“Nobody can do dill pickles like you can, Lila. You’ve got a secret recipe, I believe. One of these days I’m going to get you down and mash that recipe out of you.”
“I just do it by guess. Last year I got them too sour. They was sour enough to make a pig squeal!” Lila laughs, then hiccups.
The old woman’s voice booms through the curtain. “Who’s got the he-cups over there?”
“Me,” says Lila. She can’t get comfortable, and the little jolts hurt her incision.
“You’re a-growing,” Mrs. Wright says. “That’s what that means.”
“I hope so,” Lila says, pulling at her gown. “I wish I could grow a new jug.”
“You can’t get no sleep around here to save your neck,” Mrs. Wright says. “They come in here late last night and started burning the house down!”
Lila sees the prisoner trudging past the door, clinging to his uniformed guard. His gown gapes open in the back, exposing his hairy rear end. He shuffles along, his head bent. Lila feels a sudden foreboding of death. This is all there is left to life: lying here in a hospital gown with her breast amputated, watching a bare-butt criminal go by and listening to a nutty old woman griping behind a curtain. Days ago, Lila told herself she was ready to go, that she had made her peace with the world, that she had had a good life and she was grateful. But now she revolts. She doesn’t want to give up. She swings out of bed a little too quickly, and a pain shoots through her arm. But that’s O.K. It will go away.
“Walk me down the hall,” she says to Glenda. “I ain’t ready to die yet.”
12
“You’re not eating for us, Mrs. Wright,” the nurse says disapprovingly. This nurse is the cute one, with the tiny feet. She’s the only nurse who bothers to chat with the old woman.
“She made a little sign on it,” says Lila.
“I like broccoli cooked done,” says Mrs. Wright, sitting up against her pillows defiantly and pushing her tray trolley forward. “I like all kinds of greens. I could eat my weight in asparagus. But not raw.”
It’s time for Lila to breathe oxygen. The nurse’s aide hauls the breathing contraption to Lila’s bedside and pulls the curtain between the beds. She aims the blue mask at Lila’s face.
“I believe my lungs is clearing up,” Lila says to her.
“Well, they ought to be if you keep off them cigarettes,” the girl says.
“Woman!” Mrs. Wright booms through the curtain. “I did something for sixty-five years and then quit—and you can too.”
“What’s that—smoking?” asks Lila.
“Naw—chewing tobacco. I started in the first grade, but since I was operated on four days ago I haven’t wanted a chew. Got a bad taste in my mouth.”
Lila can’t reply because she is holding her breath. The girl says, “You’re doing good. Just hold it two more seconds. There.”
Lila says, rubbing her neck, “These veins need oxygen.”
“That smoking was closing them down,” the girl says.
“I’m worried about that test they’re going to run on my neck. They don’t want to operate on both sides at once. They need to keep one vein open to feed the brain in case I have a stroke on the operating table.” The words rush out. Lila can talk to the nurses about her fears, but doctors make her flustered.
“I’m sure they know what’s best for you,” the nurse’s aide says. “Now breathe in again. The test will tell them which way to go.”
“I’m more scared of that test than I am of the operation,” Lila says. She sucks in air, feeling her face go red, her stitches tickling.
As the girl leaves, she rips open the curtain again, and Mrs. Wright says, “I’ll be glad when I get back to my cat.”
“Well, that’s the first I heard you were going to leave the hospital!” says Lila. “I thought you wasn’t aiming to leave here alive.”
Mrs. Wright grumbles and works at her short-tailed gown, which has ridden up. “The doctor didn’t say nothing about going home, but he said something about getting these belly steeples out. I feel like jerking ’em out myself. They put a screw in and some plastic. I had this herny for five or six years, and I was doing just fine with it till they started in bellyaching about it.”
“Is somebody feeding your cat?” Lila misses Abraham. Spence won’t give him enough attention.
