The State We're In

by Ann Beattie

  Inside, I saw something I thought was a piece of sculpture. Closer inspection revealed it to be a great quantity of cooked lobsters stacked on the shelves of a tall metal stand surrounded not by devotional candles but by open jars of mayonnaise. At that point, I don’t think I even knew lobsters existed; I was fascinated by their bright red shells. Wasn’t this more of an adventure than going on another pointless coffee date with Les Allan? Sure—everything I did with Aunt Sophie was exciting and new, though getting up at six in the morning in order to set out before seven had made me feel a little faint. I rode in the back of the car with Bryce’s boyfriend, Nathaniel, and the cat, who was stretched out in a cage with one of Sophie’s old bed pillows for a cushion and a cone around its head so it couldn’t overgroom its tail. Aunt Sophie rode in the passenger seat, map in hand, her eyes shadowed in silvery green powder, the lashes thick with mascara, even though you could see dark raccoon circles under her eyes. She turned around often to talk to us. I was so excited to be going to a garden party—whatever that was. For one thing, they were rich people who had a big lawn—this much I figured out from what Sophie said about them. The Boyfriend kept saying that so much driving wasn’t his idea of a good Sunday, and Bryce and Sophie both said, almost in unison, that the words good and Sunday were an oxymoron. Sundays were boring; they signified the last-minute desperation of having a good weekend. The two of them were united in their scorn of Sunday. To them, the day meant nothing but newsprint on their fingertips and eggs prepared with glutinous, highly caloric sauces. Sundays were always straining after fun, like a horse being whipped to win the race, when fun came naturally during the rest of the week. Sundays carried a burden too heavy to bear.

  Bryce was wearing a white shirt and tight jeans with a few little slashes on the thighs (and this was way before anyone did such a thing). He wore sandals a friend had brought him from Morocco. The Boyfriend had on madras Bermuda shorts and a navy blue Lacoste shirt and leather sneakers with tan colored laces and tan socks folded over at the ankle. He had very hairy legs. He worked at another restaurant—more like a bar—in Chelsea. He’d graduated from Juilliard but had some sort of breakdown and couldn’t play music or listen to any female vocalists. No one dared to turn on the car radio. Methuselah kept trying to stand in the cage, although all the turns in the road kept knocking him down, making his bell ring, and sometimes provoking long, weak cries of protest. I was wearing a wrap dress in a nice shade of gray that I’d bought at a flea market on Amsterdam Avenue for next to nothing and black patent-leather ankle-strap inch-high heels. It seemed pretty radical not to wear any jewelry, so I didn’t. The rumor was that Leo Lerman (who apparently wrote about the arts) was going to be at the party, and also a famous painter. I didn’t catch his name, but the Boyfriend clearly thought he was an idiot and that the party wasn’t worth going to, even if it was Sunday and there was nothing better to do. He refused in advance to do any of the driving, and he insisted that we stop every two hours so he could pee. He was the first person I heard worrying aloud about bedbugs. He wouldn’t go to the movies because he was afraid bedbugs might be in the theater seats.

  Now I have to tell the rest of the story another way, because I can’t keep pretending that what happened didn’t happen. It was this: we found a parking spot under a willow tree and left the windows down so Methuselah would be okay. Walking to the party, with my arm linked through Aunt Sophie’s, and the Boyfriend and the man who I now understood would never, ever be my husband, Sophie said, “I went to have my yearly mammogram, and they saw something. I have to go into the hospital on Tuesday afternoon and have it biopsied. If anything happens to me, I want you to promise to take care of Methuselah. I know I should say everything’s going to be okay, but I’ve got a premonition that it isn’t. Do you promise?”

  This was bad news, said so matter-of-factly that, right away, I began silently denying it. Did Bryce know about this? Whether the Boyfriend was aware of it didn’t matter even slightly. Did my mother know? That was important. If she did, then maybe she could reassure me, because it was clear Sophie wasn’t going to. On the other hand, if she didn’t know, would I have to tell her? Or, worse yet, keep quiet about it? Sophie said, “Bryce is going to walk Methuselah for me after my biopsy.” (So he did know!) “I’ll have to miss that day at work, but maybe I can go in the next day. Look at that man over there, peeing against a tree. He thinks we don’t see him. The party must already be in full swing!”

