by Ann Beattie
The first time I met Dara Falcon was at the party, though she did not show up until the two bottles of champagne had been drunk out of plastic cups and we had already moved on to coffee. Only the tiniest sliver of cake remained. If anyone had told me that night that Dara and I would become friends, I wouldn’t have believed it. She was everything I couldn’t stand: self-involved; always watching other people’s reactions to check how she was doing; excessive; gregarious out of a sense of greed—a need to control.
Bernie, the girl from the carnival, wearing the same white cowboy boots, opened Tom’s door and looked questioningly at the small, pretty girl who stood before her, wearing a wool poncho with a fringe that dangled to her knees and a red beret. She was holding the handle of a cake carrier, but she confused Bernie by extending it and saying, “Hello. I’m tonight’s mystery guest, and I’ve brought you a bird.”
“You made it!” Tom Van Sant said. “Hey, Dowell, is this a familiar face?”
Dowell looked perplexed. He obviously didn’t recognize her and wasn’t quick enough to cover his confusion.
“Sweetie!” she exclaimed to Tom. “This is very cruel of you. I do not want to think that I look the way I looked in high school. Otherwise, what is all this hair color for and why have I thrown away my Doll Pink lipstick, if he’s going to still recognize me?”
The bird/cake carrier was in Bernie’s hands. It swayed slightly, like a big lantern. She stood beside Dara, her brow knitted. It was obvious Bernie had no idea who this woman was.
“And you are Bernadette,” Dara said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Who is she?” I heard Osgood Smith’s wife whisper.
“Hell if I know,” I heard Osgood whisper back.
“Oh God, you-all, I am the only person on the planet who went to Webster High for less time than Tom! I was Nora in A Doll’s House in my brief four months of school. I was Esther Goodall’s understudy, and I finished the play when she broke her leg, and you, darling Dowell, gave me a ride home after the performance because it was snowing so hard and I lived two minutes from your house. You and your wife gave me a ride, and you told me I was a great actress, thereby cursing me for life!”
“I remember, vaguely,” Dowell said. He was a man of few words always, but he now seemed—as had many of the rest of us—to have lost completely the ability to speak. This woman was caught in some tempest. Her energy was willed energy, not genuine. It contained an element of panic.
“Well, I guess since I didn’t go to that high school—,” Bernie began.
“It’s not a bird, it’s a birthday cake,” Dara stage-whispered to her.
“I didn’t think it was a bird,” Bernie said.
“Hey, I remember that play,” Lois Hightman said. “But where have you been living? You mean you’ve been around here all this time, and we just haven’t seen you?”
“Los Angeles,” Dara said. “Los Angeles, and too many places to count, but I moved back just about when Tom did, and we ran into each other at the bank.”
“That ride I gave you was the night of that bad snowstorm, wasn’t it?” Dowell said, thinking aloud. He spoke to Dara’s back. She had pulled off her poncho and hung it on the back of the door, over someone else’s coat. Underneath the poncho she had on tightly fitting jeans and, though it was autumn, a sleeveless blouse. Big amber beads hung around her neck. No one took his eyes off of her.
“Won’t you sit down?” Bernie said, gesturing toward the table. There was one empty chair.
“Oh God, forgive me, but for only these few seconds I’m onstage in front of you again. I’m Nora, and you’re all watching me.”
I looked at Bob, who was trying to keep a neutral expression on his face. Like me, he thought that this was just too bizarre. I was convinced that she was about to cry.
“And now I am fine. I’m all grown-up. We share the stage together,” she said, running her hands through her thick, highlighted hair, shaking it behind her shoulders, spreading her arms. “Happy birthday, nice man who drove me home,” she said, pulling out a chair and angling it so she faced the door she had come in through, at long last becoming silent.
“Thank you,” Dowell said.
I looked at the blue vase on the center of the table filled with daisies. For a brief moment, I felt like saying, Bravo, and handing the bunch of flowers to her and clapping until she disappeared.
But she was there for the long haul. As the young Frank Sinatra sang with Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra on the stereo Bob had so admired when he came into the kitchen, while Marie silently bit her nails, and while Frank’s dog, Jinx, nosed after Larry Mazaletti’s kitten, she had the attention of every person in the room.
