by Ann Beattie
She is a little surprised that Marshall doesn’t say that he is shutting the door when he shuts the door. She stops stirring the soup and looks at them on their snowmobiles. Marshall looks up and sees her. He points to the snowmobile and smiles. Just as he said, he is going to take a ride on the snowmobile. It is snowing lightly outside. She watches until the snowmobiles are out of sight. She fears they can’t see in the snow, that they’ll run into barbed wire. She goes to the closet and looks on the top shelf. Their goggles are there. She takes them down and puts them on; everything turns bright yellow. She goes back and pours a bag of alphabet letters into the soup. She forgets that she has the goggles on until they begin to steam up. She quickly puts them back on the top shelf so Edna and Marshall won’t see her in them. She goes into the bedroom and empties the niacin pills in the trash and replaces them with aspirin from the medicine cabinet. But she takes too long. She hears Marshall and Edna in the kitchen, realizes that they are calling her. The dog is barking. The soup is boiling over.
*
“What a mess.”
“Your mother’ll kill you.”
It is summer. Mary and Kathy are fifteen. They are in Sam’s, with several boys, and Mary has pizza down her shirt. The boy who caused the accident has spilled his beer on her too. He is twenty-one, the oldest one at the table. Sam saw what happened and is coming over. Mary stands and screams at the boy; he stands too. He is drunk. Mary swings at him—to push, really, not to hit. Sam grabs the boy’s arms.
“It was an accident,” he hollers in Sam’s face.
“Go throw some water on your face,” Sam says.
Kathy is wiping pizza off Mary’s shirt. The pizza sticks to Kathy’s hands, cold and greasy.
“Give her a towel,” Sam says to Beverly.
“Never mind,” Mary says, “I’m going.”
“Let me get it,” Kathy says.
One of the other boys is handing Kathy napkins.
“It’s not doing any good,” Mary says. “I can feel it through my shirt.”
“I’ll give you a ride home,” the boy says.
“It’s got to come off,” Mary says. “She’ll find out I was here.”
“So what? You can’t smell anything on you.”
“I’m just not supposed to be here,” Mary says.
“Okay. I got an idea.”
Mary and Kathy leave Sam’s with the two boys. All four are in the front seat. Sam has come out; he is still trying to give them a towel. Mary thanks Sam and takes it. She puts it in her blouse so she can’t feel the cold pizza against her chest. They are going down a narrow road. The car windows are rolled up because it has started to get cold at night. Nobody talks until they turn into a driveway.
“Go wash your blouse in the bathroom. We can iron it dry.”
“Where are we?”
“My parents’ house.”
“Well, where are they?”
“Out.”
They are going up the front walk. Mary even has pizza in her hair. Everything is sticky. Kathy laughs at her.
“Thanks a lot,” Mary says.
“It’ll come off,” Kathy says.
The boy turns on a light. His friend sits down in the living room. A white cat rubs against his legs, rolls on its back and grabs his pants leg. The boy shakes his leg.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
“Over here.”
Mary and Kathy are in the bathroom. Running water in the sink. Mary starts combing her hair, but it is matted. She scoops some water out of the sink and wets it. She wets it again, then reaches for a comb on the windowsill. She yanks a little and the comb goes through her hair. She pushes her hair behind her ears. Kathy has her blouse. She is dipping it in the water. She soaps it, kneading the material into a tight ball. Mary dries her chest with a towel. It leaves pink stains on the towel. She refolds the towel so the stains are on the inside, and hangs it up again. Kathy is running fresh water in the sink. Someone is knocking on the door. Kathy opens it! Mary steps in back of Kathy.
“Here,” the boy says. He has opened two bottles of beer.
Kathy’s hands are wet and soapy. Mary stands in back of Kathy.
He puts the bottles down. “I’m going to get you the iron,” he says.
Kathy and Mary go out of the bathroom. Mary has a towel around her.
“I’ll do it,” Kathy says.
