Nancy Culpepper by Bobbie Ann Mason Read Free Book Online Page A

warped-looking creature, like one of her clumsily made crafts. When Jack returned, she was in a sprawling adobe hospital, nursing a baby the color of scalded skin. The old song “In My Adobe Hacienda” was going through her head. Jack stood over her behind an unfamiliar beard, grinning in disbelief, stroking the baby as though he were a new pet. Nancy felt she had fooled Jack into thinking she had done something original at last.
    “Grover’s dying to see you,” he said to her. “They wouldn’t let him in here.”
    “I’ll be glad to see Grover,” said Nancy. “I missed him.”
    She had missed, she realized then, his various expressions: the staccato barks of joy, the forceful, menacing barks at strangers, the eerie howls when he heard cat fights at night.
    Those early years together were confused and dislocated. After leaving graduate school, at the beginning of the seventies, they lived in a number of places—sometimes on the road, with Grover, in a van— but after Robert was born they settled in Pennsylvania. Their life is orderly. Jack is a free-lance photographer, with his own studio at home. Nancy, unable to find a use for her degree in history, returned to school, taking education and administration courses. Now she is assistant principal of a small private elementary school, which Robert attends. Now and then Jack frets about becoming too middle-class. He has become semipolitical about energy, sometimes attending antinuclear power rallies. He has been building a sun space for his studio and has been insulating the house. “Retrofitting” is the term he uses for making the house energy-efficient.
    “Insulation is his hobby,” Nancy told an old friend from graduate school, Tom Green, who telephoned unexpectedly one day recently. “He insulates on weekends.”
    “Maybe he’ll turn into a butterfly—he could insulate himself into a cocoon,” said Tom, who Nancy always thought was funny. She had not seen him in ten years. He called to say he was sending a novel he had written—“about all the crazy stuff we did back then.”
    The dog is forcing Nancy to think of how Jack has changed in the years since then. He is losing his hair, but he doesn’t seem concerned. Jack was always fanatical about being honest. He used to be insensitive about his directness. “I’m just being honest,” he would say pleasantly, boyishly, when he hurt people’s feelings. He told Nancy she was uptight, that no one ever knew what she thought, that she should be more expressive. He said she “played games” with people, hiding her feelings behind her coy Southern smile. He is more tolerant now, less judgmental. He used to criticize her for drinking Cokes and eating pastries. He didn’t like her lipstick, and she stopped wearing it. But Nancy has changed too. She is too sophisticated now to eat fried foods and rich pies and cakes, indulging in them only when she goes to Kentucky. She uses makeup now—so sparingly that Jack does not notice. Her cool reserve, her shyness, has changed to cool assurance, with only the slightest shift. Inwardly, she has reorganized. “It’s like retrofitting,” she said to Jack once, but he didn’t notice any irony.
    It wasn’t until two years ago that Nancy learned that he had lied to her when he told her he had been at the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert in 1966, just as she had, only two months before they met. When he confessed his lie, he claimed he had wanted to identify with her and impress her because he thought of her as someone so mysterious and aloof that he could not hold her attention. Nancy, who had in fact been intimidated by Jack’s directness, was troubled to learn about his peculiar deception. It was out of character. She felt a part of her past had been ripped away. More recently, when John Lennon died, Nancy and Jack watched the silent vigil from Central Park on TV and cried in each other’s arms. Everybody that week was saying that they had lost their