Secrets & Surprises

by Ann Beattie

  Nobody could understand how Delores and Carl had made such good time driving, but they said they were speeding the whole way, and that one slept while the other drove. They came to Francie’s door late Sunday night—early Monday morning, actually—with Meagan thrown like a sack over Carl’s shoulder. “She had hiccups half the way here,” Carl sighed, sinking down in the nearest chair with Meagan still sprawled up against him.

  “But what are you doing with your coats on?” Delores asked. “What’s going on?”

  “We were on our way out. Freed has got to teach school tomorrow.”

  “Freed!” Delores said, running over to him and throwing her arms around his neck.

  “Do I know this woman?” Freed said, rubbing the palm of his hand down her spine after he hugged her. Freed and Delores had been lovers ten years before.

  “My Pontiac was stolen,” Freed said. “Ask anybody.”

  “What?” Delores said, looking around. “What’s the joke?”

  “His car was stolen,” Perry shrugged.

  “Do you want some coffee, Delores? Do you, Carl?” Francie said.

  “I don’t care,” Carl said. “I’ll do anything.”

  “I can’t let you two take off when I just got here,” Delores said.

  “I’ll write out directions to my house,” Perry said. “The three of you can come up and stay with me.”

  “That’s right,” Delores said. “You have that big house now.”

  “Francie,” Carl said, “you look freakishly beautiful. You’ve kinked up your hair and your butt is unnaturally shapely.”

  “T.W. was here,” Francie said to Carl, ignoring what he had just said. “He would have stayed around if he had known you would be here so soon, I know.”

  “How’s your ex-husband, Francie? It looks like you decided to go on living after he pulled out. Last time I was here there wasn’t a chair to sit in. How’s Beth Ann, Perry? Might as well state all the shit that’s in my mind and calm myself down.”

  Delores broke in, saying, “She has nightmares,” to Francie and pointing to Meagan. “They took her to Disney World and she screams in the night.”

  Carl picked up a small bottle from the table and shook it back and forth absently. Meagan shifted on him and was still again. The bottle was Hard As Nails, which T.W. coated the middle fingernail of his right hand with, to keep the nail in good shape; to relax, when he was not playing electric music with the band, T.W. played the banjo.

  “Did Anita have her kid yet?” Delores asked.

  “No—she’s just four months pregnant,” Freed said. “How did you know about that?”

  “She wrote me.”

  “What did you do to your foot, Perry?” Carl said, standing.

  “I broke it.”

  “I can see that your foot is broken. Forgive me for speaking imprecisely: how did you break your foot, Perry?”

  “I fell down. I was stepping off of a stone wall in the woods and my foot went out from under me in wet leaves beneath the wall.”

  “Oh Christ, I’ve got to teach in the morning,” Freed said. “I hate to bust things up, but are we about to move?”

  “I’ll spread out the sleeping bag for Meagan,” Perry said. He went down the hall and turned the radiator all the way on in the bedroom, unrolled the sleeping bag at the foot of the bed. He went back to the living room and got Meagan, who flopped into his arms without waking up. He carried her to the sleeping bag and put her inside and closed the top over her without zipping it. If she had nightmares, it wouldn’t do to zip her in. There were little flecks of dried skin on her eyelids, and beneath her eyes were bluish circles. Her face was a little sunburned from Florida. “Do you remember me, Meagan?” he whispered. He smiled at her and turned off the light. Meagan never moved.

  “How’s T.W.’s band?” Carl asked when he came back into the room.

  “Are you giving me a ride home or not?” Freed said.

  “What are you going to do without a car?” Delores asked.

  “I can borrow my neighbor’s truck. I don’t know,” Freed said. “Hopefully they’ll find it and it won’t be wrecked.”

  “T.W. says they’re making money. He had a new demo tape down here that was very good.”

  “Come on,” Freed said, pulling at the sleeve of his leather jacket.

