Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [81]
Someone had taken down the poster above the fireplace and put up the picture of Sgt. Pepper—the cutout that came with the album. Sgt. Pepper overlooked the room like a stern father.
“What’s the matter?” a man asked Nancy. He was Dr. Doyle, her American History 1861–1865 professor. “This is your wedding. Loosen up.” He burst a balloon and Nancy jumped.
When someone offered her a joint, she refused, then wondered why. The house was filled with strangers, and the Beatles album played over and over. Jack and Nancy danced, hugging each other in a slow two-step that was all wrong for the music. They drifted past the wedding presents, lined up on a table Jack had fashioned from a door—hand-dipped candles, a silver roach clip, Joy of Cooking, signed pottery in nonfunctional shapes. Nancy wondered what her parents had eaten for supper. Possibly fried steak, two kinds of peas, biscuits, blackberry pie. The music shifted and the songs merged together; Jack and Nancy kept dancing.
“There aren’t any stopping places,” Nancy said. She was crying. “Songs used to have stopping places in between.”
“Let’s just keep on dancing,” Jack said.
Nancy was thinking of the blackberry bushes at the farm in Kentucky, which spread so wildly they had to be burned down every few years. They grew on the banks of the creek, which in summer shrank to still, small occasional pools. After a while Nancy realized that Jack was talking to her. He was explaining how he could predict exactly when the last, dying chord on the album was about to end.
“Listen,” he said. “There. Right there.”
—
Nancy’s parents had met Jack a few months before the wedding, during spring break, when Jack and Nancy stopped in Kentucky on their way to Denver to see an old friend of Jack’s. The visit involved some elaborate lies about their sleeping arrangements on the trip.
At the supper table, Mother and Daddy passed bowls of food self-consciously. The table was set with some napkins left over from Christmas. The vegetables were soaked in bacon grease, and Jack took small helpings. Nancy sat rigidly, watching every movement, like a cat stationed near a bird feeder. Mother had gathered poke, because it was spring, and she said to Jack, “I bet you don’t eat poke salet up there.”
“It’s weeds,” said Nancy.
“I’ve never heard of it,” Jack said. He hesitated, then took a small serving.
“It’s poison if it gets too big,” Daddy said. He turned to Nancy’s mother. “I think you picked this too big. You’re going to poison us all.”
“He’s teasing,” Nancy said.
“The berries is what’s poison,” said Mother, laughing. “Wouldn’t that be something? They’ll say up there I tried to poison your boyfriend the minute I met him!”
Everyone laughed. Jack’s face was red. He was wearing an embroidered shirt. Nancy watched him trim the fat from his ham as precisely as if he were using an X-Acto knife on mat board.
“How’s Granny?” asked Nancy. Her grandmother was then living alone in her own house.
“Tolerable well,” said Daddy.
“We’ll go see her,” Jack said. “Nancy told me all about her.”
“She cooks her egg in her oats to keep from washing a extry dish,” Mother said.
Nancy played with her food. She was looking at the pink dining room wall and the plastic flowers in the window. On the afternoon Jack and Nancy first met, he took her to a junk shop, where he bought a stained-glass window for his bathroom. Nancy would never have thought of going to a junk shop. It would not have occurred to her to put a stained-glass window in a bathroom.
“What do you aim to be when you graduate?” Daddy asked Jack abruptly, staring at him. Jack’s hair looked oddly like an Irish setter’s ears, Nancy thought suddenly.
“Won’t you have to go in the army?” Mother asked.
“I’ll apply for an assistantship if my grades are good enough,” Jack said. “Anything to avoid the draft.”
Nancy’s father was leaning into his plate, as though he were concentrating deeply on each bite.
“He makes good grades,” Nancy said.
“Nancy always made all A’s,” Daddy said to Jack.
“We gave her a dollar for