My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

by Ann Beattie

  Bernie was long gone from her waitressing job, and she was also long gone from the area. After one particularly horrendous day and evening during which her vomiting increased so dramatically that Tom had had to take her to the emergency room, he had decided that he needed to offer her more support. (“Sweetie, what did he think he was doing, being at her beck and call? He’s entirely too critical of himself.”) He told Bernie that he would see a lawyer before the baby was born, so that financial arrangements could be made. Though Dara had constantly urged him to persuade Bernie to get an abortion, she doubted that he’d hammered away at her about it; she thought—and she might have been right—that Tom was wary of Bernie, as well as feeling great conflict about the child. Several days after the trip to the emergency room, Bernie had packed her bags and left for her best friend’s house, in Chalybeate Springs, Georgia. She had decided to have the baby and give it up for adoption. (“Imagine! She’s not even going to keep it, and she’s putting herself and everybody else through all this! This is a nightmare to me, because of what I went through, myself. She is absolutely, completely, making the wrong decision.”)

  At a second lunch at Arizona, I had talked to Bob about the Dara-Tom-Bernie situation, making sure to keep my voice low, because I had no idea who on the waitstaff might have known her. The place seemed peculiarly empty without her, and the piñatas—the increasing kitschiness of the place—bothered me. I still missed the other restaurant, and pink and green curlicued horses dangling from the beams with their brightly painted, smirking red lips weren’t helping me enjoy the new restaurant more. We had margaritas. Though I would be going to the doctor the following day because I had missed at least two periods, I hadn’t said anything to Bob. I suppose I was trying to find out what he thought about babies in general, though presenting Bernie’s complex situation was hardly the way to find out. He seemed to have no opinion about whether an abortion would have been better—though it was legal, he still feared it as a medical procedure—or whether she would be doing the right thing by having the baby. By the time the food was brought to the table by the too-chipper waitress, I had begun to think that it wasn’t fair to Bob to always tell him about everyone’s problems, or even to mull over so many vague possibilities: I might go to work more regularly as a secretary for two lawyers who had just opened an office in Cape Neddick; I thought that what I most wanted to do the following summer was see the Grand Canyon, yet some part of me also wanted to go to the Bahamas, to take advantage of the off-season rates in a luxury hotel. Christmas—I was really jumping around in terms of what I might want, when—I thought should be at our house this year, but I thought it would take Bob persuading Frank to have it happen. I had finally caught on that Janey had so many events at her house because Frank insisted on it.

  I ate my chimichanga, picking out strands of shredded lettuce as if they were weeds in the garden. Then I ate the lettuce. I wanted another margarita, but thought better of it. When the waitress came to the table and asked, I ordered ginger ale. As we ate, Bob told me that he had agreed to return to Boston to see the child psychologist. Drake had phoned him the night before, though I hadn’t known why. Yet again I agreed with my husband: there was so much closeness—if you could properly call it that—so much reliance by one family member on another, that it could be stifling. Though Bob had pulled back from Barbara, letting Frank pick up the slack, he seemed resigned about being part of what was now called Louise’s recovery. As I had found out at the wedding, Bob was “immediate family.” It crossed my mind to ask whether other family members—meaning: me—would ever be called upon, or whether for some reason the therapist thought of us as the dumb kids in the classroom.

  School had just recently started, which was part of the reason I was thinking about school. Pete already hated his teacher. His younger brother had announced that the only reason he saw to go to school was that, when you graduated, you could join the marines. I couldn’t imagine what Marie must be like in school. She got good grades—A’s in everything except math—but I imagined she must be the sort the other kids stayed away from. An image of Marie, in mid-tantrum, with her big, silly bow shaken loose, lying on our living room rug, popped into my mind: Bob, disguising his taunt as an important life lesson, saying, “You have to share Uncle Bob.”

  I had been sharing Bob with everyone, and I knew how frustrating that felt. But then I began to think: What is it like to know you’re being shared? He sometimes joked about people needing to stand in line to take a ticket. He might have objected more, except that it was obvious Frank was much more in demand. So many things were expected of Frank. What would Frank’s ideal vacation be? Surely the Caribbean—not packing up the family and going to the Grand Canyon.

  After lunch, Bob would be dropping me off in Cape Neddick. I’d agreed to return to the office to work a second half day. The lawyers wanted me to work for them. Whether I wanted them was another matter. Bob would be going to the greenhouse to see what he could do about fixing the soil-cooking machine. So far, his newly acquired accounting skills hadn’t been put to much use, though at night, slowly, he’d been setting up a new system for keeping the books.

  Bob had coffee, which he only drank a few sips of. It was the cinnamon-flavored coffee Bernie had told us to refuse if we didn’t like it. But Bernie had left for Georgia, and Bob might have liked the coffee well enough, but just felt anxious about getting on with the day. That night, we would be going to Portsmouth. A Doll’s House had opened to rave reviews, but we’d had various obligations—babysitting; working on the business’s books—so Tuesday night was the first time we could go together. Dara was a little put out with me, I knew, because I had not come without Bob. She had put us on the list for complimentary tickets opening night. When I realized it wasn’t a night we could go, I’d called Barbara. The box office didn’t know one Warner from another, so Barbara and Dowell had already seen the play. Increasingly, they did things together. She must have really brought on the charm and the candlelight the night he ate with her, because since that time, every time I spoke to Barbara, Dowell was expected momentarily, or she and Dowell had plans for the weekend. Bob was simply thankful that Dowell kept his mother occupied; he must have also done odd jobs around the house, because Barbara’s phone calls to Bob and Frank had dwindled.

