Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [36]
“Bob’s no morning glory.” Linda puts on lip gloss and works her lips together.
“You’ll be wondering how to buy them kids fine things. You’ll be off on your own, girl.”
Linda says nothing. She examines her face in the mirror and picks at a speck on her cheek.
—
Davey gets his lessons on the floor in front of the television. He is learning a new kind of arithmetic Cleo has never heard of. Later, Cleo watches Charlie’s Angels with Tammy, and after Tammy goes to bed, she watches the 10 O’Clock Report. She tells herself that she has to wait up to unlock the doors for Linda. She has put a chain on the door, because young people are going wild, breaking in on defenseless older women. Cleo is afraid Linda’s friend Shirley is a bad influence. Shirley had to get married and didn’t finish school. Now she is divorced. She even let her husband have her kids, while she went gallivanting around. Cleo cannot imagine a mother giving her kids away. Shirley’s husband moved to Alabama with the kids, and Shirley sees them only occasionally. On TV, Johnny Carson keeps breaking into the funny dance he does when a joke flops. Cleo usually gets a kick out of that, but it doesn’t seem funny this time, with him repeating it so much. Johnny has been divorced twice, but now he is happily married. He is the stay-at-home type, she has read.
Cleo is well into the Tomorrow show, which is a disturbing discussion of teenage alcoholism, when Linda returns. Linda’s cheeks are glowing and she looks happy.
“I thought Duke Ellington was dead,” says Cleo, when Linda tells her about the concert.
“He is. But his brother leads the band. He directs the band like this.” Linda makes her hands dive in fishlike movements. “He danced around, with his back to the audience, swaying along in a trance. He had on this dark pink suit the exact same color of Miss Imogene’s panties that time in fifth grade—when she fell off the desk?”
Cleo groans. Everything seems to distress her, she notices. She is afraid Linda has been drinking.
“And the band had this great singer!” Linda goes on. “She wore a tight skullcap with sequins on it? And a brown tuxedo, and she sounded for all the world like Ella Fitzgerald. Boy, was she sexy. She had a real deep voice, but she could go real high at times.”
Linda unscrews the top of a quart of Coke and pours herself a glass. She drinks the Coke thirstily. “I wouldn’t be explaining all this to you if you had gone. I tried to get you to go with me.”
“And leave the kids here?” Cleo turns off the TV.
“Shirley had on the darlingest outfit. It had these pleats—what do you want, Davey?”
Davey is trailing a quilt into the living room. “I couldn’t sleep,” he whines. “The big girls was going to get me.”
“He means Charlie’s Angels,” says Cleo. “We were watching them and they kept him awake.”
“He’s had a bad dream. Here, hon.” Linda hugs Davey and takes him back to bed.
—
“I worked myself to death yesterday getting this house in shape and it looks like a cyclone hit it,” Cleo says to Rita Jean on the telephone the next morning. “First, tell me how’s Dexter.”
Cleo listens to Rita Jean’s account of Dexter’s trip to the vet. “He said there’s nothing to do now but wait. He’s not suffering any, and the vet said it would be all right if I keep him at home. He’s asleep most of the time. He’s the pitifulest thing.”
Rita Jean’s cat is thirteen. After the news came from Vietnam, Rita Jean got a cat and then another cat when the first one got run over. The present cat she has kept in the house all its life.
“The one thing about cats,” says Cleo, trying to sound comforting, “is that there’s more where that one come from. You’ll grieve, but you’ll get over it and get you another cat.”
“I guess so.”
Cleo tells about Linda’s night out. “She was dolled up so pretty, she looked like she was going out on a date. It made me feel so funny. She had on a new pants suit. The kids didn’t want her to go, either. They know something’s wrong. They never miss a thing.”
“Kids don’t