by Ann Beattie
When I met her, she was phobic about Cambridge, afraid when she had nightmares that she was back there, slogging through the winter snow, high on grass or on prescription drugs, the songs of that period triggering real depression, the tastes of certain foods she’d eaten inextricable from the metallic taste in her mouth during the time she’d been hospitalized. “Promise I won’t ever be back there,” she would say to me—meaning all of it: on the snowy sidewalks; in the hospital; at Radcliffe; at the various grim apartments—and because it seemed very unlikely, indeed, I would promise, as if I had the power to ensure it. “One time when I disobeyed some stupid McLean rule, they cut off a bunch of my hair and stuffed it in my mouth,” she told me. “They were the animals, not the patients.” As she said it, she grabbed hold of both sides of her long, dark blond hair and pulled it lightly away from her face, allowing it to drift down, as if her hair were gently falling snow.
I dropped out of college in 1975, my sophomore year, and got married to a man whose family owned a nursery in Dell, New Hampshire. We moved there in 1976, after Bob graduated from the University of New Hampshire. I was twenty and Bob was twenty-one. He had a big family, most of whom lived in the area: two brothers and a sister, and also—such things were important in those days—two nephews, two nieces, and numerous cats, gerbils, and dogs. I was an only child, and I liked the idea of large family gatherings. I felt very adult taking on obligations: celebrating people’s birthdays and anniversaries; going with them to the doctor if they needed moral support; offering my car, which my aunt had given me as a wedding present, if theirs was broken—which, in that climate, and given the age of the cars, happened often. We lived in the same neighborhood as Bob’s brother, Frank, who had a very nice wife a few years older than he was named Janey, who was a nurse. Of all the family, we saw them the most, even using their land for a combined garden. Janey and I canned vegetables together at the end of summer and went to flea markets in the spring. The other brother, Drake, was in law school on a scholarship, and occasionally visited from Boston. He had custody of his daughter, the offspring of a brief marriage in undergraduate school. His grandmother lived with him in the Cambridge apartment and took care of the little girl, who called her Mama, though she was eighty. Then there was Bob’s sister, Sandra. She was the mother of Bob’s niece, Marie, a pale, gawky child who was allergic to everything and who bit her nails to the quick and who spoke out loud when she read—which was most of the time, because she didn’t enjoy taking part in anything the adults did. Sandra had tried everything, and she couldn’t get her daughter to stop reading aloud. Marie would make temporary progress when she saw a specialist in reading disorders after school, but inevitably she would revert to her old ways. Instead of music playing in the background—or along with music in the background—we usually did whatever we did while Marie read audibly from one book or another. She often ignored her mother and wouldn’t make eye contact with the rest of us, except for those times when, unpredictably, she had talking jags. I shied away from asking her questions about school, or about what she was reading, because it obviously made her uncomfortable: she’d answer as briefly as possible and bite her fingernails until I went away. For some reason, though, she was relatively animated and available to Bob, and we all encouraged him to get her to talk, or to urge her to go along on a canoe ride because she could help him paddle, or to try petting some of the animals and seeing what happened if she did not then put her hands anywhere near her face (allergies made her prone to sneezing fits). I still remember Bob crouched on the floor with her kneeling beside him, softly stroking Jinx, the oldest and most docile of the family dogs, and afterward his picking her up and taking her to the kitchen sink to wash her hands, and his washing his hands along with her, saying, “See—I’ll wash too, because that’s a good idea for everyone after they’ve petted a dog, and then neither of us will put our hands anywhere near our faces, will we?” I also remember his playing hide-and-seek with her, pretending to have no idea she’d disappeared behind the living room curtains, or into the pantry, or whatever obvious place she’d thought to hide, asking aloud, when he got in close proximity, “Where could she be? Could Marie have disappeared like Tinker Bell, or could she have become a leaf and blown out the front door?” He would open the door, and cold air would rush in. “No Marie out there,” he would say, sounding very puzzled. “Well then—could she be in the oven, baking like a cookie?” Bob and I had discussed when we would have children, and I was the one who wanted to delay it, saying—rightly enough—that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and that I should decide before I became a mother. But as much as I commended him for being such a devoted soul when it came to Marie, something about the way he threw himself into the part also made me reluctant to imagine that he might be playing those same games with a child of ours. It was mean-spirited of me, and I kept my thoughts to myself, but there was something unsettling about the way his jaw would go flaccid when he spoke in such an exaggerated way. Something about the fact that at those times he looked like a snared fish. That he was trying so hard. As I watched him deliberately overlooking the black-and-white oxfords that poked out from beneath his mother’s gold curtains, though, I became sure that starting our own family was a bad idea. “Methinks I spy Horatio!” I said in a loud stage whisper to Janey one time, pointing to Marie’s protruding shoes. “Shh!” she said, slapping my outstretched hand. Marie’s little face—her pale little face—peeked from behind the curtains: she wanted to see who, besides Bob, was playing the game. She frowned at me and withdrew. As Bob looked at me, exasperated, it seemed clear to me that something had been decided.
