“He’s going off to camp tomorrow. Jack’s taking him up to New Hampshire. It’s the same place he went last year, where they go on treks into the mountains.”
“Bring him down here. I’ll see that he communes with nature.” Spence grins at Nancy.
“I’m sure you will. You’ll have him out planting soybeans.” Nancy twists out of a nurse’s way.
“It would be good for him,” Lila says sleepily. “Working out in the fields would teach him something.”
She closes her eyes, vaguely listening to Spence and the girls talk. If this is her time to go, she should be ready. And she has her family with her, except for Lee, who had to work. She feels she is looking over her whole life, holding it up to see how it has turned out—like a piece of sewing. She can see Cat trying on a dress Lila has made for her, and Lila checks to see whether it needs taking up. She turns up the hem, jerks the top to see how it fits across the shoulders, considers an extra tuck in the waist. In a recurrent dream she has had for years, she is trying to finish a garment, sewing fast against the clock.
They are still chattering nervously around her when the surgeon appears. He’s young, with sensitive hands that look skilled at delicate finger work. Lila always notices people’s fingers. Nancy and Cat keep asking questions, but Lila is sleepy and can’t follow all that he is saying. Then he moves closer to her and says, “If the biopsy shows a malignancy, I’m going to recommend a modified radical mastectomy. I’ll remove the breast tissue and the lymph nodes under the arm. But I’ll leave the chest muscles. If you follow the physical therapy, then you’ll have full use of your arm and you’ll be just fine.” He smiles reassuringly. He resembles a cousin of Lila’s—Whip Stanton, a little man with a lisp and a wife with palsy.
“How small would the lump have to be for you to recommend a lumpectomy instead?” Nancy asks the doctor.
“Infinitesimal,” he says. “It’s better to get it all out and be sure. This way is more certain.”
“Well, more and more doctors are recommending lumpectomies instead of mastectomies,” Nancy argues. “What I’m asking is, what is the dividing line? How large should the lump be for the mastectomy to be preferable?”
Lila sees Spence cringe. Nancy has always asked questions and done things differently, just to be contrary. “Nancy, Nancy, quite contrary,” they used to tease her.
The doctor shrugs and leans against the wall. “It depends on a number of factors,” he says. “You can’t reduce it to a question of size. If it’s an aggressive tumor, a fast-growing one, then a smaller lump might be more dangerous than one that has grown slowly over a longer period of time. And my suspicion is that this is an aggressive tumor. You can get a second opinion if you want to, but we’ve got her prepped, and if the second opinion was in favor of a lumpectomy, then wouldn’t you have to go for a third opinion, so you could take two out of three? But in this case, time is of the essence.” The doctor grins at Lila. “What do you think, Mrs. Culpepper? You look like a pretty smart lady.”
“Why, you’re just a little whippersnapper,” Lila says. “All the big words make me bumfuzzled. I guess you know your stuff, but I got you beat when it comes to producing pretty daughters.” She has heard he is single, and she heard the nurses joking with him. She can’t keep her mind on the conversation. It’s as though she’s floating around the room, dipping in and out of the situation, the way the nurses do.
“That’s for certain,” he says, twirling his stethoscope like a toy.
“My daughters are curious, though,” Lila says apologetically. Even the outfits they are wearing are curious—layers of dark, wrinkled cotton.
“They’re weird,” Spence says.
“No, we’re not,” says Cat indignantly. She’s dressed up in one of her man-catching outfits, with heavy jewelry, but what man would like that getup? Cat claims women actually dress for women. Nancy was always too impatient to fool with her appearance. She’s like Lila that way, wearing any old thing handy. When Nancy moved up North she stopped wearing lipstick and curling her hair, and for a while she didn’t even wear a brassiere. Lila was afraid Nancy’s breasts would be damaged.
“Do you have any questions, Mr. Culpepper?” the doctor asks. “Is there anything I can clarify?”
Lila senses Spence’s embarrassment as he shakes his head no. The nurses are whizzing around, and the woman in the other bed is arguing with her doctor.
“What about them strokes?” Spence pipes up then.
