by Ann Beattie
That wasn’t the truth; it was what I did in order to have something to do.
The next morning, I made lemonade with fresh lemons and sugar and club soda. I wrote checks to pay bills. Frank called, wanting to know if he could borrow Bob’s drill. I told him that Bob was camping, but to come over and get it. Then I squeezed one more lemon, in case Frank might like a lemonade also. The sugar was kept in what was really a small pâté pan. It was hammered tin, and it had a lid with a tin duck sitting on top. I had bought it years ago in Cambridge, at a shop that sold kitchenware imported from France. I had also bought a beautiful mold for making madeleines, which I’d never used. It might be a nice housewarming gift for Dara. It seemed like something she would like. I pulled it out from the bottom drawer of the Hoosier cabinet. It contained a button and several highway tokens. I dropped them on the counter and polished the pan with my shirttail, thinking, as I did, how odd it was: the time I’d spent living with Bob had made me think of my clothing as towels and polishing cloths. I needed some new clothes. Some pretty things.
Back at the typewriter, the lemonade on a coaster, I typed: Each morning Mr. Aldridge would eat a big breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and sometimes biscuits, as well, followed by a bowl of cornflakes with whatever seasonal fruit was available. He would not eat but that one meal a day, though in the afternoon he would most often have a mint julep, followed by a late-night beer. By late night I mean only 9 o’clock, because we always turned in by 9:30. Since the reader already knew that he had lost a considerable part of their savings the previous day, would there be any interest in knowing what he ate for breakfast? Automatically filtering out many commas, I continued: One day Mr. Aldridge said I was bringing him bad luck and he would appreciate my not accompanying him to the racetrack. I was never as fond of the races as Mr. Aldridge and I readily agreed to stay at the motel and I was both sorry and happy that I did, because in the late morning there was banging and crashing next door which resulted in screaming and in the motel door being thrown open and my door being pulled on. A girl of about eight or nine ran in and locked the door behind her. She said her father had gone mad and indeed it turned out he had. He threw the television onto a car which was not his own which was parked outside the room, and it was the motel owner who called the police. When they came they found out that the man was down to his last dime and his wife had run away in the night, though they later found her in a bar. The poor little girl was taken by the police somewhere, but not before she said to me that it was a sin to gamble and that I should not gamble because she never would, and this was because it was a sin. I certainly could relate to what she was saying, because of Mr. A’s previous bad luck, though it seemed more than a problem with gambling to me, it seemed the sad situation of being part of the human race. Here was this young girl who was frightened of her father and her mother was later to be found offering favors to men in a bar, if I believed what the motel owner later told me while urging me to stay because these people were not his usual clientele. I skipped ahead and saw that the next day the two of them had waded into a stream and gone fishing with a temporary two-day license they’d gotten at the local store. For what it was worth, Mr. Aldridge had had better luck without his wife, though because I’d flipped ahead, I knew their losses would not be recovered.
Frank came in without knocking. He had obviously been stopped in midproject by his drill breaking. If I were Mrs. Aldridge, I would no doubt write that down: Frank had been stopped in midproject from working because his drill had broken. What had Frank eaten for breakfast? Would he later go fishing?
“What did you have for breakfast?” I asked him.
“Me? Breakfast?” He put his hand on his chin and rubbed it, assuming there was some telltale crumb.
“An in-joke with myself,” I said. “You’ll be better at finding the drill than me.”
“I can do all things,” Frank said. “I am Superman.”
“Feeling a little overburdened?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “How’d you know?”
“Lemonade?”
He looked at the liquid in the glass fruit juicer. “Probably a little too concentrated for my taste,” he said.
“If I diluted it?”
“Ah!” he said, pulling up a stool and sitting down. He rubbed his entire face this time. His shirt was buttoned wrong. He looked like someone who needed a bath and a night’s sleep.
“I had a talk with Tom the other day,” I said. “Want to hear about it?”
“My, my,” he said. “And did his charm rub off on you like cooties?”
I got ice cubes and put them in a glass, added club soda and sugar, then poured in the lemon juice. I stirred the mixture with what was handiest: a knife that I wiped dry on my shirt.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Bob didn’t want to hear about it,” I said. “It’s not that much of a big deal. It’s not like I convinced him to pack his bags and take his business somewhere else.”
“So what did he say?”
“I don’t think he’s trying to drive us out of business. He says he’s going to have a large stock of houseplants. That he’s going to do a lot with dried flowers, and with greenhouse stuff.”
“So he’ll have everything we have plus a dried-flower business,” Frank said.
“But the lot isn’t that big. I don’t think he can have anything like the stock you have.”
Frank thought about it. “That’s true,” he said. “That’s the first thing anybody’s said that makes me feel better.” He took a long sip of lemonade. “He must have thought Bob and I really lacked cojones,” Frank said. “What did he think about you being the front man?”
