Perfect Recall

by Ann Beattie

  “Remember when he got Georgette to plug in her hairdryer so he could demonstrate the windmill he’d made out of cereal boxes?” Fran said.

  “I’m not riding in that thing,” Hank muttered.

  She said, “You’re lucky my mother is dead and my father lives in England.”

  “Only child,” he said. He pretended to taunt her. “Only child. Only child.”

  “Only child,” she echoed, as the car swung into her in-law’s driveway. She flipped down the visor and examined her face. There was no makeup to fuss with. Her hair had just been cut and curled, and the new hairstyle pleased her. She flipped the visor up, noticing, as she did, several large wooden animals on the front lawn. There was a pig, a greyhound, and a genuinely alarming bear, reared up on its hind legs, fangs bared. “Also birdhouses,” read a hand-lettered sign nailed to the bear’s leg. “Ask at door.” An arrow pointed toward the house, as if whoever read the sign might miss the ranch house with brown shutters that sat ten or fifteen feet behind it.

  Dreamy Dora threw open the door and waved; Georgette, in her jumpsuit and apron, ran past her daughter and threw herself around the greyhound’s neck, honking its rubber nose as Hank and Fran got out of the car.

  “Hello, darlin’. Both my darlin’s,” Georgette called.

  “Quite the menagerie, Georgette,” Fran said, embracing her mother-in-law.

  “What is it doing at your house?” Hank said. “Why doesn’t Macklin have this stuff over at Hettie’s, or at her store?”

  “He does, darlin’. Macklin put some in our front yard to spread the wealth. Aren’t they the funniest things? And they work, too. One goes in the water.”

  At sixty-seven, Georgette was still smiling and slender, but her hair was noticeably thinner, and almost entirely gray. Her older sister, Aunt Georgia, dyed her hair silver-blue. Fran tried not to stare at Georgette’s hair as they broke their embrace. Georgette smelled of talcum powder and hot chocolate. No one in the family drank coffee anymore, since Dora had decided to give up caffeine.

  “Well, put ’er there, pardner,” Hank’s stepfather said, wandering out of the house. “And let the pretty girl kiss my cheek, if she will.”

  “Home, home on the range,” Georgette said, as Fran went on tiptoes to kiss her father-in-law.

  Dora, on the front stoop, called out, “This is not a television series. It’s our life.” Though she gestured toward the carved animals, everyone stopped whatever they were doing, slightly perplexed. Dora often had the ability to completely stop conversation.

  Hank raised a hand to his sister, offering a silent hello. “When’s Hettie and Macklin’s wedding?” he said to Georgette, as they all started toward the house.

  “Well, I don’t think that’s anything we asked when you two were living together!” Georgette said.

  “I’m not asking them. I’m asking behind their backs.” He held the door open for Fran, who was already biting her nails.

  “Okay. It’s not important. Don’t tell me,” Hank said.

  “August first at three P.M., by a justice of the peace in the garden of the Café Domani,” Georgette said.

  “Come on down to the shed and see my restoration work,” Winston said. “Keeps me busy. Keeps me off the streets.” He turned to Georgette and winked.

  Over the winter he had kept Hank and Fran posted on the progress of the bicycle-built-for-two he was fixing; he had also sent Polaroids of a carriage cabin he was working on, though the carriage lacked the framework. It was something Macklin had promised to work on with him now that summer had come. Winston loved puttering around the shed so much that he wore battery-powered socks and double layers of thermal underwear so he could work there all winter long. More than a dozen flashlights mounted on brackets that swiveled toward his projects greatly augmented the wan New England winter light. Winston’s invitation to the shed was only meant for Hank; it was understood that Fran would stay in the kitchen with the women.

  Another of whom appeared, suddenly. Myra came in the back door, wearing the twin to Georgette’s apron over her plaid shirt and stirrup pants. Her feet were in paint-spattered tennis shoes, with poked-out toes. She wore her socks bunched at her ankle like a teenager, but she was forty-three, and six feet tall. Fran extended her hand. Myra’s handshake was resounding.

  “Myra, darlin’, I don’t want you weeding my garden for another moment,” Georgette said. “I do not think you are a gardening service, Myra!”

