Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “She’s smart,” Beverly said. Her cheeks were burning. She popped ice cubes out of a tray and began pouring Coke into a glass of ice.

  “She gets it honest—she’s got smart parents,” he said with a grin.

  Beverly drank the Coke while it was still foaming. Bubbles burst on her nose. “It’s not crap on TV,” she said angrily. “How can you say that?”

  He looked hurt. She observed the dimple on his chin, the corresponding kink of his hairline above his ear, the way his hat shaded his eyes and deepened their fire. Even if he lived to be a hundred, Joe would still have those seductive eyes. Kerry wandered into the kitchen, dragging a green dinosaur by a hind foot. “We didn’t have any corny cakes,” he whined. He meant cornflakes.

  “Why didn’t Daddy get you some?”

  After Kerry drifted away, Joe said, “I’m going to South Carolina in a couple of weeks. Check it out and try to find a place to live.”

  Beverly opened the freezer and took chicken thighs out to thaw, then began clearing dishes to keep from bursting into tears.

  “Columbia’s real progressive,” he said. “Lots of businesses are relocating there. It’s a place on the way up.”

  The foam had settled on her Coke, and she poured some more. She began loading the dishwasher. One of her new nonstick pans already had a scratch.

  “How was Memphis?” Joe asked, his hand on the kitchen doorknob.

  “Fine,” she said. “Jolene had too many Fuzzy Navels.”

  “That figures.”

  Shayla rushed in then and said, “Daddy, you got to fix that thing in my closet. The door won’t close.”

  “That track at the top? Not again! I don’t have time to work on it right now.”

  “He doesn’t live here,” Beverly said to Shayla.

  “Well, my closet’s broke, and who’s going to fix it?” Shayla threw up her hands and stomped out of the kitchen.

  Joe said, “You know, in the future, if we’re going to keep this up, we’re going to have to learn to carry on a better conversation, because this stinks.” He adjusted his hat, setting it firmly on his head. “You’re so full of wants you don’t know what you want,” he said.

  Through the glass section of the door she could see him walking to his truck with his hands in his pockets. She had seen him march out the door exactly that way so many times before—whenever he didn’t want to hear what was coming next, or when he thought he had had the last word. She hurried out to speak to him, but he was already pulling away, gunning his engine loudly. She watched him disappear, his tail-lights winking briefly at a stop sign. She felt ashamed.

  Beverly paused beside the young pin-oak tree at the corner of the driveway. When Joe planted it, there were hardly any trees in the subdivision. All the houses were built within the last ten years, and the trees were still spindly. The house just to her left was Mrs. Grim’s. She was a widow and kept cats. On the other side, a German police dog in a backyard pen spent his time barking across Beverly’s yard at Mrs. Grim’s cats. The man who owned the dog operated a video store, and his wife mysteriously spent several weeks a year out of town. When she was away her husband stayed up all night watching TV, like a child freed from rules. Beverly could see his light on when she got up in the night with the kids. She had never really noticed that the bricks of all three houses were a mottled red and gray, like uniformly splattered paint. There was a row of vertical bricks supporting each window. She stood at the foot of the driveway feeling slightly amazed that she should be stopped in her tracks at this particular time and place.

  It ought to be so easy to work out what she really wanted. Beverly’s parents had stayed married like two dogs locked together in passion, except it wasn’t passion. But she and Joe didn’t have to do that. Times had changed. Joe could up and move to South Carolina. Beverly and Jolene could hop down to Memphis just for a fun weekend. Who knew what might happen or what anybody would decide to do on any given weekend or at any stage of life?

  She brought in yesterday’s mail—a car magazine for Joe, a credit-card bill he was supposed to pay, some junk mail. She laid the items for Joe on a kitchen shelf next to the videotape she had borrowed from him and forgotten to return.

  Midnight Magic

  FROM Love Life (1989)

  Steve leaves the supermarket and hits the sunlight. Blinking, he stands there a moment, then glances at his feet. He has on running shoes, but he was sure he had put on boots. He touches his face. He hasn’t shaved. His car, illegally parked in the space for the handicapped, is deep blue and wicked. The rear has “Midnight Magic” painted on it in large pink curlicue letters with orange-and-red tails. Rays of color, fractured rainbows, spread out over the flanks. He picked the design from a thick book the custom painters had. The car’s rear end is hiked up like a female cat in heat. Prowling in his car at night, he could be Dracula.

