by Ann Beattie
But today she was on her own, Daniel now working for Sapient in Boston, though they hoped the job he really wanted would become available in D.C. after the first of the year. Her only reason to come back to town was a business meeting she’d volunteered to attend because she wanted to see Sterling. She might also visit a couple of places that could be nice venues for their wedding reception—they’d decided on a city hall wedding and a big party soon afterward—though more and more she was thinking of having the party at his parents’ house in Sperryville. Everything could seem a bit too university-connected sometimes, even if the town was quite various, with its Street o’ Liberals (as Sterling called Park Street), its horsey crowd, the arts community.
She walked to Mudhouse and ordered a café au lait. While others had gotten through school on caffeine, she’d existed primarily on milk (milk shakes: skim milk with Hershey’s chocolate added, along with a packet of powdered vitamins, in the late afternoon), though a café au lait was the perfect combination of the two. The person behind the counter (her ears with many piercings) gave Candace a cup to put in the amount of coffee she wanted, then hand back for the hot, foamy milk to be poured in. “Do you like foam?” the barista asked. What a question. Who did not like foam except those people who did not like foam, though they might have thought it an important component of waves, or of laundering clothes, or of shampooing. It was one of those questions you couldn’t trust to convey the right meaning if you put it in a time capsule.
Her new leather boots had cost five hundred and fifty dollars. She’d admitted to three, to Daniel. If Sterling commented at all, he wouldn’t have any idea what they cost—he lived alone and cared nothing about fashion—so she wouldn’t have to lie. She’d noticed that the woman checking her in earlier in the day had eyed the boots; since the woman had already commented on her ring, though, she wasn’t about to keep complimenting her. Candace was wearing her favorite black skirt, with black tights and a cashmere sweater slightly silver-tinged, a gift from Daniel’s mother. She didn’t look like a college girl, and she didn’t look like a faculty member, either. They wore sensible shoes and rectangular glasses and weighed too much or much too little. She was just right. At least that was what Daniel thought.
She checked her cell and saw that Sterling had called while she’d been in the coffee place. The message said he’d pick her up at six unless she told him otherwise. He’d be taking her to the restaurant in Belmont that she’d suggested for dinner—not too fussy or expensive, and Sterling was always interested in changing neighborhoods. He wasn’t like her mother, who thought nothing ever changed for the better; he was appreciative of old buildings being saved, of new energy coming into the community.
* * *
On the porch of the inn, Sterling gave her a big hug—he felt thin—and commented on her boots first thing. “New shoes?” he said. There was no reason to wear them yet during this late, mild October, but they made her feel good. “You and your mother, always fashionable,” he said.
He was driving his old Lexus with a crooked back bumper, an Obama/Biden decal, and a patch of paint gone from around the door handle on the passenger side. Ninety-three, he told her proudly as he opened the door from one of the few still-operating features, the button that unlocked all doors. The last time she’d been in his car, the window wouldn’t go down on the passenger side. She settled back into the slightly cracked seat, pulled on her seat belt. No place to park in front of the restaurant; thirty-minute limit by the convenience store. Sterling made a right turn, then a left, then saw a place on the opposite side of the street. He made a U-turn and parallel-parked and turned off the engine. She opened the door, wondering whether it was okay that the bumper slightly overhung the white line by a driveway. He saw her looking. “Okay to park here?” he called to a man she hadn’t seen, sitting on his front porch in the near dark.
“Yessir, that’s fine,” the man replied. From his voice, it was obvious he was old. There was another man sitting with him. Sterling gave a little salute and walked around to give Candace his arm. It felt bony. She wanted to talk about what he’d been through, but later, when they were in the restaurant and more comfortable, after they’d had a drink, not right off, which would seem aggressive. If her mother was forty-eight, Sterling was fifty-one, though he acted younger than his sister. Not immature younger, but tentative, without Claire’s easy way of conversing, a little preoccupied and twitchy, like a young boy. He did hate to sit still.
The restaurant was crazy, and she hadn’t thought to make a reservation: A young woman with a topknot was shrieking at the corner table; some blowhard was hectoring a table of fat, middle-aged people in suits and ugly dresses who looked at him puzzled, as if firecracker after firecracker was failing to ignite; waitresses made themselves mouse-thin to slide through the small holes in the crowd of people with their barstools pushed back into the aisles, or headed to the bathroom, or on their way to the second floor, or to the roof, from which they’d take flight and clutter the night sky, for all she knew. “Let’s go somewhere quieter,” she said. It was too chaotic in the restaurant. All wrong.
They walked back to the car, Sterling’s hand guiding her elbow. Her mother had said, “Sterling got Papa’s cancer, and I’m going to get Leigh’s breast cancer, you watch.” Her mother was in Florida tonight, visiting her best friend who’d moved there from Pennsylvania a year ago. They’d be drinking too much wine and doing other unhealthy things sure to lessen her mother’s chances of escaping “the family curse,” though as far as Candace knew, only one woman in the family had had breast cancer, and she’d survived it.
