by Ann Beattie
By noon, it seemed strange to me that Liam hadn’t called. By midafternoon, I convinced myself that something had happened to him: he had fallen, painting his bedroom ceiling (the New Year’s project); his car had skidded off the road. Still, I didn’t call. Instead, I became maudlin, thinking that it was foolish to go to such lengths to keep my distance from people when they didn’t care about me or want to be around me in the first place. My cynicism from the night before returned: by late afternoon, it was clear to me that my husband was relieved that I was gone, that Dara was only smoothing over her true dislike of me for her own purposes, and that everyone from my lover to my housemates thought I was a dark cloud it was best simply to ignore. Eventually, I put the dog in the car—a way of apologizing to someone, at least, for my endless inadequacies—and began to drive. I turned into the parking lot of the tiny white clapboard liquor store in Ashford and bought a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau, which was one of the few wines I knew, because a hand-lettered banner was stretched above an opened case, saying that it had just arrived. The owner was pleasant. I had been told that he was always pleasant if anyone bought a bottle of wine that cost more than three dollars. I put the bag in the backseat.
Driving aimlessly, I wondered what I would do with a degree in English. I also felt that I would never be able to live without the dog—his head was in my lap; all was forgiven—and convinced myself that the people in the house would never relinquish him. That would be the custody battle I had avoided with Bob; it would still happen, only it would be about Sparkle the dog.
I turned off the highway and parked, briefly attaching the leash to the dog’s collar as we walked at the side of the road, until we reached a dirt path where I felt the dog could safely run free. It would be all I needed, to have a car strike the dog.
It didn’t happen. We walked and walked. At the end of the road was an outcropping of houses with the foundations poured and some framed in, and then the houses seemed to have been abandoned. A bulldozer leaned crookedly into the frozen muck. Had the people run out of money? Or was I looking at something abandoned for no good reason—an idea people had simply lost interest in. Perhaps work would start again in the spring. I made a mental note to check then, but not to return to this site during the winter.
It occurred to me that the world was pretty much divided into people who constantly moved, and those who stayed put. When I was younger, I had never known anyone who moved. Aunt Elizabeth never moved; my parents never had. But when they died, there had been some talk of Elizabeth’s moving into that house, because it was bigger, and because people had suggested to her that it might be better for me if I didn’t have to leave. She had asked me whether I wanted to stay, or to move in with her, but I had understood from the tentative way she phrased the question that she hoped I would be willing to move. I had been. Instead of thinking the house would hold pleasant memories, I had felt sure I would feel my parents’ presence everywhere and I would be tortured by not being able to actually see them. When I married Bob, there had been some talk of Barbara’s moving out of her house, because it was so difficult to keep up, and because she could use a smaller place, and letting us rent the house from her very reasonably. But Bob hadn’t wanted that; like me, he hadn’t wanted to have memories surrounding him. For the first time, I wondered if he had had any trouble staying on in our house when I left. I thought that I might have been the lucky one, moving into a place I felt no responsibility toward—a house that held no memories, good or bad. It allowed me to be a little like an amnesiac. With nothing to remember, more seemed possible.
That night, I accepted a last-minute invitation to Gail Jason’s for dinner. Like everyone else I knew in Connecticut—not that there were that many—she lived in temporary quarters. Something about her house, and Liam’s—though not so much the house I lived in, because I had not decorated at all—was at once permanent and impermanent. Both serious, and not serious. Unlike the people in Dell, the people in Connecticut were concerned about their careers, about themselves—about where they would eventually go, and what they would do in the world—not about their houses where they would live day after day. And frankly, I liked the unfinished, extemporized environments; I liked them because they reflected the unfinished aspects of the people who lived in them.
I went back to the car with the dog, thinking vaguely of the many places Dara had lived since I’d met her—or the many places she’d stayed, with no pretense of really living there. If I hadn’t seen how grim some of them were, it would be easier to romanticize her moving from place to place. As I looked at a big, leafy squirrel’s nest high up in a tree, I thought of her spiderweb—the web I had thought of as metaphorical; the web Bernie had vividly described as real. I felt sure it was meant as a joke—a nasty joke, as if Tom Van Sant shared, or should be expected to share, Dara’s concept of herself. Or maybe he did. Maybe that was one of the reasons he had decided to stay with Bernie. Maybe he had come to think that Dara was trying to entrap him. Maybe Bernie should give thanks that Dara had made literal her metaphorical spider’s web.
Driving home, I felt tired and cold. The initial excitement about being in school was being eroded by the amount of studying I had to do, and my gradual realization that it was going to take quite a bit of time to accomplish what I needed to accomplish. I was upset—why not admit it—that Dara was angry with me, and upset with myself that I had been so angry with Liam. I couldn’t always account for my moods; like an adolescent, sometimes I overreacted, and other times I probably underreacted. But then I had been so intimidated, always the grateful little orphan, that I hadn’t enacted the throes of adolescence when everybody else had, so maybe I was just coming to all that very late.
