Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [5]
“What are you talking about?” Leroy says, nervously shuffling blueprints.
“You know good and well,” Norma Jean says. She is sitting in a kitchen chair with her feet up and her arms wrapped around her knees. She looks small and helpless. She says, “The very idea, her bringing up a subject like that! Saying it was neglect.”
“She didn’t mean that,” Leroy says.
“She might not have thought she meant it. She always says things like that. You don’t know how she goes on.”
“But she didn’t really mean it. She was just talking.”
Leroy opens a king-sized bottle of beer and pours it into two glasses, dividing it carefully. He hands a glass to Norma Jean and she takes it from him mechanically. For a long time, they sit by the kitchen window watching the birds at the feeder.
——
Something is happening. Norma Jean is going to night school. She has graduated from her six-week body-building course and now she is taking an adult-education course in composition at Paducah Community College. She spends her evenings outlining paragraphs.
“First you have a topic sentence,” she explains to Leroy. “Then you divide it up. Your secondary topic has to be connected to your primary topic.”
To Leroy, this sounds intimidating. “I never was any good in English,” he says.
“It makes a lot of sense.”
“What are you doing this for, anyhow?”
She shrugs. “It’s something to do.” She stands up and lifts her dumbbells a few times.
“Driving a rig, nobody cared about my English.”
“I’m not criticizing your English.”
Norma Jean used to say, “If I lose ten minutes’ sleep, I just drag all day.” Now she stays up late, writing compositions. She got a B on her first paper—a how-to theme on soup-based casseroles. Recently Norma Jean has been cooking unusual foods—tacos, lasagna, Bombay chicken. She doesn’t play the organ anymore, though her second paper was called “Why Music Is Important to Me.” She sits at the kitchen table, concentrating on her outlines, while Leroy plays with his log house plans, practicing with a set of Lincoln Logs. The thought of getting a truckload of notched, numbered logs scares him, and he wants to be prepared. As he and Norma Jean work together at the kitchen table, Leroy has the hopeful thought that they are sharing something, but he knows he is a fool to think this. Norma Jean is miles away. He knows he is going to lose her. Like Mabel, he is just waiting for time to pass.
One day, Mabel is there before Norma Jean gets home from work, and Leroy finds himself confiding in her. Mabel, he realizes, must know Norma Jean better than he does.
“I don’t know what’s got into that girl,” Mabel says. “She used to go to bed with the chickens. Now you say she’s up all hours. Plus her a-smoking. I like to died.”
“I want to make her this beautiful home,” Leroy says, indicating the Lincoln Logs. “I don’t think she even wants it. Maybe she was happier with me gone.”
“She don’t know what to make of you, coming home like this.”
“Is that it?”
Mabel takes the roof off his Lincoln Log cabin. “You couldn’t get me in a log cabin,” she says. “I was raised in one. It’s no picnic, let me tell you.”
“They’re different now,” says Leroy.
“I tell you what,” Mabel says, smiling oddly at Leroy.
“What?”
“Take her on down to Shiloh. Y’all need to get out together, stir a little. Her brain’s all balled up over them books.”
Leroy can see traces of Norma Jean’s features in her mother’s face. Mabel’s worn face has the texture of crinkled cotton, but suddenly she looks pretty. It occurs to Leroy that Mabel has been hinting all along that she wants them to take her with them to Shiloh.
“Let’s all go to Shiloh,” he says. “You and me and her. Come Sunday.”
Mabel throws up her hands in protest. “Oh, no, not me. Young folks want to be by theirselves.”
When Norma Jean comes in with groceries, Leroy says excitedly, “Your mama here’s been dying to go to Shiloh for thirty-five years. It’s about time we went, don’t you think?”
“I’m not going to butt in on anybody’s second honeymoon,” Mabel says.
“Who’s going on a honeymoon, for Christ’s sake?” Norma Jean says loudly.