  “We came yesterday,” Dora said to Fran. Her voice was dull; Fran couldn’t tell whether this was meant as subtle criticism, or as a fact even Dora was bored to announce.

  “What does my girl say?” Georgette said to Dora. “Does she say that she will have a cocoa with chipped ice? Because there’s fruit juice if cocoa isn’t wanted.”

  “I don’t want anything,” Dora said.

  “Will it be a big wedding?” Fran said, feeling the sudden need to speak and jolt herself into sociability. “Will what be a big wedding?” Dora said.

  “Uncle Macklin and—”

  “Of course!” Georgette said. “Seventy people is a big wedding. When Winston and I married, we had ten family members and his best man and the woman who stood for me, and oh—we would have had the dearest girl as ring bearer, but she had such a bad cold she couldn’t come, and do you know, now that little girl is engaged herself.”

  “My marriage was a disaster from start to finish,” Dora said. “This everybody knows.” She went to the refrigerator and found a Coke. “You didn’t say you had Cokes,” she said to Georgette.

  “I just assume my family knows I always have Coca-Cola,” Georgette said. She opened the cupboard and offered Dora a tall glass. Dora waved it away, opened the can, and drank.

  “I was thinking that I might go out and sit in the horseless carriage, to try it out,” Georgette said.

  “It’s a sexist thing to say, but I don’t see why we don’t just leave the men alone,” Myra said.

  “It’s true, though. They’d hate it if we barged in,” Dora said.

  “—And I,” Georgette said, breaking into the middle of her own thought, “I do mean to sit like a princess in the carriage eventually, now that nice weather has come.”

  This early in the visit, the time had already come when Fran began to replay the past to convince herself she had a life apart from these people, whose conversation jumped from subject to subject like the ever clicking minute hand of the kitchen clock. She thought of some things from the day before: going to the doctor so he could take a blood sample; dinner at the Chinese restaurant with Hank. Hank had worn a hat in the rain, instead of carrying an umbrella, and she had joined him, plopping on her canvas hat with the lavender bow her best friend called her Mr. Ed hat. With their spring rolls, they had ordered champagne to celebrate her promotion. In this kitchen, jobs would never be talked about, let alone promotions. And, in fact, she didn’t think she had much to be proud of. The person the store had wanted to promote to chief window dresser—a nice man named Stone Franklin, who had once built a Lego Ferris wheel in the front window, which he’d studded with dangling bikini pants and brassieres he’d made it appear the Ken dolls placed in the cars of the Ferris wheel had discarded—had left for Hawaii, and she had been their second choice. Perhaps third.

  The cocoa had not entirely dissolved, Fran saw, as Myra helped herself to cocoa. It spread like moss on Myra’s teeth. Everyone was running out of things to say and Georgette, who could never stand a silent moment, announced that she was going out to the shed.

  “Just once,” Dora said, the minute her mother was out the door. “Just once, I wish she would come back and say something brilliant. Do you know what I mean? That she might come through the door and have discovered something.”

  “What would she discover?” Myra said.

  Dora had gone to the big picture window. She frowned. “Aunt Hettie and Uncle Macklin,” she said.

  Fran was always anxious around Dora because Dora was so fractious, and
she could never anticipate what Dora would talk about. It was the opposite of Dora’s problem with Georgette— Dora’s histrionic fatigue with Georgette’s predictable responses.

  “Myra,” Fran said. “Do you like to come here? Do you mind coming?” It was out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

  Myra snorted. “Of course I don’t like to come,” she said.

  “It’s really none of my business,” Fran said.

  “You have a right to ask any question you want,” Myra said. “Have the courage of your convictions, Fran. It’s absolutely necessary in this family.”

