O Beautiful

by Jung Yun

  She wonders if Maren is trying to pick a fight, or if she’s simply stating the obvious. Either way, she’s right. Elinor had no intention of visiting Maren or spending time with her family during this trip.

  “So how’s your article going?”

  “Fine. Just trying to get my bearings still.”

  “You’ll have to interview Tom when you come over. He has lots of opinions about fracking.”

  Her sister simply won’t give up. “What about you? You must have opinions too.”

  Maren shrugs. “Tom’s all worried about how it affects the water supply and wildlife and everything, which I get. But if someone offered us a million dollars to put some wells on our land right now, I definitely wouldn’t say no.”

  It’s hard to tell if Maren actually thinks companies are paying a million dollars for the rights to drill, or if she’s just exaggerating the figure because it’s a fantasy for people like her and Tom. Unlike Avery, their town wasn’t built on a shale formation. There’s no fossilized crude oil under their soybean fields, waiting to be pumped from the earth. No promise of royalty income from any wells that manage to produce. Elinor looked at the distance on a map once. If Tom’s family farm had been situated just forty or fifty miles to the west of where it is, they might actually be rich instead of lower middle class.

  “You know they don’t really pay…” She hesitates, trying to figure out how to reword in midsentence. Maren is sensitive about not going to college. Tom is too. They get prickly whenever she says things that make them feel uneducated or ill-informed, so she quickly abandons the thread. “You know they don’t give us much paid time for these research trips. Ten days is pretty short.”

  “Have you written a lot so far?”

  “I probably won’t start writing until I’m back in New York. It’s just interviews for now.”

  Richard used to read early drafts of her work when they were together. He always took a pen to the text whether she asked him to or not, making note after note in fine blue ink. However critical his feedback was, it still felt like a privilege to go through the dog-eared, marked-up pages afterward, realizing how the introduction of a new paragraph or the movement of an existing one could make such a difference. Even his small edits—a word choice, a deletion—seemed seismic to her. She learned more from reading his marginalia than she did in any class. Studying it made her a better writer, capable of improving her work independently. Elinor wonders if he’ll want to see a draft of her piece before she sends the final copy to Lydia. Maybe he’ll even want to see multiple drafts, going back and forth over her revisions like they used to. She can’t summon the same sense of excitement or gratitude about Richard’s involvement anymore. She’d been looking forward to doing this on her own. But even if the byline is hers, even if most of the writing is hers, the story will still be his.

  “It’s going to be a lot of work. More than I really understood, but it’s a good opportunity…” She trails off, aware that Maren is texting under the table.

  “Sorry, sorry. I just had to deal with something real quick.” She sets down her phone as the waitress returns with their drinks.

  Elinor assumes that a toast is coming. Something embarrassingly sentimental, but Maren simply picks up her glass and takes a long slug. She decides to do the same.

  “So how are your boys?” she asks. It doesn’t feel right to call them “my nephews.” The oldest, whose name she sometimes confuses with the youngest’s, was barely walking the last time she saw him. And the youngest, she’s only seen in pictures. Certain childless people, she’s noticed, dote on their siblings’ kids like their own—something Maren occasionally points out, not making any effort to be subtle. Elinor’s former agent was like this, displaying her nieces’ pigtailed school photos on her desk and taking time off to attend their Christmas pageants and choir concerts. Elinor admires this kind of closeness, even though she doesn’t aspire to it herself.

  “The boys are doing good, but Jesus, preteens are hard. They’ve been driving me crazy lately. You know I caught Nathan smoking a couple weeks ago? And Adam has a girlfriend all of a sudden. Can you believe that? My baby has a girlfriend. Tom says eleven’s still too early for a conversation about the birds and the bees, but this girl Adam’s been hanging out with…” Maren’s phone vibrates and she snatches it up with both hands, her face flickering with a strange, almost nervous expression as she types out a reply.

  The call from Richard could arrive at any minute. A message might even be waiting for her now. Still, Elinor resists the urge to check her phone. It strikes her as odd, maybe even a little rude, that Maren can’t demonstrate the same restraint.

  “What were you saying about the girl?”

