by Ann Beattie
“Okay, well, you ace it with your story about flowers in the sky, your ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ story,” Zelda said. She hated for people to go. She always said something to keep them. She toed another bit of wet sand in Jocelyn’s direction. It looked like shit. That was what it looked like, wet and more brown than gray.
* * *
She drove through the parking lot of the hospital, but didn’t go in. She turned on the radio and heard that rain and thunder were predicted later, and also the next day. Maybe it would rain out her uncle’s golf game.
She almost forgot the pizza, it was such a stupid thing to do—eating another dinner at almost ten o’clock at night. She made a U-turn and pulled into the parking lot, but she wasn’t the only person who’d forgotten. The owner’s son was sponging off tables, saying that nobody’d phoned in an order. She wondered if she should just ask for a small plain pizza and get points with her aunt, but she decided no—her aunt could really do without a pizza. She bought a ginger ale in a bottle that exploded all over her when she unscrewed the cap. “Shit!” she said, which brought the owner to the counter. His son shrugged, acknowledging what had happened, but making no comment. “So what’s this? Did you shake the bottle?” Mister Rogers said. It wasn’t his real name, it was his nickname, behind his back, because he always said “Beautiful day” to adults, and T. G. had pointed out that Mister Rogers said, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” Or, at least, the guy who imitated him on the old Saturday Night Live did.
She shook her head. A question like that didn’t even deserve a response. The guys did that, sometimes. Would she do it? A girl?
Then came the very loud sound of shattering glass. She ducked, thinking a car was coming in right through the front windows. Mister Rogers and his son ducked, too, and the sponge flew across the room. Mister Rogers quickly got out of his crouch and ran toward the door.
There stood Ms. Nementhal. In a halter top and blue Bermuda shorts, Ms. Nementhal was wincing, her arms clasping her shoulders, her mouth agape. Someone had thrown bottles out of a car window, lots of them, it turned out. Could it have been on purpose? Who littered that way anymore? One had made a huge crack in one of the front windows. “Oh, Jesus,” the owner’s son moaned. “Are you okay?” he said to Ms. Nementhal.
“What was that?” she said, hysterically. “WHAT WAS THAT?”
“Trash. Every year it’s worse trash,” Mister Rogers said. “You’re all right, ma’am? Is that a little cut on your leg?”
“Shit, shit, shit,” the owner’s son said, tapping his cell phone. “That was probably that pond scum, Winston Bales.” He turned away. Behind Ms. Nementhal were several broken bottles, their necks scattered in one direction, glass strewn across the parking lot. There was a cut on her leg. She was bent over, examining it, her long hair obscuring any expression, and she hadn’t responded to the question. She hadn’t said one thing, though everybody knew she could monologue for hours. The owner must not know who she was. How would he? Some kid from Yale with her first summer job (as the newspaper report would later inform everyone), a volunteer in a program for troubled teens. They were not troubled! They weren’t! Jocelyn had not had the program advertised to her that way. What, exactly, was she troubled about?
One thing would be having to finish her essay, trying to write in a way that was credible about Earth being reversed with the sky; flowers sparkling instead of stars, the stars all fallen around everyone’s feet. A detritus (was that too big a word?) of stars. What would she be going for, though? Was that just another C-plus idea, or would something like that be Magical Realism?
THE FLEDGLING
She was hurrying out of the house, late for an appointment, purse slung over one shoulder, canvas shopping bag in her hand. A squawk came from the oak tree. Somewhere nearby a car backfired, but the squawking bird wasn’t silenced. It flew down one branch and sat at the tip of another, weighing it down, continuing to make the sound, less a squawk than a piercing cry.