  The storm clouds were so heavy, and the rain so imminent, that the idea of a front-lawn picnic disappeared as a possibility. As Fran sliced tomatoes, Winston and Macklin arm wrestled on the kitchen table; each time Macklin won and they locked hands again, Winston accused Macklin of rising out of his chair. “I’m buns to leather,” Macklin hissed, through clenched teeth, and Fran was surprised that he would call the plastic chair covers leather. From earlier in the afternoon she had retained the conjured-up image of a stopped Ferris wheel, and now she envisioned various family members—for all intents and purposes, everyone here was family—stopped at the top. Then she imagined their expressions. Most of them instantly appeared, but Hank’s expression was not decipherable. She tried to imagine his strange look as frightened, but that didn’t seem right. She tried to imagine him scowling, and that came a bit closer. He was out of the room, pulling up croquet stakes from the side lawn that Georgette was worried sick would get rained on and warp. Again, Fran tried to conjure up a more believable image of Hank atop the Ferris wheel, but the bemused look he had, coming back toward the house with the disassembled croquet set in his hands, couldn’t be superimposed on the image of him scowling.

  “Put a bit of lemon juice on the tomatoes so they don’t discolor,” Dora said to Fran. She had been standing beside Fran, stirring brownie batter.

  “Tomatoes don’t discolor, Dora.”

  “Of course they do. They’re just like apples,” Dora said.

  “Too many cooks spoil the broth!” Georgette said, looking over her shoulder from where she was stirring a pot on the stove.

  “Mother, we’re dealing with factual information here,” Dora said. “I don’t want this to get blown out of proportion, though, so I’m going to take three deep breaths and say no more.”

  “That’s wonderful, darlin’,” Georgette said. Georgette looked around the kitchen. “Where is Myra?” she said.

  “Weeding,” Dora said dully.

  “Weeding! But poor Myra’s done enough.”

  “She doesn’t cook,” Dora said, “so she’s gone out to weed.”

  “Well, we aren’t here doing penance!” Georgette said. “If one of us doesn’t cook, there’s no need to find another activity just to keep busy.”

  “That’s what the whole human race does, Mother,” Dora said.

  “Sloth. A day of sloth for me,” Winston said. “After much expenditure of energy, sloth.”

  “The day you didn’t get the television fixed was the happiest day of my life,” Aunt Georgia said.

  “I’m not of that opinion myself,” Winston said, “but Georgette decided we’d see what life was like without the television.”

  “I did watch every minute of the Los Angeles earthquake’s aftereffects,” Georgette said.

  Dora snorted.

  “Please let us not talk about upsetting things on the Fourth of July,” Georgette said.

  “It’s not the Fourth,” Hank said.

  “I hope you’re not on the roads that day,” Georgette said, putting a lid on the pan and wiping her hands on her apron. “It won’t be because of me if you’re out on the highway July fourth.”

  “Rain,” Dora said, as the first raindrops began to fall. She opened the front door. “Come inside!” she screamed shrilly to Myra.

  Fran looked out the window and saw Myra, holding a trowel and running fast, her tall body hunched. She bolted over the greyhound and raced between the bear and the pig. Hank reached past Fran to close the windows, then ran to the back door, which had blown open in the wind, and slammed it shut. Winston rolled in the windows by the table, looking out at his “folky art,” made intermittently bright by flashing lightning. As he stepped back, his elbow knocked over the vase of daisies on the table, and Aunt Georgia jumped in fright, as Winston reached forward, too late, trying to steady it.

  “Spilled milk,” Dora mumbled, pouring batter into a large greased pan. She wiped her forehead against her large, fleshy upper arm.

  “Someone in the royal family gardens in the rain,” Myra said, taking the dishtowel off the refrigerator handle and drying her hair. “Which one is it, Dora?”

  “Myra gave me a calendar with month-by-month pictures of English royalty, and suddenly she thinks I know everything,” Dora said. She was speaking into the sink, but quite distinctly, as if the spout were a microphone. “Myra, you’re probably confusing the queen taking walkabouts in the rain with her corgis with gardening in the rain,” Dora said. “That was the April picture.”

  “A feast for royalty, that’s for sure,” Winston said, coming up behind Georgette and hugging her. Then he quickly undid her apron bow and jumped back, laughing. “Gotcha!” he said.

  “Married for many a long year, and as happy as teenagers,” Aunt Georgia said.

  Fran looked at Hank, who was mopping up spilled water on the table. Outside, a strong wind had come up. Sheets of rain lashed the house, sending rivulets down the windows.

