by Ann Beattie
“It’s really not the boonies here,” I said. “There are some very nice places. I’ve been on some beautiful hikes, too.”
“Maybe sometime we could go walking in the woods,” she said.
Point registered: she wanted there to be a next time.
“Not in hunting season,” I said.
Meaning: not soon. Certainly not today. Let’s not prolong today any longer than necessary.
Back at the driveway, the dog hopped in the car, and we took him with us. He stood between the seats, with two paws on Dara’s lap, and sniffed the air through the inch of open window. Dara patted him. She also looked out the window, deliberately distancing herself.
At the coffee shop, we ordered coffee at the counter. I deliberately did not ask if she wanted dessert. She didn’t mention it. We looked around for a table. There was a table for six, which was too large, and one for two. It was not until we approached it and she overtook me that I realized what she was doing. She was taking the inside seat, so her back wouldn’t be to the room.
On the way back to New Hampshire for a pre-Christmas visit, I stopped at a craft shop and bought a foot-high upright mouse, dressed in white, its gray tail sticking out from a hole in its skirt, a little white nurse’s cap perched on its head. I paid cash, though I had recently applied for and received my first credit card. It had a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar limit, which I thought I might need if I decided to visit Dara in New York. She had expressed her frustration that the second time I’d returned to New Hampshire, she was gone, staying in Edward Quill’s apartment while he was in London. She had told me that he slept on red satin bedding and had velvet thongs that matched his sheets. She gave me an inventory of the things she’d found in his apartment, from the spotlit shell sitting on a Lucite cube on top of the toilet tank underneath an Edward Weston photograph of a similar shell, to a rhinestone-encrusted riding crop, found in with the umbrellas. She thought that Edward Quill was, as she put it, “just too far gone” to be able to help her; how—if it was true—he managed to have meetings with producers and directors, she couldn’t imagine. She thought he might be delusional or, at the very least, a consummate liar. He was living off the money Grace Aldridge had left him. Grace’s engagement photograph was on his bedside table, along with a photograph of a young man Dara described as looking like the bird in “Peanuts.” She wore his bangles and used his hairspray. And she wondered aloud what could possibly have been going on between him and Grace Aldridge, whom she called “that little blue-haired lady,” although Grace’s hair had been white, not blue. I was tempted to go visit his apartment. It had really begun to sink in with me that people lived very differently from one another. (Gail Jason, my favorite professor, lived with a black futon on a black frame and two black metal chairs with fake-leopard cushions, a kitchen table with four more chairs padded with black cushions, and little else except books, books, books.)
Going back to visit Janey and Barbara—even going back to the house I had shared with Bob (though I still wasn’t sure I wasn’t going to ask him to meet me in some neutral place)—was sure to be daunting. While my room in Eastford was hardly fascinating, I had come to like its shabbiness. I thought the cracks in the wall and the shavings of paint gave the room character. It was totally my environment, shared only with the dog, for whom I’d laid a pallet, the walls newly hung with a series of paint-by-number landscapes I’d bought at a junk store. I congratulated myself for having a sense of humor. Perhaps it had been liberated because of the books I was reading, or because of the underground movies I’d come to love, screened on campus in the auditorium of the Physics Building every Friday night. Gail Jason’s favorite mode was the ironic, which, while it did not exactly constitute a sense of humor, still persuaded me that detachment could be amusing, rather than just a cover-up, as it was with Bob. I was discovering who I was slightly late, but at least I had begun to think about myself, instead of about everyone else, and I had also thrown off my Republican cloth coat. On cold days, I wore a purple poncho over a fisherman’s knit sweater, well-worn jeans, and men’s size-six hiking boots. In October I’d written a long letter to Aunt Elizabeth, asking her whether she didn’t feel guilty for what she’d done. I asked if she had gambled because of an irresistible urge (I said that that seemed unlikely to me, since she’d felt the urge on schedule, once a year, year after year) or to punish me. I asked her to explain herself, either by letter or by phone. By December, she still had not responded. As I drove, I listened to “Sweet Baby James”: James Taylor, singing about “the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston.” It was good driving music: appropriate to where I was; elegiac—appropriate to my state of mind.
Naturally, I went first to Janey’s. She ran out without a coat and hugged me as I got out of the car. I was so thickly padded, I could hardly feel her embrace. She had on tennis shoes and plaid slacks and a blouse made of material that looked like autumn leaves. It wasn’t just her maternity clothes; she dressed like an older person, I realized: ill-fitting slacks; an ugly blouse that had no style. But I was happy to see her, and my impulse was to try to pull her into the car and drive away with her, just steal her away, make her sit through the same classes I sat through, read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, see Blowup, read the same “Zap” comics.
“So you’re doing really well in school?” she said. She was like the proud, solicitous parent I’d never had. She was beaming at me. I could do no wrong.
The baby was crawling. Pete was at a friend’s house. Max was accompanying his father on a ride to the dump. She expected them back any minute.
