Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  The State Pen

  Featured in Elm Leaves Journal, Winter 2016

  Sandra went with me to visit my boy at the state penitentiary, an unforgiving castle-like fortress with a splendid view of the lake from the cellblock. We were walking past the pleasant house outside the gates. It had a dog house inside a chain-link fence. The dog, a cute pug, was running around in the yard loose. And then I saw the kitten, who was meowing at the front door. The dog jumped up on the porch and the kitten playfully chased it off. I was thinking how sad it was that they had to live next to the pen. And then I saw the little girl open the door and call her pets inside.

  “That could be me,” Sandra said. “When I was growing up in that house. We moved away when I was fourteen.”

  “Weren’t you afraid to live next to the pen? Weren’t your parents afraid to bring up children so close to the worst mess of hardened criminals in the state?”

  “Honey, my parents knew one thing for sure—if one of those guys busted loose, he wasn’t going to tarry. He wasn’t going to come to our house and ask for a sandwich and a change of clothes. He was gone.”

  “So you weren’t afraid.”

  “Oh, no. We played in the yard on the grass. We would peek through the wire and watch them do their exercises. There were some mean looking guys. There was one guy with a scar right down the middle of his face, top of his forehead, down the nose, down the middle of the lips and chin. A big slash. It was fascinating.”

  Sandra has a sweet nature and a sense of fairness, all maybe gained from growing up next to the pit of evil.

  But they’re not evil. I can’t believe they are all evil. Some of them maybe. Not Kevin. Not my sweet boy. That trouble in California? He says it wasn’t him. I believe him. It has been nothing but agony and despair from the beginning, from the first news of his arrest to the time they locked him up here. I should be grateful they brought him back here, close to home. I can visit him. I can lay eyes on him.

  “They still used the electric chair when I was growing up here,” Sandra was saying. “Sometimes if I stayed up late—and I did on the scheduled executions, they couldn’t stop me—the lights would flicker around midnight. I knew what was happening, but my parents never said a word.”

  I was gazing into eternity when suddenly I saw another kitten shoot across the grass and leap onto the porch.

  Falling

  Featured in the online journal New World Writing, Fall 2014

  1 SYNOPSIS OF MY DAY

  George had a fitful night, the nurse said on the phone. Surgery scheduled for nine a.m. Frantic about getting to hospital in time. First: I zipped Squirrelly Girl over to the groomer—her spring molt. It took a month to get the appointment so I didn’t want to cancel. Had to leave her there for the day.

  Waited for Shelby to arrive. She can’t manage dogs and vacuum cleaner at same time so I had to leave four dogs outside with storms forecast.

  Walked Bootsy and shut her in laundry room for the day so Schotze wouldn’t bother her.

  Tractor Guy called about picking up lawn tractor for repair. No, don’t know where key is.

  Rain and storms.

  Dropped Kookie at the Cat Clinic on the way to hospital. She was very dehydrated. George always gave her IV fluids. I cannot even get the cap off the needle.

  Yesterday, when George lay unconscious on the deck the dogs did not jump on him. They circled and kept barking. They howled when they heard the siren. I fastened them indoors and they were afraid.

  Downpour and thrashing windshield wipers. Traffic, hellish circling in parking garage, shuttle to hospital.

  Reached hospital just as George was arriving in his room from recovery. Asking for crackers.

  Could have been far worse, a cheery nurse said. She said there was a rod in the leg. Another nurse said it was a plate with sixteen screws.

  A third nurse said, “Third ladder fall I’ve seen in two weeks.”

  No sign of a doctor.

  Loved the new hospital. Wanted to move in. Charming guest nook with daybed, desk, Internet.

  “There were helicopters outside the window all night,” said George.

  When he fell asleep at four something I left to get Kookie.

  Met with vet about Kookie and arranged drop-off for fluids again tomorrow and Sunday. $325 today for blood tests, etc.

  Took Kookie home. Driving rain.

  Went to get Squirrelly Girl. All pretty and fluffy.

  Talked with groomer about the dog’s paw—the limp from her last fight with Schotze. Groomer suspects a “joint mouse.”

  Home with Squirrelly Girl.

  Fed everybody. The dogs wouldn’t eat. Kept looking for George. I ate a bowl of soup and fell asleep. Woke up several times, hearing that ladder slide and thump once more. I woke up too early.

  The moon was a little grin in the dawn.

  2 AT HOME

  I bought George a luxury recliner to coddle his hurt leg. It raises your feet higher than your heart. Your head flips back and your feet aim for the stars. Your torso remains perpendicular to your legs, as if you were sitting. It’s the astronaut position. Whoopee, but can he sleep in it, with a broken leg?

  I ordered this over the phone and got the store to agree to a two-week trial, since I was buying it sight unseen. It is a floor model, 35 percent off. Bargain.

  The store manager brought it himself. He and his burly man unpacked the chair and showed me the chair’s tricks. The astronaut position is supposed to take the pressure off of every square inch of your body. I keep wondering how you calculate the surface area of your body in square inches.

  The chair uses backup batteries in case of power failure. But it didn’t come with batteries. Would anyone ever expect batteries? George was afraid the electricity would go off during the storms last night and he would be stranded in take-off position on the launch pad. I fetched the 9-volt batteries from town.

  I fetch everything now.

  Here comes the hard part. You send the chair, on its own, into astronaut take-off position. Then you find the little receptacle with a wee plastic door where the leads for the batteries are stored. To connect the batteries, I had to poke my head into a cave under the chair and, at an awkward angle, try to fit the male part of each battery to the female part. But in my strained position I couldn’t get them to make love. The sex parts failed to grab, so I couldn’t press them together. I recently watched a pair of orangutans on TV grappling with this same problem, up in a tree.

  I worry about trees. Last week I saw a dead tree with a jagged crack near the base. It could fall any moment, I thought, so I didn’t go past. It fell within the day and brought down a live tree with it, and two or three other dead trees also toppled, encouraged by the crashes and thuds.

  While I was studying the devastation I saw another dead tree tilted at an angle of about 50 degrees. I thought it was leaning on another tree for support, but as I inched closer I saw that the two trees were not touching at all. I backed away swiftly.

  Storms in the night. The electricity flickered off momentarily, but the chair was untroubled. Dulled by oxycodone, George lolled in his easeful new electric chair, so far away from me, strung up like a man on a rack.

  Rain, rain today. Momentary hail. Going out to look for the dead tree, to see if it has surrendered to the earth.

  XVII

  The Hot Seat: Interviews

  In interviews I rarely manage to say what I mean, or I don’t realize until later what I meant to say or should have said. Writers, who may spend months and years fussing over words to get them just right, are somehow expected to talk off the top of their heads during interviews. It can be a greater challenge than writing a story or a novel, for it calls on skills the writer doesn’t necessarily possess. One may be tongue-tied on the spot but later able to imagine carefree witticisms, brilliant comebacks. Roger Angell calls this condition “retardant Wildeanism.”

  Interviews I have done that manage to be informative or enlightening were con
ducted by superb, understanding interviewers. Here are a few.

  —BAM

  BOMB Magazine Interview

  By Craig Gholson, Summer 1989

  Craig Gholson: We’re both from Western Kentucky, and I always refer to it as the South. But I have friends, particularly ones that come from further south, who pooh-pooh the notion of Kentucky as being of the South. They talk about it like it’s a plain stepsister. Is Kentucky of the South to you?

  Bobbie Ann Mason: It’s a border state. I think the place we come from, the Jackson Purchase, has a lot of history. And it seems to be more Southern than other parts of Kentucky.

  CG: Your stories are rife with aphorisms and sayings particular to Western Kentucky.

  BAM: I get them from my mother.

  CG: They’re phrases I heard all throughout my childhood, like: “If ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ was candy and nuts, we’d have Christmas every day.” And: “It’s as ugly as homemade sin.” I put the book down and laughed for five minutes on that one. Do you use a notebook to keep these phrases? Do you remember them? Or do you use them yourself?

  BAM: No, I write them down in a notebook. My mother is always coming up with one. And she does it quite unselfconsciously. She’ll come out with some expression that either I’ve never heard before or remembered, or it’s something I had forgotten and I’ll whip out my notebook. Or I’ll say, “Now, what did you say? Say that again.” And she’ll protest that she didn’t know where it came from, and she wasn’t even aware that she said it. It’s just so natural to her. And, of course, I then make something out of it.

  CG: So you go on these fact-finding missions.

  BAM: (laughter) You might say that, but I happen to be there, anyway.

  CG: I think one of the ironies presented in your work is that these older clichés have the ring of truth about them, and seem profound compared to the latter-day clichés that have replaced them. In “Hunktown,” Debbie says, “We’re always caught in one cliché or another.” It almost seems as if one of the tragedies of modern life is that everything, including clichés, have been devalued, or marked down, or means less.

  BAM: The nature of language is that metaphors die, and then they are just used unthinkingly, and they lose their meaning. But my mother’s language, for example, seems fresh and new because it’s so old that we’ve forgotten it, and she still uses it. And she usually can’t explain to you the source of it. My father uses a lot of it, too. For example, our dog was very happy, so he was running around in figure eights, in circles. Daddy said that Oscar was “cuttin’ didoes.” Do you remember that one?

  CG: No.

  BAM: I guess it’s D-I-D-O. Cutting didoes. I said, “What in the world does that mean? Where did you get that expression?” “Well, he’s cuttin’ didoes.” “What does it mean?” “Well, it means he’s happy.” “But what does the expression come from?” And he said, “Well, it just means cuttin’ didoes.” (laughter)

  CG: I think some of the most poignant passages in your work come when your characters make up facts. It’s a kind of poetry of misinformation. For example, Joe, in “Memphis,” tells his kids that marabou feathers come from the marabou bird, which is a cross between a caribou and a marigold. These are pure storytelling moments and they are some of the few moments when your characters really seem connected with one another and are really happy. But those moments are basically lies.

  BAM: Lies?

  CG: Yes, because they’re nontruths. Is that a more cynical reading than you would intend?

  BAM: I think so. I thought all people told their children stories and made up things. I don’t know.

