by Ann Beattie
Nancy pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her cheek against one of them. She started to laugh.
“Really,” he said.
“Okay—really,” she said, going poker-faced. “I know, darling Garrett. You really do mean it.”
“I do,” he said.
She stood up. “Then we don’t have to share a studio,” she said. “But you can’t take it back that you said you wanted to marry me.” She rubbed her hands through her hair and let one hand linger to massage her neck. Her body was cold from sitting on the window seat. Clasping her legs, she had realized that the thigh muscles ached.
“Maybe all that envy and anxiety has to be burnt away with constant passion,” she said. “I mean—I really, really mean that.” She smiled. “Really,” she said. “Maybe you just want to give in to it—like scratching a mosquito bite until it’s so sore you cry.”
They were within seconds of touching each other, but just at the moment when she was about to step toward him they heard the old oak stairs creaking beneath Kyle’s feet.
“This will come as no surprise to you,” Kyle said, standing in the doorway, “but I’m checking to make sure that you know you’re invited to dinner. I provide the chicken, sliced tomatoes, and bread—right? You bring dessert and something to drink.”
Even in her disappointment, Nancy could smile at him. Of course he knew that he had stumbled into something. Probably he wanted to turn and run back down the stairs. It wasn’t easy to be the younger extra person in a threesome. When she raised her head, Garrett caught her eye, and in that moment they both knew how embarrassed Kyle must be. His need for them was never masked as well as he thought. The two of them, clearly lovers, were forgoing candlelight and deliberately bumped knees and the intimacy of holding glasses to each other’s lips in order to have dinner with him. Kyle had once told Nancy, on one of their late-fall walks, that one of his worst fears had always been that someone might be able to read his mind. It was clear to her that he had fantasies about them. At the time, Nancy had tried to pass it off lightly; she told him that when she was drawing she always sensed the model’s bones and muscles, and what she did was stroke a soft surface over them until a body took form.
—
Kyle wanted to stay close to them—meant to stay close—but time passed, and after they all had moved several times he lost track of them. He knew nothing of Nancy Niles’s life, had no idea that in October 1985 she was out trick-or-treating with Garrett and their two-year-old child, Fraser, who was dressed up as a goblin for his first real Halloween. A plastic orange pumpkin, lit by batteries, bobbed in front of her as she walked a few steps ahead of them. She was dressed in a skeleton costume, but she might have been an angel, beaming salvation into the depths of the mines. Where she lived—their part of Providence, Rhode Island—was as grim and dark as an underground labyrinth.
It was ironic that men thought she could lead the way for them, because Nancy had realized all along that she had little sense of direction. She felt isolated, angry at herself for not pursuing her career as an artist, for no longer being in love. It would have surprised her to know that in a moment of crisis, late that night, in Warrenton, Virginia, when leaves, like shadows on an X ray, suddenly flew up and obscured his vision and his car went into a skid, Kyle Brown would see her again, in a vision. Nancy Niles! he thought, in that instant of fear and shock. There she was, for a split second—her face, ghostly pale under the gasstation lights, metamorphosed into brightness. In a flash, she was again the embodiment of beauty to him. As his car spun in a widening circle and then came to rest with its back wheels on an embankment, Nancy Niles the skeleton was walking slowly down the sidewalk. Leaves flew past her like footsteps, quickly descending the stairs.
WHERE YOU’LL FIND ME
Friends keep calling my broken arm a broken wing. It’s the left arm, now folded against my chest and kept in place with a blue scarf sling that is knotted behind my neck, and it weighs too much ever to have been winglike. The accident happened when I ran for a bus. I tried to stop it from pulling away by shaking my shopping bags like maracas in the air, and that’s when I slipped on the ice and went down.
