by Ann Beattie
He went into a coffee shop, feeling guilty for leaving John Joel alone in the doctor’s office. But he hated to treat him like a child, the way Louise did. Maybe letting him handle it on his own would give him self-confidence. He drank a black coffee, pouring a little water into the cup to cool it while two men who worked there argued about what song titles ought to be put in the jukebox. A tall fat man sitting on a stool at the counter kept whispering to them, cupping his hand over a piece of paper. “ ‘Greek selection’ is good enough,” one said, and the other hit him with a dishtowel, saying, “The songs have names. You think all Greek songs are ‘Never on Sunday’?” Finally, both men had towels and were slapping each other’s shoulders. Two women waited by the cash register. “ ‘Oh you can kiss me on a Mon-day, a Mon-day, a Mon-day,’ ” one man sang, and the tall fat man shrugged in disgust. The other man swatted the man who was dancing and singing. “Can I have a bagel and a coffee to go?” one of the women by the cash register said. “ ‘Or you can kiss me on a Tues-day, a Tues-day, a Tues-day, a Tues-day’s very good,’ ” the man sang. He was jumping in the air and clicking his heels together, hands cupped over his head. “ ‘Greek selection,’ ” the other man said. “Just write it down, and that’s that.” The tall man put his head in his hands and let it all go on. One of the women walked out, but the one who had asked for the bagel just gave her order again. John left a dollar, without asking for a check, and went out. The coffee had given him a lift. He looked up at the sky: still overcast, but a few breaks of light. He checked his watch and went to the corner and looked for a cab. Cabs came by him so fast that they looked like they had been launched. Finally he saw an empty one and hailed it. “Thirty-ninth and Fifth,” he said.
He hardly ever went into Lord and Taylor’s because it made him sad that she worked there. But he wanted to see her. He felt as if he had been running and running and had never touched base. It was a kind of anxiety that came on him lately: that he was rushing forward, but leaving something behind. Not that he could grab her over the counter at Lord and Taylor’s. And he had no idea what he was going to say when he saw her.
He leaned on the counter and waited while she folded something and handed it to a customer and thanked her. She knew he was there, but didn’t acknowledge him.
“You know what Lois Lane wonders when she’s flying with Superman?” Nina said, without showing any surprise at seeing him.
“What?”
“She’s thinking: Can you read my mind?”
“I can’t. What are you thinking?”
“That I don’t like working at Lord and Taylor’s, and I’m embarrassed for you to be here.”
“Why should you be embarrassed? Your mother is the only one who believes in success for college grads, right?”
“This place is creepy. You don’t belong here. I hope I don’t belong here.”
“Can you read my mind?” he said. “I feel like it’s been steamrollered. I feel like a tumbleweed might blow out of my ear when the winds shift in the desert in there.”
“God,” she said. “Stop it.”
“I can’t come over tonight,” he said. “John Joel’s at the orthodontist’s, and I’ve got to take him back to Rye this afternoon.”
“Then come back,” she said.
“Come back again?” he said. He hesitated. “Maybe I should have dinner with them.”
“Then do it,” she said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sit around and get stoned,” he said.
She shrugged.
“I’ll drive back in,” he said. “I’m meeting him for lunch. He and Nick and I are having lunch. Maybe that’s good enough.”
“Listen,” she said. “If you think you should have dinner with them tonight, do it.”
“He was telling me… Did you ever see those things called snakes? They’re about the size of a cigarette, and when you light them they expand and curl like a snake? I hadn’t thought about them since I was a kid. Do you know the things I’m talking about?”
“I don’t think Lord and Taylor’s carries them.”
“Come on,” he said. “You know the things I mean?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re not just saying that?”
“No. Why would I pretend to know what snakes are? The boy who lived next door to us used to light snakes. What about them?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to get some snakes and sparklers for the Fourth of July?”
“All right,” she said. “Why?”
“You sound like my kid.”
“Is this another one of your things about how much younger I am than you? Even if I am, I’m more together than you are.”
“That’s the truth.”
“Maybe you ought to go to work,” she said. She laid her hand over his.
“I was scared to death of those things,” he said. “The truth of it is that I hated caps and cherry bombs and snakes. How did I ever make it through the Army?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was barely born. Remember?”
“I want to get a snake and have you light it, okay? You light it, and this time if I feel like jumping back, I jump back.”
He realized for the first time that a woman was waiting politely beside him, holding a package of panty hose.
The de rigueur picture on the desk: Nantucket, rented boat, August vacation. The children: not the children as they really were, even then. Mary in her gingerbread-man bathing suit, wet pigtails tied with red ribbons, staring seriously into the camera; John Joel still a baby, sitting on the deck at Louise’s feet, Louise’s face a little blurred because at the last second she had moved slightly, trying to make him look into the camera. Before he was fat. When he still had his downy, shoulder-length baby hair. Louise tall and tanned, seven months pregnant, wearing a gingerbread-man bathing suit like Mary’s, but without the ruffle. And from the left, harsh sunlight, washing out the deck so that it looked as if Louise was poised on the edge of something, a woman not bending forward to direct her little boy’s attention to the lens, but moving to protect him from something more serious. At the right was the jagged shadow of the ship’s big sail. How strange that years later he would be fascinated not by the people but by the light and shadow, the light washing out one side of the photograph and the dark shadow jabbing toward them from the other side. He could not remember, and the picture did not help himremember, what it was like to take a family vacation in Nantucket. How easy to look back and see that things were ending, going wrong. Even the way shadows fell in a snapshot became symbolic.