The first summer we lived in Dell, sales at the nursery were down because of a sluggish economy. Bob and Frank started taking bushes down to the driveway of the local library and selling them roadside. I manned the stand a couple of times while they took the opportunity of business’s being so slow to supervise the building of an addition to the greenhouse. That was the way I met Tom Van Sant. He was driving a black VW bug, which chugged into the library driveway as he peered out the window to examine the flowering azaleas, rhododendrons, and spirea. “Don’t have lemonade, do you?” he said. His big smile let me know he was joking. “Oh hell—no lemonade, and a wedding ring, too,” he said, as I pointed out what I thought was the prettiest azalea. After standing around for a few minutes, he took out his wallet and looked inside. “As I suspected: plenty of cash, plenty of rubbers,” he said. He was pleased with himself for being provocative. “Well, I might as well take two bushes,” he said, handing me two twenties. Before he left, he also gave me his business card. The card did not state any occupation; there was only his name, address, and telephone number. I threw it away that night.
A month or so later, I met him again. Walking through the carnival with Janey and Bob and Bob’s mother, Barbara, I saw him coming toward me, his arm around the waist of a tall redhead who wore white cowboy boots with her jeans and purple V neck.
“Hey!” he said.
“Hi,” I said, raising my hand but intending to keep walking.
“Hey, what do you know?” he said. “Bob Warner, am I right?”
“Yes,” Bob said, confused.
“Tom Van Sant,” he said. “I was two classes ahead of you. I went to school with your brother Frank.”
“Oh, Van Sant, sure,” Bob said, putting out his hand. “Nice to see you.”
“What a coincidence,” Tom said. “I bought some things from your wife a while back. Stopped because I thought it was a lemonade stand, but decided to purchase some shrubbery.”
“Nice to see you again.” Bob smiled, putting his hand on my shoulder and starting to walk forward.
“Hey—I just moved back a few months ago, from Washington. We don’t know many people. If you ever feel like getting together, your wife has my card.” He looked at me. “You know, this is embarrassing, but I don’t remember your name,” he said.
“Jean Warner,” I said. He didn’t reme
mber my name because I hadn’t told it to him. I’d resented his flirting, and I’d deliberately not said my name.
Bob looked at me.
“I don’t think I still have the card,” I said. I had no idea whether Bob might really be interested in calling him.
“I’ve got another one,” he said, pulling out his wallet. As he looked inside, he said: “Everything in here but money. Look at all this stuff…okay: here it is.” He handed the card to Bob. Bob put it in his pocket, as I had.
“Give me a call,” Tom Van Sant said.
As we walked away, Bob’s mother said, “People from your generation are always moving. Young people are moving all over the place. I’m a lucky woman that my children haven’t gotten too far from home.”
“Are you going to call him?” I asked Bob.
