She turns the radio on and finds a country music station.
When Shelby comes in, with the children, she is asleep on the couch. They tiptoe around her and she pretends to sleep on. “Sunday is a day of rest,” Shelby is saying to the children. “For everybody but preachers, that is.” Shelby turns off the radio.
“Not for me,” says Jason. “That’s my day to play catch with Jeff.”
When Georgeann gets up, Shelby gives her a hug, one of his proper Sunday embraces. She apologizes for not going with him. “How was the funeral?”
“The usual. You don’t really want to know, do you?”
“No.”
—
Georgeann plans for the retreat. She makes a doctor’s appointment for Wednesday. She takes Shelby’s suits to the cleaners. She visits some shut-ins she neglected to see on Sunday. She arranges with her mother to keep Tamara and Jason. Although her mother still believes Georgeann married unwisely, she now promotes the sanctity of the union. “Marriage is forever, but a preacher’s marriage is longer than that,” she says.
Today, Georgeann’s mother sounds as though she is making excuses for Shelby. She knows very well that Georgeann is unhappy, but she says, “I never gave him much credit at first, but Lord knows he’s ambitious. I’ll say that for him. And practical. He knew he had to learn a trade so he could support himself in his dedication to the church.”
“You make him sound like a junkie supporting a habit.”
Georgeann’s mother laughs uproariously. “It’s the same thing! The same thing.” She is a stout, good-looking woman who loves to drink at parties. She and Shelby have never had much to say to each other, and Georgeann gets very sad whenever she realizes how her mother treats her marriage like a joke. It isn’t fair.
—
When Georgeann feeds the chickens, she notices the sick hen is unable to get up on its feet. Its comb is turning black. She picks it up and sets it in the henhouse. She puts some mash in a Crisco can and sets it in front of the chicken. It pecks indifferently at the mash. Georgeann goes to the house and finds a margarine tub and fills it with water. There is nothing to do for a sick chicken, except to let it die. Or kill it to keep disease from spreading to the others. She won’t tell Shelby the chicken is sick, because Shelby will get the ax and chop its head off. Shelby isn’t being cruel. He believes in the necessities of things.
Shelby will have a substitute in church next Sunday, while he is at the retreat, but he has his sermon ready for the following Sunday. On Tuesday evening, Georgeann types it for him. He writes in longhand on yellow legal pads, the way Nixon wrote his memoirs, and after ten years Georgeann has finally mastered his corkscrew handwriting. The sermon is on sex education in the schools. When Georgeann comes to a word she doesn’t know, she goes downstairs.
“There’s no such word as ‘pucelage,’ ” she says to Shelby, who is at the kitchen table, trying to fix a gun-shaped hair dryer. Parts are scattered all over the table.
“Sure there is,” he says. “Pucelage means virginity.”
“Why didn’t you say so! Nobody will know what it means.”
“But it’s just the word I want.”
“And what about this word in the next paragraph? ‘Matures-cent’? Are you kidding?”
“Now don’t start in on how I’m making fun of you because you haven’t been to college,” Shelby says.
Georgeann doesn’t answer. She goes back to the study and continues typing. Something pinches her on the stomach. She raises her blouse and scratches a bite. She sees a tiny brown speck scurrying across her flesh. Fascinated, she catches it by moistening a fingertip. It drowns in her saliva. She puts it on a scrap of yellow legal paper and folds it up. Something to show the doctor. Maybe the doctor will let her look at it under a microscope.
The next day, Georgeann goes to the doctor, taking the speck with her. “I started getting these bites after I cleaned out the henhouse,” she tells the nurse. “And I’ve been handling a sick chicken.”
The nurse scrapes the speck onto a slide and instructs Georgeann to get undressed and put on a paper robe so that it opens in the back. Georgeann piles her clothes in a corner behind a curtain and pulls on the paper robe. As she waits, she twists and stretches a corner of the robe, but the paper is tough, like the “quicker picker-upper” paper towel she has seen in TV ads. When the doctor bursts in, Georgeann gets a whiff of strong cologne.
The doctor says, “I’m afraid we can’t continue with the examination until we treat you for that critter you brought in.” He looks alarmed.