The flapping of wings stopped her. Was the bird dive-bombing her, or just having an awkward moment? It flew back into the tree and sat again on a lower branch. Then she heard the second sound, the little sound, the curious tinkle of wind chimes, though she did not have wind chimes, thinking them obnoxious. But it was unmistakably the sound of glass rattling. You could hardly hear it above what were now two, no three noisy birds; medium-size, common birds of ordinary color she should have known the name of, but if they weren’t cardinals or mourning doves, she didn’t know birds’ names. Well, she knew a grackle when she saw one. Recently, flying squirrels had gotten into the attic and multiplied like crazy, the animal control guy going up every day on the ladder to check the traps until seventeen of them were caught. The mother, then the only remaining baby, old enough to go to college and drink beer if it had been human, were the last to go. They were billed by the day.
Birds! What’s happening here? Might a storm be on the way?
Tinkle, tinkle. Then nothing. One more bird flying into the tree, two of the three already lifting off, one landing on the lawn and making the sound over and over, standing there in the grass. No more tinkling sound, no more pseudo-wind-chime susurration, but really: how dumb could she be? It was there, in the blue recycling bin, still filled with wine bottles, seltzer bottles, milk containers, a crushed Budweiser can she’d picked up out of the road (they were not the sort to drink Budweiser) the day before. Also in the recycling bin, where dirty water pooled in a corner, was a tiny fledgling, every now and then beating its wings futilely, voicing an almost silent burble. Right there in the dark water that was probably mostly rainwater, mixed with a bit of undrunk red wine, a splash of Coke that leaked out when the can was tossed. The little bird just looked like an animated piece of crap, its nondescript color that of sludge, some pollen dusting the tops of the bottles and cans, a small fallen branch across one corner like those old-fashioned picture darts her mother used to lick to stick her baby pictures in an album. There had been hundreds of them, but the photographic record fizzled out pretty much where it should have: with her, knobby-kneed, pigtailed, and ribboned, on the steps outside the building where she went to kindergarten.
You weren’t supposed to touch birds, because they wouldn’t be allowed back in the nest, right? If you got your human smell on them. Or was that an old wives’ tale? Were there still old wives who told tales, or did everyone know everything now, including how to remove red wine stains, how to make your tablecloth soft, how to keep salt from getting moist in the container? Oh, it was a world of rice now, very little ingested because quinoa was so popular, that and tabouli and spelt, though rice grains were still put in saltshakers. Rice was still thrown at weddings. Certain weddings.
Poor little dirty sad frightened bird! Poor distraught elders! They all feared the worst scenario: death by drowning; death by starvation; an ugly end with no one but them as witnesses, and they could do nothing except send up a storm of sound and hope either the gods, or the humans who acted like gods, would do the right thing, that one of them would be the savior. She was obviously that, staring nervously for only a few seconds before dropping everything, checking her impulse to plunge in her hand, running inside for the oven mitts, guaranteed to be safe for food cooked up to 450 degrees.
Into the house she ran, out of the house she ran, hands in mitts. But she didn’t want to crush it. It was so small. So sodden. The skin of its tiny head looked like the crow’s-feet fanning out from the corners of her eyes.
The birds were making a terrible sound, two on the ground as if facing off with her, yet much too far away. Two others sitting high up in the tree were making the loudest noise. She was capable of reaching in, even though the mitts made the use of her hands awkward, to say the least, and lifting out the little thing and putting it on the walkway, where she hoped all traces of Roundup were gone from the spraying done by the lawn service, to keep weeds from sprouting in the sand between bricks . . . maybe put it on the grass. Though it l
ooked like it would need all the traction it could get. What was the scenario? She could retreat to the house or go to the car and turn on the AC and watch in her rearview mirror to see Mother Bird swoop down and—however she did it—enfold Baby Bird somehow, and lift it again to the nest, which she imagined she saw—either that or some dead leaves—midtree. Well, it was nature. It would work out. Of course it would. She kept focusing on the near future because the little bird was cupped in her oven mitts now. When suddenly she remembered something she had forgotten for . . . well, for most of her life. It was a poem that began “Good-bye, little fledgling, fly away.” Her grandmother, who’d been such a good baker, had placed in the center of her famous apple pies made with three kinds of apples a little black bird with an open beak, a pie bird, to release steam. A simplified version of a bird, a little objet, the clever baker’s secret to a perfect pie.
