The State We're In

by Ann Beattie

  She understood that Chip was now to be called Duff, but he was eighty-two, and changing your name that late in life was ridiculous, so she either called him “my fine neighbor” or did not address him directly, relying on the Maine “ey-ah,” said rather loudly to let him know she’d entered his house.

  It was big of her, she thought. Thirty-some years before, Chip’s brother had led her on, then married a young Portuguese woman and moved away to Providence. Such things had happened to many of her women friends, the most notable being her friend Rochelle Pennybaker, whose ex-husband wooed her back over several years, remarrying her with a justice of the peace presiding and their twin sons present. (One came from Arizona and was thrilled; the other—a psychology researcher at Harvard—begged his mother to reconsider and also told his father to join AA. He didn’t have much credibility, however, because he himself had been twice divorced.) Shortly after the honeymoon (heard this one before?) he did, indeed, join AA, where he took up with a transgender person—a lawyer, who managed to get the second marriage annulled. You don’t think things like this happen in woodsy Maine, off the beaten path? It sounds more like L.A.? In Maine, there may be a path, but it’s never clear, except perhaps to that great GPS programmer in the sky, and there are also significant numbers of beatings between husbands and wives, daughters and mothers, cousins and nephews—many of whom end up at the hospital ER, where I work. One came in last week with a Swiss Army knife sticking through his calf, bleeding profusely, in terrible pain, and all he could say over and over was that the person who stabbed him—who was standing right there, clutching his hand—was his cousin (female!).

  Mrs. Terhune is a lady. I’ve rented her converted garage for the last six years or so, working on the novel I began in Iowa City, which I could summarize, but every day I live in fear that someone might have had the idea to publish a book on the same subject. To support myself, I work weekends as a sort of glorified janitor at the local hospital, and in the summertime at the local hardware store, which has a beautiful array of plants for sale. In winter I bartend three nights a week at one of the inns, which also assures me free cheese cubes. Mrs. Terhune is generous about giving me a container of soup or, when she makes it, because I really love it, tapioca. Inside my little house is a flat-screen, a Bose sound system (the outlet is in Kittery), and under grow lights, flourishing plants that would have otherwise died when they were unsold at the end of the season.

  I began this story talking about Chip, now Duff. He’s a rather overwhelming presence because he has hearing problems and talks loudly, but also because of his height, six four, and a lifetime of overcompensating for a strawberry stain over his forehead that dips down across his eyebrow. People notice him coming—that is what he often says when he doesn’t know what else to say about some odd encounter he’s had on one of his trips about town. He drives only in daylight, and only if he feels rested and clearheaded. I’ve learned that with old people, you have to listen to all their rationalizations: they go over and over their I’m-safe-because-I-say-I-am routines.

  For the last year or so, since my book is about two-thirds finished, I’ve sometimes read aloud to Mrs. Terhune. Let me just say that Shackleton figures in the plot, and that like many people I’ve been fascinated by the doomed expedition and writers’ various perspectives on it. It turned out that Mrs. Terhune had never heard of Shackleton or his expedition, and she became morbidly obsessed (as who isn’t). She’s probably heard fifty or sixty pages of the manuscript by now, and—this is so true of nonwriters—she always says that she can’t understand why my whole book isn’t about Shackleton. She can’t get enough of frozen toes and sacrificed dogs.

  One night in March when it was still unusually cold she brought Duff along with her for reading night. I have electric baseboard heat (expensive!). Duff has a furnace that doesn’t work well; also, he’s a New Englander, and cheap, so he won’t turn up the thermostat. There the two of them were at my door, she with a jar of soup she’d made from tomatoes she’d canned, he just standing there, pretending to be chewing tobacco when he wasn’t, his big boots caked with mud and snow. I did ask him to leave them outside. He hung on to Mrs. Terhune and to me, though I proved more useful in bending down and unlacing the boots and pulling them off, with his hand that wasn’t on Mrs. Terhune’s shoulder clutching my door frame. I don’t even remember how I segued, that evening, from Shackleton to Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia—probably because of the quality of his prose, which I much admire—only to learn, at the end of my little reading, during which we all sipped herbal tea with honey, that Duff’s father had been to Patagonia. He’d also been to the Galápagos, and to the Suez Canal, where he’d gotten dengue fever. “He was no businessman, he was OSS, then CIA,” Duff announced. “You might wonder, well, what’s our business in the Galápagos? And the answer’s mine to give. The tortoises. At one time, believe it or not, our country considered rigging up tortoises to record conversation going on around them. Well, you might ask: how many bad guys were going to step outside to talk important business, like the Galápagos was just one big backyard? The answer was—at least if you got them to the Galápagos—quite a number! There was some ‘Go to the Galápagos’ campaign after World War Two. That’s where they wanted everybody to go, though most people preferred San Michael of Allende. You think about recent times and those boys, Nixon I think it was, trying to give Fidel Castro an exploding cigar. That’s no joke.”