So I took the train from New York City to Saratoga yesterday, instead of driving. I had the perfect excuse not to go to Saratoga to visit my brother at all, but once I had geared up for it I decided to go through with the trip and avoid guilt. It isn’t Howard I mind but his wife’s two children—a girl of eleven and a boy of three. Becky either pays no attention to her brother, Todd, or else she tortures him. Last winter she used to taunt him by stalking around the house on his heels, clomping close behind him wherever he went, which made him run and scream at the same time. Sophie did not intervene until both children became hysterical and we could no longer shout over their voices. “I think I like it that they’re physical,” she said. “Maybe if they enact some of their hostility like this, they won’t grow up with the habit of getting what they want by playing mind games with other people.” It seems to me that they will not ever grow up but will burn out like meteors.
Howard has finally found what he wants: the opposite of domestic tranquillity. For six years, he lived in Oregon with a pale, passive woman. On the rebound, he married an even paler premed student named Francine. That marriage lasted less than a year, and then, on a blind date in Los Angeles, he met Sophie, whose husband was away on a business trip to Denmark just then. In no time, Sophie and her daughter and infant son moved in with him, to the studio apartment in Laguna Beach he was sharing with a screenwriter. The two men had been working on a script about Medgar Evers, but when Sophie and the children moved in they switched to writing a screenplay about what happens when a man meets a married woman with two children on a blind date and the three of them move in with him and his friend. Then Howard’s collaborator got engaged and moved out, and the screenplay was abandoned. Howard accepted a last-minute invitation to teach writing at an upstate college in New York, and within a week they were all ensconced in a drafty Victorian house in Saratoga. Sophie’s husband had begun divorce proceedings before she moved in with Howard, but eventually he agreed not to sue for custody of Becky and Todd in exchange for child-support payments that were less than half of what his lawyer thought he would have to pay. Now he sends the children enormous stuffed animals that they have little or no interest in, with notes that say, “Put this in Mom’s zoo.” A stuffed toy every month or so—giraffes, a life-size German shepherd, an overstuffed standing bear—and, every time, the same note.
The bear stands in one corner of the kitchen, and people have gotten in the habit of pinning notes to it—reminders to buy milk or get the oil changed in the car. Wraparound sunglasses have been added. Scarves and jackets are sometimes draped on its arms. Sometimes the stuffed German shepherd is brought over and propped up with its paws placed on the bear’s haunch, imploring it.
Right now, I’m in the kitchen with the bear. I’ve just turned up the thermostat—the first one up in the morning is supposed to do that—and am dunking a tea bag in a mug of hot water. For some reason, it’s impossible for me to make tea with loose tea and the tea ball unless I have help. The only tea bag I could find was Emperor’s Choice.
I sit in one of the kitchen chairs to drink the tea. The chair seems to stick to me, even though I have on thermal long johns and a long flannel nightgown. The chairs are plastic, very 1950s, patterned with shapes that look sometimes geometric, sometimes almost human. Little things like malformed hands reach out toward triangles and squares. I asked. Howard and Sophie got the kitchen set at an auction, for thirty dollars. They thought it was funny. The house itself is not funny. It has four fireplaces, wide-board floors, and high, dusty ceilings. They bought it with his share of an inheritance that came to us when our grandfather died. Sophie’s contribution to restoring the house has been transforming the baseboards into faux marbre. How effective this is has to do with how stoned she is when she starts. Sometimes the baseboards look like clotted versions of th
e kitchen-chair pattern, instead of marble. Sophie considers what she calls “parenting” to be a full-time job. When they first moved to Saratoga, she used to give piano lessons. Now she ignores the children and paints the baseboards.
And who am I to stand in judgment? I am a thirty-eight-year-old woman, out of a job, on tenuous enough footing with her sometime lover that she can imagine crashing emotionally as easily as she did on the ice. It may be true, as my lover, Lance, says, that having money is not good for the soul. Money that is given to you, that is. He is a lawyer who also has money, but it is money he earned and parlayed into more money by investing in real estate. An herb farm is part of this real estate. Boxes of herbs keep turning up at Lance’s office—herbs in foil, herbs in plastic bags, dried herbs wrapped in cones of newspaper. He crumbles them over omelettes, roasts, vegetables. He is opposed to salt. He insists herbs are more healthful.
