by Ann Beattie
Patty Arthur was Helen Fox’s daughter. Helen had given birth to her when she was sixteen, and in our community she was Hester Prynne, and Patty Arthur was Pearl. When the Foxes arrived, suburban lawns were suddenly bordered by a deep forest. Everyone who mentioned what was called “Mrs. Fox’s situation” whispered, and the mothers were all very kind to, even solicitous of, Helen Fox, including our mother. Patty was always known as “Poor Patty Arthur.” There was a family, two brothers and a baby sister, that had come after Patty, from Helen’s marriage to Mr. Fox. How did we know so much about the Foxes? How had their secrets become so public? Our father worked at the hospital with Mr. Fox. He was an administrator, though, not a doctor. Whatever they did, the Foxes were never as good as everyone else. Even if they had their lawn landscaped, which they did, the busheswere inferior to everyone else’s bushes. Girls were cautioned not to let happen to them what had happened to Mrs. Fox. When she walked down the street, people pointed at her (thinking they were doing it subtly) as a living example. Her daughter Patty came in for even worse treatment: kids who knew perfectly well what the situation was taunted Patty by asking why she was so much older than her parents’ other children. On Halloween the Foxes’ house got pelted with eggs, whether or not they opened the door for trick-or-treaters. Patty was quite thin—now, I realize she was anorexic—and her hair was limp, with the barrettes always sliding out. She looked defeated, so of course the mean kids set out to defeat her. She was picked last for teams; if she gave a wrong answer to a question, there was giggling, though there was indifferent silence if anybody else screwed up. I was never mean to her, but I was never nice, either. At least, not until she returned one September after spending the summer at what my father would describe only as “a special camp” (“Don’t give those piggies any ammunition!” my mother’s retort) and looked much better, with a nice haircut and bangs. Also, she had gained weight. I complimented her as we walked toward the school bus. She looked nice, and something made me say so. You would have thought I’d crowned her queen: she drew herself up, smiled, while looking into the distance, and said quietly, “Thank you very much.” It confused me, and I didn’t have anything else to say, so I walked on. But that night she called and invited me to her house. She sounded nervous, and not at all regal, on the phone. In the background, I heard the baby crying, and also, I thought, her mother’s voice, quietly urging her on. Iblurted out yes. I was to go to her house—to Poor Patty Arthur’s house—that Saturday, at noon. The notion frightened me so much—even now I couldn’t say why, but I do remember being simply terrified—so I asked my mother what I could do to get out of it. In spite of her condescending attitude toward the Foxes, all she would say was that I was an awful person, and that it was my genes, from my father’s side, that made me that way. Then she poured a drink and dismissed me. I went directly to Andrew. He understood instinctively that of course I wouldn’t want to go, but in his own confusion about what I should do, he suddenly volunteered to go with me. I doubted that what Patty had in mind was my brother and me, but I was so happy he’d volunteered that I jumped at the idea. Then I held my breath for two days, hoping he wouldn’t change his mind.
He didn’t. Only slightly grudgingly, saying that he was doing me a big favor, he got on his bike, and I got on mine and we rode over to the Foxes’. It turned out that no one was there except Patty. The whole family was gone, toys left behind, mess everywhere, dirty dinner plates on furniture in the living room, ashtrays overflowing. If she was surprised to see Andrew, she didn’t let on. “Come in,” she said, smiling her slightly remote smile. I quickly told her that my brother had come along because I wasn’t sure where she lived. “Everybody knows,” she said, refuting me. But she said it nicely. Even wryly.
And then our very weird afternoon began to unfold. She mentioned her brothers, who were playing at a house down the block, and she said that the baby was with a baby-sitter. As we followed her through the house, she mentioned thather parents had gone to Baltimore for the day. She added that her mother had left a pound cake, and that there was orange juice and Coke, if we liked.
Then we were in her room. It was small, with a big bed taking up most of the floor. On the bed were piles of beautiful pillows. It became the style, in the eighties, to bank pillows on one’s bed. I had never seen so many, of all shapes and sizes, clustered together. Her aunt traveled abroad—to places like Morocco, she told us—and always brought her a pillow as a souvenir when she returned. Then she began explaining how some of the fabrics were made: with dye and embroidery. Some of them, though, had been made by Patty, herself. She said that she looked for art deco fabric at rummage sales. I had never heard of art deco, and couldn’t decide whether it was interesting or ugly. I really remember that: standing in the room, absolutely mystified, but also interested, thinking:Pink and gray is a very nice combination.Andrew, it turned out, had recently read something about Morocco in aNational Geographic. He began to talk to her about the stone used in Moroccan architecture.
The bed was not the only thing of interest in her room. She also had an aquarium. Her very own aquarium, with fish whose colors were so intense the Moroccan fabrics paled in comparison. Andrew turned out to know quite a few things about angelfish.
