by Ann Beattie
Lucy had understood it all in a flash, and for some reason she had been terrified—terrified of both her father and the waitress. It was a rotten thing to have done to her—more punishment in the guise of pleasure—but if he hadn’t been so outspoken, and so harsh, what happened next might not have happened. Her father had started to order Beefeater martinis made ten to one. She must have looked miserable enough to have softened the waitress’ heart. She no longer remembered how they got from the table to the bathroom, or why she would have gone, but she did remember the waitress drying off the formica counter at the side of the sink, and the two of them sitting there moments later, swinging their legs like schoolgirls. “Nobody is any one way,” the waitress had said to her. “I’ve got a lot of talent. Don’t look at me and just think I’m some waitress. Your father has a good heart. He’s also got a mean streak. You’re not just sixteen years old, right? You’re full of energy, like a kid, but another part of you can sit still in a restaurant and sip champagne with the best of them, right?”
Lucy nodded. She had gone into the bathroom afraid of the waitress—she supposed she went because getting away from her father seemed more important than avoiding the woman—but suddenly something about the way the waitress smoked her cigarette and slouched as she talked made her feel sorry for her, sorrier than she felt for herself. She had asked what the waitress did when she wasn’t a waitress. The waitress had hopped down from the counter to tap and twirl, and as she did, Lucy had felt happy and then almost elated. The waitress had freed her with the kick of her foot, in a way: if people weren’t any one thing, then of course situations weren’t. No one ever again changed quite so abruptly in her presence, but that was irrelevant: Lucy believed that the potential was there, and from then on she became the Lucy who was involved in something, and the Lucy who watched herself and the situation from afar. She felt sorry for all the people who didn’t realize that their world could change in a second.
It was Jane’s beauty and her craziness that made her attractive to men, but it was Lucy’s personality that attracted them. Ever since that night when she understood everything differently, she didn’t judge people in the same way. When they put on a performance to impress her, she was pleased that they had made the effort, if she liked them. Pleased but restrained, because it was likely that the opposite was also true. And when men she did not care about put on a show, she was dismissive but polite, assuming that, of course, they were also men who were potentially interesting and attractive. Simply because she would not pass judgment, men became more and more fascinated.
This approach took its toll, of course. When doors were left open, it could get drafty at night. Endless opportunities were extended merely because she did not rule out possibilities. And since there were no particular ground rules, even those who were malicious couldn’t zip the rug out from under and topple her, because she had made no firm assumptions about where she stood to begin with. Sometimes, like today, what she was most sure of was fatigue. She could see the attraction of winding a turban around her hair, putting on a white robe, and marching off to meet her fate in crumbling Earth Shoes. As Nigel, at the magazine, was fond of saying, “Set the camera on infinity and you’re bound to get the long view.”
She went back to the living room. Piggy’s wife was no longer there, and Piggy stood with his back to her, reading letters and telegrams, head bent. PP was embroidered in elaborate letters on the back of his robe. He was as much of a father as any of them had. She might have thought of him as old, standing with his head bent, but instead of an old man’s scuffs, he had on blue Nikes, black knee-high executive socks, and two-pound ankle weights. That took care of that.
26
JANE and Lucy’s mother, Rita, sitting at her desk in her house in Philadelphia, looked out at the park across the street and reflected on the fact that she thought of herself in terms of her connection to them: she was Jane and Lucy’s mother. Even though Jane was dead, she was still Jane’s mother—to another mother, at least, she would never have to explain that. She did not really feel that she had to explain anything anymore. She could not remember the last time anyone had asked her for an explanation.
In spite of the fact that she was under no obligation to explain anything, she was sitting at her desk because she had gotten up that morning wanting to write Lucy a letter. Lucy felt as bad about Jane’s death as she did. If she called to talk to her about it, though, Lucy would be brave. Lucy would not have to be brave reading a letter.
She was not sure what she wanted to say to Lucy. This, for certain: that from the first, the children had had the greatest interest in anything dangerous. They preferred to stand at the top of the landing, barefoot, toes overhanging the top step as if they were standing on a diving board, rather than to sit in a chair in the living room. They were as comfortable with height as the angels. Also, if anything was slightly precarious, they were drawn to it. They would have walked like the Wallendas on the clothesline stretched from the porch roof to the maple tree if she or her husband hadn’t grabbed them and lifted them down. They shimmied up the side of the tree like mountain climbers, and later in the day they’d be filthy from spelunking in the crawl space under the porch. There was always a reason: the neighbor’s cat had been down there for an entire afternoon, meowing, and it might be hurt; the bird’s nest had to be brought down right away, before Daddy got home, because there was going to be a storm. They always thought of themselves as people on a rescue mission. As though it mattered that the balloon string had gotten tangled around the clothesline. As if the birds didn’t build nests strong enough to survive storms. The way they thought about it, inanimate objects were to be cared for just as if they were alive, and the whole world was there for the saving. They loved little things. Seedlings in the garden. Lucy probably remembered going out after a rain and trying to remove the little clumps of mud that weighted the new plants down. She certainly remembered the gardens. She could recite the names, still, of every flower.
