The Accomplished Guest: Stories

by Ann Beattie

  She walked over to the chair, stepped out of one clog, unzipped a boot, and slipped her bare foot in. The lining was so soft, it felt like poking into a powder puff. Her size. She did not even need to stand up to know that. She looked and looked at her foot, elegant and riveting, the other one clumsy in its clog. Then she stepped out of the boot, pushed it aside without bothering to rezip it or even to stand it upright. Ashamed, she slipped her foot into her old shoe and went downstairs as quickly as she could.

  Blair, her kind daughter, was embracing Dee Dee, who was crying on her shoulder. Janet saw Jeff on the gurney, being put into the ambulance. Steven—good boy—was signing paperwork, then gesturing to Blair, letting her know that Dee Dee just needed to take the pen and sign in one place. Blair had grown up. She did perfectly fine in any situation. This was her third serious boyfriend, and every one of them had been handsome, liberal, conscientious, smitten.

  There was a shower of pink peony petals on the counter, and the cake sat untouched, unfrosted. Without its siren, the ambulance streaked away, with Dee Dee still moaning in Blair’s arms. Did anyone suggest she go in the ambulance? Janet asked Blair with her eyes; Blair let her mother know by her expression that yes, she’d been asked. Janet watched a large black ant—theirs? hers?—move quickly down the kitchen counter and run behind a sponge. An SUV that was waiting for the ambulance to exit came into the driveway, and a man and a woman, both in summer suits, got out and walked quickly toward the house, all the while looking over their shoulders. The dog stood atop the fallen poster board, scratching Bernie Madoff’s face as if digging down to find a little mole.

  Her mother and father. Janet had forgotten them. She went into the kitchen and picked up the telephone, dialed their number. Dee Dee left Blair’s arms, and Blair began talking to the woman in the pale-yellow suit as the man embraced Dee Dee. The dog had decided the poster board was carrion and had begun wiggling against it. The dog consistently kept itself amused. “Dad?” Janet said shakily. “You’re home okay? Mom has her medicine?”

  “Bottom line, yes, but the pills already made her upchuck, so we’re waiting for the doctor’s call. Everything was stolen out of my car, and that includes my golf bag and clubs, my ESPN jacket, my favorite cap, and approximately ten dollars’ worth of quarters for parking meters, along with your mother’s cashmere shawl so the air-conditioning won’t kill her. So that’s how smart our police are, picking the human scum off the car like barnacles on a ship, then leaving the ship wide open for pirates. What can you do? Hard to blame them. At first they thought I was some old codger who didn’t know what he was talking about, so why listen to him? Your mother—”

  “Yes! Is she able to talk on the phone, Dad? Do you think you should get an ambulance if she’s throwing up, and take her to the emergency room?”

  “You take care of yourself, my baby,” Janet’s mother said in the faintest voice imaginable. “Everything works out for the best. Daddy is safely home.”

  “Mom, do you think—”

  The phone dropped. “Mom!” Janet shouted. “Dad, pick up the phone. Dad?”

  Steven appeared at Janet’s side and put an arm around her shoulders. “Okay, let’s not involve a lot of people in this situation,” he said. “Big excitement, but things are going to work out and”—he lowered his voice—“not our problem.”

  Janet was listening to a dial tone.

  Dee Dee suddenly came up behind Steven. She said, “What happened to Jeff was revenge, pure and simple. Why didn’t he just let it go? He blames Madoff for everything, Madoff ruined the country, made fools of everybody, Madoff, Madoff, Madoff. He was going to have a funeral pyre, throw his poster-board artwork on the fire for a grand finale. Now you see where all his anger and bitterness got him.”

  “Oh, Dee Dee, I don’t think this happened because of his feelings about Madoff, do you really think that?” the man in the suit said. “Has Jeff been that upset?”

  “I think we’ll just leave things as they are and pick up whatever’s left tomorrow,” Blair said. Dee Dee was running her fingers through her hair, looking dazed. The woman in the yellow suit murmured agreement with what Blair had said, shooting the man warning glances that he shouldn’t say anything more. Another car pulled into the drive.