At the house, I hugged the dog and explained that he could not come with me. He understood from my tone of voice, not from my words. It reminded me of how much I always knew by looking at someone, even before the person began to speak. I patted Sparkle, reassuringly telling him a lie: that he wouldn’t want to come with me, anyway. At the last minute, when I decided to wear a scarf and went back into the room for it, I also decided to put Dara’s letter in my pocket.
There was a stream of cars on the highway, once I got off the back roads. I only had to drive a short distance, though, because Gail lived between my house and the university. She lived on the second floor of a turn-of-the-century house that was occupied downstairs only in the spring, when the retired professor who owned it returned with his son for a two-month vacation. The rest of the time Gail was there alone: no music she didn’t turn on herself; no people banging around in the morning to wake her up. There was a back staircase that led into her kitchen. On her porch were frozen geraniums and other flowering plants from the summer, still in their pots. There were also dusty brown bags stacked under two brick weights, and lawn chairs, folded and leaning against a wall, an old shower curtain wrapped around them. The porch was a mess. It was hard to believe it was the same clean, airy, flowery place I’d first seen only a few months before.
Gail already had wine, it turned out: a gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, which she and another woman had been drinking before I got there. I was surprised to see another person in Gail’s apartment; I thought she must have invited me over, as she usually did, because she was lonesome, but she and the woman seemed to be having a good time. Jazz was playing quietly. The bag of groceries sat on the table. I liked the fact that she and her friend had had a drink before she’d even put the groceries away. Gail introduced me and then seized my bottle and pronounced it much better than hers. She handed her friend the corkscrew as she took my coat.
The other woman was named Joyce. She worked for an architect in New York. She and Gail had been friends since high school, when they had both been cheerleaders. I was amazed at this information. Everything Gail did was done slowly. I couldn’t imagine her holding pompoms and jumping in the air. She held out the possibility that after a bit more wine, though, she might show me.
“Come on, tell us
,” Joyce said. “What were you like in high school?”
“I was just—I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I didn’t even go to the senior prom.”
“I’ll bet you were one of the smart girls,” Gail said.
“I wasn’t particularly smart. I was a B student. I wasn’t in any clubs, or anything.”
“Oh, a lot of people who are smart don’t show their intelligence in high school.”
“No, really,” I said, sitting down next to Joyce at the kitchen table. “I lived with my aunt, who hardly even spoke, and at school I was very shy. Nobody paid any attention to me in high school.”
“And then you were very young when you got married, like me, weren’t you?” Gail said.
“I was nineteen.”
“I beat you by a year,” Gail said.
“And I stayed an old maid,” Joyce said.
“Stop it. She had a lover for five years who set her up in an apartment and paid all her bills. She was the happiest kept woman in New York, and she didn’t have to worry about marrying him, because he was already married.”
“Then he was hit by a truck,” Joyce said.
The way she said it made me laugh. I didn’t doubt that she was serious, but it was so unexpected, and she said it so drolly, that I couldn’t help laughing.
“It’s the truth,” Gail said. “We went to the funeral, all dressed in black, pretending we knew him from work. I don’t know what the people he worked with thought, but maybe they thought we were friends of the family.”
“I was crying that day,” Joyce said.
“No wonder,” Gail said.
“So how come you lived with your aunt?” Joyce said.
“My parents died in a plane crash.”
“Oh my God!” Joyce said.
“And her aunt gambled away her inheritance,” Gail said.
“She did not!” Joyce said.
“As you always say to me, Joyce, who doesn’t surprise you?”
“But how could she get away with that?” Joyce said.
“Because when it was happening, I didn’t know.”
“Don’t the courts protect children?”
“Apparently not,” Gail said. She said to me: “If I give you these garlic cloves, could you pretend they’re your aunt’s jugular vein?” She handed me a large knife and a chopping board. I was taken aback by what she’d said but didn’t want to seem humorless. Also, Joyce reacted for me. “Gail!” she said.
“I’ve been trying to get her to explain herself,” I said. “She got married when I went to school. But since I’ve started asking for an explanation, she won’t answer my letters.”
“Couldn’t you sue her?” Joyce said.
“Letter writing. A lost art,” Gail said.
I realized for the first time that Gail was a little drunk. She was examining the lettuce as if it were an unfamiliar substance. “Why did I buy this? It’s wilted,” she said.
“Because you don’t live where there are the finest supermarkets,” Joyce said.
“She wants me to live in New York and be miserable along with her,” Gail said.
“When you leave here,” Joyce said. “You won’t be here forever.”
“I won’t be here past next year,” Gail said glumly, pouring more wine.