“Wait a minute, hold on, folks,” came the old man’s voice. They stopped outside the car, turning in his direction. “I’ve got something for you. It was polite of you to ask about parking near my driveway.” He was tall, and his lanky arm was outstretched. Both reached out to shake his extended hand, but instead of shaking, he dropped something into each of their palms. There was enough lamplight that she could see hers was a dark origami bird. Two smaller birds sat in Sterling’s hand: one white; one that seemed to have been made out of some lightweight cardboard.
“For us?” she said. “How did you do this?”
“I fold,” the man said. “I hope you like ’em.”
“This is very nice of you,” Sterling said, staring at the little birds in his hand but not touching them. Actually, he seemed quite taken aback.
“Origami!” she said, realizing Sterling probably didn’t know the word. “What a lovely present. Origami birds.”
“That one’s a swan,” the man said, though the sentence was uninflected, not proud at all.
“Thank you very much,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re giving these to us.”
“More where they came from, sailing up and down Mother Nature’s river,” the man said. “You have a nice night.”
“Really, thank you,” Sterling said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“I’m a veteran,” the old man said flatly. “You have a nice evening.”
Sterling handed her his birds so he could insert the key into the lock on the passenger side. The three birds, with big beaks and lovely wings, really looked like treasures in her hand. She stepped into the car carefully off the steep curb, a little awkward about settling herself gracefully when one hand was useless.
She looked back at the porch in time to see the light extinguished, though it seemed the two men were still seated in the dark. She dumped the birds on her lap and reached across quickly to unlock her uncle’s door, but he’d already inserted the key. The door swung open. “I don’t know why he did that,” Sterling said. “Do you think he took you for my girlfriend or something?”
“Of course not!” she said. “That’s ridiculous, Uncle Sterling.”
“Or he seemed to think I’d been in the military,” Sterling said.
“Not with your asthma,” she said.
“Honey, I never had asthma. I had pneumonia twice when I
was a teenager, and your mother never got over it. I never tried to enlist. One idiot doing that in the family was enough. Cousin Coop going to fight in Desert Storm. Nobody in our family had anything to do with the military since the Second World War, when they had to. Coop—he’d do anything it took to push his old man’s buttons. I guess he did, too, coming back with a blown-off pinkie and a lifetime of migraines.”
“Mom said you tried to enlist, but they wouldn’t take you because of asthma.”
“Your mother lives in her head,” he said.
“Really? She completely made that up? I’ve always thought it was strange that you felt so patriotic, but you never vote.”
“Like I said: She lives in her head.”
“But you did finish with chemo, right? And everything’s looking good?” Why had she blurted that out now. Why?
“It’s not a good kind of cancer to get. Without treatment, something like forty, fifty percent chance of recurrence, pretty quick. I think it halves it, something like that, if you do chemo.”
“Oh. Well—I think Mom might have told me that, but I was just feeling very optimistic.”
“She didn’t tell you. I’ll bet you anything.”
“No, I don’t think she did, actually. So now are you going to tell me my father’s not such a bad guy, that with all her bitterness about money and broken promises, she was just living in her head?”
“Honey, I don’t want to say anything about your parents’ divorce. They’re divorced. That’s that.”
“Are you going to vote?”
“America’s run by a big machine, and we’re not even a splinter of a cog in the wheel. They fixed the election the year Al Gore had it. I’m not gonna vote, I’m not gonna avoid having a beer tonight in spite of my medicine, and also, just to keep you fully informed, a few weeks ago I took on my girlfriend’s car payments, which makes me a chump and a fool, because her husband’s just waiting in the shadows, and when that car’s paid for, you can bet he’ll be back behind the wheel.”
“You have a girlfriend?”
“Yeah, what? Your mom told you I was gay?”
“She never said that.”
“Maybe she did and you were just optimistic.”
“Stop it!” she said, shoving his shoulder. A bird fell from her lap to the floor. She picked it up, wiped it carefully, unnecessarily, on her jacket. Its finely pointed beak resembled the toes of her Italian boots. She dropped it on top of the others.
“So you e-mailed that you were going to check out some wedding places? What kind of places you thinking of?”
“You know, now I’m thinking about having the party at his parents’ weekend place in Sperryville. It might be easier for our friends in D.C., and it’s really pretty there.”
“But your poor afflicted uncle would have to drive farther. Think about that. And now I’ve got a pet—now I’ve got a wild swan—so going north might mess up its migration.”
“We could eat dinner at that place out 250,” she said. “The one that’s like a family restaurant.”
“That’s for old folks,” he said.
“No, it isn’t. I used to go there with my friends.”
“Old-people vegetables. Brussels sprouts. Mashed potatoes.”
“So where do you want to go?”
“I’ll take you to my girlfriend’s and we can order pizza,” he said. “She lives in a cliff-hanger of a so-called townhouse on the way to the entrance onto 64, with crappy wall-to-wall carpeting and an addict daughter who comes and goes, who can’t even make it through beauty school. I was reaching for a plate the other night, and the cabinet door came off in my hand. Particleboard.”
“Why would I want to go there?”
“Because she cares about me,” he said. “Because I shouldn’t compartmentalize. It would be good for her to meet somebody from my family.”
