Distortions

by Ann Beattie

With Lincoln, Cynthia lived in an apartment in Columbus, Ohio. “It’s a good thing you live halfway across the country,” her father wrote her, “because your mother surely does not want to see that black man, who claims his father was a Cherappy Indian.” She never met Lincoln’s parents, so she wasn’t sure herself about the Indian thing. One of Lincoln’s friends, who was always trying to be her lover, told her that Lincoln Divine wasn’t even his real name—he had made it up and got his old name legally changed when he was twenty-one. “It’s like believing in Santa Claus,” the friend told her. “There is no Lincoln Divine.”

  Charlie was different from Pete and Lincoln. Neither of them paid much attention to her, but Charlie was attentive. During the years, she had regained the twenty pounds she lost when she was first married and added twenty-five more on top of that. She was going to have to get in shape before she married Charlie, even though he wanted to marry her now. “I’ll take it as is,” Charlie said. “Ready-made can be altered.” Charlie was a tailor. He wasn’t really a tailor, but his brother had a shop, and to make extra money Charlie did alterations on the weekends. Once, when they were both a little drunk, Cynthia and Charlie vowed to tell each other a dark secret. Cynthia told Charlie she had had an abortion just before she and Pete got divorced. Charlie was really shocked by that. “That’s why you got so fat, I guess,” he said. “Happens when they fix animals, too.” She didn’t know what he was talking about, and she didn’t want to ask. She’d almost forgotten it herself. Charlie’s secret was that he knew how to run a sewing machine. He thought it was “woman’s work.” She thought that was crazy; she had told him something important, and he had just said he knew how to run a sewing machine.

  “We’re not going to live in any apartment,” Charlie said. “We’re going to live in a house.” And “You’re not going to have to go up and down stairs. We’re going to find a split-level.” And “It’s not going to be any neighborhood that’s getting worse. Our neighborhood is going to be getting better.” And “You don’t have to lose weight. Why don’t you marry me now, and we can get a house and start a life together?”

  But she wouldn’t do it. She was going to lose twenty pounds and save enough money to buy a pretty wedding dress. She had already started using more makeup and letting her hair grow, as the beauty-parlor operator had suggested, so that she could have curls that fell to her shoulders on her wedding day. She’d been reading brides’ magazines, and long curls were what she thought was pretty. Charlie hated the magazines. He thought the magazines had told her to lose twenty pounds—that the magazines were responsible for keeping him waiting.

  She had nightmares. A recurring nightmare was one in which she stood at the altar with Charlie, wearing a beautiful long dress, but the dress wasn’t quite long enough, and everyone could see that she was standing on a scale. What did the scale say? She would wake up peering into the dark and get out of bed and go to the kitchen.

  This night, as she dipped potato chips into cheddar-cheese dip, she reread a letter from her mother: “You are not a bad girl, and so I do not know why you would get married three times. Your father does not count that black man as a marriage, but I have got to, and so it is three. That’s too many marriages, Cynthia. You are a good girl and know enough now to come home and settle down with your family. We are willing to look out for you, even your dad, and warn you not to make another dreadful mistake.” There was no greeting, no signature. The letter had probably been dashed off by her mother when she, too, had insomnia. Cynthia would have to answer the note, but she didn’t think her mother would be convinced by anything she could say. If she thought her parents would be convinced she was making the right decision by seeing Charlie, she would have asked him to meet her parents. But her parents liked people who had a lot to say, or who could make them laugh (“break the monotony,” her father called it), and Charlie didn’t have a lot to say. Charlie was a very serious person. He was also forty years old, and he had never been married. Her parents would want to know why that was. You couldn’t please them: they hated people who were divorced and they were suspicious of single people. So she had never suggested to Charlie that he meet her parents. Finally, he suggested it himself. Cynthia thought up excuses, but Charlie saw through them. He thought it was all because he had confessed to her that he sewed. She was ashamed of him—that was the real reason she was putting off the wedding, and why she wouldn’t introduce him to her parents. “No,” she said. “No, Charlie. No, no, no.” And because she had said it so many times, she was convinced. “Then set a date for the wedding,” he told her. “You’ve got to say when.” She promised to do that the next time she saw him, but she couldn’t think right, and that was because of the notes that her mother wrote her, and because she couldn’t get any sleep, and because she got depressed by taking off weight and gaining it right back by eating at night.