Mary is left standing next to the boy. She stands there a minute, then goes back into the bathroom and gets the bottles of beer the boy left on the windowsill. She leans against the wall and drinks some beer.
“It came out pretty good,” Kathy says. “It’s awfully wet to iron.”
Kathy takes a sip of beer.
“I was gonna ask you to dance,” the boy says to Mary, “before you got all that crap on you.”
“We dance all the time.”
“I’ll give you two dollars if you’ll dance now.”
Mary considers. “What records have you got?”
“Without records.”
“All right,” she says. “Come on.”
“Without me.”
“Just dance by myself?”
He nods. Kathy laughs.
Mary shrugs. She turns toward the boy and starts dancing. Her wet hair swings in front of her face. The other boy has left the living room. He is stroking the cat in his arms, watching. Kathy has stopped ironing and is watching too.
“Are you going to give me two dollars to dance?” Kathy asks the other boy.
He shakes his head. His friend grabs the front of Mary’s towel and pulls.
*
Edna pulls the cord. The engine starts. She rides her Arctic Cat over the grave in the snow. Edna goes to the store early, before the customers arrive. She turns on the television and the radio. There is no picture on the television, only bright streaks rolling down the picture tube. She turns up the volume on the radio. It has been so quiet at home since she died. Marshall and George and Anna speak in whispers. It is so quiet you can hear the snow in the wind. She sits in the chair and shakes the radio, then throws it hard against the door of the shop. The television pushes over easily. It is snowing hard—there will be a lot of people on the weekend, but unless the snow lets up, few people will come into the shop today. The broken glass is only in back of the counter. No danger to the customers.
*
“It’s not going away.”
Beverly is talking to George in a bar in New York.
“You’re very pale,” George says. “Do you feel any better?”
Didn’t he hear her? Maybe she didn’t say anything. It hurts to talk. She feels drowsy, but at the same time she is in pain. Her hands are on her ribs. No—his hands are on her ribs.
“Let me get a cab outside. Did this just happen suddenly?”
He nods. She must be answering him. Suddenly there is no more pain. She is talking to more than one man, several men, or a nurse and a man, in a hospital. Then there is pain again. She is on a bed. The man is not with her any more. The doctor sees her looking around.
“Your husband is in the waiting room. He has your things.”
“He comes to New York. He’s my lover. Someone else’s husband.”
New York was a crazy idea. Seeing George in New York was a crazy idea. The pain has come back; it makes her feel like she’s going crazy. The doctor is still talking. She is having trouble hearing. They have given her an injection. His hand is out to pay the cab driver. His hand is out putting a needle in her arm. The nurse’s hand is on top of her hand. They are holding hands in a bar. Someone’s hands are on her ribs. Someone’s hands remove her appendix.
*
He takes them out carefully, throwing the crumbs low so the wind doesn’t take them away after he crumbles the bread in his hand. Edna watches. He is so methodical, so thorough. She imagines that just for him there will be one bird that otherwise might have starved that will find these breadcrumbs. But the sky is empty, except for snow.
“There aren�
��t any birds, Marshall.”
“There are animals.”
“I’m surprised you don’t scatter vitamin pills in the snow.”
Edna’s helmet sparkles. Marshall has scattered all the crumbs. He looks satisfied. Usually she tries to disturb him when he looks satisfied. She laughed at his vitamin pills when he first took them. She decides that, yes, there will be one bird—just as God punished her with a cold because she ridiculed Marshall’s vitamin pills. Marshall does not seem to notice when she tries to disturb him. The only way she can disturb him is by being a martyr about his mother, and even then Marshall can offer no response: Edna is with the old lady all day; Edna drives her to doctors; Edna sits up with her at night when Marshall is asleep. They both know that she is dying. Edna sits on her snowmobile and watches. He has carefully put the empty bread bag in his pocket.
“Want to go back?” Marshall asks.
There is snow all over Marshall’s coat and hair.
“You told her we’d be right back,” Edna says.
She is cold and doesn’t want to ride any more. But Marshall understands something else. There is nothing he can say.
