Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [82]
“In graduate school they don’t give A’s,” said Nancy. “They just give S’s and U’s.”
Jack wadded up his napkin. Then Mother served fried pies with white sauce. “Nancy always loved these better than anything,” she said.
After supper, Nancy showed Jack the farm. As they walked through the fields, Nancy felt that he was seeing peaceful landscapes—arrangements of picturesque cows, an old red barn. She had never thought of the place this way before; it reminded her of prints in a dime store.
—
While her mother washes the dishes, Nancy takes Granny’s dinner to her, and sits in a rocking chair while Granny eats in bed. The food is on an old TV-dinner tray. The compartments hold chicken and dressing, mashed potatoes, field peas, green beans, and vinegar slaw. The servings are tiny—six green beans, a spoonful of peas.
Granny’s teeth no longer fit, and she has to bite sideways, like a cat. She wears the lower teeth only during meals, but she will not get new ones. She says it would be wasteful to be buried with a new three-hundred-dollar set of teeth. In between bites, Granny guzzles iced tea from a Kentucky Lakes mug. “That slaw don’t have enough sugar in it,” she says. “It makes my mouth draw up.” She smacks her lips.
Nancy says, “I’ve heard the food is really good at the Orchard Acres Rest Home.”
Granny does not reply for a moment. She is working on a chicken gristle, which causes her teeth to clatter. Then she says, “I ain’t going nowhere.”
“Mother and Daddy are moving back into their house. You don’t want to stay here by yourself, do you?” Nancy’s voice sounds hollow to her.
“I’ll be all right. I can do for myself.”
When Granny swallows, it sounds like water spilling from a bucket into a cistern. After Nancy’s parents moved in, they covered Granny’s old cistern, but Nancy still remembers drawing the bucket up from below. The chains made a sound like crying.
Granny pushes her food with a piece of bread, cleaning her tray. “I can do a little cooking,” she says. “I can sweep.”
“Try this boiled custard, Granny. I made it just for you. Just the way you used to make it.”
“It ain’t yaller enough,” says Granny, tasting the custard. “Store-bought eggs.”
When she finishes, she removes her lower teeth and sloshes them in a plastic tumbler on the bedside table. Nancy looks away. On the wall are Nancy’s high school graduation photograph and a picture of Jesus. Nancy looks sassy; her graduation hat resembles a tilted lid. Jesus has a halo, set at about the same angle.
Now Nancy ventures a question about the pictures hidden behind the closet wall. At first Granny is puzzled. Then she seems to remember.
“They’re behind the stovepipe,” she says. Grimacing with pain, she stretches her legs out slowly, and then, holding her head, she sinks back into her pillows and draws the quilt over her shoulders. “I’ll look for them one of these days—when I’m able.”
—
Jack photographs weeds, twigs, pond reflections, silhouettes of Robert against the sun with his arms flung out like a scarecrow’s. Sometimes he works in the evenings in his studio at home, drinking tequila sunrises and composing bizarre still lifes with light bulbs, wine bottles, Tinker Toys, Lucite cubes. He makes arrangements of gourds look like breasts.
On the day Nancy tried to explain to Jack about her need to save Granny’s pictures, a hailstorm interrupted her. It was the only hailstorm she had ever seen in the North, and she had forgotten all about them. Granny always said a hailstorm meant that God was cleaning out his icebox. Nancy stood against a white Masonite wall mounted with a new series of photographs and looked out the window at tulips being smashed. The ice pellets littered the ground like shattered glass. Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the hailstorm was over.
“Pictures didn’t use to be so common,” Nancy said. Jack’s trash can was stuffed with rejected prints, and Robert’s face was crumpled on top. “I want to keep Granny’s pictures as reminders.”
“If you think that will solve anything,” said Jack, squinting