Perfect Recall

by Ann Beattie

  “They’re what I do to relax,” he said.

  “There’s no champagne, but there’s grape juice,” Kate said, surveying the refrigerator shelves. “Who will drink a toast to my marriage to Nathaniel?”

  “I should just lie down,” my mother said.

  “The sofa folds out,” Kate said, sounding disappointed.

  “I’m sleeping with Mom. I was almost killed,” Elizabeth said.

  Everyone looked at Elizabeth. I continued to look at Uncle Nate’s tires.

  “You’re an artist,” I said.

  “Well, yes, I suppose I am,” he said.

  “He’s very creative,” Kate said.

  “This place is weird,” Elizabeth said. “Mom, you’re not going to have an attack because it’s so musty, are you?”

  “Shhh,” our mother said.

  “What’s going to happen to our car, Mom?” Elizabeth said.

  “I never thought they’d like it here. That’s why I didn’t have them in today,” he said. “I’m not comfortable here myself, it’s just that it’s my house.”

  “That was so awful,” Elizabeth said. “That was so, so awful. Mom, you said you saw possums? Do you think they were really there, or do you think you imagined them?”

  “Of course they were there,” our mother said.

  “Did they have little shiny eyes?” Elizabeth said.

  “Please stop talking so much.”

  Our mother looked at Kate. She said: “He gave me his phone number. He seemed awfully nice, but I don’t know why he thought I’d have any reason to call him.”

  “Double wedding!” Kate exclaimed.

  But Nate married Kate at the office of the county registrar, and though she eventually went to live with him, our mother never officially married Dennis Trellis. She couldn’t have married him if she’d wanted to, because she had never divorced our father. But she started living with him a few months after the accident, after many late-night telephone calls. First my mother moved us to a little town half an hour away from Uncle Nate and Aunt Kate’s that we moved out of that spring, when our mother moved in with Dennis. Elizabeth thought that our mother was “unstable,” and that her relationship with Dennis was making her sacrifice her daughters’ best interests for her own insatiable sexual appetite—meaning: tap dancing classes and elocution lessons with Mrs. Marieanne DuFarge, in my sister’s case. My sister explained sex to me, in the rather histrionic way Mrs. DuFarge had encouraged her to talk when she had something of importance to say, using a broom and a dustpan to illustrate her point. So that was why we were living in rural Maine. That was what was going on with the creaking bedsprings at night: Dennis Trellis was sweeping our mother.

  Elizabeth, not to be done in by what she called “rural isolation,” began a program of self-improvement she hoped would make her a highly paid model. She was tall for her age—five nine and growing—and it was her ambition to walk the runways in Paris. She steered her sled into a tree to break her nose—she was successful—and came out of surgery with the bump on her nose gone, as well as two black eyes we worried would never disappear. She hung photographs of exotic models on her bedroom walls and examined their eye makeup under the lens of the school microscope. She padded around the house wearing ankle weights, to give her shapelier calves. When she was sixteen, my mother and Dennis gave in and let her join the gym. There, she took step aerobics and practiced jumping up in the air like a jack-in-the-box on the trampoline, as well as attending Saturday morning advanced workouts. She was lean and muscular, with long hair and her new, almost perfect nose, and she wore more makeup than anyone in town. It was the frustration of her life that our mother steadfastly refused to let her climb into the gym’s tanning machine, but eventually she decided to opt for a look she described as “pale and perfect.” “Mom, I am trying to look like Liz Taylor in Cleopatra,” she would whine when criticized. “This is an established look,” she would argue, barely containing her contempt. Dennis Trellis just shrugged, trying not to take sides. I, because I saw the effort that went into applying so many colors and substances to her face, was admiring of anything that took so much work. Elizabeth let me squirt mineral water on her face from a plant mister turned to the finest spray, to protect her makeup. She taught me how to paint her fingernails, and then how to do nail art. For Christmas, she got what she most desired: a subscription to French Vogue.

