“But she’s been through so much,” Mama says. “She thinks the world of you, Sandra.”
“I know.”
“She thinks Jerry hung the moon.”
“I tell you, if he so much as walks through that door—”
“I love those cosmos you planted,” Mama says. “They’re the prettiest I’ve ever seen. I’d give anything if I could get mine to do like that.”
“They’re volunteers. I didn’t do a thing.”
“You didn’t?”
“I didn’t thin them either. I just hated to thin them.”
“I know what you mean,” says Mama. “It always broke my heart to thin corn. But you learn.”
——
A movie, That’s Entertainment!, is on TV. Sandra stands in the doorway to watch Fred Astaire dancing with Eleanor Powell, who is as loose as a rag doll. She is wearing a little-girl dress with squared shoulders.
“Fred Astaire is the limberest thing I ever saw,” says Mama.
“I remember his sister Adele,” says Grandmother. “She could really dance.”
“Her name was Estelle,” says Mama.
“Estelle Astaire?” says Sandra. For some reason, she remembers a girl she knew in grade school named Sandy Beach.
Sandra makes tomato sauce, and they offer to help, but she tells them to relax and watch the movie. As she scalds tomatoes and presses hot pulp through a food mill, she listens to the singing and tap-dancing from the next room. She comes to the doorway to watch Gene Kelly do his famous “Singin’ in the Rain” number. His suit is soaked, and he jumps into puddles with both feet, like a child. A policeman scowls at his antics. Grandmother laughs. When the sauce boils down, Sandra pours it into bowls to cool. She sees bowls of blood lined up on the counter. Sandra watches Esther Williams dive through a ring of fire and splash in the center of a star formed by women, with spread legs, lying on their backs in the water.
During a commercial, Sandra asks her mother if she wants to come to the barn with her, to help with the ducks. The dog bounds out the door with them, happy at this unexpected excursion. Out in the yard, Mama lights a cigarette.
“Finally!” Mama says with a sigh. “That feels good.”
Two cats, Blackie and Bubbles, join them. Sandra wonders if Bubbles remembers the mole she caught yesterday. The mole had a star-shaped nose, which Bubbles ate first, like a delicacy.
The ducks are not in the barn, and Sandra and her mother walk down a narrow path through the weeds to the pond. The pond is quiet as they approach. Then they can make out patches of white on the dark water. The ducks hear them and begin diving, fleeing to the far shore in panic.
“There’s no way to drive ducks in from a pond,” Mama says.
“Sometimes they just take a notion to stay out here all night,” says Sandra.
They stand side by side at the edge of the pond while Mama smokes. The sounds of evening are at their fullest now, and lightning bugs wink frantically. Sometimes Sandra has heard foxes at night, their menacing yaps echoing on the hillside. Once, she saw three fox pups playing in the full moon, like dancers in a spotlight. And just last week she heard a baby screaming in terror. It was the sound of a wildcat—a thrill she listens for every night now. It occurs to her that she would not mind if the wildcat took her ducks. They are her offering.
Mama throws her cigarette in the pond, and a duck splashes. The night is peaceful, and Sandra thinks of the thousands of large golden garden spiders hidden in the field. In the early morning the dew shines on their trampolines, and she can imagine bouncing with an excited spring from web to web, all the way up the hill to the woods.
STILL LIFE WITH WATERMELON
For several weeks now, Louise Milsap has been painting pictures of watermelons. The first one she tried looked like a dark-green basketball floating on an algae-covered pond. Too much green, she realized. She began varying the backgrounds, and sometimes now she throws in unusual decorative objects—a few candles, a soap dish, a pair of wire pliers. She tried including other fruits, but the size of the melons among apples and grapes made them appear odd and unnatural. When she saw a photograph of a cornucopia in a magazine, she imagined a huge watermelon stuck in its mouth.
Louise’s housemate, Peggy Wilson, insists that a rich collector from Paducah named Herman Priddle will buy the pictures. Peggy and her husband, Jerry, had rented an apartment from him, but Jerry ran away with Priddle’s mistress and now Peggy lives with Louise. Peggy told her, “That man’s whole house is full of them stupid watermelons.” When Peggy said he would pay a fortune for anything with a watermelon in it, Louise bought a set of paints.