“Well, the first priority is to deal with this lump in her breast, and later we’ll check the obstructions in the carotid arteries.” The doctor touches his neck, indicating the main blood vessels. He says, “It’s possible that I’ll recommend further surgery next week to clean out the plaque in those arteries.”
“I was having strokes in Florida,” Lila says. She touches her arm, where the numbness spreads a few times a day. As they talk, she feels one of her dizzy spells coming on. She longs for a cigarette.
“How risky is that second operation?” Cat demands.
“Well, there’s always the risk of death,” the doctor says bluntly. He’s not looking at anyone. His eyes are fixed on the doorframe. “And a carotid endarterectomy is tricky because there’s always the chance the patient will have a stroke on the table. But the benefits outweigh the risks. Increase the blood supply to the brain and she’ll stop having those transient ischemic attacks, and we’ll prevent the big stroke down the road.”
“The big stroke down the road,” Nancy repeats, after he leaves. “It sounds like the title of a children’s book.”
Spence seems frozen in his position in the corner chair. His eyes stare vacantly as a nurse comes in with a syringe in her hand like a weapon. “Are you ready, Mrs. Culpepper?”
“Oh, must I?”
“It’ll all be over with before you know it.”
“Y’all messed up my fishing trip,” Lila says crossly, trying to manage a smile. “I was aiming to go fishing this week.”
“That’s why we call you patients—because you have to be patient,” the nurse says cheerfully. “Now you want to lie back for me? And make a fist.”
From out of nowhere, Lila can hear Spence telling about the war, about a guy on his ship who went ashore one night on one of the Pacific islands and got himself tattooed. Spence wrote in his letter, “He had his whole butt tattooed with a picture of two beagles in a field— a pretty field, with green grass. And the dogs were after a rabbit that was disappearing into his crack. The next day the bos’n made him chip paint all day, and he hurt so bad he cried. It was a pretty picture, though, the grass was just as green! But I sure bet that hurt. He’s a big guy too.” She’s about to laugh, remembering that letter.
She sees the girls whispering. The patient in the other bed is up walking again, but she refused her breakfast. Lila’s breakfast was ice water. She wasn’t hungry anyway. Food doesn’t taste right to her anymore. The food on her trip to New Orleans back in March was unappetizing. The gumbo even had shells in it. Now Nancy is bending over her, hugging her, followed by Cat, her face close to Lila’s. Cat whispers, “Hang in there, Mom.” Spence is edging out the door as the orderlies appear with a bed on wheels. In their green outfits, they are leprechauns. Or men from Mars. “Are you going to give me some sugar or not?” Lila calls to Spence.
“I reckon,” he says, clutching her hand and bending down to kiss her. He’s self-conscious, but the nurse is busy filling out a chart and doesn’t notice them.
“Take care of my babies,” she says, meaning the cat and dog. “And don’t forget them beans.”
“I won’t forget your old beans!” He chokes on his laugh.
As the leprechauns wheel her away, she sees Spence gazing after her helplessly. She has forgotten to tell Nancy and Cat something, something important she meant to say about Spence. His face disappears and she is in an elevator, with music playing, the kind of music they play in heaven.
5
Spence can’t stand hosp
itals. The smells make him sick. The sounds of pain hurt. In an hour, the doctor will telephone Lila’s room with the biopsy report, which will determine how he should proceed with the surgery. Spence hates waiting.
He drives to a gas station that has a mini-market. There, he buys two baked potatoes with cheese topping and eats them in the car with a can of Coke. He plays the radio, his rock station. The potatoes need more pepper. Nancy and Cat urged him to eat in the cafeteria with them, but he had little appetite in a building with so many sick people and their germs. In the corridor when he arrived at the hospital that morning, Spence saw a man with a hole in his face where his nose had been. Spence knows a man who went to the cancer specialists in Memphis and had a new nose grafted on. His face doesn’t look bad with the new nose, considering it came from a dead man. When Spence told Nancy about it, she didn’t believe him. Nancy always believes what she wants to believe. He smiles, thinking of how the doctor outsmarted her when she tried to challenge him. Spence is proud of his daughter, though. She has an important job—something to do with computers—with a company that requires her to travel all over the United States. When Nancy married Jack Cleveland, a Yankee, Spence was sure she was making a mistake. He was afraid there wasn’t a living in photography—more of a hobby than work—but the marriage has lasted, and Robert is a smart, good-looking boy. It pains Spence that Nancy lives so far away. She went up there right after college. She was always restless and adventurous, because of the books she read. When she was little, she would read the same book over and over, as if she could make it come true.