  “This isn’t America! It’s not the America I grew up in, it’s a joke,” Dee Dee cried, “it’s a big joke controlled by evildoers, and that’s what they are, whether people want to laugh at George Bush or not, they are evil, and they do want us to be driven into the ground, everybody ruined, let the pirates ride the high seas. I agree with Jeff: I could take Madoff’s head and push it under the water, and then push it under again, and then . . .” Another car bumped up the driveway.

  “Okay, tomorrow, be back tomorrow, don’t worry about this—” Steven gestured. His gesture seemed to encompass a lot; it was a very big house.

  “Fuck him, fuck him,” Dee Dee said. When she returned to railing against America, it was clear she’d been talking about Madoff, not Jeff.

  Everything had happened so quickly. All of it had happened in ten or fifteen minutes. Janet was breathing heavily. It seemed important to go upstairs, on any pretext, to open the closet door and make sure that there was indeed a small person in Dee Dee’s closet. Just that: Open; close; confirm. Then, as smart, sane Steven had said, they’d be off.

  No one said a thing as Janet turned and walked quickly upstairs. This won’t be definitive, she told herself. The little woman easily could have stepped out of the closet; she could be in any of that long row of bedrooms—and even if Janet found her, what would that mean? Some illegal immigrant, someone without a green card, she’d decided. Maybe it would be the wrong thing to do, to open the door and frighten her, if she’d stayed inside the closet.

  Instead Janet stood in the darkening room. The woman must have closed the curtains because Janet remembered the windows being open when she’d first entered the room. She decided that the woman was waiting in her hiding place, immobile, as if about to go onstage, or as if she were in a lineup and had been told to stand where she was: Show us your profile; take two steps forward. The woman had done both things earlier, excruciatingly slowly, fear in her eyes. Janet dropped her eyes, ashamed, and on the rug she saw her Swiss Army knife and quickly snatched it up. There! She’d had every reason to sense the need to return, subconsciously registering the loss of something. She dropped the knife in her pocket and turned when she sensed she was being watched.

  The woman stood in the doorway, holding out a slightly lumpy package, neatly wrapped in brown paper. The woman said, “Por favor,” then gestured for Janet to shove it down her waistband.

  Which she did, numb. The dark-skinned woman was most certainly real, and although it was upsetting that the person was probably Dee Dee’s frightened servant, Janet wanted to communicate that she meant no harm. Janet knew her hair was frenzied, and she was panting like a beast while the woman standing across from her barely breathed. Janet smiled and nodded, seeing flower petals fall in her peripheral vision, gestured to the closet, pointing to her heart, shaking her head. The little woman watched; then, moving gently across the floor, she passed by and walked into the closet, once again pulling the door closed soundlessly behind her.

  * * *

  Janet was talking to herself, muttering consolations, reassurances, whatever it was she was saying, until she’d moved through the gathering crowd—another car was driving in, passing her Subaru halfway down the drive. She ran to get into her car. Steven was sitting behind the wheel. “You holler for me when I take three minutes to pee?” he said. “Let’s get outta here.”

  “I have this horrible feeling something bad is happening with Dad and Mom,” Janet said, raising her hand to smooth her hair. “They say a parent always knows when a child is in trouble, but it goes the other way, too: A child knows when a parent—when a parent might not make it.”

  “That’s what’s been going on long-distance?” Steven said.

  “What if
she dies? I don’t think I convinced him to call an ambulance, and she’s in pain, vomiting. They’re hundreds of miles away. This is horrible. Horrible.”

  “Take it easy, Mom,” Blair said from the front seat. “They’re old, and there are bound to be a lot of false alarms. We’ll go home and call the neighbor, make her call an ambulance. She loves Grandmom—she’d be over there anyway if she was sick, wouldn’t she?”

  It was just what Janet wanted to believe. The answer was yes. Yes, she would. Someone would be taking control.

  “I sort of can’t believe what just happened,” Steven said. “Not even getting in the ambulance. I mean, the bottom line has to be that she doesn’t care very much about the guy.”

  Blair looked over her shoulder and peered into the backseat. “Do you have a stomachache?” she asked.

