by Ann Beattie
“What?” Nell says. Before I can answer, she says, “I’m not going to be floating when Mommy comes home, am I?”
Lyric bursts into laughter. I give her a dirty look.
“No. Why would you think you’d be floating around?” I ask.
“Because that lady in a balloon.”
“I thought you were asleep when that went over,” I say.
“A bride edging closer to her spirit babies,” Lyric says.
This is too much for Nell. She just ignores her. But the man next to Nell has gotten interested. I see him looking at her. I see that she is aware she’s being overheard. She adjusts the top of her bikini and looks straight ahead.
The man next to Lyric turns his head. “Here on vacation?” he says.
“No,” Lyric says slowly. “This is all work related.”
There’s a pause.
“May I ask what kind of work you do?” the man asks.
“I work with computers. I set up programs to monitor the way vineyards are run.”
This exchange all happens quickly, and Lyric sounds so calm and reasonable, that I’m stunned into silence. Not that the man was flirting with me, in the first place.
“There are vineyards in Utah?”
“I’m here to meet with a client from Sonoma, who’s on vacation.”
“Really?” the man says. The longer Lyric keeps it up, the more you can see him questioning his perceptions. She might be some sort of prodigy, for all he knows.
“And what about you?” she says.
“I’m one of those people writing the great American novel,” he says. “I’m retired from Dow Corning.”
“Dow Corning! You know, when I was in my midtwenties, I had breast implants,” Lyric says, raising one leg and resting the calf of the other leg on her knee. She looks at me. “Did you hear that? This man is responsible for the money I’m soon going to receive.” She turns to the man. “Those implants were responsible for causing me more than a bit of trouble.”
“I wasn’t a scientist,” the man says. “I worked in bookkeeping.”
“I was thanking you,” Lyric says. “Don’t feel defensive.”
“Are you…are you all in the wine business?” he says to me. I can tell he doubts this highly.
“Who is that man?” Nell says to me.
Lyric answers for me: “It’s not that we’re in the wine business, per se; we’re developmental people, responsible for setting up creative programs that monitor—”
“The little girl, too?” he says.
“I’m a mermaid!” she says.
The man laughs slightly.
“Have you met Jacques?” Lyric says. “He’s in a snit today, because we shot down one of his ideas, so he’s sulking over there across the pool.”
She points to the Frenchman in his little bathing suit. He is reading a magazine.
“I haven’t met him,” the man says.
“Lyric,” I say. She ignores me. I see the waitress approaching. She moves to the man’s lounge and gives him a bottle of beer, with a plastic cup turned upside down on the neck. Our three cones stand upright in a metal holder. They are wrapped with napkins absorbing the melting ice cream.
“So here’s to great financial settlements!” Lyric says, raising her cone as if to toast him.
“Lyric,” I say again. “Give it a rest. Please.”
I pay the waitress money for the cones and tell her to keep the change. It might be a lot, it might be a little. Lyric is making me very uncomfortable. From the waitress’s “Thank you” I can’t tell how I tipped.
There is awkward silence as we lick our cones. For the rest of the time we’re there—another half hour or so—the man avoids looking our way, and Lyric loses interest entirely in her game. From her fanny pack, she takes a bottle of nail polish and redoes her toes. It’s a big day for ballooning; several others float by, like big, colorful insects. Nell requests her coloring book and crayons and obliterates a picture of a rose garden with wide blue strokes. Before we leave, I take her to the ladies’ room to pee. She shrugs her bathing suit to her ankles and jumps backward on the toilet, bracing herself with both hands.
“Don’t watch,” she says, and I turn and face the door of the stall. I don’t hear anything, but in a few seconds she hops off and says, “Flush when I leave,” and quickly unlocks the door and rushes out, clutching her half-pulled-up bathing suit, before I hit the handle. She has no fear of flushing a toilet where we live, but she is terrified of flushing toilets in public places.
