Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [101]
At the cast party, at Jeff’s house, Jeff and Sue are publicly affectionate, getting away with it by playing their Laurey and Curly roles, but eventually Jeff’s wife, who has made ham, potato salad, chiffon cakes, eggnog, and cranberry punch for sixty people, suddenly disappears from the party. Jeff whizzes off in his Camaro to find her. Sabrina whispers to Edwin, “Look how Sue’s pretending nothing’s happened. She’s flirting with the guy who played Jud Fry.” Sabrina, so excited that she bounces around on her tiptoes, is impressed by Jeff’s house, which has wicker furniture and rose plush carpets.
Edwin drinks too much cranberry punch at the party, and most of the time he sits on a wicker love seat watching Sabrina flit around the room, beaming with the joy of her success. She is out of costume, wearing a sweatshirt with a rainbow on the front and pots of gold on her breasts. He realizes how proud he is of her. Her complexion is as smooth as a white mushroom, and she has crinkled her hair by braiding and unbraiding it. He watches her join some of the cast members around the piano to sing songs from the play, as though they cannot bear it that the play has ended. Sabrina seems to belong with them, these theatre people. Edwin knows they are not really theatre people. They are only local merchants putting on a play in their spare time. But Edwin is just a bus driver. He should get a better job so that he can send Sabrina to college, but he knows that he has to take care of his passengers. Their faces have become as familiar to him as the sound track of Oklahoma! He can practically hear Freddie Johnson shouting out her TV shows: “Popeye on! Dukes on!” He sees Sabrina looking at him lovingly. The singers shout, “Oklahoma, O.K.!”
Sabrina brings him a plastic glass of cranberry punch and sits with him on the love seat, holding his hand. She says, “Jim definitely said I should take a drama course at Murray State next semester. He was real encouraging. He said, ‘Why not be in the play and take a course or two?’ I could drive back and forth, don’t you think?”
“Why not? You can have anything you want.” Edwin plays with her hand.
“Jeff took two courses at Murray and look how good he was. Didn’t you think he was good? I loved that cute way he went into that dance.”
Edwin is a little drunk. He finds himself telling Sabrina about how he plays disc jockey on the bus, and he confesses to her his shame about the way he sounded off about his golden-oldie format. His mind is reeling and the topic sounds trivial, compared to Sabrina’s future.
“Why don’t you play a new-wave format?” she asks him. “It’s what everybody listens to.” She nods at the stereo, which is playing “(You’re Living in Your Own) Private Idaho,” by the B-52s, a song Edwin has often heard on the radio late at night when Sabrina is unwinding, moving into his arms. The music is violent and mindless, with a fast beat like a crazed parent abusing a child, thrashing it senseless.
“I don’t know,” Edwin says. “I shouldn’t have said that to Lou Murphy. It bothers me.”
“She don’t know the difference,” Sabrina says, patting his head. “It’s ridiculous to make a big thing out of it. Words are so arbitrary, and people don’t say what they mean half the time anyway.”
“You should talk, Miss Oklahoma!” Edwin laughs, spurting a little punch on the love seat. “You and your two lines!”
“They’re just lines,” she says, smiling up at him and poking her finger into his dimple.
—
Some of Edwin’s passengers bring him Christmas presents, badly wrapped, with tags that say his name in wobbly writing. Edwin puts the presents in a drawer, where Sabrina finds them.
“Aren’t you going to open them?” she asks. “I’d be dying to know what was inside.