by Ann Beattie
“I knew it,” our father whispered. “So now I see. The adolescent version of the boy who plays doctor. Is that what you do? You have someone undress, so you can examine them?” He pushed the toe of his shoe into Andrew’s side. “Are you playing doctor, or are you pretending to be a big, important movie producer, maybe? Is that what you think you are?” He leaned forward and spoke to the back of Andrew’s head, his voice veering crazily. “Well, I guess I should at least give thanks that you found yourself two little sluts besides your sister,” he said. He turned to me. “You’d do anything for him, wouldn’t you?” I knew him well enough to know that whatever he asked, he would be dismayed to hear any response. He became a frenzy of motion. He threw open the basement door and charged outside.
The girls were not far away. They were so terrified, all they had done was go into the yard, pulling on what clothes they could, to shiver behind a bush. Our father dashed backinto the house, grabbing Andrew by one arm. “Round up your little whores,” he said. Andrew flinched as he raised his fist; somehow, Andrew managed to avoid the blow and also back up through the door. I have no idea what Andrew did to make Dianne and Lucy re-enter the basement, or why he even came back, but he did, and they did. Lucy turned and started to run once our father put out his hand. Andrew was on his feet, wavering, but standing. Andrew caught Lucy by the wrist. In a trembling voice, he tried to tell my father that what was going on was not as bad as it seemed.
“That’s what I’m always told, but I’m a doctor, a smart doctor, and I know otherwise,” our father said. “Your mother’s not here now to protect you.”
He wouldn’t listen. Every time Andrew started to explain our father raised his fist in a threatening way, and said, “Is my son playing doctor? Is that what he’s doing? Is he exploring girls’ bodies? Is he getting his jollies with two little sluts?” He looked at me. “Withthreelittle sluts?” he said. Andrew had long ago stopped smiling. “What kind of boy doesn’t have a hard-on when there are pretty naked girls?” he said. “Do you have a hard-on, or do you have a limp dick that pissed your pants when you fell down?”
Lucy was crying so hard she was sobbing. Dianne looked at our father as if he were an alien who had just landed, speaking some frantic, repulsive language. Only the tip of her nose quivered, making her look like a frightened rabbit. “Back to your positions!” he said. The girls clung to each other, backing away. He moved faster than they did; he slammed shut the door from the basement to the upstairs. “Sweater off,” he said to Lucy. “Just the way I found you. We need to get thispicture for your mother. Come on—off with it.” Lucy pleaded to be allowed to leave the room. When she ran out of words—when it became clear that he would kill her if she did not do what he wanted—slowly, her head hung in misery, Lucy removed her sweater.
“Take the picture,” he said to me. I knew he wasn’t kidding. I picked up the camera and looked through the viewfinder. I saw the stain on Andrew’s pants. This was a nightmare. How could he ever, possibly have known where we were? He never knew where we were. “What’s the matter with you?” he said, turning to Andrew. “What’s your role in this? This was your idea, wasn’t it? Aren’t you the boy who loves to play doctor? I hope this was at least your idea, that you aren’t just some pansy pretending to be a man.”
“You bastard,” Andrew said. He elbowed Dianne aside. At first I misunderstood; I thought he was upset with Dianne. But he had already seen that my father was done with talk and was about to spring into action, and tackle one of the girls the same way he had tackled him. Andrew and our father struggled on the floor. I thought he was going to kill Andrew. I thought that I was watching the murder of my brother by my father. Eventually—in not much time at all—Andrew lay there so still, I thought he must be unconscious, or sleeping like an owl with open eyes.
“Do what you’re supposed to do in a situation like this,” my father said, pulling him up and pushing him against the wall. A picture fell and broke. That was what happened when our father was angry: things broke. “At least put yourhandon it,” he said, exaggerating every word, grabbing his own crotch to show Andrew what he expected. “Look at themama’s boy,” he sneered. “He’s such a pansy he won’t touch it.” Maybe I looked. I don’t remember. Maybe we were all looking at Andrew, or maybe no one was except our father, but our father’s gaze could have bored a hole through Andrew’s head. Slowly, I watched as Andrew’s shoulders slumped. He was a veritable statue, he stood so still. Except for the blood from a cut on his cheek, he was as white as marble.
One last time, our father spoke his epithet for his son. One day before, Andrew had turned fifteen.
The note I received from Jim Burnham was different in tone from Mrs. M’s, and was written on an embossed note card. The postmark was Minneapolis, Minnesota. It said:I am afraid I have had to relocate. In Boston, I thought I was out from under, but losing my job a second time has made me come to my senses, so I am here to dry out. I hope that you will not hold this against me, and that if I should return to Boston, you might still be willing to have that long-promised dinner, though I’m afraid water will have to replace the wine. Thank you for your friendliness and generosity.
