Nancy Culpepper (5 page)

“Coal burns more efficiently than wood,” Jack says.

“Coal’s a lot cheaper in this area,” says Ted. “I wish I could switch.”

“My grandparents had big stone fireplaces in their country house,” says Jan, who comes from Connecticut. “They were so pleasant. I always looked forward to going there. Sometimes in the summer the evenings were cool and we’d have a fire. It was lovely.”

“I remember being cold,” says Nancy. “It was always very cold, even in the South.”

“The heat just goes up the chimney in a fireplace,” says Jack.

Nancy stares at Jack. She says, “I would stand in front of the fire until I was roasted. Then I would turn and roast the other side. In the evenings, my grandparents sat on the hearth and read the Bible. There wasn’t anything
lovely
about it. They were trying to keep warm. Of course, nobody had heard of insulation.”

“There goes Nancy, talking about her deprived childhood,” Jack says with a laugh.

Nancy says, “Jack is so concerned about wasting energy. But when he goes out he never wears a hat.” She looks at Jack. “Don’t you know your body heat just flies out the top of your head? It’s a chimney.”

Surprised by her tone, she almost breaks into tears.

It is the following evening, and Jack is flipping through some contact sheets of a series on solar hot-water heaters he is doing for a magazine. Robert sheds his goose-down vest, and he and Grover, on the floor, simultaneously inch away from the fire. Nancy is trying to read the novel written by the friend from Amherst, but the book is boring. She would not have recognized her witty friend from the past in the turgid prose she is reading.

“It’s a dump on the sixties,” she tells Jack when he asks. “A really cynical look. All the characters are types.”

“Are we in it?”

“No. I hope not. I think it’s based on that Phil Baxter who cracked up at that party.”

Grover raises his head, his eyes alert, and Robert jumps up, saying, “It’s time for Grover’s treat.”

He shakes a Pet-Tab from a plastic bottle and holds it before Grover’s nose. Grover bangs his tail against the rug as he crunches the pill.

Jack turns on the porch light and steps outside for a moment, returning with a shroud of cold air. “It’s starting to snow,” he says. “Come on out, Grover.”

Grover struggles to stand, and Jack heaves the dog’s hind legs over the threshold.

Later, in bed, Jack turns on his side and watches Nancy, reading her book, until she looks up at him.

“You read so much,” he says. “You’re always reading.”

“Hmm.”

“We used to have more fun. We used to be silly together.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Just something silly.”

“I can’t think of anything silly.” Nancy flips the page back, rereading. “God, this guy can’t write. I used to think he was so clever.”

In the dark, touching Jack tentatively, she says, “We’ve changed. We used to lie awake all night, thrilled just to touch each other.”

“We’ve been busy. That’s what happens. People get busy.”

“That scares me,” says Nancy. “Do you want to have another baby?”

“No. I want a dog.” Jack rolls away from her, and Nancy can hear him breathing into his pillow. She waits to hear if he will cry. She recalls Jack returning to her in California after Robert was born. He brought a God’s-eye, which he hung from the ceiling above Robert’s crib, to protect him. Jack never wore the sweater Nancy made for him. Instead, Grover slept on it. Nancy gave the dog her granny-square afghan too, and eventually, when they moved back East, she got rid of the pathetic evidence of her creative period—the crochet hooks, the piles of yarn, some splotchy batik tapestries. Now most of the objects in the house are Jack’s. He made the oak counters and the dining room table; he remodeled the studio; he chose the draperies; he photographed the pictures on the wall. If Jack were to leave again, there would be no way to remove his presence, the way the dog can disappear completely, with his sounds. Nancy revises the scene in her mind. The house is still there, but Nancy is not in it.

In the morning, there is a four-inch snow, with a drift blowing up the back-porch steps. From the kitchen window, Nancy watches her son float silently down the hill behind the house. At the end, he tumbles off his sled deliberately, wallowing in the snow, before standing up to wave, trying to catch her attention.

On the back porch, Nancy and Jack hold Grover over newspapers. Grover performs unselfconsciously now. Nancy says, “Maybe he can hang on, as long as we can do this.”

“But look at him, Nancy,” Jack says. “He’s in misery.”

Jack holds Grover’s collar and helps him slide over the threshold. Grover aims for his place by the fire.