  She met her husband-to-be, Donovan McCallister, at the gym. She met him when she was eighteen, just after Eileen Ford turned her down because she didn’t have the right look. She had taken the train to New York, neatly dressed in a shirtwaist dress and low-heeled pumps, carrying a small overnight bag (she was going to stay on Central Park West with an old lady who was a friend of Grandmother Huntlowe’s). Inside the bag she carried what she really intended to wear to the interview: a tiny black skirt, sheer stockings painted with a viper breathing fire at the ankles, her T-strap patent leather high heels, and several scarves she folded artfully, then tied around her breasts, dropping a white sheer blouse over top and adding necklaces of varying lengths, dangling ristras and silver crosses.

  She went to four agencies, but she didn’t have the right look for any of them. She came home with her waterproof eye makeup a mess, having cried for hours on the train. She was convinced that the “unsophistication” of Maine had tainted her, in spite of her best efforts. “I look almost like Lauren Hutton, so why didn’t they want me?” she asked, for weeks. The plant mister went back to misting the philodendron. She stopped “cleansing her system” with quarts of mineral water. The Cleopatra look was abandoned for a modified, early Cheryl Tiegs. And then she met Donovan, who came into the gym to deliver lobsters. Many places in Maine where you wouldn’t expect to find lobsters had lobsters: the Midas Muffler Shop; the greeting-card store. Donovan’s cousin owned the gym, and Donovan and his friend Billy kept the tank by the front desk stocked, making a dollar fifty for every lobster sold up to one and a quarter pounds, and two dollars for every lobster sold up to three pounds. Billy whistled at my sister as she was leaving the gym. Donovan apologized for his creepy friend. Elizabeth ended up buying a three-pound cul and bringing it home for the family. In a year, she was married to him.

  I haven’t said much yet about myself. I’ve been a tagalong all my life. I was the youngest in my family, and it inhibited me. I looked to my sister to explain things, and to my mother to deny most of Elizabeth’s explanations and substitute her own ideas. From their two ways of thinking, I arrived at a compromise, which I ran past Dennis Trellis, who had his own axe to grind, though I didn’t know that then. He was large and affable and sincere, and I thought he was the most objective person in our family, though now I know that he was bitter he hadn’t succeeded the way he’d hoped to in life, and that he always expected the worst. He had been sure, the night he went off the road, that when he got to us, somebody in the car would be dead. He had feared Elizabeth would be killed on her trip to New York City. He had thought Grandma’s friend would have forgotten her arrival, and that she’d have to sit all night in Penn Station. He also thought that indeed she would become a model, and that that guaranteed a life of drugs, sex, exploitation, and overwork, while she associated with the smarmiest of characters. So, along with sweeping, these were the things he would discuss with my mother at night, which reinforced her own fear of the world. Leaving aside her problems with us, she already had a brother she considered crazy, or at best, a wild eccentric; her sister-in-law was fixated on the fact that Uncle Nate might leave her, because since the wedding, he had never again celebrated Valentine’s Day with the half-price candy-box hearts; Aunt Kate’s daughter, Cindy Sue, had gone to college in Roanoke, Virginia, and dropped out to become a Moonie, and she had been married in a mass ceremony in Madison Square Garden. Even Prince Valiant was a worry: “a homosexual”—it was the first time I’d ever heard the word—because when a male collie moved into the neighborhood, Prince became infatuated with it to such an extent that one time, chained t
o the doghouse, he dragged it half a mile to the other dog’s property, to visit. They preferred to kill sheep together—it was the dog catcher who first alerted Uncle Nate and Aunt Kate to the dog’s alliance—but when both dogs were tied up, Prince still found a way to make a visit, and together the two of them dug a large hole in the lawn, which they stuffed themselves into, dragging their chains down with them. My mother also began to worry more and more about Grandma Huntlowe, because she wouldn’t eat anything but devil’s food cookies and Fritos, and about Mother Brink, who had become agoraphobic (though we didn’t know the term in those days), and who watched daytime soap operas and confused the characters’ problems with Mother’s. To his credit, Dennis Trellis tried to deal with all these problems, buying groceries for Grandma, phoning Mother Brink’s doctor; taking Uncle Nate aside and telling him the wisest thing, the day after Valentine’s, would be to buy his wife a box of candy. He was also reading a book about intervention (Cindy Sue) and how sensitive men could best deal with menopause (my mother), though he preferred reading the Sunday comics. He was stumped about what to do with the problem of Donovan McCallister—not only did they both consider him unsuitable for my sister, but Donovan had become so involved in various self-protection classes that he was always shadow-boxing the walls. Still, some part of him felt that he and Donovan were similar, or at least he wished he could also be a hustler, filled with confidence about himself, pulling lobsters out of the water after finishing his day job, working out at the gym on weekends, taking judo classes and boxing. But he also thought Donovan was a smooth talker—he did not believe he was only twenty-five and asked for proof, which Donovan showed him by way of a fake ID he’d made at an amusement park—and he worried, as he probably would have worried about any suitor, that he would take advantage of Elizabeth.

  About this time, what my mother called “the doubling up” began to take place. Mother Brink moved back in with Grandma, to be taken care of (meaning: an odd diet that forced her to cook for herself, and no more daytime TV). Prince Valiant was given to our family when he wouldn’t stop running away, but we only had him a few months before he died of a broken heart, on the same day he refused, for the first time, to do the hot-dog trick. Then that summer Elizabeth got married to Donovan, and soon thereafter—as I’ve already mentioned— Donovan’s son, Banyan, showed up at the door, which made an instant family of three. People shifted around, the dog died—it was a little as if we’d been tinged by magic, except that nothing was straightened out at the end of the evening.

  An amazing thing that did happen, though, was that Nathaniel Jasper Brink—my Uncle Nate—became a sensation in the art world.

  In the summer of 1979, a new gallery opened in Belfast, Maine, run by a former New York City art dealer. Lula, the owner’s wife, had been a friend of Kate’s in high school, and when she moved to the area, she called Kate. Kate had her over, and she saw Uncle Nate’s tires. She not only saw them, she flipped for them. She had Kate take her out to the garage, where by then Nate had set up a workroom, to see the pieces he was working on. She came back another day to photograph them, bringing her husband with her. He offered to have a show. Uncle Nate said he didn’t think so—they were his hobby. Private. But Aunt Kate prevailed. He would have done anything to console her after Prince’s death and Cindy Sue’s disappearance.

  The night of the show, Uncle Nate put on his nicest jacket and pants, and Aunt Kate wore a dress she had ordered from Frederick’s of Hollywood. Outside the gallery was a big white limousine. There were also motorcycles and a Jaguar convertible, and someone was filming the opening for the local news. The limousine turned out to belong to Tony Curtis, who was already inside the gallery. Alex Katz was there. Aunt Kate overheard Tony Curtis telling Ada Katz that the woman getting her plastic champagne flute filled was Johnny Carson’s wife. Aunt Kate was struck by all the celebrities. It took her a while to notice that Nate’s tires had all been placed on white cubes that sat in front of enormous blowups of Lula’s photographs. The show had a title: TIRED ART. It flew from two white flags leaning out from wall anchors. Fans tilted upward sent the flags billowing. They were large and silky; they reminded Nate of sails that had caught the wind. He thought they were the most beautiful things in the show, he told us later, including his art.

  The photographs that provided the backdrops were, for the most part, highly editorial. The tire with Polynesian figures sat in front of a photograph of a woman in a grass skirt, bare breasted, silver rings piercing the woman’s dark nipples. The tire with the farm animals and windmills stood in front of a photo of a crowded parking lot. The tire glued with toy cars going every which way had as a backdrop a heap of compacted metal in a junkyard. Uncle Nate had thought of his tires as whimsical; in the gallery, people regarded them with serious expressions, nodding and whispering. Three tires sold, and the penguin tire with spray-painted snow was put on hold.

  I stood at Uncle Nate’s side as he moved around the gallery. All the tires had been placed in front of photographs, except for the one that had been sunk. Wires attached it to the corners of a large fishtank. It was Nate’s sea-life tire: metal waves, sprayed various shades of blue, plus little rubber fish, including a shark that seemed to be pulling fish backwards. Among the fish was a drowned woman, about a quarter of an inch tall, in a blouse and skirt. There was a small bicycle on its side, and a tiny tire Nate had gotten from a toy truck. The photograph behind the tank showed a shark zeroing in on a decapitated corpse, a cloud of blood spreading smokily through the water. The tank was on a higher pedestal than the other tires, so that the photograph showed through when you looked at it at eye level, wavery and distorting. That was the photograph that prompted Kate’s shocked question, which elicited the information that that particular photograph came from a service that supplied photos.