  Sitting behind the wheel, he eats the chocolate-covered doughnuts he just bought and drinks from a carton of chocolate milk. The taste of the milk is off. They do something weird to chocolate milk now. His father used to drive a milk truck, before he got arrested for stealing a shipment of bowling shoes he found stacked up behind a shoe store. He had always told Steve to cover his tracks and accentuate the positive.

  It is Sunday. Steve is a wreck, still half drunk. Last night, just after he and Karen quarreled and she retreated to his bathroom to sulk, the telephone rang. It was Steve’s brother, Bud, wanting to know if Steve had seen Bud’s dog, Big Red. Bud had been out hunting with Big Red and his two beagles, and Big Red had strayed. Steve hadn’t seen the stupid dog. Where would he have seen him—strolling down Main Street? Bud lived several miles out in the country. Steve was annoyed with him for calling late on a Saturday night. He still hadn’t forgiven Bud for the time he shot a skunk and left it in Steve’s garbage can. Steve popped another beer and watched some junk on television until Karen emerged from the bathroom and started gathering up her things.

  “Why don’t you get some decent dishes?” she said, pointing to the splotched paper plates littering the kitchen counter.

  “Paper plates are simpler,” he said. “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy paper plates.” He pulled her down on the couch and tousled her hair, then held her arms down, tickling her.

  “Quit it!” she squealed, but he was sure she didn’t mean it. He was just playing.

  “You’re like that old cat Mama used to have,” she said, wrenching herself away from him. “He always got rough when you played with him, and then he’d start drumming with his hind legs. Cats do that when they want to rip out a rabbit’s guts.”

  Steve will be glad when his friends Doran and Nancy get home. Whenever Doran wrestled Nancy down onto the couch at Steve’s apartment and tickled her, she loved it. Doran and Nancy got married last week and went to Disney World, and Steve has promised to pick them up at the airport down in Nashville later today. Doran met Nancy only six weeks ago—at the Bluebird Cocktail Lounge and Restaurant, over in Paducah. Doran was with Steve and Karen, celebrating Karen’s twentythird birthday. Nancy and another waitress brought Karen’s birthday cake to the table and sang “Happy Birthday.” The cake was sizzling with lighted sparklers. Nancy wore clinging sports tights—hot pink, with black slashes across the calves—and a long aqua sweatshirt that reached just below her ass. Doran fell in love—suddenly and passionately. Steve knew Doran had never stayed with one girl long enough to get a deep relationship going, and suddenly he was in love. Steve was surprised and envious.

  Nancy has a cute giggle, a note of encouragement in response to anything Doran says. Her hips are slender, her legs long and well proportioned. She wears contact lenses tinted blue. But she is not really any more attractive than Karen, who has blond hair and natural blue eyes. And Nancy doesn’t know anything about cars. Karen has a working knowledge of crankshafts and fuel pumps. When her car stalls, she knows it’s probably because the distributor cap is wet. Steve wishes he and Karen could cut up like Nancy and Dora
n. Nancy and Doran love “The New Newlywed Game.” They make fun of it, trying to guess things they should know about each other if they were on that show. If Nancy learned that grilled steak was Doran’s favorite food, she’d say, “Now, I’m going to remember that! That’s the kind of thing you have to know on the ‘Newlyweds.’”

  During those weeks of watching Doran and Nancy in love, Steve felt empty inside, doomed. When Karen was angry at him last night, it was as if a voice from another time had spoken through her and told him his fate. Karen believes in things like that. She is always telling him what Sardo says in the Sunday-night meetings she goes to at the converted dance hall, next to the bowling alley. Sardo is a thousand-year-old American Indian inhabiting the body of a teenage girl in Paducah. Until Karen started going to those meetings, she and Steve had been solid together—not deliriously in love, like Doran and Nancy, but reasonably happy. Now Steve feels confused and transparent, as though Karen has eyes that see right through him.

  In his apartment, on the second floor of a big old house with a large landlady (gland problem), he searches for his laundry. Karen must have hidden his clothes. If he’s lucky, she has taken them home with her to wash. The clipping about Nancy’s wedding flutters from the stereo. He is saving it for her. “The bride wore a full-length off-white dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves, dotted with seed pearls.” There’s a misprint in the story: “The bridgeroom, Doran Palmer, is employed at Johnson Sheet Metal Co.” Steve smiles. Doran will get a kick out of that. Before he and Nancy left for Florida, Doran told Steve he felt as though he had won a sweepstakes. “She really makes me feel like somebody,” Doran said. “Isn’t that all anybody wants in the world—just to feel like somebody?”