  I looked in the same direction but didn’t see anyone. “Right there!” she said, pointing. There were many trees. I squinted a little, though I didn’t really want to see a man peeing. But then I did see him: a guy tucking his penis inside his pants, turning and walking quickly away. “That didn’t even happen at the party at the Great Gatsby’s,” she said. “But I guess you can’t expect him to put everything in one book. I’ll write about it in my diary: that it was an omen. Fate was pissing on me.”

  At least, I think that’s what she said. Methuselah was crying. We both turned and looked at the car, but now it was quiet.

  “I think I’ll have a smoke. You go in and I’ll join you in a minute,” the Boyfriend said.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Bryce said. “We’ll see you girls soon.”

  We walked ahead, still arm in arm. I hadn’t answered her about the cat. I hadn’t said anything sympathetic or helpful or even acknowledged that I’d heard what she’d told me. I couldn’t think what to say. I, too, trusted her instincts. I couldn’t imagine life without her. And to be honest, I’d always had to fake it about liking Methuselah. I didn’t want to be a young old maid who lived alone with her cat. The thought of it resulted in tears filling my eyes. I wiped them quickly away with my free hand as Star exited the party barefoot, with lobsters raised like free weights above her head, and was chased, giggling, around the side of the house. I never saw either of them again, though I once saw a man with a similar mustache I mistook for Walrus when I was checking out of a CVS a couple of years later.

  Another car bumped onto the grassy area: a Mustang convertible with a Vermont license plate, music playing loudly, an old Sinéad O’Connor song, “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The driver and a woman in the passenger seat were laughing loudly, enjoying every tree root the car bumped over, the woman holding her sequined baseball cap to her head in an exaggerated way. So was her hat a joke? Why were so many women at the party wearing hats? Was Aunt Sophie serious in what she was suddenly saying about Bryce and Nathaniel intending to hook up with the man who’d been peeing against a tree? I turned to see Nathaniel cupping his hand around a match to light a cigarette, and Bryce stretching, slowly lowering his hands down his thighs to his knees, then lower, bending further. Was it a kind of preening, or just a postdrive stretch? A puff of smoke went up in the air. I wanted to be that smoke. To disappear. Instead, I listened from afar to my own voice as I lied about my affection for the cat. I let go of her arm. She brushed her hand lightly down my long hair I was too stupid to know was attractive to men, though later I practiced tossing it in front of a mirror. Aunt Sophie’s heels were higher than anyone else’s I’d seen—certainly higher than mine—but she walked briskly, with confidence. How did a person have confidence if they didn’t believe in the future? I wondered. In an hour or so, Aunt Sophie would be placing the little metal baskets inside her blouse, seeming to be having a good time, shocking people but making them laugh.

  It was a rocky road to death, full of bumps and obstacles, with low-hanging branches that would slap you in the face if you didn’t duck, and there was always the danger that the underside of the car might sink deeply into a pothole and bottom out, leaving us all stranded. You could call for help, but how to describe where we were, surrounded by trees that blocked out the sun, an anonymous place at the end of an unpaved road, where man pissed on nature and puffed carcinogens into the air, sending up smoke signals to mix with the clouds.

  The Boyfriend knew how to blow smoke rings. It was amazing for a few seconds until he
stopped pursing his lips, silently puffing out the message of the day, and of every day: O, O, O.

  ADIRONDACK CHAIRS

  After Artigan’s death, Bea was afraid to weed the garden. Artigan had not died from the yellow jacket bites—though he was horribly allergic—but because as his shovel split their in-ground nest and they swarmed up as the first and last golden tornado he’d ever see, he fell backward over the stone wall and hit his head on a tree stump. Artigan had been doing some gardening for summer people who were not yet occupying their house. The blood was congealing when Bea arrived in the Heppendales’ truck to pick him up. She worked at the greenhouse, where there’d been a big run on lemon verbena. She and Tracy (who’d once worked at a vineyard in Sonoma) had come up with the idea that the greenhouse could offer a free wine tasting with music and gardening information. There was a tip jar, and they were a little embarrassed that people left so much.

