Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [30]
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If Peggy goes back to her husband, Louise will have to earn some extra money. It dawns on her that the paintings are an absurd idea. Childish. For a few days she stays out of the canning room, afraid to look at the pictures. Halfheartedly she reads the want ads. They say: salesclerk, short-order cook, secretarial assistant, salesclerk.
On the day she is scheduled to sign up for her weekly unemployment check, Louise arranges the paintings in the living room, intending to decide whether to continue with them. The pictures are startling. Some of the first ones appear to be optical illusions—watermelons disappearing like black holes into vacant skies. The later pictures are more credible—one watermelon is on a table before a paned window, with the light making little windows on the surface of the fruit; another, split in half, is balanced against a coffee percolator. Louise pretends she’s a woman from Mars and the paintings are the first things she sees on Earth. They aren’t bad, but the backgrounds worry her. They don’t match the melons. Why would a watermelon be placed against a blue sky? One watermelon on a flowered tablecloth resembles a blimp that has landed in a petunia bed. Even the sliced melons are unrealistic. The red is wrong—too pale, like a tongue. Tom sent her a picture postcard of the Painted Desert, but Louise suspects the colors in that picture are too brilliant. No desert could look like that.
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On her way to the unemployment office, Louise picks up a set of acrylics on discount at Big-D. Acrylics are far more economical than oils. In the car, Louise, pleased by the prospect of the fresh tubes of paint, examines the colors: scarlet, cobalt blue, Prussian blue, aquamarine, emerald, yellow ochre, orange, white, black. She doesn’t really need green. The discovery that yellow and blue make green still astonishes her; when she mixes them, she feels like a magician. As she drives toward the unemployment office she wonders recklessly if the green of the trees along the street could be broken down by some scientific process into their true colors.
At the unemployment office the line is long and the building stuffy. The whole place seems wound up. A fat woman standing behind Louise says, “One time it got so hot here I passed out, and not a soul would help. They didn’t want to lose their place in line. Look at ’em. Lined up like cows at a slaughterhouse. Ever notice how cows follow along, nose to tail?”
“Elephants have a cute way of doing that,” says Louise, in high spirits. “They grab the next one’s tail with their trunk.”
“Grab,” the woman says. “That’s all people want to do. Just grab.” She reaches inside her blouse and yanks her bra strap back onto her shoulder. She has yellow hair and blue eyes. She could turn green if she doesn’t watch out, Louise thinks. The line moves slowly. No one faints.
When Louise arrives at home, Peggy’s husband is there, and he and Peggy are piling her possessions into his van. Peggy has happy feet, like Steve Martin on TV. She is moving to Paducah with Jerry. Calmly Louise pours a glass of iced tea and watches the ice cubes crack.
“I already up and quit work,” Peggy calls to Louise from her bedroom.
“I got us a place in a big apartment complex,” says Jerry with an air of satisfaction.
“It’s got a swimming pool,” says Peggy, appearing with an armload of clothes on hangers.
“I saved twenty dollars a month by getting one without a dishwasher,” says Jerry. “I’m going to put one in myself.”
Peggy’s husband is tall and muscular, with a sparse mustache that a teenager might grow. He looks amazingly like one of the Sha Na Na, the one in the sleeveless black T-shirt. Louise notices that he can’t keep his hands off his wife. He holds on to her hips, her elbows, as she tries to pack.
“Tell what else you promised,” Peggy says.
“You mean about going to New Orleans?” Jerry says.
“Yeah.”
Louise says, “Well, don’t you go off