“Nah,” he said.
“You could be hospitable,” Barbara said. “How would you like it if you just moved somewhere and hardly knew anybody?”
“If I had a dyed redhead like that hanging on my arm?” Bob said.
“Bobby! She seemed like a nice girl. You don’t want to hold it against someone that she’s colored her hair.”
“Is there a consensus?” Bob said. “I call?”
“Not on my account,” I said, shrugging. “I threw away his card.”
“I say forget it,” Janey said. “He’s just some guy.”
“But Janey, didn’t he say he went to high school with Frank?”
“He worked at the gas station,” Janey said. “I remember him. He was always making wisecracks.”
“You two are just terrible! You should be careful about making such snap judgments.”
“His mother committed suicide,” Janey said. “His father sent him to Webster High because Tom had an uncle living here, and his father knew he was cracking up.”
“He was cracking up? Who was cracking up?” Barbara said.
“The father. After his wife killed herself.”
“How do you know this?” Barbara said. Bob and I were both listening intently.
“A girlfriend of mine went out with Tom.”
“And?” Bob said.
“And nothing,” Janey said. “That’s how I know.”
“Well, Janey, I would think that would make you all the more sympathetic—”
Janey started to say something, but stopped. We continued walking.
“Suicide,” Bob’s mother said in a whisper, shaking her head. Then she shook her head harder, as if to physically shake up her thoughts. “Look over there; it’s a Ferris wheel. Let’s take a ride.”
We bought tickets, and Barbara rode with me. Bob and Janey sat in the car behind us. Several times I turned to look at them—I suppose I thought that by looking, I might also magically overhear what they were saying. It seemed certain Janey would be talking to Bob about Tom Van Sant.
“Face forward, darling!” Barbara said to me. She was gripping the bar with both hands, white-knuckled.
“Next we’re going on the spider,” I said.
“I’m not going on anything named that!”
“The hornet,” I said.
“You’re crazy if you think I’d go on anything called that!” she said, gasping as our car dipped toward the ground, then began to rise.
“The octopus,” I said, wiggling my fingers toward her face.
“Be quiet!” she said. “You’re making me a nervous wreck just talking about those rides!”
I was. I knew I was, and it wasn’t without a slight bit of malice, because she wanted us to get together with Tom Van Sant, and I didn’t like the idea of befriending anyone just because there was reason to feel sorry for him.
As it turned out, he called us, a couple of months later. He was giving a birthday party for Dowell Churnin, the retired basketball coach. Bob’s brother Frank had been Dowell’s son’s best friend all through school. Nelson Churnin, Dowell’s only child, had been killed in Vietnam. Within a year or so of that news, Mrs. Churnin had left town, and within the next few years, Dowell took early retirement. It was generally agreed that Dowell was a tragic figure: solitary; lonely; and with a drinking problem, some said. For years after his son’s death, apparently, Frank had cut his lawn every week, and he’d try to talk to him—to get Dowell to come to dinner with the family, or to go to Boston to see the Red Sox. Once Dowell came to dinner, but he said he didn’t feel well and left before the food was served. He and Frank and another of Frank’s friends did go to Boston, but Dowell wouldn’t take them up on their offer a second time. Bob’s mother maintained that Dowell had a red face because of high blood pressure, not from drinking. It was her opinion that Dowell Churnin could do no wrong. She had thought of Dowell’s son, Nelson, almost as her own child, he had spent so much time at the house. If anyone had a problem, we might think about Mrs. Churnin’s having had her demons, Barbara said cryptically.
I heard Bob asking Tom—though the night he called, I didn’t at first know who the caller was—whether he thought there was a real possibility Dowell Churnin would attend a party in his honor. Our family had all but given up on seeing him, unless we ran into him and persuaded him to have a quick cup of coffee at Rick’s restaurant. Bob’s mother always sent a Christmas card, but she never received one in return.