  “Hmm?” She sets the phone down again. “Oh … right. Right. He’s dating this seventh grader who’s really bad news. She’s not even thirteen yet, and all the moms I’m friends with call her ‘the bicycle.’ I mean, I know we probably shouldn’t talk like that. She’s just a kid after all, but these parents of hers—they let her run completely wild.” This also feels like an elbow to the ribs, something to justify the way Maren used to police Elinor’s behavior as a teenager, ratting her out to their father at every opportunity. “I’m worried Adam’s going to come home one day and tell me she’s pregnant. Can you believe I have to think about things like this now? He’s eleven.”

  “Wait. Why do you call her the bicycle?”

  “You know … the sort of girl everyone’s taken for a ride.”

  Elinor blinks at her. She still can’t get used to the idea of Maren as a mother, friendly with the kind of mothers who never gave theirs the time of day. This was what Maren always wanted though, to belong to something, to be like everyone else. Elinor can’t really blame her, growing up in a place where the kids at school used to accuse them of eating stray dogs and called them “chinks” and “gooks” right to their faces. Whenever their classmates turned their attentions to the Sioux or Mahua girls, they’d both join in gladly, so grateful not to be on the receiving end of the name calling for a change.

  She takes another sip of whiskey, noticing that Maren’s glass is almost empty already. “And what about Tom? How’s he?”

  She shrugs. “Tom is Tom.”

  “Still fixing old cars?”

  “When he has time.”

  “And listening to talk radio?”

  “Oh, God. Constantly.”

  Elinor never knows whether to be upset or disappointed by her sister’s choice of husband. However unfair the comparison, she can’t help but think of her brother-in-law as an adult version of the shitty little kids they went to school with. Shortly after they eloped, Maren brought him to New York for a long weekend so that he and Elinor could finally meet. At first, she was so embarrassed to be seen walking alongside him, dressed in his pearl-snap shirts and stiff blue Wrangler jeans, gee-whizzing at the architecture as if he’d never seen a tall building before. Although Elinor had been living in New York for over a year by that point, her impostor syndrome still ran deep. She thought she could sense people looking at her because they were looking at him, and she hated what his proximity implied. Occasionally, she found herself wishing that Maren and Tom hadn’t spent their hard-earned money to pay her a visit, which made her feel like a terrible sister, a terrible person. But then she’d hear Tom’s booming voice, warning Maren not to buy the counterfeit purses from the Africans. Not “the men” or “the street vendors,” but “the Africans,” he kept calling them, which made her wish they’d both just pack up and go home.

  Maren finishes her drink and signals to the waitress for another. It’s been less than ten minutes since they sat down.

  “Are you okay?” Elinor tries not to sound concerned.

  She checks her phone again. “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, and she really doesn’t. In person, Maren is so different from what she remembers, different from what she expected. The drinking and texting and constant distract
ion seem unlike her, although it occurs to Elinor that she has no idea what kind of woman her sister is now.

  22

  The jukebox has been playing Jimmy Buffett’s greatest hits for the past half hour. Then the dollar bills that someone fed into the machine finally run out and the selections abruptly change. An old AC/DC song that was popular in the eighties starts, the intro a series of long, echoing chords on an electric guitar. Maren sits up straight at the sound of the familiar notes, slapping the table with both palms as the drums join in.

  “You remember this one?” she asks excitedly. She finishes off her third drink and shouts “turn it up” at no one in particular.

  Elinor sinks into her seat, mortified. She glances around the room, certain that people are staring at them. But shouting at the jukebox is apparently something that people do at Roswell’s. It doesn’t earn them any extraordinary notice.

  Maren’s second and third drinks went down as quickly as the first. In between, she told more disjointed stories about her kids, one of which involved an ATV they totaled, and another about living in a house with three males and only one bathroom. Elinor gently pushes a red plastic basket of fries across the table. She wasn’t particularly hungry or even in the mood for fries when she ordered them. She just wanted Maren to eat something solid.

  “You should help me with these before they get cold,” she suggests.

  Maren shakes her head and looks over Elinor’s shoulder at the door. Roswell’s has gotten busier since they first arrived. Every bar seat and table is now taken. The mostly male crowd is a mix of old and young, roughneck and local. A good place to find new sources, if she weren’t here with her sister. Maren, whose face is becoming increasingly flushed, surveys the room with the kind of wide-eyed interest better suited to a big city or a natural phenomenon.

  “I think that guy likes you,” she says, motioning toward the other side of the room. “He keeps staring.”