Lucy probably did not know—but perhaps it would not interest her—that one time Jane cried all afternoon when a boy in the neighborhood poured boiling water on an anthill. It was as if she’d turned the corner and seen the river Styx.
They developed their own systems for things. That was admirable, of course. Why should mothers be so disturbed by inventiveness? Lucy had had such a terrible time learning the Palmer Method. “Fluid motion,” her teacher had said. “It is necessary to feel these curves in the hand,” moving her own hand like a metronome. When she wasn’t looking, Lucy would copy a page from the book, as she was supposed to. Then she would go back and add swishes to the letters—a combination of writing and painting, it looked like. “Ladies,” their dance instructor, Miss Jersild, would say, “spine straight, feel no weight. Head high, body dangling from the sky.” They were supposed to think of themselves as marionettes, erect but relaxed, waiting to be put into motion.
One day, in the basement, Lucy had stood on her father’s workbench, with torn nylons she had found in the wastebasket tied together, looking for all the world as if she were about to drop a noose over Jane’s head. Lucy couldn’t possibly have been about to hang her, because she worshiped Jane, always. They were just pretending—wanting to really feel the pull from above. It was one of the few times they ever took an abstraction and tried to be literal-minded about it. They spent their lives doing quite the opposite.
Rita thought that that sort of imaginative ability could help a person. A pleasant notion, to think of dirty clothes piled high in the laundry basket as Monet’s haystack. To see the melting ice cream as a cloud.
Dear Lucy—How you two loved bubbles! I’d try to do the dishes and you two would reach around me and dip your blowers into the sink and lift them out and blow and blow. I had to put so much detergent in the water that the dishes almost slipped out of my hands. It took forever to rinse them. To think that I ever thought of all that fun as frustrating. There we’d be, bubbles all around us, a storm of them m
irroring everything in the kitchen—all those mundane things, stepstools and canisters, become for a second mere flashes of color that popped and collided.
They were endlessly fascinated with lightning bugs. They would beg to sleep with a jar of them in their room, air holes punched with the ice pick in the metal top. They’d put it by the night-light because they thought they blinked more when there was some source of light. It had its equivalent in Christian thinking—all the little children prospering under God’s radiance.
Rita felt sure that their religious training had been neglected. They had memorized the recipe for chocolate chip cookies before they knew the Ten Commandments. They were so worshipful of each other that it was hard to make Mary take on any real character. The apostles paled by comparison with the lives of their stuffed animals. She should have sent the girls to church regularly. Eventually, the minister might have prevailed.
He would not have prevailed. It got to the point where no man could persuade them of anything. Jane didn’t even take men seriously enough to bother finding one who was better than the rest. Except that there was a similarity in the men she chose. She liked childish men. Not because she felt threatened by men or because she wanted to have power over them, but because it became increasingly difficult as she got older to find women who were childlike, and Jane always enjoyed childhood so. She would have been perfectly happy to remain a child.
With Lucy, it was another matter. Her father influenced her much more. They weren’t close, but he never begrudged giving her time. Jane seemed to bore him. He and Lucy did seem to have some relationship. It upset her very much when he left. She latched on to Hildon, and stayed attached to him.
They were once so naïve that they thought the paisley sheets would make them pregnant. There they were on the floor in the morning, because they wouldn’t lie on the sheets. It was one of those mysterious tableaux of childhood that didn’t get explained until years later.
They were so busy when they were children that Rita could still not believe that they had grown up and done whatever they could to avoid work. They liked doing things of all sorts. Their days were so scheduled, they barely had time for school. They lived for summer. Night, and summer. At night they turned their bedroom into the Old Vic. Jane’s bedroom. Lucy was always in Jane’s room. One time she had a cap gun. Rita could remember taking it away and wrapping it in newspaper as if it were a fish. Then she threw it away. Real guns or toy guns too often led to tragedy. She had read, recently, that some man had picked up his son’s water pistol, when the paper boy was being adamant about the money he was owed. The paper boy came back with a revolver and aimed it through the window and shot the man in the back of the head. She believed in gun control, no matter what the hunters said. The paper boy with the gun had no more trouble getting it than a person would have going out to buy a candy bar. He was thirteen years old.
She understood that she was not to think about what went on in the world. That the New York Times no more reflected the problems of the day than a statement made by the Queen of Hearts. She was not supposed to embarrass people by reading the paper and telling them what she had read.
Dear Lucy—I try not to think of Jane as dead. Frankly, this means, lately, that I try not to think about Jane.
Jane probably got too much attention. People would say, Oh, it must be wonderful not to have the children fighting all the time, jealous of each other, but the two of them together—they were almost always united in everything—were an ebb tide to a person’s reasoning. Insist, and you’d feel like a bully.
Rita believed that little things did get remembered. The small things in her house were quite lovely. One lovely thing made a more perfect statement than half a dozen objects put out on a tabletop.
What were Jane’s last thoughts? She hoped that they were peaceful. Jane must have been scared to death even before she died. Or perhaps it made her angry, because she hated predictable things that she couldn’t control. Friday night traffic, backed up on the road to the beach.
Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” came to mind. It was her favorite painting, for purely sentimental reasons.
It must be very difficult for Lucy. In some ways, she acted as if she were much older than Jane: placating her, indulging her. She was good at distracting her. She could invent a game right on the spot. They loved to scare each other. They would take any excuse to jump out of a closet. Even if one knew the other was in there, she would be frightened enough to jump or scream. They would play Ghosts. Or Africa. What did jumping out of a closet have to do with Africa? She remembered the time Lucy knocked down the clothes bar and all the clothes fell on the floor of the closet. Henry had said, “What game is this? Niagara?”
Henry. Henry Nolan Spenser.
She thought: the aspen is the most beautiful tree, followed by the birch.
She found herself thinking that Mozart was born in 1756, Blake one year later. What an age that must have been. Contemporary poetry was all about young fathers’ perceptions of their sons. Speculative poetry, about rocks talking and planets humming.
They loved music. The carrousel. Music boxes. Dear Lucy—Do you remember that I would sing you to sleep when you were restless? Those songs always seemed sad, sung at night—songs such as “I Love You Truly” and “You Are My Sunshine.” The sadder the song, the later the hour, the prettier my voice. That really was true. Until I had children I was inhibited about singing. I still would not sing in a room filled with people. Not even a Christmas carol. Two years ago I found myself in such a situation and lip-synched “Jingle Bells.”
Most people simply stopped seeing her when Henry left. A common reaction—people felt awkward, as if they themselves had deserted the person. This resulted in their deserting the person.
It was written somewhere that Joseph P. Kennedy agreed with his father that there were only two great things about the modern age. One was that there were window screens. The other thing … there was another thing. There were actually many things to like. Digital clocks, although they were not functionally an improvement over regular clocks. The kinds of teas that were readily available were amazing. In almost any small grocery store, you could find camomile, rose hip, mint. Women’s shoes were now often quite stunning, though there seemed to be no standardization of the M width. A skate blade would not fit in some M width shoes. In others, the span was adequate.
Dear Lucy—One of the advantages of being old is that you do not have to endlessly explain things. People are afraid to ask you questions—partly because they become deferential and partly because they are afraid that the answer will be too lengthy and boring. They will ask you how you feel instead of what you did on a particular day. This makes it easier to do strange things, because it is unlikely that anyone will question you about what you did. Also, since most people have no way of checking, you can say what is convenient. For example, there is a sepia-toned baby picture on my upstairs table. I have been asked, once or twice, who it is. I have shrugged and said, “Some relative.” Actually, it is the baby picture of the first man I loved. His mother, who thought we would marry, gave it to me the Christmas before he died of the flu. The look in the baby’s eyes is the same as his look when he was a twenty-year-old man and I knew him. I don’t think I would remember that without having the picture set out. I remember taking a walk on a snowy day and running into his brother, and hearing that he had been taken to the hospital. I was supposed to be home, but I cut across the park with the boy—a younger brother, perhaps fourteen, though he seems in my mind to have been a mere baby compared to Nicole—and I went to see him. He recognized me, but the next day he recognized no one, and the following day he was dead. It was still snowing when he was buried, and they had to delay the funeral until they could dig again in the cemetery. Imagine: the flu, which was so contagious, and I sat at his bedside for an hour.
Or, she could write: People are reluctant to believe that a parent doesn’t prefer one child, however slightly, to another. Someti
mes there would be a period when one of you seemed sweeter than the other, but then the situation would be reversed. It evened out.
Or, that when she went to the hospital, it was the first time that she saw a hospital room that was not painted white. It was painted green.
Or, that Henry had just come right out and said that he was going to leave. For years he had struggled, with little subtlety, to keep himself rooted. He had held on to the wheel of the station wagon, and before that to the handle of the baby carriage, as though all day, everywhere, he was hearing the voices of the Sirens. He was always grabbing onto things. Grabbing the phone, instead of holding it. All that tension was apparent to everyone. Why not admit that it made Jane and Lucy stay childish longer than they might have. They had had better luck with him when they were young, so they thought that being sprites would please Daddy. They always looked at him full face, with their large, lovely eyes. They always had their arms around his neck. They wore long white cotton nightgowns with punchwork and embroidery at the neckline. It seemed that he would carry them, and they would stay plastered against him, until they were so tall that they would have to be dragged. There were nights when he wouldn’t come home. They would cry and cry. Lucy would make up a story to tell Jane. Lucy hated him a little in the end, and Jane became a dreamer.
Lucy: when Henry left, I no longer rolled toward the center of the bed at night. The mattress wasn’t weighted down, and I stayed where I was. I was always astonished to wake up and find myself on one side of the big bed. For a while I doubted that I had slept.
Homonyms. The trouble you had with those, Lucy—you would have thought that you had been raised in a foreign land. Some people seize on some one thing about someone else and then blow it out of proportion, overestimating its symbolic potential. With you, Lucy, it would be homonyms. Once you heard a word and attached it to a particular thing, you couldn’t admit that there was an alternate reality. The struggle we had with pair and pare. How you wept over there and their.
