Perfect Recall

by Ann Beattie

  “When is she ever going to wake up?” LaValle says, coming onto the porch and sniff-sniffing the air, in which he’s caught the scent—the unmistakable Dove soap scent—of Anders. Anders’s own nose twitches slightly, as he starts his approach-avoidance dance, moving behind the plant stand to snap off a dead fern frond, then circling forward until he’s out from behind his protection. Erin—now there is a person Cheri loves. Cheri often reminds herself that if she was fucked-up because her mother, predivorce, and pre-Topanga Canyon, ran away to join an ashram when she was five, Erin had it worse, because her mother moved her so-called spiritual advisor right into the house to follow her like a shadow, intoning speculative questions about the yin or yang of what Erin’s mother was doing. The advisor’s husband came and went—mostly went—but when he was in residence he had clients come for Rolfing, and Erin, who had spoken to some older friends about the situation, got the mistaken impression that the deep moans she heard were the sounds of people in childbirth, so that of course she was frantic, absolutely desperate, when she herself got pregnant at twelve. Then she had the baby and the spiritual advisor appropriated it, moved to Montana, leaving behind the husband, who still came and went, though after his wife’s departure he and Erin’s mother began long nights of drinking frozen vodka together and eventually had a baby of their own. Babies. Women of every age were always having babies. The girls at the agency always talked about getting their bodies in shape for childbirth, which meant trying to overcome bulimia. Every magazine was full of advice about pregnancy and raising children. Cheri had zero inclination to have sex and insisted on seeing a doctor’s report that the person had tested negative for HIV and had no sexually transmitted diseases before she’d sleep with him, and except for unavoidable business reasons, she wouldn’t sleep with anybody, anyway. She had an IUD, and Erin was going to be fitted with a cervical cap as soon as she could get back to the private clinic in Chelsea. Meanwhile, Erin was not sleeping with LaValle, who had begun embracing and winding around her like an octopus. She was probably just taking afternoon naps to get away from him.

  “I’m going to make sandwiches for us,” Anders says, skirting the imaginary line that divides his porch space from LaValle’s. “Diet mayo? Anyone?”

  “Plain bread, toasted, please,” Cheri says.

  “Would you like me to help you?” LaValle says.

  “No, thanks,” Anders says. “But perhaps it’s time to rouse the Sleeping Beauty?”

  “I’m wide awake,” Cheri says, trying out a Farrah smile.

  Both of them let it pass and turned toward the kitchen door. What are women supposed to love about men? Cheri suddenly wonders. Their butts and their shoes. That was what you usually heard: their butts and their shoes. LaValle is so thin he doesn’t have a butt. Anders she’s seen naked so many times that denim-covered, there’s absolutely no mystery. His butt is covered with fine, corkscrewy blond hairs that grow in a haze from pores large enough to make his skin look pocked, like a pincushion. He has the same hairs on his legs, with oblong patches chafed away at the front of each thigh. His hands are very nice, but the way he gestures bothers her; he’s always declaring something, then moving his left hand as if throwing a Frisbee. His right hand is used to slap something into the ground—an imaginary pole, perhaps. Or in the arcades, those games where they give you a rubber hammer, and you have a split second to mash down the head of some Muppet or whatever it is that keeps popping up. Frisbee, Muppet bashing: the self-righteous stupidity of the military (left hand); the declining interest rates (right).

  Erin comes downstairs in briefs and one of LaValle’s white shirts. She has one black toenail, from stubbing her toe on a rock when she stumbled in a brook the week before. Also one nail painted red: an experiment with color. She sinks into a wicker rocker and crosses her legs, pushing her hair back from her sleep-puffed face. Cheri reaches out and clasps her hand, swings it back and forth a few times, drops it.

  “Today is my mother’s birthday,” Erin says. “You know how things come to you in dreams? I dreamed I came downstairs and Anders had made a huge cake, only it was a wedding cake instead of a birthday cake, and my mother was there in the kitchen, eating it. I thought that if she wasn’t saying anything to him about making the wrong kind of cake, I certainly wasn’t going to. It didn’t exactly come to me in a dream that it was her birthday—I was wondering about whether it might be before I went to sleep, but once I saw the wedding cake, I was sure it was her birthday, instead. She got married on Valentine’s Day. That’s hard to forget.”

