by Ann Beattie
“Listen to yourself. You think you’re pointless?”
“You can be so maddening, Moira. You listen, yourself. You’re being a bitch. Let’s not do this, okay? Let’s sit outside.”
“Sure, sure, the world’s for our entertainment,” Moira said, walking past him.
The wind chimes tinkled. Would the film people take them down? Or would they like ambient sound? In the distance, the owner raised a hand again as he hurried into the locked closet and came out with a vacuum, which he carried to the man with the motorcycle in the far room. There were five or six—six—men already in the parking lot. “Don’t move the cars, leave ’em where they are,” one shouted. “No way!” another shouted back. “We move the cars and see what the light’s like first.” “That’s unnecessary, I’m telling ya,” the first man said. Well—good. They wouldn’t have to move their car.
In front of the fence around the pool sat two chairs side by side. Moira sat in one, unnoticed by the work crew. Hughes came out of the motel room, pulling the door shut. She could only hope he’d remembered a key, since she hadn’t. Not like her, but she’d been rattled.
She saw the key flash in his hand, then his hand plunge into his pants pocket. Or she saw no such thing—she saw only that something was being held, something disappeared. “Have the key?” she said, trying to sound casual.
“Yup,” he said. He sat down beside her. He said, “I’m surprised he didn’t put a table between the chairs and maybe drag out two of those plastic footstools.”
She looked at him. He looked older than she expected in the shadows. “Maybe free popcorn’s still to come,” she said, again trying to sound neutral. Casual and neutral: were they the same thing? Was she going to be wondering about little distinctions when she was old and gray—was she going to be one of those stereotypes, the amoral woman who does whatever she wants, but who never gets what she wants, because she doesn’t even know what that would be?
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the Norwegian couple, the woman in a cropped top and tight silver pants, the man in jeans and pointed-toe boots and a Western shirt in a crazy shade of yellow decorated with dark brown arrows. The Norwegians? Was this their version of going native? “Over there, step out of that light into that other one,” the older man called and they moved immediately, in unison, where they were told to go. The woman’s hair looked longer than Moira remembered. Maybe it was extensions. They were clearly actors. Part of the film. Startled at the same realization, Hughes punched her lightly in the arm. “The ghouls are stars!” he said. “What do you know!”
Kunal came out of the Norwegians’ room, carrying an ice bucket holding an upended bottle. He didn’t look in their direction. “Move more to the left, that’s right,” one of the men rolling lights said to the couple. “You know what you’re doing, right?” They nodded. Hughes continued to stare, slowly shaking his head. Kunal and the owner stood outside the office in a huddle. “James, back it up a little,” one of the men called to another. “That’s right, follow Rick. I think I fucked up placing that last camera over there.”
The Norwegians stood shoulder to shoulder. Tinkle, tinkle went the wind chimes. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, Moira thought. How I wonder what you are. She’d once played that, slowly, on her xylophone. Her brother had taught her how to read music. Her father had taught her to play tennis, then beat her every time. Her mother had taught her that kindness was a virtue and tried to see that her two children lived that way, even if her husband started fights in restaurants and once deliberately knocked over a glass of water on a tablecloth.
She was on her feet before she realized she was in motion. It was now thought that actions often started first, and explanations or rationalizations followed: I jumped up because I was mad! No, the person jumped up and then had to find a reason why.
Moira said to Kunal, “I know you’re busy, but I wanted to apologize for him. We’re not married, you know, and he’s never going to marry me, but that’s neither here nor there. You’ve seen to it that we had a lovely time here, and he appreciates that as much as I do. He’s just one of those guys. You read him right. I apologize.” She leaned forward slightly, the owner looking at her, perplexed. She kissed Kunal lightly on his forehead, a chaste, sister-brother kiss, which startled him and made him blush, though she could see from the sparkle in his eye that it was okay.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. He turned to the motel owner, who held the ice bucket out to him. With his thumb in the slushy, cold water, Kunal took a step backward. He said to the owner, “What does it mean, ‘neither here nor there’?”
