 by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. Copyright © renewed, assigned to Ched Music Corporation and EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. in the USA. All rights for the World outside of the USA controlled by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications Inc., Miami. FL 33014
WILLIAMSON MUSIC, CHERRY LANE MUSIC AND UNIVERSAL-MCA MUSIC PUBLISHERS, A DIVISION OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS, INC.: Excerpt from “Hound Dog” by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Copyright © 1956 by Elvis Presley Music, Inc., and Lion Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright renewed and assigned to Gladys Music (Administered by Williamson Music) and Cherry Lane Music o/b/o Gladys Music (ASCAP). Rights in the US are controlled by Williamson Music and Cherry Lane Music. Rights outside of the United States are controlled by Universal-MCA Music Publishers, a division of Universal Studios, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Williamson Music, Cherry Lane Music and Universal-MCA Music Publishers, a division of Universal Studios, Inc.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
•
Daniel J. Boorstin
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Ron Chernow
•
Shelby Foote
•
Stephen Jay Gould
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Richard Howard
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
•
Carolyn See
•
William Styron
•
Gore Vidal
FOR ROGER
ALSO BY BOBBIE ANN MASON
FICTION
In Country
Spence + Lila
Love Life
Feather Crowns
Midnight Magic
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail
An Atomic Romance
Nancy Culpepper
NONFICTION
Nabokov’s Garden
The Girl Sleuth
Clear Springs
Elvis Presley
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOBBIE ANN MASON is the author of In Country, Nancy Culpepper, An Atomic Romance, and a memoir, Clear Springs. She won the PEN/Hemingway Award and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Kentucky with her husband.
Shiloh and Other Stories Page 26