“This is someone you’re serious about, Sterling?”
“The love of my life. At least up to this point.”
“Well, sure. It would be nice to meet her, then. Sure.”
“Her name’s Lana. She’s vegetarian, but she smokes. You okay with that?”
“With smoking? Will she absolutely have to smoke?”
“She lives there,” he said.
He glanced in the rearview mirror and made a quick U-turn: They were suddenly headed away from town, past a Food Lion and a dollar store. So her uncle wasn’t asthmatic, he had a girlfriend, and he knew in detail his chances for survival. Since that was true, what else might he tell her? She’d probably hear more about her mother before the night was out, and it wouldn’t just have to do with her cowardice about pneumonia thirty years ago. Claire had always been phobic about catching colds. She kept Ivory soap, which she maintained was much better than hand sanitizer, in not one but two soap holders on both sides of the sink in her bathroom and in the kitchen.
“You know what happened to Lana a week or so ago? She’d been working on the story of her life, a memoir thing about being kidnapped when she was a teenager and made to work on a ranch out west, and this one horse that she said saved her life. She had eighty pages, and it all just disappeared. We took her Mac to a place in town, but they couldn’t get it back. She said it was like the horse dying all over again, working so hard on something and having it desert her, it just made her crazy. She’d been taking this course up at Piedmont at night, along with her nursing course: people’s stories about how they got where they are in life. Not the kind of thing you probably studied over at the university, but—”
“Uncle Sterling, she didn’t have it backed up in any way she could retrieve it? Do you mean the hard drive crashed or—”
“The one thing I know, I convinced her to keep the machine, to print the story every time she had a new part. She didn’t have a printer before. Anyway, this guy who was teaching the course told us that for very little money, she could have everything backed up and it could go to heaven.”
“What?”
“A service you pay for, where everything you write—”
“Automatic backup? It goes to the cloud?”
“That’s it! I told you, up to the sky, like a moonbeam bouncing back! Goes to the clouds.”
“Cloud,” she corrected. “It’s an abstraction, but—”
“ ‘Buckets of moonbeams, buckets of tears!’ ”
She looked at him, confused. It was like having a conversation with a crazy person. “ ‘Buckets of moonbeams, buckets of tears . . . blah, blah, blah, honey, when you go,’ ” he sang in a good imitation of Bob Dylan. Aha!
She smiled with relief. “He was at John Paul Jones. I saw him with Elvis Costello when I was here. Did you see that concert, Sterling?”
“Don’t go to concerts,” Sterling said. “Those days are behind me.”
Sterling was pulling into a new development—she’d imagined the girlfriend living in some old, outdated place, from the way he’d described the dreary interior—with bath-mat-sized balconies off the front, bordered in metal railings. On one, someone stood in front of a glowing grill that puffed steam into the night’s cooling air. Romney signs were draped over a few of the rails. In front of them, a boy pedaled slowly up the incline, the light underneath his seat weakly blinking as his bike moved up the steep hill.
“This feels good. This seems like just the right thing to do,” Sterling said, and she realized by the way he spoke that he was perplexed by his actions, not certain. Had he been drinking before he picked her up? Or was the medicine having some bad effect on him? She could hardly ask. He’d turned on the radio, and they were listening to Radiohead—Radiohead!—as he pulled into an empty carport that looked as flimsy as an opened tin of sardines, and turned off the ignition. “You’ll like her,” he said. “Even if you don’t, you can tell your mother, and she’ll be shocked. She won’t believe I introduced you to someone I’ve been dating, who lives in a housing development with a bunch of Republicans.”
Candace pulled her jacket more tightly arou
nd her as she got out of the car. It was a part of town she hadn’t known existed; it had been a field the last time she’d driven past this big outcropping of buildings on the hillside of bare earth, with what looked like the devil tending his fire with a pitchfork just above them as they ascended the stairs.
The door Sterling was heading toward was on the third level, right in front of the stairs, a Coke machine making noise beside it. It was the sort of room you’d ask not to have in a motel. There was no light inside, but two doors down, she could see a little boy in boxing gloves hammering his father’s leg as he tended the grill. Sterling knew someone who’d been kidnapped? Like that girl the crazy couple took in Utah? A large long-haired cat arched its back and darted around the man and the boy, playing with something it batted between its paws.
“It’s me, Lana!” Sterling said, staring into the peephole as if it would allow him to see inside. “I want you to meet my niece, open up, darlin’!”
“Jee-zus,” a young Hispanic woman said, peeking through the door opened only a crack, its safety chain pulled on. “Did you ever think of calling first?” She slid back the chain and stepped aside. Sterling preceded Candace into the apartment without an entranceway and gave the young woman a quick one-armed hug. “Where’s your mother, darlin’?” he said.
“I thought you were sick,” she said. “Who’s this?”
She spoke as if Candace weren’t present. The young woman seemed about her age, maybe younger. She was wearing three gigantic hair rollers and was dressed in black: black sweatpants; black turtleneck; black shoes with white laces. “Ooh la la,” she said, whistling through the space between her front teeth. “Those are million-dollar boots. This is the way you dress your other girlfriends, Sterl?”