I picked up the baby, and her face clouded over. I gave her to Janey before she actually began to cry. Jinx the dog sniffed my leg intently, no doubt smelling my dog, who was not really my dog, but whom I thought of that way. Janey wanted to do everything at once: give me coffee; show me the completed downstairs; urge Joanna on me a second time. She was four months pregnant, but already looked quite large. She held Joanna in one arm and gently clasped her own belly, rolling her eyes upward as if the pregnancy were some strange, momentary digression in which her body was participating—something slightly amusing that didn’t need to be apologized for, but that wasn’t exactly correct either, like Joanna’s teetering walk.
I went outside and found the bag with the nurse mouse and brought it in to Joanna. She hesitated to take it, but Janey peered in the bag and exclaimed, and then Joanna reached in. She lifted the mouse by one ear and immediately dropped it on the floor, then stared at it. I picked it up and rocked it in my arms, pronouncing it a “nice mousey.” She reached for it. Again, I gave it to her, and she tossed it on the floor, then reared back in her mother’s arms. Janey sat her down. She started to walk, fell, then crawled to the mouse. When she reached it, she held it by one ear and raised her other hand, to suck her thumb.
“Pick her up,” Janey said. I did, and Joanna accepted it. She reached out and pinched my nose. I removed her hand. She reared back again, but I reached out and braced her. “Do you remember your aunt Jean?” I said. “Do you remember me?”
“She’d better remember,” Janey said. “The girls have got to stick together.”
We went into the kitchen. She offered me soup or a sandwich or both or neither: I could have a Snickers bar that she kept hidden from the boys, or I could have…she was looking through the cupboard.
I told her I wasn’t hungry.
“I’m hungry all the time,” she said. She opened a jar and dug around in it. She lifted out the Snickers. She unwrapped it, put it on the counter, and cut it in two pieces. “Save me from myself,” she said. I reached out and took a bite of the other half. Joanna reached for it and began to bounce in my arms. I chewed quickly, then put the remaining piece in my mouth. Joanna looked at me, wide-eyed. Then she frowned and wailed.
“At least, we have to stick together except where sharing candy is involved,” Janey said.
I jostled the baby. It was hard to stop smacking my lips, the sweetness ling
ered so long.
“Sit down,” Janey said. “Tell me everything.”
“How are you?” I said. Joanna leaned toward the floor. I placed her on it. “How’s everybody? How’s—”
“I mean, it’s not as if we never talk on the phone,” Janey said. “But that’s so different, isn’t it?”
I nodded yes. I began to think that if something meaningful wasn’t said soon, it never would be. But what meaningful thing was there to say? Should I tell her, again, that I was sure I’d made the right decision to leave? I worried that if I said that, I might be talking more to myself than to her. Still, it was all I could think to say.
She listened. She said: “You do seem happier.”
“What about you?” I said. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I won’t be working again until after the baby’s born. I was bleeding a little. Same problem every time. I’ve been off already for a couple of weeks.”
“And Frank and the kids are fine?”
“Frank’s got more of a nesting urge than I do,” Janey said. “He’s excited about the new baby. He’s going to turn the porch into a nursery. We’re waiting for the building permit.”
“I guess you need the space,” I said. I liked their porch the way it had always been, with the blowsy screens and the hydrangeas outside. I hated to see their porch disappear.
“I don’t know. I don’t see why every child has to have a separate bedroom, when the littlest are so, you know, little.”
“Maybe he should have become an architect,” I said.
“He really thinks more is better. He told me last night that if we had another boy, he’d still like to try for a second girl.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?”
“You sound so horrified,” she said. “Really: What’s the difference between four and five?”
“Janey!”
“I know,” she said, the bubble bursting. “But he sounded sincere. Maybe this is the big new thing. Fatherhood, I mean. Maybe it’s because he was so close to his own father. I don’t know.”
“Have him visit the grave, instead of having a fifth child,” I said.
She laughed. She said: “You always make me laugh.”
“I suppose I’m not the one to give advice,” I said. “You and Frank have always worked things out. I just worry for you, that you—”
“I know you do,” she said. “I appreciate it.”
“Would you do it over again?” I said.
“Are you kidding? Of course I would.” She got a glass of water. “I mean, everybody has bad days,” she said.
“You don’t think I’ve just been having a bad day, do you, Janey?”
“No,” she said, frowning. “No—I assume you thought long and hard about it, and—”
“I didn’t. It just struck me that everything was wrong. That the only way to fix anything was to leave.”
“I’m sure you thought about it more than that,” she said. She examined her fingernails. “Well, I guess if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have moved to Dell,” she said. “Frank would have done fine somewhere else. Frank can do all sorts of things. We could have…I don’t know. We could have moved away and done something. I know he could have.”
“Do you ever talk about it with him?”
“Oh, in a way. I guess it’s become something of a joke. He always answers me as if I’m a broken record, saying we should go to Florida. He knows it wouldn’t have to be Florida. And that if it was, I’m not talking about Miami Beach. You know Frank: he likes to kid me, and he also doesn’t like to focus on what he doesn’t want to focus on.”
“Maybe I could talk to him.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I’ve got cold feet now, myself. If things don’t start going better with the business, we’re going to be in trouble.”
“Has Tom’s greenhouse cut into business a lot?”