  “One minute,” Perry said. He went into Francie’s bedroom and got the painting and hobbled out to the car with it. Freed came out the door behind him, and then Francie, carrying his crutches, saying, “Aren’t you even going to say goodbye?”

  “I’m just carrying this out to the car.”

  “I’m sitting in the car,” Freed said. “I’m sitting in the car until you decide to start driving it.”

  “I hope they find your car, Freed,” Francie said.

  “Del looks great,” Freed sighed, and pushed around the snow with the toe of his boot. “That’s all I need to see.”

  “Oh—are you giving them directions to your house?” Francie asked Perry.

  He closed the trunk and wiped the snow off his hands on his jeans.

  “Just one second,” he said to Freed.

  “Thank you for the weekend, Francie,” Freed said. “I’m going to sit here and freeze until he decides to get going.”

  “He has to give directions—”

  “I understand what’s being said, Francie.” He closed the car door, opened the window a crack to let the smoke from his cigarette leave the car. Freed was talking to himself in the car about how he was going to sit there until they got going.

  Perry went into the house and found a piece of paper and wrote directions and a map. He gave it to Carl, who pocketed it and said, “Thanks. When are we welcome?”

  “Any time,” he said. “Come up as soon as you can.”

  “Thank you,” Delores said. “We can help you work on the house.”

  He nodded. He could not remember ever seeing Delores do anything with her hands.

  “Goodbye, Francie,” he said, giving her a hug. “Stop entertaining people and do your painting.”

  “I can’t see,” Carl said. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Go ahead,” Francie said. “Goodbye, Perry. Let me know where you hang the picture.”

  He hugged her again and stepped to the side, still holding her. He was clowning, clumping in his cast to do the box step. The walkway was covered with snow. The flagstones underneath the snow were slick with ice, so he hopped down the grass, feeling the snow edging over the top of his low boots.

  “It’s an odd match,” Freed said, shivering in the car. “Delores and Carl. I don’t get it.”

  “Come on, close that window,” Perry said, starting the car.

  “I’m smoking.”

  “Wait’ll I get the heat on.”

  Freed pitched the cigarette into the snow. “You think he’s still on reds?” Freed said. Before Perry could answer, Freed changed his voice. “You have to feel sorry for the little children,” he said, wobbling his head at Perry. “What will become of the little ones?” With the hood of his parka covering his head, he looked enough like a little old lady to make Perry laugh. “What the fuck did I do to deserve having my car stolen?”

  Freed lit another cigarette. “Tonight when I saw Del I wished I had her back,” he said. “It makes me sad that I still don’t have any sense.”

  “Delores is okay now.”

  “She might look it, but she’ll never be okay. You think Carl is still swallowing pills?”

  “If he is, they aren’t keeping him too alert.”

  “They looked good. Tired, but okay. Del looked good.” Freed sighed. He pushed the tape into the tape deck, listened a second, then rewound to Gatemouth Brown doing “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

  “You forgive me for cheering for the Red Sox?” Freed said. He opened the window a crack. “Where’s my car?” he said. “It could be anywhere.”

  (They finally went to Alexandria, Virginia, to get Freed’s car. The police found it after
four days. At the start of the ride Freed had said, “Thank you very much for doing this,” but Freed had let him pay for his own coffee in the machines along the highway, and Freed had not thanked him again. It was true that when Freed saw the car parked on the lot behind the police station he reached out and grabbed the crook of Perry’s arm, but that was almost certainly happiness at seeing the car rather than silent thanks to Perry. Yet on the ride back to Vermont without Freed, he had been lonesome. He and Freed had shared a motel room the night they got the car. They had eaten soggy fried shrimp in the motel dining room, and wandered around Alexandria. Freed, who always had a lot of energy, had tried to talk him into going across the bridge into Georgetown, but he wouldn’t do it, and Freed had had the nerve to sulk. He had told Freed that he didn’t feel like dragging his broken foot around that night—actually, it didn’t bother him very much, and by that time he was hardly able to remember what it had felt like not to have a broken foot. Reading a letter he had written Francie at that time but forgot to mail—a letter he found in a book—he could read between the lines of his petulance that he was already becoming antisocial.)