Peggy said, “He’s got this one cute picture of these two little colored twins eating a slice of watermelon. One at each end, like bookends. I bet he paid at least thirty dollars for it.”
Louise has lost her job at Kroger’s supermarket, and she lies to the unemployment office about seeking a new job. Instead, she spends all day painting on small canvas boards in her canning room. Her husband, Tom, is in Texas with Jim Yates, a carpenter who worked for him. A month before, Tom suddenly left his business and went out West to work on Jim’s uncle’s ranch. Louise used to like Tom’s impulsiveness. He would call up a radio program and dedicate love songs to her, knowing it both embarrassed and pleased her to hear her name on the radio. Tom never cared about public opinion. Before he went to Texas, he bought a cowboy hat from Sam’s Surplus. He left in his pickup, his “General Contracting” sign still painted on the door, and he didn’t say when he would return. Louise said to him, “If you’re going to be a born-again cowboy, I guess you’ll want to get yourself all bunged up on one of them bull machines.”
“That ain’t necessarily what I’m aiming to do,” he said.
“Go ahead. See if I care.”
Louise, always a practical person, is determined to get along without Tom. She should look for a job, but she doesn’t want to. She paints a dozen pictures in a row. She feels less and less practical. For two dollars and eighty-nine cents she buys a watermelon at Kroger’s and paints a picture of it. It is a long, slender melon the color of a tobacco worm, with zigzag stripes. She went to Kroger’s from force of habit, and then felt embarrassed to be seen at her old checkout lane.
“Old man Priddle would give you a hundred dollars for that,” says Peggy, glancing at the painting when she comes home from work. Louise is just finishing the clouds in the background. Clouds had been a last-minute inspiration.
—
Peggy inserts a Dixieland tape into Louise’s tape deck and opens a beer. Beer makes Peggy giggly, but Dixieland puts her in a sad mood because her husband once promised to take her to New Orleans to hear Al Hirt in person. Louise stands there with her paintbrush, waiting to see what will happen.
Peggy says, “He’s got this big velvet tapestry on his wall? It’s one big, solid watermelon that must have weighed a ton.” Laughing, she stretches her arms to show the size. The beer can tilts, about to spill. Three slugs of beer and Peggy is already giggly.
Louise needs Peggy’s rent money, but having her around is like having a grown child who refuses to leave home. Peggy reads Harlequin romances and watches TV simultaneously. She pays attention when the minister on The 700 Club gives advice on budgets. “People just aren’t smart about the way they use credit cards,” she informs Louise. This is shop talk from her job in customer services at the K Mart. Peggy keeps promising to call Herman Priddle, to make an appointment for Louise to take her paintings to Paducah, but Peggy has a thing about using the telephone. She doesn’t want to tie up the line in case her husband tries to call. She frowns impatiently when Louise is on the telephone. One good thing about living with Peggy—she does all the cooking. Sometimes she pours beer into the spaghetti sauce—“to give it a little whang,” she says.
“You shouldn’t listen to that tape,” Louise says to Peggy later. The music is getting to Peggy by now. She sits in a cross-legged, meditative pose, the beer can balanced in her palm.
“I just don’t know what he sees in a woman who’s twenty years older than him,” says Peggy. “With a face-lift.”
“How long can it last, anyhow?”
“Till she needs another face-lift, I reckon.”
“Well, that can’t be long. I read they don’t last,” says Louise.
“That woman’s so big and strong, she could skin a mule one-handed,” says Peggy, lifting her beer.
Louise puts away her paints and then props the new picture against a chair. Looking at the melon, she can feel its weight and imagine just exactly how ripe it is.
—
While she paints, Louise has time to reflect on their situation: two women with little in common whose husbands are away. Both men left unconscionably. Sudden yearnings. One thought he could be a cowboy (Tom had never been on a horse); the other fell for an older woman. Louise cannot understand either compulsion. The fact that she cannot helps her not to care.