  Back at the house, we went through the mail together. My car was being serviced, so the plan was for one of the lawyers to give me a ride home. Somehow, Bob had convinced the garage to drop the car off at the end of the day, when the work was finished, so we wouldn’t have to go get it. The owner of the garage was Trenton’s best friend. Guys did things for other guys.

  I went to the bathroom, while Bob made a quick phone call. “Oh, damn,” he said, when I came out. He was looking at the calendar. “That play’s tonight, isn’t it?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I told Frank I’d give him a hand with the wainscoting, but I can do it another night.”

  “I’m sure he won’t care,” I said. “We have seventh row center.”

  “Freebies?

  “She did send us tickets, but they were for opening night, and we couldn’t go. I gave them to Barbara.”

  “The better to entertain the charming Dowell,” he said. “Dowell Churnin and my mother. Who in the world would have thought this would happen?”

  “I thought you were glad she was happy.”

  “I’m glad that for the first time in years she’s off my back. She was happy enough before she got together with him.”

  “I’m sure she’s happier.”

  “Do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t defend Barbara. As mothers go, Barbara is fine. But she never learned to stand on her own, and Dowell isn’t the solution to her perception of herself as helpless either.”

  “You think she sees herself as helpless?” I was putting on a sweater. My summer straw hat, on the peg, already looked dusty. The cabbage roses, faded by the sun, were droopy. It was my favorite sun hat
of all time, but it would probably only last one more season.

  “Sure she does. When she was raising us, we were all given to understand that everything was juuuuust beyond her grasp. She could suggest how we might do it, but it was never to be assumed that she, herself, could climb up one rung of a ladder to change a lightbulb. It made overachievers of us—of the boys, I mean. Sandra’s just like Barbara. Even Marie is more on the ball than my sister.”

  “It must have been difficult to grow up in a house full of boys.”

  “Sympathy for Barbara and for Sandra as a duo is too much for me,” he said. “Come on. I’ve got to get going.”

  We went out. The day was cold, bright, and breezy; it would have been a good day to go to the beach. I wondered if Barbara ever flew her kites with Dowell. Who could imagine what they did privately? I was as surprised as Bob by her relationship with him, but it seemed proper, somehow, that I take Barbara’s side. I thought Bob was making fun of a loneliness he didn’t understand. At the same time, I could understand that he wanted to be cut loose.

  “Pete’s having a bad time in school,” I said, apropos of nothing, settling into the passenger seat.

  “Frank told me that,” he said. “I think Pete’s a good kid, but all in all, I’ve always been more fond of his brother. Maybe that’s because Max looks just like Frank, and Pete looks just like Janey.”

  “Who do you think the baby looks like?” I said.

  “She looks like a baby,” he said.

  Going down Route 1, we passed Snell’s without commenting. From what I’d heard, it was doing well. Tom had hired someone who’d worked at another Snell’s to do the day-to-day management. By the time we got to the intersection with the blinking light, I was lost in thought, as if my thoughts could do anything to change the situation: Was Bernie right to insist upon having the baby? Should Dara have fought with Tom so much about his decision to remain loyal to Bernie? Would Dara and Tom eventually marry? It could be preoccupying, even though it was a tempest happening elsewhere. On the radio, Debby Boone was singing “You Light Up My Life.” Like me, Bob had heard it one too many times. He changed the station and stopped when he heard the Eagles. Bob tapped his thumb on the wheel. We passed the house where we sometimes bought lobsters from the fisherman. Two towheaded boys played on the front lawn. They seemed to be watched only by a Doberman on a leash. The yard was full of junk. The lobster pots were stacked neatly.

  “Is this a play I’m going to understand?” Bob said.

  “Sure,” I said. For a minute, something in his voice reminded me of Pete’s in the backseat of the car the day Janey and I had gone to Boston. I often forgot that Bob was hesitant about many things. Frank made fun of what he wasn’t familiar with, but Bob approached with caution. Drake, as far as I could tell, wasn’t unfamiliar with anything—only disdainful.

  He dropped me off in front of the lawyers’ house. Their office was in the addition. A steam room was under construction, and the kitchen was being renovated. It was a beautiful old house; I was glad they’d saved it.

  “Seven o’clock?” he said.

  I nodded. I leaned across the seat and gave him a quick kiss. There was zero electrical charge when our lips touched, which made me sad. I almost thought of kissing him longer, but he was in a hurry, and someone had been peeking through the curtains. I picked up my purse and got out of the car.

  Inside, Nubble the cat rubbed against my leg. It was a calico that had been abandoned in the shopping center: something else the lawyers had saved.