When Mary and John Joel were asleep, they had lain in their cabin and she had curled on her side, with her back to him, and he had made love to her that way, holding her stomach in the front. They had been afraid that the children, separated from them by a wall the thickness of cardboard, would wake up, that a wave would toss the ship at the wrong moment, that it was late in the pregnancy and there might be pain.
Not true: Those were easier things to say to each other than what they were really afraid of.
Seven
MARY WAS watching as Angela dipped the tiny sable brush into the small glass bottle, wiped the brush on the lip of the bottle, then opened her mouth as though she were singing “o” and slowly outlined her top lip with the plum-colored lip gloss.
Downstairs, Angela’s father was complaining about his latest case to Angela’s mother, who was reading the evening paper and eating an apple. His ranting had driven Angela and Mary upstairs, and then they had started to fool around with Angela’s make-up.
“He lost five hundred dollars over the weekend in Saratoga,” Angela said. “And Mom says that he thinks he’s going to lose this case.”
“That looks great,” Mary said. “Your mouth is so sensual. It looks like Bianca Jagger’s.”
“I’ve got big lips,” Angela said. “I read that if you emphasize your worst features people will think they’re beauti
ful because you think they are.” Angela shrugged. She was sitting on an old piano stool, covered with red velvet, in front of an Art Deco vanity that her grandmother had given her for her birthday. Inside one of the drawers (her grandmother got the vanity at an auction) there had been a card with ten heart-shaped buttons on it, and in another drawer what was probably the veil from a hat, dotted with little white flowers that had curled into balls with age and dirt—and, best of all, scratched in the top drawer, “Richard loves Daniel.” Angela had taken the veil and the card of buttons and put them in that drawer. She opened it again to see if the message, surrounded by the big scratched heart, was still there. It was.
“He’s really fucked-up,” Angela said. “Maybe he lost a thousand dollars. Sometimes he takes a thousand.”
“Peter Frampton gets his hair curled, I think,” Mary said. “God—I wish I looked like his girlfriend. The one who sued him. She was so incredible.”
“Bobby Pendergast took Annie’s copy of ‘I’m in You’ to the park and was playing Frisbee with it. She went down there and she goes, ‘What are you doing?’ and he goes, ‘He’s a faggot.’ All those Pendergasts are creeps.”
“I don’t see why we’re sitting around waiting to be invited to a party at the last minute,” Mary said. “Big deal anyway—the Fourth of July.”
“What?” Angela said. “You’re liberated or something?” Angela was dotting on lavender eye shadow with a Q-tip. “I told you: Marcy told me that Lloyd was just being cool, and she saw that he was going to ask me to the party. The phone rang twice yesterday, and the person hung up. He’s just afraid to ask. So I’m going to sit here and assume he will.” Angela widened her eyes the way her father did when he punched words. Angela’s father was always telling them, “Get some inflection in your voice. When you talk, you’ll bore people if you don’t emphasize anything.”
“I don’t believe that he had a list drawn up of who he was inviting to this party,” Mary said. “That’s like what my mother would do. She writes notes to herself: Take trash down front.’ Jesus.”
Angela looked at her watch. It was a silver watch with single diamonds at the top and bottom of the face—another gift from her grandmother. She was waiting exactly half an hour, as she always did after dinner, for the food to settle in her stomach, but not be digested. Then she would turn up the volume on the stereo and go into the bathroom and stick her finger down her throat to vomit so she would stay thin. By the time her father shouted for the music to be turned down she would already have thrown up and flushed the toilet—she gagged a few times before she turned up the volume, then ran into the bathroom to finish the job. The lipstick she had just stroked on wasn’t the color she was going to wear to the party anyway, so that didn’t matter. And she had gotten used to the routine: She could vomit without her eyes even watering anymore. Mary was the only one she let in on her secret. Mary refused to do it with her, though. Mary hadn’t even believed her until she watched. “Models do it,” Angela said. “Lots of people do it.” “You’re a pervert,” Mary had said. But Mary thought everybody was a pervert: her brother, because he was fat; Henri, the poodle who had gone to live with Mary’s father and grandmother, because he sniffed crotches; Lloyd Bergman. Mary thought that giving hickeys was perverted. Angela had tried to find out, earlier in the day, whether Mary had ever French-kissed somebody. She knew that if she asked, Mary would tell her that she was a pervert for asking, so she had done it subtly, talking about another girl they knew. Mary didn’t say “yuck,” so Angela decided to assume that she had done it. Then her curiosity overwhelmed her, and she said, “I’m surprised you don’t think Frenching is yucky,” and Mary had said, “Not really.” Of course, that didn’t mean that Mary had done it. If she hadn’t, Angela wanted her to do it at the party. Everybody did that at Lloyd Bergman’s parties.
