Perfect Recall

by Ann Beattie

  Fran frowned, looking at the pile of carrot shavings she’d just dumped in the sink. Why had Hank never mentioned it? And how many other secrets did she not know? She looked at the sun, peeking out between fast-rolling clouds. The field was beautiful—glossy in the rain. It was the field they’d crisscrossed in the past on cross-country skis, and on the Arctic Cat, driving in figure eights, making themselves dizzy roaring through the snow. After the graphic image Dora had just conjured up, she could not throw the switch for the garbage disposal. Instead, she stood there, looking out the window, sensing that Hank had left the kitchen. Then she was aware that someone else—it turned out to be Dora—had also left the room. As she turned and looked at the people who remained, she had an afterimage of Macklin’s absurd animals on the lawn, and thought for a second that it would be wonderful to join them and sail off on Noah’s Ark. As soon as that thought formed, though, it was followed by another: the family would probably climb aboard with her, and also, they would float forever, and nothing would endure, because everyone was old, except for Dora and Myra, who were gay, and among Macklin’s animals, there was only one of each. She had seen three doctors, and only one held out a slight hope that she might become pregnant eventually. Which made her unsure whether it was sad, or tragic, that species might disappear. And as she looked out the window again and saw Hank walking with his arm around Dora’s shoulder, she wondered whether he was sympathizing with her, or trying, as his family had once done, and as he himself had just recently done after her disappointing doctor’s visits, to persuade her that things almost always turned out for the best.

  Only the women were in the kitchen late at night, except for Hettie, who had left with Macklin right after dinner. They could all have been elsewhere, because for hours they had drifted in many directions, sitting beside their husbands, finding excuses to help each other (Georgette explaining to Fran how to roll her hair in a French twist, once it grew), making phone calls (Myra, more upset by the discussion than Dora, had phoned one of their friends from the support group and talked to her for an hour). But though they could have retreated, they did not, straggling into the kitchen one by one, for real reasons or on some pretext, so that by midnight Aunt Georgia was uncharacteristically wide awake, knitting, and Georgette was humming, rearranging food on the refrigerator shelves. Myra, Dora, and Fran sat at the table. Myra was drinking wine, which Dora said she wasn’t even tempted by, and Fran was enjoying a Coke—Coke Classic, full of calories she usually wouldn’t consider ingesting. She had told Dora about the miscarriage she suffered the year before she and Hank married, and about their subsequent inability to conceive. Myra, seeming much milder than usual, occasionally touched Dora’s wrist and said they could adopt children, if that was important to Dora. Georgette and Dora darted looks at each other, but only connected when they talked about very general things: cooking, and gardening, and the fact that summer seemed not to have come yet, with such rainy and often cold weather. The implication was that there was still much fun to be had when summer really began. The windows by the table had been rolled open again, and a mist of rain glistened on the windowsills.

  “Let me show you what Winston did,” Georgette said, throwing a light switch by the cabinet. He had hooked up a floodlight, which beamed intensely, lighting up Macklin’s animals. “He’d heard reports of prowlers,” Georgette said, “but you know, I think men just like to install things. They’re reassured by lights and alarms.”

  The bright patch of lit-up lawn was mesmerizing to Fran. Around the border, where dark grass gradually brightened to white in the illuminated circle, something was happening, Fran saw: something was moving, some shadow was darkening the light. At first it was just a flicker in her peripheral vision, but gradually she realized that her eye kept being drawn back to one spot. Dora, still with an eye on Fran, followed Fran’s line of vision, and Georgette turned and looked, too. She was the first to whisper that there was something out there. Myra stood, towering over them, staring. “It’s a dog,” Myra finally said.

  “It’s a coydog,” Aunt Georgia said, her needles in the air, blue yarn coiling from thumb to needle. “I heard about them down at Hettie’s store. Since spring, the woods have been filling up with them.”

  “People call mutts that, darlin’,” Georgette said, “but they don’t really exist. It’s like the unicorns. Wild coyotes mating with people’s pet dogs is just . . . it’s a way people upset themselves, Georgia.”