Mrs. Wright shakes her head. “I guess she’ll find something. That cat—she’s a beautiful cat. Calico. She has the prettiest face. Where she’s white she’s white, and where she’s black she’s black, and where she’s red she’s red! She ain’t got no tail. When she was a kitten she got in the hay baler and got her tail cut off. And she got her ears snipped off too somehow. She’s crippled up in one paw. But she can catch mice. She catches ’em with one paw and stuffs ’em in her mouth and reaches out and hooks another one. That cat sleeps with me in the house every night in the world!”
“My cat doesn’t come in the house,” Lila says. “Spence never did like cats in the house.”
“I’d tease the menfolks and offer ’em a chaw of tobacco straight out of the tobacco barn. I’d say you ain’t a man if you can’t chew that.” Mrs. Wright laughs, a man’s grunt. “If you chew tobacco, you won’t never have worms. Lands, I ain’t worked tobacco in ten years! That’s how I ruptured myself, lifting a ten-by-twenty-five presser of tobacco.”
“We never raised tobacco. I’ve got corn coming in and my girls don’t know how to do it right.”
“Honey, there ain’t a soul to tend to my garden. I’ve got bell peppers and okry and Kentucky Wonders. Everything will ruin.”
The TV news comes on, and the old woman says, “The politicians send all our money overseas, where all they do is fight and all they ever will do is fight.”
The hospital routines are becoming too familiar—the florist’s delivery cart passing by the door, the physical therapist who comes in each morning to help Lila work her arm to keep it from freezing up, the boy who sweeps the floors every afternoon, the night nurse with the cold hands and the way she has of popping the thermometer in Lila’s mouth just as though she were using a dipstick to check the oil level in a car engine. When Lila asked the night nurse about the prisoner, she said, “I don’t know what happened to him, but I sure wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley.”
Lila tries to read recipes in Family Circle, but her eyes blur and her glasses don’t help. She would like to read from the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand, but the print is too fine. The preacher is supposed to come by, but he hasn’t.
13
Sitting in the lounge while Lila naps, Spence is surrounded by worried-looking strangers, most of them overweight. Human beings come in such freakish forms, it always surprises him to be in a crowd of them. His nerves are bad. He can’t sit still. Downstairs, he saw a woman in a wheelchair; evidently she was too fat to walk. She was the fattest woman he’d ever seen outside a circus. He works a Coke out of the ice in the cooler and lifts the tab. He takes a long drink and belches. Heartburn. The night before, it woke him up at two-thirty and he couldn’t go back to sleep. His head whirled, catching memories of recent events until he was brought up to date, to the awful present. If Lila didn’t make it through the second operation, her funeral could be as early as next weekend. In the dark, tossing in bed, he imagined her funeral. He couldn’t stop whole scenes from playing in his head, like a TV documentary. The sermon, the flowers, perfunctory conversations with the kinfolks at the funeral home, coming home with his children and solemnly feasting on that food the neighbors brought.
If this is going to be her time, then what he and Lila should do is have a last fling together. But he can’t go in her room and make love to her. He can’t even talk to her or tell her how he feels while she’s lying there in that white-cold bed with the nurses bumbling around the room like doodlebugs working on a cowpile. And now it seems likely that the doctors will get hold of her again, with their knives and scissors, probing violently in another place precious to him—her
rugged throat, always tanned and healthy. The surgeons in masks will probably laugh and joke while they work, probably because they’re making so much money. They must feel immense power, like presidents and TV executives. Spence’s stomach turns over as a cloud of cigarette smoke fills the room. Someone switches the TV from a fishing show to the Nashville channel. Spence hates hillbilly music.
Lee and the kids came to see Lila earlier that afternoon. Now Lee joins Spence in the lounge, drinking a Sprite and gazing vacantly at the TV while Jennifer and Greg explore the hospital. Lee always seems tired. He didn’t want to learn farming because he didn’t want to get up at four to milk, but he has to work even harder at his factory job. He owes the bank almost four hundred dollars a month for a squatty little brick ranch house on a hundred-foot lot in town with no trees. It makes Spence sick.