“I was cleaning out the henhouse,” Georgeann explains. “I figured it was a chicken mite.”
“What you have is a body louse. I don’t know how you got it, but we’ll have to treat it completely before we can look at you further.”
“Do they carry diseases?”
“This is a disease,” the doctor says. “What I want you to do is take off that paper gown and wad it up very tightly into a ball and put it in the wastebasket. Whatever you do, don’t shake it! When you get dressed, I’ll tell you what to do next.”
Later, after prescribing a treatment, the doctor lets her look at the louse through the microscope. It looks like a bloated tick from a dog; it is lying on its back and its legs are flung around crazily.
“I just brought it in for fun,” Georgeann says. “I had no idea.”
At the library, she looks up lice in a medical book. There are three kinds, and to her relief she has the kind that won’t get in the hair. The book says that body lice are common only in alcoholics and indigent elderly persons who rarely change their clothes. Georgeann cannot imagine how she got lice. When she goes to the drugstore to get her prescription filled, a woman brushes close to her, and Georgeann sends out a silent message: I have lice. She is enjoying this.
“I’ve got lice,” she announces when Shelby gets home. “I have to take a fifteen-minute hot shower and put this cream on all over, and then I have to wash all the clothes and curtains and everything—and what’s more, the same goes for you and Tamara and Jason. You’re incubating them, the doctor said. They’re in the bed covers and the mattresses and the rugs. Everywhere.” Georgeann makes creepy crawling motions with her fingers.
The pain on Shelby’s face registers with her after a moment. “What about the retreat?” he asks.
“I don’t know if I’ll have time to get all this done first.”
“This sounds fishy to me. Where would you get lice?”
Georgeann shrugs. “He asked me if I’d been to a motel room lately. I probably got them from one of those shut-ins. Old Mrs. Speed maybe. That filthy old horsehair chair of hers.”
Shelby looks really depressed, but Georgeann continues brightly, “I thought sure it was chicken mites because I’d been cleaning out the henhouse? But he let me look at it in the microscope and he said it was a body louse.”
“Those doctors don’t know everything,” Shelby says. “Why don’t you call a vet? I bet that doctor you went to wouldn’t know a chicken mite if it crawled up his leg.”
“He said it was lice.”
“I’ve been itching ever since you brought this up.”
“Don’t worry. Why don’t we just get you ready for the retreat—clean clothes and hot shower—and then I’ll stay here and get the rest of us fumigated?”
“You don’t really want to go to the retreat, do you?”
Georgeann doesn’t answer. She gets busy in the kitchen. She makes a pork roast for supper, with fried apples and mashed potatoes. For dessert, she makes jello and peaches with Dream Whip. She is really hungry. While she peels potatoes, she sings a song to herself. She doesn’t know the name of it, but it has a haunting melody. It is either a song her mother used to sing to her or a jingle from a TV ad.
They decide not to tell Tamara and Jason that the family has lice. Tamara was inspected for head lice once at school, but there is no reason to make a show of this, Shelby tells Georgeann. He gets the children to tak
e long baths by telling them it’s a ritual cleansing, something like baptism. That night in bed, after long showers, Georgeann and Shelby don’t touch each other. Shelby lies flat with his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling. He talks about the value of spiritual renewal. He wants Georgeann to finish washing all the clothes so that she can go to the retreat. He says, “Every person needs to stop once in a while and take a look at what’s around him. Even preaching wears thin.”
“Your preaching’s up-to-date,” says Georgeann. “You’re more up-to-date than a lot of those old-timey preachers who haven’t even been to seminary.” Georgeann is aware that she sounds too perky.
“You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? This little church is falling off so bad they’re probably going to close it down and reassign me to Deep Springs.”
“Well, you’ve been expecting that for a long time, haven’t you?”
“It’s awful,” Shelby says. “These people depend on this church. They don’t want to travel all the way to Deep Springs. Besides, everybody wants their own home church.” He reaches across Georgeann and turns out the light.