  “No. Just—” Janet didn’t want to say she was clutching something tightly under her tunic and didn’t even know what it was. She’d been weird enough with them; they’d done a good job of being mature, while she’d pretty much run away like a child.

  * * *

  That night she opened the package, the ends of the brown paper bag folded at the corners and neatly taped, paper towel padding inside, to find the black boots she’d tried on in the bedroom. There were two possibilities: that the woman had instinctually known what was going on in the room, or that there’d been a tiny crack between the door and the frame or some other peephole through which she’d seen Janet trying on the boot. There was, however, only one explanation of why the woman had done it: to buy Janet’s silence. There’d been no long-term thinking about any question that might have arisen regarding where the boots were. The woman had done it because it was exactly the thing to do in the moment, and that knowledge had overwhelmed her, made what she did absolutely necessary.

  Janet put on the boots and walked through the house, her daughter and her boyfriend asleep in Blair’s old bedroom. She walked onto the porch, then out the door and down the steps, standing in the dewy grass, under starlight, imagining the rest of herself coordinated with the beautiful, audacious boots. Instead of the stretched-out, oversize T-shirt, she’d be wearing clingy satin lingerie. Then what did she think? That she’d be a bride again, Blair’s age, but because of the magic boots, her husband would love her forever and not leave her for another woman? Or that whatever happened in her life, she’d still be standing ramrod-straight, the sexy boots making her tall, powerful, risky?

  At her feet lay the corpse of a half-eaten field mouse. Though the proud cat had not dropped it at her feet, she had found her way to the gift.

  THE GYPSY CHOOSES THE WHATEVER CARD

  Pru Silowicz has listed me on her CV (not that I would have known what that was, if she hadn’t told me in plain English) as the recipient of her “Volunteer activity: Interacting with older community member needing help.” This CV situation has them thinking all the time—really thinking hard, like Nixon in his last days at the White House. She showed the piece of paper to me proudly, the way Edith, my next-door neighbor back in the day, used to post her son’s crayon drawings of the family, even when her husband was identified as “Fat Dad Frank.”

  Who knows what my own husband, Donny, would have made of it, if he’d lived to see the way the world changed.

  Pru usually comes on Tuesday afternoon after lunch, though recently she’s been rearranging the time—calling on her cell phone, shouting over hectic background noise. I can only hope she isn’t calling while driving. She’s a nice girl. She’s rather ordinary-looking, with her eyes, predictably, her nicest feature. She will be twenty-one in September. Last year she made her own birthday cake, as she tells me she’s done for years, so she can have exactly what she wants. In this case, a slightly lopsided cake that almost made me faint when she cut into it: mahogany-red layers of “red velvet cake” with a gooey marshmallow frosting that looked like a caterpillar tent.

  My best friend, Edith, now lives in an assisted-living facility. (“Facility” automatically follows “assisted-living.” You would not, for example, say, “She lives in assisted-living limbo.”) Anyway, Edith met her when Pru and some of her sorority sisters went visiting with their dogs to cheer the ladies. It was assumed that a pet, staring a lady right in the eye, would both engage her and also make her feel in command, since the dog would eventually deferentially drop its eyes. The pets gave the ladies the opportunity to touch fur again—even if it wasn’t a beloved fur coat now probably moldering in some great-niece’s closet—without being spit on by PETA. For some reason Edith didn’t understand, they’d also brought an assortment of barrettes and headbands in case anyone wanted them. When one of the dogs jumped for a headband and tried to run away with it—minimalist Frisbee!—everyone almost died laughing. Truth be told, Edith was more taken with that particular dog than with the visitors, but only Pru and one other girl returned the following week, without their dogs (Pru’s had been borrowed), and then Edith, being Edith, decided on her favorite among the girls and had a private word with Pru to ask if she could use a little extra income doing some errands and helping out at the home of an old friend (me).

  Today Pru will be bringing another sorority sister with her—the reason being not what I suspected at first (dumping me; introducing me to her replacement) but still something to cause wariness: The girl’s mother is an Avon salesperson whose house may soon be in foreclosure. Like Lady Macbeth, I feel that all the perfume in Arabia—all her perfume sales, that is—could not alter her situation, but because Pru greatly esteems reciprocity, I will accompany Pru and her friend Carrie to a coffee shop where the mother will be waiting to pounce. I will buy a few Avon products to help out.