And who am I to claim to love a man when I am skeptical even about his use of herbs? I am embarrassed to be unemployed. I am insecure enough to stay with someone because of the look that sometimes comes into his eyes when he makes love to me. I am a person who secretly shakes on salt in the kitchen, then comes out with her plate, smiling, as basil is crumbled over the tomatoes.
Sometimes, in our bed, his fingers smell of rosemary or tarragon. Strong smells. Sour smells. Whatever Shakespeare says, or whatever is written in Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, I cannot imagine that herbs have anything to do with love. But many brides-to-be come to the herb farm and buy branches of herbs to stick in their bouquets. They anoint their wrists with herbal extracts, to smell mysterious. They believe that herbs bring them luck. These days, they want tubs of rosemary in their houses, not ficus trees. “I got in right on the cusp of the new world,” Lance says. He isn’t kidding.
—
For the Christmas party tonight, there are cherry tomatoes halved and stuffed with peaks of cheese, mushrooms stuffed with pureed tomatoes, tomatoes stuffed with chopped mushrooms, and mushrooms stuffed with cheese. Sophie is laughing in the kitchen. “No one’s going to notice,” she mutters. “No one’s going to say anything.”
“Why don’t we put out some nuts?” Howard says.
“Nuts are so conventional. This is funny,” Sophie says, squirting more soft cheese out of a pastry tube.
“Last year we had mistletoe and mulled cider.”
“Last year we lost our sense of humor. What happened that we got all hyped up? We even ran out on Christmas Eve to cut a tree—”
“The kids,” Howard says.
“That’s right,” she says. “The kids were crying. They were feeling competitive with the other kids, or something.”
“Becky was crying. Todd was too young to cry about that,” Howard says.
“Why are we talking about tears?” Sophie says. “We can talk about tears when it’s not the season to be jolly. Everybody’s going to come in tonight and love the wreaths on the picture hooks and think this food is so festive.”
“We invited a new Indian guy from the philosophy department,” Howard says. “American Indian—not an Indian from India.”
“If we want, we can watch the tapes of Jewel in the Crown,” Sophie says.
“I’m feeling really depressed,” Howard says, backing up to the counter and sliding down until he rests on his elbows. His tennis shoes are wet. He never takes off his wet shoes, and he never gets colds.
“Try one of those mushrooms,” Sophie says. “They’ll be better when they’re cooked, though.”
“What’s wrong with me?” Howard says. It’s almost the first time he’s looked at me since I arrived. I’ve been trying not to register my boredom and my frustration with Sophie’s prattle.
“Maybe we should get a tree,” I say.
“I don’t think it’s Christmas that’s making me feel this way,” Howard says.
“Well, snap out of it,” Sophie says. “You can open one of your presents early, if you want to.”
“No, no,” Howard says, “it isn’t Christmas.” He hands a plate to Sophie, who has begun to stack the dishwasher. “I’ve been worrying that you’re in a lot of pain and you just aren’t saying so,” he says to me.
“It’s just uncomfortable,” I say.
“I know, but do you keep going over what happened, in your mind? When you fell, or in the emergency room, or anything?”
“I had a dream last night about the ballerinas at Victoria Pool,” I say. “It was like Victoria Pool was a stage set instead of a real place, and tall, thin ballerinas kept parading in and twirling and pirouetting. I was envying their being able to touch their fingertips together over their heads.”
Howard opens the top level of the dishwasher and Sophie begins to hand him the rinsed glasses.
“You just told a little story,” Howard says. “You didn’t really answer the question.”
“I don’t keep going over it in my mind,” I say.
“So you’re repressing it,” he says.
“Mom,” Becky says, walking into the kitchen, “is it okay if Deirdre comes to the party tonight if her dad doesn’t drive here to pick her up this weekend?”