The next day, after Shelby finishes wiring a house, he consults with a veterinarian about chicken mites. When he comes home, he tells Georgeann that in the veterinarian’s opinion, the brown speck was a chicken mite. “The vet just laughed at that doctor,” Shelby says. “He said the mites would leave of their own accord. They’re looking for chickens, not people.”
“Should I wash all these clothes or not? I’m half finished.”
“I don’t itch anymore, do you?”
Shelby has brought home a can of roost paint, a chemical to kill chicken mites. Georgeann takes the roost paint to the henhouse and applies it to the roosts. It smells like fumes from a paper mill and almost makes her gag. When she finishes, she gathers eggs, and then sees that the sick hen has flopped outside again and can’t get up on her feet. Georgeann carries the chicken into the henhouse and sets her down by the food. She examines the chicken’s feathers. Suddenly she notices that the chicken is covered with moving specks. Georgeann backs out of the henhouse and looks at her hands in the sunlight. The specks are swarming all over her hands. She watches them head up her arms, spinning crazily, disappearing on her.
—
The retreat is at a lodge at Kentucky Lake. In the mornings, a hundred people eat a country ham breakfast on picnic tables, out of doors by the lake. The dew is still on the grass. Now and then a speedboat races by, drowning out conversation. Georgeann wears a badge with her name on it and BACK TO BASICS, the theme of the gathering, in Gothic lettering. After the first day, Shelby’s spirit seems renewed. He talks and laughs with old acquaintances, and during social hour, he seems cheerful and relaxed. At the workshops and lectures, he takes notes like mad on his yellow legal paper, which he carries on a clipboard. He already has fifty ideas for new sermons, he tells Georgeann happily. He looks handsome in his clean suit. She has begun to see him as someone remote, like a meter reader. Georgeann thinks: He is not the same person who once stole a ham.
On the second day, she skips silent prayers after breakfast and stays in the room watching Phil Donahue. Donahue is interviewing parents of murdered children; the parents have organized to support each other in their grief. There is an organization for everything, Georgeann realizes. When Shelby comes in before the noon meal, she is asleep and the farm market report is blaring from the TV. As she wakes up, he turns off the TV. Shelby is a kind and good man, she says to herself. He still thinks she has low blood. He wants to bring her food on a tray, but Georgeann refuses.
“I’m alive,” she says. “There’s a workshop this afternoon I want to go to. On marriage. Do you want to go to that one?”
“No, I can’t make that one,” says Shelby, consulting his schedule. “I have to attend The Changing Role of the Country Pastor.”
“It will probably be just women,” says Georgeann. “You wouldn’t enjoy it.” When he looks at her oddly, she says, “I mean the one on marriage.”
Shelby winks at her. “Take notes for me.”
The workshop concerns Christian marriage. A woman leading the workshop describes seven kinds of intimacy, and eleven women volunteer their opinions. Seven of the women present are ministers’ wives. Georgeann isn’t counting herself. The women talk about marriage enhancement, a term that is used five times.
A fat woman in a pink dress says, “God made man so that he can’t resist a woman’s adoration. She should treat him as a priceless treasure, for man is the highest form of creation. A man is born of God—and just think, you get to live with him.”
“That’s so exciting I can hardly stand it,” says a young woman, giggling, then looking around innocently with an expansive smile.
“Christians are such beautiful people,” says the fat woman. “And we have such nice-looking young people. We’re not dowdy at all.”
“People just get that idea,” someone says.
A tall woman with curly hair stands up and says, “The world has become so filled with the false, the artificial—we have gotten so phony that we think the First Lady doesn’t have smelly feet. Or the Pope doesn’t go to the bathroom.”
“Leave the Pope out of this,” says the fat woman in pink. “He can’t get married.” Everyone laughs.
Georgeann stands up and asks a question. “What do you do if the man you’re married to—this is just a hypothetical question—say he’s the cream of creation and all, and he’s sweet as can be, but he turns out to be the wrong one for you? What do you do if you’re just simply mismatched?”
Everyone looks at her.
—
Shelby stays busy with the workshops and lectures, and Georgeann wanders in and out of them, as though she is visiting someone else’s dreams. She and Shelby pass each other casually on the path, hurrying along between the lodge and the conference building. They wave hello like friendly acquaintances. In bed she tells him, “Christella Simmons told me I looked like Mindy on Mork and Mindy. Do you think I do?”
