by Ann Beattie
“I can’t think of one right now.”
“Tell the one about the snakes’ shoes.”
“Your uncle was kidding about the snakes, you know,” Alice said.
“I know,” she said. Then she said to Sam, “Are you going to tell another one?”
“I’m not telling stories to people who don’t believe them,” Sam said.
“Come on,” she said.
Sam looked at her. She had bony knees, and her hair was brownish-blond. It didn’t lighten in the sunshine like her mother’s. She was not going to be as pretty as her mother. He rested his hand on the top of her head.
The clouds were rolling quickly across the sky, and when they moved a certain way it was possible for them to see the moon, full and faint in the sky. The crows were still in the treetops. A fish jumped near the rock, and someone said, “Look,” and everyone did—late, but in time to see the circles widening where it had landed.
“What did you marry Hans for?” Richard asked.
“I don’t know why I married either of you,” Alice said.
“Where did you tell him you were going while he was away?” Richard asked.
“To see my sister.”
“How is your sister?” he asked.
She laughed. “Fine, I guess.”
“What’s funny?” Richard asked.
“Our conversation,” she said.
Sam was helping his niece off the rock. “We’ll take a walk,” he said to her. “I have a long story for you, but it will bore the rest of them.”
The little girl’s knees stuck out. Sam felt sorry for her. He lifted her on his shoulders and cupped his hands over her knees so he wouldn’t have to look at them.
“What’s the story?” she said.
“One time,” Sam said, “I wrote a book about your mother.”
“What was it about?” the little girl asked.
“It was about a little girl who met all sorts of interesting animals—a rabbit who kept showing her his pocket watch, who was very upset because he was late—”
“I know that book,” she said. “You didn’t write that.”
“I did write it. But at the time I was very shy, and I didn’t want to admit that I’d written it, so I signed another name to it.”
“You’re not shy,” the little girl said.
Sam continued walking, ducking whenever a branch hung low.
“Do you think there are more snakes?” she asked.
“If there are, they’re harmless. They won’t hurt you.”
“Do they ever hide in trees?”
“No snakes are going to get you,” Sam said. “Where was I?”
“You were talking about Alice in Wonderland.”
“Don’t you think I did a good job with that book?” Sam asked.
“You’re silly,” she said.
It was evening—cool enough for them to wish they had more than two towels to wrap around themselves. The little girl was sitting between her father’s legs. A minute before, he had said that she was cold and they should go, but she said that she wasn’t and even managed to stop shivering. Alice’s son was asleep, squinting. Small black insects clustered on the water in front of the rock. It was their last night there.
“Where will we go?” Richard said.
“How about a seafood restaurant? The motel owner said he could get a babysitter.”
Richard shook his head.
“No?” Alice said, disappointed.
“Yes, that would be fine,” Richard said. “I was thinking more existentially.”
“What does that mean?” the little girl asked.
“It’s a word your father made up,” Sam said.
“Don’t tease her,” Alice said.
“I wish I could look through that man’s glasses again,” the little girl said.
“Here,” Sam said, making two circles with the thumb and first finger of each hand. “Look through these.”
She leaned over and looked up at the trees through Sam’s fingers.
“Much clearer, huh?” Sam said.
“Yes,” she said. She liked this game.
“Let me see,” Richard said, leaning to look through his brother’s fingers.
“Don’t forget me,” Alice said, and she leaned across Richard to peer through the circles. As she leaned across him, Richard kissed the back of her neck.
Fancy Flights
Silas is afraid of the vacuum cleaner. He stands, looking out the bedroom door, growling at it. He also growls when small children are around. The dog is afraid of them, and they are afraid of him because he growls. His growling always gets him in trouble; nobody thinks he is entitled to growl. The dog is also afraid of a lot of music. “One Little Story that the Crow Told Me” by the New Lost City Ramblers raises his hackles. Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” brings bared teeth and a drooping tail. Sometimes he keeps his teeth bared even through the quiet intervals. If the dog had his way, all small children would disappear, and a lot of musicians would sound their last notes. If the dog had his way, he would get Dylan by the leg in a dark alley. Maybe they could take a trip—Michael and the dog—to a recording studio or a concert hall, wherever Dylan was playing, and wait for him to come out. Then Silas could get him. Thoughts like these (“fancy flights,” his foreman called them) were responsible for Michael’s no longer having a job.
He had worked in a furniture factory in Ashford, Connecticut. Sometimes when his lathe was churning and grinding, he would start laughing. Everyone was aware of his laughter, but nobody did anything about it. He smoked hash in the parking lot in back of the factory during his break. Toward the end of his shift, he often had to choke back hysteria. One night, the foreman told him a Little Moron joke that was so funny Michael almost fell down laughing. After that, several people who worked there stopped by to tell him jokes, and every time he nearly laughed himself sick. Anybody there who spoke to him made him beam, and if they told a joke, or even if they said they had “a good one,” he began to laugh right away. Every day he smoked as much hash as he could stand. He wore a hairnet—everyone had to wear a hairnet, after a woman had her face yanked down to within a fraction of an inch of a blade when a machine caught her hair—and half the time he forgot to take it off after he finished work. He’d find out he was still wearing it in the morning when he woke up. He thought that was pretty funny; he might be somebody’s wife, with pink curlers under the net and a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.