After the snowplow passes, late in the morning, Nancy drives Robert to the school on slushy roads, all the while lecturing him on the absurdity of raising money to buy official Boy Scout equipment, especially on a snowy Saturday. The Boy Scouts are selling watersavers for toilet tanks in order to earn money for camping gear.

“I thought Boy Scouts spent their time earning badges,” says Nancy. “I thought you were supposed to learn about nature, instead of spending money on official Boy Scout pots and pans.”

“This is nature,” Robert says solemnly. “It’s ecology. Saving water when you flush is ecology.”

Later, Nancy and Jack walk in the woods together. Nancy walks behind Jack, stepping in his boot tracks. He shields her from the wind. Her hair is blowing. They walk briskly up a hill and emerge on a ridge that overlooks a valley. In the distance they can see a housing development, a radio tower, a winding road. House trailers dot the hillsides. A snowplow is going up a road, like a zipper in the landscape.

Jack says, “I’m going to call the vet Monday.”

Nancy gasps in cold air. She says, “Robert made us promise you won’t do anything without letting him in on it. That goes for me too.” When Jack doesn’t respond, she says, “I’d want to hang on, even if I was in a coma. There must be some spark, in the deep recesses of the mind, some twitch, a flicker of a dream—”

“A twitch that could make life worth living?” Jack laughs bitterly.

“Yes.” She points to the brilliantly colored sparkles the sun is making on the snow. “Those are the sparks I mean,” she says. “In the brain somewhere, something like that. That would be beautiful.”

“You’re weird, Nancy.”

“I learned it from you. I never would have noticed anything like that if I hadn’t known you, if you hadn’t got me stoned and made me look at your photographs.” She stomps her feet in the snow. Her toes are cold. “You educated me. I was so out of it when I met you. One day I was listening to Hank Williams and shelling corn for the chickens and the next day I was expected to know what wines went with what. Talk about weird.”

“You’re exaggerating. That was years ago. You always exaggerate your background.” He adds in a teasing tone, “Your humble origins.”

“We’ve been together fifteen years,” says Nancy. She stops him, holding his arm. Jack is squinting, looking at something in the distance. She goes on, “You said we didn’t do anything silly anymore. What should we do, Jack? Should we make angels in the snow?”

Jack touches his rough glove to her face. “We shouldn’t unless we really feel like it.”

It was the same as Jack chiding her to be honest, to be expressive. The same old Jack, she thought, relieved.

“Come and look,” Robert cries, bursting in the back door. He and Jack have been outside making a snowman. Nancy is rolling dough for a quiche. Jack will eat a quiche but not a custard pie, although they are virtually the same. She wipes her hands and goes to the door of the porch. She sees Grover swinging from the lower branch of the maple tree. Jack has rigged up a sling, so that the dog is supported in a harness, with the canvas from the back of a deck chair holding his stomach. His legs dangle free.

“Oh, Jack,” Nancy calls. “The poor thing.”

“I thought this might work,” Jack explains. “A support for his hind legs.” His arms cradle the dog’s head. “I did it for you,” he adds, looking at Nancy. “Don’t push him, Robert. I don’t think he wants to swing.”

Grover looks amazingly patient, like a cat in a doll bonnet.

“He hates it,” says Jack, unbuckling the harness.

“He can learn to like it,” Robert says, his voice rising shrilly.

On the day that Jack has planned to take Grover to the veterinarian, Nancy runs into a crisis at work. One of the children has been exposed to hepatitis, and it is necessary to vaccinate all of them. Nancy has to arrange the details, which means staying late. She telephones Jack to ask him to pick up Robert after school.

“I don’t know when I’ll be home,” she says. “This is an administrative nightmare. I have to call all the parents, get permissions, make arrangements with family doctors.”

“What will we do about Grover?”

“Please postpone it. I want to be with you then.”

“I want to get it over with,” says Jack impatiently. “I hate to put Robert through another day of this.”

“Robert will be glad of the extra time,” Nancy insists. “So will I.”

“I just want to face things,” Jack says. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want to cling to the past like you’re doing.”

“Please wait for us,” Nancy says, her voice calm and controlled.

