by Ann Beattie
“I don’t want to talk,” he said. He had also just realized that the window on his side was rolled up. He put it down and put his elbow out the window. He tried to rest his head on his arm, but that made his head pound worse.
“I’d sympathize if I thought this had to do with your emotions,” she said, “but at the risk of making you mad, I’ll say it anyway: You should tell them to hold the MSG. MSG gives you headaches.”
The air was almost cold. He waited for her to tell him to put up the window, but she didn’t. He opened his eyes and looked at her, finally. Her short hair was lifted by the breeze, but it just fluttered in place; there was no way for it to tangle, no strand long enough to blow forward and obscure her face. She had on lipstick. She had had an argument with him, and eaten, and talked on the phone, and through it all, her lips were not their real color. They were pinker. A color pink he didn’t see women wear anymore, but he thought it was preferable to the red-black lipstick women in the office wore. Their nails were always painted the color of a bruise.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t see any reason why we can’t go to Nantucket.”
“Agreeable of you,” she said. “I’m surprised. Should I press my luck?”
“Why not? Go ahead.”
“It’s either you or me, and I would rather that you do it. Someone has to speak to Mary’s teacher. She won’t get credit for the course if she gets a D, and all of her papers but one are D’s.”
“What’s the matter with her?” he said.
“Ask her teacher.”
“Okay,” he said. “When?”
“Call and make an appointment.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Remember when she was born and you used to blow on the fuzz on top of her head and she liked it so well she’d close her eyes?”
She stopped on the hill above the marina and got out. He sat there while she climbed on the hood of the car again and looked at the boats bobbing. A man and a woman were dancing on the deck of one, in their bathing suits, to “Heart of Glass” on a portable radio. Down the road, he could see the cluster of cars at the soft ice-cream stand. A big black dog, the sort of dog a boy would run away with, knapsack on his back, in a Norman Rockwell painting, bounded down the middle of the street. No cars came by. He made it to the ice-cream stand, a boy about eight years old trailing behind him with a leash. It was almost dark, and he worried for both the boy and the dog. Louise was watching them, too. Probably she was thinking about her dog that had died. Years ago, before she decided that fishing was cruel, she used to fish at the marina, from the base of the hill, or from the Pendergasts’ boat. The dog went with her and sat, quiet and panting, and leaped with joy when she pulled up a fish. Then he would lick it and guard it as it flopped. The dog had immense respect for Louise, and Louise for the dog.
He got out and sat beside her. The people on the boat were summer people. The Pendergasts’ boat was there, but they weren’t on it. He was glad, because he did not want to have a drink with anybody. He thought that an ice cream would taste good. He asked Louise if she wanted to walk down.
“In a minute,” she said.
He watched her watching the boats. Her eyes were still red, and she didn’t seem to care what she looked like. She had brushed up against something and gotten dirt on her leg. She ignored him as he looked at her. Finally he looked away, into the water, almost still, inky and still, lit up by the three-quarter moon.
After a while they walked to the ice-cream stand. The big black dog was there, hanging around, begging for ice cream. The boy with the leash was nowhere around. John asked a little boy in line ahead of him if he knew where the dog’s owner was. “Nope,” the boy said. The dog was staring at John. If the dog was still there when he got to the window, he was going to buy it a dish of ice cream.
The dog was still there. He got it a large dish of vanilla, and he and Louise got vanilla cones. The dog almost dove into the dish. “Hey! Lookit the stupid dog!” one boy said, and John almost exploded. “Leave the dog alone,” he managed to say, calmly. He stood there while the boy and his friend backed off. They had been about to grab the dog’s dish. John half wished that he had let them, and that the dog had bitten them. The dog slurped and slurped. Melted ice cream ran down John’s wrist, because he forgot to keep turning the cone and licking.
