My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

by Ann Beattie

  “Poor kid,” he said.

  “So where are we having lunch?” I said, not wanting to get depressed because of the boy’s problems.

  He smiled. “Right here,” he said. He was pointing to Arizona.

  “There?”

  “Why not?” he said. “Let’s give it a try.”

  He turned into the large parking lot, which was apparently going to be even larger: a big patch of land at the side had been cleared, bulldozed trees lay like pick-up-sticks, and a tractor sat in the middle of the dirt.

  I flipped down the visor and examined my hair: it was in need of washing, but the new eyeliner I’d bought made me look alert. Maybe my eyes would distract attention from my hair.

  The inside had been painted bright yellow, and piñatas dangled from the ceiling. Where the large paintings of the quarries used to hang were tin mirrors, three in a row. Mexican fabric was draped over the tops of the windows; the places were set with plastic mats depicting the desert at twilight. There were neon-pink napkins and cactus salt and pepper shakers. The same man who seated us turned over our water glasses and poured from a big pitcher of ice water he left on the table with a pink napkin tied around the handle. “Bern will be right with you,” he said, taking two menus off the table next to us and putting them on our table. Six men were in the corner; they were drinking beer with their lunch and talking animatedly. At another table, two elderly women were sharing what looked like a big taco salad. One had her napkin tucked in the neckline of her blouse.

  “Oh, gosh,” Bernie said, stopping short of our table once she realized it was Bob and me. “Well, hi!”

  Bernie had on a purple cotton sweater with a deep V neck and tight jeans pushed into red, knee-high cowboy boots. Her red hair was tied back with a bandanna. She had on a small apron made of the same fabric that draped the windows. She was holding two menus, though we already had menus. She reached for the water pitcher, then realized our glasses were full.

  “You didn’t know I was a waitress, did you?” she said, bending from the waist and looking slightly mischievous as she whispered in Bob’s ear loud enough for me to hear.

  “No,” Bob said. “We used to come here when it was the other place.”

  “It’s nice to see you,” I said.

  “I don’t think you’re going to see much of me, unless you come to lunch here,” Bernie said. “You know that Tom and I broke up?”

  “No,” we said, in unison. “No, I didn’t know anything about that,” I said.

  “It was because of her,” Bernie said. “Theda Bara. She goes around giving me nicknames; I can think of a few that are good for her.”

  Bob and I both knew whom she meant.

  “That’s a shame,” Bob said.

  “I shouldn’t ruin you-all’s lunch,” she said. “Some other time I’ll cry on your shoulder.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, opening my menu.

  “Well, to be honest, he and I still see each other every now and then, but I’m getting my own business together, and I’ve gone back to night school to get my high school diploma. Just call me when you’re ready,” Bernie said, turning to the two ladies, who were signalling for more coffee.

  “It’s too bad things aren’t working out for them,” Bob said, shrugging. “I mean, I suppose it is.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be involved with him,” I said.

  He had put on the Buddy Holly glasses to read the menu. He looked up. “Why wouldn’t you?” he said.

  “Because he’s a womanizer, that’s why.”

  “What makes you say that? The only person you ever saw him with was Bernie, wasn’t it?”

  “He was hustling Janey’s friend back in high school. She told us—don’t you remember? He was trying to get her to run away with him. Janey told me about it later. Her friend started running around with him, and she slipped off the honor roll.”

  Bob looked slightly perturbed. “Oh, come on. You’re talking about years ago. You were so perfectly adept at everything you did back in high school?” He looked at the menu. He was holding it so high that I couldn’t see his face.

  “Chicken burritos and an iced tea,” Bob said, when Bernie came back to the table and opened her pad.

  “I’ll have chile rellenos,” I said. “Coffee, I guess.”

  “Right away,” Bernie said, and turned. She almost collided with the man who seated us, who was now heading toward the corner table with a couple following him.

  “I don’t want to talk about Tom Van Sant,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s not talk about him.”