“Maybe we should live in Wellfleet, where my parents are, if you don’t want to live in the city. They have that house they always rent out.”
“And just sit there, stringing beads?”
“My parents like you,” Joyce said.
“They say they do,” Gail said.
“My best friend has been living in New York,” I said.
“Does she like it?” Joyce said.
“She’s an actress,” I said. “It’s either there or L.A.”
“An actress? What’s her name?” Joyce said.
“Dara Falcon,” I said.
Joyce shrugged. “Don’t know her,” she said.
“She did an amazing job acting the role of Nora in A Doll’s House,” I said.
“Off Broadway?”
“In New Hampshire, actually.”
“That’s definitely off Broadway,” Gail said. She was rinsing lettuce leaves.
“In fact,” I said, rushing on without being entirely conscious of what I was about to blurt out. “In fact, I’m not so sure that she’s still my friend, because I got caught in the middle of a situation that involved Dara and another person, and she ended up thinking I betrayed her.”
“Did you?” Gail said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. At least, I felt like I had to do something, and I tried to do what I thought was right.”
“The other person was your friend, too?” Joyce said.
“Not really,” I said.
“Couldn’t you have let them work it out?” Gail said.
“Go ahead and tell us,” Joyce said, pouring wine. “We’re not going to know what you’re talking about unless you tell us the story.”
I didn’t know where to begin. While I was thinking, Gail shook the lettuce and droplets of water rained down on us. “You have to suffer for your dinner,” she said.
“Well, Dara and Tom used to be a couple. And then it turned out that a woman he’d dated before he got together with Dara became pregnant with his child. And he went back and forth, not knowing what to do. Dara was living in his house. He’d given Dara a ring that had been his mother’s. And somehow—I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but she’d flung the ring across a room one time, and I think she was afraid she’d throw it into a field, or something—”
“Don’t tell me she gave you the ring,” Gail said.
I nodded.
“Naturally,” Gail said. “People love to involve other people in their pain.”
“There’s also the fact…my sister-in-law thought the ring was bad luck. She got involved in this situation, too, but that’s too much to go into. What she thought was that I should give the ring back to Tom, and that would be that.”
“Tell us what was really going on,” Joyce said.
“What was really going on? Well, I guess Dara did want to involve me, but she missed her guess about my just doing what she wanted,” I said to Gail. “I suppose in a way the ring was a symbol of something that had happened in my other life…I mean, when I left Dell and came here, I wanted to extricate myself. And Tom decided to remain loyal to Bernie—that’s the other woman, the one who had his child—he wanted the ring back, I heard, and I gave it to him.”
“Why didn’t you give it back to Dara?” Gail said.
“I guess because I believed she’d throw it away.”
“That would have been between her and Tom,” Gail said.
“But Gail—Jean had taken the ring. She was the one who actually had it.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t give it back to Dara,” Gail said again.
“Because Gail—she would have felt responsible if Dara had thrown it out the window, or whatever she was going to do.”
“That still wouldn’t have been her problem.”
“You can’t just detach yourself that way,” Joyce said. “You know it’s not that easy.”
“Then look at it another way,” Gail said. “You’re acting like her having a fit and hurling the ring into space was an inevitability. You might have given it to Dara, and Dara might have returned it to Tom.” She looked at me again. “Did you ever ask her whether she didn’t think it was right to return it?”
“No,” I said. If she asked, it was going to be very difficult to explain why I had not.
“Why not?” she said.
“Well, because I know Dara. She didn’t—she doesn’t—change her mind. If she said she was afraid of what she’d do with the ring, there is every reason to be afraid of what she’d do.”
“Worst scenario,” Gail said. “The two of them aren’t getting back together anyway. The ring is gone. So what?”
“It was his mother’s.”
Gail frowned. “He’d given it to Dara as an engagement ring?”
“Well, I think—I think he might have, but she said she didn’t mean to marry him, although I’m not one hundred percent sure that was true.”
“Say,” Gail said, “I’ve got a suitcase some stranger left on my porch. It’s making a weird ticking noise, like a clock’s inside, or something. Do you think you could take it home with you?”
“You are so nasty!” Joyce said to Gail.
“And also, I think I might kill myself if you don’t cook the dinner instead of me, so could you make the meatloaf?”
“She is nasty!” Joyce said to me.
“You think I was really stupid to get involved,” I said to Gail.
She nodded. “But do you understand now why you wanted to?”
I held the knife and didn’t chop. I felt a strand of hair tickling my eye, but didn’t brush it away. Finally, Joyce poked the side of my hand with another garlic clove. I responded by jumping slightly.
“She’s wickedly good at getting people to confront themselves,” Joyce said. She sounded quite sympathetic. She spoke as if Gail weren’t in the room. Gail was drying the lettuce. She had begun to dry it leaf by leaf.