As they were walking away, a girl got out of a car giggling. A boy jumped out the other side, and then another boy. It was the two Bergman boys. Andy with his long mane of nearly white hair, cowboy shirt unbuttoned except for one button above his cowboy belt. The buckle was enormous, shaped like Texas, mother-of-pearl, surrounded by a thick silver rim. Andy was the errant son— the last John had heard, Andy had flunked out of his second college and was doing lights for a band in New York. Lloyd was almost as tall as his brother, but without the mane of hair. He had on yellow aviator glasses, and he had caught up with the laughing girl and was pretending to be about to grab her, lunging and zigzagging from side to side like a basketball player blocking a shot. She had something she wasn’t giving him, and John might have found out what it was if Andy Bergman hadn’t recognized him and said hello. Then the game stopped. Angela pushed her hair out of her face and said hello very properly. She had on canvas shoes with high heels, shorts, and a tight T-shirt.
“What do you think?” Louise said, walking away, licking her cone. “Is what John Joel said true? Can you really tell by looking at them?”
They walked to the car in the dark. With his tongue cold from the ice cream, his headache felt better. He leaned against the car for a minute before he got in. He would have thought no about Nina, when actually she had been attracted to him and had been waiting for him to ask. So the fact that he thought yes about Angela probably meant no. He got in the car, chewing the last of the cone.
“What you did for the dog was nice,” she said. “You didn’t really dislike Mr. Blue, did you? Why did you act like you didn’t like my dog?”
“It just got to be a standing joke. I don’t know why.”
“But you liked him.”
“Yeah. Of course I liked him.”
“I am not going to cry,” Louise said. “I am going to drive, and if I did not cry in the restaurant I am not going to cry now.”
When they were home, in the bedroom, she lay on her side, leafing through the magazine on the floor. He looked down and saw a picture of a woman standing beside a car with its door open, her hand on the door, her foot raised, resting on the doorsill, a gold buckle on her shoe. The woman was looking off to the left. She wore a scarf, long and white, the sort Isadora Duncan must have had hundreds of. The scarf dangled down the front of a maroon velvet jacket, and beneath the jacket was a long pleated skirt, as silvery as tinsel. Behind the woman was a string of fuzzy lights. A person with cataracts would have seen the lights that way, all aura and haze. The scarf was so white you couldn’t see the texture. The woman’s fingers held the edge of the scarf, as she stood with one foot in the door, one foot on the pavement, looking away.
“Vogue,” Louise said. “Care to make a comment?”
“I like the scarf,” he said.
He went into the bathroom. Through the wall he could hear, very faintly, the radio playing in Mary’s bedroom. She did not seem to be worried about flunking English in summer school. He supposed that it was his obligation to Mary to confront her teacher and say: She told me that Vanity Fair was about how things just fall into place. She’s fifteen years old and she knows that. Why is she failing English? He would imply, of course, that the teacher was not attuned to Mary. Not stimulating her. He tried to imagine Mary stimulated. She was always lethargic, resigned, sarcastic—though she had been right about his sarcasm. She had been the one to end that game, at dinner: Mary grew weary of things. He wondered if she might be weary of her weariness. If yes meant no in Angela’s case, then no might mean yes in Mary’s. He shook the thought away. He took a shower, blasting himself with hot water. He took four Excedrin before he got into th
e shower. It felt as if they had lodged about six inches down his chest and were there, still and heavy, like pebbles in a pond. He soaped himself briskly. The suds came up fast. Just as fast, he rinsed them off. He cupped his hands and splashed water on his face, then held his breath and turned his face up into the spray. When he took his face out, he thought he heard “Heart of Glass,” but when he turned the water off, he realized that what he had been hearing had been a man’s voice on the radio. It was not “Heart of Glass” for the second time that day, the millionth time this summer, after all. Nick had told him that once in Boston, years ago, he had been out of money and out of food, and the woman he lived with had left to keep bees with a sixty-year-old ex-professor of Slavic languages, and his eighteen-year-old sister had just put her baby up for adoption, and the girl he had hoped would be his new girl had called to say she had drawn night duty for the rest of the week. He had been sprawled in the hot Boston apartment he shared with four other people, the window in his room jammed so that it would open only a couple of inches, wearing the same clothes he had worn for four days, with a slow, drumming toothache coming on and no money, late at night. The people in the apartment next door had come home and they had been laughing, and he knew that pretty soon he was going to have to listen to them, having more fun on their mattress than he was having on his, and the most he had been able to do was roll to the far side of his mattress. And then two amazing things had happened. A breeze had started, as strong as the low speed of a fan, a breeze after days of nothing but still air; and at the same time, from the apartment next door, a song so beautiful that he had wept but decided to stay alive: Diana Ross singing “Everything’s Good About You.” Nick credited the breeze and the song with saving his life. Nick was only five years younger than he was, but when Nick told stories like that, it broke his heart, as much as his heart broke when something terrible happened to one of his children. Actually, nothing really terrible had ever happened. A couple of frightening runs to the emergency room with infants whose fevers rose and rose and wouldn’t break, but lately—summer school? The crisis was that Mary was not doing well in summer school. He would take care of it.