  As long as she couldn’t sleep, and there were only a few potato chips left, which she might as well finish off, she decided to level with herself the same way she and Charlie had the night they told their secrets. She asked herself why she was getting married. Part of the answer was that she didn’t like her job. She was a typer—a typist, the other girls always said, correcting her—and also she was thirty-two, and if she didn’t get married soon she might not find anybody. She and Charlie would live in a house, and she could have a flower garden, and, although they had not discussed it, if she had a baby she wouldn’t have to work. It was getting late if she intended to have a baby. There was no point in asking herself more questions. Her head hurt, and she had eaten too much and felt a little sick, and no matter what she thought she knew she was still going to marry Charlie.

  Cynthia would marry Charlie on February the tenth. That was what she told Charlie, because she hadn’t been able to think of a date and she had to say something, and that was what she would tell her boss, Mr. Greer, when she asked if she could be given her week’s vacation then.

  “We would like to be married the tenth of February, and, if I could, I’d like to have the next week off.”

  “I’m looking for that calendar.”

  “What?”

  “Sit down and relax, Cynthia. You can have the week off if that isn’t the week when—”

  “Mr. Greer, I could change the date of the wedding.”

  “I’m not asking you to do that. Please sit down while I—”

  “Thank you. I don’t mind standing.”

  “Cynthia, let’s just say that week is fine.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If you like standing, what about having a hot dog with me down at the corner?” he said to Cynthia.

  That surprised her. Having lunch with her boss! She could feel the heat of her cheeks. A crazy thought went through her head: Cynthia Greer. It got mixed up right away with Peterson, Divine, and Pinehurst.

  At the hot-dog place, they stood side by side, eating hot dogs and french fries.

  “It’s none of my business,” Mr. Greer said to her, “but you don’t seem like the most excited bride-to-be. I mean, you do seem excited, but …”

  Cynthia continued to eat.

  “Well?” he asked. “I was just being polite when I said it was none of my business.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Yes, I’m very happy. I’m going to come back to work after I’m married, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Mr. Greer was staring at her. She had said something wrong.

  “I’m not sure that we’ll go on a honeymoon. We’re going to buy a house.”

  “Oh? Been looking at some houses?”

  “No. We might look for houses.”

  “You’re very hard to talk to,” Mr. Greer said.

  “I know. I’m not thinking quickly. I make so many mistakes typing.”

  A mistake to have told him that. He didn’t pick it up.

  “February will be a nice time to have off,” he said pleasantly.

  “I picked February because I’m dieting, and by then I’ll have lost
weight.”

  “Oh? My wife is always dieting. She’s eating fourteen grapefruit a week on this new diet she’s found.”

  “That’s the grapefruit diet.”

  Mr. Greer laughed.

  “What did I do that was funny?”

  She sees Mr. Greer is embarrassed. A mistake to have embarrassed him.

  “I don’t think right when I haven’t had eight hours’ sleep, and I haven’t even had close to that. And on this diet I’m always hungry.”

  “Are you hungry? Would you like another hot dog?”

  “That would be nice,” she says.

  He orders another hot dog and talks more as she eats.

  “Sometimes I think it’s best to forget all this dieting,” he says. “If so many people are fat, there must be something to it.”

  “But I’ll get fatter and fatter.”

  “And then what?” he says. “What if you did? Does your fiancé like thin women?”

  “He doesn’t care if I lose weight or not. He probably wouldn’t care.”

  “Then you’ve got the perfect man. Eat away.”