She showed us an album with pictures of the camp she’d gone to over the summer. It was quite amazing, with a big waterfall and a hay wagon on which people were taking a ride. I could see her, smiling. She pointed to someone she identified as “my best friend”—a blonde with sunglasses ontop of her head and crinkly eyes. She handed me the book to flip through. Andrew was staring into the aquarium.
I remember my feeling of confusion as I stood in Patty’s room. Everything seemed at once particular and impersonal, as if we were touring a museum. Finally, she asked again whether we wouldn’t like some cake and something to drink. “Sure,” Andrew said, and preceded us out of the room, down the hall to the kitchen. The kitchen was much worse than the living room in terms of dirty plates, but the cake was on a cake stand—it was a Bundt cake, not an ordinary pound cake—and there was a silver cake server next to it, which she used to cut us big pieces. The cake was marbled with chocolate, I saw with delight, as she cut into it. Also, there was some sort of glaze—a thin icing over the cake. I followed her to the kitchen table, but she passed by the table and went to a window seat and scrunched herself into the corner, patting the cushion to indicate that we could both sit beside her. We all ate appreciatively, though Andrew stood, leaning against the counter, looking past us, out the window, as if the view was as captivating as life inside the aquarium. Finally she gave me a little clue about what we were doing there. She said: “You seem more mature than other girls at school. I was glad that you said something nice to me the other day.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly confused. “Oh, well—”
“I had heard that your brother was very nice,” she said. She spoke as if he wasn’t there. I could see that her remark got Andrew’s attention.
“So,” she said, “if you two want to be friends, it’s my goal to make friends this year, and you’re the people I’d most liketo be friends with.” Had she taken a sudden shine to Andrew and included him, or had she known that I had an older brother?
“Sure,” I heard Andrew say.
She smiled. I nodded yes. This was, to my way of thinking, a pretty odd encounter. It had that remote, superpolite tone my mother sometimes used when she was angry.
“That is a very, very conventional school we go to,” she said. “I’m not just being stubborn when I say that most of those people aren’t worth getting together with.”
“Yeah, some of those guys can be real assholes,” Andrew said.
He had finished his cake and was helping himself to a second slice. Who, I wondered, did he have in mind? What exactly had one of them done that had made him an asshole?
“I sort of led you to believe that my mother made the cake,” she said. “Actually, I made it this morning. From a recipe inGourmet.”
“You did?” I said. It was excellent cake.
“Uh-huh. Sometimes I’m afraid it might seem like bragging if I say what things I’m interested in. Like baking,” she added. After a little pause, she said: “Morocco.”
“I’m friends for life with anybody who can make this cake,” Andrew said.
“I hope so,” she said. “That would be wonderful.”
I almost said thatso was I. But I suddenly realized that my feelings weren’t the issue. She had known I had a brother. What good fortune made him accompany me she probably couldn’t account for any more than I could, but in that instant it came clear to me. She was playing it cool, but thiswas the scenario she’d most wanted to happen. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. I didn’t know what to do, dizzied by a combination of insight and instinct. And something else, which I wouldn’t have expected: the realization that Ididlike her—that if it was my brother she was interested in, I would try to give him to her.
“I’m supposed to be somewhere!” I said, looking at my watchless wrist. This was the best I could do: get out of there as quickly as I could; become the White Rabbit. If I’d been wrong, of course he could have left with me. But I wasn’t wrong.
For the rest of high school my brother and Patty had what might have been the only secret relationship in the entire school—at least, I never heard the slightest bit of gossip—and, of course, because of what I’d done, I had impressed my brother with my great loyalty. It was part of the reason he was so loyal to me, always. I had only been looking for protection, but they had seen me, instead, as the one who determined things.
I remember knowing that something had changed in my life forever, feeling more lonely than I had ever felt before, picking up my bike from the front lawn, where the kickstand hadn’t held in the deep grass. My brother’s bike stood upright. I looked at it for a minute before setting out. It was a melancholy feeling, riding home alone. Maybe the first time I’d felt melancholy, which until that point was only a word I’d heard my mother use, on the rare occasions I’d asked her, futilely, why she had to drink.
The same week I heard Serena’s sad, bizarre story about her relationship with Andrew and the dastardly way he had behaved toward her, I was sent a book-length manuscript to edit—no research required; just a straightforward editing job—on the subject of people who had survived a serious childhood illness. The first essay was by Josephine Bower Epping. I passed over the name, but by the time I had read the first few lines, I realized that I had been sent a book that contained a piece by a person I knew. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.
I had a funny feeling as I began to read. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to know what Josie Bower had to say, though illness itself rarely made me squeamish. My intuition told me that there was going to be something about Andrew in the piece. I felt almost as if I were snooping. Or worse yet, that fate had sent this particular manuscript my way deliberately, to throw me a curve. I was torn between walking away from it—physically walking away—or reading as fast as I could. What were the chances that Josie Bower would write about her cancer, and that twenty-five years later, someone who had known her—someone whose brother had probably screwed her—would be handed what she’d written to edit?