“This is a small place, and in my opinion, which I wouldn’t say to anyone but you, Frank and Bob have always had small aspirations. See? I’m more like you than you think. I think they should have thought about updating, or really expanding, long before Snell’s moved here. Boy—I really sound like Grandma today, don’t I? Saying that if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else.” She picked at a cuticle. She looked at the baby. The baby liked her nurse mouse; she was waving it in her arms, like someone waving a flag at a parade.
“How’s everybody else?” I said.
“Actually, the good news—at least, I consider it the good news—doesn’t have anything to do with the family, but it’s made me happy. Tom brought Bernie and the baby back from Georgia last week. It seems she never did give it up for adoption and was living with her friends all this time. She called me to come over and see the baby. She was absolutely delighted to be back, and of course I didn’t let on that I knew anything about her having considered giving up the baby. For all I know, her hormones were just on a roller-coaster ride. Anyway, it’s a sweet baby, and the two of them seem very happy.”
“Wow,” I said. “Has that news caught up with Dara?”
“How would I know?” Janey said. She dropped her hands in her lap. Then deliberately changing the subject, she pointed to the ring on my finger. “Don’t you think you ought to return that to him?” she said. “It’s weird that you took it in the first place. Don’t look at me that way: I have good instincts, and I sense that your wearing that ring that strange woman gave you is going to cause nothing but trouble.”
“What do you think? That it’s casting a spell?”
“Don’t be mad,” she said. “I hate to state the family motto, but okay: It’s None of My Business.”
“No,” I said. “It’s good that we discuss it. Bob and I never really discussed anything, and look where it got us.”
“That’s something else entirely,” she said.
“So how is he?” I said.
“He’s sulking. He hangs out a lot with Trenton these days, from what I’ve heard. Trenton’s blue because the great writer left him. The two of them have tried to recruit Frank for various things—trekking up mountains, or whatever it is they do. Trenton bought an iceboat.”
“I heard that Dara was modelling for him,” I said.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Janey,” I said, softening, “I agree that if she’d set her sights on my husband, I wouldn’t like her.”
“I don’t like her,” Janey said. “Frank swears that’s all in the past, though, and I believe him. They’re not the most sophisticated men, you know? I mean, I don’t think that being raised by Barbara exactly taught them how to understand women. They always think that at any moment the helpless woman is going to simply tell them what’s needed. She killed their intuition, in my opinion.”
I was surprised that Janey had given such thought to the way Barbara had brought up her family. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, because as a mother, Janey would have more reason to think about those things than I would. Still, I was taken aback.
“Bob and Frank and I all think you should dump her,” Janey said. “Though I’m sure that’s just going to reinforce your loyalty.”
“Dump Barbara?”
“No. Dara.”
“The three of you talk about who should be my friend?”
“Don’t make it sound like a witches’ cabal,” she said. “Frank really cares about you. And Bob’s told you what he thinks—don’t pretend you’re hearing it from me for the first time.”
“Stop lecturing me, Janey. This isn’t like you at all.”
“I don’t care what’s like me and what isn’t,” she said. “It may surprise you to know that I’m every bit as fed up with the way I’m supposed to be as you were. I only bite my tongue with the family. I talk straight to my patients. I talk straight to everybody else. Since you decided to step out of context, how about rethinking sweet, proper Janey.”
“I don’t think you’re sweet and proper,” I said. “I mean, you’
re one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, but that’s a lot different from being sweet and proper.”
She looked at me. When she spoke again, her voice was lower. Almost a whisper. “Tom told me she’s written Bernie very disturbing letters, Jean. Threatening letters. If Dara thought that was the way to win him back, what she did had the exact opposite effect.”
I was surprised, but I didn’t want to be sucked into the family’s paranoia. “People think about her too much,” I said. “When relationships break up, people do crazy things. Do you know what he’s written Dara, or said to her? She’s everybody’s scapegoat.”
“I really doubt whether you would have left Bob if it hadn’t been for her,” Janey burst out.
“Janey, that’s nuts. And also, think about it: this is a place that isn’t friendly to outsiders. It’s a small town, and people have ways of protecting themselves, by not letting anyone or anything new in.”
“Snell’s was built,” she said.
“Nobody had any control over that. You know what I mean. If you know so much about what Bob and Frank think, you must realize they feel stifled.”
“I realize that more and more every day,” she said bitterly. “Next he’ll build a wall around his expanding fortress. We’re here for the long haul, Jean. Just do me a favor: Don’t drop me. Don’t stop talking to me, or visiting me. I married into the family. I am not this family.”
She burst into tears. Joanna looked at her mother and reached out. I saw her out of the corner of my eye and ignored her, as I stood and swooped down on Janey, awkwardly hugging her, kissing her cheek. “Janey, Janey, I don’t think you’re them,” I said.
Frank came in the front door, whistling. Max stood beside him. A draft of cold air blew in.
“Tell her, Frank,” Janey said, wiping tears away, as if Frank had been in the room all along. “Tell her that she should give Tom the goddamn ring. Tell her we don’t want to be in the middle of this. Why should Tom think we’d want to be the ones to sort everything out between him and the great Dara Falcon?”