“He didn’t say anything about you,” I said. I thought about mentioning Dara, but thought better of it. I wanted to give Frank the impression that Tom and I had had more or less a business meeting. And we had, I supposed—whether or not Dara had been there. Or did I just hesitate because I wasn’t sure about bringing up her name? “Anyway,” I said, “he didn’t seem the slightest bit hostile. I realize he’s still got a big advantage, being located where he is, and that it’s going to be a very attractive place, but you know we’re going to have a lot of loyal customers among the locals. And Warner’s is a great place: people will still come.”
“It’s kind of touching that you’ve taken all this so seriously,” he said. “Janey wouldn’t mind if we put the business up for sale and moved to Fort Lauderdale. Or Big Pine Key. Wherever it is she wants to go.” Frank shrugged. “I’m restless myself,” Frank said. “I might surprise her by how far I’d go.”
I considered that for a minute. “You’re talking about the business, right?”
“What else would I be talking about? You think that suddenly I’m going to be like my brothers and get some new glasses and pack my lunch box and go back to school?”
“Bob’s only in school to help the business,” I said.
“Still,” Frank said.
“Frank—you’re opposed to somebody taking classes?”
“I think Drake’s out of his fucking mind. I don’t care about Bob taking classes if he wants to.”
“Why is Drake out of his mind?”
“You’re right,” he said. “He’s not. He’s just declaring his individuality. He wants to be a high-priced lawyer and start his life over again. Why not? But think about it,” Frank said. “Drake is a user. Back in the days when he did have something to do with the business, he put in six-hour days. When he brought home that bitch he married, every one of us told him to wait—at least to wait—but he didn’t wait. So now he’s got a kid, and Grandma has to live in Boston to keep things going, and, God knows, he’s opted out of any responsibility in this part of the world. He never calls Barbara.”
“Bob seems to think that Barbara’s become pretty demanding.”
“Oh, is that what he thinks? Is that why I had to rush over there this morning to talk to the septic tank people?” He sipped the lemonade.
; “He suggested that I look at Barbara in a new light, and I’m passing on the advice.”
“Okay, so we think about it, and we decide Barbara’s really a harpy. Then what do we do: abandon her?” Frank said, draining the glass. “And next: Frank responsibly descends to the basement to procure a drill, to continue responsibly installing Sheetrock in the now-being-renovated basement, for whose configuration he takes full responsibility.”
“Bob’s kayaking,” I said.
“Bully for him,” Frank said, putting his hand above his head to be sure to clear the overhang.
“Bob’s acting sort of like Drake himself these days,” I said.
“They were always similar.”
“They were?” I said. I was standing at the top of the stairs.
“You’ve got a dead mouse in a trap down here,” he said.
“You shouldn’t say that to me because I’m not supposed to know he sets traps.”
“Christ. Is my brother so stupid he doesn’t think women know everything?” He came upstairs. “Brrr, brrr,” Frank said, pointing the drill at me. “I will go home now, and drill responsibly.”
“How’s the baby?” I said.
“Kept us up half the night,” he said.
“Can I ask you something that’s none of my business?”
“Shoot,” Frank said.
“You both wanted Joanna, didn’t you?”
“Sure we did. Why do you ask? Janey got a little discouraged, having to be in bed all the time, pissing in a bedpan. Who wouldn’t?”
“She didn’t go out for long walks when she was pregnant, did she?”
“Walking? She was in bed.”
“Some woman told me she thought she saw her walking.”
“That’s bullshit,” he said.
“It was probably somebody else the woman saw.”
“Ask Janey. It’ll put your mind at rest.”
“That would be insulting.”
“She knows you’d forgive her anything,” Frank said. “Even I know that.”
“You mean, you think I’d forgive anyone anything?”
“I didn’t say that. I said Janey.”
“How many people do you think I’d forgive?” I said.
“Is something the matter?” he said. “This is really a strange conversation.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Do you think I’d forgive you anything?”
He looked at me a long time. He went to the refrigerator and rummaged for a beer. He opened the bottle. He leaned back against the wall and continued to look at me, his belly visible through the gap in his badly buttoned shirt, his face streaked with sweat. He took a long sip of beer. I thought, as he assessed me, that I probably would forgive him anything, though I had never thought of it in the abstract.
“I guess you’re saying you already have,” he said.
That was the way I confirmed my suspicion that Dara had not entirely levelled with me about her involvement with Frank.
Early the following morning, the call came. Drake didn’t call himself; he left it to Barbara to tell us the bad news: Grandma had died in her sleep; she had had a stroke. Barbara could not stop crying. Ten minutes after she hung up, Barbara called again to say that the body was going to be transported to Carrigan’s Funeral Home, in Exeter. If Bob ever got home (that was the way she put it), she would see us there. I asked if she’d like me to come over and sit with her. She said she wouldn’t; Sandra had insisted on coming, and dealing with Sandra and Marie was all she was up to. It was the first time I realized what a toll Barbara’s daughter and grandchild took on her. “I just don’t know what I’ll do,” Barbara added. “I don’t know how I’ll ever adjust.”
I said what was expected: that she would adjust; that fortunately, Grandma had not suffered.
“Oh,” Barbara said, “you’re such a sweet girl, Janey.”
A slip of the tongue. Surely she knew to whom she was talking.