  When she finishes that hot dog, he orders another for her.

  “A world full of food, and she eats fourteen grapefruit a week.”

  “Why don’t you tell her not to diet, Mr. Greer?”

  “She won’t listen to me. She reads those magazines, and I can’t do anything.”

  “Charlie hates those magazines, too. Why do men hate magazines?”

  “I don’t hate all magazines. I don’t hate Newsweek.”

  She tells Charlie that her boss took her to lunch. At first he is impressed. Then he seems let down. Probably he is disappointed that his boss didn’t take him to lunch.

  “What did you talk about?” Charlie asks.

  “Me. He told me I could get fat—that it didn’t matter.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He said his wife is on the grapefruit diet.”

  “You aren’t very talkative. Is everything all right?”

  “He said not to marry you.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “He said to go home and eat and eat and eat but not to get married.”

  “One of the girls said that before she got married he told her the same thing.”

  “What’s that guy up to? He’s got no right to say that.”

  “She got divorced, too.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?” Charlie says.

  “Nothing. I’m just telling you about the lunch. You asked about it.”

  “Well, I don’t understand all this. I’d like to know what’s behind it.”

  Cynthia does not feel that she has understood, either. She feels sleep coming on, and hopes that she will drop off before long. Her second husband, Lincoln, felt that she was incapable of understanding anything. He had a string of Indian beads that he wore under his shirt, and on their wedding night he removed the beads before they went to bed and held them in front of her face and shook them and said, “What’s this?” It was the inside of her head, Lincoln told her. She understood that she was being insulted. But why had he married her? She had not understood Lincoln, and, like Charlie, she didn’t understand what Mr. Greer was up to. “Memorize,” she heard her English teacher saying. “Anyone can memorize.” Cynthia began to go over past events. I married Pete and Lincoln and I will marry Charlie. Today I had lunch with Mr. Greer. Mrs. Greer eats grapefruit.

  “Well, what are you laughing about?” Charlie asked. “Some private joke with you and Greer, or something?”

  Cynthia saw an ad in the newspaper. “Call Crisis Center,” it said. “We Care.” She thinks that a crisis center is a good idea, but she isn’t having a crisis. She just can’t sleep. But the idea of it is very good. If I were having a crisis, what would I do? she wonders. She has to answer her mother’s note. Another note came today. Now her mother wants to meet Charlie: “As God is my witness, I tried to get through to you, but perhaps I did not say that you would really be welcome at home and do not have to do this foolish thing you are doing. Your dad feels you are never going to find true happiness when you don’t spend any time thinking between one husband and the next. I know that love makes us do funny things, but your dad has said to tell you that he feels you do not really love this man, and there is nothing worse than just doing something funny with not even the reason of love driving you. You probably don’t want to listen to me, and so I keep these short, but if you should come home alone we would be most glad. If you bring this new man with you, we will also come to the station. Let us at least look him over before you do this thing. Your dad has said that if he had met Lincoln it never would have been.”

  Cynthia takes out a piece of paper. Instead of writing her mother’s name at the top, though, she writes, “If you are still at that high school, I want you to know I am glad to be away from it and you and I have forgotten all those lousy poems you had me memorize for nothing. Sincerely, Cynthia Knight.” On another piece of paper she writes, “Are you still in love with me? Do you want to see me again?” She gets another piece of paper and draws two parallel vertical lines with a horizontal line joining them at the bottom—Pete’s trapeze. “APE MAN,” she prints. She puts the first into an envelope and addresses it to her teacher at the high school. The second is for Lincoln. The next goes to Pete, care of his parents. She doesn’t know Lincoln’s address, so she rips up that piece of paper and throws it away. This makes her cry. Why is she crying? One of the girls at work says it’s the times they are living in. The girl campaigned for George McGovern. Not only that, but she wrote letters against Nixon. Cynthia takes another piece of paper from the box and writes a message to President Nixon: “Some girls in my office won’t write you because they say that’s crank mail and their names will get put on a list. I don’t care if I’m on some list You’re the crank. You’ve got prices so high I can’t eat steak.” Cynthia doesn’t know what else to say to the President. “Tell your wife she’s a stone face,” she writes. She addresses the envelope and stamps it and takes the mail to the mailbox before she goes to bed. She begins to think that it’s Nixon’s fault—all of it. Whatever that means. She is still weeping. Damn you, Nixon, she thinks. Damn you.

