Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [55]
“I thought you’d like choc-o-mint.”
“You’re right.”
“I know you have a sweet tooth.”
“You’re just trying to give me cavities, so you can charge me thirty dollars a tooth.”
I opened the screen door to get dishes. One cat went in and another went out. The changing of the guard. Larry and I sat on the porch and ate ice cream and watched crows in the corn. The corn had shot up after a recent rain.
“You shouldn’t go to Louisville,” said Larry. “This part of Kentucky is the prettiest. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
“I never used to think that. Boy, I couldn’t wait to get out!” The ice cream was thrillingly cold. I wondered if Larry envied me. Compared to him, I was a world traveler. I had lived in a commune in Aspen, backpacked through the Rockies, and worked on the National Limited as one of the first female porters. When Larry was in high school, he was known as a hell-raiser, so the whole town was amazed when he became a dentist, married, and settled down. Now he was divorced.
Larry and I sat on the porch for an interminable time on that sultry day, each waiting for some external sign—a sudden shift in the weather, a sound, an event of some kind—to bring our bodies together. Finally, it was something I said about my new filling. He leaped up to look in my mouth.
“You should have let me take X-rays,” he said.
“I told you I don’t believe in all that radiation.”
“The amount is teensy,” said Larry, holding my jaw. A mouth is a word processor, I thought suddenly, as I tried to speak.
“Besides,” he said, “I always use the lead apron to catch any fragmentation.”
“What are you talking about?” I cried, jerking loose. I imagined splintering X-rays zinging around the room. Larry patted me on the knee.
“I should put on some music,” I said. He followed me inside.
—
Stephen is on the phone. It is 3:00 P.M. and I am eating supper—pork and beans, cottage cheese and dill pickles. My routines are cockeyed since he left.
“I found us a house!” he says excitedly. His voice is so familiar I can almost see him, and I realize that I miss him. “I want you to come up here this weekend and take a look at it,” he says.
“Do I have to?” My mouth is full of pork and beans.
“I can’t buy it unless you see it first.”
“I don’t care what it looks like.”
“Sure you do. But you’ll like it. It’s a three-bedroom brick with a two-car garage, finished basement, dining alcove, patio—”
“Does it have a canning kitchen?” I want to know.
Stephen laughs. “No, but it has a rec room.”
I quake at the thought of a rec room. I tell Stephen, “I know this is crazy, but I think we’ll have to set up a kennel in back for the cats, to keep them out of traffic.”
I tell Stephen about the New Jersey veterinarian I saw on a talk show who keeps an African lioness, an ocelot, and three margays in his yard in the suburbs. They all have the run of his house. “Cats aren’t that hard to get along with,” the vet said.
“Aren’t you carrying this a little far?” Stephen asks, sounding worried. He doesn’t suspect how far I might be carrying things. I have managed to swallow the last trace of the food, as if it were guilt.
“What do you think?” I ask abruptly.
“I don’t know what to think,” he says.
I fall silent. I am holding Ellen, the cat who had a vaginal infection not long ago. The vet X-rayed her and found she was pregnant. She lost the kittens, because of the X-ray, but the miscarriage was incomplete, and she developed a rare infection called pyometra and had to be spayed. I wrote every detail of this to my parents, thinking they would care, but they did not mention it in their letters. Their minds are on the condominium they are planning to buy when this farm is sold. Now Stephen is talking about our investments and telling me things to do at the bank. When we buy a house, we will have to get a complicated mortgage.
“The thing about owning real estate outright,” he says, “is that one’s assets aren’t liquid.”
“Daddy always taught me to avoid debt.”
“That’s not the way it works anymore.”
“He’s going to pay cash for his