by Ann Beattie
He had always known how to start things, but he had never known how to stop things. The nice thing about the tiny pill was that it would only make a drink foam for fifteen seconds.
Three
“DADDY,” John Joel said, “she calls me Prince Piss and Monkey Meat.”
“Your father doesn’t want to be nagged at, John Joel. Forget it,” Louise said.
“Yeah,” Mary said. “He wants you to be quiet. Go climb a tree and dribble spit. We want you out of here.”
“That’s enough,” Mary’s father said.
Under one arm, Mary’s mother, Louise, was carrying a Styrofoam cooler filled with hot dogs and Tab and a bottle of Chablis, the pretzels and potato chips piled on the lid so they wouldn’t get wet. She held her five-year-old’s hand. He pulled on her arm, wanting to pull her, it seemed, to the center of the earth. John, their father, carried a shopping bag with some charcoal, lighter fluid, a radio, a pack of True cigarettes, the late edition of the New York Times and a towel.
They were at the park for a cookout. Nobody had wanted to come, except Brandt, the baby. He was hoping that the three-legged dog would be there. The dog could do everything: It could run, swim, fetch sticks. Brandt was half interested in sighting the dog, half interested in seeing if he could pull his mother over.
“Say anything you want to your brother about his ugly face, but lay off about his weight. Understand?” John said to Mary.
Peter Frampton, on her T-shirt, was looking straight ahead. She nodded yes.
“What about here?” Louise said. “That’s a nice grove back from the road.”
“Closer to the water,” John said.
“Daddy-” John Joel said.
“Are you going to start complaining again when I just told you to be quiet?” Louise said.
“What is it?” John said.
“Daddy, how many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
“That’s not what he was going to say,” Mary said. “He was going to nag.”
“I don’t give a shit about feminists,” John said. “I don’t send my secretary for coffee, I go get it myself. Today I walked down the hall to the machine, and it was being repaired. I didn’t say anything. I looked disappointed for a second, I suppose. The person repairing it was a woman. ‘Oh, just send your girl down in about five minutes,’ she said. Very sarcastic.”
“Four,” John Joel said.
The baby screamed, so he didn’t get to say his joke. The baby screamed because his mother had let go of his hand, making him stumble to regain his balance. He knew that if he screamed his father would start screaming at his mother. He had tried to pull her over, and she was stronger: She had almost gotten him to go down.
John didn’t say anything. He kept walking. He slapped the back of his neck to kill a mosquito.
“Daddy, it takes four,” John Joel said.
“Why does it take four?” John said.
“One to do it and three to write books about it.”
“You think that’s funny? You should work with women today,” John said. “You will. You’ll get your chance.”
“I think that one thing women don’t like is having men generalize about all women,” Louise said.
“Women don’t like anything.”
“Not even nice soapy dishwater and darning tiny little booties?”
“Where’d you learn the snappy comebacks? Exercise class?”
“Pay no attention to me,” Louise said. “Women go crazy during their periods.”
“At least you’re not so crazy you’re pregnant.”
“I impregnated myself the other three times,” Louise said, “but now I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t do that again all by myself.”
“Dad, look! Is that a snake? Is that a crushed snake?”
“Look at the shape of it. Does that look like a snake to you?”
It was a squashed frog, with a wasp hovering over it. A bee joined the wasp. The frog had been recently squashed.
“Don’t just stand there, John Joel. Come on,” Louise said.
“He’s too fat to walk anymore,” Mary said.
“I got through to you very well when I spoke to you a minute ago, didn’t I?”
Mary lifted a strand of hair from behind her ear, stroked it and twisted it around her finger. She wished she had hair that hung in long waves and curls like Peter Frampton’s girlfriend’s. She had just seen a picture of the two of them at a Hollywood party. Their hair was more noticeable than it might have been because the photographer had gotten so close to snap them that their features had been washed out. It was almost like looking at people without faces, but Peter Frampton’s expression, however faint, was unmistakable: the expression on the poster. Peter Frampton and his girlfriend—the paper identified her only as his “lady love”—would have thought that this scene was hopelessly bourgeois. If Peter Frampton went on a picnic, Mary was sure that he went naked, in a speedboat, to some private island at midnight, with the lady love and a bottle of champagne. He wouldn’t be seen dead in a button-down shirt hanging out of a pair of baggy jeans, with a bag full of things to have a barbecue with and a wife and three children trailing behind him. On Peter Frampton’s picnic, he would want to pour champagne on the lady love’s nipples and lap off the sweet, tiny bubbles; he wouldn’t want to find out how many feminists it took to change a light bulb.
She had bought a pen and ink and a book about calligraphy so that she could write a love letter to Peter Frampton.