  “To your father?” Cheri says.

  “Well, to my knowledge she never married Yannos.”

  “Sri Sensitivity,” Cheri says, under her breath: her variation of the Rolfer’s Hindu name.

  “Sri Stolichnaya,” Erin sighs.

  A brown rabbit with a white tail emerges from the underbrush at the edge of the property, where the land begins to slope toward the meadow that leads to the dock.

  “Look at that!” Erin says.

  “And the robin!” Cheri says.

  A robin is dive-bombing the rabbit. The rabbit hops forward, then zigzags, springing closer.

  “Open the door for it!” Erin squeals, bringing Anders, slice of bread in hand, onto the back porch. He almost collides with Cheri, who’s jumped up, amused at the idea that she controls the gate at the finish line. “Come on, Mr. Rabbit!” she hollers, throwing open the porch door, and surprisingly, the rabbit, instead of retreating from her voice, hip-hops toward the door, fast, veering off to scurry under the chokecherry bush just as the danger of being pecked equals the terror of finding himself inside, among vacationers. The swooping bird circles for a last, desperate dive. Suddenly, on the stereo, Patsy Cline begins to sing: “See the pyramids. . . .” When they first got to the house, LaValle hooked up small speakers with amazing sound quality, which he placed horizontally on the overhang above the kitchen door; as Anders makes lunch, LaValle, freed from the constraint of silence while Erin was asleep, has turned on some music. “See the pyramids. . . .” Problem is, the CD’s damaged. Where is LaValle? This excitement between the bird and the rabbit has been going on while Patsy Cline sings the same three words over and over. Is that the shower Cheri hears? “See the pyramids. . . .”

  “LaValle!” Anders barks. Then he turns and takes the back stairs three at a time. The CD player is in LaValle’s room. LaValle has put on one of his favorite singers, then gone to take a shower.

  “Along the Nile,” Patsy Cline sings. It’s a relief, like sneezing after keeping still and waiting. “See the . . .” But again the music stops, and apparently it’s stopped for good, because Anders is running down the stairs, while up above, water is still pelting down in the shower.

  “That was our nature lesson for the day,” Erin says.

  “That rabbit didn’t have good posture,” Cheri calls to Anders. “Did you see that its ears were just flopping? Not like its head was being pulled up by an imaginary string.”

  “Do you know,” Anders says, coming back onto the porch, “that this is the forty-third day of flooding in the Midwest? People have lost their homes, they don’t have drinking water, they have nothing to eat, they’re sleeping in shelters, their crops are ruined, they don’t know where to turn—and what you want to do is tease me for caring about your posture. I don’t care so goddamn much about your posture. I feel like joining the relief effort, going out there and laying sandbags, because that would be more constructive and more meaningful than trying to help you, when you’ve got a charmed life and not even the sense to be thankful. You’re a wiseass who nags anybody who cares about her.”

  “Really, Anders?” Erin says. “You’re taking a plane to Illinois or someplace like that to stack sandbags on the levee, or something like that?”

  But the damage has been done. Cheri is crushed, and Anders isn’t budging. He’s turning to go back into the house, but he isn’t budging. To add insult to injury, he calls over his shoulder: “Erin, at leas
t you know a big word. You know what a levee is.”

  Tears roll down Cheri’s cheeks as the rabbit hops out from under the bush, then makes a mad dash for the underbrush.

  “Maybe it got too near the robin’s nest,” Erin says, looking off to the middle distance, trying not to embarrass Cheri by noticing the tears she’s trying to wipe away.

  “Maybe it’ll go back in the woods and get bitten by a viper, like I’ve been,” Cheri says.

  “You’re clever,” Erin says. “I don’t know why he picks on you.”

  “Clever? I’m clever but I’m not intelligent, am I? That’s what he thinks, too.”

  “I live with a moron. How intelligent is that?”

  “He’s not a moron. He’s nicer than Anders a lot of the time.”

  Erin shrugs. This is generally true, so what can she say?

  “I don’t have to be with him,” Cheri says.

  “Of course you don’t,” Erin says.