What a handful Lyric is, I think, following Nell out of the bathroom. Damon has obviously not had an easy time, but I don’t even want to look at him, let alone hear his point of view, after what Lyric told me. I wonder how many women there have been, then decide that might be the way to open the discussion with Janet. If she knows. But if she doesn’t know, if she hasn’t wanted to hear about his past, she’s really not going to want to hear my bad news.
Ahead of me, Nell is running back to three empty lounges. Lyric is nowhere in sight, and neither is the man. I see his beer bottle, empty, beside his lounge, and my heart stops for a second; it’s like finding a missing person’s watch deep in the woods. I look all around. It doesn’t help that Nell asks, “Where’s Lyric?” The man is nowhere. And then he is somewhere: he’s coming out of a telephone booth, walking slowly in our direction, returning to his lounge. Not long afterward, I see Lyric’s head break the surface of the water—she never swims!—and she pulls herself onto the rim of the pool, very close to where “Jacques” sits. She sits with her back to him, swishing her legs in the pool. Then she turns sideways, pretending to want to catch the sun on her face. She has Jacques’ attention. I go and get her. If it were necessary to take her by the hand and pull her, I would. But she can see from my expression that she’s gone as far as she can go. She hops up and skitters toward me, giving me a wet hug.
“Admit it. I was pretty good,” she says.
Back at the condo, there’s a message on the answering machine. Tom Selleck is paying an unscheduled visit to the seminar; Janet and Damon won’t be back until after dinner. We should get dinner on our own. “Jillie Mack is already in the hotel,” Janet adds, as if this would matter. But it does matter to Janet: she’s decided on a new direction for her life, and Tom Selleck, and even his wife, are beacons. She ends her message by asking, “Who does Mommy love most? Bye.”
“It’s me,” Nell says triumphantly, standing on tiptoe, as if that will bring her closer to her mother, whose voice has been playing from the telephone-answering machine mounted on the kitchen wall.
“To save this message, press one,” an automated voice says.
“Press. Press!” Nell says.
I lift her up and let her press it herself.
“Play it again,” Nell says.
“Press the replay button,” I say, pointing to it. Janet begins to speak again. “Hi, everybody, it’s me. Listen, we’re going to be late getting home because Tom Selleck is flying in to talk to us. I already saw”—she lowers her voice—“Jillie Mack is in the hotel, and she is tiny. I saw her by the Coke machine. There was some rumor that Robert Redford was going to show up and it was like Fantasy Island: somebody who worked at the hotel started pointing to a helicopter and saying it was him, and everybody ran out of the building and stood around, but the thing never landed. I’m not exactly sure what he’s going to be doing—Selleck, I mean—but you should get dinner because there’s some reception for him at some lodge a friend of Damon’s is renting after the talk he’s giving, or whatever it is. Anyway: love you all, and I’ll see you soon, and I want my dear sister to give a special kiss to Nell if Nell can correctly answer the question: Who does Mommy love most? Bye.”
Nell turns in my arms to look at me. “What do I get for a special kiss?” she says.
“Top of the head,” I say, kissing her lightly before setting her on the floor.
“I’m not going to take a bath,” Nell says. She calls over her
shoulder: “I don’t have to.”
—
Lyric and I get iced decaf cappuccinos from the store next to the condo. We get an Orangina for Nell. Basically, she likes the bottle. She ate almost no dinner, sulking because Janet didn’t come back. In the living room of the condo, when we returned earlier that afternoon, was a green glass vase filled with red roses—a totally unexpected hello (that’s all the card said) from Hale. There was also a note:
These delivered approx. 1 p.m. Delivery person upset because he was sent to Yarrow House, where they knew where you were. V. upset when he got here, then I heard he had dropped roses and broken vase—had to come back a second time. I left them in an ice bucket in my sink until he returned, and I cleaned up the broken glass. I noticed that there were eleven roses only and suspected they had counted wrong. Had him phone the florist, who he says told him only eleven were ordered, one dozen bad luck, 13 bad luck, therefore rather under. I will be playing Friday night, because the boy is already too sick. Please come! Hope you are enjoying your stay! Remember that I am always available for deep tissue massage.—Nikki
“So, like, would you consider going back with him?” Lyric says, flopping on the strange-colored sofa.