Spence finishes the potatoes, gasses up the car, then drives to an auto-supply store to buy a windshield-wiper blade refill, but he can’t find the right length and he doesn’t want to buy a whole new wiper. He needs to get a tune-up, but he forgot to bring the coupon he clipped from the newspaper for a free one. He tries to calculate whether he would come out ahead if he went instead to that filling station offering the free case of Coke with a tune-up. But he doesn’t have time to fool with the car today anyway. Impatiently, he drives back to the hospital, the radio blasting out rock-and-roll. The music fits the urgency of his life. The music seems to organize all the noises of public places into something he can tolerate. The rhythm of driving blends with the music on the radio and the beat in his nervous system. Before the children were born, he and Lila used to go dancing at little places out in the country that people called “nigger juke joints.” They went to one across the country line where they could get beer. Lila never liked beer, but she loved to dance. He can imagine her long legs now, flashing white in the dark of the dance floor. He remembers a saxophone player and a blues singer as good as Joe Williams. The real music is always hidden somewhere, off in the country, back in his head, in his memory. There are occasional echoes of that raunchy old music he always loved in some of the rock songs on the radio.
At the hospital, he is forced to park in the last row. “Midnight Rambler” by the Rolling Stones comes on the radio then, and he sits there and listens until it is finished. His family is busting out at the seams—like the music. He can’t keep track of what they are up to. When a plane crash is on the news, he’s afraid Nancy was on the plane. And Cat’s life is a mess. She married too young, and her husband had big ideas he couldn’t follow through on. He managed a hardware store, then opened his own waterbed outlet, but it failed. Spence told Cat the day Dan leased the store that waterbeds were filled with snake oil, not water, and she was mad at him for a long time for saying that. Lila tried to talk Cat into staying with Dan, but Spence is glad she got rid of him. Lila worries about Cat and the kids alone at night, with no man around the house, but Lila isn’t afraid to go gallivanting around the world herself.
When Spence’s mother died a few years ago, they were free to travel. By then, they had sold off the cows and weren’t tied down on the farm. Spence told Lila he was going to send her around the world. She begged him to go too, but he refused to go traveling with a bunch of old people, yammering about their ailments. “I ain’t that old,” he protested.
“But we couldn’t light out by ourselves,” she said. “We’d get knocked in the head and robbed. We’d get lost. On these tours, they take care of you.”
He was afraid for her to go off, but he wanted her to have the chance. Her first trip was to Hawaii, and at home alone he imagined her out on the Pacific, in a cruise boat that stopped at Pearl Harbor. When she came home from Hawaii, she brought a certificate for a hula-dancing course (three lessons) and some ceramic pineapples. “Did you get scared?” he asked. “Not a bit,” she said. “I slept good, had the biggest time of my life.” The airplane, she said, was big enough to play ball in. On her second trip, a bus tour out to the Badlands, she brought him a toy rabbit with antlers—a jackelope. It was a joke present, but she wouldn’t admit it, insisting she saw a jackelope cross the highway. After that, she went on two more trips, and when relatives commented snidely about how his wife was running around on him and spending all his money, it made him furious. He told them, “She took care of my mother for ten years, and she deserves to get out and have fun. If she wants to go to the moon, I’ll let her. I don’t care how much it costs.”