Stupid Lost in the Forest had had a tantrum when nobody had any idea why Becky had thrown away the dictionary in the first chapter of Vanity Fair. “You probably think that getting rid of a book that heavy would just be common sense,” she had said. She had threatened to make them write essays called “What I Did with My Summer.” Even Lost in the Forest, much as Mary hated to admit it, was probably having a better summer than she was. She was on her own, and if her parents were somewhere having a barbecue, she didn’t have to go along. She could stay home and read one of her precious books and understand every word of it. Even reading a book would be better than coming to the park on Friday evening and eating hot dogs, with mosquitoes closing in as it got dark, and nobody with anything to say. Her father was deliberately walking them this far on the path by the side of the access road so they would be tired when they got to just the place he wanted them to be, and nobody would talk, and he could read the paper and listen to the radio. Her mother knew it, too. Her mother was glaring at his back as he walked ahead of them. Brandt was swinging on John Joel’s arm, singing “Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the Af-ri-can ex-plorer… ” He lived with his grandmother, John’s mother, and he watched television all the time. He knew a lot of routines from Marx Brothers movies. Last week he had driven everybody crazy by putting one leg up for them to hold, and when they swatted it down, bobbing his leg up again. He was also able to imitate, perfectly, Harpo’s eye roll and Groucho’s walk. He did it so often that Louise was embarrassed, worried that people would think he was retarded. She was always worried that somebody would think one of her children was retarded. She was also worried that neighbors would see in her windows. Never mind that no neighbors could see through the tall fir trees that bordered their lawn, and that there was a huge lot between their house and the Dowells’: The neighbors would see from the road, driving home. See what?
John spent the weekends at home. The rest of the week he lived with his mother in Rye, and Brandt and Henri the big black poodle lived with them. John had gone there, in part, because his mother said she had cancer when she didn’t. When he found out the truth, he didn’t much care: Rye was a short drive to New York, and he hated commuting.
At first he had gone alone, and then he had returned for the poodle. There had been two dogs, and suddenly, when they were both five years old, one of them (at least) had started shitting in the house. Louise had been convinced that it was the poodle. She had always liked the German shepherd better. But an experiment with bl
ue food coloring in the poodle’s food had pinned the blame on the shepherd, and the next weekend John had taken the unfairly maligned poodle with him to Rye.
He went to stay with his mother, at first, because she had said she was dying. What she said was cancer was only anemia, though, and now she took pills and cooked in an iron pot, and her anemia was just fine. When he first went to his mother’s, Louise was sick with the flu, so he took the baby—partly to relieve Louise, partly to cheer up his mother. When they were both better, Brandt stayed. It was argued about for a year, and then they stopped arguing. For the last two years, they hadn’t talked much. The shepherd had been hit by a car.
Mary thought that Lost in the Forest might like to hear how her father came home on Friday evening and left on Sunday night, and about how the housebroken poodle was with her grandmother and her younger brother—all of them together in Rye with the Marx Brothers running amok on the tube. The situation was embarrassing, and Mary wouldn’t have minded embarrassing Lost in the Forest.
She wondered with what emotion Lost in the Forest would read the essay: the way she read “The Pardoner’s Tale,” smiling at every word, or the way she sounded self-righteous, reading “All happy families are alike… ” That was pretty good. Mary remembered that one. The rest of the book probably fell off, but that was a zinger.
“Daddy,” John Joel said, “make him stop.”
“Stop,” John said tonelessly. Probably John Joel didn’t even hear that his father had responded. Mary heard him, because she was walking close behind him.
“Stop it!” Louise said, whirling so suddenly on Brandt, who was pulling his brother’s arm, that both John Joel and Brandt stopped walking. “Walk with me,” she said to Brandt.
Brandt turned and ran into the road.
John put down his bag and ran after him. He caught him before he made it around the curve. Mary braced herself for Brandt’s scream, but John just hoisted him on his shoulders, and Brandt laughed, either because he was relieved, or just because he was enjoying the ride. No doubt about who was the favorite child in the family.
“I’m not carrying this thing another mile to humor you,” Louise said to John, when he and Brandt came up beside her. “If you don’t want to have the picnic at the next bench, I’m going back to the car.”
A car passed them and turned into the next picnic area.
“Not my fault,” John shrugged.
“Not that you’re not happy they’re there,” Louise said.
The car bumped over pebbles and onto the grass. As they passed by, music was already playing loudly and two boys were throwing cans of beer to two girls who had gotten out of the car. They were trying to go into the woods, but the beer cans kept sailing at them.
“They’re going to explode!” one of the girls hollered. “Stop it.”
The beer cans kept flying. Once Mary had seen a comedy routine on television when the comic had thrown balls offstage, throwing carefully into somebody’s hand, no sound because there were no misses, and then as he was about to toss another ball, all the balls came flying back, knocking him over. She couldn’t remember how it ended.
