Park City

by Ann Beattie

  “We can leave a note for her and go on the ride!” Nell says.

  “How would you like it if you went to look for one of us, and when you got back, we’d gone without you?”

  “No,” Nell says, climbing into my lap. She turns around and puts her thumb in her mouth. She never sucks her thumb.

  “You wouldn’t like it a bit, would you?” I say. I bounce her slightly on my knees. She is staring at Damon. She continues to suck her thumb.

  “Sometimes there are things I sure don’t like one bit, either,” Damon says. “Like, for instance, one person who will tell another person how she should live her life.” He gives me a quick look, then looks back at the TV. “Such as”—he spells—“a-b-o-r-t-i-o-n.”

  This is not lost on Nell. She looks at me but, surprisingly, does not say, “What did he say?” I jiggle her a little harder on my knees.

  “If Lyric goes out to the deck looking for me, Nikki will tell her where I am,” I say. Damon shoots me another look, this one much quicker than the last. When he looks away, he looks out the window, not back at the TV. “Because I was up by the hot tub talking to Nikki,” I say to Nell, as if she asked to be informed. “She and I were t-a-l-k-i-n-g.”

  “Tell me!” Nell says. “What did you spell?”

  “Talking,” I say. “T-a-l-k-i-n-g.”

  Damon turns off the TV, tosses the remote onto the sofa cushion with obvious disgust, and starts down one of the corridors.

  “What’s he doing?” Nell says.

  “Honey, I can’t read his mind. I guess he’s going to pee.”

  “I want the TV back on,” Nell says, jumping off my lap.

  “No you don’t, you want to ride on the fabulous Alpine Slide,” Lyric says, coming through the front door. She flops down near my feet. “So now that I’ve made the entire run of the building, including waking up your sister, who looks totally wasted, I’m sorry to say, I find you in our own cozy living room.”

  “I didn’t realize everybody was ready to leave,” I say.

  “We are ready!” Nell says, beginning to march in a circle. “We are ready! We are ready!”

  “Gee, but the question is: Is Nell ready?” Lyric says.

  “Yesssssss!” Nell says, crouching and jumping.

  “She’s perfecting her Ed McMahon imitation,” Lyric says to me.

  “I am ready! I am ready!” Nell says.

  “So am I! So am I!” Damon says, coming back into the room, tucking his shirt into his jeans. “So is this it? We go have some fun now?”

  This is the way he’s decided to deal with the information I just gave him. He’s going to make me look sulky and strange if I don’t get in the swing of things. But the mood is false; it’s too put-on, too euphoric, too sudden. What should I believe? That he got happy peeing?

  “Do you want to go on the merry-go-round, sweetheart?” he says to Nell.

  “No! I want Alpine Slide!”

  “Can she go on that?” Damon says. He looks at Lyric. “Is that okay for children?”

  “I don’t know, Daddy,” she says, answering him with a voice as false as his own. “We’ll have to go up there and see.”

  “Yes! I’m going!” Nell says, with the same panic and desire with which she announced, a few days earlier, that her mother would buy her espadrilles. I wonder if she even remembered to ask Janet for them. I wonder when she and Janet last had any real time together. Maternal feelings begin to overwhelm me. Although I’d know better than to do it, some part of me wonders whether Janet might have been half serious about my moving in. Worse, even, than his hurting Janet, if he ever touched a hair on Nell’s head….

  We ride down together in the elevator. I watch the way Lyric moves closer to the control panel, away from her father. I keep Nell in my arms, but when we reach the lobby, she won’t be contained; she kicks free and races for the front door. As fate would have it, the fat girl is coming in at the same time. She’s taken off her skates and is walking in her thick brown socks. She’s limping, actually. She sees us and looks like she wants to run, but obviously she can’t: we’re a wall of people coming jaggedly toward her. Damon goes first, taking up so much of the center of the hallway that the girl has to move aside. I go next, not looking at her, holding Nell’s hand, which she has backtracked to put in mine. I sense that Nell is looking at the floor.