  I worked at the greenhouse, too, but I never had any bright ideas. The Heppendales raised my friends’ hourly wage and agreed that, yes, they should offer the back building for weddings. Alex Heppendale ordered Bea and Tracy new gardening boots from Zappos, along with a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate each for another pair of shoes. By July, when word had spread about the cocktails and gardening advice, business had almost doubled. Chilean chardonnay, supercold, in real glasses, with hors d’oeuvres and Mr. Heppendale and his daughter Alex (a Princeton graduate) circulating and offering tips about gardening . . . people in town went mad for it, as well as people from away. Mrs. Heppendale bought flouncy dresses and meant to attend, but found that, Friday after Friday, she had a headache.

  On Saturdays, Artigan also worked at the greenhouse, tending the suddenly popular, slightly strange herbs and repotting orchids. Had he not died, he and Bea were going to test out the back building for their own wedding at the end of August. They’d already been a couple long enough for him to teach her to drive, for her to break his texting addiction, for them to consider sponsoring a child from the Fresh Air Fund the following summer, by which time they’d be legit. As a little girl Bea had believed in angels, but that was more or less because she loved girlie tchotchkes. My Little Pony was over the top, but even as she got older, she kept her fondness for barrettes decorated with sunflowers and bunches of cherries. Her hair was seventeen inches long, measured from the crown to its longest point. (Tracy had the idea, and I measured. I admit, we thought a lot about ourselves and very little about plants on our half-hour lunch breaks.)

  At the ER, there was much commotion, little talk. People either pulled Bea forward by her hand like a child or repeatedly dropped her hand, she couldn’t remember. She knew when she saw him on the grass near the garden that he was dead. She’d seen enough corpses on TV. She had no religious beliefs, so she didn’t think Artigan was anywhere but there, and as she dialed 911, she knew he’d only be on the ground a few minutes longer. So much for their wedding.

  I quit my other job waiting tables at the York Harbor Inn and stepped in full-time to join Tracy at the greenhouse at the end of July, when it became clear Bea wasn’t going to be able to work anymore. It wasn’t just grief, it was morning sickness. She wouldn’t have to borrow a child from Fresh Air to play with on the beach the following summer. Of course she wasn’t going to be able to afford to live in town anymore. She’d only been able to do it because a former college roommate had offered Artigan his cousin’s house for the summer while the estate was being settled. In exchange for gardening and lawn mowing, Artigan and Bea had briefly seemed like everybody else, sitting on the front lawn in the Adirondack chairs, admiring the bobbly headed peonies that dowsed the ground, drinking a G and T in the evening (which, for them, meant eight o’clock). When Bea’s mother and father came to take her home, they stripped the beds and wrote thank-you notes to the family (strangely, using no salutation). They also turned the Adirondack chairs upside down on the front lawn as if they were boats that needed to drain. My aunt and uncle, who had a lot more money than my parents, once had a maid who was intent on showing you that she’d cleaned the rugs, so she put them back upside down. Sometimes the colors were surprisingly bright. Once or twice they were left wrong side up.

  At the Heppendales’ greenhouse, Tracy and I were really the also-rans. I was always tripping over the hose or putting a plant down too hard and cracking the clay pot. She fainted, on a hot August day, loading a ten-pound bag of soil into some old guy’s trunk. After that she made sure to hydrate and wore the big canvas sun hat with the annoying chin strap. She told me later it was weird to have felt the way Artigan might have just before he died. We’d both gone to the funeral, though Bea wasn’t there. It was my second and Tracy’s first. It was a hot day and Mrs. Heppendale hadn’t been there because she’d had an allergic reaction to something she ate the night before. For one reason or another, Mrs. Heppendale was hardly ever anywhere.