  In June, Beth Ann came back from Albuquerque. She found out from Francie where Perry was living and wrote down his phone number, and took a bus to the town nearest him in Vermont. He picked up his phone one night when the band was practicing—everyone’s instrument was instantly silent—and he stood there wishing they would make noise again when he realized who was on the phone. “Whether you want me or not, I’m almost to your house,” Beth Ann said. “Will you come get me?”

  He went to the drugstore where the bus had left her off, and got her. She had on a black cap and a trench coat. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her skin was filmed with sweat, as if she had walked to Vermont instead of taking the bus. They walked back to his car without touching. “I actually knew your number,” she said. “The reason I called Francie first was to see if she was still living in New Hampshire, or if she had moved here with you.”

  “She’s still in New Hampshire,” he said. “What made you think she’d be with me?”

  “Everybody knows how you feel about Francie except Francie. Or maybe she pretends not to know. I don’t know.”

  “Francie’s having a show in New York next month,” he said.

  “I don’t want to be filled in on the news.”

  “Should I talk about politics?”

  “Do you read the newspaper?” she said. “What’s the point of being so isolated if you pick up the paper?”

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  They drove without speaking all the way back to the house. He was glad that T.W.’s band was there because that would give him something to do other than listen to whatever she had to say. They would be eating dinner by the time they got back—he could sit down and eat, and not talk much.

  “T.W.’s band is at my place,” he said.

  When they got inside, T.W. was on the phone. “Here he is, wait a minute,” T.W. said, holding the phone out to Perry. “There’s Beth Ann!” T.W. said, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “Good to see you.”

  Perry was talking to Nick, who had just become a father—a long, blurted story about how Anita was all right and how they had an enormous baby that Anita and the midwife hadn’t been able to deliver at home. “They took her out in the ambulance bent like a boomerang,” Nick said. It sounded as if he was crying. “This kid is eleven pounds and some ounces, I can’t remember how many. One, I think. The kid looks like he’s ready to take off crawling.”

  “Well, congratulations, Nick. What are you naming him?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t written down anything yet. Call me back if you think of a good name.”

  He hung up. “Nick and Anita had a baby,” he said to Beth Ann.

  “Hey,” said T.W., “you ought to see Delores’ kid now, Beth Ann. She’s the prettiest little girl I’ve ever seen. Delores is living in New Hampshire with Carl Fellows, on a farm his grandfather used to run. I think they’re getting married. Is that right, Perry?”

  Perry shrugged.

  “Hey, what happened to Zack?” T.W. asked.

  Perry rolled his eyes, and not wanting to hear, he started for the kitchen, where two people from the band were cooking spaghetti sauce. He heard her say, “Zack is dead.”

  “What are you talking about?” T.W. said.

  “He fell off a rock in the Sandia Range. I’m not kidding you.”

  “What did you say?” Dickie said, coming out of the kitchen, dripping tomato sauce from a spoon.

  “He really is,” Beth Ann said. “He’s dead.”

  “Is he buried?” T.W. said. Perry looked at T.W., wondering why he asked such a thing.

  “Of course,” Beth Ann said.

  “Where?” T.W. said.

  “In Albuquerque.”

  “He is not dead,” Dickie said. “Look at her: she’s smiling.”

  “I’m smiling because it’s so horrible, and because I told you in such an awful way.” She was no longer smiling. She went over to the sofa where Perry had just sat down and slumped beside him. “He’s been dead for four months,” she said.

  “Fuck it!” Dickie said. “Fuck it—he didn’t fall off a mountain.”

  “I don’t know,” Roger said. Roger had just come out of the kitchen. He had joined the band a little while before and hadn’t known Zack.

  “Oh fuck it!” Dickie said, and walked to the front door and went outside. Roger went after him and looked out the door for a minute, then quietly closed it.