  I nodded. It was Kennedy, but it seemed like something Nixon would do.

  “That was their best thought!” Duff said, loudly. “So a bunch of turtles . . . I mean, tortoises. My father taught me the distinction: tortoises. What I’m saying is, there was a big conference in the Galápagos, and they were sleeping in the sun or crawling their ten inches a day, or standing up, looking left and right, and plopping down again, wired for sound!”

  “My fine neighbor, you are full of surprises,” Mrs. Terhune said.

  “That writer fellow, he happened to be an acquaintance of my father. You might ask, where would my father encounter the dashing Bruce Chatwin? Well, it was on faraway soil, where his Sherpa knew the Sherpa who was taking some Brits on a hike, and they thought in their Sherpa way that maybe they could lead the two expeditions together. One of the hikers was an English writer, name of Chatwin. When he and my father met, he was astonished at my father’s age. Said he didn’t look a day over sixty. Had some reluctance about letting the Sherpas get off easy, but they did agree they’d join up. But on the second day one of the men fell ill and had to be airlifted out with a ruptured appendix, so First Sherpa went ahead. Anyway, that first night, my father talked old age and dengue fever and London bars with Bruce Chatwin, who fell ill himself in the 1980s, but by then my father didn’t read the paper, and except for reading In Patagonia, I don’t think he ever read another of his books. I can’t be sure of that. Anyway, my father—as you surely remember, Muriel—was always fired up about something or somebody, and for a while it was nothing but Chatwin, Chatwin, Chatwin. When he died, I wrote a note to Mrs. Chatwin, telling her how much that one meeting meant to my father and saying that if she remembered ever hearing about a Charles Manley Arthur Bromwell, that was my late father, who died at the age of one hundred and three.”

  Mrs. Terhune turned to me, the fingers of her free hand rubbing the warm mug. She said, “One time Mr. Bromwell was all fired up about digging a new well, and he had a dowser come, a famous one, who charged by the day. He looked and he looked. He couldn’t find anything. So another dowser was called in, and bingo! He knew where to drill, but on drilling day, who should show up but Dowser Number One, who stood there disagreeing with where the dig should begin. He’d had a dream that he woke up from with tingling fingertips, he said, which had happened to him ten times previously, and every single time he’d been right: he’d envisioned the property in his dreams, and his fingertips had started to tingle, so that when he sat up in bed, he was pointing toward some part of the scene that remained as cle
ar to him as if he were watching a movie. Then he’d sort of sleepwalk toward it—a gulley or a shaded area under oak trees—and his fingertips would turn hot and stop having that funny feeling, but when the digging began, it was always the right place.” She turned toward Duff Moulton. “So, Chip—I mean, Duff: your late father, I believe he came up with the solution of not having either of the dowsers work for him, because he thought the man with the itchy fingers was clearly crazy, yet he’d cast enough doubt that he didn’t want the other guy doing the work, either. When the well ran dry, someone else in the family called in the person who drilled a new one, so a well did get drilled successfully while Mr. Bromwell was still with us.”

  “If you don’t think it’s too forward of me, Mr. Moulton, how is it that your father was named Bromwell, and you Moulton?” I asked.

  “Not forward, at all! Don’t they complain that young people never ask questions? I was the first and last baby born to my parents, and my mother could never have another because they had to remove her inner workings when I was born. She was so sad, she cried for days, and finally my father said, “Well, why not name him for your side of the family, since we don’t want the Moultons to die out.” He cleared his throat and pretended to switch the tobacco plug from one cheek to the other. “That was a little joke. The Moultons aren’t about to die out. Not before the Smiths do, anyway. All of that might take another meteor. But anyway, he was an enlightened man, or at least an unusual one. He’d get a gold medal now from the women’s liberation front.”

  I looked at Mrs. Terhune. I suspected I shouldn’t correct him and say he shouldn’t say “front.” I don’t know why I bothered to send her a silent look, because she wasn’t the kind of woman to return another woman’s glance, and if a man looked at her for agreement, she’d only squint.

  So that was more or less my evening with my landlady and the neighbor. Enough information was revealed to provide me with material for several books. Anyone prudent would have asked if they’d mind being recorded, but it wasn’t until the next day that this possibility hit me, and then—in spite of being a bit shy—I went first to Mr. Moulton and asked, calling what he’d provide “an essential oral history,” and also flattering him—I hoped I wasn’t frightening him—about using his stories in my writing, someday. I figured that if I went to him first, Mrs. Terhune might also agree, but I missed my guess. “You go ahead and put your recorder in my fine neighbor’s house, if he agrees, but I don’t hold with wiring turtles or setting up a machine to talk into every time a thought pops into my head. No, I wouldn’t want to sit around and do that. Most things are best forgotten. With that Shackleton man, you’ve got enough information to write for a lifetime! You go ahead and record Chip, I mean Duff, but Duff’s done enough. You’ll have to excuse me for saying no.”

  Mrs. Terhune—in fact, everyone in New England—was unwilling to rethink anything, so that was that. I thanked her and made plans to proceed with Duff (as he asked me to call him). I drove to Radio Shack to see what I could buy to make the recordings. I wanted something a little old-fashioned so it wouldn’t put him off. In the back, they found a machine that took cassettes, of which they had a plentiful supply. The salesman, who looked about sixteen, was amazed at what the older salesman had managed to put his hands on. He examined all of it as if it were dinosaur dung. I drove home so excited; I could hardly believe what I’d stumbled into. This was the expedition that would go right. The dogs (that would be me) would prance forward effortlessly, devoted to their task. Soon we’d glide through to beautiful spring weather, day after day, until we arrived at our destination. Of course, I suspected that my unstated goal was to stop writing my book. That something about Duff and the new project was subversive, as well as extraneous. I almost had a first draft, and as any writer knows, once you have that the going gets easier. Then it’s just editing: adjusting, adding the better word here and there, finding the perfect phrase, the enlightening metaphor, taking away the drift of words that have become too plentiful on the snowy white page. The new book might be better—much better—but it was a distraction from my story, the one I’d been moving forward with for years, in self-imposed near isolation, with only a radio to bring in Mozart to brighten the dark days.

  Fate fooled me. Duff moved in with Mrs. Terhune, and together they agreed that I should finish the book I was writing and maybe, maybe we’d talk later, if summer wasn’t too busy. He did not romantically move in with Mrs. Terhune. He did the sensible, New England thing of doubling up. He’d turn off the heat in his house and drain the pipes, and together they’d adequately heat her house, and split the bill. It was as if they’d just been waiting to be better friends and I’d facilitated it by being the hostess of an evening on which they got to know each other better. Duff moved into her back bedroom, the one with the toile de Jouy wallpaper that had been brought back by one of her mother’s friends from her trip of a lifetime (sailing to Le Havre, France), the overall pattern repeating its story of Dutch people in dirndls and bonnets tied under their chins, walking along in their wooden shoes, tending their animals, swinging milk pails as they stroll past windmills.

  The whole world’s full of stories. I never doubted that. Every writer will tell you the same thing: it’s next to impossible to find the inevitable story, because so many needles appear in so many haystacks. Most writers spend their entire careers—those who are lucky enough to have them—considering endless piles of hay, praying, just praying that a needle will prick their finger.

