by Ann Beattie
“Isn’t this place awful?” he says. “But the spiced shrimp are great.”
Betty smiles.
“If you don’t feel like smiling, don’t smile,” he says.
“Then all the pills would be for nothing.”
“Everything is for nothing,” he says.
“If you weren’t drinking you could take one of the pills,” Betty says. “Then you wouldn’t feel that way.”
*
“Did you see Esquire?” James asks.
“No,” MacDonald says. “Why?”
“Wait here,” James says.
MacDonald waits. A dwarf comes into the room and looks under his chair. MacDonald raises his feet.
“Excuse me,” the dwarf says. He turns cartwheels to leave the room.
“He used to be with the circus,” James says, returning. “He leads us in exercises now.”
MacDonald looks at Esquire. There has been a convention of dwarfs at the Oakland Hilton, and Esquire got pictures of it. Two male dwarfs are leading a delighted female dwarf down a runway. A baseball team of dwarfs. A group picture. Someone named Larry—MacDonald does not look back up at the picture to see which one he is—says, “I haven’t had so much fun since I was born.” MacDonald turns another page. An article on Daniel Ellsberg.
“Huh,” MacDonald says.
“How come Esquire didn’t know about our dwarf house?” James asks. “They could have come here.”
“Listen,” MacDonald says, “Mother asked me to bring this to you. I don’t mean to insult you, but she made me promise I’d deliver it. You know she’s very worried about you.”
“What is it?” James asks.
MacDonald gives him the piece of paper that Mrs. Esposito wrote instructions on in English.
“Take it back,” James says.
“No. Then I’ll have to tell her you refused it.”
“Tell her.”
“No. She’s miserable. I know it’s crazy, but just keep it for her sake.”
James turns and throws the jar. Bright yellow liquid runs down the wall.
“Tell her not to send you back here either,” James says. MacDonald thinks that if James were his size he would have hit him instead of only speaking.
“Come back and hit me if you want,” MacDonald hollers. “Stand on the arm of this chair and hit me in the face.”
James does not come back. A dwarf in the hallway says to MacDonald, as he is leaving, “It was a good idea to be sarcastic to him.”
*
MacDonald and his wife and mother and Mrs. Esposito stand amid a cluster of dwarfs and one giant waiting for the wedding to begin. James and his bride are being married on the lawn outside the church. They are still inside with the minister. His mother is already weeping. “I wish I had never married your father,” she says, and borrows Mrs. Esposito’s handkerchief to dry her eyes. Mrs. Esposito is wearing her jungle dress again. On the way over she told MacDonald’s wife that her husband had locked her out of the house and that she only had one dress. “It’s lucky it was such a pretty one,” his wife said, and Mrs. Esposito shyly protested that it wasn’t very fancy, though.
The minister and James and his bride come out of the church onto the lawn. The minister is a hippie, or something like a hippie: a tall, white-faced man with stringy blond hair and black motorcycle boots. “Friends,” the minister says, “before the happy marriage of these two people, we will release this bird from its cage, symbolic of the new freedom of marriage, and of the ascension of the spirit.”
The minister is holding the cage with the parakeet in it.
“MacDonald,” his wife whispers, “that’s the parakeet. You can’t release a pet into the wild.”
His mother disapproves of all this. Perhaps her tears are partly disapproval, and not all hatred of his father.
The bird is released: it flies shakily into a tree and disappears into the new spring foliage.
The dwarfs clap and cheer. The minister wraps his arms around himself and spins. In a second the wedding ceremony begins, and just a few minutes later it is over. James kisses the bride, and the dwarfs swarm around them. MacDonald thinks of a piece of Hershey bar he dropped in the woods once on a camping trip, and how the ants were all over it before he finished lacing his boot. He and his wife step forward, followed by his mother and Mrs. Esposito. MacDonald sees that the bride is smiling beautifully—a smile no pills could produce—and that the sun is shining on her hair so that it sparkles. She looks small, and bright, and so lovely that MacDonald, on his knees to kiss her, doesn’t want to get up.
Snake’s Shoes
The little girl sat between her Uncle Sam’s legs. Alice and Richard, her parents, sat next to them. They were divorced, and Alice had remarried. She was holding a ten-month-old baby. It had been Sam’s idea that they all get together again, and now they were sitting on a big flat rock not far out into the pond.
“Look,” the little girl said.
They turned and saw a very small snake coming out of a crack between two rocks on the shore.
“It’s nothing,” Richard said.
“It’s a snake,” Alice said. “You have to be careful of them. Never touch them.”
“Excuse me,” Richard said. “Always be careful of everything.”
That was what the little girl wanted to hear, because she didn’t like the way the snake looked.
“You know what snakes do?” Sam asked her.
“What?” she said.
“They can tuck their tail into their mouth and turn into a hoop.”
“Why do they do that?” she asked.
“So they can roll down hills easily.”
“Why don’t they just walk?”
“They don’t have feet. See?” Sam said.
The snake was still; it must have sensed their presence.
“Tell her the truth now,” Alice said to Sam.
The little girl looked at her uncle.
“They have feet, but they shed them in the summer,” Sam said. “If you ever see tiny shoes in the woods, they belong to the snakes.”
“Tell her the truth,” Alice said again.
“Imagination is better than reality,” Sam said to the little girl.
The little girl patted the baby. She loved all the people who were sitting on the rock. Everybody was happy, except that in the back of their minds the grownups thought that their being together again was bizarre. Alice’s husband had gone to Germany to look after his father, who was ill. When Sam learned about this, he called Richard, who was his brother. Richard did not think that it was a good idea for the three of them to get together again. Sam called the next day, and Richard told him to stop asking about it. But when Sam called again that night, Richard said sure, what the hell.
They sat on the rock looking at the pond. Earlier in the afternoon a game warden had come by and he let the little girl look at the crows in the trees through his binoculars. She was impressed. Now she said that she wanted a crow.
“I’ve got a good story about crows,” Sam said to her. “I know how they got their name. You see, they all used to be sparrows, and they annoyed the king, so he ordered one of his servants to kill them. The servant didn’t want to kill all the sparrows, so he went outside and looked at them and prayed, ‘Grow. Grow.’ And miraculously they did. The king could never kill anything as big and as grand as a crow, so the king and the birds and the servant were all happy.”
“But why are they called crows?” the little girl said.
“Well,” Sam said, “long, long ago, a historical linguist heard the story, but he misunderstood what he was told and thought that the servant had said ‘crow,’ instead of ‘grow.’”
“Tell her the truth,” Alice said.
“That’s the truth,” Sam said. “A lot of our vocabulary is twisted around.”
“Is that true?” the little girl asked her father.
“Don’t ask me,” he said.
Back when Richard and Alice were engaged, Sa
m had tried to talk Richard out of it. He told him that he would be tied down; he said that if Richard hadn’t got used to regimentation in the Air Force he wouldn’t even consider marriage at twenty-four. He was so convinced that it was a bad idea that he cornered Alice at the engagement party (there were heart-shaped boxes of heart-shaped mints wrapped in paper printed with hearts for everybody to take home) and asked her to back down. At first Alice thought this was amusing. “You make me sound like a vicious dog,” she said to Sam. “It’s not going to work out,” Sam said. “Don’t do it.” He showed her the little heart he was holding. “Look at these God-damned things,” he said.
“They weren’t my idea. They were your mother’s,” Alice said. She walked away. Sam watched her go. She had on a lacy beige dress. Her shoes sparkled. She was very pretty. He wished she would not marry his brother, who had been kicked around all his life—first by their mother, then by the Air Force (“Think of me as you fly into the blue,” their mother had written Richard once. Christ!)—and now would be watched over by a wife.
The summer Richard and Alice married, they invited Sam to spend his vacation with them. It was nice that Alice didn’t hold grudges. She also didn’t hold a grudge against her husband, who burned a hole in an armchair and who tore the mainsail on their sailboat beyond repair by going out on the lake in a storm. She was a very patient woman. Sam found that he liked her. He liked the way she worried about Richard out in a boat in the middle of the storm. After that, Sam spent part of every summer vacation with them, and went to their house every Thanksgiving. Two years ago, just when Sam was convinced that everything was perfect, Richard told him that they were getting divorced. The next day, when Sam was alone with Alice after breakfast, he asked why.
“He burns up all the furniture,” she said. “He acts like a madman with that boat. He’s swamped her three times this year. I’ve been seeing someone else.”
“Who have you been seeing?”
“No one you know.”
“I’m curious, Alice. I just want to know his name.”
“Hans.”
“Hans. Is he a German?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in love with this German?”
“I’m not going to talk about it. Why are you talking to me? Why don’t you go sympathize with your brother?”
“He knows about this German?”
“His name is Hans.”
“That’s a German name,” Sam said, and he went outside to find Richard and sympathize with him.
Richard was crouching beside his daughter’s flower garden. His daughter was sitting on the grass across from him, talking to her flowers.
“You haven’t been bothering Alice, have you?” Richard said.
“Richard, she’s seeing a God-damned German,” Sam said.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“What are you talking about?” the little girl asked.
That silenced both of them. They stared at the bright-orange flowers.
“Do you still love her?” Sam asked after his second drink.
They were in a bar, off a boardwalk. After their conversation about the German, Richard had asked Sam to go for a drive. They had driven thirty or forty miles to this bar, which neither of them had seen before and neither of them liked, although Sam was fascinated by a conversation now taking place between two blond transvestites on the bar stools to his right. He wondered if Richard knew that they weren’t really women, but he hadn’t been able to think of a way to work it into the conversation, and he started talking about Alice instead.
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I think you were right. The Air Force, Mother, marriage—”
“They’re not real women,” Sam said.
“What?”
Sam thought that Richard had been staring at the two people he had been watching. A mistake on his part; Richard had just been glancing around the bar.
“Those two blondes on the bar stools. They’re men.”
Richard studied them. “Are you sure?” he said.
“Of course I’m sure. I live in N.Y.C., you know.”
“Maybe I’ll come live with you. Can I do that?”