THE LITTLE HUTCHINSONS
On their way to their summer house, the Little Hutchinsons stopped in to say hello to us every summer. If you’re curious about why they were called the Little Hutchinsons, it’s because Al Hutchinson was six foot three—a basketball player, later a coach, from North Carolina—who married a very short woman from Bangor, Maine, and together they produced three sons, the tallest about five foot seven. The other boys, including our friend Gilly (the youngest), were about my height, which is five foot two.
I’m not obsessed with height, but it’s the obvious thing to ask about someone called “little.” The Senior Hutchinsons died when their private plane went down. Neither of the older boys wanted their house, uninsulated and in need of repair, though beautifully situated above cliffs that staggered like the nude descending a staircase down to a small, pebbly beach.
Etta Rae, who had not particularly enjoyed visiting her husband, Gilly’s, parents when they were alive because of the amount of work it required helping them plant and prune flowers and bushes, making the meals, washing up . . . Etta Rae totally changed her impression of the house and of life in Maine after the tragedy that befell the Senior Hutchinsons. Every summer since, they’ve vacationed during June and July in the house, renting it out in August.
My husband and I live in the town you have to drive through to get to the big houses on the cliff above the beach. Our house is near the stone bungalow that used to be the library. I was quite surprised when Etta Rae asked if Marcy, their only child, might have her wedding party in our backyard. The house they inherited is a big, beautiful Victorian. There’s even a cupola at the edge of the property, though it’s lacking most of its roof. Etta Rae told me that they’d been advised that because of the direction the wind usually blew when there was a storm, a tent pitched in their backyard would be inadvisable in the event of bad weather on Marcy and Jasper’s wedding day. Marcy was marrying her third cousin, who had cut our lawn every summer when he was going to Colby. They’d met in college, having seen each other only once during their childhoods. He’d been a problem child who’d been sent away to boarding school in Baltimore when he was younger, but he’d returned to Maine for college.
Marcy was a petite girl who wore heels or platform shoes or boots with stacked heels, no matter the fashion. Her husband-to-be was even shorter. For a man, he was quite short. When Marcy and her fiancé were out walking, people sometimes collided with them because they didn’t see them coming—especially when one or the other was disembarking from a parked car. I liked Marcy, but I was less sure about Jasper, though years had passed since he’d last been called before a judge. He’d gone to drug rehab and gotten clean. Still, there was something about him I didn’t trust. I expected him to erupt someday, or to cause trouble eventually—what kind, I couldn’t have anticipated. This fear figures in the story because, as crazy as I thought the request was to use our backyard to erect a tent when they lived on beautiful property overlooking a beach, I might simply have said yes if not for the fact that I once saw Jasper deliberately run the lawn mower over a turtle. He wasn’t a child when he did this; he was a junior at Colby.
Etta Rae did not make her request in my husband’s presence. We had our annual lunch of lobster rolls and herbal iced tea at the hotel across the road from the newish park full of rugosa roses and, in recent years, an assortment of tall grasses. As we sipped
our tea, she told me that anxiety about the wedding was raising her blood pressure and that her husband, Gilly, was quite upset about it. He had even, behind her back, offered to give a considerable sum of money to the young couple if they would elope. Apparently at least the groom had considered this a good idea, but their daughter very much wanted a celebration. Could they elope and would her parents still give them a party, a bit after the fact, in June or July? They would. But because two companies who erected tents had expressed doubt about the safety and security of structures pitched above the cliffs (the gazebo would hold about six people and would have been useless, even if in perfect condition), Gilly had the idea—at least according to Etta Rae—that they ask if we’d be willing, as an alternative, to have the party at our house.