  We sat in silence until Bernie brought Bob’s iced tea, in an enormous glass with a slice of lime on the rim and a slice of lemon around the curve. “New pot of coffee’s heating. I’ll be right out with it once it’s done,” she said to me. She dipped sideways to hand menus to the newly seated couple.

  Bob sipped the iced tea, frowned, reached for the sugar, and opened a packet. He dumped it in and stirred. He gave a self-satisfied smile when he sipped again. I reached across the table and took his hand and squeezed it. Then I studied the other couple, studying their menus. Her hair was clean. Her husband wore glasses with small metal frames. They were well dressed and had perfect posture. They were not locals.

  “They put a little cinnamon in the coffee,” Bernie said, putting down a big blue mug. She lowered her voice. “If you don’t like cinnamon, tell me. There’s an employees’ pot, because we can’t stand the stuff.”

  But it tasted good, and so did the lunch. The rellenos were thick with melted cheese, and the rice was spicy.

  “I know more about Van Sant than you do,” Bob said. “When he came to Webster, his mother had just killed herself. I know Janey told you that, but what she didn’t tell you was that Van Sant had taken an overdose himself. He made the mistake of confiding that to one of the cheerleaders he tried to sleep with, and she told her girlfriends, and they were worse to him about being a sissy than guys are when they gossip to everybody about what girl is easy. They made his life hell, until Dowell got to the girl and made her shut up.”

  I was completely taken aback. There was usually nothing Bob liked more than dropping a difficult subject.

  “Who told you that?” I said.

  “Dowell. He told me the other day when I ran into him at Rick’s. People get older and they talk about the past—what bothered them. I don’t know.”

  I ate another bite of food. I took a sip of coffee and put the cup down.

  “Well, that’s definitely the sort of story that would explain why you’d feel sympathetic toward him,” I said.

  “Yep,” he said.

  Bernie reappeared, wanting to know how the food was. We told her it was very good. She nodded in a slightly distracted way. Then she went to the other couple’s table and took their order. The woman was having a shrimp taco. The man ordered a taco, burrito, and cheese enchilada platter. They both ordered margaritas without salt.

  “Maybe we should have a margarita,” Bob said, nodding his head backward to indicate he’d overheard them.

  “Not a bad idea,” I said.

  “Then maybe we should go home and fool around,” he said, raising his eyebrows and wiggling them comically.

  “Also a good idea,” I said.

  “Afterwards, maybe we should try out one of the kites.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Anything else today?” Bernie said, coming up behind me.

  “Two margaritas on the rocks, no salt,” Bob said.

  “Margaritas for dessert. That shows real style,” Bernie said, approvingly. Her smile was genuine, and I suddenly thought that maybe I was going to miss her. I felt sorry for her, too, because of her busted romance and because waitressing wasn’t an easy job, and certainly going to night school must be tiring.

  I forgot to ask her what her business was before we left. I also didn’t think to question Bob’s chronology once we were outside. He drove to a field to fly one of the kites before we w
ent home and went to bed. Putting in the balsa-wood stretchers and carefully lacing the string through, Bob crouched in the field like a little boy, completely involved in what he was doing, gnawing on his bottom lip in the fear that whatever was required might be just a bit beyond him.

  It wasn’t. The wind took the big red cardinal and sent it soaring, and a school bus passed by, small faces dotting the windows. It was one of the images that would come back to me many times: the sunny, windy day when we’d run together, our eye on the big bird, whose own eye looked straight across the field, in the direction of the new townhouses that had been built west of town. Its black eye could have penetrated any window. Had we let it off its string, it could have drifted north and spied us in our own bedroom, not long afterward. At the moment it became airborne, it also became our bird, even though it was Bob’s mother’s birthday present. For fifteen minutes, until it caught a down draft and bumped to the ground and got a smudged nose, it was up there.