That January, Bob started taking night classes in Boston to become a C.P.A. He thought it would help with the business, keeping expenses down by learning to do the books and taking care of the taxes himself, as well as its being a good way to earn extra money with private clients during tax season. He stayed in Boston with his brother, grandmother, and niece three nights a week. Because his brother never stopped studying after he got out of his law classes, his grandmother was particularly delighted to have another adult to talk to. At first Bob came home late Wednesday night, but after he had a bad scare skidding on black ice, he started sleeping over an extra night and returning early Thursday morning. Because of the time he took away from the nursery, he often worked both Saturdays and Sundays, quitting early only occasionally if I was clearly on the verge of blowing up at him. The business had begun to do better—especially the new greenhouse, which was filled with flowering plants—and I didn’t see why another person couldn’t be brought in part-time while Bob was in Boston, so Bob and I could have something resembling a life, at least on the weekends.
Bob had become infatuated with his brother Drake’s daughter, Louise, whom he hadn’t known as well as he knew the other children for the simple reason that Drake was so rarely around. Also, the child was shy, and it was only after he’d appeared regularly for more than a month that she began to talk to him. He brought back a snapshot of himself with his brother and Louise in front of the shark tank at the aquarium. They were all baring their teeth, and sticking out their noses. For a while this sat on the TV, framed, and then it migrated to the bookshelf. Louise and Drake occupied many of his thoughts when he was away from them: he went to used-book stores to find children’s books he remembered fondly from his youth, which Drake and his grandmother hadn’t been able to locate around Boston; he stocked up on the pencils Drake liked from the local stationery store. At times he talked about the two of them almost as if they were a couple, instead of father and daughter. The way he presented their relationship, they got along as perfectly as Fred and Ginger danced. I had to suggest to him, occasionally, that while he was procuring things for the two of them, he might also think about taking his grandmother a present of some sort. Of course, I wished for presents myself, but Bob had become convinced, early on, that I was like him: a practical person who didn’t want a lot of silly things. And probably that had once been true, but only because I repressed my desire for beautiful things. I had never had them, and it had been communicated to me, while I was being raised and, later, by hippies I met at college who aspired to be unencumbered, free of worrisome, pointless possessions, that doing without things carried with it a certain cachet.
As he studied, Bob began to have trouble with his eyes, so I made an appointment for him with the eye doctor, where he was given a prescription for glasses. When the glasses were ready, the secretary called to say they could be picked up. They might need to be adjusted, the secretary told me, but I could come in and take them home and see how well they fit.
On Tuesday, when I was supposed to get them, it rained, and I didn’t go out. I had begun typing manuscripts for people at home, and I had gotten behind in my work. But when it was still rainy the next day, I put on my raincoat and set out, convinced—as I always was—of the importance of sparing Bob errands that weren’t essenti
al. My mother-in-law had had a bad case of bronchitis, and Janey and I had taken turns doing things for her for the last two weeks. That day, I stopped at the post office to get her stamps, and I stopped at a convenience store to get her milk and coffee. If my life was as much of a grind as Bob’s, that seemed only fair, but I did wonder whether there wasn’t some way he could arrange things a little better. We hadn’t seen a movie together for months. Except for sprawling in front of the TV, we hardly did anything. We didn’t even go to the family’s Sunday dinners anymore: while his mother felt under the weather, at first Janey had stepped in to cook the Sunday dinners at her house, though that had ended after only the second week. I offered to cook myself, but Janey talked me out of it. “Listen: it’s just too much trouble. Let’s suspend it for the winter,” she said. “We don’t have to do this just because it’s always been done. You don’t see the family helping us, do you?” The truth was, if anything touched off my hostility toward Bob these days, I could easily be persuaded not to bother doing the things I usually did. I was surprised, though, that I missed the dinners so much, and surprised, too, that Bob didn’t seem to mind that they no longer took place. “Too much togetherness.” He sighed. “I tell you, Drake and Louise are a breath of fresh air just because they haven’t always been around. I can read everybody else’s mind, by now. You may think I love all my routines, but they’re pretty deadening. I hope what I’m doing is worth it.” When he talked to me and was forthcoming, of course he had my immediate sympathy. It was one of the things that had first drawn me to Bob: the clarity and simplicity with which he expressed his thoughts. But I was sorry for myself: the rain; the errands; the funny feeling it gave me to miss the family more than they missed me. All those thoughts had been knocking around in my head when I went into the doctor’s office to pick up the glasses. I was damp and preoccupied and I felt out of sorts. I was not in the mood to see Dara Falcon, yet there she was, the only other person in the waiting room. She looked particularly small and downcast, her hair mashed down from the rain. She was dabbing a tissue at her eyes. At first I thought she was weeping. “Sweetie, hello,” she said, in a tiny voice. Compared to the way she’d been at the party for Dowell, she was downright deflated.