I said all the expected things: How would the bridal couple feel about that? Wouldn’t they want to have the celebration inside their parents’ house if the weather was bad? It seemed that the answer was complicated by the problem of Etta Rae’s blood pressure. There were so many antiques, and she didn’t know what she would do with them. She knew that I knew how disrespectful young people were now. They’d put out a cigarette, which they’d had the nerve to light up on the step right outside the kitchen door, in a Limoges dish. One of her daughter’s friends had picked up a bisque figurine of a beckoning mermaid and used it as a back scratcher! Etta Rae always made me laugh. It makes me sound superficial, but I don’t like to hear other people’s problems, though I’ll tolerate most anything if they take me aback and make me laugh. Etta Rae was the perfect storm in that way.
I tried to change the subject, but she was having none of it. She’d already lost ten pounds, and the blood pressure had not come down. She was determined to lose more weight. She’d just bought a book called Wheat Belly and was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. She was not going to cleanse, however. (As she was elaborating on her opposition to cleansing, the waitress approached with the pitcher of iced tea, but quickly turned away before refilling our glasses.) By the time more iced tea was poured, Etta Rae had sweetened the deal (and I’m not talking sugar packet dumped in tea): she and Gilly would like to express their appreciation by giving me a day at the spa and buying Jamie an expensive putter they knew he coveted. People would tend our yard before and after the ceremony. All we had to do was say yes, save Etta Rae’s life, and enjoy the party along with fifty or so other people. I said that I’d speak to Jamie. She clasped my hand. “This is not blush on my cheeks,” she said, hovering her fingers.
As you might expect of someone who’d make this request of a friend, she’d had many ideas I thought were odd over the years. One had been to buy an empty building in Asheville, North Carolina, and to convert it to an old-age home for five couples (we could be the first to choose our floor). She sent me photographs of the building and floor plans in a mailing tube. Another time, she asked us to invest in a business that would involve protecting the reef off Key West by hiring people in shark costumes to scare people snorkeling or scuba diving, because their flippers inadvertently caused damage to the reef. She always had some crazy idea. While I found many of them amusing (not so the dreadful building she’d found in North Carolina, with fire damage and the roof caved in), I was perturbed by her most recent request.
“Let’s say no,” I said to my husband. “Why should someone have a wedding reception in our backyard, where years ago they deliberately killed a poor defenseless turtle?”
“He’s turned into a nice young man,” my husband said. “I once threw a dead raccoon down a well because I hated the people who ran the summer camp.”
“She acts like some sitcom character, always spewing complications. I don’t want a smelly Porta Potti in our backyard and people trampling the flowers.”
“Then call her and tell her that.”
“I’d sound like some neurotic, uncharitable woman who needed to lighten up.”
“Well, isn’t that the case?”
“Every time I tell you a problem that involves something Etta Rae wants, you take it as an excuse to let me know I have deficiencies,” I said. “She provokes fights in our marriage.”
“Call her and tell her that.”
“Why don’t you call Gilly, man-to-man, and say we don’t want to volunteer our backyard.”
He lowered the newspaper. “Tell me exactly why we can’t do it,” he said. “Portable toilets?”
“She probably thinks the guests should go inside the house!” I said.
“We do have two and a half bathrooms. Certainly some guests would want to do something that day other than pee.”
“What about my own antiques?”
“You’re a big girl,” he said. “If you don’t want to do this, be honest about it. She’ll understand. She’ll have to. Or they won’t be our friends anymore, if that’s the way it turns out.” He shrugged. On the front page of the New York Times, Obama’s sideways expression was one of intense sorrow.
“That’s part of the problem,” I said. “I’m a big girl. They’re so self-conscious about their height. It seems like we’re lording it over them that we’re big and powerful and can make any decision we want.”
“Well, we can, about our house.”
“She’ll give me that look,” I said. “Like a crab who’s just had one claw ripped off so somebody can eat it, who knows before it’s tossed back in the water that it’s going to have to regenerate.”
