Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [28]
“That woman’s so big and strong, she could skin a mule one-handed,” says Peggy, lifting her beer.
Louise puts away her paints and then props the new picture against a chair. Looking at the melon, she can feel its weight and imagine just exactly how ripe it is.
—
While she paints, Louise has time to reflect on their situation: two women with little in common whose husbands are away. Both men left unconscionably. Sudden yearnings. One thought he could be a cowboy (Tom had never been on a horse); the other fell for an older woman. Louise cannot understand either compulsion. The fact that she cannot helps her not to care.
She tried to reason with Tom—about how boyish his notion was and how disastrous it would be to leave his business. Jim Yates had lived in Denver one summer, and in every conversation he found a way to mention Colorado and how pure the air was there. Tom believed everything Jim said. “You can’t just take off and expect to pick up your business where you left it when you get back,” Louise argued. “There’s plenty of guys waiting to horn in. It takes years to get where you’ve got.” That was Louise being reasonable. At first Tom wanted her to go with him, but she wouldn’t dream of moving so far away from home. He accused her of being afraid to try new things, and over a period of weeks her resistance turned to anger. Eventually Louise, to her own astonishment, threw a Corning Ware Petite Pan at Tom and made his ear bleed. He and Jim took off two days later. The day they left, Tom was wearing a T-shirt that read: “You better get in line now ’cause I get better-looking every day.” Who did he think he was?
Peggy does not like to be reminded of the watermelon collector, and Louise has to probe for information. Peggy and her husband, Jerry (“Flathead”) Wilson, had gone to live in Paducah, forty miles away, and had had trouble finding work and a place to live, but an elderly man, Herman Priddle, offered them three identical bedrooms on the third floor of his house. “It was a mansion,” Peggy told Louise. Then Priddle hired Jerry to convert two of the rooms into a bathroom and a kitchen. Peggy laid vinyl tiles and painted the walls. The old man, fascinated, watched them work. He let Peggy and Jerry watch his TV and he invited them to eat with him. His mistress, a beautician named Eddy Gail Moses, slept with him three nights a week, and while she was there she made enough hamburger-and-macaroni casseroles to last him the rest of the week. She lived with her father, who disapproved of her behavior, despite her age.
Before Peggy knew what was happening, her husband had become infatuated with the woman, and he abruptly went to live with her and her father, leaving Peggy with Herman Priddle. Although Peggy grew suspicious of the way he looked at her, she and Priddle consoled each other for a while. Peggy started making the casseroles he was used to, and she stayed in Paducah for a few months, working at a pit barbecue stand. Gradually, Peggy told Louise, the old man began collecting pictures of watermelons. He looked for them in flea markets, at antique shops, and in catalogs; and he put ads in trade papers. When he hung one of the pictures in her bedroom, Peggy moved out. The watermelon was sliced lengthwise and it resembled a lecherous grin, she said, shuddering.
“Peggy’s still in shock from the way Jerry treated her,” Louise tells Tom in a letter one evening. She writes him in care of a tourist home in Amarillo, Texas. She intends to write only perfunctory replies to his postcards so he will know she is alive, but she finds herself being more expressive than she ever was in the four years they were face to face. Hitting him seemed to release something in her, but she won’t apologize. She won’t beg him to come back. He doesn’t know she has lost her job. And if he saw her paintings, he would laugh.
When Louise seals the letter, Peggy says to her, “Did I tell you I heard Jim Yates is queer?”
“No.”
“Debbie Potts said that at work. She used to know Jim Yates