  I suppose it pricked mine when I opened my door and saw Mrs. Terhune standing there with Duff Moulton. The union radiated inevitability, though I’m sure it was more apparent to me than to them. I was the spinner of tales whose closed-off world had been pricked like a big bubble. As with any accident—because accidents are by definition unexpected—you react instantly to that unmistakable, tiny stab of pain, so you rub your finger on your pant leg or you suck it for a second. It’s a tiny, split-second annoyance unless it’s bleeding all over everything, and you’re embarrassed when people see that you’ve been hurt, so you insist that you haven’t been.

  ELVIS IS AHEAD OF US

  The house at the end of our dead-end street had been for sale almost a year when two girls and a boy broke into it through the back bathroom window. They were kids from the neighborhood: Genevieve, Blake, and Ted. Genevieve and Blake were unlikely friends, Blake tall and lively, with ear piercings and blue fingernails, Genevieve very pulled together, more French than her mother born in Avignon (which her daughter had never seen and Mrs. DuPenn did not remember). Genevieve was always called Genevieve, though Blake was sometimes called Fuzzy. Ted was really Edward.

  Barbara Gillicut, the Re/Max agent who had the listing of what the neighborhood kids called “the abandoned house,” posted no photographs online except of the exterior. There was never an open house, and no one from the neighborhood asked for an appointment to view it, and for a while after the owner left, there was no word of its contents. Who knows why kids would get obsessed with something as ordinary as an empty house. But they did. They began to gather there in the evening and to peek in the windows, though they didn’t see much of what was inside until they finally broke in and went into the room at the back, the one without windows.

  Jon Enders, the owner, had seemed pleasant enough when he first bought the house—but that means next to nothing nowadays, I suppose. He hadn’t exactly thrown a neighborhood barbecue, but when I dropped by with a paper plate of brownies he invited me in and we sat in the front room, which was beautifully arranged, though very spare: two chairs (two!) facing each other, each upholstered in a slightly different shade of blue velvet, and an enormous coffee table with a few stones on it, along with orchids whose budding stems were staked with chopsticks, and fashion magazines from foreign countries. Not all were fashion magazines. I went home with a borrowed Paris Review, which I found most enjoyable. Years ago, I’d worked at Le Pli salon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, coloring hair. Several models
from the same agency often came in to get their hair foiled on the same day. One had lived in Paris in her teens and brought me madeleines. Another, an American girl from the South, brought me the best peanuts I’d ever tasted, which changed my mind about that nut. I don’t think the other ever brought me anything, but like her friends, she was nice and tipped big.

  If Jon had visitors, they were few, though in the summer months I saw stylish cars go to the end of the street, and once I was curious enough to step out to see if the silver Miata was parked in Jon’s driveway again (it was), but beyond that it wasn’t a socializing sort of neighborhood—which was why I thought the custom in our town of teasing newcomers into having a barbecue, then never reciprocating, was pretty mean. “Trial by fire!” my husband said. “Get it? It’s a pun: the ‘fire’ of the barbecue.” He was always pleased when he made a pun.

  The first time the kids broke into the house, Genevieve told her mother about it later, because she told her mother everything. I was visiting Marie when Genevieve made her confession—perhaps thinking I’d be protection of some kind, and that her mother wouldn’t scold her in front of a visitor. She reported that there was a mysterious door locked with a padlock. The dining room didn’t even have a table, just a stand with a vase on it, and upstairs in one of the bedrooms there was a rowing machine and a set of free weights and a stationary bicycle and a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. There was a bed and a bedside table in the other bedroom, nothing else. The bed was covered in what Genevieve described as some “elaborate quilted sort of Indian patterned thing, with little mirrors and all, and knots that looked like raspberries. Mostly silver and gray.” I listened with interest, because Jon had not offered me a tour of the house the time I visited. Genevieve said that there was also a chair in the upstairs hallway that she didn’t see at first because it was a ghost chair—one of those stylish chairs you can see right through. But the strangest thing—and here she became quite excited, in that young-girl way she has that’s going to charm boys forever . . . she said the shower curtain was the worst-looking thing she’d ever seen, printed all over with neon signs in really bright paint, made to look like they were glowing. VIVA LAS VEGAS! appeared in green, orange, red—every possible color. When she left the room, Marie DuPenn rolled her eyes and said, “At least we can be thankful there wasn’t some woman chained to the wall who had to give the owner blow jobs or be electrocuted.”