The essay began matter-of-factly. She described the way the tumor was found: on an X ray, after she’d fractured her ankle. She described the difficulty of treating such a tumor. She described the surgery and the radiation, during which all her hair fell out, and then her shortened leg, when it came out of traction. She hated not the limp so much as the lift in her shoe. She said she had tantrums, wanting the lift to be taken out. Whenever possible she would go barefoot, toexaggerateher limp. She said that in hindsight, she could see it had been very difficult on her mother, whose show of support included throwing away all her own high heels and wearing only flats. This was Josie’s point of departure for saying that it had made her feel ashamed because her mother had been defeminized by the surgery—that she had realizedthatbefore she had thought about her own situation: the perfect daughter had been revised; the mother’s own assumptions about femininity needed to be changed. The essay was going to be about her mother, as Josie had seen her as a child, and her mother as Josie came to think about her as an adult.
I read that Adelle Bower had been having an affair with a doctor in the town. The day Josie was hurt, Adelle ran into him—her lover—in the corridor of the hospital. She was upset, but not terribly upset. Still, he hung around and tried to calm her when it appeared there was something irregular on the X ray. A mass. He was not their doctor, but Josie had seen him before because she had been at parties with the doctor’s children, when he had come to pick them up. She digressed to say that the doctor’s wife was an alcoholic.
So then the concern, the confusion, remaining in the hospital for further tests, which her mother’s lover patiently tried to explain to her. My father was kind to his patients, but abrupt with his family. Josie’s father was away on business; at first, a fractured ankle hardly seemed reason to return. But at the end of the day, his wife called and he returned immediately. Then there was a new doctor at Josie’s bedside. Her mother had told her not to mention Dr. X to her father. Not even to say that he had visited the room. To Josie’s question about why not, her mother had replied that if Josie wantedMommy and Daddy to stay together, the best thing she could do would be to say nothing. If her mother had said nothing, Josie doubted whether she would ever have had reason to ask about the doctor. But her mother’s admonition had resulted in a mystery, and perhaps because she needed something to distract her, she needed to requestion her mother time and again.Already learning the ways of being women, Josie wrote.
The essay, itself, was suspenseful. I was sure I would have been riveted even if I hadn’t known her.
Much more about the discovery of the cancer. And then: one day, when the surgery was over, the doctor—Dr. X, about whom she wasn’t supposed to talk—came into her hospital room, bringing with him his son. A boy that age was not allowed in, but because he was the doctor’s son, the nurses looked the other way. The doctor had brought her daisies. Daisies, or some other flower. He seemed concerned. His son hung back, alarmed at the machines and the intravenous tubes and other hospital paraphernalia. She remembered recognizing him, and his faintly acknowledging her. He had been carrying a glass of water, in which the flowers were put, though it was the doctor who placed them on the bedside table. His son was reluctant to move close to the bed, and Josie was embarrassed because he was a boy . . . and then suddenly Josie’s mother was in the doorway, surprised—not happily surprised, it seemed—to see her daughter’s visitors. Josie’s mother and Dr. X ended up quarreling. Right in front of the children. Now, Josie wrote, she realized that her mother had felt that Josie’s illness had come as punishment for her affair, and she had tried to end her relationship with the doctor. There had been an argument, with her motherslapping the doctor, and the doctor whispering harshly, grabbing her wrists, trying to hold her as the boy ran out of the room. Finally things calmed down, but then there was another problem for the doctor. Where had his son gone? Josie had been frightened, and in an effort to calm her, her mother explained the situation to her: that she and the doctor had fallen in love some time ago, but that it was over now. That was why she had asked Josie not to say anything to her father, and that was why she and the doctor had struggled in the room—because Mommy wanted to be with Daddy, but that was not what the doctor wanted.
What Josie had to say in the rest of the essay was that having the emotional trauma of her mother’s situation as well as the physical trauma of her own had been a terrible burden. When her mother tearfully said that if her daughter would never again walk in pretty shoes, then neither would she, Josie had not protested, because in some ways that seemed fair: that her mother be punished. It was not until years later that she realized Dr. X was the person who prescribed the pills her mother took too many of.
One day, the doctor�
�s son was in her house when Josie returned from school. It was years after Josie’s surgery. He had come bearing a bottle of pills from the doctor. Just as if she’d walked in on a drug deal, and that was what the doctor’s son had been doing—handing over a bottle to Josie’s mother, who had been crying, slumped in a chair, still in her nightgown, though it was late afternoon. The doctor’s son had been the delivery boy, and when he saw Josie, he had looked even more uncomfortable than he had in the hospital room. It was not until they were teenagers that they everspoke of it, and even then obliquely, as they stood in line waiting to see a movie. “My mother hated your father,” Josie remembered telling the doctor’s son. And the doctor’s son replied, “We hate him, too.” A week or so later, with no contact except in passing at school, they had paired off at a party and Josie had had sex for the first time. She knew that what she was doing was different than having a real boyfriend. But what Josie took away from it was that she would, someday, have a boyfriend. That knowledge had made her happy, but from her mother she had been withholding, secretly glad that her mother walked in ugly flat shoes.