He got out of the shower and threw his sweaty clothes into the hamper, but not before removing the small package, wrapped in paper napkins, from his shirt pocket. He put it on the back of the sink, and reached in the medicine cabinet for adhesive tape and scissors. He cut off the right-size piece and taped it to the dry edge of the sink, then dried himself well and unfolded the napkins. Inside was the duck foot from the Chinese restaurant, gray and curved. He taped the duck foot securely to his penis, then put on his pajamas and went into the bedroom. If she didn’t laugh, it was really all over. It was even more all over than he had thought it could be. He got into bed and she closed the magazine and dropped it on the floor.
“Hot night,” he said.
She was lying on her back, with her eyes closed. She had combed her hair, and her lipstick was gone.
He struggled out of his pajama top. Then the bottoms. She didn’t look. He pulled the sheet over them and took her hand.
He got up on one elbow and kissed her on the forehead. She had no expression on her face, before or after.
“Hey,” he said, moving her hand down his stomach.
“Not on your life,” she said.
He kept moving her hand, until her fingers were touching the duck foot. She yanked her hand away, turned toward him, pulled back the sheet. He held his breath, trying to choke back his laughter. She looked into his eyes.
“Is this what you and the New York girls are into?” she said.
The grotesquely funny was obviously much in vogue. Women wore purple pedal pushers and hacked off their hair with a razor. A put-on. To be ugly is to be funny. To be funny is, maybe, to get through. But did he even realize that the horrible duck foot was a joke directed at himself and his own sexuality? He had changed so much. He would do things more childish than what the children did, and although he didn’t actually harm himself, there was something self-destructive in his shock tactics. A month before—three weeks before, five weeks, it didn’t matter—when there had been so much sun and the blackberry bush bore fruit so early in the summer, he had been picking up sticks in the grass before he mowed it, and she had been planting seeds in the garden. She had looked up to see him clasping his heart in mock-horror, a circular smear of red on his forehead. She had watched him lurch toward her, eyes big, the ugly red smear like a child’s finger-painting, then collapse without a word. He had mashed the blackberries and pretended to be wounded. He had been playing a game with her, but she could not imagine what part he had expected her to take. She had almost wanted to rush toward him—not because she was fooled, but just that if she grabbed him, if she got that close, she might find out something. Or break the tension. Or even laugh with him. But what he had done hadn’t really been that funny. The strangeness of it, the impetuousness with which he had acted, had convinced her that he really did have another life: not the life in Rye, but another life, a real life, a life she didn’t understand anymore. When he finally got up—slowly, like an exhausted person doing a final push-up—he had cocked his head and looked at her, and not wanting to look fazed, she had smiled at him. Just smiled. And then she had gone on sprinkling seeds, evenly, looking to see where they hit the dirt. They were so tiny that of course she couldn’t see. She would see when they came up. She would find out what was going on with John when he left her.