He had already been somebody’s husband, but he and his wife were separated. He was also separated from his daughter, but she looked so much like his wife that he thought of them as one. Toward the end, he had sometimes got confused and talked baby talk to his wife and complained about his life to his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter. His wife wrote to his grandmother about the way he was acting, and the old woman sent him a hundred dollars and told him to “buy a psychiatrist,” as if they were shirts. Instead, he bought his daughter a pink plastic bunny that held a bar of soap and floated in the bath. The bunny had blue eyebrows and a blue nose and an amazed look, probably because its stomach was soap. He had bought her the bunny because he was not ungenerous, and he spent the rest on fontina cheese for his wife and hash for himself. They had a nice family gathering—his daughter nose-to-nose with the bunny, his wife eating the cheese, he smoking hash. His wife said that his smoking had killed her red-veined maranta. “How can you keep smoking something that killed a plant?” she kept asking. Actually, he was glad to see the maranta dead. It was a creepy plant. It looked as if its veins had blood in them. Smoke hadn’t killed the plant, though. A curse that his friend Carlos put on it at his request did it. It died in six days: the leaves turned brown at the tips and barely unfolded in the daytime, and soon it fell over the rim of the pot, where it hung until it turned completely brown.
Plant dead, wife gone, Michael still has his dog and his grandmother, and she can be counted on for words of encouragement, mail-order delicacies, and money.
Now that they are alone together, he devotes most of his time to Silas, and takes better care of him than ever before. He gives Silas Milk-Bones so that his teeth will be clean. He always has good intentions, but before he knows it he has smoked some hash and put on “One Little Story that the Crow Told Me,” and there is Silas listening to the music, with his clean, white teeth bared.
Michael is living in a house that belongs to some friends named Prudence and Richard. They have gone to Manila. Michael doesn’t have to pay any rent—just the heat and electricity bills. Since he never turns a light on, the bill will be small. And on nights when he smokes hash he turns the heat down to fifty-five. He does this gradually—smoke for an hour, turn it from seventy to sixty-five; smoke another hour and put it down to fifty-five. Prudence, he discovers, is interested in acupuncture. There is a picture in one of her books of a man with his face contorted with agony, with a long, thin spike in his back. No. He must be imagining that. Usually Michael doesn’t look at the books that are lying around. He goes through Prudence’s and Richard’s bureau drawers. Richard wears size thirty-two Jockey shorts. Prudence has a little blue barrette for her hair. Michael has even unwrapped some of the food in the freezer. Fish. He thinks about defrosting it and eating it, but then he forgets. He usually eats two cans of Campbell’s Vegetarian Vegetable soup for lunch and four Chunky Pecan candy bars for dinner. If he is awake in time for breakfast, he smokes hash.
One evening, the phone rings. Silas gets there first, as usual, but he can’t answer it. Poor old Silas. Michael lets him out the door before he answers the phone. He notices that Ray has come calling. Ray is a female German shepherd, named by the next-door neighbor’s children. Silas tries to mount Ray.
“Richard?” says the voice on the telephone.
“Yeah. Hi,” Michael says.
“Is this Richard?”
“Right.”
“It doesn’t sound like you, Richard.”
“You sound funny, too. What’s new?”
“What? You really sound screwed up tonight, Richard.”
“Are you in a bad mood or something?” Michael counters.
“Well, I might be surprised that we haven’t talked for months, and I call and you just mutter.”
“It’s the connection.”
“Richard, this doesn’t sound like you.”
“This is Richard’s mother. I forgot to say that.”
“What are you so hostile about, Richard? Are you all right?”
“Of course I am.”
“O.K. This is weird. I called to find out what Prudence was going to do about California.”
“She’s going to go,” Michael says.
“You’re kidding me.”
“No.”
“Oh—I guess I picked the wrong time to call. Why don’t I call you back tomorrow?”
“O.K.,” Michael says. “Bye.”
Prudence left exact directions about how to take care of her plants. Michael has it down pretty well by now, but sometimes he just splashes some water on them. These plants moderately damp, those quite damp, some every third day—what does it matter? A few have died, but a few have new leaves. Sometimes Michael feels guilty and he hovers over them, wondering what you do for a plant that is supposed to be moderately dry but is soaking wet. In addition to watering the plants, he tries to do a few other things that will be appreciated. He has rubbed some oil into Prudence’s big iron frying pan and has let it sit on the stove. Once, Silas went out and rolled in cow dung and then came in and rolled on the kitchen floor, and Michael was very conscientious about washing that. The same day, he found some chalk in the kitchen cabinet and drew a hopscotch court on the floor and jumped around a little bit. Sometimes he squirts Silas with some of Prudence’s Réplique, just to make Silas mad. Silas is the kind of dog who would be offended if a homosexual approached him. Michael thinks of the dog as a displaced person. He is aware that he and the dog get into a lot of clichéd situations—man with dog curled at his side, sitting by fire; dog accepts food from man’s hand, licks hand when food is gone. Prudence was reluctant to let the big dog stay in the house. Silas won her over, though. Making fine use of another cliché at the time, Silas curled around her feet and beat his tail on the rug.
