Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [13]
Later, after they drop off Clausie and are driving home, Judy turns on the car radio. Mary Lou is still chuckling over the movie, but Judy seems depressed. She has hardly mentioned her roommate, so Mary Lou asks, “Where’d Stephanie go then, if she didn’t go home?”
Judy turns the radio down. “She went to her sister’s, in Nashville. Her brother-in-law’s a record promoter and they’ve got this big place with a swimming pool and horses and stuff.”
“Well, maybe she can make up with her boyfriend when she cools off.”
“I don’t think so.” Judy turns right at the high school and heads down the highway. She says, “She wants to break up with him, but he won’t leave her alone, so she just took off.”
Mary Lou sighs. “This day and time, people just do what they please. They just hit the road. Like those guys in the show. And like Ed.”
“Stephanie’s afraid of Jeff, though, afraid of what he might do.”
“What?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just something crazy.” Judy turns up the volume of the radio, saying, “Here’s a song for you, Mom. It’s a dirty song. ‘The Horizontal Bop’—get it?”
Mary Lou listens for a moment. “I don’t get it,” she says, fearing something as abstruse as the photons. In the song, the singer says repeatedly, “Everybody wants to do the Horizontal Bop.”
“Oh, I get it,” Mary Lou says with a sudden laugh. “I don’t dare tell my Rookers about that.” A moment later, she says, “But they wouldn’t get it. It’s the word ‘bop.’ They probably never heard the word ‘bop.’ ”
Mary Lou feels a little pleased with herself. Bop. Bebop. She’s not so old. Her daughter is not so far away. For a brief moment, Mary Lou feels that rush of joy that children experience when they whirl around happily, unconscious of time.
—
When Mary Lou’s friends come to play Rook the following evening, they are curious about Judy’s roommate, but Judy won’t divulge much. She is curled on the love seat, studying math. Mary Lou explains to the Rookers, “Stephanie comes from a kind of disturbed family. Her mother’s had a bunch of nervous breakdowns and her daddy’s a vegetarian.” Mack has the TV too loud, and it almost seems that the Incredible Hulk is in on the card game. Mary Lou gets Mack to turn down the sound. Later, he turns the TV off and picks up Judy’s physics book. As the game goes on, he periodically goes to the telephone and dials the time-and-temperature number. The temperature is dropping, he reports. It is already down to twenty-four. He is hoping for snow, but the Rookers worry about the weather, fearful of driving back in the freezing night air.
When Clausie tells about Stir Crazy, Mary Lou tries to describe the scene that cracked her up—Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder dressed up in elaborate feathered costumes. They were supposed to be woodpeckers.
Clausie says, “I liked to died when the jailer woke ’em up in the morning, and they was both of ’em trying to use the commode at the same time.”
The Rookers keep getting mixed up, missing plays. Thelma plays the wrong color.
“What did you do that for?” asks Edda, her partner tonight. “Trumps is green.”
Thelma says, “I’m so bumfuzzled I can’t think. I don’t know when I’ve ever listened to such foolishness. Peckerwoods and niggers and a dirty show.”
Mary Lou has been thinking of commenting on a new disease she has heard of, in which a person is afflicted by uncontrollable twitching and compulsive swearing, but she realizes that’s a bad idea. She jumps up, saying, “Let’s stop for refreshments, y’all. I made coconut cake with seven-minute icing.”
Mary Lou