It was standing there. It was either shivering or trying to move its wet wings. It could have died in the recycling. What if she’d hurried on, thought the happy birds were just voicing their happy songs? Both birds had now flown from the lawn back into the tree. One kept flying up and landing exactly where it had started from. Surely it had a plan? The little bird was slightly lopsided. It made a motion resembling a hop. It opened its beak and made a slightly louder sound than it had made in the blue plastic recycling container, which seemed to alarm it and make it tilt farther sideways. She was overstaying her welcome. Car plan: she scooped up her purse and bag, still wearing the cumbersome silver oven mitts. That was the way she looked as she emerged from under the bower of wisteria, making it a point not to torture herself by looking back, and greeted the man in the open-doored mail truck, only slightly surprised to have come upon her looking the way she did: rather frantic, breathing heavily, her hands like lobster claws immobilized by thick rubber bands.
Regardless of her grandmother’s lessons and always gently delivered advice, she’d never made a pie in her life.
AUNT SOPHIE RENALDO BROWN
Years ago, I saw two people at a summer party who arrived in grand style and departed to everyone’s protestations that they shouldn’t drive. The driver of the little MG was called Walrus, which I thought was the funniest name I’d ever heard, and his ladyfriend was called Star. She’d been an extra in a few movies but never managed to have a career in Hollywood. Someone at the party said she was a secretary at a recording studio, and someone else said she’d eloped with a much older man and never had the marriage annulled, and that he looked out for her. These people had hardly turned their backs when the gossip began. Someone said to me that it was like everyone lying and conjecturing at Gatsby’s parties, but I had not at that point read the book.
Aunt Sophie Renaldo Brown was wearing red sling-back high heels and khaki shorts (hardly Gatsby attire, as I’d later learn) and a tight lavender blouse, under which she wore a push-up bra and, inside the bra, carefully placed, two metal wire champagne cork baskets to suggest hugely protruding nipples. As Sophie Renaldo, she’d been a teetotaler, but after getting her life together, divorcing Roy Renaldo, and eventually a subsequent marriage that lasted six months but gave her the name Brown, matriculating at NYU, she’d developed a taste for icy cold rosé. You know how it is: you get a cat; the cat needs toys; you get a bell so the cat won’t kill birds and also a cushion so the cat can rest comfortably somewhere other than on the sofa. A cat becomes a whole big deal. She did have such a cat, named Methuselah by her first ex-husband, who’d believed that the cat was eight or nine years old when they got it from the shelter (this is what they’d been told), and then it had lived another nineteen years and was still going strong except for a recent bout of hypergrooming in the tail area.
Roy was happy to leave the animal behind with Sophie when he moved to York, Maine, to work at an accounting firm with an old Navy friend. He was not so happy to have to continue to pay his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s tuition, but the following year she graduated with a degree in sociology. She was currently a hostess at a busy, successful Upper West Side restaurant. She got up early in the morning to walk the cat on a leash (people stared), to buy a small bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice, then return home to sip it as she took her daily vitamins and wrote lengthy passages in her diary. Bryce, the new waiter, often stopped by to round her up for the three-block walk to Café Anywhere. He was the one who’d introduced her to rosé.
My father called her a lush and would have nothing to do with her once she was divorced from his brother—when she became more of an exhibitionist than ever. At her first wedding, she’d constantly raised her wedding gown to show the garter with its thinly braided white ribbons whose little satin pigtail points were dusted with blue sparkles and tiny, dangling heart-shaped crystals. She told me they were edible! She had quite a sense of humor. I was seven years old, and absolutely mesmerized. Who could believe Uncle Roy would find such a prize? His other girlfriends had been heavier, and none had had such luxurious hair, and certainly none had giggled or offered to take me to Central Park. One had asthma.