She tried to reason with Tom—about how boyish his notion was and how disastrous it would be to leave his business. Jim Yates had lived in Denver one summer, and in every conversation he found a way to mention Colorado and how pure the air was there. Tom believed everything Jim said. “You can’t just take off and expect to pick up your business where you left it when you get back,” Louise argued. “There’s plenty of guys waiting to horn in. It takes years to get where you’ve got.” That was Louise being reasonable. At first Tom wanted her to go with him, but she wouldn’t dream of moving so far away from home. He accused her of being afraid to try new things, and over a period of weeks her resistance turned to anger. Eventually Louise, to her own astonishment, threw a Corning Ware Petite Pan at Tom and made his ear bleed. He and Jim took off two days later. The day they left, Tom was wearing a T-shirt that read: “You better get in line now ’cause I get better-looking every day.” Who did he think he was?
Peggy does not like to be reminded of the watermelon collector, and Louise has to probe for information. Peggy and her husband, Jerry (“Flathead”) Wilson, had gone to live in Paducah, forty miles away, and had had trouble finding work and a place to live, but an elderly man, Herman Priddle, offered them three identical bedrooms on the third floor of his house. “It was a mansion,” Peggy told Louise. Then Priddle hired Jerry to convert two of the rooms into a bathroom and a kitchen. Peggy laid vinyl tiles and painted the walls. The old man, fascinated, watched them work. He let Peggy and Jerry watch his TV and he invited them to eat with him. His mistress, a beautician named Eddy Gail Moses, slept with him three nights a week, and while she was there she made enough hamburger-and-macaroni casseroles to last him the rest of the week. She lived with her father, who disapproved of her behavior, despite her age.
Before Peggy knew what was happening, her husband had become infatuated with the woman, and he abruptly went to live with her and her father, leaving Peggy with Herman Priddle. Although Peggy grew suspicious of the way he looked at her, she and Priddle consoled each other for a while. Peggy started making the casseroles he was used to, and she stayed in Paducah for a few months, working at a pit barbecue stand. Gradually, Peggy told Louise, the old man began collecting pictures of watermelons. He looked for them in flea markets, at antique shops, and in catalogs; and he put ads in trade papers. When he hung one of the pictures in her bedroom, Peggy moved out. The watermelon was sliced lengthwise and it resembled a lecherous grin, she said, shuddering.
“Peggy’s still in shock from the way Jerry treated her,” Louise tells Tom in a letter one evening. She writes him in care of a tourist home in Amarillo, Texas. She intends to write only perfunctory replies to his postcards so he will know she is alive, but she finds herself being more expressive than she ever was in the four years they were face to face. Hitting him seemed to release something in her, but she won’t apologize. She won’t beg him to come back. He doesn’t know she has lost her job. And if he saw her paintings, he would laugh.
When Louise seals the letter, Peggy says to her, “Did I tell you I heard Jim Yates is queer?”
“No.”
“Debbie Potts said that at work. She used to know Jim Yates back in high school.”
“Well, I don’t believe it. He’s too overbearing.”
“Debbie Potts has been to Europe,” says Peggy, looking up from the kitchen counter, where she is making supper. “Did you know that?”
“Hooray for her.”
“That don’t mean she’s an expert on anything,” Peggy says apologetically. “I’m sure she don’t know what she’s talking about.”
“For crying out loud.”
“I’m sorry, Louise. I’m always putting my big foot in it. But you know, a lot of guys are coming right out now and saying they’re gay? It’s amazing.” She laughs wildly. “They sure wouldn’t be much use where it counts, would they? At least Flathead ran off with a woman—knock on wood.” Peggy taps a wooden spoon against the counter.
“How can you love a guy called Flathead?” says Louise, irritated. Apparently Jerry Wilson’s nickname has nothing to do with his appearance. Louise has read that the Flathead Indians used to tie rocks to their heads to flatten them—why, she cannot imagine.
Peggy says, “It’s just what I know him by. I never thought about it.”
Peggy is making a casserole, probably one of Eddy Gail Moses’s recipes. The Dixieland tape is playing full blast. Peggy says, “The real reason he run off with that floozy was she babied him.”
“I wouldn’t baby a man if my life depended on it,” says Louise.
