Distortions

by Ann Beattie

On July the twenty-second, Toby and David Warner quarreled. He told her that she should not have allowed Penelope to go to the beach; she said that he was overly protective. Penelope’s measles had been a slight case, and she had been completely well for two days. He said that Penelope had been weepy the night before; she said that was because he always hovered around her. Before the argument began, Toby had been sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the book of photographs. She had attempted to converse with him before they got into the argument; she talked about Diane Arbus’s being influenced by the Chinese belief that people pass through boredom to fascination. It seemed to David that Toby was neither bored nor fascinated; she seemed to be in a fog. He had taken the clothes to the laundromat because it looked like Toby was going to smoke cigarettes and stare at the book all day. There had been several young men in the laundromat. They all looked like the lifeguard to him. Why was she interested in the lifeguard? Why would she be so blunt about it? What could he do about it? He had put too much detergent into one of the machines and it foamed over. The owner had given him a mop-pleasantly, considering the mess he had made. “If you was a hippie I’d feel differently,” the owner had said. David had always been “a nice young man.” Except for dodging the Army, which shocked his parents, he had never even let anyone down. Except Toby. He must have let her down. He folded the clothes crookedly, took some out of the dryer too soon.

  “Would you like to go out for dinner?” David asked after the argument.

  “Yes,” she said. “That would be nice.” Formal, forced pleasantness.

  “Where did you get that book?” he asked.

  “At the bookstore.”

  “What’s your fascination with it?”

  “You still want to fight, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I can’t believe you let Penelope go to the beach.”

  “Andrew and Randy are with her. They’d bring her back if she felt sick.”

  “Randy’s always playing with the Collins’ kids. He’d never notice. What’s his fascination with those little beasts?”

  “Tom’s a nice kid.”

  “The older one isn’t.”

  “The older one’s twelve. He has another set of friends.”

  “He got put out of the drugstore today. I was standing there reading a magazine while the clothes were drying, and he and some of his friends lit a pile of napkins on the counter.”

  “What happened?”

  “The counter girl threw water on it and put it out. The manager put them all out of the store.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t forbid Randy to play with Tom because Tom’s brother is screwed up.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do that.”

  “Then what were you getting at?”

  “I was just telling you what happened.”

  “You want to be argumentative,” she said. “I told you that before.”

  David sighed—a very theatrical sigh—and walked out the kitchen door. He stumbled on the dump truck and twisted his ankle. He sat down and rubbed it, waiting for the bleeding to begin. It didn’t bleed; it just hurt.

  “Let’s take a walk down to the beach,” he called to Toby.

  In a minute the kitchen door opened and she came out. No lover of the sun, she was quite pale. She was smoking. She had on a red T-shirt and cut-off jeans. She looked very maternal—not for any reason he could name. He was tempted to whine to her that he had hurt himself. Maybe that was what was wrong; the children were always complaining to her. He thought about asking how she felt about the children, but there were three of them. What was he going to do about it? He stepped on something and got a splinter in his foot

  “Stop and take it out,” she said.

  He sat in the sand on the side of the road, the tall grass tickling his arms, a dragonfly buzzing around him. He held out his foot to her and she removed the splinter. She had long fingernails. They were painted bright red, and because he only looked at what she was doing to his foot for a second, he thought that it was blood on his foot. He thought about how brave he was, back in the road walking on his bleeding foot, until he realized that the flash of red had been Toby’s fingernail.

  “We’ll see that lifeguard any second,” he said to her, squeezing her hand.

  “You make beeg joke, hah? I love him …”

  He suspected a literary allusion; it was either that or a line from some favorite movie of hers, and considering the kind of movies she liked, all hazy and European, he didn’t really think it was a movie. An allusion to what? She read all the time—no way he could keep up with her. And such funny things stuck in her mind. He was always saying, “What’s that from?”

  The questions David and Toby would ask in the future would not have to do with how it was best to care for the children, or what book was being alluded to. All that would seem trivial, and they wouldn’t do it In fact, for a long period they would hardly communicate at all. They didn’t know that, though. They expected to walk along the beach—pick up a few shells?—eat dinner, perhaps at the Cliff House, which all the natives said was very good, get their feet wet. They held hands, going up the path to the beach. He whistled softly. “When we leave here I’d like to get a puppy,” Toby said. He was surprised—her idea just came out of the blue, like the rest of the events that day.

