Shiloh and Other Stories (12 page)

“He always was good to the kids.”

“They had to pinch them pennies, but those kids never did without. He makes good at the lumberyard, and with what Linda brings in from the K Mart, they’re pretty well off. That house is just as fine as can be—and Linda walks off and leaves it! You just can’t tell me he done her that way, the way she said. And she don’t seem to care!”

“She’s keeping it in.”

“I keep halfway expecting Bob to pull in the driveway, but he hasn’t called or said boo to the kids or anything. I don’t want to run them out, but I’ll be glad when they get this thing worked out! They’re tearing up jack! There’s always something a-going. A washing machine or the dishwasher. The television, of course. I never saw so many dishes as these younguns can mess up. I never aimed to be feeding Coxey’s Army! And they just strow like you’ve never seen. Right through the middle of the living room. Here comes one dropping this and that, and then right behind here comes the other one. Prissy-Tail’s got her tail tied up in knots with all the combustion here!”

Cleo stands up. She has to get an aspirin. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your doodling!”

When Cleo starts toward the refrigerator to get ice water, Prissy-Tail bounds straight out of the living room and beats her to the refrigerator.

“You’re going to throw me down,” she cries.

She gives Prissy-Tail some milk and takes two aspirins. Phil Donahue is talking to former dope addicts. Cleo turns off the TV and finishes her coffee. She looks around at all the extra objects that have accumulated. A tennis racket. Orange-and-blue-striped
shoes. Bluejeans in heaps like rag dolls. Tammy’s snapshots scattered around on the divan and end tables. A collapsible plaid suitcase. Tote bags with dirty clothes streaming out the tops. Davey’s Star Wars toys and his red computer toy that resembles a Princess phone. Tammy’s Minute Maker camera. Cleo has forgotten how to move effortlessly through the clutter children make. She pours more coffee and looks at the mail. She looks at a mail-order catalog which specializes in household gadgets. She is impressed with the number of things you can buy to help you organize things, items such as plastic pockets for grocery coupons and accessory chests for closets. She spends a long time then studying the luxurious compartments of a Winnebago in a magazine ad. She imagines traveling out West in it, doing her cooking in the tiny kitchen, but she can’t think why she would be going out West by herself.

The cheerleaders’ outfits are taking a week. Everything has to be done over. Cleo puts zippers in upside down, allows too much on seams, has to cut plackets out twice. The cheerleaders come over for a fitting and everything is the wrong size. Cleo tells the cheerleaders, “I’m just like a wiggleworm in hot ashes.” In comparison to the overalls, the blouses are easy, but she has trouble with the interfacing.

“You don’t charge enough,” Linda tells her. “You should charge twenty-five dollars apiece for those things.”

“People here won’t pay that much,” Cleo says.

Linda is in and out. The kids visit Bob at home during the weekend. It is more peaceful, but it makes Cleo worry. She is almost glad when they return Sunday evening, carrying tote bags of clothes and playthings. Bob has taken them out for pizza every meal, and they turn up their noses at what she has on the table—fried channel cat and hush puppies. Linda doesn’t eat either. She is going out with Shirley. Cleo gives Prissy-Tail more fish than she can eat.

—

“Smile, Grandma.”

“Well, hurry up,” Cleo says, her body poised as if about to take off and fly. “I can’t hold like this all day.”

“Just a minute.” Tammy moves the camera around. It looks like the mask on a space suit. “Say cheese!”

Cleo holds her smile, which is growing halfhearted and strained. The camera clicks, and the flashbulb flares. Together, they watch the picture take shape. Like the dawn, it grows in intensity until finally Cleo’s features appear. The Cleo in the picture stands there vacantly, like a scared cat.

“I look terrible,” says Cleo.

“You look old, Grandma.”

—

On the cheerleader outfits, Cleo is down to finger work. As she whips the facings, she imagines Bob alone in the big ranch house. What would a man do in a house like that by himself? Linda had left him late one night and brought Tammy and Davey over, right in the middle of
The Tonight Show
(John Davidson was the guest host). The children were half asleep. Cleo imagines them groggy and senseless, one day hooked on dope.

—

The cheerleader outfits are finished. There are some flaws, Cleo knows, where she has had to take out and put in again so many times, but she tells herself that only somebody who sews will notice them. She pulls out bright blue basting thread.

She does some wash, finishes this week’s
Family Circle
and cuts out a hamburger casserole recipe she thinks the kids might like. She throws away the
Family Circle
and the old
TV Guide
. She carries out trash. Then she straightens up her sewing corner and sorts her threads. She collects Tammy’s scattered pictures and puts them in a pile. As she tries to find a box they will fit in, she accidentally steps on the cat’s tail. “Oh, I’m sorry!” she cries, shocked. Prissy-Tail hides under the couch. Cleo can’t find a box the right size.

When the cheerleaders try on their new outfits, Cleo spots bits of blue basting thread she has missed. Embarrassed, she pulls out the threads. She knows the cheerleaders will go to the ball game and someone will see blue basting thread sticking out.

Later, thinking she will go to the show if there is a decent one on, Cleo drives to the shopping center. There isn’t. An invasion from outer space and Jane Fonda. Cleo parks and goes to the
K Mart. She waves at Linda, who is busy with a long line of people at her register. Cleo walks around the store and finds a picture album with plastic pockets for Tammy. She will pay for it with some of the money she collected from the cheerleaders. Davey will want something too, but she doesn’t know what to buy that he will like. After rejecting all the toys she sees, she buys a striped turtleneck sweater on sale. The album and sweater are roughly the same price. She doesn’t see Linda when she goes through the checkout line.

Cleo sits in the parking lot of the shopping center for a long time and then she goes home and makes the hamburger recipe.

—

“You all go on about your cats like they was babies,” says Linda. Linda is sanding a rocking chair, which is upside down on newspapers in the hall.

“They’re a heap sight less trouble,” says Cleo, who is dusting. Rita Jean has called to say Dexter is home from the hospital, but there isn’t much hope.

“Stop fanning doors, Tammy,” Linda says. “Grandma’s got a present for you.”

Cleo brings out the picture album and the sweater.

“Now I want you to keep all them pictures in this,” she tells Tammy. “Here, squirt,” she says to Davey. “Here’s something else for me to pick up.”

The children take the presents wordlessly, examining them. Tammy turns the pages and pokes her fingers into the picture pockets. Davey rips the plastic wrapper off the sweater and holds it up. “It fits!” he says.

Davey turns on the television and Tammy sits on the divan, turning the empty pages of the picture album.

“You didn’t have to do that,” says Linda to Cleo.

“I’m just keeping up with the times,” Cleo says. “Spend, spend, spend.”

“Nothing wrong with keeping up with the times,” says Linda.

“I see you are. With all that old-timey stuff you’re collecting. Explain that.”

“Everybody’s going back to old-timey stuff. Furniture like yours is out of style.”

“Then maybe one day it’ll be antique. If I live that long.” Cleo pokes the dusting broom at the ceiling.

“We’re getting on your nerves,” says Linda. “We’re going to be getting out before long.”

“I hope you mean going back home where you belong. Not that I mean to kick you out. You know what I mean.”

“We’re going back home, all right,” Linda says. “This is the big night—I’m going to meet Bob at Kenlake. I’m going to have it out with him. I can’t wait.” She wipes the rocker with a rag and turns it right side up. “There, I think that’s enough. What a job. If I could just find a twin to it. Tammy, turn that radio down; you’re bothering Grandma.”

Cleo has to sit down. She is out of breath. The broom falls to the floor as she sinks onto the divan. “I’m not sixteen anymore,” she says. “I give out too quick.”

“Mama, there’s not a thing wrong with you. You just don’t do anything with yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at you; you’re still a young woman. You could go to school, make a nurse or something. That Mrs. Smith over yonder is sixty-eight and flies an airplane. By herself too.”

“I can see me doing that.” Cleo clutches a needlepoint pillow. Tammy and Davey are arguing, sounding like wild Indians, but the racket is losing its definition around her. She finds it hard to pick out individual sounds. It is just a racket, something like a prolonged, steady snore—with lots of tuneful snorts and snuffles and puffs. Jake used to snore like that, but she could always tug the covers or kick at him gently and he would stop.

“Rita Jean said I was in the prime of life,” says Cleo.

“Rita Jean should talk. Look at her. She petted that cat to death, if you ask me. And I never heard anything so ridiculous as her not wanting to go out West when she had the chance! I’d be gone in a minute!”