“Maybe your friend can take you home,” the secretary said tenuously, looking from Dara to me.
“Oh God, it’s not her problem,” Dara said.
“What’s the matter?” I said, becoming concerned.
“Somebody skidded into my car. I’m all right,” she said.
“That would have shaken anyone up,” the secretary said. “It’s not the sort of weather any of us should be out in.”
Dara’s eyes were dilated from drops the doctor had put in, the secretary told me, nodding in agreement with herself, as if she were reading my mind and wanted to assure me that Dara wasn’t crying. Interestingly enough, she was also having what I would soon learn was a not untypical response to Dara, as if Dara were both there and not there—someone who so clearly needed protecting that your first impulse was to do or say anything that could get it for her. She was speaking gently to me, on Dara’s behalf.
“You don’t have your car—is that it?” I said. I had begun speaking the way the secretary had spoken to me, as if coaxing a child.
She dabbed her eyes. “This is so embarrassing,” she said.
“It isn’t embarrassing,” the receptionist said. “How did you know somebody was going to careen into your car? I can tell you, I wouldn’t have the money on me most times for a long cab ride. Nobody would.”
Dara looked at me searchingly. She had no makeup on, and she was quite pale. Her extraordinary hair seemed to be all one dull, soaked color. She had turned in such a brilliant performance at the party; this was like seeing Bette Davis scrubbing the floor.
“Oh, listen, really,” I said. “I just came in to pick up some glasses for Bob. My errands are done now. I’d be happy to take you home.”
“Really?” she said. The “really” was ever so slightly italicized, but compared to the emphatic way she usually spoke, it was the difference between a train roaring away and the slightly flapping tail of a kite.
The secretary held out an eyeglasses case to me. “Tell Bob Doctor McRae will make adjustments if these are too tight on the bridge of his nose,” she said, repeating what she had told me on the phone.
I opened the case and took out the glasses. They were Buddy Holly glasses—big, dark, clunky frames; almost as bad as the rubber glasses with a nose and bushy eyebrows attached that kids wear as a joke.
Though the secretary tried to look neutral—or, for all I know, she thought the frames were perfectly nice—Dara and I gasped and burst into laughter.
That moment was the beginning of what brought us together: our realization that men’s best thoughts could sometimes be absolutely, completely absurd. Another thing that brought us together was her house. The part of a clapboard house she lived in, I should say: a medium-size house in downtown Portsmouth in bad repair, with crayon-blue shutters. It was so ugly that almost nothing short of a complete renovation inside would have made it less atrocious. The shag carpeting was stained, and a white plastic sunburst clock hung over the sofa, which had a missing center cushion. The ceiling was textured with swirls of plaster and sparkle dust, and an empty aquarium on a metal stand was pushed to one side of the room. Empty cardboard boxes were piled inside it. Dara had draped a paisley scarf around a lampshade, and there was a pretty Chinese runner down the center of a 1950s coffee table with peg legs. “Don’t even look at this.” She sighed. “I spend as little time here as possible.” She led me through the kitchen, which had cracked Formica counters along one side and a picnic table with one seat shoved against the far wall. On the other side of the kitchen, past the tiny bathroom, was another room about the size of the living room. That had been painted pale pink, and lace curtains had been hung at the windows. Under a grow light, a white orchid was blooming. The rest of the room was taken up with a bed covered with a down comforter, piled with large, square pillows in white eyelet cases and rectangular pillows covered in pale pink and green satin stripes. There were six pillows in all: three tall ones behind, two striped ones, and a deep pink rolled pillow in front. A tiny light that glowed amber was clipped to one bedpost, which she turned on as she flopped on the bed. “Isn’t it dreamy? If I stay in this room, I can pretend I live in a grand house that is absolutely clean and beautiful and sunny,” she said, patting the bed to indicate I should sit down. Since there was nowhere else to sit, I did. I leaned back against a bedpost, and she tossed me one of the large, square pillows. She had some beautiful things, and I found myself wanting to touch everything. I was covetous of her room. It was like a high school slumber party all over again: What would we be, when we grew up? And how had so many unexpected things happened to us so far? These things, which, as if it were night, and as if we were sixteen years old and meant the world to each other, we could suddenly talk about so easily.