  “But you think I do.”

  “I don’t think that. I think you could be with anybody.”

  “Anybody. Like who? Henry Kissinger?”

  Erin’s eyes flash with surprise. “Kissinger,” she says slowly. “What would make you think of him?”

  “Because maybe I listen to NPR. Maybe I see his name when I read the newspaper occasionally, when LaValle throws it on the bathroom floor.”

  “Isn’t he a slob?” Erin says. “I mean, he really is. He discards the newspaper first, then lets things pile up on it, like socks and stuff from his pants pockets when he’s emptying them, and then he picks up the newspaper like he’s going to carry everything off nicely on a big silver tray, and he’s astonished when everything falls all over the floor.” Erin sees that Cheri is still crying. “Don’t let him make you feel insecure,” Erin says quietly. “Life’s not one big improvement lesson. You’re a beautiful girl, you’ve got friends who love you. . . .”

  “What friends? I’ve just got you, and you’ll probably marry LaValle. It’ll be like my father marrying Janey. Suddenly Cheri is no longer number one. I’m not feeling sorry for myself, I’m just telling you the way things are. Or are going to be.”

  “He has been bugging me about marrying him,” Erin says.

  “Yeah? Well, I just knew he was. He doesn’t like Anders at all, and he’d probably like it better without me, too. Just the two of you in this house would be better. You could get married, go on a honeymoon, see the pyramids.”

  “And what? Come back to the United States and sit with him all alone in some big house on the Maine coast, watching the birds and the bunnies? Get real.”

  “What’s the difference? We’re sitting here watching the birds and the bunnies.”

  “Well,” Erin says after a long pause. “I’m sure we should be saintly like you-know-who and go throw sandbags in front of flooding rivers.”

  “You’re going to marry him, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” Erin says. You can hear the squirm in her voice. “He’s not so bad,” she says. “We’re used to each other. I don’t want to keep experimenting. I see where that’s gotten everybody else: married to people who are sort of right for them and sort of wrong for them. But they spend so much time getting into relationships and getting out of them. I don’t know anybody who found anybody perfect, do you?”

  Cheri doesn’t answer. She’s going through the list of her friends, which is small, indeed. Once Janey was her friend. Janey confided in her that she didn’t want a second child, she was just doing it because it was what Cheri’s father wanted. She was afraid he’d leave her for someone else. Cheri had seen him in a car once with a woman—at a drive-in hamburger place out by the beach, on a day when she was skipping school; she’d seen him and ducked down to the floor of the car so he wouldn’t see her, but she made her boyfriend pull in near her father’s car and describe the woman. “Now he’s kissing her,” her boyfriend had said, and she had felt physically sick, crouched on the floor of the car. The baby wasn’t six months old. “I was kidding. I was just kidding you,” her boyfriend had protested later, but he’d said it so intently, with his eyes narrowed, that his earnestness had been a dead giveaway he was lying. So: Janey—but why stick around to see Janey get hurt?—and another girl she sometimes wrote letters to, a girl from grade school who lived in Santa Fe now, and an ex-boyfriend who felt he was her friend, though she didn’t feel the same way; he was just someone she’d once slept with a few times. Still, she sometimes called him, late at night, because she was on the East Coast, and he was back there in California time. Though that wasn’t it: she called late because she didn’t want Anders to know she was calling. The boy was sentimental and loved to play Remember When. Remember When I won you that prize on the Santa Monica Pier. Remember When we did it in the elevator at the Chateau Marmont. He was in law school. He seemed maudlin, earnest, and trapped in the past. She was a little afraid, finally, that he’d depress her more than he could help her. So that left Anders— who did like her, let’s be honest—who liked her, but who couldn’t stop himself from criticizing, and Erin, who’d been her best friend since they met in Seattle at the safe house, and then there was no one else, unless you counted LaValle, who was ambivalent. She didn’t think he liked her or disliked her; he was ambivalent. A word Anders had taught her.

  There the two of them stood: LaValle freshly showered, his long hair combed back with a wide-toothed comb, wearing white bermuda shorts and a Banks Beer tank top, and Anders, gripping the canvas carryall that held their lunch, looking slightly chagrined at the direction the day had taken.