The prisoner enters the lounge with the guard, who walks him around the room as if on an inspection tour. He is huge and young, with short blond hair and freckles. He looks as though he might have been a nice boy who turned bad. His dark eyes somehow don’t fit his physique—a clue, Spence thinks, to why he turned bad. Something about his body isn’t quite right. The sight of him is jarring. The guy has probably known that all his life, and the conflict made him mean. The criminal’s I.V. rolls along with him like an obedient dog on a rope.
“I bet he got stabbed,” Lee says. “All those prisoners want to do is cut on each other when they get the chance.”
Spence says, “When the guard has to go to the bathroom, he chains that guy to the bed. I saw him.”
“He don’t look strong enough to get very far.”
Spence asks, “How does she seem to you?”
“Mom? Oh, she’s bearing up. She almost seems like her old self.” Lee stares at his lap. “I feel terrible that we dragged her to Florida.”
“She worries,” Spence says. “She gets something in her head. Like that deal with you and Cat over the air conditioner.”
“Mom didn’t have anything to do with that.”
Spence rubs his hands against his jeans. “I thought Cat give you that air conditioner.”
“I told you how it was.” Lee takes his time lighting a cigarette. “Cat said I could have the air conditioner, so I went and got it and installed it, and then she changed her mind and wanted it back, but I already had it in the window. I had to rework the frame to get it set right. It would have been easier for her to get a secondhand air conditioner than to fool with this one. She got mad because I wouldn’t let her have it back.”
“She claims she just meant to let you borrow it.”
“She said I could have it, and I took her at her word.”
Words. Lila’s kinfolks deliberately tried to hurt her with words. They put him in a sour mood. And her friends chattered about diseases. Lila ate it up. His daughters embarrassed him. They even complained to the doctors about the hospital food, but the doctors had nothing to do with it. When Lila’s first meal after surgery was a hamburger with pickles and potato chips, Nancy said it wasn’t nutritious, especially for someone with carotid-artery disease. “A greasy old hamburger!” Nancy snapped at the doctor. Spence wanted to spank her. He can remember when he and Lila were courting, and they went out for hamburgers. A hamburger and Coke at Fred and Sue’s Drive-in was the most delicious meal they had ever had. Even after they were married, they looked forward to going out for hamburgers almost as much as they looked forward to making love. His mother was stingy with meat and cooked the same plain grub day in and day out.
Lee is speaking to him about subdivisions. Lee brings up subdivisions about once a month, trying to convince Spence that since his land is close to town it will be worth something someday.
“Why don’t you sell off some frontage and get a start on a development?” Lee asks.
“What would I want to do that for?”
“You’re setting on a gold mine.”
“Good. You can come over and dig in it.”
“You could sell one lot and get enough to build a house on another lot and then sell it at a profit.”
“Why didn’t Joy come today?” Spence asks.
“She went to Mister Sun. Her and her sister go to the tanning booth every chance they get. I gave her a membership for her birthday.” Lee stands to go, as Jennifer and Greg appear in the lounge. “I have to get home and finish paneling the den. The wallpaper’s peeling off, and Joy’s having a fit.”
“You’re going to do that on Sunday?” asks Spence, surprised. “I thought your mama taught you not to work on Sunday.”
“I don’t have time during the week, with overtime.”
“Why don’t you repaper? Ain’t that cheaper?”
“No. I’d have to put up some new gypsum board, and by the time you get gypsum board and tape it and paint an undercoat, it’s cheaper to panel.” Lee clutches his Sprite can, crumpling it, left-handed.
“Paneling’s got formaldehyde in it,” says Spence. “It causes cancer. Ask Nancy. Nancy can explain it to you.”
“Nancy’s got an explanation for everything,” Lee says with a laugh. “What does she say caused Mom to get cancer?”
“Bacon grease. She says them veins in her neck is stopped up with bacon grease.”
“Bacon grease in her neck?” asks Jennifer, Lee’s seven-year-old.