“Cut it out!” the girl screamed again. The other girl had run into the woods.
Beer cans kept flying at the girl. She was dodging them, after she had caught one can in each hand. She was trying to keep away from them, backing into the woods, backing up because she didn’t want to get hit in the back.
“Lovely little bit of Americana,” John said to Louise when they passed the boys.
John had put Brandt down, and he scurried away, looking left and right, doing his flat-footed Groucho shuffle.
“Your mother’s turning him into a great intellectual,” Louise said.
“He’s five years old.”
“I remember how old he is. Little as I see him, and small as my brain is, I am able to store some facts away.”
“Go ahead and be a bitch,” he said.
“Thank you for encouraging me to grow in new directions,” Louise said.
Mary passed them. John Joel was lagging behind, panting as they began to go up another hill. Brandt had picked up a stick and was pretending it was a cigar, tapping the top of it, rolling his eyes and talking to himself.
“Mary,” Louise called, “why don’t you carry this cooler the rest of the way?”
“Because I don’t even want to be on this picnic,” she said.
“Come here and get it and carry it,” her father said. “Please.”
Mary stopped and let them catch up with her. When they did, she took the cooler. “I guess I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to be on this picnic,” she said.
“Where would everybody like to be?” John said. “Just where would everybody like to be? You want a pizza? You want Chinese? What? I didn’t hear that nobody wanted to be on this picnic until we were on the picnic.”
“This isn’t a picnic,” Louise said. “This is walking around and getting sweaty. Which is okay, if you’re in the mood for that.”
“What would you rather be doing, Louise?”
“It doesn’t matter what I would rather be doing.”
“Just tell me,” he said. “Tell me, and stop right here, and I’ll go get the car and chauffeur you wherever you want to go.”
“Magnanimous,” Louise said. “You’re only here two nights a week, but it’s the quality, not the quantity.”
“Where?” he said. “Where do you want to go?”
“Oh, maybe you could drop me at exercise class. I like that a lot. I can socialize with Tiffy Adamson and Marge Pendergast and I can wonder along with everybody else what it feels like for Marge to do those stretch exercises with no tits. I can pick up some more smart talk. Or you could drop me at the hospital and I could see if Marlene’s father’s leg ulcer is clearing up. It’s not New York, but there’s a world of excitement out here in suburbia. I read in the paper today that a deer got hit crossing the road. We could call the police barracks and find out where the deer was buried and make a pilgrimage to its grave. It was probably escaping from New York when it had its accident.”
“Don’t kid yourself. Whatever cop pronounced it dead is eating it tonight.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s not entirely civilized out here in the woods. Everyone has to make do.”
“I asked you at Christmas if you wanted to get an apartment in the city.”
“You’re going to put them all in private school?” she said.
Mary was far enough ahead of them so that she didn’t have to hear the answer. She wished she had gone to Angela’s for dinner, even if it would have meant listening to Angela’s father trying to convince both of them to do well in summer school so they could get into good colleges and become lawyers. He wanted everybody to be a lawyer. Angela’s mother was taking courses in law at night. During the day she worked selling real estate. Mary wanted to do well in English just so she would never have to read, or have read to her, another book. It was for sure that Peter Frampton didn’t sit around reading first chapters of famous books. You could bet that Peter Frampton’s business manager didn’t bore the lady love by lecturing her about going to law school.
Her parents called to her. Finally, her father had found the place he wanted to have the cookout. Her mother was already sitting at the wooden bench, opening the bottle of wine. If this was like the last cookout, her mother wouldn’t eat anything, and she would make a scene if Brandt refused to eat. Brandt liked hamburgers instead of hot dogs. Tonight there were hot dogs.
John threw a match on the coals. Small blue flames spread through the coals. He watched until a streak of flame went up.
“How many men does it take to light a barbecue?” John said to John Joel.
“How many?” he said.
“One,” John said. “One supremely confident and competent man. Your dad. Don’t forget that Father’s Day is the seventeenth.”
John Joel laughed.
“They’re all as materialistic as you ar
e,” Louise said. “They’re not likely to forget. They’ll have to think hard about what’s presentable but inexpensive. Isn’t that right, my loves?”
She had started drinking the Chablis. She was staring at the coals burning down.
“The eternal flame blew out at Kennedy’s grave,” she said. “It does it all the time, but they keep it hushed up.” She took another sip of wine. She ran her hand across the picnic table, lightly, so she wouldn’t get a splinter. “If there was one thing I could have tonight,” she said, trailing her fingertip along the wood, “do you know what it would be? Mister Blue brought back to life. I’d like to be playing ‘get the stick’ with my dog.”