  Barbara’s birthday was overcast, with rain predicted by afternoon. It wasn’t particularly warm, but it would be fine down at the beach if we put on winter jackets. By the time Bob and I arrived at her house, she’d already looked out the kitchen window and seen the lilacs. “Frank could have scared me to death, moving around the yard,” Barbara kept saying, half amused, half serious about what must have been Frank’s long period of nocturnal digging.

  Sandra had let Marie stay home from school to celebrate her grandmother’s birthday. She was stirring the mixture that would be spread gently on the crepes before they were rolled. There was a small grater and a whole nutmeg that it was Frank’s job to grate over the finished crepes. He was being teased because he had played the washboards in a band in grade school. Family occasions always presented the opportunity for them to tease each other about the people they had once been, and Barbara could always be counted on to attempt reconciliations, though there were no real problems; the fact was, the family very much approved of its own oddities and excesses. Old times were talked about so often because, it seemed, everyone had been so much more colorful in the past.

  “Now Bob, don’t pick on Sandra about her guiches,” Barbara said, sitting at the dining room table with a birthday napkin in her lap.

  “What’s a quiche?” Marie wanted to know, forgetting about her stirring.

  “Not ‘quiche,’ ” Bob said. “ ‘Guiche.’ It was two little sort of spit curls that your mother had curved out on her cheeks that she kept there with enough hairspray to kill a flock of birds.”

  “Mama, did you?” Marie said.

  “It was the style,” Sandra said.

  “Like if you grew your sideburns and they curled out?” Marie said to Bob.

  “Just like,” Bob said. “But that would be nothing, now. Men with ponytails—”

  “Let us not pretend to be perfect, and above it all!” Barbara said.

  “You don’t even own a can of hairspray,” Frank said, pointing at his mother. “You don’t even wear lipstick anymore. Remember her Morticia lips? First thing in the morning, painting them on…”

  “You are lucky that my primping was accomplished in ten seconds. That allowed me plenty of time to slave over the stove cooking your breakfasts!” Barbara said.

  “I told you to stay in bed and put out a box of cereal,” Grandma said. “I learned all my lessons about not doing everything for everyone too late, and then when I passed on my wisdom, your mother wouldn’t listen.”

  “Oh, if only she’d stayed in bed,” Frank said. “No criticism about mismatched socks. No questions about whether we had all our books and all our homework…”

  “Don’t forget Dad, bellowing like an elephant about how everything in the house was missing, from the toothpaste to his bathrobe to his address book.”

  “It all became community property. That used to drive him crazy,” Barbara said. “Every one of you had a bizarre fascination with anything that was your father’s. You were like squirrels, hiding nuts for the winter. You’d dart in and get what you thought you needed, and then you’d squirrel it away. You took his own personal tube of toothpaste more times than I can count, and you knew very well that the toothpaste he so loved came from England and could not be mistaken for the Pepsodent the rest of us used.”

  “You took his robe and rolled it up and put it inside a pillowcase, and it was missing a week!” Frank said to Sandra.

  “Be nice to me, or I won’t cook for you,” Sandra said, lifting another crepe onto the warming plate.

  “It was shameful,” Barbara said. “And the poor man: he hated mornings.”

  “I like morning because it’s my favorite time of day,” Marie said.

  “Well spoken, Marie,” Frank said. Janey shot him a dirty look.

  Janey was pregnant, and the week before, she had started to bleed. The doctor had ordered bed rest. She was cheating by attending the breakfast, though she sat in her pajamas and robe at the end of the table in a chair padded with bed pillows, with an afghan over her, and her feet elevated on a vinyl cushion.

  “Take this plate to your aunt before she starts feeling sorry for herself,” Sandra said. “We don’t any of us want Janey to do anything against the doctor’s advice, do we, honey?”

  “I don’t know,” Marie said.

  “Of course you know,” Sandra said, flipping another crepe. “What a silly thing to say.”

  “Adults can always say they don’t know,” Marie said.

  “I think she has a point!” Barbara said.

  “But the thing is, adults can find themselves in very difficult situations,” Frank said to Marie. “Adults need excuses more than people your age, I think.”

