Shiloh and Other Stories (17 page)

Larry started coming out to the house soon after I had a six-month checkup. I can’t remember what signals passed between us, but it was suddenly appropriate that he drop by. When I saw his truck out on the road that day, I knew it would turn up my lane. The truck has a chrome streak on it that makes it look like a rocket, and on the doors it has flames painted.

“I brought you some ice cream,” he said.

“I didn’t know dentists made house calls. What kind of ice cream is it?”

“I thought you’d like choc-o-mint.”

“You’re right.”

“I know you have a sweet tooth.”

“You’re just trying to give me cavities, so you can charge me thirty dollars a tooth.”

I opened the screen door to get dishes. One cat went in and another went out. The changing of the guard. Larry and I sat on the porch and ate ice cream and watched crows in the corn. The corn had shot up after a recent rain.

“You shouldn’t go to Louisville,” said Larry. “This part of Kentucky is the prettiest. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

“I never used to think that. Boy, I couldn’t wait to get out!” The ice cream was thrillingly cold. I wondered if Larry envied me. Compared to him, I was a world traveler. I had lived in a commune in Aspen, backpacked through the Rockies, and worked on the National Limited as one of the first female porters. When Larry was in high school, he was known as a hell-raiser, so the whole town was amazed when he became a dentist, married, and settled down. Now he was divorced.

Larry and I sat on the porch for an interminable time on that sultry day, each waiting for some external sign—a sudden shift in the weather, a sound, an event of some kind—to bring our bodies together. Finally, it was something I said about my new filling. He leaped up to look in my mouth.

“You should have let me take X-rays,” he said.

“I told you I don’t believe in all that radiation.”

“The amount is teensy,” said Larry, holding my jaw. A mouth is a word processor, I thought suddenly, as I tried to speak.

“Besides,” he said, “I always use the lead apron to catch any fragmentation.”

“What are you talking about?” I cried, jerking loose. I imagined splintering X-rays zinging around the room. Larry patted me on the knee.

“I should put on some music,” I said. He followed me inside.

—

Stephen is on the phone. It is 3:00
P
.
M
. and I am eating supper—pork and beans, cottage cheese and dill pickles. My routines are cockeyed since he left.

“I found us a house!” he says excitedly. His voice is so familiar I can almost see him, and I realize that I miss him. “I want you to come up here this weekend and take a look at it,” he says.

“Do I have to?” My mouth is full of pork and beans.

“I can’t buy it unless you see it first.”

“I don’t care what it looks like.”

“Sure you do. But you’ll like it. It’s a three-bedroom brick with a two-car garage, finished basement, dining alcove, patio—”

“Does it have a canning kitchen?” I want to know.

Stephen laughs. “No, but it has a rec room.”

I quake at the thought of a rec room. I tell Stephen, “I know
this is crazy, but I think we’ll have to set up a kennel in back for the cats, to keep them out of traffic.”

I tell Stephen about the New Jersey veterinarian I saw on a talk show who keeps an African lioness, an ocelot, and three margays in his yard in the suburbs. They all have the run of his house. “Cats aren’t that hard to get along with,” the vet said.

“Aren’t you carrying this a little far?” Stephen asks, sounding worried. He doesn’t suspect how far I might be carrying things. I have managed to swallow the last trace of the food, as if it were guilt.

“What do
you
think?” I ask abruptly.

“I don’t know what to think,” he says.

I fall silent. I am holding Ellen, the cat who had a vaginal infection not long ago. The vet X-rayed her and found she was pregnant. She lost the kittens, because of the X-ray, but the miscarriage was incomplete, and she developed a rare infection called pyometra and had to be spayed. I wrote every detail of this to my parents, thinking they would care, but they did not mention it in their letters. Their minds are on the condominium they are planning to buy when this farm is sold. Now Stephen is talking about our investments and telling me things to do at the bank. When we buy a house, we will have to get a complicated mortgage.

“The thing about owning real estate outright,” he says, “is that one’s assets aren’t liquid.”

“Daddy always taught me to avoid debt.”

“That’s not the way it works anymore.”

“He’s going to pay cash for his condo.”

“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’s still money buried in your yard.”

“Maybe. My grandmother was very frugal. She wouldn’t let go of
anything.
”

“Some people are like that.”