  *

  The tragedy was the fault of “the mad boy.” The natives, slow-moving, quick-thinking people, understood the situation in the correct perspective. “The mad boy,” Duncan Collins, twelve, took his brother Tom (the natives’ eyes lit up for a second—you understand that the family named their son Tom Collins?) and two other children, Penelope and her twin Andrew, out in a boat he had made—he had been forbidden to go out in the boat by his father after an incident at the drugstore, but Duncan got it out of the garage without his father noticing that Duncan had even left his room, where he was being punished—and set fire to the boat Duncan, Tom and Andrew died in the water. Penelope lived for a few minutes. The diver who was called to search the area (what for? There had been four children, and all were accounted for) brought a life jacket ashore. Duncan, who did not know how to swim, always wore a life jacket. What was he doing without it? Reasonably, the natives assumed that it was intentional. Suicide. Penelope was an excellent swimmer, but she was weak from a recent illness. Half her body was badly burned. Why didn’t she get out of the boat before she got so badly burned? It was anybody’s guess (the natives differed). Andrew was hardly burned at all, but the coroner said that he was the first to die. Tom died second. (Why did they compare the times of death? Just to have the facts? To have more to talk about?) The specifics of the incident were well-known, but nobody could really account for them. What did the other children think when Duncan Collins put a can of gasoline in the boat with them?

  The lifeguard whistled for the boat to come in a little later than he should have, perhaps, but when he really started to go crazy at the police station later that night, they backed down about that. But to be honest—and the lifeguard always thought he was honest with himself—he should have whistled about two minutes before he did. He kept thinking for two minutes that the people in the boat would see that it was going out too far and come in. Two minutes, for Christ’s sake—not too long to wait, expecting they’d see their error. He blew the whistle and thought he saw the boat edge in a little. He waited. Then the boat began to go out to sea quickly. He realized that the people were deliberately taunting him. The world was full of them—people who want the lifeguard to get wet. He blew the whistle and looked through his binoculars. They were kids! He felt very uneasy when he saw that, and he blew the whistle loudly, one long blow, scrambling down from the chair. He was untying the boat, so he did not see the exact moment the boat burst into flames. He did see a child jump overboard. He was totally confused when he saw the fire. But yes—one did jump overboard. The waves were very rough, and although he was an excellent rower, he had trouble getting up speed. Some man from the beach ran into the water just b
ehind the rowboat—everyone else just stood there—and jumped in before the lifeguard could tell him to get lost. Later he was glad he had let the man in, because with each of them working an oar, the rowboat moved quickly. It was that man who pulled Penelope out of the water and rowed her to shore—almost pushed the lifeguard out of the boat, because of course someone had to get the others, and rowed into shore with Penelope. The man’s name was Eugene Anderson. He was thirty-nine years old. He lived in Bangor, Maine. When Eugene Anderson disappeared with the boat, the lifeguard, in the icy water, swam around the fire. He saw no one inside the fire, which was by now dying out. He was extremely confused. He dived under about ten times … well, maybe fifteen … and heard a roar in the water that confused and frightened him more. Later, he realized that it was the sound of his heart. He found Andrew and Tom, and a diver who arrived, much to the lifeguard’s surprise, from the main beach, got Duncan. Eugene Anderson and the diver tried to get Duncan to breathe on the beach, but he was dead. He was naked. His chest was charred. What in the hell was happening? the lifeguard kept thinking. He was exhausted from all the diving and couldn’t do anything but support himself on one arm. He stared into the crowd. He was dizzy; it seemed like the people were standing at an odd angle. He reached toward them—he didn’t know why he was doing it—and a woman rushed forward and grabbed his hand. She’s breaking it, he thought, but couldn’t do anything about it. By the time his breath started to come back, he saw that his leg was cut. He never figured out how he cut it—a cut about four inches long, down his shin. The police were there. The diver, when it was clear that Duncan was dead, picked up heaps of sand and threw them into the crowd, into the lifeguard’s eyes, the policemen’s eyes. The diver did not even act as well as the life-guard, and the lifeguard was given Thorazine at the police station. They did something with the diver—took him somewhere. Eugene Anderson was a big help to the police. He was an accountant and a Boy Scout leader. The lifeguard kept interrupting his story, asking questions that he already knew the answers to. “That was a hell of a fire. But it went out so quickly, didn’t it?” Eugene Anderson answered calmly. His bottom lip kept jerking, though. “They set it on fire deliberately. Boats don’t just explode in the middle of the ocean,” the lifeguard said to Eugene Anderson, and Eugene Anderson answered him as if it had been a question.

  They were at the police station for a long time. There were reporters. Then they took them to the hospital. What for? They were all dead. The police didn’t ask them to look at the bodies. They just drove them around. It was chaos. At ten o’clock the police called the lifeguard’s house. His roommate answered. He went to the police station to pick up the lifeguard and drive him home.