“I appreciate the analogy, but ask yourself: do I sound rational?”
I didn’t, but neither was Etta Rae. Her house was far superior to ours. Why should we go along with her rather audacious request? But I did hate to disappoint her, and the truth was she had to go through life wobbling everywhere in her high heels and dealing with her husband’s insecurity because he’d been so picked on during his childhood. For years, before they married, Gilly had seen a psychologist in Chelsea about his feelings of inferiority. One night, fishing around in his martini, standing with the three of us on our front porch, he’d scrutinized the dripping green olive and said, “If they’d invented bowling with midgets back then, I’d have been a human bowling ball.”
Zelda-land. That had been her proposed name for our old people’s apartment building. Zelda-land.
The next day I called and told her no. I apologized for being so uptight. I invoked my inherited collection of Steuben glass birds and mentioned the many expensive art books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. I exaggerated the problem with our toilets barely flushing. I said I had to entertain my great-aunt, and I wasn’t sure when she and her companion would be visiting (true). As she listened silently, I added a few more qualms, then invited them to dinner. She said, “I am so surprised and disappointed, I cannot think what to say.”
They did come to dinner, but it was awkward. She didn’t call again all summer, though somehow her husband sent a signal, and he and Jamie had a couple of games of golf. Then came the end of July. The situation had ruined my summer. We didn’t know when the party was given, and we certainly weren’t invited. We found out about it from the FedEx man, who’d been hired to play music with his band. I will always feel as guilty as I imagine an older, wiser boy would feel for having lawn-mowered a turtle in his youth.
The weather that day was everyone’s worst scenario. It was overcast, then fiercely sunny, then gray clouds accumulated and raced forward like cars escaping rush-hour gridlock. Then began a pounding rain. They’d found a tent company earlier in the week that had come from Boston—cocky guys who said that barring a tsunami, their tent would hold. It didn’t, and the groom was leaning against a pole when the entire thing lifted up like an enormous parachute that carried him out over the beach, where rain pounded down like arrows in the Iliad. He went up, up, then down. His hands must have lost their grip on the cloth. While the few drunks who didn’t know what was happening partied on, he was launched like a sailor wrapped in a broken topsail, then fell from a great height onto the rocky beach, where he lay unconscious with a broken pelvis, broken ar
m, and three snapped ribs.
When I heard this, it made me remember a guide my husband and I had once hired, who’d told us, at the Cliffs of Moher, that the updraft was so fierce that if you threw someone over the edge, they might blow right up again—except in this case the groom didn’t reappear. By the time we found out, the FedEx guy had written a song about it, but as he said to me, “It’s no ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.’ ”
It will be on my conscience forever, of course: the revenge of the universe for the groom’s mercilessness toward a fellow creature. But in what way does the dainty little doll-bride deserve such a thing, to have the dripping fist of fate grab her tiny companion and hurl him to earth in splinters? In the great flip-book of heaven, where our movement is created and the story reveals itself, what’s to be made of some tragedy in miniature: not two people embracing to waltz with perfect steps and swirling tux tails and a voluminous skirt; not an agile fox chasing a rabbit that outwits him at the last second by burrowing into the hole of a tree . . . instead, one tiny figure approaching another, clasping that person’s hand, both turning to face the viewer and to take a modest bow, then suddenly we see only the legs of one figure who levitates, the toes of tiny shoes dangling atop the page. Then nothing. Only the bride. White space.
Our flipping thumb runs out of space and time. We can only raise our first finger in the universal sign: a lesson must be learned.
Having learned it, I pass it on.
THE STROKE
“We don’t like the children.”
“We do love them, though.”
“Doesn’t matter. We want them to go away.”
“I don’t want Amity to go. She came all the way from Santa Cruz. And I’m sure she didn’t really want to come.”
“She criticized your new glass frames. Then she bragged about her vacation. We don’t like to hear about other people’s vacations.”
