Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  At a motel that night—the first time Ruby had ever stayed in a motel with a man—she felt that the knot in her breast had a presence of its own. Her awareness of it made it seem like a little energy source, like the radium dial of a watch glowing in the dark. Lying close to Buddy, she had the crazy feeling that it would burn a hole through him.

  During The Tonight Show, she massaged his back with baby oil, rubbing it in thoroughly, as if she were polishing a piece of fine furniture.

  “Beat on me,” he said. “Just like you were tenderizing steak.”

  “Like this?” She pounded his hard muscles with the edge of her hand.

  “That feels wonderful.”

  “Why are you so tensed up?”

  “Just so I can get you to do this. Don’t stop.”

  Ruby pummeled his shoulder with her fist. Outside, a dog barked. “That man you bought the dogs from looked so funny,” she said. “I thought he was going to cry. He must have loved those dogs.”

  “He was just scared.”

  “How come?”

  “He didn’t want to get in trouble.” Buddy raised up on an elbow and looked at her. “He was afraid I was going to use those dogs in a dogfight, and he didn’t want to be traced.”

  “I thought they were hunting dogs.”

  “No. He trained them to fight.” He grasped her hand and guided it to a spot on his back. “Right there. Work that place out for me.” As Ruby rubbed in a hard circle with her knuckles, he said, “They’re good friendly dogs if they’re treated right.”

  Buddy punched off the TV button and smoked a cigarette in the dark, lying with one arm under her shoulders. “You know what I’d like?” he said suddenly. “I’d like to build me a log cabin somewhere—off in the mountains maybe. Just a place for me and some dogs.”

  “Just you? I’d come with you if you went to the Rocky Mountains.”

  “How good are you at survival techniques?” he said. “Can you fish? Can you chop wood? Could you live without a purse?”

  “I might could.” Ruby smiled to herself at the thought.

  “Women always have to have a lot of baggage along—placemats and teapots and stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “Not as funny as you.” Ruby shifted her position. His hand under her was hurting her ribs.

  “I’ll tell you a story. Listen.” He sounded suddenly confessional. He sat up and flicked sparks at the ashtray. He said, “My daddy died last year, and this old lady he married was just out to get what he had. He heired her two thousand dollars, and my sister and me were to get the homeplace—the house, the barn, and thirty acres of bottomland. But before he was cold in the ground, she had stripped the place and sold every stick of furniture. Everything that was loose, she took.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “My sister sells Tupperware, and she was in somebody’s house, and she recognized the bedroom suit. She said, ‘Don’t I know that?’ and this person said, ‘Why, yes, I believe that was your daddy’s. I bought it at such-and-such auction.’”

  “What an awful thing to do to your daddy!” Ruby said.

  “He taught me everything I know about training dogs. I learned it from him and he picked it up from his daddy.” Buddy jabbed his cigarette in the ashtray. “He knew everything there was to know about field dogs.”

  “I bet you don’t have much to do with your stepmother now.”

  “She really showed her butt,” he said with a bitter laugh. “But really it’s my sister who’s hurt. She wanted all those keepsakes. There was a lot of Mama’s stuff. Listen, I see that kind of sorrow every day in my line of work—all those stupid, homeless dishes people trade. People buy all that stuff and decorate with it and think it means something.”

  “I don’t do that,” Ruby said.

  “I don’t keep anything. I don’t want anything to remind me of anything.”

  Ruby sat up and tried to see him in the dark, but he was a shadowy form, like the strange little mountains she had seen outside at twilight. The new dogs were noisy—bawling and groaning fitfully. Ruby said, “Hey, you’re not going to get them dogs to fight, are you?”

  “Nope. But I’m not responsible for what anybody else wants to do. I’m just the middleman.”

  Buddy turned on the light to find his cigarettes. With relief, Ruby saw how familiar he was—his tanned, chunky arms, and the mustache under his nose like the brush on her vacuum cleaner. He was tame and gentle, like his best dogs. “They make good watchdogs,” he said. “Listen at ’em!” He laughed like a man watching a funny movie.

  “They must see the moon,” Ruby said. She turned out the light and tiptoed across the scratchy carpet. Through a crack in the curtains she could see the dark humps of the hills against the pale sky, but it was cloudy and she could not see the moon.