“People can’t just have everything they want, all the time,” Cleo says.

“I’m not mad at you, Mama. But people don’t have to do what they don’t want to as much now as they used to.”

“I should know that,” Cleo says. “It’s all over television. You make me feel awful.”

“I don’t mean to. It’s for your own good.”

Prissy-Tail jumps up on the divan and Cleo grabs her. She squirms up onto Cleo’s shoulder.

“You sure are lucky, Prissy-Tail, that you don’t have to worry,” Cleo says.

Linda pulls the rocker through the doorway into the living room. It scrapes the paint on the door facing.

—

Cleo is behind on supper. She is making a blackberry cobbler and she is confused about the timing. The children’s favorite show comes on before supper is ready. They take their plates into the living room.
Mork and Mindy
is the one thing Tammy and Davey agree on. Cleo fills her plate and watches it with them. It isn’t one of her regular stories, and it seems strange to her. Mork is from outer space and drinks through his finger. Otherwise, he is like a human being. Cleo finds his nonstop wisecracks hard to follow. Also, he wears galluses and sleeps hanging upside down. Jake used to wear galluses, Cleo thinks suddenly. Mork lives with Mindy, but Davey and Tammy seem to think nothing of it. Cleo is pleased that they eat the hamburger casserole without complaining. During the commercial she gets them large helpings of hot blackberry cobbler.

In the light she sees that Tammy is wearing blue eye shadow. “It makes you look holler-eyed,” Cleo tells her, but Tammy shrugs.

When Tammy and Davey are asleep, Cleo gets out her family picture album. It has few pictures, compared to the way people take pictures nowadays, she thinks. The little black corners are coming loose, and some of the pictures are lying at crazy angles. She tries to put them back in place, knowing they won’t stay. She looks through the pictures of her parents’ wedding trip to Biloxi. Her parents look so young. Her mother looks like Linda in the picture. She is wearing a long baggy dress in style at the time. Cleo’s father is a slim, dark-haired man in the picture. He is smiling. He always smiled. Cleo’s parents are both dead. She
turns the pages to her own honeymoon pictures. One, in which she and Jake look like children, was taken by a stranger in front of the Jefferson Davis monument. She looks carefully at Jake’s face, realizing that the memory of the snapshots is more real than the memory of his actual face. As she turns the pages she sees herself and Jake get slightly older. A picture of Linda shows a stubborn child with bangs.

Cleo looks at a picture of Jake on the tractor. He is grinning into the sun. That was Jake when he was happy. He was a quiet man. Cleo studies a picture taken the year he died, and she wonders suddenly if Jake had ever cheated on her. He could have that time he went to the state fair, she thinks. When he returned he acted strangely, bringing back a red ribbon he had won, and talking in a peculiar way about the future of the family farm. Jake would never forgive her for selling the farm. It was surely her way of cheating on him, she thinks uncomfortably, but she never would have thought of divorcing him, just as she has not been able later to think of remarrying.

On the last pages of the album she sees a surprise, a picture she does not recognize at first. It is dim figures on a television screen. Then she remembers. Tammy took pictures of
Charlie’s Angels
the night Linda missed it.

“Here, Mama, that’s you.” Tammy had pointed to the dark-haired actress, whose face was no bigger than a pencil eraser and hard to make out.

“Just give me her money and I’ll do without her looks,” Linda had replied.

Tammy has put this picture in Cleo’s family album. Cleo cannot think why Tammy would do this. Then she sees on the next page that Tammy has also put in the picture she took of Cleo. The picture is the last one in the scrapbook. Again, Cleo sees herself, looking scared and old.

—

“The roof fell in,” Cleo tells Rita Jean the next day. “Linda says she’s not going back to Bob. She says she wants a separation and he’s agreed to move out. Them children will be packed from pillar to post. I didn’t sleep a wink all night last night.”

Cleo is at Rita Jean’s. Cleo has driven over, skipping the
Today
show and her morning phone conversation. Now she feels more comfortable at Rita Jean’s than at home. The house is brightly decorated with handmade objects. Rita belongs to a mail-order craft club which sends a kit every month. She has made a new embroidered wall hanging of an Arizona sunset. Cleo admires it and says, as she gazes at a whipstitch, “What I don’t understand is how my daughter can carry on like she does. She chirps like a bird!”