“Well yeah, sure, I’m glad to know he’s excited about this,” Bob said hesitantly, tapping his finger on the calendar, which was hung above the phone. Only one or two boxes had anything written in them: an upcoming dentist’s appointment; a notation toward the end of the month about the concert in which Marie would perform.
“It was that guy,” Bob said, when he hung up.
“Who?” I said. But I knew.
“Van Sant,” he said. “What is it about him that makes me uncomfortable?”
“That he flirts with women,” I said.
“With you?”
“Sort of.” I was stretched out in the comfortable chair, watching an old movie on TV.
“I guess the guy’s just lonesome,” Bob said, surprising me with his change of heart.
“You really think that’s it?”
Bob shrugged. “It’s nice of him to do something for Dowell,” he said.
I turned through a few other stations, then returned to Fred dancing with Ginger.
“Those movies were the stuff Dowell grew up with,” Bob said. “Imagine it.”
“Imagine what?”
“Imagine all that silliness, all those elegant fantasy figures, and then your son gets drafted and dies in a pointless war.” Bob, himself, would never have been drafted because he had flat feet and dangerously high blood pressure. His brother Frank had gotten out because a prestigious psychiatrist wrote a letter saying he was mentally ill. Before each physical, Frank had lost enormous amounts of weight by not eating and staying awake for days, taking amphetamines washed down with bottle after bottle of beer, and rehearsing long, crazy monologues about the nobility of death. Frank was quite proud of himself for what he considered a foolproof routine. I had no idea how Drake had gotten out. I don’t remember its ever being discussed.
Bob sat on the footstool and untied one of my sneakers. He dropped it on the floor. He rubbed my foot. My feet were always cold. It felt good to have my foot warmed by Bob’s big hand.
“You’ll like me again eventually,” he said.
“Who said I don’t now?”
Fred and Ginger touched the rims of their glasses together. Fred began to sing to her.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “He wants us at a party for Dowell, no reason why we shouldn’t go,” he said, wiggling my little toe.
“Ginger’s feet must have killed her,” I said. “Can you imagine women wearing high heels every day, let alone dancing in them?”
He ran his hand up my ankle, squeezing lightly. “Does it bother you that it’s so provincial here? Do you wish that when we got married, we’d gone away?”
“You’d break your mother’s heart,” I said.
“She’s ada
ptable.”
“Well, we weren’t thinking of her, anyway,” I said. “You said you wanted to work in the family business. As far as I know, you’re all here because you’ve chosen to be.”
“We could have been in big-time Washington, D.C., like Van Sant.”
“He’s your new role model? This guy you hardly remember, that you’re shamed into seeing because he’s manipulative?”
“Manipulative?” he said, removing his hand. “Giving a birthday party for Dowell is manipulative?”
For some reason, the fact that the party was to celebrate Dowell’s birthday—which I hadn’t at first understood—made me feel small for having rushed to criticize Tom. But what would the difference be, if it was a party held for a real occasion, or just because he’d been inspired to throw a party? Why was I so down on Tom Van Sant? I clicked through channel after channel. Something about Tom Van Sant did seem threatening, but it wasn’t because I took him for a cosmopolitan or that, even if I had, he had any power to make me question the decisions I’d made about my life. Almost all my older acquaintances from college who’d started out working in cities had migrated. Some had given up commuting entirely, deciding in favor of odd jobs and free time, instead of careers. The problem wasn’t so much that Tom offended me, I decided, but that he provoked Bob in some way, which resulted in Bob’s taking the long view, or his expressing attitudes I doubted he really had. After a brief phone call from Tom, Bob would become preoccupied and increasingly eager to see if he could provoke a fight with me. It perplexed me, but eventually I decided the safest thing to do would be to diffuse Tom Van Sant’s power. I decided that in the future, regardless of what my intuition told me, I would indicate no skepticism about Tom Van Sant. It was not unfamiliar to me, the idea that sometimes it was easiest to be withholding, if that got you what you wanted.