  “I know about coydogs,” Myra said. “They were in the Southwest, where I grew up. People would say you could tame them, but I never knew anybody who did. You were supposed to keep away. They were worse than wild dogs, except for wild dogs in a pack.”

  “People should bring in their dogs at night,” Georgette said, ignoring Myra’s remark. “Nowadays there’s more traffic. They should have them on leads if they don’t want them run over.”

  “Look at it nosing into the light,” Dora whispered.

  Whatever it was, its pointed ears, backlit, stretched enormously as the creature cast its shadow. Then the shadow retracted, and everything was still. Aunt Georgia was the first to react, letting down her guard by heaving a great sigh, sure it had gone away. From the bushes close to the house, though, it began, once again, to approach the periphery of the light. It must be mistaking Macklin’s animals for a real menagerie, Fran realized. It must be trying to get a scent to find out whether it was encountering friends or foe.

  “Look!” Dora said, grabbing Myra’s arm, toppling her glass of wine. “It’s got the bear!”

  For the second time that day, liquid—red wine—spilled on the table and pooled in a puddle, quickly seeping through the tablecloth.

  “Salt. Salt will stop it from staining,” Myra said. But she didn’t know where the salt was, and for some reason everyone sat paralyzed, staring at the spilled wine. The coydog, finally backing off from the animals, suddenly darted into the darkness, and was next heard bristling through the hedge of for-sythia outside the kitchen. Aunt Georgia drew back and Fran looked at the wine-soaked tablecloth, the wine moving in a rivulet toward a magazine, heading toward the vase of daisies. The second hand of the clock dropped and ticked, dropped and ticked.

  “What do you not like about our coydog, Mother?” Dora said, pulling up the tablecloth, wadding it in her hand, wine spattering her blouse as she squeezed the wine-sodden cloth into the sink. “Just the idea offends you, so it shouldn’t exist?”

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, he loves me, he loves me not, Fran thought, looking from the clock to the vase of daisies, a few heads dangling, a few petals shed, once again in place on top of the table.

  Much later, alone in the kitchen when everyone had gone to bed, Fran turned on the spotlight and waited. Eventually, as she thought might happen, she did manage a final look at the coydog. Near its tail, its coat was missing big patches of fur, and its ribs protruded. But there it was, still smitten with its wooden compatriots, or sick, perhaps: it was probably moving in circles and seeming disoriented because it was sick. As with so many things that were at first terrifying, Fran thought, it was also sad. It approached the pig, but went only so close. Then it hung its head and sniffed close to the greyhound. If she hadn’t been exhausted, she would have watched it longer, but she was tired, and simply turned off the light.

  She would be married to Hank for four more years. In that time, though the family convened regularly in Morristown, all of them would inevitably talk about this day. Other things would be omitted. The stories told could be summarized as follows: I remember the day the poor lonesome coydog got a broken heart when it went and fell in love with animals not quite its kind.

  Perfect Recall

  UNCLE Nate was estranged from the family for many years—a period during which, my mother told my sister and me, Nate intended to be a loner and misbehaved if anyone forced him to do anything for the family. He was her only brother, and I know it made her sad that he had moved to Maine and gone into what she could only see as sel
f-imposed exile. I must have been seven when my mother, sister, and I spent the first day with Nate I could really remember at a small cove beach not far from his house. We were not invited to his house, though. “A total mess, nothing I could do with it,” Nate said to our mother, who seemed to blithely accept this information. We had hot dogs and lemonade for lunch at a small shack near the beach where Nate’s girlfriend, Kate, worked. Kate had a teenage daughter named Cindy Sue, and she also had a large husky named Prince Valiant. The dog could balance a hot dog on his nose. He would scratch the sand to smooth the ground when he saw Kate coming toward him with the hot dog. Then, after he was done scratching, Kate would step forward and center the hot dog on his nose, vertically. Prince Valiant would move slightly to the left and right to keep it upright for several seconds after Kate’s hand was removed, his blue eyes crossed, and then he would give the hot dog a little toss in the air, catch it, and eat it in two bites. The dog was delighted when this trick had to be repeated for my sister, who had run off while he was still scratching.

