Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [56]
“That’s ridiculous.”
Not long ago, Stephen and I sat before an investment counselor, who told us, without cracking a smile, “You want to select an investment posture that will maximize your potential.” I had him confused with a marriage counselor, some kind of weird sex therapist. Now I think of water streaming in the dentist’s bowl. When I was a child, the water in a dentist’s bowl ran continuously. Larry’s bowl has a shut-off button to save water. Stephen is talking about flexibility and fluid assets. It occurs to me that wordprocessing, all one word, is also a runny sound. How many billion words a day could one of Stephen’s machines process without forgetting? How many pecks of pickled peppers can Peter Piper pick? You don’t pick pickled peppers, I want to say to Stephen defiantly, as if he has asked this question. Peppers can’t be pickled till after they’re picked, I want to say, as if I have a point to make.
—
Larry is here almost daily. He comes over after he finishes overhauling mouths for the day. I tease him about this peculiarity of his profession. Sometimes I pretend to be afraid of him. I won’t let him near my mouth. I clamp my teeth shut and grin widely, fighting off imaginary drills. Larry is gap-toothed. He should have had braces, I say. Too late now, he says. Cats march up and down the bed purring while we are in it. Larry does not seem to notice. I’m accustomed to the cats. Cats, I’m aware, like to be involved in anything that’s going on. Pete has a hobby of chasing butterflies. When he loses sight of one, he searches the air, wailing pathetically, as though abandoned. Brenda plays with paper clips. She likes the way she can hook a paper clip so simply with one claw. She attacks spiders in the same way. Their legs draw up and she drops them.
I see Larry watching the cats, but he rarely comments on them. Today he notices Brenda’s odd eyes. One is blue and one is yellow. I show him her paper clip trick. We are in the canning kitchen and the daylight is fading.
“Do you want another drink?” asks Larry.
“No.”
“You’re getting one anyway.”
We are drinking Bloody Marys, made with my mother’s canned tomato juice. There are rows of jars in the basement. She would be mortified to know what I am doing, in her house, with her tomato juice.
Larry brings me a drink and a soggy grilled cheese sandwich.
“You’d think a dentist would make something dainty and precise,” I say. “Jello molds, maybe, the way you make false teeth.”
We laugh. He thinks I am being funny.
The other day he took me up in a single-engine Cessna. We circled west Kentucky, looking at the land, and when we flew over the farm I felt I was in a creaky hay wagon, skimming just above the fields. I thought of the Dylan Thomas poem with the dream about the birds flying along with the stacks of hay. I could see eighty acres of corn and pasture, neat green squares. I am nearly thirty years old. I have two men, eight cats, no cavities. One day I was counting the cats and I absentmindedly counted myself.
Larry and I are playing Monopoly in the parlor, which is full of doilies and trinkets on whatnots. Every day I notice something that I must save for my mother. I’m sure Larry wishes we were at his house, a modern brick home in a good section of town, five doors down from a U.S. congressman. Larry gets up from the card table and mixes another Bloody Mary for me. I’ve been buying hotels left and right, against the advice of my investment counselor. I own all the utilities. I shuffle my paper money and it feels like dried corn shucks. I wonder if there is a new board game involving money market funds.
“When my grandmother was alive, my father used to bury her savings in the yard, in order to avoid inheritance taxes,” I say as Larry hands me the drink.
He laughs. He always laughs, whatever I say. His lips are like parentheses, enclosing compliments.
“In the last ten years of her life she saved ten thousand dollars from her social security checks.”
“That’s incredible.” He looks doubtful, as though I have made up a story to amuse him. “Maybe there