  “Hey, you scuzzes, you might see if you could help me, since I’ve probably got a broken ankle,” the girl says. It stops me in my tracks. I turn around and see her sidling up to the side wall of the hallway. One sock is unrolled almost to her ankle. As I look down, I see blood on it. I’m about to go to her, in spite of how much I dislike her, and in spite of how nastily she spoke to us, when I see her begin to fall. Lyric has hung behind to topple her, hard. I watch in horror as she reaches out and pokes her fingers in the falling girl’s chest. “Fuck you,” Lyric says. “You’re not a human being.” I’m stunned. Stunned. I look for Damon, as if, being the oldest, he’ll surely do something, but he’s already made it out the door.

  “Lyric,” I gasp. “What did you do?” But I don’t stop to find out. Coward that I am—or maybe because I’m so numb I’ve become robotic—I grab Nell’s hand tightly and keep walking. Maybe I just imagined that all that happened. It happened in about six seconds, didn’t it? Could I really be hearing the girl, wailing, way back behind the closed door?

  “Listen: in this world, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” Lyric says as she stalks past me, tossing her hair to one side. When she catches up with Damon, she slips her hand into his. He picks up the beat automatically when he takes her hand. Together, they go quickly up the stairs to the next level.

  Nell’s thumb is back in her mouth. She lags behind, keeping pace with me, while I try to catch my breath. Ahead of us, I see Damon and Lyric stopping at the ticket kiosk. There are a lot of people clustered around, but they don’t seem to be in line. They’re standing and staring, I see, as we come closer, at a blond girl in a bustier and short-shorts, and her biker boyfriend. A flashbulb goes off. They’re movie stars, apparently. But which movie stars? I suddenly feel old and disconnected and—I’ve felt this since Lyric first confided in me—discouraged and depressed. The man has long, dirty hair, so dark it must be dyed black, and wears boots with spurs and a torn black T-shirt with a heavy chain around the middle. His arms are covered with tattoos. The girl’s diamond earrings flash in the sun. “They look just like them,” a woman holding a little boy’s hand says to me, as I edge nearer.

  “Tom Selleck?” Nell says, getting the drift of what’s going on. Recently, she’s heard Tom Selleck’s name mentioned a lot.

  The woman looks taken aback. “No. Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee,” she says in a stage whisper. “But they’re not really them. They’ve just made themselves up to look like them.”

  “The tatts are fake, man,” a teenage boy says to his friend. “You can always tell.” The boy he speaks to has a tattoo of a coiling serpent that is certainly not fake on his biceps. They stand there, shaking their heads at the impostors. Pamela Anderson has on the brightest pink lipstick I have ever seen. Tommy Lee’s boots are made from reptile’s skin: some reptile with big, black scales. Meanwhile, Damon and Lyric begin to walk away. Damon drops his arm over Lyric’s shoulder. In his other hand, he clasps our tickets.

  “That little girl thought Tommy Lee was Tom Selleck,” I overhear the woman saying to her son, as we walk away. “Can you imagine that?”

  Several Rollerbladers make a path around us, going in the direction of the steps. I keep walking without looking back, but by now there’s no wailing: only the sound of wheels receding, and of the breeze. It gets much cooler in Park City about six o’clock. You need a jacket, which I forgot to wear. Nell, too, has hunched her shoulders in the cold. Lyric has on a cotton V-neck sweater over her khakis. Damon has on his leather jacket, which he snatched off the antler coat hook on our way out the front door.

  Nell skips ahead as we get closer to the rid
e. The ski lifts that take passengers to the top are rising. Far in the distance, a few riders on little toboggan-like slides come down a track cut into the mountain. There’s almost no line. A group of kids runs into line ahead of us, and a middle-aged man and his gray-haired wife, expressing great doubt about going on the ride, get in line next. The woman is saying exactly what I’m thinking: that she isn’t that fond of height; that it looks like a long way up the mountain. Her husband chides her; she’ll be fine. Didn’t she ride the roller coaster at Coney Island and survive? “They don’t make these things so people will get hurt and sue them,” the man says, patting his wife’s bottom.

  “Three to a lift,” a teenage boy calls out to the man and woman in front of Lyric and Damon. He stands where the ski lifts round the bend and slow slightly.

  “You mean we go with one of them?” the man says to the attendant.