  *

  David believed it was happening, but he thought it would turn out all right. He was usually negative in his thinking, and after that day he was more negative than ever, but at the time he kept thinking that it was going to turn out okay. He held Randy’s hand. Toby held Randy’s arm, and when David realized that they were pulling him, he let go … let her have him. He wanted to run up, be certain that they were his children, but stupidly he kept thinking Randy is my child, and he held onto Randy and didn’t move. He fainted, and imagined, while he was passed out, that he was scrambling along the ground, a crab, an ant, moving very fast, whatever he was. He tried to figure out if he was being pursued, or if he was pursuing something, but it never came clear. When he regained consciousness he saw lines in the sand, made by his fingers, he supposed. He thought of his mother pouring the boiling water over the ants, then the long wait until the next pot boiled and she poured that. He counted: Penelope, Andrew.

  Someone—it turned out to be a policeman—was slapping his face. It hurt to have sand slapped into your face. He saw the policeman as a shaky, pale figure, because he had just opened his eyes. The policeman, slapping him, had made his eyes open. Everything vibrated. He literally saw stars—or spots of some kind, bright spots, interspersed with the sunset that glowed palely in the distance.

  *

  Toby was staring at the naked body of Duncan Collins, and the young boy’s body was beautiful, smooth and golden. She was transfixed by him, stretched in the sand, his back gleaming wet. Then she saw the lifeguard—she blocked out the pile of bodies, the actual heap of them, looking only long enough to think that they were like a picture in Life of a Nazi concentration camp, thinking that this was some such remote tragedy, they were not her children. She did move forward, but it was to take the lifeguard’s hand. She closed her eyes and pressed his hand hard, imagined that they were holding each other, that the breeze blowing through her hair made her beautiful, that the lifeguard was pressing her hand, that the pressure she felt was the lifeguard … she opened her eyes and saw, giddily, that it was the lifeguard. She was conscious of her breathing. It was hard because she was exerting so much energy squeezing the lifeguard’s hand, but she didn’t realize it and thought she was breathing shallowly, that she wasn’t getting enough air. Air, breeze, the cool sand. The erotic fantasy she was having about the lifeguard lasted about two minutes, but she remembered them so vividly. The rest was a blur and stayed a blur, but the sedatives that she would later take, the psychiatrist, none of it shook those minutes out of her head. They were more real than anything, and they stayed that way.

  *

  In his senior year at Dartmouth, the lifeguard broke up with Laura and got back together with his old girlfriend, Michelle. She said that he seemed more … human. She came every weekend from Manchester, where she worked, and stayed with him in his apartment. He got drunk and introspected once or twice a week instead of once a year. She didn’t drink, or at least she didn’t get drunk, but she didn’t say anything about his drinking, and she listened to him tell the story of what happened on the twenty-second of July over and over and over. She gave him a Mickey Mouse night light, and Mickey glowed and smiled through the night. He drank tequila and orange juice. Tequila. Mexico. Maybe he should get out of New Hampshire, go to … Mexico. What for? What’s in Mexico? Sometimes he felt panicky, as though he had to get away. Michelle talked about her work at the clinic. They were sick people, physically sick. As opposed to me, he thought, they are sick. That made him feel hopeful.

  It took him longer than it had in the past to do the mathematics problems, because he found himself tracing over numbers. His eights were one black circle on top of another. Michelle told him not to drink so much, and he gave it up, quit entirely. Some people couldn’t give up alcohol that way, but he gave it up and wouldn’t go back to it. He told Michelle these things earnestly, the way a convict would talk to the parole board. He thought of himself as a convict. The police station had scared him to death.

  In the spring, Michelle picked flowers and put them in a vase on the dresser. They opened the window and slept with the fresh air, two blankets over them and a quilt, wanting to hurry the spring into summer. The Warners, although he was no longer in touch with them, were also anxious for the summer. When it was June and Randy was out of school, they were going to Europe. The lifeguard had no plans for the summer. He wondered what would happen between Michelle and him. Mickey Mouse glowed and smiled.

  David and Toby Warner usually stayed awake for some time after they went to bed. There was no night light in their room. They preferred the uninterrupted darkness. They stared into it. Randy Warner, who had just celebrated his seventh birthday, slept easily. He took his dump truck to bed with him. Toby hated to see the thing, hated to see anything she associated with the previous summer, but she was very solicitous of Randy, and she didn’t say anything. Sometimes when David was asleep and Toby was not, she would look at his blank face and know that he was dreaming sunsets. She half hated him for it and half admired him. David usually studied Toby in the early morning, when she slept deeply. It was the lifeguard, he knew, but the lifeguard wasn’t a threat to him any more—he only felt slightly dismayed. In June, when they left for Europe, Randy did not take his dump truck along. He took, instead, a C
aptain Magic slate. He liked to write on it and draw pictures, then zip up the top part and watch it all disappear.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ann Beattie lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry.