by Ann Beattie
Banderas nearly topples me, then immediately begins sniffing, dragging the afghan off the sofa. He rolls on a corner as if it were carrion, snorting as he rises and charges toward the bedroom.
“That’s the letter?” Vic says, snatching the envelope from the center of the table. He rips it open. “Dear Sister-in-law,” he reads, holding the paper above his head as I run toward him. He looks so different with his stubbly beard, and I realize with a pang that I don’t recognize the shirt he’s wearing. He starts again: “Dear Sister-in-law.” He whirls sideways, the paper clutched tightly in his hand. “I know that Tim will be speaking to you, but I wanted to personally send you this note. I think that families have differences, but everyone’s viewpoint is important. I would very much like—” He whirls again, and this time Banderas runs into the fray, rising up on his back legs as if he, too, wanted the letter.
“Let the dog eat it! Let him eat the thing if you have to read it out loud!” I say.
“—to invite you for Thanksgiving dinner, and also to offer you some of our frequent-flier miles, if that might be helpful, parenthesis, though it may be a blackout period, end paren.”
Vic looks at me. “Aren’t you embarrassed at your reaction to this woman? Aren’t you?”
The dog leaps into the afghan and rolls again, catching a claw in the weave. Vic and I stand facing each other. I am panting, too shocked to speak.
“Please excuse Tim for disappearing when I came to the door of the Oaks. I was there to see if I could help. He said my face provoked a realization of his newfound strength.” Vic sighs. He says, “Just what I was afraid of—some New Ager as crazy as your brother. ‘I’m sure you understand that I was happy to know that I could be helpful to Tim in this trying time. We must all put the past behind us and celebrate our personal Thanksgiving, parenthesis, our wedding, end paren, and I am sure that everything can be put right when we get together. Fondly, your sister-in-law, Cora.’ ”
There are tears in my eyes. The afghan is going to need major repair. Vic has brought his best friend into my house to destroy it, and all he will do is hold the piece of paper above his head, as if he’d just won a trophy.
“I practiced this afternoon,” he says finally, lowering his arm. “I can do either a train coming through the mountains or a garland of roses with a butterfly on top.”
“Great,” I say, sitting on the floor, fighting back tears. “The butterfly can be dreaming it’s a man, or the man can be dreaming he’s…” I change my mind about what I was going to say: “Or the man can be dreaming he’s desperate.”
Vic doesn’t hear me; he’s busy trying to get Banderas to drop a starfish costume he’s capering with.
“Why do you think it would work?” I say to Vic. “We were never right for each other. I’m in my fifties. It would be my third marriage.”
Carefully, he creases the letter a second, then a third time. He lifts the scissors out of their small plastic container, fumbling awkwardly with his big fingers. He frowns in concentration and begins to cut. Eventually, from the positive cuttings, I figure out that he’s decided on the train motif. Cutting air away to expose a puff of steam, he says, “Let’s take it slow, then. You could invite me to go with you to Thanksgiving.”
Just Going Out
MY cousin Renny and I were raised in Minneapolis by my mother’s brother and, occasionally, women hired to help around the house: boarders or (we supposed) Uncle Roy’s lady friends, our favorite female anything being Gladys the dog. Shortly before we arrived, Roy found Gladys panting at the door and took her in to give her a drink of water. She waited politely in the kitchen (he always began the story at this point) as he looked for a suitable bowl. Then he called the police, who told him to call the Animal Rescue League and have the dog taken to the pound. Instead, he asked around the neighborhood, ran an ad, then checked out many books about dog ownership from the library. Gladys became an early subject of my cousin’s photographs, wearing various headdresses Renny made. Except that she was a mongrel and ducked her head in an embarrassed way, Renny’s photographs were much in the spirit of William Wegman’s Weimaraners. In spite of the difficulty he must have experienced, suddenly having a twelve-year-old girl and a fifteen-year-old boy to raise, Roy gave a fair share of his attention to Gladys (who made it clear, when she dragged certain things from one woman’s room, that the boarder wasn’t the old maid she presented herself as being).
I had been sent to Minneapolis to stay with my mother’s brother while she had surgery. She died as a reaction to anesthesia. My grandmother was supposed to take me, but she remarried and moved to Florida. It was Roy’s idea to have me joined by my cousin Sarah, from a broken home, though when the day came her brother Reginald showed up instead, a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea lunch box at his feet, his collection of miniature flags of the world in the backseat. Reginald’s sister had promised to start attending school again if she could stay with her mother; Renny asked to go in her place, saying he needed a father figure in his life.
Several months after we arrived, one of Roy’s neighbors called, saying that her son, a film student at NYU, wanted to come over to talk to the family (“We’re a family, we’re a slightly unconventional family” was another of Roy’s refrains). Nelson Crawford was tall, with red hair and what turned out to be a temporary tattoo salamander disappearing under the sleeve of his T-shirt. He wore a silver stud in one ear and had little, bony hands that looked almost vestigial.
We liked Nelson—we being Renny and me—though Gladys showed little interest, and Uncle Roy was wary about anyone coming in to make a film of us living our lives. Elizabeth Brown, one of the boarders who had rented my room before I arrived, advised against letting Nelson into our home. She had heard that he was an atheist, and also that he belonged to some group that went swimming naked in the middle of winter. She did not believe he was a student at NYU. He was, though. He had changed his major from religion to philosophy to film. He’d once had a cup of coffee with Robert De Niro, and he lived in his own apartment on lower Broadway. As much as possible, as he explained his project to us, he wanted to disappear into the background (it would be an under-statement to say that all of us were used to people disappearing), and film us doing everyday things like the laundry, or eating dinner, but he also wanted to talk to us about our individual interests. Tape recorder running, Renny started right in about flags, while Uncle Roy hinted strongly that things sometimes tended to be a little chaotic, and he worried that whatever was captured (as he put it) might give the wrong impression. He warmed up a little, though, when Nelson said that he’d heard Roy was an artist.
Roy’s hobby was making herbal wreaths. He grew most of the herbs, drying them over the summer and working in his heated garage in the winter, late at night. He spray-painted pinecones, bought little birds at the craft store in town, and sold his wreaths at a crafts fair that took place every Saturday in August, near the lake.
“What’s your interest?” Nelson asked me.
“She’s a big reader,” Uncle Roy answered.
“Then I’ll bet you’re going to be a writer,” Nelson said.
Being a writer became synonymous, for me, with New York City (which was synonymous with Robert De Niro) and also with my assumption that I’d know more people like Nelson, who seemed filled with self-assurance. I had never met a man who wore two scarves, twined together like a twist ice cream cone—in clashing colors, no less. I was grateful that Nelson had not jumped to a more likely possibility—one I’d heard mentioned by my mother: that I should be a librarian.
Nelson came every day for a week. He’d go home and have dinner with his parents, then return. By the third night some of the novelty had worn off; we got tired of clowning around, and stopped making remarks to the handheld camera. We tuned him out as we did homework, watched TV, or talked on the phone. When Gramma Abby called from Fort Lauderdale, she was surprised to learn that a film student was in Roy’s house. She acted like I was slow-witted and didn’t realize N
elson must be a boarder. Nelson filmed and recorded as I explained to her that he lived in New York, and had decided to come to our house to show people how ordinary, yet exceptional, a typical American family could be. (He had told me this, drawing invisible quotation marks in the air around typical.) I had begun to keep a journal, which I planned to turn into a novel when I was more mature. Renny had demonstrated how flags were used in various military exercises in Greece, marching back and forth with tennis balls held atop his shoes with rubber bands, a down vest pulled over his pajamas.
The house seemed empty, in spite of Gladys’s reemergence, when Nelson went back to New York. When the phone rang, Renny and I raced for it, wanting to know if Nelson had been able to get a grant for a plane ticket back in March. We were delighted when the approval came through. “You don’t want to get your hopes up,” Roy said. “Remember, this won’t be shown in a movie theater. It’s a school project.”
I sang in the school choir. Renny became interested in coins. Renny explained to Roy that we could not do our assignments without a computer. Roy bought us one to share, saying that he knew nothing about them and to please not ask him to help us. In the same way Gladys disappeared when either Nelson or the vacuum appeared, Roy passed by quickly when he saw the screen glowing.
Soon afterward, Renny and Nelson began e-mailing. Renny was RennywhenUR. Nelson was [email protected]. Nelson reported primarily on his love life: a triangle with two women who were only sort of friends (one pretended to be friendly in order to gather information, then stabbed her friend in the back). Pru was pretty, Janine plain. My mother had explained to me that plain was a euphemism for ugly. I explained that to Renny, who involved me in his e-mailing. He wrote Nelson that I was in concert choir because the only alternative had been drama club, which I’d joined, and then been selected only to play a butterfly in one production, and as the understudy for another, in which I would have been an old woman with a broom who opens a door. He told him things about Uncle Roy: that he’d given up smoking, but was biting his nails to the quick. He told him I wanted to live in New York, but he wanted to go to the desert (he hated the cold). Nelfilm e-mailed back about Pru and Janine. Pru had a good body, but was a bitch who said she wanted to have sex, then didn’t show up; Janine had ham-butt thighs and was obsessed with Pru’s perfection, though she sneered at Pru’s having had a nose job and hinted that if Pru took the subway instead of walking, she’d gain weight instantly. Janine showed up (inevitably late), but accused Nelson of really caring only for Pru. Janine was too defensive; Pru was insecure. Both of them were ballbusters. We were amazed when it was revealed that all three of them, in their clothes, got in Nelson’s bed and drank a giant margarita they sipped from the pitcher, Pru licking the rim to reapply salt, Janine poking her foot out of the covers to have Nelson apply polish, which she requested that Pru blow on.
To hear Nelson tell it, they’d get into these situations with no forethought, and just happen to have margarita mix and special salt, while Janine carried a bottle of Ming Dynasty Red wherever she went (in this case, her father’s apartment. He let her stay there when he was in Denmark). They drank his liquor, watered down the bottle, smoked marijuana, said sarcastically funny things about one another’s deficiencies; they switched locales not only from downtown to uptown, but as far as Stowe, Vermont, where they built a snowman they carried into their friend’s ski chalet, taking the shower curtain off its hooks to protect the antique rug they had sex on, in front of the melting snowman. We also learned of a blow job in the ladies’ room at Kennedy airport, as a cleaning woman worked her way up the stalls, singing in Spanish.
I think we stopped telling Nelson about our lives because we realized they were dull. We were embarrassed to ask for details of things we didn’t understand. We were also embarrassed to be reading them in each other’s presence. Sometimes when Renny turned on the computer and opened one of Nelson’s messages, I could tell from the check mark he’d already read it. He’d leave me alone and pretend to have something to do in the other room. For a while we tried to think of nasty things to report about everyone, because if we couldn’t talk about our nonexistent sexual exploits, at least we could be cruel. But it was difficult to keep imagining bad things. Our schoolwork took a lot of time, and we still had the habit of walking Gladys together, at night, and we also worried—at least, I did—that our nasty streaks might stain us. Then Renny got pneumonia. He was hospitalized for several days and nobody looked at e-mail for a week; when we did, it was obvious that Nelson had gone over the top. There were more than sixty messages waiting, many of them very long, growing more and more insistent that we respond, because we owed him that. He’d spent a lot of time enlightening us. He’d thought we were his friends. The last few turned accusatory: we were losers, unsophisticated kids who couldn’t handle the truth about adult life. Even Pru sneered at us—or Nelson pretending to write as Pru. We figured that out.
We were amazed that someone who had been our friend could turn against us so viciously, just because he’d misread our silence. Renny ripped up the list he’d been keeping of words he hadn’t understood. I was disgusted when Nelson said Renny was a limp dick who’d probably spend the rest of his life trying to hump Gladys, though when I look back at my diary, I realize that I had no idea that hump meant intercourse; I’d thought it had something to do with Renny’s grabbing Gladys’s haunches when her body seemed to go in two directions as she tried to hold on to a ball. Renny thought we should say something about the whole bizarre (as we now understood) exchange to Roy.
“Enough! You need rest!” Roy finally said, and we all but did a body block, fearing he might see what was on the screen. I stood by the printer in case he had any curiosity about its spewing pages. But Roy (we’d told Nelson that Roy was cannibalistic, gnawing his own flesh from the fingers up) only seemed concerned we had so much homework, and the e-mails made us think of him by contrast as blessedly levelheaded, rather than an old fogy. In one of the last messages, Pru said that if we stopped corresponding, we would experience phantom pain. She wrote at length about Viet vets who couldn’t sleep at night, tortured by the pain of their scorched, amputated feet, or their aching missing arms. In a message that started out chiding, she ended up saying she could send out bad vibes to bring down cowards.
What do you imagine? That somehow, perversely, she was right? That something awful happened? Gladys hit by a car? Roy found out and called Gramma Abby and we were gone from his house like sand blown down a beach?
Those things didn’t happen. After Pru’s dismissal of us as “fuck-faces,” the messages ended. Roy came home with a box of éclairs. Gladys, on her leash, walked at heel. Renny’s cough did not turn out to be a recurrence of pneumonia. In the spring concert, I sang a capella, with the other altos, “The Pasture,” adapted from a poem by Robert Frost. Roy clapped. Renny got an exciting new book about Roman coins. After another week or so, Renny said, walking home from school, “It’s over.” It reassured me. We still sat side by side to sign on to e-mail, but we stopped holding our breath. Every junk e-mail was a relief. Renny pressed “delete” and “delete” and “delete.” He got permission to order another book about numismatics by the author of the library book on Roman coins. I rarely thought about Nelson. When I came into the room, Renny was never e-mailing. Take the rest of this story as a report from a would-be fiction writer. Like any story worth telling, it isn’t easily paraphrased. But don’t worry: Roy never found out; Renny married into a big Southern family the year he graduated from Duke. He still collects coins and flies an American flag from the front porch in Savannah, where, for many years, he has created artwork in his workshop. He is president of a Nations-Bank. Gladys lived to be thirteen, having eaten scrambled eggs the morning she died in her sleep, her favorite toy, the SS Uncle Roy, clamped under her chin.
You will realize that I have omitted mention of myself.
In August 2003 I was on my first trip to Paris, engaged to a man named Steven whom I’d met at a d
eli in New York, whose older sister had married a Parisian. We were staying with them in the Fifth in a sunny apartment with speckled glass vases on the deep windowsill. The vases had curling lips that looked like cresting waves, and it seemed as if confetti were mixed into the water. They were the ugliest thing I had ever seen: Murano glass, I learned. Perhaps ugly, but coveted by many, including my future brother-in-law.
The next day I would fly to New York and my fiancé would go to Chicago; he had decided to start law school and eventually join the family practice in Evanston. I would put things from our New York student housing into storage, room with a friend in midtown to save money, and fly to Chicago on the weekends, while I finished my MFA at Columbia. In the years I’d already spent there, I’d thought of Nelson a few times, but the evil spell was long broken. The episode had not been important enough to tell Steven about.
Another American couple, Charlie and Annette, had been invited to dinner at Steven’s sister’s apartment. Charlie was in a program in Paris as an apprentice to a museum curator; his much nicer girlfriend, Annette, was flaxen-haired and had a shy smile; she wore dangling turquoise earrings and pale lipstick and looked like a model from my mother’s generation. She was up on everything: what was in the museums; the new fashions; books that were being discussed.
It came up in conversation that Annette’s sister was the assistant manager of a café a few blocks from where I planned to live when I returned to the States. Her sister, she said, was the creative force behind the place: she had added magazine racks up front and changed the music. Annette’s best friend worked at Vogue and had gotten the place mentioned. The ficus had been removed, a piece of sculpture moved in. For a while, we were caught in a whirlwind of detail: the sculptor’s work had been selected for the Whitney Biennial, making Annette’s sister look prescient. “You have to meet her,” Annette said, writing on the back of her boyfriend’s card: “Café Risqué, 134 E. 66th Street.” In block letters: “PRUDENCE WINTER.”