“We could go see Moonraker,” Mary said. “I don’t want to sit around here all night. Why would you believe his ten-year-old sister anyway?”
Angela looked in the mirror and stuck her index finger down her throat.
“Turn the music up,” Angela said. “Be helpful.”
“You are so disgusting,” Mary said.
“I don’t care,” Angela said.
“You ought to save it in a bag for Lost in the Forest.”
“That’s gross,” Angela said.
“Stop it,” Mary said. “You’re really gross.”
Angela stuck her finger down her throat again, crossing the room to turn the music louder. The record was Parallel Lines. The song was “Heart of Glass.”
Mary decided to ignore Angela; she sat on the velvet-covered piano stool and looked at the tubes and pots and cakes of eye-shadow. She decided to brush some of the gold-colored shadow over her eyes. Angela was vomiting in the bathroom.
“I can count on having to ask every night for an end to the noise, can’t I?” Angela’s father shouted from the foot of the stairs. Angela was still retching in the bathroom. Mary put down the gold-flecked brush nervously.
“Angela!” her father hollered. “Turn that down!”
Mary got up and turned it down. She was relieved that Angela, in the bathroom, had stopped gagging. Angela came out, looking fine, holding Vogue open to a page of a doberman snarling by a model’s ankle. “This magazine is really neat,” Angela said. “Your eyes look gross. That’s the worst color. Put on something nice for the party.”
“If we were going to the party, he would have called.”
“He’ll call,” Angela said.
Mary looked at Vogue. She envied Angela for having subscriptions to every fashion magazine available. They were so much more interesting than She Stoops to Conquer and Pride and Prejudice. That was all just a lot of crap, and didn’t have anything to do with the way people lived, or how they could look better.
“What do you think my worst feature is?” Mary said.
“Your eyebrows,” Angela said. “But they wouldn’t be if you’d just pluck them.”
“My mother’d kill me.”
“She wouldn’t care. She’d like it when she saw how much better you looked. You look like Talia Shire. You can pluck them, you know. The thing is right there.”
Mary picked up the tweezers. They were old and ornate: They had belonged to Angela’s grandmother’s mother. Mary knew the history of everything on Angela’s dressing table.
“I don’t know,” Mary said.
“You’re hopeless,” Angela said.
“You pull out the ones underneath, right?”
“I can’t believe you’ve never plucked one hair out of your eyebrows.”
“Big deal,” Mary said. “You criticize a lot, Angela.”
“Because I’m your friend. Nobody has naturally pretty eyebrows. If you’d tweeze them, your eyes would look bigger. Your eyes are your best feature.”
“Okay,” Mary said.
“It helps if you put an ice cube on them first,” Angela said. “Wait a minute.”
She had a small refrigerator in her room. She took an ice cube out of the tray, shaking her hands to get the flecks of ice off, putting the tray on the rug.
“Don’t drip it in my lipgloss,” Angela said, pushing one of the little pots to the back of the vanity. “You don’t have to freeze your skin pink, either. Just hold it there about ten seconds. Give it to me,” Angela said. Angela took it back to the tray and put the tray in the refrigerator.
“Just do one at a time,” she said. “Pluck mostly in the middle.”
“Now I’ll always have to pluck my eyebrows.”
“So?” Angela said. “You want to, anyway.”
“Shit,” Mary said.
“You didn’t freeze it enough,” Angela said.
“That ice felt gross. Forget it.”
“There it is,” Angela said. “I told you.”
Angela’s mother called up the stairs to Angela. Angela walked across the room and picked up the phone on her night table. “Hi,” she said. “Who’s this?… I don’t know.
Maybe.”
“Blondie,” Angela said. “Do you want me to bring it?”
“I’ll think about it,” Angela said. “If I do come, do you want me to bring Blondie?”
“Maybe,” Angela said. “What time are people getting there?”
“Mary might come with me,” Angela said. “If we come.”
When she hung up, she gave Mary a smug smile. Tears were pouring down Mary’s cheeks—mostly the pain of pulling hairs, but also a sudden flash of embarrassment that she was always tagging along with Angela, and Angela was so much prettier; she was the one the boys wanted at their parties. She went on plucking because she thought she should look good for Angela—Angela would stop bringing her along to the parties if she started thinking she was hopeless.
“I bet he was really happy when you said I was coming,” Mary said, sorry for herself.
“Listen,” Angela said. “You’re not going to believe this, but do you know what I read in Cosmopolitan? That one night Marisa Berenson and Diane von Furstenberg, before she was Diane von Furstenberg, were in Paris and they didn’t have dates for New Year’s Eve. Can you believe it? They were sitting around feeling sorry for themselves, and then the two of them went off to a party together, and years later Diane von Furstenberg married Egon von Furstenberg, and look at how famous Marisa Berenson is.”
“I’m not going to be famous,” Mary said.
“So?” Angela said. “You can still marry somebody rich. You have to look good, though. To be honest with you, you’ve got to tweeze out another whole line of hairs.”
“Do you think you’re going to be famous?”
“I think so,” Angela said. “I don’t know as what. My grandmother’s getting me singing lessons in the fall. I might join a band.”