On the telephone, Nancy is authoritative, a quick decision-maker. The problem at work is a reprieve. She feels free, on her own. During the afternoon, she works rapidly and efficiently, filing reports, consulting health authorities, notifying parents. She talks with the disease-control center in Atlanta, inquiring about guidelines. She checks on supplies of gamma globulin. She is so preoccupied that in the middle of the afternoon, when Robert suddenly appears in her office, she is startled, for a fleeting instant not recognizing him.

He says, “Kevin has a sore throat. Is that hepatitis?”

“It’s probably just a cold. I’ll talk to his mother.” Nancy is holding Robert’s arm, partly to keep him still, partly to steady herself.

“When do I have to get a shot?” Robert asks.

“Tomorrow.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes. It won’t hurt, though.”

“I guess it’s a good thing this happened,” Robert says bravely.

“Now we get to have Grover another day.” Robert spills his books on the floor and bends to pick them up. When he looks up, he says, “Daddy doesn’t care about him. He just wants to get rid of him. He wants to kill him.”

“Oh, Robert, that’s not true,” says Nancy. “He just doesn’t want Grover to suffer.”

“But Grover still has half a bottle of Pet-Tabs,” Robert says. “What will we do with them?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy says. She hands Robert his numbers work-book. Like a tape loop, the face of her child as a stranger replays in her mind. Robert has her plain brown hair, her coloring, but his eyes are Jack’s—demanding and eerily penetrating, eyes that could pin her to the wall.

After Robert leaves, Nancy lowers the venetian blinds. Her office is brilliantly lighted by the sun, through south-facing windows. The design was accidental, nothing to do with solar energy. It is an old building. Bars of light slant across her desk, like a formidable scene in a forties movie. Nancy’s secretary goes home, but Nancy works on, contacting all the parents she couldn’t get during working hours. One parent anxiously reports that her child has a swollen lymph node on his neck.

“No,” Nancy says firmly. “That is
not
a symptom of hepatitis. But you should ask the doctor about that when you go in for the gamma globulin.”

Gamma globulin. The phrase rolls off her tongue. She tries to remember an odd title of a movie about gamma rays. It comes to her as she is dialing the telephone:
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.
She has never known what that title meant.

The office grows dim, and Nancy turns on the lights. The school is quiet, as though the threat of an infectious disease has emptied the corridors, leaving her in charge. She recalls another movie,
The Andromeda Strain.
Her work is like the thrill of watching drama, a threat held safely at a distance. Historians have to be detached, Nancy once said, defensively, to Jack, when he accused her of being unfriendly to shopkeepers and waiters. Where was all that Southern hospitality he had heard so much about? he wanted to know. It hits her now that historians are detached about the past, not the present. Jack has learned some of this detachment; he wants to let Grover go. Nancy thinks of the stark images in his recent photographs—snow, icicles, fences, the long shot of Grover on the hill like a stray wolf. Nancy had always liked Jack’s pictures simply for what they were, but Jack didn’t see the people or the objects in them. He saw illusions. The vulnerability of the image, he once said, was what he was after. The image was meant to evoke its own death, he told her.

By the time Nancy finishes the scheduling, the night maintenance crew has arrived, and the coffeepot they keep in a closet is perking. Nancy removes her contact lenses and changes into her fleece-lined boots. In the parking lot, she maneuvers cautiously along a path past a mountain of black-stained snow. It is so cold that she makes sparks on the vinyl car seat. The engine is cold, slow to turn over.

At home, Nancy is surprised to see balloons in the living room. The stove is blazing and Robert’s face is red from the heat.

“We’re having a party,” he says. “For Grover.”

“There’s a surprise for you in the oven,” says Jack, handing Nancy a glass of sherry. “Because you worked so hard.”

“Grover had ice cream,” Robert says. “We got Häagen-Dazs.”

“He looks cheerful,” Nancy says, sinking onto the couch next to Jack. Her glasses are fogged up. She removes them and wipes them with a Kleenex. When she puts them back on, she sees Grover looking at her, his head on his paws. His tail thumps. For the first time, Nancy feels ready to let the dog die.

When Nancy tells about the gamma globulin, the phrase has stopped rolling off her tongue so trippingly. She laughs. She is so tired she throbs with relief. She drinks the sherry too fast. Suddenly, she sits up straight and announces, “I’ve got a clue. I’m thinking of a parking lot.”