  “Why didn’t you call us?” Perry said.

  “I wasn’t thinking. It didn’t even hit me that I had no reason to be in Albuquerque until a few days ago. I sat around a rented room for four months. I called his parents, and they came out and put on a funeral. It was horrible. His mother was taking sedatives, and we all had to hold her up for three days so she wouldn’t fall over. When she left she said to me, ‘I’m not even going to see you again, ever in my life,’ as though I was her kid.”

  The phone rang. Perry picked it up. “We’re naming her Belinda,” Nick said. “This is really embarrassing, but the baby’s a girl. I don’t know what I was talking about. I haven’t had any sleep for almost two days.”

  “Tell Anita we’re happy,” Perry said. “T.W. and the band are here. We’ll come around soon and inspect the kid and see for ourselves if it has a penis.”

  “What’s he talking about?” T.W. said to Beth Ann.

  Perry hung up. He sat on the floor by the phone, thinking of all the times he’d cursed Zack. He hoped that he had never said that he wished he would fall off a mountain.

  “I’m going to eat dinner,” Roger said. “If anybody else can eat, they’re welcome.”

  They sat in the living room, smelling the sauce. T.W. pulled a guitar slide out of his case. Joints were tightly packed inside it. He looked at it and said, “I guess that’s not the thing to do,” put it in his pocket, and got up and went into the kitchen. Perry and Beth Ann could hear Roger, feigning cheerfulness, saying, “Would you like me to get you some spaghetti?”

  “Maybe I ought to go after Dickie,” Beth Ann said.

  Dickie came back, with leaves and mud and bark sticking to him, as they were finishing dinner. He bit into a piece of cold garlic bread. He tore a square of paper towel from the roll that was in the center of the table and rubbed it over his face. “What was that spastic asshole doing climbing mountains?” he said.

  The phone rang, and no one got up to answer it.

  Roger went to the door the next evening, when Delores and Carl showed up. The others had organized a softball game on a neighbor’s field, but Roger had been feeling sick to his stomach, and he had stayed around for Borka’s arrival. Borka played electric bass with the band, and he was thinking about moving in on her. He loved her wavy gold hair and the little pierced earrings she wore, a moon in one ear and a star in the other. She had won his heart when she did an imitation of Viva in Bike Bo
y for an audience in a bar between sets, calling Bike Boy an “old movie.” When he went to answer the door, he thought it was her. It was Delores and Carl, and he didn’t know who they were. They introduced themselves and came in and sprawled on the sofa, and alternately commented on how nice the house was and argued about whether it was wrong to have left Meagan with Francie. Carl said it was, and Delores said that Meagan knew very well who Francie was, and was just bluffing when they left. Roger told them that he would have to excuse himself (he had been lying on the couch before they took it over) to go stretch out because his stomach felt funny. “Papaya leaf tea,” Delores said and instantly pulled a box from her canvas bag. She went into the kitchen and brewed it for him. Roger began to formulate questions to find out who they were.

  “Who are you?” Carl finally said to him.

  “I’m Roger. I play trumpet with the band.”

  “You look familiar,” Carl said. “Did I see you some other time with another band?”

  “I doubt it,” Roger said. “I haven’t played with a group for a long time.” What he didn’t tell Carl was that he had been in the seminary. He realized that that always stopped conversation, and he had been trying hard not to say it to people.

  “Who are you?” Roger said to Carl.

  “Hello, look at this,” Perry said, coming into the house. There was a grass stain down the side of his khakis and he had torn the knee of his pants.

  “Is there room for us?” Delores called from the kitchen. “We tried to call you twice this morning, but everybody must have been out.”

  “Sure,” Perry said.

  He looked around. “Where’s Meagan?” he said.

  “We were visiting Francie and we left her there. Carl thinks I’m a bad mother.”

  Carl looked away and said nothing.

  “She’s with Francie?” Perry echoed. “Well, have you two eaten? We were going to drive into town and get a pizza.”