Secrets & Surprises

by Ann Beattie

  Another Tuesday night I went out and bought plants. I used my American Express card and got seventy dollars’ worth of plants and some plant hangers. The woman in the store helped me carry the boxes out to the car. I went home and drove nails into the top of the window frames and hung the plants. They did not need to be watered yet, but I held the plastic plant waterer up to them, to see what it would be like to water them. I squeezed the plastic bottle and stared at the curved plastic tube coming out of it. Later I gave myself a facial with egg whites.

  There is a mouse. I first saw it in the kitchen—a small gray mouse, moseying along, taking its time in getting from under the counter to the back of the stove. I had Dan seal off the little mouse hole in the back of the stove. Then I saw the mouse again, under the chest in the living room.

  “It’s a mouse. It’s one little mouse,” Dan said. “Let it be.”

  “Everybody knows that if there’s one mouse, there are more,” I said. “We’ve got to get rid of them.”

  Dan, the humanist, was secretly glad the mouse had resurfaced—that he hadn’t done any damage in sealing off its home.

  “It looked like the same mouse to me,” Henry said.

  “They all look that way,” I said. “That doesn’t mean—”

  “Poor thing,” Dan said.

  “Are either of you going to set traps, or do I have to do it?”

  “You have to do it,” Dan said. “I can’t stand it. I don’t want to kill a mouse.”

  “I think there’s only one mouse,” Henry said.

  Glaring at them, I went into the kitchen and took the mousetraps out of their cellophane packages. I stared at them with tears in my eyes. I did not know how to set them. Dan and Henry had made me seem like a cold-blooded killer.

  “Maybe it will just leave,” Dan said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Dan,” I said. “If you aren’t going to help, at least don’t sit around snickering with Henry.”

  “We’re not snickering,” Henry said.

  “You two certainly are buddy-buddy.”

  “What’s the matter now? You want us to hate each other?” Henry said.

  “I don’t know how to set a mousetrap,” I said. “I can’t do it myself.”

  “Poor Mommy,” Joanna said. She was in the hallway outside the living room, listening. I almost turned on her to tell her not to be sarcastic, when I realized that she was serious. She felt sorry for me. With someone on my side, I felt new courage about going back into the kitchen and tackling the problem of the traps.

  Dianne called and said she had asked her husband if he would go out one night a week so she could go out with friends or stay home by herself. He said no, but agreed to take stained-glass lessons with her.

  One Tuesday it rained. I stayed home and daydreamed, and remembered the past. I thought about the boy I dated my last year in high school who used to take me out to the country on weekends, to where some cousins of his lived. I wondered why he always went there, because we never got near the house. He would drive partway up their long driveway in the woods and then pull off onto a narrow little road that trucks sometimes used when they were logging the property. We parked on the little road and necked. Sometimes the boy would drive slowly along on the country roads looking for rabbits, and whenever he saw one, which was pretty often—sometimes even two or three rabbits at once—he floored it, trying to run the rabbit down. There was no radio in the car. He had a portable radio that got only two stations (soul music and classical) and I held it on my lap. He liked the volume turned up very loud.

  Joanna comes to my bedroom and announces that Uncle Bobby is on the phone.

  “I got a dog,” he says.

  “What kind?”

  “Aren’t you even surprised?”

  “Yes. Where did you get the dog?”

  “A guy I knew a little bit in college is going to jail, and he persuaded me to take the dog.”

  “What is he going to jail for?”

  “Burglary.”

  “Joanna,” I say, “don’t stand there staring at me when I’m talking on the phone.”

  “He robbed a house,” Bobby says.

  “What kind of a dog is it?” I ask.

  “Malamute and German shepherd. It’s in heat.”

  “Well,” I say, “you always wanted a dog.”

  “I call you all the time, and you never call me,” Bobby says.

  “I never have interesting news.”

  “You could call and tell me what you do on Tuesday nights.”

  “Nothing very interesting,” I say.

  “You could go to a bar and have rum drinks and weep,” Bobby says. He chuckles.

  “Are you stoned?” I ask.

  “Sure I am. Been home from work for an hour and a half. Ate a Celeste pizza, had a little smoke.”

  “Do you really have a dog?” I ask.

  “If you were a male dog, you wouldn’t have any doubt of it.”

  “You’re always much more clever than I am. It’s hard to talk to you on the phone, Bobby.”

  “It’s hard to be me,” Bobby says. A silence. “I’m not sure the dog likes me.”

  “Bring it over. Joanna will love it.”

  “I’ll be around with it Tuesday night,” he says.

  “Why is it so interesting to you that I have one night a week to myself?”

  “Whatever you do,” Bobby says, “don’t rob a house.”

  We hang up, and I go tell Joanna the news.

  “You yelled at me,” she says.

  “I did not. I asked you not to stand there staring at me while I was on the phone.”

  “You raised your voice,” she says. Soon it will be Tuesday night.

  Joanna asks me suspiciously what I do on Tuesday nights.

  “What does your father say I do?” I ask.

  “He says he doesn’t know.”

  “Does he seem curious?”