It was illuminating, and right to the point. The thing that bothered me was that I hadn’t suspected. It made me wonder—after all the training I’d gotten in my childhood—whether there was something thickheaded about me, so I failed to see what was happening in front of my eyes. I understood that I would never see him again; something written between the lines let me know he knew that, too. I threw the note in the trash. A little later, when I put on my coat to go out, I opened my door to find a tall carton shipped by UPSsitting on the step. I took it in and unpacked an orchid plant, its single blossom conch-shell pink, delicately flecked with lavender. The plant had been carefully wrapped in a cocoon of excelsior. I expected the note card to be signed by Jim Burnham, but instead the plant had come from the grateful author of the interminable piece I had finally signed off on the week before. He didn’t have a chance of impressing me with a gift, or anything else, after the note from Jim. I didn’t want to have anything to do with men. Andrew and I were on good terms again—nothing like thinking someone might die to reinforce the bond—but other men? Forget it. I didn’t want to hear Henry’s sad story about how things were falling apart; I didn’t want anything from anyone except to be allowed to disappear again. The drama and deceptions, the sorrowfulness of other people’s lives was nothing I could do anything about. Furthermore, I had decided I was not going to take up the subject of Jim and his drinking with Angie, who I could only think must have been pimping for her ex-husband. I was not going to ask her about her recommendation that I look him up. Neither was I going to ask for the writer’s address. It had been a nice gesture, but I had also spent an unusual amount of time on his piece, adding to it so greatly that I had almost written it, myself. Not only that, but the orchid was just another thing that was going to die on me. The carriage house did not get good light. Mac’s plants—what few were left—never bloomed.
I left the house. I walked and walked, closing my eyes sometimes, because I knew the sidewalks so well. I could go blind, and still walk those paths. In a way, I had gone blind: I was impervious to what went on around me; I haddevelopedthe habit of ducking my head and hurrying toward my destination.
I made myself slow down and stroll. I met people’s eyes, those few times their heads were not also pointed at the ground. A woman in a pale blue coat smiled as she walked by, and I remembered myself when I was her age: how much I had liked the place where I lived; how automatically I had smiled when I looked into someone’s face. I did not come from an expressive family. My father never smiled; my mother narrowed her eyes when her lips turned up, as if happiness caused her discomfort. Andrew did smile: a slow, almost dreamy smile, his face so relaxed he might have been falling asleep to sweet dreams as he looked into your eyes. I never saw that expression except for the times we were alone. He and I had our private world, as childr
en always do. We lived a parallel reality to what was going on. For years—for years and years and years and years now—our most private expressions, our most sincere expressions, had not figured in the way we related to each other. I’ve wondered sometimes if they are still there, below the surface, deep in the woods, or lurking in a corner of the attic. But even if I could bring myself to ask, how do you request that a person shine a particular smile on you? You might as well waste your time rooting for the sun to outrun the clouds or for the autumn leaves to return to the trees. For all the years Andrew’s seemed to be happier than he was in his youth, for all the years we’ve now spent away from our parents, in all the time that anyone who didn’t know him well would be sure he was happier and more content and more adventurous and filled with such self-confidence—in all this time that he’s grinnedso often, I’ve been less and less convinced, and I’ve missed his dreamy smile all the more.
Maybe he bestows his special smile on the high school girls. Maybe he smiles that way if someone shows up at his motel wearing underpants and a raincoat; maybe it’s his expression when he greets anyone—even Rochelle Rogan. Maybe he’s appropriated the smile from his younger self, and in smiling it again, he’s filled himself with promise.
Near the newsstand, a girl in a sari and her tall blond boyfriend stood with their arms around each other’s waists, closing the distance between them until their bodies fused. Young love. It was more noticeable in the spring than in the winter, but there were always so many sidewalk romances in Cambridge, you would quickly lose count.
I couldn’t imagine myself anymore as the other half of a couple, so my thoughts went, instead, to Andrew. When he reunited with those girls from his past, did they walk down the street hip-to-hip? Did they stop for coffee or a drink as an excuse to sit close together at a tiny table and to look meaningfully into each other’s eyes? Was it like high school again—painfully fraught with significance? Did they still believe in possibility, or had things come to seem less possible, and if so, did that realization make their relationship cozy and companionable, or something of a letdown?
I walked into the same coffee shop where I had seen Serena and ordered a cappuccino. As I waited at the far end of the counter for my order, I began to wonder about what Andrew had told me: Had he really only talked to Josie? Really? Not even a quick kiss on the lips? If that was true—which it might have been, he had sounded so emphatic—then maybe it was because by escaping death she had become superhuman. A living miracle. Not someone he’d toy with. There was an explanation, I thought, picking up my cappuccino capped with its quivering dome of froth.
