Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [103]
“My parents would just love it if we got married,” Sabrina explains. “For them, it’s worse for me to live in sin than to be involved with an older man.”
“I didn’t think I was really older,” says Edwin. “But now I know it. I feel like I’ve had a developmental disability and it suddenly went away. Something like if Freddie Johnson learned to read. That’s how I feel.”
“I never thought of you as backward. Laid back is what I said.” Sabrina laughs at her joke. “I’m sure you’re going to impress Mom and Dad.”
Tomorrow she is going to her parents’ farm, thirty miles away, for the Christmas holidays, and she has invited Edwin to go with her. He does not want to disappoint her. He does not want to go through Christmas without her. She has arranged her Christmas cards on a red string between the living room and the kitchen. She is making cookies, and Edwin has a feeling she is adding something strange to them. Her pale, fine hair is falling down in her face. Flour streaks her jeans.
“Let me show you something,” Edwin says, bringing out a drugstore envelope of pictures. “One of my passengers, Merle Cope, gave me these.”
“Which one is he? The one with the fits?”
“No. The one that claps all the time. He lives with a lot of sisters and brothers down in Langley’s Bottom. It’s a case of incest. The whole family’s backward—your word. He’s forty-seven and goes around with this big smile on his face, clapping.” Edwin demonstrates.
He pins the pictures on Sabrina’s Christmas card line with tiny red and green clothespins. “Look at these and tell me what you think.”
Sabrina squints, going down the row of pictures. Her hands are covered with flour and she holds them in front of her, the way she learned from her actor friends to hold an invisible baby.
The pictures are black-and-white snapshots: fried eggs on cracked plates, an oilclothed kitchen table, a bottle of tomato ketchup, a fence post, a rusted tractor seat sitting on a stump, a corncrib, a sagging door, a toilet bowl, a cow, and finally, a horse’s rear end.
“I can’t look,” says Sabrina. “These are disgusting.”
“I think they’re arty.”
Sabrina laughs. She points to the pictures one by one, getting flour on some of them. Then she gets the giggles and can’t stop. “Can you imagine what the developers thought when they saw that horse’s ass?” she gasps. Her laughter goes on and on, then subsides with a little whimper. She goes back to the cookies. While she cuts out the cookies, Edwin takes the pictures down and puts them in the envelope. He hides the envelope in the drawer with the Christmas presents. Sabrina sets the cookie sheet in the oven and washes her hands.
Edwin asks, “How long do those cookies take?”
“Twelve minutes. Why?”
“Let me show you something else—in case you ever need to know it. The CPR technique—that’s cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, in case you’ve forgotten.”
Sabrina looks annoyed. “I’d rather do the Heimlich maneuver,” she says. “Besides, you’ve practiced CPR on me a hundred times.”
“I’m not practicing. I don’t have to anymore. I’m beyond that.” Edwin notices Sabrina’s puzzled face. The thought of her fennel toothpaste, which makes her breath smell like licorice, fills him with something like nostalgia, as though she is already only a memory. He says, “I just want you to feel what it would be like. Come on.” He leads her to the couch and sets her down. Her hands are still moist. He says, “Now just pretend. Bend over like this. Just pretend you have the biggest pain, right here, right in your chest, right there.”
“Like this?” Sabrina is doubled over, her hair falling to her knees and her fists knotted between