  “Not you, them,” the attendant hollers, grabbing a car and slowing it ever so slightly for the children to jump on. “Three to a car! No doubles!” he hollers again.

  When everyone from their squirmy, excited group is gone, there is one extra boy. He rushes toward the next car and tries to jump on, but a second attendant, in the field, shouts something I can’t understand, and the teenage boy puts his arm out, forcing the little boy back in line.

  “Step forward! Stand in the footprints!” the attendant says, darting forward to tap his toe on one of three pairs of yellow feet lined up on the mat. He jerks his leg back just before his knee is sideswiped. The boy hesitates, not sure what to do.

  “Do we go together?” the middle-aged man says, but before there is any answer, the boy has boarded the lift, sinking in so heavily that it swings wildly from side to side, and the attendant is urging the man into the car, as the man tugs his wife’s hand. “Slow it up, okay, open it up again,” the attendant hollers. “Oh! My!” I hear the woman exclaim, and then the couple and the boy begin to rise.

  So how is it going to work out with four of us? Lyric is already standing soldier-straight in the yellow footprints, but Damon, having heard all the shouting about three to a car, looks over his shoulder at us. “Get in, move!” the attendant says, and suddenly Lyric and Damon are swinging in front of us, being lifted away, the pulley rolling them up the cables. I see Damon put his arm around Lyric. I see her hair float backward. I am, frankly, mesmerized by the sight of the two of them, so that I don’t see what’s happening with the circling ski lifts, and when the next one comes around, it almost hits me in the head. I duck, and it gets away without either of us in it. Nell is suddenly pulling hard on my hand. What does she want? If she’s saying anything, I can’t hear her because of the escalating exchange between the two attendants. “Get ’em in! No more empties!” the boy who is farther away hollers, and suddenly I find myself pushed from behind, resting precariously on one hip in the rising lift, scrambling to hold on to the dangling Nell, who is facing me, her belly on the lift, her legs dangling as we rise above the receding green field. “Wait!” I scream hysterically. She seems to weigh twice what she normally does, and I know I’ll pitch too far forward myself if I release my grip on the pole on my side of the swaying lift. Suddenly, having leaped an amazing height from the ground, a young man is in our car, pulling—he’s got Nell by her waistband at the same time I’m seizing her arm, and he is making good progress in getting her turned forward and seated, though she is screaming so much she can’t hear anything he says. At first I think one of the attendants must have jumped on, but when I catch my breath enough to look at the man I see he’s just another visitor to the park: a geeky guy in glasses and a baseball cap whose concern seems to be as much about me as about Nell. He is telling me that if the height is bothering me, not to look down. I immediately look down. Someone says, “I don’t like height very much,” but it’s not my voice, it’s a little voice inside my head. The ground is bubbling like the hot tub. Some tiny animal zigzags far below. Except for the echo of the little voice, it is preternaturally quiet as we ascend: a swarming, all-enveloping silence. Black specks rise in front of my eyes, like mist. Tears are pouring from my eyes. “Hey, have you ever been on one of these rides before?” the man asks, trying to make light of my near swoon and trying to calm Nell at the same time. “Sit down, honey. We’re all taking a ride up the mountain,” the man says, reasonably. I see the man’s arm tightly around Nell, hooking a seat belt across our car with his free hand. They don’t even put seat belts on down there? They didn’t even stop the ride when a three-year-old child….But that’s it, and then it’s blackout. When I come to, I’m lying on the ground at the top of the mountain and people are staring down at me. My hand hurts. I pull it from underneath me and the young man touches my wrist, frowning, then delicately places my hand on my stomach. He continues fanning me, demanding that everyone step back. Nell. Where’s Nell? Where is Nell?

  Then I see her, in Damon’s arms. He’s taken off his leather jacket and is holding her in the big black bunting, as she alternately rubs her eyes and struggles to run to my side. She almost died. The kids who run the ride are crazy. What if my reflexes hadn’t been as good as they were? What if the man hadn’t jumped in the car?

