Park City

by Ann Beattie

  “Honey, do you want to go to the other car, where we can have a drink?” Charlie asks her.

  Cynthia didn’t want Charlie to know she had been taking the pills, so when she had a chance she reached into her handbag and shook out a whole one and swallowed it when he wasn’t looking. Now she is pretty groggy.

  “I think I’ll come down later,” she says. She smiles at him.

  As he walks down the aisle, she looks at his back. He could be anybody. Just some man on a train. The door closes behind him.

  A young man sitting across the aisle from her catches her eye. He has long hair. “Paper?” he says.

  He is offering her his paper. She feels her cheeks color, and she takes it, not wanting to offend him. Some people wouldn’t mind offending somebody who looks like him, she thinks self-righteously, but you are always polite.

  “How far you two headed?” he asks.

  “Pavo, Georgia,” she says.

  “Gonna eat peaches in Georgia?” he asks.

  She stares at him.

  “I’m just kidding,” he says. “My grandparents live in Georgia.”

  “Do they eat peaches all day?” she asks.

  He laughs. She doesn’t know what she’s done right.

  “Why, lordy lands, they do,” he says with a thick drawl.

  She flips through the paper. There is a comic strip of President Nixon. The president is leaning against a wall, being frisked by a policeman. He is confessing to various sins.

  “Great, huh?” the man says, smiling, and leans across the aisle.

  “I wrote Nixon a letter,” Cynthia says quietly. “I don’t know what they’ll do. I said all kinds of things.”

  “You did? Wow. You wrote Nixon?”

  “Did you ever write him?”

  “Yeah, sure, I write him all the time. Send telegrams. It’ll be a while before he’s really up against that wall, though.”

  Cynthia continues to look through the paper. There are full-page ads for records by people she has never heard of, singers she will never hear. The singers look like the young man.

  “Are you a musician?” she asks.

  “Me? Well, sometimes. I play electric piano. I can play classical piano. I don’t do much of it.”

  “No time?” she says.

  “Right. Too many distractions.”

  He takes a flask out from under his sweater. “If you don’t feel like the long walk to join your friend, have a drink with me.”

  Cynthia accepts the flask, quickly, so no one will see. Once it is in her hands, she doesn’t know what else to do but drink from it.

  “Where you coming from?” he asks.

  “Buffalo.”

  “Seen the comet?” he asks.

  “No. Have you?”

  “No,” he says. “Some days I don’t think there is any comet. Propaganda, maybe.”

  “If Nixon said there was a comet, then we could be sure there wasn’t,” she says.

  The sound of her own voice is strange to her. The man is smiling. He seems to like talk about Nixon.

  “Right,” he says. “Beautiful. President issues bulletin comet will appear. Then we can all relax and know we’re not missing anything.”

  She doesn’t understand what he has said, so she takes another drink. That way, she has no expression.

  “I’ll drink to that, too,” he says, and the flask is back with him.

  Because Charlie is apparently going to be in the drinking car for a while, the man, whose name is Peter, comes and sits next to her.

  “My first husband was named Pete,” she says. “He was in the army. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  The man nods, affirming some connection.

  He nods. She must have been right.

  Peter tells her that he is on his way to see his grandfather, who is recovering from a stroke. “He can’t talk. They think he will, but not yet.”

  “I’m scared to death of getting old,” Cynthia says.

  “Yeah,” Peter says. “But you’ve got a way to go.”

  “And then other times I don’t care what happens, I just don’t care what happens at all.”

  He nods slowly. “There’s plenty happening we’re not going to be able to do anything about,” he says.

  He holds up a little book he has been looking through. It is called Know What Your Dreams Mean.

  “Ever read these things?” he asks.

  “No. Is it good?”

  “You know what it is—right? A book that interprets dreams.”

  “I have a dream,” she says, “about being at an altar in a wedding dress, only instead of standing on the floor I’m on a scale.”

  He laughs and shakes his head. “There’s no weird stuff in here. It’s all the usual Freudian stuff.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “Oh—you dream about your teeth crumbling; it means castration. That sort of stuff.”

  “But what do you think my dream means?” she asks.

  “I don’t even know if I half believe what I read in the book,” he says, tapping it on his knee. He knows he hasn’t answered her question. “Maybe the scale means you’re weighing the possibilities.”

  “Of what?”

  “Well, you’re in a wedding dress, right? You could be weighing the possibilities.”

  “What will I do?” she says.

  He laughs. “I’m no seer. Let’s look it up in your horoscope. What are you?”

  “Virgo.”

  “Virgo,” he says. “That would figure. Virgos are meticulous. They’d be susceptible to a dream like the one you were talking about.”

  Peter reads from the book: “Be generous to friends, but don’t be taken advantage of. Unexpected windfall may prove less than you expected. Loved one causes problems. Take your time.”

  He shrugs. He passes her the flask.

  It’s too vague. She can’t really understand it. She sees Lincoln shaking the beads, but it’s not her fault this time—it’s the horoscope’s fault. It doesn’t say enough.

  “That man I’m with wants to marry me,” she confides to Peter. “What should I do?”