  “It’s hard to tell with him,” she says.

  Having got my answer, I’ve forgotten about her question.

  “So what things do you do?” she says.

  “Sometimes you like to play in your tent,” I say defensively. “Well, I like some time to just do what I want to do, too, Joanna.”

  “That’s okay,” she says. She sounds like an adult placating a child.

  I have to face the fact that I don’t do much of anything on Tuesdays, and that one night alone each week isn’t making me any less edgy or more agreeable to live with. I tell Dan this, as if it’s his fault.

  “I don’t think you ever wanted to divorce Henry,” Dan says.

  “Oh, Dan, I did.”

  “You two seem to get along fine.”

  “But we fought. We didn’t get along.”

  He looks at me. “Oh,” he says. He is being inordinately nice to me because of the scene I threw when a mouse got caught in one of the traps. The trap didn’t kill it. It just got it by the paw, and Dan had to beat it to death with a screwdriver.

  “Maybe you’d rather the two of us did something regularly on Tuesday nights,” he says now. “Maybe I could get the night of my meetings changed.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “Maybe I should give it a little longer.”

  “That’s up to you,” he says. “There hasn’t been enough time to judge by, I guess.”

  Inordinately kind. Deferential. He has been saying for a long time that our relationship is turning sour, and now it must have turned so sour for him that he doesn’t even want to fight. What does he want?

  “Maybe you’d like a night—” I begin.

  “The hell with that,” he says. “If there has to be so much time alone, I can’t see the point of living together.”

  I hate fights. The day after this one, I get weepy and go over to Dianne’s. She ends up subtly suggesting that I take stained-glass lessons. We drink some sherry and I drive home. The last thing I want is to run into her husband, who calls me “the squirrel” behind my back. Dianne says that when I call and
he answers, he lets her know it’s me on the phone by puffing up his cheeks to make himself look like a squirrel.

  Tonight Dan and I each sit on a side of Joanna’s tester bed to say good night to her. The canopy above the bed is white nylon, with small puckered stars. She is ready for sleep. As soon as she goes to sleep, Dan will be ready to talk to me. Dan has clicked off the light next to Joanna’s bed. Going out of the bedroom before him, I grope for the hall light. I remember Henry saying to me, as a way of leading up to talking about divorce, that going to work one morning he had driven over a hill and had been astonished when at the top he saw a huge yellow tree, and realized for the first time that it was autumn.

  Secrets

  and

  Surprises

  C

  orinne and Lenny are sitting at the side of the driveway with their shoes off. Corinne is upset because Lenny sat in a patch of strawberries. “Get up, Lenny! Look what you’ve done!”

  Lenny is one of my oldest friends. I went to high school with Lenny and Corinne and his first wife, Lucy, who was my best friend there. Lenny did not know Corinne then. He met her at a party many years later. Corinne remembered Lenny from high school; he did not remember her. The next year, after his divorce from Lucy became final, they married. Two years later their daughter was born, and I was a godmother. Lenny teases me by saying that his life would have been entirely different if only I had introduced him to Corinne years ago. I knew her because she was my boyfriend’s sister. She was a couple of years ahead of us, and she would do things like picking us up if we got drunk at a party and buying us coffee before taking us home. Corinne once lied to my mother when she took me home that way, telling her that there was flu going around and that I had sneezed in her car all the way home.

  I was ugly in high school. I wore braces, and everything seemed to me funny and inappropriate: the seasons, television personalities, the latest fashions—even music seemed silly. I played the piano, but for some reason I stopped playing Brahms or even listening to Brahms. I played only a few pieces of music myself, the same ones, over and over: a couple of Bach two-part inventions, a Chopin nocturne. I earnestly smoked cigarettes, and all one spring I harbored a secret love for Lenny. I once confessed my love for him in a note I pushed through the slats in his locker in school. Then I got scared and waited by his locker when school was over, talked to him for a while, and when he opened the locker door, grabbed the note back and ran. This was fifteen years ago.

  I used to live in the city, but five years ago my husband and I moved up here to Woodbridge. My husband has gone, and now it is only my house. It is my driveway that Lenny and Corinne sit beside. The driveway badly needs to be graveled. There are holes in it that should be filled, and the drainpipe is cracked. A lot of things here need fixing. I don’t like to talk to the landlord, Colonel Albright. Every month he loses the rent check I send him and then calls me from the nursing home where he lives, asking for another. The man is eighty-eight. I should consider him an amusing old character, a forgetful old man. I suspect he is persecuting me. He doesn’t want a young person renting his house. Or anyone at all. When we moved in, I found some empty clothing bags hanging in the closets, with old dry-cleaning stubs stapled to the plastic: “Col. Albright, 9–8–54.” I stared at the stub. I was eleven years old the day Colonel Albright picked up his clothes at the dry cleaners. I found one of his neckties wound around the base of a lamp in an upstairs closet. “Do you want these things?” I asked him on the phone. “Throw them out, I don’t care,” he said, “but don’t ask me about them.” I also do not tell him about things that need to be fixed. I close off one bathroom in the winter because the tiles are cracked and cold air comes through the floor; the heat register in my bedroom can’t be set above sixty, so I set the living-room register at seventy-five to compensate. Corinne and Lenny think this is funny. Corinne says that I will not fight with the landlord because I did enough fighting with my husband about his girl friend and now I enjoy peace; Lenny says that I am just too kind. The truth is that Colonel Albright shouts at me on the phone and I am afraid of him. He is also old and sad, and I have displaced him in his own house. Twice this summer, a friend has driven him from the nursing home back to the house, and he walked around the gardens in the front, tapping his cane through the clusters of sweet peas that are strangling out the asters and azaleas in the flower beds, and he dusted the pollen off the sundial in the back with a white handkerchief.