  “Henry,” Georgette said, calling Hank by his given name. “Darling, you know—I say this to you, too, Fran—your father and I would like it very much next Fourth of July if we could see your lovely house in Morristown and change things around a bit. About where we visit, not move furniture in your house, I mean.”

  “This is not an important occasion to me one way or the other,” Dora said. “Myra and I were saying, coming up here, that it’s just a summer visit. We don’t know why there’s this pretense of celebrating the Fourth.”

  “You young people are so busy, we thought it might make it easier,” Winston said. “We could stay at a motel. We’re very adaptable people.”

  The notion of their adaptability was so far-fetched that Fran, Hank, and even Aunt Georgia snorted along with Dora. Dora, though, stopped peeling carrots and pointed her finger at Georgette, laughing until tears came to her eyes. Then, abruptly, she stopped. “They don’t want us,” she said.

  Fran quickly contradicted Dora, but her voice was so insincere it embarrassed her. Everything she said came out in a rush: how they’d meant to entertain them at Christmas, but then she’d had to fly to Cleveland for business; that they’d thought so many times of inviting them, but work, horrible work, always got in the way. . . . As the words rushed out, Fran found herself talking more than she intended. Suddenly, she was ordering Dora not to contradict what she was saying. She was telling Dora she was very unpleasant when she made her constant, negative comments, and that Dora was not to rush in anymore and contradict everyone’s thoughts. Fran said, tremulously, “If you think it exhibits your superiority, Dora, you should know that it does quite the opposite.”

  Wide-eyed, Dora again began to pour tears. She scooped up a pile of carrot shavings and threw them at Fran, though they were so light they fluttered to the floor just beyond Dora’s out stretched hands. Dora and Fran stared at the orange curls on the floor. Fran was aware that all eyes were on them. She kept her head bowed.

  “You’re a spoiled snot. You don’t know anything about family dynamics,” Dora said. “I have every reason to resent them. They made me have an abortion when I was in high school. There happens to have been a boy who wanted to marry me, but no one in this house would hear of it, Miss Hettie the Queen of Propriety included, and I decided after that—”

  “Be quiet, Dora,” Myra said.

  “I will be quiet,” Dora said, speaking very quietly and emphatically. “I will be qu
iet to honor my chosen one.”

  “Please, ladies,” Winston said.

  “I’ve become a lady?” Dora said to Winston. “When did I become a lady? After my insides were scraped out?”

  Hettie pushed her chair back from the table. “Macklin,” she said, “I think we had better take a stroll.”

  “Oh, now, our discussion’s all over,” Winston said. “Push your chair back into the table, Hettie. It wouldn’t be July Fourth without you two.” He looked at Macklin with a worried expression.

  “I think we might borrow an umbrella and take a little walk,” Macklin said. “Rain’s eased up. I say we stroll out among my animal kingdom and breathe a breath of fresh air and continue with what is sure to be a lovely dinner.”

  “They’d never talk about it from the minute it happened, right through my marriage and divorce from Dan Kramer, until last year when I was in the hospital,” Dora said to Fran. “They still don’t want to think it happened, or that they had any part in it. His name was Richard Mayhall, and he’d given me his grandmother’s engagement ring, but Georgette and Winston intimidated me and made me have an abortion, and every time he called me, they hung up the phone. I missed all the rest of the year at school. They kept me back a year because they wouldn’t let me go back until he’d graduated.”

  “We did what we thought best,” Winston said.

  “I’m not familiar with this issue,” Macklin said. “I do know that life is filled with sadness, but I think we have to move forward and forgive.”

  Georgia’s face rested in her hands, her elbows propped on the edge of the table. Myra had disappeared some time before. Not sure what to do, Fran said to Dora, “I’m sorry,” and bent to pick up the carrot scrapings.

  “That’s what they didn’t mind doing to my insides,” Dora said to Fran, as she carried the stringy carrots to the garbage disposal.

  “Enough!” Hank said. “Macklin, get an umbrella out of the hall closet and take your walk. Look at that: it’s brightening over the field.”

  “He knew all about it,” Dora said to Fran. “That’s why he doesn’t feel the way you feel now.”