“Come on, Goofus,” says Lee to Greg, who is punching on Lee, trying to get his attention. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” Lee says to Spence.
After Lee leaves, Spence goes to check on Lila one more time before he heads home for the evening. He runs into Cat in the hall. She’s wearing some kind of pink getup with a green-flowered ruffle at the bottom.
“Hi, kid,” he says. “Where you been all day?”
“I went to the River Days Festival. They had a flea market and a fiddle contest.”
“Fiddles ought to be outlawed.”
“Why?”
“They make too much noise. The way they screak gives me a rigor.”
She ignores him. “Did you see how pretty Mom looked? I fixed her hair and painted her fingernails this morning before her company came.”
He nods. “You look pretty too. Except your ears look like some tobacco worms are sucking on ’em.” Her earrings are fat and pale green and hang down past her chin line.
Cat slaps at his arm playfully. “I don’t know how Mom put up with you all these years,” she says.
“Where are you going?” he asks when Cat turns toward the elevator.
“I have a date to go out to eat.”
“With that guy that took you up to Carbondale and left you that time?”
“No. He was a jerk.”
“I thought you had more sense than that.”
“Well, sometimes you just get in a fix and you don’t know how you got there.”
The elevator doors open and she steps on, waving goodbye. As the doors close, he remembers the time Cat was coming down the lane to meet him in the field. She was only about three. She crawled under the fence and started across the pasture toward him when a bull saw her and headed her way. “Go back, Cathy,” he cried. “Get under the fence!” He never saw such a calm, smart child. She purposefully turned and sped toward the fence and crawled under. He was always proud of that, of how smart she was.
14
A woman from the mastectomy support group arrives the next afternoon, bringing Lila a temporary pad to stuff in her brassiere until she can be measured for a permanent one. Lila feels embarrassed because both her daughters and Spence are right there. Spence is reading the newspaper noisily, rattling the pages and jerking them out smooth. Lila worries about his nerves.
“It’s called a prosthesis,” the woman explains. Lila did not catch her name. Cheerful and little, pert as a wren, she stands beside the bed, speaking to Lila like a schoolteacher. She presents Lila with the object, which is in a plastic bag.
“Law,” says Lila. “That weighs a ton.” It reminds her of those sandbags used to hold
down temporary signs on the highway.
“I can tell you’re surprised,” the woman chirps. “We don’t realize the weight we’re carrying around. You can put a strain on your back if you don’t get properly fitted. So don’t just stuff your bra with any old thing to make it look right. It’s got to feel right and it’s got to be the right weight, or you can run into serious problems.”
The woman says she has had a mastectomy herself, and presumably she is wearing one of these sandbags in her brassiere. Lila notices Spence squirming. Nancy and Cat don’t jump on this woman the way they did on the doctors. Cat is playing solitaire and Nancy is reading a book. Mrs. Wright is asleep.
The woman tells a long tale about her own mastectomy. “I was worried about recurrence,” she says. “And I did have a lump to come in the other breast. It was tested and it was benign, but I made the decision to have the second breast removed too. I just didn’t want to take the chance of having cancer again. Now, that may sound extreme to you, but it was just the way I felt. So I’m free from worry, and the prosthesis works just fine.”
The woman’s little points are as perky as her personality. If the originals were that small, she probably doesn’t miss them, Lila thinks. The woman talks awhile about balance, and then she talks about understanding. She has a packet of materials for Lila to read. “You may get depressed over losing part of your femininity,” she says. “And we want you to know we’re available to help.” Lila listens carefully, but she can’t think of anything to say.
“The doctors were skeptical when we started our organization,” the woman says, leaning toward Lila and speaking in a confidential half-whisper. “But after we advertised, we had fifty women come to the first meeting. There was a great need for this, and we want you to know that we’re there to serve you.”
“Would I have to come all the way to Paducah?”
“Yes. That’s where we hold our meetings, on the first Monday night of each month.”
“Well, I don’t get out much at night. And I don’t like to drive on that Paducah highway.”
Nancy Culpepper Page 12