  Pru comes into the house in her usual rush. She always has a topic, the way people at war always move forward with a weapon. She earnestly wants to know what I think of double-dating. Does it more or less ensure that the couples will swap partners “somewhere down the line”? (This is one of Pru’s favorite expressions; she often uses it when discussing a potential romantic relationship.) I tell her honestly that although it was common for groups of people to go out together in my youth, I never double-dated.

  She says: “What would be something a group of people did back then?”

  “Well, in the summertime there were always musicians down by the Tidal Basin who got together and played, never for money, they would have been mortified by such a thought, but often someone would have found out that so-and-so was going to be playing his banjo that night, and someone else’s visiting cousin would turn out to be a good singer, so we’d pack a picnic and go sit by the water and listen to them play. Almost everyone knew the same songs, and people would just chime in if they knew the words, or someone might bring out his harmonica.”

  “Got it. And you weren’t afraid of getting mugged, right? And you didn’t make sandwiches with mayonnaise because it would spoil and poison you.”

  She has integrated these important life lessons. I wonder if she also knows that Napoleon was said to have lost Waterloo because of his painful hemorrhoids, but I decide against asking. I do like to tease her, though. “I would take my parasol, of course. And swirl it three times ’round to signal my best friend if I liked the boy I was sitting next to.”

  “Really?” she squeals.

  “No,” I say. “Don’t make yourself miserable thinking life was easier. It was always complicated.”

  “My grandfather bought my grandmother—I told you I was named after her, right?—a heart-shaped aquamarine ring and wrote her a poem to propose, but she burst into tears because she was in love with his brother. As an example of something that was complicated, I mean,” she says. “Tic Tac?”

  “No, thank you,” I say. All flavors of Tic Tac are so intense they could bore a hole in my tongue. “But she married your grandfather anyway?”

  “No. She married his older brother, who gave her a ruby ring made of white gold.”

  “Wasn’t that a little awkward for everyone involved?”

>   “He enlisted in the army and never came back. Like that old song—the Boston guy on the MTA? You know that song, right?”

  Damned if I’ll tell her I do. “Faintly,” I say.

  “Riding forever, or whatever,” she says.

  At my request, she has taken down the bowls from the top shelf of a cabinet where I can’t reach them and put them on the counter. Nowadays, it’s usual for people to have all sorts of mundane things sitting around, so I’ll just leave the bowls on the kitchen counter. Pru folds the stepstool and puts it back behind the kitchen door. Now I am to be taken to the coffee shop to meet the destitute Avon lady. Apparently her husband left her and their daughter and also gave her an STD. (This had to be explained to me. Not the concept but the abbreviation.)

  “I used to make coffee in a percolator,” I tell her. “It was delicious, we thought. But now coffee tastes like a fine wine. Some things do improve.”

  “Thanks for meeting her,” Pru says. “Coffee’s on me. And don’t feel like you have to buy hydrating skin masks or anything really expensive to try to save her from the poorhouse. Just if there might be something you could really use, like blush or lipstick.”

  “I don’t think my purchases can solve her problems, Pru.”

  “Bonding with women—it’s got to help, right?”

  “What is helped if two women turn out to like each other?”

  “Well, I mean—” (I’ve thrown her.) “It’s a sisterhood and everything. You don’t feel alone. It’s, like, somebody shares with you and you share with them and you’re friends. So everything has got to be a little better, right?”

  “What can friendship matter if you’re being put out of your house?”

  “I know. Her only backup plan if the bank takes it is to go live with her sister-in-law in Buffalo and work the night shift at the drugstore, because the sister-in-law has some connection to a druggist or something. Imagine having to start over, with your kid, in some really cold place, and you didn’t get an education because you quit school when you got pregnant and you just couldn’t hack anthropology anymore, and then you had the baby and it had colic. The sister-in-law has a husband, but they’re estranged, so I guess she might move in to her house.”