  The summer we went to Maine my sister, Elizabeth, was fourteen. In another four years she would be married to Donovan McCallister, who told us he was twenty-five when actually he was thirty-five, and one year after her marriage, Elizabeth would open her door to find a woman standing there holding a small boy by the hand: the reputed son of Donovan McCallister. She then became the mother to four-year-old Banyan McCallister, so named because he had been conceived behind the wall-like roots of a banyan tree in Key West, Florida, when Donovan was stationed at the navy base. The woman had been a waitress. She later married a private investigator, who, on their honeymoon, tracked down Donovan McCallister so he could assume responsibility for his son. The introduction was not very successful, because Elizabeth almost fainted, and Banyan burst into tears the minute the door was opened, and Banyan’s mother, the former waitress, while not crying, was apparently not coherent, either. Though that preliminary encounter did not go well, Donovan was forced to go to a lawyer, who ordered a test to ascertain parentage, which came back after what seemed an excessively long time saying that Donovan McCallister was the boy’s father, unless you were going to argue about .0000001 percent, which would of course make the lawyer richer but get little sympathy from a judge. How exactly Banyan came to move in with my sister and her husband was never clear to the family. Obviously that had been Banyan’s mother’s intention all along, but why this came to be was either not talked about, or perhaps not even questioned. Even before the test results came back, Banyan had been ditched. He was left by his mother with a hotel-provided babysitter who, when Banyan’s mother and the private investigator did not return by three A.M., called the phone number she had been provided with, which turned out to be my sister and Donovan’s home phone. It was the day after the woman’s initial visit, and after a night of arguments and acrimony, my sister was packing her suitcase to move back home. Why she stayed is not clear.

  That day at the beach, Kate—who had apparently facilitated the exchange of letters that resulted in Nate’s picking up the phone and telling the family exactly where he was—took my mother aside and told her that Nathaniel, as she called Uncle Nate, had proposed and retracted his proposal three times in the three years she had known him. Each time he proposed had been the day after Valentine’s, and the third time it happened, and she accepted, and then he called on February 16 to say he’d just as soon put it off for a while, she realized that the reason Nathaniel proposed the day after Valentine’s Day was because the large satin hearts filled with candy were fifty percent off. “Too conventional to propose on the day itself,” Uncle Nate had apparently told her. She’d believed the proposals the first two times, but the third time he proposed, she’d agreed without any hope that there would really be a wedding. Her reason for confiding in my mother—who told us the whole story that night, on the way home—was to try to elicit her help. Kate’s idea was a little vague, but basically it involved assembling the family for dinner at her house, and then mentioning that for three years Uncle Nate had proposed to her and then rescinded the offer. She thought she might embarrass him by telling everyone what he’d done, sort of anecdotally, but she also hoped for the family’s support: a chorus of chiding voices. My mother told Kate she doubted such a strategy would work. But Kate pleaded with her to bring us next Valentine’s, as well as our mother’s mother and grandmother. My mother, more to find a way to end the discussion than anything else, said that she would think about it, though she didn’t think she would ever get Mother Brink to Maine in the winter, with her arthritis, and of course my father had simply disappeared from the face of the earth over three years ago, so Kate could hardly expect him, since my mother no longer expected him, herself. That would leave only Grandmother Huntlowe, Mother Brink’s mother, but everyone knew she would go absolutely anywhere, as long as someone drove her.