While she was away in Hawaii, his memories of the Pacific grew louder, more insistent. The sounds of the antiaircraft guns echoed and reverberated below deck, where he was an ammunition passer. Storms battled the ship relentlessly, slopping the decks and plunging and hurtling the ship like a carnival ride. In the dark, cramped quarters—stinking with B.O. and puke—he tried to sleep, but he thought about Lila, nursing the baby and helping his parents get the crops in. He could see her milking the few cows they had during the war, washing the milk cans. One calm, sunny day, he carried buckets of water to swab the deck and forgot momentarily where he was, imagining he was carrying buckets of milk from the barn to the house. Then a fighter plane zoomed down low over the destroyer to land on the aircraft carrier a few hundred yards off the port bow.
When Spence enters Lila’s room, the girls are reading magazines. The air-conditioning is cold. He’s in a short-sleeved shirt, but they are wrapped up in layers of clothes.
“We stole her cigarettes,” Cat says. “She had five packs at the bottom of her bag.”
Nancy seems smaller each time he sees her, while Cat fattens up like a Butterball turkey. Cat has on a wrinkled jumpsuit with buttons and zippers all over it, and a wide belt with three buckles, and several pounds of beads. Nancy has on a sweater and a jacket and baggy pants with buttons at the ankles. This is July.
“Where did y’all get them clothes?” he says. “The rag barrel?”
Cat lets out a giggle. “One of the doctors called us ‘honky Shiite terrorists.’ ”
Spence’s daughters have never acted their age, but in a way he doesn’t mind—they are still his little girls. He may burst into tears. Feeling a pang of heartburn, he sits down and grabs a section of the Courier-Journal from the floor. Too late, he thinks about the germs on the floor.
A nurse flies in and says to Nancy, “I’ll have to ask you to get off the bed, hon. It’s for the patient.”
“I was warming it up for her,” Nancy grumbles. She folds her reading glasses and slips them into a case.
“Y’all are always arguing with the doctors and nurses,” Spence says to his daughters after the nurse leaves. “Talking back to them.”
“Well, if we left it up to you, who knows what could happen to Mom!” Nancy says, sitting up on the edge of the bed and reaching for her shoes. “She could get mutilated. A lot of doctors just want to operate because they’re enamored with their equipment.” Nancy situates herself on a spread-out newspaper on the floor. “Let me ask you one thing, Dad. If you were in the hospital hooked up to tubes and you weren’t even conscious, or maybe you were in excruciating pain—what would you want us to do?”
“I’m afraid of what y’all might have them doctors do to me.” Spence shudders.
“Well, maybe you ought to think ab
out it,” Nancy says. “While you’re still in charge.”
“I’ll solve that one,” he says. “I just won’t go to doctors. You’re right about them anyway. They just want to work you over and take your money.” He folds the newspaper and drops it to the floor. He says to Cat, “I believe your mama is more worried about you than she is about this operation.”
“Well, I don’t know what to do about it. She didn’t see Scott laying on the ground that time. I thought he was dead!”
“He wasn’t hurt.”
“But Lee never should have let Scott ride that dumb three-wheeler. He was too little, and he didn’t have a helmet. Those things are dangerous, the way kids ride them all over creation.”
For a moment Spence sees Lila in his daughter. Lila swinging in a porch swing the night they married, her shoulder pads sticking out like scaffolding.
Cat goes on, “When I took Scott to the hospital, his fingers were numb—that’s a sign of concussion. There was a kid killed just last week on a three-wheeler. Didn’t you see that in the paper?”
Spence shakes his head in despair. It was an accident, and Lee was scared too. He says, “That’s not what I meant. Lila’s just worried about you—staying by yourself at night.”
“What does she want me to do—bring some guy home with me?”
The telephone trills just then and Cat snatches it up. “Yes. Yes.” She listens grimly.
“What is it?” Nancy says, motioning anxiously to Cat. “Is she O.K.?”
Cat nods. When she hangs up, she says, “The biopsy showed it was malignant, and he’s going ahead with the mastectomy.”
Spence’s stomach lurches. “Oh, no,” he says faintly. His heart is racing. Nancy says nothing. Cat picks at her nails.
“They won’t have her back up here till she gets out of the recovery room,” Cat says. “It could be hours.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Nancy says. “Let’s go do something.” She rolls her magazine and plunges it into her tote bag.
Nancy Culpepper Page 8