“I don’t know that I should jump to conclusions, when all the card says is ‘Hello,’ ” I say.
“You could send him flowers, too, and let him make the next move,” Lyric says.
“I don’t know where he is. He’s driving around the Southwest.”
“So how did he know where you were?”
I think about it a minute. “I had the brochure for this conference lying around the house in Silver Lake for a long time,” I say.
“Do you think that maybe he went back there and saw the brochure and missed you?”
“Since when do you have this romantic impulse to get everybody together?” I say.
“I’m meddlesome,” she says. “Isn’t that a great word? Damon said it about me. Not when I was trying to get him back together with somebody—just when I was putting some decent stuff into the grocery cart.”
From Nell’s bedroom, we hear the TV. She’s channel surfing.
“Please put your nightgown on, Nell, even if you aren’t going to bathe,” I call out to her.
“I think it was nice of him to send you roses,” Lyric says, touching her toes to the edge of the vase. “What was your biggest problem, or was it nothing but problems?”
I’m scanning the USA Today I didn’t read at the pool. “He was a mechanic when I first met him. Then suddenly he and a guy he worked with started going to Mexico on the weekends and bringing chests back. Chests, chairs, all kinds of stuff. The other guy got a storefront and was selling it in Santa Monica. I thought it was sort of nuts, going to Mexico all the time, but the money was great, and I guess I didn’t want to ask questions. Then one night we had the volume control up on the phone by mistake, and in the middle of the night I heard a voice shouting that Hale should stay away, not come anywhere near the store, that it was better to let them do Helter Skelter. He jumped out of bed and took the call. The cops had gone into the store in the middle of the night. They apparently took the door off the hinges and walked in and started axing chair legs off and prying up the bottoms of the chests, or whatever they were doing, looking for drugs. Which they didn’t find, but they ended up arresting the other guy. When they didn’t find drugs, the stuff suddenly became priceless antiquities, and the other guy got hauled out of his house in the middle of the night, but he never said anything about Hale, and he also got word to his lawyer to tell Hale to stay away. I was stunned to realize that a lawyer was calling in the middle of the night, that hysterical.”
“Wow,” Lyric says. “But I don’t get it. Were they smuggling drugs?”
“Hale didn’t think so. They didn’t find any,” I say.
“Yeah, but were they?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“So why did you break up?”
“Things hadn’t been great before Helter Skelter. We had separate friends, he wanted to move away from L.A. and I didn’t. But the week after the phone call was terrible. We got so paranoid we thought people were watching the house.”
“Looks like he wants to apologize,” Lyric says.
“I wouldn’t get back together with him,” I say, surprising myself by how suddenly I speak. “I always had an uneasy feeling that he was up to a lot of stuff I didn’t know about. I don’t want to be with somebody I’d hesitate to ask questions of.”
“That’s very sensible,” Lyric says. “That’s a good way of looking at things. I hope I remember that.”
I look at her to see if she’s mocking me. She isn’t. Furthermore, she does me the favor of calling out to Nell to change the channel, so I don’t have to be the heavy.
“No! I’m watching!” Nell hollers back.
“You know, if I don’t get to hang with you down the line, maybe we could still talk on the phone,” Lyric says.
“Sure,” I say.
“But you don’t know where you’ll be living, right?”
“No. I’ve got to be out of the house by the end of the month. But I know where you are, so I can call you.”
“Can you keep a secret?” she says.
“I don’t want to,” I say, raising my hands as if she’s announced a stickup.
“Are you kidding?” she says.
I look at her and suddenly am so self-conscious about my expression that I realize I must look the way Nell did, much earlier, hearing the contents of Cherry Garcia.