  CG: That particular example just happened to be a father and child. There are other moments when adults do that amongst themselves, too.

  BAM: Let me ask you something, since you come from that place. Do my stories seem depressing or bleak to you? Some people—usually people from quite far away from that world—think they are.

  CG: I don’t think of them as being bleak and depressing. They are, however, lives of middle-class hardship.

  BAM: It seems like some people look at a story and think, “Well this is about a factory worker. How depressing.” Or, “These people don’t read books, they watch television. How depressing.”

  CG: Well, who only wants to read stories that confirm their own reality?

  BAM: It seems to me that the reader, then, is judging in terms of his and her own experience and value judgments. Whereas I feel that in the world of my characters whether they read books or not is beside the point. Of course they don’t read books, they’re doing other things. And I don’t feel that their lives are at all bleak or depressing. The factory worker, for example. If you work all day in a factory and you get a chance to go to Disney World and take your family, that’s great. That’s a big deal. And the same way with the shopping malls. A lot of sophisticated people find shopping malls and people who shop in shopping malls very depressing. But the thing about my characters that maybe others don’t notice is that my characters don’t actually have a shopping mall. They have to go all the way to Paducah. And people come to that mall from a hundred miles around because it has a certain strong presence.

  CG: For me, those people have an immediacy to their lives that I, basically, don’t have anymore. That’s the way I read them. They have a different set of problems. However, one of the ways that I think that people may see the stories as depressing, is that a larger theme of your work is that the center doesn’t hold anymore. Your characters constantly say, “I don’t understand what’s happening to people, the way they can’t hold together anymore.” In “Sorghum,” Ed and Liz are getting their pictures taken in Wild West costumes, and the woman who runs the booth says, “Everybody gets a kick out of this, because it takes them back to a simpler time.” And Ed says, “If there ever was such a time.” Do you think that there ever was a simpler time?

  BAM: No. I mean, yes and no. There is a lot of nostalgia abroad for a simpler time. And I think that simpler time was full of hardship. It didn’t have the same set of problems as we have now. Basically, what I write about is how people are dealing with their relationships in the face of the phenomenal swirl of change going on in this world. And it’s what we’re all doing, all of the world. And it’s very confusing and scary and hard for the center to hold, and hard to know where you belong and what’s going to last. But, on the other hand, these characters are facing change and what they think of as progress, and they’re getting a lot of advantages out of it, opportunities that their parents’ generation didn’t have. There’s a lot of optimism and positive value coming out of this. I may find it more exciting than some of the characters do because they’re the ones who have to go through it. For example, in the story “Memphis,” Beverly is cutting loose from a marriage that no longer works. It’s scary and confusing, and she’s not sure what she’s going to do or how she’s going to make it. But in thinking about this, she’s thinking about her parents’ world, in which people stayed married whether they liked it or not. And nowadays they don’t have to. There’s a passage toward the end which has her thinking about how many choices we have these days. And she’s seeing this in a very positive way; it means that she could do something with her life. And so it takes courage, and I have a lot of hope that she will make it through this chaotic time and make some sense of her life, and get beyond the trap that she was in. So, in that way, I’m very optimistic, and I feel that there’s a lot of energy emanating from these characters, because they’re not jaded. They’re not really disillusioned yet. A lot of them are holding onto the tag end of the American Dream. So I’ll go with them and see what they’re doing and care about them, and hope that they have the courage to get through it and not turn cynical.

  CG: One of the things your characters constantly struggle with is expression. Words seem to fail them. In “Hunktown,” there’s a line: “Debbie had her tubes tied rather than tell her husband in plain English to treat her better.” There’s this myth that has
grown about the oral tradition in the South, about how storytelling has fed the fiction coming from the South. Your fiction seems to go contrary to that, and I’ve read something in which you talked about how nonverbal your father was. Or that he wasn’t particularly loquacious. Do you think that that particular oral storytelling tradition is a myth of the South, or just wasn’t pertinent in your particular case?

  BAM: I really don’t have any way of knowing. I think there must be a strain of reticence, especially among farm people, who don’t see a lot of other people. This may be a cliché, coming out of the South, but the idea is that some people will say what they think, which means that those people are uninhibited and straightforward and not hypocritical. And then other people will put up a pretense, put on a front and be polite. But some people are bold enough to say what they think. And the character you just mentioned, Debbie, apparently didn’t have the courage to say what she thought in her marriage.

  CG: There’s a lot of noise in your stories. Mainly it’s from the television, like M*A*S*H or MTV, or the radio, where you’ll hear Bruce Springsteen or Michael Jackson. It’s noise that once, in another age, probably would have just been in the background, or for entertainment. Now, however, it’s a noise that has become louder both physically and emotionally. It’s insistent and your characters use it to shape their values and to define their thoughts.

  BAM: Well, if you take a story by, say, John Cheever, or somebody, if there was a TV set on in any of his stories—and I don’t know that there ever was—it probably would be just background, something not very important. But in my characters’ world, TV is very important. They spend a lot of time with it, and they care about it. They get a lot of information about the outside world from it.

  CG: Yes, but I’m always surprised that the songs and TV episodes don’t just collapse under the weight of all the content that your characters put onto them.