  Lately, throughout all of this, she hasn’t been sleeping with Charlie. When he comes to her apartment, she unbuttons his shirt, rubs her hands across his chest, up and down his chest, and undoes his belt.

  She writes more letters. One is to Jean Nidetch, of Weight Watchers. “What if you got fat again, if you couldn’t stop eating?” she writes. “Then you’d lose all your money! You couldn’t go out in public or they’d see you! I hope you get fatter and fatter and die.” The second letter (a picture, really) is to Charlie—a heart with “Cynthia” in it. That’s wrong. She draws another heart and writes “Charlie” in it. The last letter is to a woman she knew when she was married to Pete. “Dear Sandy,” she writes. “Sorry I haven’t written in so long. I am going to get married the tenth of February. I think I told you that Lincoln and I got divorced. I really wish I had you around to encourage me to lose weight before the wedding! I hope everything is well with your family. The baby must be walking now. Everything is fine with me. Well, got to go. Love, Cynthia.”

  They are on the train, on the way to visit her parents before the wedding. It is late January. Charlie has spilled some beer on his jacket and has gone to the men’s room twice to wash it off, even though she told him he got it all out the first time. He has a tie folded in his jacket pocket. It is a red tie with white dogs on it that she bought for him. She has been buying him presents, to make up for the way she acts toward him sometimes. She has been taking sleeping pills, and now that she’s more rested she isn’t nervous all the time. That’s all it was—no sleep. She even takes half a sleeping pill with her lunch, and that keeps her calm during the day.

  “Honey, do you want to go to the other car, where we can have a drink?” Charlie asks her.

  Cynthia didn’t wan
t Charlie to know she had been taking the pills, so when she had a chance she reached into her handbag and shook out a whole one and swallowed it when he wasn’t looking. Now she is pretty groggy.

  “I think I’ll come down later,” she says. She smiles at him.

  As he walks down the aisle, she looks at his back. He could be anybody. Just some man on a train. The door closes behind him.

  A young man sitting across the aisle from her catches her eye. He has long hair. “Paper?” he says.

  He is offering her his paper. She feels her cheeks color, and she takes it, not wanting to offend him. Some people wouldn’t mind offending somebody who looks like him, she thinks self-righteously, but you are always polite.

  “How far you two headed?” he asks.

  “Pavo, Georgia,” she says.

  “Gonna eat peaches in Georgia?” he asks.

  She stares at him.

  “I’m just kidding,” he says. “My grandparents live in Georgia.”

  “Do they eat peaches all day?” she asks.

  He laughs. She doesn’t know what she’s done right.

  “Why, lordy lands, they do,” he says with a thick drawl.

  She flips through the paper. There is a comic strip of President Nixon. The President is leaning against a wall, being frisked by a policeman. He is confessing to various sins.

  “Great, huh?” the man says, smiling, and leans across the aisle.

  “I wrote Nixon a letter,” Cynthia says quietly. “I don’t know what they’ll do. I said all kinds of things.”

  “You did? Wow. You wrote Nixon?”

  “Did you ever write him?”

  “Yeah, sure, I write him all the time. Send telegrams. It’ll be a while before he’s really up against that wall, though.”

  Cynthia continues to look through the paper. There are full-page ads for records by people she has never heard of, singers she will never hear. The singers look like the young man.

  “Are you a musician?” she asks.

  “Me? Well, sometimes. I play electric piano. I can play classical piano. I don’t do much of it.”