  He shakes his head and looks out the window. “Don’t ask me,” he says, a little nervously.

  “Do you have any more books?”

  “No,” he says. “All out.”

  They ride in silence.

  “You could go to a palmist,” he says after a while. “They’ll tell you what’s up.”

  “A palmist? Really?”

  “Well, I don’t know. If you believe half they say…”

  “You don’t believe them?”

  “Well, I fool around with stuff like this, but I sort of pay attention to what I like and forget what I don’t like. The horoscope told me to delay travel yesterday, and I did.”

  “Why don’t you believe them?” Cynthia asks.

  “Oh, I think most of them don’t know any more than you or me.”

  “Then let’s do it as a game,” she says. “I’ll ask questions, and you give the answer.”

  Peter laughs. “Okay,” he says. He lifts her hand from her lap and stares hard at it. He turns it over and examines the other side, frowning.

  “Should I marry Charlie?” she whispers.

  “I see…” he begins. “I see a man. I see a man…in the drinking car.”

  “But what am I going to do?” she whispers. “Should I marry him?”

  Peter gazes intently at her palm, then smooths his fingers down hers. “Maybe,” he says gravely when he reaches her fingertips.

  Delighted with his performance, he cracks up. A woman in the seat in front of them peers over the back of her chair to see what the noise is about. She sees a hippie holding a fat woman’s hand and drinking from a flask.

  “Coleridge,” Peter is saying. “You know—Coleridge, the poet? Well, he says that we don’t, for instance, dream about a wolf and then get scared. He says it’s that we’re scared to begin with, see, and therefore we dream about a wolf
.”

  Cynthia begins to understand, but then she loses it. It is the fault of the sleeping pill and many drinks. In fact, when Charlie comes back, Cynthia is asleep on Peter’s shoulder. There is a scene—or as much of a scene as a quiet man like Charlie can make. Charlie is also drunk, which makes him mellow instead of really angry. Eventually, brooding, he sits down across the aisle. Late that night, when the train slows down for the Georgia station, he gazes out the window as if he noticed nothing. Peter helps Cynthia get her bag down. The train has stopped at the station, and Charlie is still sitting, staring out the window at a few lights that shine along the tracks. Without looking at him, without knowing what will happen, Cynthia walks down the aisle. She is the last one off. She is the last one off before the train pulls out, with Charlie still on it.

  —

  Her parents watch the train go down the track, looking as if they are visitors from an earlier century, amazed by such a machine. They had expected Charlie, of course, but now they have Cynthia. They were not prepared to be pleasant, and there is a strained silence as the three watch the train disappear.

  That night, lying in the bed she slept in as a child, Cynthia can’t sleep. She gets up, finally, and sits in the kitchen at the table. What am I trying to think about, she wonders, closing her hands over her face for deeper concentration. It is cold in the kitchen, and she is not so much hungry as empty. Not in the head, she feels like shouting to Lincoln, but in the stomach—somewhere inside. She clasps her hands in front of her, over her stomach. Her eyes are closed. A picture comes to her—a high, white mountain. She isn’t on it, or in the picture at all. When she opens her eyes she is looking at the shiny surface of the table. She closes her eyes and sees the snow-covered mountain again—high and white, no trees, just mountain—and she shivers with the coldness of it.

  DWARF HOUSE

  “Are you happy?” MacDonald says. “Because if you’re happy I’ll leave you alone.”

  MacDonald is sitting in a small gray chair, patterned with grayer leaves, talking to his brother, who is standing in a blue chair. MacDonald’s brother is four feet six and three-quarter inches tall, and when he stands in a chair he can look down on MacDonald. MacDonald is twenty-eight years old. His brother, James, is thirty-eight. There was a brother between them, Clem, who died of a rare disease in Panama. There was a sister also, Amy, who flew to Panama to be with her dying brother. She died in the same hospital, one month later, of the same disease. None of the family went to the funeral. Today MacDonald, at his mother’s request, is visiting James to find out if he is happy. Of course James is not, but standing on the chair helps, and the twenty-dollar bill that MacDonald slipped into his tiny hand helps too.

  “What do you want to live in a dwarf house for?”

  “There’s a giant here.”

  “Well it must just depress the hell out of the giant.”

  “He’s pretty happy.”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m as happy as the giant.”

  “What do you do all day?”

  “Use up the family’s money.”

  “You know I’m not here to accuse you. I’m here to see what I can do.”

  “She sent you again, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this your lunch hour?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you eaten? I’ve got some candy bars in my room.”

  “Thank you. I’m not hungry.”

  “Place make you lose your appetite?”

  “I do feel nervous. Do you like living here?”

  “I like it better than the giant does. He’s lost twenty-five pounds. Nobody’s supposed to know about that—the official word is fifteen—but I overheard the doctors talking. He’s lost twenty-five pounds.”

  “Is the food bad?”

  “Sure. Why else would he lose twenty-five pounds?”

  “Do you mind…if we don’t talk about the giant right now? I’d like to take back some reassurance to Mother.”

  “Tell her I’m as happy as she is.”