Shelby laughs. “Don’t be silly,” he says. When he reaches for her, she turns away.
Georgeann walks by the lake. She watches seagulls flying over the water. It amazes her that seagulls have flown this far inland, as though they were looking for something, the source of all that water. They are above the water, flying away from her. She expects them to return, like hurled boomerangs. The sky changes as she watches, puffy clouds thinning out into threads, a jet contrail intersecting them and spreading, like something melting: an icicle. The sun pops out. Georgeann walks past a family of picnickers. The family is having an argument over who gets to use an inner tube first. The father says threateningly, “I’m going to get me a switch!” Georgeann feels a stiffening inside her. Instead of letting go, loosening up, relaxing, she is tightening up. But this means she is growing stronger.
Georgeann goes to the basement of the lodge to buy a Coke from a machine, but she finds herself drawn to the electronic games along the wall. She puts a quarter in one of the machines, the Galaxian. She is a Galaxian, with a rocket ship something like the “Enterprise” on Star Trek, firing at a convoy of fleeing, multicolored aliens. When her missiles hit them, they make satisfying little bursts of color. Suddenly, as she is firing away, three of them—two red ships and one yellow ship—zoom down the screen and blow up her ship. She loses her three ships one right after the other and the game is over. Georgeann runs upstairs to the desk and gets change for a dollar. She puts another quarter in the machine and begins firing. She likes the sound of the firing and the siren wail of the diving formation. She is beginning to get the hang of it. The hardest thing is controlling the left and right movements of her rocket ship with her left hand as she tries to aim or to dodge the formation. The aliens keep returning and she keeps on firing and firing until she goes through all her quarters.
After supper, Georgeann removes her name badge and escapes to the basement again. Shelby has gone to the evening service, but
she told him she had a headache. She has five dollars’ worth of quarters, and she loses two of them before she can regain her control. Her game improves and she scores 3,660. The high score of the day, according to the machine, is 28,480. The situation is dangerous and thrilling, but Georgeann feels in control. She isn’t running away; she is chasing the aliens. The basement is dim, and some men are playing at the other machines. One of them begins watching her game, making her nervous. When the game ends, he says, “You get eight hundred points when you get those three zonkers, but you have to get the yellow one last or it ain’t worth as much.”
“You must be an expert,” says Georgeann, looking at him skeptically.
“You catch on after a while.”
The man says he is a trucker. He wears a yellow billed cap and a denim jacket lined with fleece. He says, “You’re good. Get a load of them fingers.”
“I play the piano.”
“Are you with them church people?”
“Unh-huh.”
“You don’t look like a church lady.”
Georgeann plugs in another quarter. “This could be an expensive habit,” she says idly. It has just occurred to her how good-looking the man is. He has curly sideburns that seem to match the fleece inside his jacket.
“I’m into Space Invaders myself,” the trucker says. “See, in Galaxians you’re attacking from behind. It’s a kind of cowardly way to go at things.”
“Well, they turn around and get you,” says Georgeann. “And they never stop coming. There’s always more of them.”
The man takes off his cap and tugs at his hair, then puts his cap back on. “I’d ask you out for a beer, but I don’t want to get in trouble with the church.” He laughs. “Do you want a Coke? I’ll buy you a Co-Cola.”
Georgeann shakes her head no. She starts the new game. The aliens are flying in formation. She begins the chase. When the game ends—her best yet—she turns to look for the man, but he has left.
Georgeann spends most of the rest of the retreat in the basement, playing Galaxians. She doesn’t see the trucker again. Eventually, Shelby finds her in the basement. She has lost track of time, and she has spent all their reserve cash. Shelby is treating her like a mental case. When she tries to explain to him how it feels to play the game, he looks at her indulgently, the way he looks at shut-ins when he takes them baskets of fruit. “You forget everything but who you are,” Georgeann tells him. “Your mind leaves your body.” Shelby looks depressed.
Shiloh and Other Stories Page 15
