Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [8]
“You sound like that guy that used to stand out on the corner and yell when church let out on Sunday,” said Mary Lou. “ ‘Here come the hyps,’ he’d say.”
“Who was that?”
“Oh, just some guy in town. That was years ago. He led a crusade against fluoride too.”
“Fluoride’s O.K. It hardens the teeth.”
For their twenty-fifth anniversary, Mack made Mary Lou a round card table from scrap pine, with an old sprocket from a bulldozer as a base. It was connected to the table with a length of lead pipe. “It didn’t cost a thing,” Mack said. “Just imagination.”
The tabletop, a mosaic of wood scraps, was like a crazy quilt, Mary Lou thought. It was heavily varnished with polyurethane, making a slick surface. Mack had spray-painted the sprocket black.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“No, you don’t. I can tell you don’t.”
“It’s real pretty.”
“It’s not something you would buy in a store,” Mack said apologetically.
Mary Lou had never seen a table like it. Automatically, she counted the oddly shaped pieces Mack had fit together for the top. Twenty-one. It seemed that Mack was trying to put together the years of their marriage into a convincing whole and this was as far as he got. Mary Lou is concerned about Mack. He seems embarrassed that they are alone in the house now for the first time in years. When Judy fails to come home on weekends, he paces around restlessly. He has even started reading books and magazines, as if he can somehow keep up with Judy and her studies. Lately he has become obsessed with the weather. He likes to compare the weather with the predictions in the Old Farmer’s Almanac. He likes it when the Almanac is wrong. Anyone else would be rooting for the Almanac to be right.
When the women Mary Lou plays Rook with come over, Mack stays in the den watching TV, hardly emerging to say hello. Thelma Crandall, Clausie Dowdy, and Edda Griffin—the Rookers, Mary Lou calls them—are all much older than Mary Lou, and they are all widows. Mack and Mary Lou married young, and even though they have three grown daughters, they are only in their late forties. Mack says it is unhealthy for her to socialize with senior citizens, but Mary Lou doesn’t believe him. It does her good to have some friends.
Mary Lou shows off the new card table when the women arrive one evening. They all come in separate cars, not trusting each other’s driving.
“It’s set on a bulldozer sprocket,” Mary Lou explains.
“How did Mack come up with such an idea?” asks Clausie, admiring the table.
Thelma, the oldest of the group, is reluctant to sit at the table, for fear she will catch her foot in one of the holes at the base.
“Couldn’t you cover up the bottom of that table with a rug or something?” asks Edda. “We might catch our feet.”
Mary Lou finds an old afghan and drapes it around the bulldozer sprocket, tamping it down carefully in the holes. She gets along with old people, and she feels exhilarated when she is playing cards with her friends. “They tickle me,” she told Mack once. “Old people are liable to say anything.” Mack said old people gave him the creeps, the way they talked about diseases.
Mary Lou keeps a list of whose turn it is to deal, because they often lose track. When they deal the cards on the new table, the cards shoot across the slick surface. This evening they discuss curtain material, Edda’s granddaughter’s ovary infection, a place that appeared on Thelma’s arm, and the way the climate has changed. All three of the widows live in nice houses in town. When Mary Lou goes to their houses to play Rook, she is impressed by their shag rugs, their matching sets of furniture, their neat kitchens. Their walls are filled with pictures of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mary Lou’s pictures are scattered around in drawers, and her kitchen is always a mess.
“They’re beating the socks off of us,” Mary Lou tells Mack when he watches the game for a moment. Mary Lou is teamed up with Thelma. “I had the bird—that was the only trump I had.”
“I haven