  I have to interrupt at this point to say a few things about how my sister, Elizabeth, usually conducted herself on car rides. She reverted to being babyish: a whiny brat, who kept up a constant routine of chatter, singing songs off-key as she interrupted her questioning to recite a limerick, grandstanding as if the car were a stage. She would call out “deer crossing!” when we passed a sign that depicted a leaping deer; she would change the stations on the radio so often that my mother made her ride in the backseat. On that particular car ride, she had demanded to know everything about Kate, and about Kate’s daughter, wanting to know why Kate’s daughter was called by her first and middle names, wanting to know why the South lost the Civil War, wondering aloud about all the missing men in everyone’s family. She was singing along with the radio, “Lovely Rita, meter maid . . .” when a deer jumped across the road and my mother swerved into the breakdown lane. We found out later that she had slammed on the brakes harder than necessary to also avoid a family of possums, which is what made the car careen off the road and hit a tree that stopped our skid down the incline. There was serious damage to the right side of the car. Nothing happened to our mother, except that it provoked an asthma attack. She got her inhaler out of the glove compartment, put it in her mouth, and squirted. My sister, Elizabeth, although she had only the teeniest cut from where her hand hit the window handle, became hysterical, hollering for Grandma Huntlowe, instead of Mother, which really offended Mother. I was in the front seat, and the Beatles were still singing. All that had happened to me was that I got a headache the second the car hit the tree, but between Mother’s asthma attack and Elizabeth’s personal drama, I was the most coherent person when the first of many motorists who’d stopped reached our car. One of them, a man in a pickup truck, was the person we later lived with for many years, but that night he was just a tall red-haired man in a blue shirt and blue jeans, who had trouble figuring out what had happened because his glasses had flown off as he ran down the incline. When he first arrived, he was breathing as heavily as my mother. He was also more full of questions than my sister. “All right, everybody, take it easy. Who’s hurt?” he said. My sister, when he opened the back door, unfastened her seat belt and scurried into his arms. By then, a man and a woman had arrived on my side of the car. I remember the woman saying, “My God. They were listening to the same song we were.”

  Uncle Nate was called to come get us, as my mother talked to the police and we watched the car slowly towed back up the incline. My mother was weak-kneed and tearful, constantly saying how glad she was that the tree stopped us. She kept trying to cuddle us, wiping away her tears and my sister’s and telling me what a brave girl I was. After the accident, as we waited for Nate and for the tow truck, she and I shared the front seat of Dennis Trellis’s pickup, bumping each other’s hips to try to get more room. We would sit in that seat many more times, as it turned out, but that night it seemed a continuation of our adventure, sitting in such a large, unfamiliar vehicle as our mother talked to the police.

  Uncle Nate came for us in Kate’s station wagon. Kate was in the passenger’s seat, her hair uncombed, no ma
keup . . . and I thought that no, he would never marry her, whether or not the family said he should, because without makeup her eyes almost disappeared, and she had no top lip at all. I was wrong about her prospects, as it turned out, because riding back to his house he began to declare how very glad he was we were all alive and miraculously unhurt, and before we got to his house he said the accident made him realize that life was full of terrible surprises, and that the one thing he wanted to do was to be wedded to Kate, which my mother quickly agreed would be a wonderful idea. Kate took what he said seriously because it was not the day after Valentine’s.

  Uncle Nate’s house was as much of a mess as he’d said it was, but it was also more interesting than just any messy house. The kitchen counters were flecked with congealed food and caved-in Chinese take-out cartons. The ceiling was peeling so that the surface matched the shag carpeting in the living room. The only furniture was a sofa and two pole lamps hung with drying socks and a coffee table made from a lobster trap, with a piece of glass on top that had seashells glued around the edge. There were more cartons, and TV dinner containers, on the coffee table, as well as empty milk cartons and tools. In the living room were posters of Elvis and Jim Morrison held to the wall with yellowing tape. There was Elvis in one of his sparkly white jumpsuits paired with Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Leaning against the walls were old tires decorated with the oddest things: forests fashioned out of bent metal hangers that had been painted green were on some of them—little plastic animals glued to the tires helped the illusion—and others had boats sailing on them, the tops of the tires painted blue and white to look like ocean waves, while another one had the Eiffel Tower made from broom straws, with little plastic dollhouse figures walking toward it. My mother, preoccupied as she was, began to squint at them with curiosity almost as fast as my sister and I did. “Nate . . . whatever are these?” she said.