  “Jeez, I guess you weren’t kidding when you said you didn’t like height,” the man says to me. People peer over his shoulder. Aspen leaves rustle behind their heads in the breeze: first green, then silver, then green. I see the cloudless, dark-blue evening sky. I don’t even want to think of how I’ll get off the mountain. Not by riding the Alpine Slide down, that’s for sure. My face is wet with tears and perspiration. Lyric is looking deep enough into my eyes to see her own reflection. Remembering what Nikki said to me, I try to look deep into hers, but she wavers out of focus. “You scared me,” she says, cupping her hand over my painful wrist.

  “We’re even,” I say.

  The ski lifts dangle going down the mountain like big black spiders. The silence, except for the people’s whispered voices, is astonishing. The near crisis has slowed everything down, and everyone on top of the mountain, me among them, is temporarily stranded in the cold and silence. Nell bounces in Damon’s arms, stretching one hand toward me. He holds her tight. Is it possible, I wonder hazily, that he only made one mistake, one time? And also: Is it possible that he, too, might love Nell?

  The man—my savior; our savior—can’t disguise his worry. He is adding to the breeze by fanning me more. It’s as if he’s enacting some weird ritual. He leans close, and I’m sure he’s going to confide in me what it is he’s really doing: that he’s exorcising demons, or keeping away ghosts. “Next time, remember to ask for a slow start,” he says. He has stopped fanning and has decided to try to warm me, instead. “I know right this minute you don’t think you’ll ever be on it again, but believe me, eventually you will. And the one thing you’ve got to remember”—he lowers his voice, his lips almost touching my ear—“the one thing you’ve got to remember next time is to request a slow start.”

  DISTORTIONS

  VERMONT

  Noel is in our living room shaking his head. He refused my offer and then David’s offer of a drink, but he has had three glasses of water. It is absurd to wonder at such a time when he will get up to go to the bathroom, but I do. I would like to see Noel move; he seems so rigid that I forget to sympathize, forget that he is a real person. “That’s not what I want,” he said to David when David began sympathizing. Absurd, at such a time, to ask what he does want. I can’t remember how it came about that David started bringing glasses of water.

  Noel’s wife, Susan, has told him that she’s been seeing John Stiller-man. We live on the first floor, Noel and Susan on the second, John on the eleventh. Interesting that John, on the eleventh, should steal Susan from the second floor. John proposes that they just rearrange—that Susan move up to the eleventh, into the apartment John’s wife only recently left, that they just…John’s wife had a mastectomy last fall, and in the elevator she told Susan that if she was losing what she didn’t want to lose, she migh
t as well lose what she did want to lose. She lost John—left him the way popcorn flies out of the bag on the roller coaster. She is living somewhere in the city, but John doesn’t know where. John is a museum curator, and last month, after John’s picture appeared in a newsmagazine, showing him standing in front of an empty space where a stolen canvas had hung, he got a one-word note from his wife: “Good.” He showed the note to David in the elevator. “It was tucked in the back of his wallet—the way all my friends used to carry rubbers in high school,” David told me.

  “Did you guys know?” Noel asks. A difficult one; of course we didn’t know, but naturally we guessed. Is Noel able to handle such semantics? David answers vaguely. Noel shakes his head vaguely, accepting David’s vague answer. What else will he accept? The move upstairs? For now, another glass of water.

  David gives Noel a sweater, hoping, no doubt, to stop his shivering. Noel pulls on the sweater over pajamas patterned with small gray fish. David brings him a raincoat, too. A long white scarf hangs from the pocket. Noel swishes it back and forth listlessly. He gets up and goes to the bathroom.

  “Why did she have to tell him when he was in his pajamas?” David whispers.

  Noel comes back, looks out the window. “I don’t know why I didn’t know. I can tell you guys knew.”

  Noel goes to our front door, opens it, and wanders off down the hallway.

  “If he had stayed any longer, he would have said, ‘Jeepers,’ ” David says.

  David looks at his watch and sighs. Usually he opens Beth’s door on his way to bed, and tiptoes in to admire her. Beth is our daughter. She is five. Some nights, David even leaves a note in her slippers, saying that he loves her. But tonight he’s depressed. I follow him into the bedroom, undress, and get into bed. David looks at me sadly, lies down next to me, turns off the light. I want to say something but don’t know what to say. I could say, “One of us should have gone with Noel. Do you know your socks are still on? You’re going to do to me what Susan did to Noel, aren’t you?”