*
Mary picks up the phone, but the boy doesn’t say anything. He can see her at Sam’s—he doesn’t have to ask her to the dance.
*
“I don’t know what to say, Marshall. You don’t think it was deliberate, do you? I thought he came back in when I was holding the door open. I thought I saw him.”
*
Why say anything to the cardiologist? He is a young man, his office is filled with books. Would he believe that her heart stops and starts again? That she knows when her heart is going to stop?
It’s awkward; they run into each other in town. There is a boutique, painted white and yellow, where the card shop used to be: a post office, a drugstore, beauty salon, movie house, sporting-goods store. They both hate the town—no need to say anything about that. When they walk through town they think of New York. Neither of them understands what happened in New York. When she got well she came home. They can’t think of anything to say.
*
The snow continues to fall, three nights after the funeral. Mary and Kathy are sitting in Sam’s. The boys are sitting with them. Kathy is already at the jukebox, putting money in, and Beverly has come to the table to offer condolences. A cold night. There aren’t many people in Sam’s. Beverly sits down a minute, rearranging her hair. She complains that her car acted funny earlier and decides to call her sister to pick her up after work.
“I’m staying until closing if Miriam’s coming,” the boy says.
Kathy is dancing with his friend.
“Christ, look,” Beverly says. “I couldn’t move my feet that much. They’re so painful now that I’d like to cut them off.”
“That’s what I did,” a boy tells Beverly, looking at her through the gap in his hand where his middle finger is missing.
“You get crazy when you’re drunk,” Beverly says. “I remember the night you almost hauled off and hit Mary.”
Beverly leaves the table. She makes a phone call, then waits on two women at a table on the other side of the bar. Mary is listening to the boys at the table in back of her, singing along with the jukebox. She can’t tell what they’re singing because the jukebox is turned up full blast. Mary takes a bite of the hamburger. One of the boys ordered it for her. They order food for her without telling her, then Mary has to argue with them about who pays for it. Tonight she doesn’t care, though. Her father gave her some money and told her to go have a good time. It’s depressing at Edna and Marshall’s house night after night. It’s worse than school. Edna is very upset, but she doesn’t talk about the death. She says things that make no sense—that she’s going to sell her snowmobile and never ride again. Her mother and father go to her aunt and uncle’s every night; Edna sits in the rocking chair by the window and rocks back and forth, holding her knees, asking what they’re going to do. One of the boys is smiling at Mary. He’s the one who ordered the hamburger.
“Who’s paying for it?” Mary asks automatically.
He makes a crude joke. There is loud music; it gets so loud that she blocks it out. Two people come in in raincoats. Wind blows across the floor; the wind is blowing so hard that they have to force the door shut behind them. Mary is glad when the door is closed. She is tired of looking at snow. The four stained-glass squares in the top of the door shine brightly. The street light outside illuminates them. Mary is listening to the music, looking at the colors. There aren’t many people. Sam tells Beverly to go home early. Beverly makes another phone call, comes back to the table for last orders. The people in the raincoats are telling some other people that it’s not their dog. There is a large brown-and-white dog in Sam’s; it is wet, confused, stopping to shake itself, then running forward to sniff under a table. Mary recognizes the dog—it belongs to her uncle. But the dog doesn’t recognize Mary. It runs forward to sniff under another table. Beverly goes after the dog, intending to lead it outside. One of the boys watches what’s going on through the space in his hand, then goes after Beverly with his arms out, grabs her from behind, lets her go. Then the boy grabs the dog. Sam is talking to Beverly.
“I told you,” he says. “It’s Marshall’s dog. Call Marshall.”
“The boy took it.”
“Tell Marshall.”
Beverly shrugs. Sam can be as unreasonable as a drunk. Years ago she was going to get away from all this. She looks up Marshall’s number. She stares at the last name. Then she dials him. The phone rings and rings, no answer. Later, when Marshall does answer the phone, they’ll tell him his dog is dead.