  Cheri quickly scanned the woods, looking for the rabbit. Gone, and likely to stay hidden for a while.

  On the way to the car, Anders reached out and took her hand.

  The house LaValle had them “motor to” was half an hour away, a historic house once owned by a shipbuilder, down a paved road so rutted and dusty Cheri thought at first it was a dirt road. For a second, beyond the tall trees, she could see only the second story of the house, which reminded her very much of the way the safe house peeked through the woods in Seattle. What a thing to call a house: as if, like the rabbit rushing onto the porch, once over the finish line you were inside, safe. What did that mean? That the wolf wouldn’t dare huff and puff? That the cops couldn’t come with a search warrant? That it could remain a well-kept secret, even if half the teenagers in Santa Monica knew about its existence? Or that Robert Redford, with all his money, might not decide to buy the place, just pick up the phone and have his attorneys work it out: Oh, there’s a laminating machine and fake ID forms so kids can get a new identity? Well—maybe that could be relocated to the pool house. Redford wouldn’t shut down an important, safe place, would he? After all, hadn’t she read somewhere that he built a building at Sundance around a tree?

  The lawn was scorched because it hadn’t rained much this summer, but the bushes and trees were green, and the gardens off to the side, with iron garden benches placed here and there to face the tiered lawn that stretched to the bay, were blooming with white phlox and morning glories and begonias— more flowers than Cheri recognized, more than necessary to make a lavish garden. LaValle is preening: everyone likes the place he has discovered. He leads them through the garden, down a path to a small house that sits below, and they cup their hands to the windows to look into the empty rooms, seeing through the French doors on the opposite side the bay, glistening in the sun.

  “It’s so wonderful not having to pose,” Erin says, standing on tiptoe next to Cheri, to see the highest reaches of the little room inside.

  “I know. It drives me crazy when everything in the world turns into a backdrop for a pose,” Cheri says.

  Anders and LaValle have walked ahead, around the corner of the house, looking for the ideal picnic spot. Cheri sees their profiles as they pass the last window, and thinks, briefly, that Anders is cuter. When either one of them is in trouble with Erin, or with her, they draw together. They’ve organized into a team now, sni
ffing out new territory.

  “I wonder if this is a caretaker’s house, or whether it’s just here, empty. It doesn’t seem like anybody lives inside,” Erin says.

  As they’re staring in, taking in the very un-California wide-board floors, the fireplace and mantel in the room Cheri would make her bedroom if she lived there, a little girl comes around the corner and stops, seeing them there. She’s pretty, about four years old, holding a small toy horse. Cheri looks at her Velcro-fastened running shoes and her white anklets, her grass-stained knees protruding below the pleated skirt of her short jumper. In ten years, she’s the person who’ll look at Cheri and Erin posing for the camera—if they last in the business. Right now, though, what they have in common is that they’re all three a bit rumpled on a summer day, all three strangers to a place that seems to be empty except for them. Then the little girl’s mother comes on the scene, snuggling into the side of an older man, who has a baby in a Snuglee on his back—a sleeping, bonneted baby. It’s instantaneous, the woman’s sudden look of recognition, and Cheri sees that Erin sees it, feels the wheels turning in Erin’s brain, writing the whole scenario before the woman speaks: they look familiar; are they in the movies? On TV? Cheri senses Erin’s irritation; her determination to be polite; her desire to move on. Just as Erin smiles, the woman says, quietly, “Dorothy Weston.”

  Jesus; it couldn’t be worse if the woman had said Rumpelstiltskin. Better if she’d said Rumpelstiltskin, in fact. It’s somebody from California, some friend of Janey’s, isn’t it? The midwife Janey had for the birth of her first baby, or . . .

  “Dorothy. Honey,” the woman says.

  The little girl runs to her mother’s side and does what Cheri wants to do; she hides, shyly. She puts her horse in front of her lips and gazes over the top of its mane, waiting to see what will happen next. What happens next is that the man looks puzzled. “This is a friend’s daughter from California,” the woman says to the man. Couldn’t there be a hint of doubt in her voice, Cheri wonders? She certainly isn’t responding to the woman. Erin, taken aback at hearing Cheri’s real name, has frozen.