  Steve’s clothes are under his bed, along with some dust fluffs. From the television screen a shiny-haired guy in a dark-blue suit yells at him about salvation. There is an 800-number telephone listing at the bottom of the screen. All Steve has to do is send money. “You send me some money and I’ll work on your soul,” Steve tells the guy. He flips through all the stations on cable, but nothing good is on. He picks up the telephone to call Karen, then replaces it. He has to think of what to say. He cracks his knuckles. She hates that.

  Steve stuffs all his laundry into one big bag, grabs his keys, and slams out of his place. As usual, the bag slung over his shoulder makes him think of Santa Claus. At the laundromat he packs everything into one machine. He pours powder in and rams in the quarters, pretending he’s playing a slot machine. The laundromat is crowded. It’s surprising how many people skip church nowadays. But it’s good that there are fewer hypocrites, he decides. Catholic priests are dying from AIDS, and here in town half the Baptists are alcoholics. A pretty woman in purple jeans is reading a book. He considers approaching her, then decides not to. She might be too smart for him. He leaves his clothes churning and cruises past McDonald’s and Hardee’s to see if there’s anyone he knows. Should he go over to Karen’s? While he thinks about it, he pulls into the Amoco station and gasses up. Steve’s friend Pete squirts blue fluid on Steve’s windshield—a personal service not usually provided at the self-serve island. Pete leans into Steve’s car and tugs the lavender garter dangling from the rearview mirror. “Hey, Steve, looks like you got lucky.”

  “Yeah.” It was Nancy’s, from the wedding. It was supposed to be blue, but she got lavender because it was on sale. Doran told Nancy that her blue-tinted contact lenses would do for “something blue.” Nancy threw the garter to Steve—the same way she tossed her bridal bouquet to her girlfriends. He thought that catching her garter meant he was next in line for something. Something good—he doesn’t know what. Maybe Karen could ask Sardo, but whatever Sardo said, Steve wouldn’t believe it. Sardo is a first-class fake.

  Steve has been banging on the pump, trying to get his gas cap to jump off the top. When it does, he catches it neatly: infield-fly rule. The gas nozzle clicks and he finishes the fill-up.

  “Well, Steve, don’t you go falling asleep on the job,” Pete says as Steve guns the engine.

  That’s an old joke. Steve works at the mattress factory. The factory is long and low and windowless, and bales of fiberfill hug the walls. Steve steers giant scissors across soft, patterned fabric fastened on stretchers. After he crams the stuffing into the frame, Janetta and Lynn do the finishing work. The guys at the plant tease those girls all day. Janetta and Lynn play along, saying, “Do you want to get in my bed?” Or, “Let’s spend lunch hour in the bed room.” The new mattresses are displayed beneath glaring fluorescent lights—not the sexiest place to get anything going. But Steve likes the new-bed smell there. He likes the smell of anything new. The girls are nice, but they’re not serious. Lynn is engaged, and she’s three years older than Steve.

  At the laundromat he transfers the soggy, cold load into a dryer and flips each dime on the back of his hand before inserting it. Two heads, two tails. He slides a dollar bill into the change machine and watches George Washington’s face disappear and turn into dimes. He laughs, imagining George Washington coming back in the twentieth century and trying to make sense out of laundromats, Midnight Magic, and crazy women. The woman in the purple pants is still there, reading her book. He drives off, screeching loudly out of his parking spot.

  Karen’s apartment is above a dry cleaner’s, next to a vacant lot. It’s a lonesome part of town, near the overhead bridge that leads out of town. The parking lot has four cars in it, including her red Escort. An exterior wooden stairway with several broken steps leads to her apartment. There’s a rapist in town, and he has struck twice in Karen’s neighborhood. Now she sleeps with a knife beside her bed and a shotgun beneath it.

  “Are you still mad at me?” he asks when she opens the door. She just woke up and her hair is shooting off in several directions.

  “Yeah.” She lets him in and returns to her bed.

  “What did I do?” He sits down on the edge of the bed.

  She doesn’t answer that. She says, “When I came in last night I was too nervous to sleep, so I painted that wall.” She points to the bedroom wall, now a pale green. The other walls are pink. The colors are like the candy mints at Nancy and Doran’s wedding. “The landlord said if I paint everything he’ll take it off the rent,” Karen says.

  “He ought to put bars on the windows,” Steve says. Lined-up Coke bottles stand guard on the windowsills, along with spider plants that dangle their creepy arms all the way to the floor.

  “If that rapist comes in through the window I’ll be ready for him,” she says. “I’ll blast him to kingdom come. I mean it, too. I’ll kill that sucker dead.” She scrunches up her pillow and hugs it. “I need some coffee.”

  “Want me to go get you some? I can get some at McDonald’s when I go get my clothes out of the dryer.”

  “I’ll just turn on the coffeepot,” she says, swinging out of bed. She’s wearing a red football shirt with the number 46 on the front. Steve thumps his fist on the mattress. It’s a poor mattress. He doesn’t like sleeping with her here. He wanted her to stay with him last night.

  Karen flip-flops into the kitchen and runs water into her coffeepot. She measures coffee into a filter paper and sets it in the cone above the pot, then pours the water into the top compartment of the coffee maker. He envies her. He can’t even make a pot of coffee. He should do more for her—maybe get her a new mattress, at cost. Her apartment is small, decorated with things she made in a crafts club.

  “You ought to move,” he says.

  She laughs. “Hey! I’m trying to lure the guy here. I want that five-thousand-dollar reward!”

  “You could move in with me.” He’s never said anything like that before, and he’s shocked at himself.

  She disappears into her bedroom and returns in a few minutes wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. The dripping coffee smells like burning leaves, with acorns. Steve likes the smell, but he doesn’t really like coffee. When he was little, the smell of his mother’s percolator in the morning was intoxicating, but w
hen he got old enough to drink it he couldn’t believe how bitter it was.

  “Did you find your clothes?” Karen asks after she has poured two mugs of coffee and dosed them with milk and sugar.

  “Yeah, I had to haul ’em out from under the bed. Some fluffy little animals had made their nests in them.” He reaches over and draws her near him.

  “What kind of animals?” she says, softening.

  “Little kittens and bunnies,” he says into her hair.

  She breathes into his neck. “I wish I knew what to do about you,” she murmurs.

  “Trust me.”

  “I don’t know,” she says, pulling away from him.

  He starts playing with the can opener, opening and closing the handles.

  “Don’t do that,” she says. “It makes me nervous. I didn’t get enough sleep. I’m not going to get a good night’s sleep till they catch that guy.”

  “Why don’t you ask Sardo who that rapist is? Old Sardo’s such a know-it-all.”

  “Oh, shut up. You never take anything seriously.”

  “I am serious. I asked you to move in with me.”

  She drinks from her coffee mug, and her face livens up. She says, “I’ve got a lot to do today. I’m going to write letters to my sister and my nephews in Tallahassee. And I want to alter that new outfit I bought and clean my apartment and finish painting the bedroom.” She sighs. “I’ll never get all that done.”

  As she talks, he has been playing air guitar, like an accompanying tune. He turns to box playfully at her. “Go to Nashville with me today to get Doran and Nancy,” he says.

  “No, I’ve got too much to do before tonight’s meeting. It’s about recognizing your inner strength.” She stares at him, in mingled exasperation and what he hopes is a hint of love. “I have to get my head together. Leave me alone today—O.K.?”

  Jittery on Karen’s coffee but feeling optimistic, he drives back to the laundromat. He spends half his life chasing after his clothes. Traffic is heavy; families are heading home from church for fried chicken and the Cardinals game. People getting out of church must feel great, he thinks. He has heard that religion is a sex substitute. Karen told him Sardo is both sexes. “Double your pleasure, double your fun” was Steve’s reply. Karen said, “Sardo says the answers are in yourself, not in God.” On TV, the evangelists say the answers are in God. When people bottom out, they often get born again and discover Jesus. That’s exactly what happened to Steve’s father. He sends Steve pathetic letters filled with Bible quotations. His father used to live for what he could get away with, but now he casually dumps his shit in Christ’s lap. Steve hopes he never gets that low. He’d rather trust himself. He’s not sure he could trust anybody, especially Sardo—even if Sardo’s message is to trust yourself. He’s afraid Karen is getting brainwashed. He has heard that the girl who claims to be Sardo is now driving a Porsche.