*
The boy runs out of the restaurant, into the snow. He hadn’t realized how warm it was in Sam’s. He left his jacket behind. He is shivering. The dog is shivering, trying to jump out of his arms. He sees the streetlight; the light is higher and higher above him. He has fallen. The dog is gone. There is a noise, a thump, the noise he makes falling into the snow, the noise the dog makes running into the car. There is someone else outside Sam’s with him. Miriam. Miriam is just walking in the snow. He smiles at her—he waited all night to see Miriam, and now she’s here, walking in the snow. There are more lights—car headlights as well as the streetlight. Miriam’s car is stopped in the middle of the street. Miriam is kneeling in front of it, then walking back and forth, shaking him, lying there in the snow. It’s noisy—as noisy as it was inside, but it’s all Miriam! She’s calling Beverly, but Beverly’s already there, and she doesn’t have a jacket either. The door opens and closes. More snow blows into Sam’s. There is cold snow all around him.
“He took it.”
“Tell Marshall.”
Beverly shudders. She runs into the restaurant.
“Forget it,” Sam calls after her. “I’ll call him.”
“What about the boy?” Miriam whispers to Sam.
Sam knocks some snow off the heel of his boot.
“Snow’ll sober him up.”
Downhill
Walking the dog at 7:30 A.M., I sit on the wet grass by the side of the road, directly across from the beaver pond and diagonally across from the graveyard. In back of me is a grapevine that I snitch from. The grapes are bitter. The dog lifts a leg on the gravestone, rolls in dead squirrel in the road, comes to my side finally—thank God none of the commuters ran over him—and licks my wrist. The wet wrist feels awful. I rub it along his back, passing it off as a stroke. I do it several times. “Please don’t leave me,” I say to the dog, who cocks his head and settles in the space between my legs on the grass.
*
My mother writes Jon this letter:
“Oh, John, we are so happy that September marks the beginning of your last year in law school. My husband said to me Saturday (we were at the Turkish restaurant we took you and Maria to when she was recuperating—the one you both liked so much) that now when he gets mad he can say, ‘I’ll sue!’ and mean it. It has been uphill for so long, a
nd now it will be downhill.”
Curiously, that week an old friend of Jon’s sent us a toy—a small bent-kneed skier who, when placed at the top of a slanting board, would glide to the bottom. I tried to foul up the toy every which way. I even tried making it ski on sandpaper, and it still worked. I tacked the sandpaper to a board, and down it went. The friend had bought it in Switzerland, where he and his wife were vacationing. So said the note in the package that was addressed to Jon, which I tore open because of the unfamiliar handwriting, thinking it might be evidence.
*
Why do I think Jon is unfaithful? Because it would be logical for him to be unfaithful. Some days I don’t even comb my hair. He must leave the house and see women with their hair clean and brushed back from their faces, and he must desire them and then tell them. It is only logical that if he admires the beauty of all the women with neatly arranged hair, one of them will want him to mess it up. It is only logical that she will invite him home. That smile, that suggestion from a woman would lure him as surely as a spring rain makes the earthworms twist out of the ground. It is even hard to blame him; he has a lawyer’s logical mind. He remembers things. He would not forget to comb his hair. He would certainly not hack his hair off with manicuring scissors. If he cut his own hair, he would do it neatly, with the correct scissors.
“What have you done?” Jon whispered. Illogical, too, for me to have cut it in the living room—to leave the clumps of curls fallen on the rug. “What have you done?” His hands on my head, feeling my bones, the bones in my skull, looking into my eyes. “You’ve cut off your hair,” he said. He will be such a good lawyer. He understands everything.
*
The dog enjoys a fire. I cook beef bones for him, and when he is tired of pawing and chewing I light a fire, throwing in several gift pinecones that send off green and blue and orange sparks, and I brush him with Jon’s French hairbrush until his coat glows in the firelight. The first few nights I lit the fire and brushed him, I washed the brush afterward, so Jon wouldn’t find out. The doctors would tell me that was unreasonable: Jon said he would be gone a week. A logical woman, I no longer bother with washing the brush.