She rummages around for a stamp. Too late, she wonders if she should have told Tom about the trouble with the air conditioner. He will think she is hinting for him to come home. Tom was always helpful around the house. He helped choose the kitchen curtains, saying that a print of butterflies she wanted was too busy and suggesting a solid color. She always admired him for that. It was so perceptive of him to say the curtains were busy. But that didn’t mean anything abnormal. In fact, after he started hanging out with Jim Yates, Tom grew less attentive to such details. He and Jim Yates had a Space Invaders competition going at Patsy’s Dairy Whip, and sometimes they stayed there until midnight. Jim, who hit six thousand long before Tom, several times had his name on the machine as high scorer of the day. Once Tom brought Jim over for supper, and Louise disliked the way Jim took charge, comparing her tacos to the ones he’d had in Denver and insisting that she get up and grate more cheese. It seemed to Louise that he was still playing Space Invaders. Tom didn’t notice. The night, weeks later, when Louise threw the Corning Ware at Tom, she knew she was trying to get his attention.
Late one evening, Peggy tells Louise that she saw her husband at the K Mart. He didn’t realize that Peggy worked there. “He turned all shades when he saw me,” Peggy says. “But I wasn’t surprised. I had a premonition.”
Peggy believes in dreams and coincidences. The night before she saw him, she had read a romance story about a complicated adoption proceeding. Louise doesn’t get the connection and Peggy is too drunk to explain. She and Jerry have been out drinking, talking things over. Louise notices that Peggy already has a spot on her new pants suit, which she managed to buy even though she owes Louise for groceries.
“Would you take him back?” Louise wants to know.
“If he’s good.” Peggy laughs loudly. “He’s coming over again one day next week. He had to get back to Paducah tonight.”
“Is he still with that woman?”
“He said he wasn’t.” Peggy closes her eyes and does a dance step. Then she says exuberantly, “Everything Flathead touches turns to money. He cashed this check at the K Mart for fifty dollars. He sold a used hot-water heater and made a twenty-dollar profit on it. Imagine that.”
When Peggy sees Louise polishing her toenails, she says abruptly, “Your second toe is longer than your big toe. That means you dominate your husband.”
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“Didn’t you know that? Everybody knows that.�
�
Louise says, “Are any of them stories you read ever about women who beat up their husbands?”
Peggy laughs. “What an idea!”
Louise is thinking of Tom’s humiliation the night she struck him with the dish. Suddenly in her memory is a vague impression that the lights flickered, the way it was said the electricity used to do on certain midnights when the electric chair was being used at the state penitentiary, not far away.
—
If Peggy goes back to her husband, Louise will have to earn some extra money. It dawns on her that the paintings are an absurd idea. Childish. For a few days she stays out of the canning room, afraid to look at the pictures. Halfheartedly she reads the want ads. They say: salesclerk, short-order cook, secretarial assistant, salesclerk.
On the day she is scheduled to sign up for her weekly unemployment check, Louise arranges the paintings in the living room, intending to decide whether to continue with them. The pictures are startling. Some of the first ones appear to be optical illusions—watermelons disappearing like black holes into vacant skies. The later pictures are more credible—one watermelon is on a table before a paned window, with the light making little windows on the surface of the fruit; another, split in half, is balanced against a coffee percolator. Louise pretends she’s a woman from Mars and the paintings are the first things she sees on Earth. They aren’t bad, but the backgrounds worry her. They don’t match the melons. Why would a watermelon be placed against a blue sky? One watermelon on a flowered tablecloth resembles a blimp that has landed in a petunia bed. Even the sliced melons are unrealistic. The red is wrong—too pale, like a tongue. Tom sent her a picture postcard of the Painted Desert, but Louise suspects the colors in that picture are too brilliant. No desert could look like that.
—
On her way to the unemployment office, Louise picks up a set of acrylics on discount at Big-D. Acrylics are far more economical than oils. In the car, Louise, pleased by the prospect of the fresh tubes of paint, examines the colors: scarlet, cobalt blue, Prussian blue, aquamarine, emerald, yellow ochre, orange, white, black. She doesn’t really need green. The discovery that yellow and blue make green still astonishes her; when she mixes them, she feels like a magician. As she drives toward the unemployment office she wonders recklessly if the green of the trees along the street could be broken down by some scientific process into their true colors.
Shiloh and Other Stories Page 7
