Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [104]
“Yes. Right in your heart.”
THIRD MONDAY
Ruby watches Linda exclaiming over a bib, then a terry cloth sleeper. It is an amazing baby shower because Linda is thirty-seven and unmarried. Ruby admires that. Linda even refused to marry the baby’s father, a man from out of town who had promised to get Linda a laundromat franchise. It turned out that he didn’t own any laundromats; he was only trying to impress her. Linda doesn’t know where he is now. Maybe Nashville.
Linda smiles at a large bakery cake with pink decorations and the message, WELCOME, HOLLY. “I’m glad I know it’s going to be a girl,” she says. “But in a way it’s like knowing ahead of time what you’re going to get for Christmas.”
“The twentieth century’s taking all the mysteries out of life,” says Ruby breezily.
Ruby is as much a guest of honor here as Linda is. Betty Lewis brings Ruby’s cake and ice cream to her and makes sure she has a comfortable chair. Ever since Ruby had a radical mastectomy, Betty and Linda and the other women on her bowling team have been awed by her. They praise her bravery and her sense of humor. Just before she had the operation, they suddenly brimmed over with inspiring tales about women who had had successful mastectomies. They reminded her about Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller. Happy … Everyone is happy now. Linda looks happy because Nancy Featherstone has taken all the ribbons from the presents and threaded them through holes in a paper plate to fashion a funny bridal bouquet. Nancy, who is artistic, explains that this is a tradition at showers. Linda is pleased. She twirls the bouquet, and the ends of the ribbons dangle like tentacles on a jellyfish.
After Ruby found the lump in her breast, the doctor recommended a mammogram. In an X-ray room, she hugged a Styrofoam basketball hanging from a metal cone and stared at the two lights overhead. The technician, a frail man in plaid pants and a smock, flipped a switch and left the room. The machine hummed. He took several X-rays, like a photographer shooting various poses of a model, and used his hands to measure distances, as one would to determine the height of a horse. “My guidelight is out,” he explained. Ruby lay on her back with her breasts flattened out, and the technician slid an X-ray plate into the drawer beneath the table. He tilted her hip and propped it against a cushion. “I have to repeat that last one,” he said. “The angle was wrong.” He told her not to breathe. The machine buzzed and shook. After she was dressed, he showed her the X-rays, which were printed on Xerox paper. Ruby looked for the lump in the squiggly lines, which resembled a rainfall map in a geography book. The outline of her breast was lovely—a lilting, soft curve. The technician would not comment on what he saw in the pictures. “Let the radiologist interpret them,” he said with a peculiar smile. “He’s our chief tea-leaf reader.” Ruby told the women in her bowling club that she had had her breasts Xeroxed.
—
The man she cares about does not know. She has been out of the hospital for a week, and in ten days he will be in town again. She wonders whether he will be disgusted and treat her as though she has been raped, his property violated. According to an article she read, this is what to expect. But Buddy is not that kind of man, and she is not his property. She sees him only once a month. He could have a wife somewhere, or other girlfriends, but she doesn’t believe that. He promised to take her home with him the next time he comes to western Kentucky. He lives far away, in East Tennessee, and he travels the flea-market circuit, trading hunting dogs and pocket knives. She met him at the fairgrounds at Third Monday—the flea market held the third Monday of each month. Ruby had first gone there on a day off from work with Janice Leggett to look for some Depression glass to match Janice’s sugar bowl. Ruby lingered in the fringe of trees near the highway, the oak grove where hundreds of dogs were whining and barking, while Janice wandered ahead to the tables of figurines and old dishes.