But Mary: What she had done, plucking her eyebrows, hadn’t been done as a joke at all. That was pathetic because it wasn’t an imitation of a joke, like pedal pushers spoofing what had been a genuinely ugly fashion; it was an imitation of what Mary really thought was beauty.
Louise rolled over in bed. She had been so upset because with her eyebrows plucked, Mary’s eyes had looked so large. They had looked so innocent. It had been an innocent gesture to pluck her eyebrows, and harmless, really. Yet when Louise saw Mary’s eyes, it had made her sadder than she had been in a long time. Sadder than she had been when John went through his crazy charade on the lawn. As much as John wanted to be a child, Mary had wanted to be a grownup, and that was even more pathetic.
Nine
DID PEOPLE ever walk into a high school, however different it might be from where they had gone to high school, and not feel, by the sight and smell of it, somehow transported through time, back to their own school?
The lockers at Mary’s school were gray metal, with built-in locks. The lockers at his school, which he would not have believed he remembered, he could envision in exact detail. They had been green metal, with padlocks, and they had had vents in the top. All that had been trapped in there had been books, yet there had been vents in the doors—a half-gesture at letting something breathe.
He was surprised that he felt nervous, that he didn’t feel on top of things, ready to talk as one adult to another. He felt like a child again. A crazy image flashed through his mind of himself, slamming a handball against the wall at the far end of the hall, slamming it and slamming it until he was caught and punished.
He took the small folded piece of paper out of his pocket. The teacher’s name was Cynthia Forrest. He had not planned what he was going to say to Cynthia Forrest. He thought that perhaps his stomach felt funny because he was hungry and hadn’t eaten, or because he had wanted to talk to Nina on the phone and he couldn’t get her. He had called Lord and Taylor’s and they had tried to connect him, but no one picked up the phone. He sent her a message, squeezing his eyes shut and making a wish: Me, Nina. Pick it up. Not some lady wanting to order stockings with gold flecks in them. Me. In Connecticut. Answer.
He walked into the classroom. He had passed only three students in the corridors—none of them kids he knew—and he hated empty places. He still hated to be the only person walking up a flight of stairs, the first person in line. Behind him, it seemed as though wind might rush in.
“You’re Mary’s father,” she said, getting up from he
r desk and putting out her hand. Her hand was light, and shaking it disturbed him. He didn’t know why. He smiled at her. His eye was drawn to her desk—the same sort of desk his teachers had had, the color of dry leaves, with nicks and scratches. Were there any desks with nice wood in schoolrooms?
“Please sit down,” she said.
He sat on one of the low desks with an inkwell. Used now for gum, of course. To hide notes, as if in the hole of a tree. He wiggled his thumb in the inkwell and felt better when his finger rested on a bump of dried gum. If you knew some of the inevitables, it kept you on top of things. Nick’s philosophy: Know as much as you can, because one tiny thing might help you. Nick knew how to tie fifteen kinds of knots.
“What can I tell you?” Cynthia said.
“I’m here because my wife and I are worried about Mary’s doing poorly in summer school. It was quite a shock that she failed English to begin with, and my wife says she isn’t doing much better now.”
Cynthia nodded and didn’t say anything.
“Why?” he said.
“Why?” Cynthia said. “One reason?”
She did not say it unkindly, but he was taken aback. He felt as ridiculous, as out of control, as he had thought he would a few minutes ago when he was walking down the hallway, reminding himself that he was one adult who would be talking to another adult.
“I know there isn’t any one reason for anything,” he said, “but I wondered if you had any ideas.”
“What does Mary say?”
He thought: She thinks of you as Lost in the Forest, but obviously you are not.
“Actually,” he said, “we were talking this past weekend, and I tried to get her to talk about one of the books you were having them read. Vanity Fair. I must say she didn’t seem eager to talk about it. I don’t think kids are comfortable talking about books when they’re her age. I know I wasn’t. But that isn’t what I started to say.”