  It was the turned-over chairs at Artigan and Bea’s that really stopped Tracy and me when we went over to the house to see if Bea and her parents needed any help. When we got there, though, they’d already left. We pulled up the steep driveway and went in through the back, so we didn’t see the chairs at first, though we did see and read the notes from Bea’s mother and father, with a box of Kleenex weighing down the corner of one and a conch shell as a paperweight over the other, both smack in the middle of the dining room table, bracketed by silver candlesticks. What was going to happen to Bea? She was almost certainly going to be okay, we figured, but that was before we knew about the pregnancy and before scuzzy Winston Bales blabbed that she’d been known to do a little coke. The Zappos boots, in a striped pattern with the stripes filled in with paisley, sat by the back door. Another empty box had been discarded in the trash: stilettos, said the print on the box, black patent, size 71/2. She must have taken them. To do what? Stumble around in her pregnancy? Bea’s family lived in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her mother worked for a dry cleaner. Her father was an accountant. One of his clients had been Big Pussy, from The Sopranos.

  Shortly after Bea’s departure, Mrs. Heppendale also left. She told people she was going to visit her sister in London, but both Alex and Mr. Heppendale said that it was a made-up story, that she was simply walking out on them. Part of her reason was that they were obsessed with Bea, and inconsolably distraught about Artigan, while they’d paid no attention to her when she had the flu, or when her migraines began (she’d had to get a cab to the ER). Also, her husband and daughter danced outside on the terrace under the stars to big-band music piped out through those excellent Bose speakers they had everywhere, and she was worried that anyone seeing such a thing would think something incestuous was going on.

  I was the last one to see Mrs. Heppendale. I was at the transportation center in Portsmouth, waiting for my best friend since first grade to arrive by bus from Logan airport. She’d just been given a Tiffany engagement ring. She was coming for a visit to show it off and to take me to dinner with her fiancé’s American Express card, to which she’d been added. Things were going to work out for Stella. Hers wasn’t going to be any tragic situation. I’d gotten my hair highlighted and was wearing new ballet flats. Stella had the same shoes—everybody that summer had those shoes—but hers were bright yellow.

  Suddenly out of nowhere came Mrs. Heppendale, as the bus was visible in the distance. Well, she came from inside, but she just appeared, big zippered bag slung over one shoulder (she traveled light), purse in hand. “How interesting that, as I exit, I encounter the budding writer,” she said to me. “I’m going to England and not coming back. I’ve got a sister there who loves me, and I love the theater. It hasn’t been easy, seeing summer productions in barns full of mosquitoes and minor TV actresses at the Ogunquit Playhouse in revivals of The Sound of Music. There’s not much of a story in my running away, because once you say I drink, no one’s going to be interested or sympathetic. I thought you were a nice girl, though seriously lacking in self-confidence. I never understood why you hung on Bea’s every wor
d. You and everybody else thought she was so great. I thought she was scared of her own shadow and that she tried to cover that by being outgoing. Did she and Arty ever really seem to be in love? I never thought so. But I’m quite a bit older than you girls, so I’m not preoccupied with love. All I care about anymore is mysteries and crossword puzzles. And by the way, I know more about orchids than any of them. I kept telling them to stop repotting. Orchids are best grown in the smallest possible pot, you know. All they care is that they’re fashionable and that they’ll sell well. That’s why we stocked those ceramic kissing frog couples and hoses made to look like cobra skin.” She gave a little snort.

  How had she gotten to the transportation center? Had she driven and left her car in the parking lot, or had someone dropped her off? She said, “There’s a species of orchid in Australia—only in Australia—a subterranean species that blooms underground. It has no chlorophyll, but it flowers beneath the soil. It’s a perfect metaphor for something, isn’t it? Use it sometime, and think of me.”

  “Mrs. Heppendale. You’re really leaving? Right now?”

  “If the bus ever arrives,” she said.

  The bus was swinging around the curve to pull into its bay. An announcement of its arrival came over the PA system.

  “I’m sorry we never really got to know each other,” I said. “You know, Bea and I liked working at the greenhouse. I think you would have liked Bea if, you know, you’d known her. Better, I mean.”

  “I don’t like people who flirt. I know people enjoy flirting and being flirted with. It’s just not my thing.”

  “Bea flirted?” I said.

  “With Alex! She was quite intent on getting something going with Alex. I was the one who had to point it out to my own daughter. What do you girls notice? Pain concentrates the mind, I suppose. When I have migraines I have to remember to breathe and to focus through them. You squint whether you want to or not. Nobody could be more surprised than me that sometimes I can see right to the heart of things. That’s no doubt what made me think to tell you about that orchid.”