Grandma had always been very nice to me. She was one of those dutiful New England women who’d made a religion of common sense. She was hardworking and cryptic enough to seem wise—or perhaps she really had been wise. Why was skepticism creeping in as I sank into a chair and tried to think of her many good qualities? It might have been because I was skeptical of Barbara, and because the two of them were so similar—though Grandma had seemed almost stunningly realistic. Compared to her mother, Barbara was really quite neurotic. Grandma’s implicit message had always been that situations were givens: there was not much you could do about them except to cope. I liked the simplicity of that reasoning. While Barbara worried and dithered, her mother had simply taken control. The afternoon she and I had had our long phone conversation I should have been more understanding: my challenging her had bordered on disrespect. The same things that were her good qualities had also been her downfall: being too accommodating; acting, always, as if freedom were irrelevant. I had been frustrated because I had really been arguing with myself. And she had touched a nerve when she mentioned my aunt. She had confronted me, just as I had confronted her. Checkmate.
The phone rang and I got up, hoping it was Bob.
“Can you believe it?” Janey said. The baby was crying in the background. I wondered if Frank had managed to get done what he’d wanted to do when he returned home with Bob’s drill the day before.
“It’s very sad,” I said.
“Sad? It’s nuts.”
“What?”
“Drake wanting to ignore her wishes and have her cremated. Frank’s been on the phone with him. He finally talked him into burying her. What did you think I was talking about?”
“Her death,” I said.
“Oh,” Janey said. Then: “Frank says Bob’s on a canoe trip?”
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s no way to reach him, but he should be home tonight.”
“So he misses a few hours of the drama,” Janey said. “More power to him. Listen: I’ve got to go.”
“Did your tooth hold up okay?”
“My tooth? Yes,” she said.
“Did Frank work in the basement yesterday?”
“Is this a survey to make sure our lives are still banal?” Janey said.
“No,” I said. “Honest concern.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just had to say something mean to somebody.” Her voice sounded tired. “I guess we’re gathering here for dinner tonight,” she said. “About six-thirty.”
“Let me cook,” I said. “I’m not doing anything.”
“I’m baking a ham,” she said. “I asked Barbara to come over now, but she’s too nervous to sit still, she says. What good it’s going to do her to walk in circles, I don’t know.”
“Sandra and Marie are going over there,” I said.
“That’s better than her sitting there worrying all day,” Janey said. “I mean, what is all this ‘What am I going to do?’ stuff? She’s going to do what she was doing anyway.”
Joanna’s next wail got her off the phone. When I hung up, I didn’t know what to do either. I also began walking around the house, brushing dust off a tabletop, gathering up old newspapers and magazines. An old issue of Time had a story about the Clamshell Alliance on the cover. Fourteen hundred people had been arrested at the Seabrook nuclear plant protest. The manager of the theater where Dara would perform had been one of them. I flipped through, stopped by a drawing of the inside of a nuclear reactor. There was a large color photograph of people being put into police wagons. I wondered what Grandma thought about Seabrook, or if she had thought much about it at all.
“Sweetie,” Dara said, when I picked up the phone, sure it was Bob. “Tonight is the night. We are going to have a very large bowl of lobster salad. Can I count you in?”
“I can’t,” I said. “Something awful just happened.”
“She married another one?”
“What?”
“Mrs. Whutzit: she married another husband, and the book is now moving into section four?”
“N
o, not that. A death in the family. Bob’s grandmother died.”
“Poor old thing,” Dara said. “Did very many people love her?”
A strange question. I was not always capable of telling when Dara was being mock-serious, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt.
“We all did,” I said.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, nearly whispering the last four words.
“How are you doing with the bedroom?” I said quickly. I wanted to have something resembling a conversation before I hung up. I felt isolated from everyone in the family—even Janey, who was more of a martyr than I was. Why couldn’t she have let me cook? And where was Bob—why hadn’t he at least called from a pay phone when they arrived, as he usually did?
“Almost finished with the first coat,” she said. “It’s going to be really fabulous.” Often her voice just trailed off at the end of a phone call, but this time she blew me a kiss and said, “Ciao.”
That seemed fitting, I thought bleakly. I might as well have been in a foreign land.
At noon I made a tuna sandwich and ate it, lamenting the loss of the lobster dinner. It was awful of me, but I regretted saying that Grandma had died; if I hadn’t, I could have gone to Tom and Dara’s. I could have had a pleasant evening and not thought about how difficult the coming days were going to be. I could have lied my way out of dinner at Frank and Janey’s, somehow. The truth was I would much rather be with friends than with the family. It was going to be sad and awkward with the family; the only real consolation would be holding little Joanna—if I even got a chance at her, with Barbara there. Suddenly I thought about Barbara’s birthday, and about Marie’s obvious jealousy of Louise. Was she jealous of Joanna, or was Joanna too small to register? I doubted that Marie would have her uncle Bob’s lap to crawl into after the ham dinner. I doubted whether he would be home before dark. On the rare occasions he’d gone kayaking, he’d always come home late. I would have to leave a note for him. Should I be explicit in the note, or just tell him that something had happened: to call Frank and Janey?