“You always said you’d rather die than live in New York.”
“Well, are you telling me to kill myself, or is it O.K. if I move in with you?”
“If you want to,” Sam said. He shrugged. “There’s only one bedroom, you know.”
“I’ve been to your apartment, Sam.”
“I just wanted to remind you. You don’t seem to be thinking too clearly.”
“You’re right,” Richard said. “A God-damned German.”
The barmaid picked up their empty glasses and looked at them.
“This gentleman’s wife is in love with another man,” Sam said to her.
“I overheard,” she said.
“What do you think of that?” Sam asked her.
“Maybe German men aren’t as creepy as American men,” she said. “Do you want refills?”
After Richard moved in with Sam he began bringing animals into the apartment. He brought back a dog, a cat that stayed through the winter, and a blue parakeet that had been in a very small cage that Richard could not persuade the pet-store owner to replace. The bird flew around the apartment. The cat was wild for it, and Sam was relieved when the cat eventually disappeared. Once, Sam saw a mouse in the kitchen and assumed that it was another of Richard’s pets, until he realized that there was no cage for it in the apartment. When Richard came home he said that the mouse was not his. Sam called the exterminator, who refused to come in and spray the apartment because the dog had growled at him. Sam told this to his brother, to make him feel guilty for his irresponsibility. Instead, Richard brought another cat in. He said that it would get the mouse, but not for a while yet—it was only a kitten. Richard fed it cat food off the tip of a spoon.
Richard’s daughter came to visit. She loved all the animals—the big mutt that let her brush him, the cat that slept in her lap, the bird that she followed from room to room, talking to it, trying to get it to land on the back of her hand. For Christmas, she gave her father a rabbit. It was a fat white rabbit with one brown ear, and it was kept in a cage on the night table when neither Sam nor Richard was in the apartment to watch it and keep it away from the cat and the dog. Sam said that the only vicious thing Alice ever did was giving her daughter the rabbit to give Richard for Christmas. Eventually the rabbit died of a fever. It cost Sam one hundred and sixty dollars to treat the rabbit’s illness; Richard did not have a job, and could not pay anything. Sam kept a book of I.O.U.S. In it he wrote, “Death of rabbit—$160 to vet.” When Richard did get a job, he looked over the debt book. “Why couldn’t you just have written down the sum?” he asked Sam. “Why did you want to remind me about the rabbit?” He was so upset that he missed the second morning of his new job. “That was inhuman,” he said to Sam. “ ‘Death of rabbit—$160’ ”—that was horrible. The poor rabbit. God damn you.” He couldn’t get control of himself.
A few weeks later, Sam and Richard’s mother died. Alice wrote to Sam, saying that she was sorry. Alice had never liked their mother, but she was fascinated by the woman. She never got over her spending a hundred and twenty-five dollars on paper lanterns for the engagement party. After all these years, she was still thinking about it. “What do you think became of the lanterns after the party?” she wrote in her letter of condolence. It was an odd letter, and it didn’t seem that Alice was very happy. Sam even forgave her for the rabbit. He wrote her a long letter, saying that they should all get together. He knew a motel out in the country where they could stay, perhaps for a whole weekend. She wrote back, saying that it sounded like a good idea. The only thing that upset her about it was that his secretary had typed his letter. In her letter to Sam, she pointed out several times that he could have written in longhand. Sam noticed that both Alice and Richard seemed to be raving. Maybe they would get back together.
Now they
were all staying at the same motel, in different rooms. Alice and her daughter and the baby were in one room, and Richard and Sam had rooms down the hall. The little girl spent the nights with different people. When Sam bought two pounds of fudge, she said she was going to spend the night with him. The next night, Alice’s son had colic, and when Sam looked out his window he saw Richard holding the baby, walking around and around the swimming pool. Alice was asleep. Sam knew this because the little girl left her mother’s room when she fell asleep and came looking for him.
“Do you want to take me to the carnival?” she asked.
She was wearing a nightgown with blue bears upside down on it, headed for a crash at the hem.
“The carnival’s closed,” Sam said. “It’s late, you know.”
“Isn’t anything open?”
“Maybe the doughnut shop. That’s open all night I suppose you want to go there?”
“I love doughnuts,” she said.
She rode to the doughnut shop on Sam’s shoulders, wrapped in his raincoat. He kept thinking, Ten years ago I would never have believed this. But he believed it now; there was a definite weight on his shoulders, and there were two legs hanging down his chest.
The next afternoon, they sat on the rock again, wrapped in towels after a swim. In the distance, two hippies and an Irish setter, all in bandannas, rowed toward shore from an island.
“I wish I had a dog,” the little girl said.
“It just makes you sad when you have to go away from them,” her father said.
“I wouldn’t leave it.”
“You’re just a kid. You get dragged all over,” her father said. “Did you ever think you’d be here today?”
“It’s strange,” Alice said.
“It was a good idea,” Sam said. “I’m always right.”
“You’re not always right,” the little girl said.
“When have I ever been wrong?”
“You tell stories,” she said.
“Your uncle is imaginative,” Sam corrected.
“Tell me another one,” she said to him.