Getting back to a simpler time, for me, would not be by way of phoning around and sleeping with people from my past. It would consist of remembering hownotto connect. Lately, I had been living outside my own life, involved in other people’s problems, having people to the house as if I were the Queen of Hearts at her perpetual tea party, rushing out to meet people for coffee, for lunch. It was better to pretend to be busy, screening calls; setting limits with Andrew and with Henry, whose troubles I could sense gathering like clouds over Cambridge. There had never been anything romantic between Henry and me, though when we discussed Andrew, sex often became the subtext. Hound struck me as entirely asexual. He wasn’t my type, in any case: a bearish man with defeated eyes and a down-on-my-luck quality he used manipulatively, to gain sympathy. For too long, I had let myself pretend that he and I had a stronger bond than we did. I had acted as if we were really connected—as if he really were a hound, and I was the moon.
I studied the faces coming toward me: college students, people getting off work, people hurrying home, hurrying to the subway, to the gym, to bars, to bookstores and music shops and restaurants and parking garages. None of them—none of them, ever—would be the face of Mac, though many of them would remind me of what might have been: the laughter; the affection; the concern. TheYou fill in.
In an attempt to cheer myself up, I went through my listof things to feel good about: Andrew did not have AIDS—he had been spared; Henry was where he chose to be; and for all I knew, Patty Arthur might be reincarnated, living in Morocco.
Oh, I liked not believing in things, didn’t I? It made me a dead girl myself, a person sleepwalking down a sidewalk in Cambridge. I tried it on for size, and it fit. Like Henry’s scarf, which I was wearing, it was long enough, and supple enough, that it couldn’t help but fit.
The ghost and the fairy flew quietly into the attic. There were musty things you would not want to touch and old toys stacked here and there. They were super careful not to be heard so they did not look through boxes.
The ghost could be invisible but the fairy could never hold her breath long enough to truly disappear so she only became teeny tiny. The ghost could disappear by willing it but she worried that someone might come up and swat her if they mistook her for a bug.
The fairy and the ghost were careful not to be discovered. In the summer they played in the woods but in the winter they made caves out of old coats and blankets eaten by moths then crept inside and curled up tightly. Sometimes in the cave when it was dark enough the ghost would let the fairy look right into his eyes though his eyes were always blurry because she was so close.
One time in the attic they discovered poor butterflies that had been put in frames. They took them into their cave and examined them. It made the fairy cry because it was so sad. The ghost did not like the fairy to feel bad so he told her to play the game where she imagined everything was the opposite of what it seemed. The butterflies escaped from the frames just like a person squeezing through a tiny crack in a window and disappeared into the woods where they joined the other butterflies and fluttered in the sunshine.
IN MY GENERATION,marriage and motherhood were supposed to be the culmination of a girl’s dreams. What if I didn’t have any dreams? Or, excuse me, I had them, Dr. Freud—I had real, complex, baffling, sometimes frightening dreams—I hadrealdreams, not silly dreamy dreams, in which my husband and I clasped hands and walked toward the sunset, and in the next sequence we walked right through the dazzling color, and found ourselves smiling on the other side, each clutching a baby’s hand: a boy for you, a girl for me, as the song goes. Get out the Brownie and take the annual Christmas card picture. And for emphasis, sign it “Dr. and Mrs.,” along with the children’s names. You’ve married well—you’re, let’s face it, a little better than everyone else, if you’re a doctor’s wife.
Thinking about colorful skies, I remember one of the first books Nina had as a child. There were little birds, each a different color, which got together at the end of the story like the June Taylor Dancers and arranged themselves into a rainbow. The red birds. The orange. The yellow. Birds in every color of the rainbow. Nina was fascinated. Now, they’d take the same idea and make it a pop-up book and it would be much more exciting, but no matter: Nina never failed tocreateher own excitement. In fact, as the smallest child, she had scorn for whatever fun I tried to instigate. She always preferred to have her nose in a book, reading about something make-believe. The only person who could distract her was her brother. If Andrew wasn’t around, she’d turn to the stories of the witch or the dragon, or to Bucky Beaver. Her father and I were just poor stand-ins for the fictional characters she believed in. She looked down on us for being so dull and so . . . human. I’d rock her, when she was a baby, trying to get her to sleep, but if my voice went out of key she’d scrunch up her face to let me know I’d blown my audition. I was always auditioning with Nina. She was never an easy person to feel comfortable with. She let me know long before she could talk that I was nothing but the sum of my deficiencies.
I thought about being a singer. My model was Billie Holiday, and I loved her as much for her gardenia as for her voice. For the style it conveyed, I mean—not that putting something pretty in your hair is the same as having been blessed with a magical voice. The exquisite perfection of that flower! There she was, in real life, down and out, drug addicted, but oh, she never
neglected style. She embodied style. And what those transgressions did for her singing! You can listen to her every day and still be uplifted by the quality of that voice. She was her own chameleon. She just turned another color when the music demanded it—went from red velvet to a lump of coal. The idea of someone opening her mouth and singing that way—using one’s life for a jazz improvisation . . . it reassures you that people can make harmony out of chaos.