Larry wears a cloudy expression of love. Everything about me that I find dreary he finds intriguing. He moves his silvery token (a flatiron) around the board so carefully, like a child learning to cross the street. Outside, a cat is yowling. I do not recognize it as one of mine. There is nothing so mournful as the yowling of a homeless cat. When a stray appears, the cats sit around, fascinated, while it eats, and then later, just when it starts to feel secure, they gang up on it and chase it away.

“This place is full of junk that no one could throw away,” I say distractedly. I have just been sent to jail. I’m thinking of the boxes in the attic, the rusted tools in the barn. In a cabinet in the canning kitchen I found some Bag Balm, antiseptic salve to soften cows’ udders. Once I used teat extenders to feed a sick kitten. The cows are gone, but I feel their presence like ghosts. “I’ve been reading up on cats,” I say suddenly. The vodka is making me plunge into something I know I cannot explain. “I don’t want you to think I’m this crazy cat freak with a mattress full of money.”

“Of course I don’t.” Larry lands on Virginia Avenue and proceeds to negotiate a complicated transaction.

“In the wild, there are two kinds of cat populations,” I tell him when he finishes his move. “Residents and transients. Some stay put, in their fixed home ranges, and others are on the move. They don’t have real homes. Everybody always thought that the ones who establish the territories are the most successful—like the capitalists who get ahold of Park Place.” (I’m eyeing my opportunities on the board.) “They are the strongest, while the transients are the bums, the losers.”

“Is that right? I didn’t know that.” Larry looks genuinely surprised. I think he is surprised at how far the subject itself extends. He is such a specialist. Teeth.

I continue bravely. “The thing is—this is what the scientists are wondering about now—it may be that the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence. They can’t decide.”

“That’s interesting.” The Bloody Marys are making Larry seem very satisfied. He is the most relaxed man I’ve ever known. “None of that is true of domestic cats,” Larry is saying. “They’re all screwed up.”

“I bet somewhere there are some who are footloose and fancy free,” I say, not believing it. I buy two houses on Park Place and almost go broke. I think of living in Louisville. Stephen said the house he wants to buy is not far from Iroquois Park. I’m reminded of Indians. When certain Indians got tired of living in a place—when they used up the soil, or the garbage pile got too high—they moved on to the next place.

—

It is a hot summer night, and Larry and I are driving back from Paducah. We went out to eat and then we saw a movie. We are rather careless about being seen together in public. Before we left the house, I brushed my teeth twice and used dental floss. On the way, Larry told me of a patient who was a hemophiliac and couldn’t floss. Working on his teeth was very risky.

We ate at a place where you choose your food from pictures on a wall, then wait at a numbered table for the food to appear. On another wall was a framed arrangement of farm tools against red felt. Other objects—saw handles, scythes, pulleys—were mounted on wood like fish trophies. I could hardly eat for looking at the tools. I was wondering what my father’s old tit-cups and dehorning shears would look like on the wall of a restaurant. Larry was unusually quiet during the meal. His reticence exaggerated his customary gentleness. He even ate french fries cautiously.

On the way home, the air is rushing through the truck. My elbow is propped in the window, feeling the cooling air like water. I think of the pickup truck as a train, swishing through the night.

Larry says then, “Do you want me to stop coming out to see you?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“I don’t have to be an Einstein to tell that you’re bored with me.”

“I don’t know. I still don’t want to go to Louisville, though.”

“I don’t want you to go. I wish you would just stay here and we would be together.”

“I wish it could be that way,” I say, trembling slightly. “I wish that was right.”

We round a curve. The night is black. The yellow line in the road is faded. In the other lane I suddenly see a rabbit move. It is hopping in place, the way runners will run in place. Its forelegs are frantically working, but its rear end has been smashed and it cannot get out of the road.

By the time we reach home I have become hysterical. Larry has his arms around me, trying to soothe me, but I cannot speak
intelligibly and I push him away. In my mind, the rabbit is a tape loop that crowds out everything else.

Inside the house, the phone rings and Larry answers. I can tell from his expression that it is Stephen calling. It was crazy to let Larry answer the phone. I was not thinking. I will have to swear on a stack of cats that nothing is going on. When Larry hands me the phone I am incoherent. Stephen is saying something nonchalant, with a sly question in his voice. Sitting on the floor, I’m rubbing my feet vigorously. “Listen,” I say in a tone of great urgency. “I’m coming to Louisville—to see that house. There’s this guy here who’ll give me a ride in his truck—”

Stephen is annoyed with me. He seems not to have heard what I said, for he is launching into a speech about my anxiety.