  “Hi,” Gardner said to me. “Have a nice lunch?” He was always pleasant. He didn’t get rattled easily. The other lawyer was his girlfriend, and she was another story: she always did at least three things at once, and everything suffered, including the two of us. She was much younger than Gardner. She had started as a legal secretary at his firm, and when she became his girlfriend, he put her through law school. She had explained the deal to me: he paid for her education; she accepted, uncomplainingly, visits from his grown sons, one of whom was in and out of rehab, addicted to both alcohol and pills, the other a lazy, unemployed “poet” who frequently visited from Dover. Both times I’d seen him he had startled me: once he’d been barefoot in clogs, wearing a kilt and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. The other time he’d had on a caftan, with metal buttons around the scooped neck. It looked a little like something Elizabeth Taylor would wear to entertain.

  I sat down at my desk and put on earphones. I listened to the Dictaphone and began to type the letters they’d recorded while I was gone. The letters were dull, but the idea was not to pay attention to content. I was doing what I was doing only because it was a job, and because the opportunity had presented itself. Also, I hadn’t yet agreed that it would be a permanent part-time job. They had appeared to like me immediately. They were already planning the winter break-in-the-kitchen party. They were so delighted to have fled Boston, they considered parties at every possible moment. The arrival of Nelson in his caftan had provoked a pizza party about a week ago. Things became a “party” when Penny got overly excited and jumped up and down in her chair and proclaimed the event a party. Later, I would find out that she got B12 shots every Monday, and that she had a prescription for amphetamines, but for the longest time, I thought she was just excitable.

  “I had a dream about Jimmy Hoffa last night,” she said, looking up from her desk when I got up to pour myself a cup of coffee. “Can you imagine? Everybody knows he’s buried in cement.”

  “You didn’t rescue him in the dream?”

  “I’ve tried to decondition myself from thinking about rescue—even subconsciously,” she said. “Women have got to stop thinking of themselves as Saint Bernards.”

  I nodded. I knew, already, that she gave a great deal of thought to feminist issues. She talked about Gloria Steinem as if she were on intimate terms with her, but when I’d asked, the closest she’d gotten was to have a letter published in Ms. She seemed to get more wound up as the day progressed, but I was learning to adjust to that. I sipped coffee along with her, to keep myself wired; if I looked convincingly wide-eyed hunched over the transcribing machine or the typewriter she would gradually stop talking to me and concentrate on her own work. Penny reminded me, when she was in her self-deprecating mode, or her wryly witty mode, of Dara: one of the things that had drawn me to Dara was her energy. In retrospect, it seems easy to understand that anxious people are often energetic people, but in those days I wanted to think of everyone as distinct. One major difference between Penny and Dara was that Penny was oblivious to her effect on people, and Dara was not. At the same time Dara talked, she was also a good listener. To be more accurate, she wasn’t also a good listener; she listened while she was talking, like a bird singing and simultaneously listening for a response.

  Which, though I hadn’t anticipated such a reaction, made it difficult for me to focus on her as Nora when we finally did get to the theater that night. I had several immediate reactions: the predictable, excited Hey-I-Know-That-Person; surprise that, although we were close to the stage, she looked smaller and thinner than I’d remembered, so that I wondered if being so upset had caused her to lose weight; and the way they had outfitted her seemed odd—the chiffon dress was so pretty and so romantic, it distracted you from focusing on Nora. It underscored the fact that Nora was ethereal, rather than offering you a way to sense the progressively more substantive person she would become. Dara’s costume reminded me of my being at the opening of Snell’s, when she had been outfitted in the antebellum southern lady getup—the day she had told me the news of Bernie’s pregnancy. The day she had let down her defenses, but I had been too reluctant—too frightened—to come through for her.

  As Nora spoke with her friend Mrs. Linde, you could sense her mounting anxiety. She was a person enthralled with another person—a missing person, a ghost for much of the play: her husband, Torvald. Dara’s Nora was a caged tiger who did not quite understand the parameters of its cage. Her silly visitor, Mrs. Linde,
was like a fly that has flown into a kitchen that almost instantly becomes attracted to the heat of the stove.

  I snuck looks at Bob, to see his reaction to the play. Though he stared straight ahead, I thought—as I did, increasingly—that his mind was elsewhere. At intermission, he stood up quickly.

  Together we went to the lobby and bought coffee. We had only been there a few minutes when Edward Quill appeared, flushed with excitement. It seemed he attended the play every night and got more out of it every time. What I really thought was that he was sweet on Dara. He gushed about her performance, saying her angelic Nora was just right: that Nora seemed only a feather until she evolved into her harder self, and then she was as hard as a nail—as hard as a nail, but not to be driven. I introduced Bob when he got back from the bathroom. Edward Quill stopped talking animatedly and became quieter; Bob said nothing about the play, except that he had never read it or seen it performed. Instead of drifting away, though, Edward Quill continued to stand at my side. I thought this was because I was a friend of Dara’s.

  “Who was the fruitcake?” Bob whispered, when we were back in our seats.

  “The man you just met? He was engaged to Grace Aldridge. I told you about the day he and a relative—”

  “Engaged to the old lady? If he was engaged to her, it was for her money.”