I was seventeen when Roy and Sophie separated and eighteen when they divorced. They’d never had children, but I always knew she wished I was hers. Sometimes when I was growing up, she’d point to little boys on the street and say she was glad she wasn’t stuck with one of them. I usually agreed, because they always seemed wound up and they tended to breathe through their mouths and to have dirt or food on their faces.
I was eighteen when I saw her with the champagne baskets protruding beneath her blouse. She was absolutely straight-faced, because she was good at pulling a joke. She’d taught me not to pop my eyes like my mother and then immediately look down if we saw somebody strange or outlandish. She explained that their appearance might be intentionally funny, and we wouldn’t want to appear unsophisticated and react negatively to the joke. Of course the majority of people just passed us by, but I tended to take her word for which of those people intended to be funny with their attire and which didn’t.
She could tell instantly whether someone was aware she was dressed ludicrously or was just a loser. Even weird, old-fashioned hats didn’t confuse Aunt Sophie. To me, the length of the feather or the amount of swirled netting or the rhinestone clips were indecipherable, but she could tell if a man dressed as a woman in line at the drugstore was kidding or serious. She explained that it would be rude to laugh at a man who thought he looked nice. Little old ladies—the ones that came out of certain apartment buildings—she discounted as being in a time warp. Age was a big factor in whether someone was putting on the audience, but I didn’t see clearly, as she did, whether someone was fifty or seventy; they just looked old.
She coached me, but it seemed like almost every case was different and I would never have an eye for nuance. She dressed a lot of different ways herself, though I never saw her wear a hat. Sophie wore high heels, kitten heels, ballet flats in wild colors, tennis shoes, and espadrilles. When she went to work, she favored platform slings, though she sometimes wore red Keds and put on stiletto heels when she got to work. In her opinion, shoes were something people did not kid about. They might buy a dress because they knew it was ridiculously girlie, or wear a color such as bright orange that was meant to shock. But whatever shoes they had on, they weren’t joking: ugly shoes they knew to be ugly shoes, though thank heavens it had become as fashionable to wear ugly shoes as attractive ones—or really any kind of shoe you wanted. Many kinds of shoes cut across class lines, such as clogs with closed backs. Nurses wore them, waitresses wore them, but so did college students and rich ladies walking their little dogs on the Upper West Side (East Side shoes were totally different). I pretty much understood Sophie’s point, but I still found certain distinctions hard to make. Boots? She explained that because they always cost so much, boots automatically conveyed wealth. Sophie granted my point that if we were somewhere else, there might be some confusion about boots, but the bottom line was that they were not working-class footwear in New York City. Also, you had to inve
st a lot of time in breaking them in, so however strange they looked—reptilian or gold-cap-toed, bright purple with stacked heels—they were never a joke joke.
I kept it in the back of my mind that if I married Bryce Seward (I had such a crush on him), I’d just ask Sophie to pick out absolutely everything I’d wear on my wedding day. I had previously thought I might marry McGann O’Marra and Jerry Underwood—in fifth and sixth grade, respectively. Then came the long stretch of believing that I would never marry anyone. That no one would ever want to marry me. All Jerry Underwood really wanted to do, it was clear to me, was to draw concentric circles around my budding breasts with Magic Marker. It took forever to fade, and I had to make sure my mother never saw me naked. My father would have killed him, and that’s not an exaggeration. Anyway—this gets me back to where I began, more or less: Aunt Sophie and the little wire champagne baskets.
She did this at the garden party, which was held at a big house in Maine nearly five hours from New York, on a river. She told us she’d called ahead to make absolutely sure that Roy, her first ex-husband, wouldn’t be there, but I thought that, secretly, she would have liked running into him. The couple giving the party had told her that she was “fun” and that they hadn’t kept up with Roy, let alone invited him to the party. She remembered these people only slightly, from a dinner she’d had with them at a restaurant when they’d all been offered a room at the hotel across the street if they’d leave. She loved to tell people how scandalously she and her friends acted, though you could never press her and get details.