“I thought her father was in the hospital,” Sophie says.
“Yeah, he was. But he got out. He called and said that it was going to snow up north, though, so he wasn’t sure if he could come.”
“Of course she can come,” Sophie says.
“And you know what?” Becky says.
“Say hello to people when you come into a room,” Sophie says. “At least make eye contact or smile or something.”
“I’m not Miss America on the runway, Mom. I’m just walking into the kitchen.”
“You have to acknowledge people’s existence,” Sophie says. “Haven’t we talked about this?”
“Oh, hel-lo,” Becky says, curtsying by pulling out the sides of an imaginary skirt. She has on purple sweatpants. She turns toward me and pulls the fabric away from her hipbones. “Oh, hello, as if we’ve never met,” she says.
“Your aunt here doesn’t want to be in the middle of this,” Howard says. “She’s got enough trouble.”
“Get back on track,” Sophie says to Becky. “What did you want to say to me?”
“You know what you do, Mom?” Becky says. “You make an issue of something and then it’s like when I speak it’s a big thing. Everybody’s listening to me.”
Sophie closes the door to the dishwasher.
“Did you want to speak to me privately?” she says.
“Nooo,” Becky says, sitting in the chair across from me and sighing. “I was just going to say—and now it’s a big deal—I was going to say that Deirdre just found out that that guy she was writing all year is in prison. He was in prison all the time, but she didn’t know what the P.O. box meant.”
“What’s she going to do?” Howard says.
“She’s going to write and ask him all about prison,” Becky says.
“That’s good,” Howard says. “That cheers me up to hear that. The guy probably agonized about whether to tell her or not. He probably thought she’d hot-potato him.”
“Lots of decent people go to prison,” Becky says.
“That’s ridiculous,” Sophie says. “You can’t generalize about convicts any more than you can generalize about the rest of humanity.”
“So?” Becky says. “If somebody in the rest of humanity had something to hide, he’d hide it, too, wouldn’t he?”
“Let’s go get a tree,” Howard says. “We’ll get a tree.”
“Somebody got hit on the highway carrying a tree home,” Becky says. “Really.”
“You really do have your ear to the ground in this town,” Sophie says. “You kids could be the town crier. I know everything before the paper comes.”
“It happened yesterday,” Becky says.
“Christ,” Howard says. “We’re talking about crying, we’re talking about death.” He is leaning against the counter again.
“We are not,” Sophie say
s, walking in front of him to open the refrigerator door. She puts a plate of stuffed tomatoes inside. “In your typical fashion, you’ve singled out two observations out of a lot that have been made, and—”
“I woke up thinking about Dennis Bidou last night,” Howard says to me. “Remember Dennis Bidou, who used to taunt you? Dad put me up to having it out with him, and he backed down after that. But I was always afraid he’d come after me. I went around for years pretending not to cringe when he came near me. And then, you know, one time I was out on a date and we ran out of gas, and as I was walking to get a can of gas a car pulled up alongside me and Dennis Bidou leaned out the window. He was surprised that it was me and I was surprised that it was him. He asked me what happened and I said I ran out of gas. He said, ‘Tough shit, I guess,’ but a girl was driving and she gave him a hard time. She stopped the car and insisted that I get in the back and they’d take me to the gas station. He didn’t say one word to me the whole way there. I remembered the way he looked in the car when I found out he was killed in Nam—the back of his head on that ramrod-straight body, and a black collar or some dark-colored collar pulled up to his hairline.” Howard makes a horizontal motion with four fingers, thumb folded under, in the air beside his ear.
“Now you’re trying to depress everybody,” Sophie says.
“I’m willing to cheer up. I’m going to cheer up before tonight. I’m going up to that Lions Club lot on Main Street and get a tree. Anybody coming with me?”
“I’m going over to Deirdre’s,” Becky says.
“I’ll come with you, if you think my advice is needed,” I say.