“Where’s Richard?” Sam asks.
“Richard and Prudence went to Manila.”
“Manila? Who are you?”
“I lost my job. I’m watching the house for them.”
“Lost your job—”
“Yeah. I don’t mind. Who wants to spend his life watching out that his machine doesn’t get him?”
“Where were you working?”
“Factory.”
Sam doesn’t have anything else to say. He was the man on the telephone, and he would like to know why Michael pretended to be Richard on the phone, but he sort of likes Michael and sees that it was a joke.
“That was pretty funny when we talked on the phone,” he says. “At least I’m glad to hear she’s not in California.”
“It’s not a bad place,” Michael says.
“She has a husband in California. She’s better off with Richard.”
“I see.”
“What do you do here?” Sam asks. “Just watch out for burglars?”
“Water the plants. Stuff like that.”
“You really got me good on the phone,” Sam says.
“Yeah. Not many people have called.”
“You have anything to drink here?” Sam asks.
“I drank all their liquor.”
“Like to go out for a beer?” Sam asks.
“Sure.”
Sam and Michael go to a bar Michael knows called Happy Jack’s. It’s a strange place, with “Heat Wave” on the jukebox, along with Tammy Wynette’s “Too Far Gone.”
“I wouldn’t mind passing an evening in the sweet arms of Tammy Wynette, even if she is a redneck,” Sam says.
The barmaid puts their empty beer bottles on her tray and walks away.
“She’s got big legs,” Michael says.
“But she’s got nice soft arms,” Sam says. “Like Tammy Wynette.”
As they talk, Tammy is singing about love and barrooms.
“What do you do?” Michael asks Sam.
“I’m a shoe salesman.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“You didn’t ask me what I did for fun. You asked me what my job was.”
“What do you do for fun?” Michael asks.
“Listen to Tammy Wynette records,” Sam says.
“You think about Tammy Wynette a lot.”
“I once went out with a girl who looked like Tammy Wynette,” Sam says. “She wore a nice low-cut blouse, with white ruffles, and black high-heel shoes.”
Michael rubs his hand across his mouth.
“She had downy arms. You know what I mean. They weren’t really hairy,” Sam says.
“Excuse me,” Michael says.
In the bathroom, Michael hopes that Happy Jack isn’t drunk anywhere in the bar. When he gets drunk he likes to go into the bathroom and start fights. After a customer has had his face bashed in by Happy Jack, his partners usually explain to the customer that he is crazy. Today, nobody is in the bathroom except an old guy at the washbasin, who isn’t washing, though. He is standing there looking in the mirror. Then he sighs deeply.
Michael returns to their table. “What do you say we go back to the house?” he says to Sam.
“Have they got any Tammy Wynette records?”
“I don’t know. They might,” Michael says.
“O.K.,” Sam says.
“How come you wanted to be a shoe salesman?” Michael asks him in the car.
“Are you out of your mind?” Sam says. “I didn’t want to be a shoe salesman.”
Michael calls his wife—a mistake. Mary Anne is having trouble in the day-care center. The child wants to quit and stay home and watch television. Since Michael isn’t doing anything, his wife says, maybe he could stay home
while she works and let Mary Anne have her way, since her maladjustment is obviously caused by Michael’s walking out on them when he knew the child adored him.
“You just want me to move back,” Michael says. “You still like me.”
“I don’t like you at all. I never make any attempt to get in touch with you, but if you call you’ll have to hear what I have to say.”
“I just called to say hello, and you started in.”
“Well, what did you call for, Michael?”
“I was lonesome.”
“I see. You walk out on your wife and daughter, then call because you’re lonesome.”
“Silas ran away.”
“I certainly hope he comes back, since he means so much to you.”
“He does,” Michael says. “I really love that dog.”
“What about Mary Anne?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to care, but what you just said didn’t make any impression on me.”
“Are you in some sensitivity group, or something?”
“No.”
“Well, before you hang up, could you think about the situation for a minute and advise me about how to handle it? If I leave her at the day-care center, she has a fit and I have to leave work and get her.”
“If I had a car I could go get her.”
“That isn’t very practical, is it? You don’t have a car.”
“You wouldn’t have one if your father hadn’t given it to you.”
“That seems a bit off the subject.”
“I wouldn’t drive a car if I had one. I’m through with machines.”
“Michael, I guess I really don’t feel like talking to you tonight.”
“One thing you could do would be to give her calcium. It’s a natural tranquilizer.”
“O.K. Thanks very much for the advice. I hope it didn’t tax you too much.”
“You’re very sarcastic to me. How do you expect me to be understanding when all I get is sarcasm?”
“I don’t really expect it.”
“You punch words when you talk.”
“Are you stoned, Michael?”
“No, I’m just lonesome. Just sitting around.”
“Where are you living?”