  “Powerful,” the woman standing next to Uncle Nate said.

  There was seaweed. There were real fish: little neons, darting above the tire as if it were a reef.

  My mother, biting her lip, turned her head away.

  “Cool,” Elizabeth exhaled in a hushed whisper.

  “God,” Dennis said, turning and walking away.

  Who could have guessed that Uncle Nate was soon to move out of the garage, into a studio he’d put up on his property with the proceeds he’d make from the show? Or that a monograph would exist the next year that featured pop-ups of the tires? Aunt Kate was soon to have a new puppy and a sapphire ring, and for a brief time there would be exciting vacations for all of us. In my own case, I would also have a computer, which Nate thought I needed because of the journal I’d been keeping about what happened to members of our family. He, himself, would be getting a new Jeep, and Kate a new Volvo. In their future were trips to St. Bart’s and to Virgin Gorda. Uncle Nate’s clothes would come from L.L. Bean, instead of being things he found at the kidney foundation shop.

  Lula Rahv came up to Uncle Nate and stood at his side, beaming. “Champagne?” she said, holding out a glass.

  “You’d probably like it better if there was a photograph behind me of a cork flying into somebody’s eye,” he said, taking the glass.

  “Is this person by any chance the artist?” a smiling man with a red face, wearing suspenders and white pants, said. He had just bought the Polynesian tire. The red dot was being placed on the wall by Lula Rahv’s husband.

  Though Uncle Nate didn’t know it then, the smiling man was the ticket to his future: Andrew Kingsley. “You must come to Boston, to see my art collection and to meet my aunt,” Kingsley said. “You’d be interested to meet my aunt.” He paused, then said, significantly: “My aunt is Willa Walker.”

  Uncle Nate looked at him blankly.

  “The landscape painter,” Andrew Kingsley said. “I’ve started to keep my own expanding collection in her dining room.”

  Aunt Kate knew who Willa Walker was. She had seen her paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, and she remembered them: lovely, lyrical little landscapes. She looked so pleased
to be introduced to the woman’s nephew that Nate just could not refuse. This was before Uncle Nate carried a Day-at-a-Glance book, though, so he jotted down the time and place of the meeting on a cocktail napkin. Kate had seen landscape paintings that moved her that much? She’d spent time at the museum? She was a constant surprise to him.

  One week to the day, they owned a Willa Walker. They had gotten it—a silvery painting of the Charles, at dusk—in trade for Uncle Nate’s “Desi Chasing Lucy” tire.

  Miss Willa—that was what her nephew called her—said the tire was something that would bring both her nephew and her much pleasure. It would be a great addition to what she called her nephew’s “annex.” I wasn’t there that day, so the rest of what I say is from Kate’s report. Uncle Nate and Aunt Kate stood in the doorway, taking things in. On one wall was a photograph of tree branches—was that what they were?—that looked like it had been shot many times, then torn in half and jaggedly patched together. A plaster bird was on the floor beneath it, in a puddle of feathers. The companion piece was a cement birdbath. The cement birdbath was in the shape of a bird. Miss Willa turned on the spotlight by touching a special wall switch. Music also filled the room at the touch of another button: La Traviata.

  “Miss Willa has the most interesting dining room in Boston,” her nephew said.

  “I didn’t use it for years,” Willa Walker said. “I was delighted when Andrew proposed an art gallery. I heard once that Joan Kennedy never cooked in her kitchen. That she put her scarves and hats in the kitchen drawers. We don’t live our lives in particular rooms anymore, do we?”

  While Uncle Nate was certainly the dominant figure in our family when he was alive, after his death everyone looked around—sort of like birds looking for a few more grains of food, I guess—and without consultation, it was mutually agreed that the next person most deserving of our attention was Banyan.