“I’m moving to Brooklyn,” she says. “He was with this very nice woman before he started going out with Janet. I mean, she was extremely nice. When she got away from him, she got a job in New York, and just like she said she would, she kept in touch with me. I’m actually a better person to talk to on the phone than in person, because when I’m not looking right at a person, I tend to have more complex thoughts.”
I pick up a pillow and hold it against my stomach, listening.
“The job she got in New York was way below her, but she’s waiting for a job in book publishing. She’s at one of those brides’ magazines right now. I mean, she has a master’s degree in history. Did Janet tell you anything about her? Sharon Oglethorpe?”
I shake my head no.
“Well, promise you won’t tell. Except that you can tell Janet—you have to tell Janet—because it’s really important that he doesn’t think he can get away with this stuff for all time. But if you tell her all the particulars, and she tells him, he’s going to know where she got the information. If that happens, I will not have immunity, I assure you.” She slides to the edge of the sofa. “I sort of deemphasized what I said before,” she says. “He slapped her one time. Sharon. And she got a detached retina. It was unbelievably awful. But anyway, she was out of there. She filed a complaint with the cops—she did all this stuff that really made him nervous. It ended up with her calling off the cops and with him giving her some money. When she got to New York, she called me, and she said if I’d promise to attend school, I could live with her. And that New York was way cooler than California. Which I’m thinking might not be such a bad change. So the thing is, she’s going to send me a plane ticket at my best friend’s, and I’m going to do it. If he tries to cause any problems, we’re both going to lie and say he pushed me around all the time. Get this: she’s living with a lawyer.”
This is almost too much to take in at one time. I find myself only nodding. She gets up, goes into the other room, and comes back with her fanny pack. From inside one of the zippered pouches she takes a small piece of paper and holds it out. It’s a business card, already imprinted with her name, telephone number, and Park Slope address. She says: “So when you land wherever, call me, and that way we can be in touch.”
“This is pretty unbelievable,” I say. “You’re fourteen years old.”
“I never think about that,” she says. Then she says it again, but the second time, instead of soundin
g cryptic, she sounds wistful: “It’s true,” she says. “I never think about that.”
Nell skitters through the room, naked. She gets a banana from the kitchen counter and runs back into the bedroom, to the TV.
“If you’re going—” I say. I start again: “If you were going to live with her, how come you came to Park City?”
“She’s at a spa this week,” Lyric says. “And anyway: Who’d miss this?”
We both look around the condo and shake our heads. “I’m with you,” Lyric says. “If this is what the Wild West has become, fuck it.” She scoots back and leans against the sofa. “Damon had all this stuff from the tourist board about white-water rafting and all this cool stuff I thought I’d gear up to do, but I don’t seem to have done it,” she says. “You don’t seem like somebody who wishes she was out riding horses or shooting the rapids, either.”
“No,” I say.
“I’d actually say there’s something deenergizing about this place. But that’s true of any place that seems artificial, I guess,” she says.
“Maybe at the very least we should go up by the miniature golf course and get on one of the rides before we leave,” I say.
“You scared me,” she says. “I thought for a minute you were suggesting miniature golf.”
—
I start slow with Janet. The night before, I put a note under her door telling her it was very important that we talk, alone, and that she had to meet me in the lobby at eight. I don’t know what time she got back, but from the circles under her eyes, I’d say it was late.
“Why don’t we take the bus down?” I say. “We can get coffee and talk at the Yarrow.”
She stands sulkily at the bus stop beside me, more like a pouting little girl than my older sister. She says nothing. In two or three minutes the bus comes, opening its doors for just the two of us.
“If you’re going to say anything critical of me, I don’t want to hear it,” Janet says. She sits in a single seat that faces sideways. I sit down in a two-seater right behind her that faces forward.
“Why don’t you give me a little credit for having something I really want to talk to you about?” I say.