  “Nonsense,” Janey said, frowning at Frank again.

  “Oh, Janey, don’t be mad at him on my birthday,” Barbara said.

  “Thank you,” Janey said, taking the plate from Marie. “And don’t listen to any of Frank’s nonsense, Marie.”

  “Come and sit on my lap for a minute,” Bob said, turning and patting his leg.

  “No,” Marie said. “You had Louise on your lap, and I don’t want to get her cooties.”

  “Poor lap,” Bob said, making a sad face.

  “I wanted to read my book, and you said I couldn’t bring it!” Marie suddenly screamed to her mother.

  “Then go get a magazine and read that,” Sandra said.

  “No, I won’t,” Marie said.

  Sandra tried the silent treatment. We had a rather forced conversation about the weather while Marie pouted and Sandra turned her attention to the crepes. Grandma said that the rain would hold off until late in the day. Frank said his knee was bothering him, so it wouldn’t. Janey said the weather didn’t affect her one way or the other, except that she wanted the sun to come out for Barbara’s birthday. “Dear me,” Barbara said. “Or perhaps sunny dispositions, if not the sun itself.”

  Louise had not slept well the night before. She had awakened many times at our house, and Grandma had gotten up every time she hollered, even though Bob or I said, as we passed her door, that we were already on our way. When we arrived at Barbara’s house, Louise had suddenly begun to cry and then had conked out, in Barbara’s bed. We had tiptoed up to check on her, and she had been emitting tiny snores, her arms flung open. “Baby,” Marie had said, looking in on her, stating the obvious. Now Marie had climbed into a kitchen chair and was flipping through a magazine, reading out loud: “ ‘Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was our American princess.’ ” She had no idea how to pronounce the first name, or Jackie’s maiden name, or the name Onassis; only “Kennedy” came out perfectly distinct. As she droned on, it became obvious she was reading some person’s reminiscences about going horseback riding with Jackie, back when Jackie and Lee were little girls, and their father, Black Jack Bouvier, was absent from their lives. No one paid any attention to Marie, hoping that reading the magazine would calm her, but it was difficult to hear so many words mispronounced. “Camelot” became “came a lot.” Like e
veryone else, I tried to tune it out.

  Bob helped in the kitchen, while Frank went outside to soak the lilacs. At one point he turned the hose on the window, and the slap it made nearly startled Janey from her chair. We glowered at him, but he couldn’t see our faces through the water-streaked windows. “He could get himself a new career in Boston,” Grandma said to Barbara, who apologized for the blast of water that had been trained on the windows as if she, herself, had risen and done it.

  We ate breakfast, at long last: strong French roast, with real cream, because it was a birthday. The men had Cokes, and Janey sipped the herbal tea I made for her. Sandra announced that more crepes were being kept warm, and we should get up whenever we were ready and serve ourselves. The food was warm and sweet; if it hadn’t been for Marie reading aloud in the kitchen, refusing to join us, it would have been very pleasant, indeed—as family gatherings usually were, once everyone had teased everybody else to blow off steam.

  “ ‘Her stepfather was like a real father to her,’ ” Marie read. “ ‘Hugh Ought pin close, Awk pin close was no stranger to…’ ”

  “They’re drowned,” Frank said, coming back in, closing the door behind him.

  “Get yourself some food from the warming tray,” Sandra said, shrugging her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Gotcha,” he said, picking up the plate and walking into the kitchen.

  Marie did not break stride. She read on.

  “You could get yourself a lucrative new career in Boston, Frank,” Grandma said. “People put it in the want ads that they need somebody to clean their windows. Of course, I suppose it would help if you’d been climbing mountains all your life, having to go up those skyscrapers.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a new career,” Frank said.

  “I see…motherhood in my crystal ball,” Janey said, peering into her empty water glass.

  “And for me, an exciting career as a certified public accountant, who also works at the local greenhouse,” Bob said.

  “Not going to be able to call it the local greenhouse for long,” Frank said, chewing.

  “Why are you not?” Barbara said.