  Almost every weekend Corinne tries to get me to leave Woodbridge and move back to New York. I am afraid of the city. In the apartment on West End Avenue I lived in with my husband when we were first married, I was always frightened. There was a bird in the apartment next to ours which shrieked, “No, no, go away!” I always mistook it for a human voice in the night, and in my sleepy confusion I thought that I was protesting an intruder in our apartment. Once a woman at the laundromat who was about to pass out from the heat took hold of my arm and pulled me to the floor with her. This could have happened anywhere. It happened in New York. I won’t go back.

  “Balducci’s!” Corinne sometimes murmurs to me, and moves her arm through the air to suggest counters spread with delicacies. I imagine tins of anchovies, wheels of Brie, huge cashews, strange greens. But then I hear voices whispering outside my door plotting to break it down, and angry, wild music late at night that is the kind that disturbed, unhappy people listen to.

  Now Corinne is holding Lenny’s hand. I am lying on my side and peeking through the netting of the hammock, and they don’t see me. She stoops to pick a strawberry. He scratches his crotch. They are bored here, I think. They pretend that they make the two-hour drive up here nearly every weekend because they are concerned for my well-being. Perhaps they actually think that living in the country is spookier than living in the city. “You sent your beagle to live in the country, Corinne,” I said to her once. “How can you be upset that a human being wants to live where there’s room to stretch?” “But what do you do here all alone?” she said.

  I do plenty of things. I play Bach and Chopin on a grand piano my husband saved for a year to buy me. I grow vegetables, and I mow the lawn. When Lenny and Corinne come for the weekend, I spy on them. He’s scratching his shoulder now. He calls Corinne to him. I think he is asking her to see if he just got a mosquito bite.

  Last year when my husband went on vacation without me, I drove from Connecticut to D.C. to visit my parents. They live in the house where I grew up. The crocheted bedspreads have turned yellow now and the bedroom curtains are the same as ever. But in the living room there is a large black plastic chair for my father and a large brown plastic chair for my mother. My brother, Raleigh, who is retarded, lives with them. He has a friend, Ed, who is retarded, and who visits him once a week. And Raleigh visits Ed once a week. Sometimes my mother or Ed’s mother takes them to the zoo. Raleigh’s chatter often makes more sense than we at first suspected. For instance, he is very fond of Ling-Ling, the panda. He was not imitating the bell the Good Humor man rings when he drives around the neighborhood, as my father once insisted. My father has never been able to understand Raleigh very well. My mother laughs at him for his lack of understanding. She is a bitter woman. For the last ten years, she has made my father adhere to a diet when he is home, and he is not overweight.

  When I visited, I drove Raleigh down to Hains Point, and we looked across the water at the lights. In spite of being retarded, he seems very moved by things. He rolled down the window and let the wind blow across his face. I slowed the car almost to a stop, and he put his hand on my hand, like a lover. He wanted me to stop the car entirely so he could look at the lights. I let him look for a long time. On the way home I drove across the bridge into Arlington and took him to Gilford’s for ice cream. He had a banana split, and I pretended not to notice when he ate the toppings with his fingers. Then I washed his fingers with a napkin dipped in a glass of water.

  One day I found him in the bathroom with Daisy, the dog, combing over her body
for ticks. There were six or seven ticks in the toilet. He was concentrating so hard that he never looked up. Standing there, I realized that there was now a small bald spot at the top of his head, and that Daisy’s fur was flecked with gray. I reached over him and got aspirin out of the medicine cabinet. Later, when I went back to the bathroom and found Raleigh and Daisy gone, I flushed the toilet so my parents would not be upset. Raleigh sometimes drops pieces of paper into the toilet instead of into the wastebaskets, and my mother goes wild. Sometimes socks are in the toilet. Coins. Pieces of candy.

  I stayed for two weeks. On Mondays, before his friend Ed came, Raleigh left the living room until the door had been answered, and then acted surprised to see Ed and his mother. When I took him to Ed’s house, Ed did the same thing. Ed held a newspaper in front of his face at first. “Oh—hello,” Ed finally said. They have been friends for almost thirty years, and the visiting routine has remained the same all that time. I think that by pretending to be surprised, they are trying to enhance the quality of the experience. I play games like this with Corinne when I meet her in the city for lunch. If I get to our table first, I study the menu until she’s right on me; sometimes, if I wait outside the restaurant, I deliberately look at the sidewalk, as if lost in thought, until she speaks.