  Everything is round and full now, like the moon. Linda’s belly. Bowling balls. On TV, Steve Martin does a comedy routine, a parody of the song, “I Believe.” He stands before a gigantic American flag and recites his beliefs. He says he doesn’t believe a woman’s breasts should be referred to derogatorily as jugs, or boobs, or Winnebagos. “I believe they should be referred to as hooters,” he says solemnly. Winnebagos? Ruby wonders.

  After the operation, she does everything left-handed. She has learned to extend her right arm and raise it slightly. Next, the doctors have told her, she will gradually reach higher and higher—an idea that thrills her, as though there were something tangible above her to reach for. It surprises her, too, to learn what her left hand has been missing. She feels like a newly blind person discovering the subtleties of sound.

  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 birthcontrol 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.

  II

  War

  I did not expect to write a novel about the Vietnam War. During the war, I did not know anyone who went to Vietnam. No personal loss or connection motivated the writing of In Country. The story grew out of a group of characters who came into my mind and danced around aimlessly for well over a year before I got a sense of their direction. Then I realized that Sam, a young girl of seventeen, is coming of age, and she would naturally ask questions about her missing father. As soon as it occurred to me that her father must have died in Vietnam, I knew I had a novel and that it had a universal theme. Although I was reluctant at first to write about war, I soon realized that war wasn’t only battle. It was also the shattering effects on the people at home.

  —BAM

  FROM In Country (1985)

  PART 1, CHAPTER 1

  “I have to stop again, hon,” Sam’s grandmother says, tapping her on the shoulder. Sam Hughes is driving, with her uncle, Emmett Smith, half asleep beside her.

  “Where are we?” grunts Emmett.

  “Still on I-64. Mamaw has to go to the restroom.”

  “I forgot to take my pill when we stopped last,” Mamaw says.

  “Do you want me to drive now?” Emmett asks, whipping out a cigarette. He smokes Kents, and he has smoked seven in the two hours they have been on the road today.

  “If Emmett drives, I could set up front,” says Mamaw, leaning forward between the front seats. “I’m crammed in the back here like a sack of sausage.”

  “Are you sure you feel like driving, Emmett?”

  “It don’t make no difference.”

  “I was just getting into it,” says Sam, irritated.

  It is her new car. Emmett drove through the heavy traffic around Lexington, because Sam wasn’t experienced at city driving, but the interstate is easy. She could glide like this all the way across America.

  At the next exit, Exxon, Chevron, and Sunoco loom up, big faces on stilts. There’s a Country Kitchen, a McDonald’s, and a
Stuckey’s. Sam has heard that Stuckey’s is terrible and the Country Kitchen is good. She notices a hillside with some white box shapes—either beehives or a small family cemetery—under some trees. She shoots onto the exit ramp a little too fast, and the tires squeal. Mamaw gasps and clutches the back of Sam’s seat, but Emmett just fiddles with the buttons on the old Army jacket in his lap. Emmett dragged it out of his closet before they left. He said it might be cold in Washington. It is summer, and Sam doesn’t believe him.

  Sam pulls in at the Sunoco and springs out of the car to let Mamaw out. Mamaw has barrel hips and rolls of fat around her waist. She is so fat she has to sleep in a special brassiere. She shakes out her legs and stretches her arms. She is wearing peach-colored knit pants and a flowered blouse, with white socks and blue tennis shoes. Sam does not know Mamaw Hughes as well as she does her other grandmother, Emmett’s mother, whom she calls Grandma, but Mamaw acts like she knows everything about Sam. It’s spooky. Mamaw is always saying, “Why, that’s just like you, Sam,” or “That’s your daddy in you, for the world.” She makes Sam feel as though she has been spied on for years. Bringing Mamaw along was Emmett’s idea. He is staring off at a bird flying over the Sunoco sign.

  “Regular?” a blond boy in a Sunoco shirt asks.

  “Yeah. Fill ’er up.” Sam likes saying “Fill ’er up.” Buying gas is one of the pleasures of owning a car at last. “Come on, Mamaw,” she says, touching her grandmother’s arm. “Take care of the car, would you, Emmett?”

  He nods, still looking in the direction of the bird.

  The restroom is locked, and Sam has to go back and ask the boy for the key. The key is on a ring with a clumsy plastic Sunoco sign. The restroom is pink and filthy, with sticky floors. In her stall, Sam reads several phone numbers written in lipstick. A message says, “The mass of the ass plus the angle of the dangle equals the scream of the cream.” She wishes she had known that one when she took algebra. She would have written it on an assignment.