It seemed that Tom Van Sant had been calling her, in spite of the fact that he was practically engaged to Big Bernie (as Dara called her). The problem with Big Bernie—and the advantage Dara was sure she had over her—was that she was not gentle. Tom Van Sant expressed this differently, but because he was honest with Dara about what he wanted that he wasn’t getting from Big Bernie, she knew what he really wanted. These things included: for warm milk and honey to be brought to him in a china cup, not a mug, before bed; for his feet to be massaged with oil; for his hair to be slowly combed away from his face with a fine-tooth comb; for Dara to share hot bubble baths with him. I was a little surprised—just a little, because I didn’t think I knew him well at all—that he was interested in such sybaritic experiences. I asked whether Big Bernie knew about Tom’s involvement with her. “Oh, sweetie, women are never dumb. She’s just playing it cool, trying to keep him,” she said. She also said she felt a little bad about what was going on, though she was bemused that it was slowly changing Big Bernie into Gir
l Scout of the Year, as she put it. Bernie had begun to prepare dinners for Dowell; cooking for Tom and herself, then packaging portions that Tom would take to Dowell, since Tom had decided Dowell wasn’t eating well. And had I noticed that Bernie had stopped wearing her cowboy boots and started wearing high heels, like (as Dara called herself, pointing to her face) moi? I told her that I didn’t see that much of them. Since Bob had started his courses in Boston, I hadn’t had much of a social life. I asked her how she saw so much of Bernie. She said she only saw her occasionally, but that Bernie was obviously going through changes. When the three of them got together for a movie, or when they picked Dara up on their way to a party, it was because Tom looked for occasions when there wouldn’t have to be much one-on-one talk. She said he was in that phase where he was trying to pretend to himself that having two girlfriends was workable; he wavered in his affections toward the two of them, and he couldn’t bring himself to come clean with Bernie. Dara could sympathize with that form of cowardice, she said; also, since she wasn’t sure she wanted to take on Tom full-time, the arrangement was really to her benefit. “I’ll tell you something about me,” she said. “I’m fickle. I like the chase, but domestic tranquillity isn’t something that really inspires me. I haven’t liked it when I’ve lived in men’s places. I haven’t even liked sharing an apartment with another woman. I’m in this dump because I moved out of the place I was sharing with a white-trash waitress I thought would be so different from me she’d never get on my nerves, but I overestimated my capacity to see someone’s ugly underwear drying all over the place. The kitchen radiator. From a hanger dangling from the lamp, for God’s sake. I just can’t do it. It’s hard enough to live with your own clutter, let alone someone else’s. Because it can be so sad, you know? The rabbit’s-foot key ring that they think is their lucky charm when they go looking for love. The wedding picture of their parents, with their mother in one of those dresses that’s all padded shoulders and pleats, and the father a cartoon: he’s always so undistinguished; his hair is slicked down, and he’s got on those sad lace-up shoes with toes as round as a half-moon…oh, listen to Miss Superiority. I can’t even stand myself, out of this one room. When I’m in here I have on a simple white nightgown—which I wear with silk long johns in the winter—and do you know what I do? I hook up my hair dryer, and I blow the dust out of the French-lace curtains every week. I try to keep this place calm and clean and simple. Just one room. That’s all I even try to triumph over.”