  “You know she’s not happy.”

  “She knows I’m not, too. Why does she keep sending you?”

  “She’s concerned about you. She’d like you to live at home. She’d come herself…”

  “I know. But she gets nervous around freaks.”

  “I was going to say that she hasn’t been going out much. She sent me, though, to see if you wouldn’t reconsider.”

  “I’m not coming home, MacDonald.”

  “Well, is there anything you’d like from home?”

  “They let you have pets here. I’d like a parakeet.”

  “A bird? Seriously?”

  “Yeah. A green parakeet.”

  “I’ve never seen a green one.”

  “Pet stores will dye them any color you ask for.”

  “Isn’t that harmful to them?”

  “You want to please the parakeet or me?”

  —

  “How did it go?” MacDonald’s wife asks.

  “That place is a zoo. Well, it’s worse than a zoo—it’s what it is: a dwarf house.”

  “Is he happy?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t really get an answer out of him. There’s a giant there who’s starving to death, and he says he’s happier than the giant. Or maybe he said he was as happy. I can’t remember. Have we run out of vermouth?”

  “Yes. I forgot to go to the liquor store. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t think a drink would have much effect anyway.”

  “It might. If I had remembered to go to the liquor store.”

  “I’m just going to call Mother and get it over with.”

  “What’s that in your pocket?”

  “Candy bars. James gave them to me. He felt sorry for me because I’d given up my lunch hour to visit him.”

  “Your brother is really a very nice person.”

  “Yeah. He’s a dwarf.”

  “What?”

  “I mean that I think of him primarily as a dwarf. I’ve had to take care of him all my life.”

  “Your mother took care of him until he moved out of the house.”

  “Yeah, well it looks like he found a replacement for her. But you might need a drink before I tell you about it.”

  “Oh, tell me.”

  “He’s got a little sweetie. He’s in love with a woman who lives in the dwarf house. He introduced me. She’s three feet eleven. She stood there smiling at my knees.”

  “That’s wonderful that he has a friend.”

  “Not a friend—a fiancée. He claims that as soon as he’s got enough money saved up he’s going to marry this other dwarf.”

  “He is?”

  “Isn’t there some liquor store that delivers? I’ve seen liquor trucks in this neighborhood, I think.”

  —

  His mother lives in a high-ceilinged old house on Newfield Street, in a neighborhood that is gradually being taken over by Puerto Ricans. Her phone has been busy for almost two hours, and MacDonald fears that she, too, may have been taken over by Puerto Ricans. He drives to his mother’s house and knocks on the door. It is opened by a Puerto Rican woman, Mrs. Esposito.

  “Is my mother all right?” he asks.

  “Yes. She’s okay.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  She steps aside—not that it does much good, because she’s so wide that there’s still not much room for passage. Mrs. Esposito is wearing a dress that looks like a jungle: tall streaks of green grass going every which way, brown stumps near the hem, flashes of red around her breasts.

  “Who were you talking to?” he asks his mother.

  “Carlotta was on the phone with her brother, seeing if he’ll take her in. Her husband put her out again.”

  Mrs. Esposito, hearing her husband spoken of, rubs her hands in anguish.

  “It took two hours?” MacDonald says good-naturedly, feeling sorry for her. “What was th
e verdict?”

  “He won’t,” Mrs. Esposito answers.

  “I told her she could stay here, but when she told him she was going to do that he went wild and said he didn’t want her living just two doors down.”

  “I don’t think he meant it,” MacDonald says. “He was probably just drinking again.”

  “He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous,” Mrs. Esposito says. “He didn’t drink for two weeks, and he went to every meeting, and one night he came home and said he wanted me out.”

  MacDonald sits down, nodding nervously. The chair he sits in has a child’s chair facing it, which is used as a footstool. When James lived with his mother it was his chair. His mother still keeps his furniture around—a tiny child’s glider, a mirror in the hall that is knee-high.

  “Did you see James?” his mother asks.

  “Yes. He said that he’s very happy.”

  “I know he didn’t say that. If I can’t rely on you I’ll have to go myself, and you know how I cry for days after I see him.”

  “He said he was pretty happy. He said he didn’t think you were.”

  “Of course I’m not happy. He never calls.”

  “He likes the place he lives in. He’s got other people to talk to now.”

  “Dwarfs, not people,” his mother says. “He’s hiding from the real world.”

  “He didn’t have anybody but you to talk to when he lived at home. He’s got a new part-time job that he likes better, too, working in a billing department.”

  “Sending unhappiness to people in the mail,” his mother says.

  “How are you doing?” he asks.

  “As James says, I’m not happy.”

  “What can I do?” MacDonald asks.

  “Go to see him tomorrow and tell him to come home.”

  “He won’t leave. He’s in love with somebody there.”

  “Who? Who does he say he’s in love with? Not another social worker?”

  “Some woman. I met her. She seems very nice.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “How tall is she?”

  “She’s a little shorter than James.”

  “Shorter than James?”

  “Yes. A little shorter.”

  “What does she want with him?”

  “He said they were in love.”

  “I heard you. I’m asking what she wants with him.”