  Elinor turns to see who she’s talking about and immediately wishes she hadn’t. There’s a man with a long, scraggly ponytail and Elvis-like sideburns leering at their table. He raises his beer at Elinor and winks.

  “Oh, great,” she says under her breath. “Some old creep is into me.”

  “Jesus.” Maren almost laughs. “Judge much?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know he’s a creep. He could be a perfectly nice guy if you gave him a chance.”

  Elinor drinks to avoid saying something she might regret. This is dangerous, familiar territory for them. Maren occasionally accuses her of acting like she’s better than other people—namely her and Tom. There’s no convincing her that being judgmental and having good judgment aren’t the same thing.

  “All I’m saying is that you don’t have to be such a snob. Someone thinks you’re pretty, El. What’s so wrong with that?”

  His attention isn’t a compliment, but Elinor doesn’t know how to explain this, not without descending into a narrow valley that would be difficult to climb out of. In the past, she used to enjoy being noticed by men, typically attractive men of means. But why did that feel better than what’s happening now? Why was it different when the man looking at her had nice eyes or was wearing a $3,000 suit? Was it actually different at all?

  “Maybe we should cancel the next round and get going. You can lie down in my room for a while before you have to drive back.”

  “I’m not drunk,” Maren snaps. “I’m just trying to have a good time.”

  There’s a strange role reversal at work here. Elinor remembers saying something eerily similar to Maren when they were teenagers. She also remembers feeling deeply resentful that she had to say it—there were only two years separating them, after all. Their father, however, was convinced that Elinor would go astray without proper oversight. At his urging, Maren became responsible for keeping her in line, which she interpreted to mean telling her what to do, what to wear, and how to behave. In high school, when she should have been getting drunk at parties, Maren was rummaging through Elinor’s belongings and interrogating her when she came home from school, trying to find evidence of her bad behavior. Her sister’s vigilance, combined with their father’s, was oppressive. And Elinor saw it for what it was—an overcorrection for Nami’s absence. She didn’t appreciate their efforts to protect her from herself any more than Maren appreciates them now.

  The waitress brings over another round of drinks—Maren’s fourth, Elinor’s second—and tells them that table service is ending. They’ll have to go up to the bar from now on. Maren clearly isn’t listening. She’s almost leaning out of her seat, craning her neck so she can see the door.

  “Why do you keep doing that?” Elinor asks.

  “Doing what?”

  “That. Right there. Are you expecting someone?”

  Maren leans across the table, lowering her voice. “Okay, listen. There’s this guy … his name’s Gary. He’s going to join us for a drink, but I don’t want you making a big deal about it.”

  “Who’s Gary?”

  “A friend.” Maren hesitates, clearly wanting to say more.

  “Is he the person you’ve been texting with?” She realizes this isn’t the first time that she’s heard the word friend since they sat down. “Wait. Is this the same friend who told you about this place?”

  Suddenly, Maren grabs both of Elinor’s hands, squeezing them tightly in hers. “I think … this is going to sound crazy, El, but I think he might be the guy I’ve been waiting for.”

  “What does that mean? ‘The guy you’ve been waiting for’? What about Tom?” Elinor pulls her hands away. It feels odd asking about her brother-in-law, a recent Tea Party convert who she can barely stand to talk to. Still, twenty-three years of marriage is a long time. “Maren, are you having an affair?” She stops, aware that the moony smile on her sister’s face, the one she assumed was just drunkenness, is getting bigger and bigger. She turns to see a dark-haired, barrel-chested man elbowing his way through the crowd toward their booth.

  “Hi, there,” he says to Maren.

  The two of them attempt to greet each other, first with a chaste kiss on the cheek and then a straight-armed hug that almost turns into a real one. It looks like they discussed how they should behave toward each other in front of Elinor, but they’ve having a hard time remembering.

  “Gary, this is my little sister.”

  He holds a large hand out in front of her. Elinor shakes it, feeling quarter-sized calluses pressing into her palm.

  “You want to sit?” Maren moves over, patting the space beside her. Gary slides in, their bodies now touching from shoulder to leg.

  “Nice to finally meet you,” Gary says. “Your sister was real excited about you being in town.”

  Real excited about you being in town. Gary doesn’t have an accent, but there’s something different about his choice of words, the way he puts them all together.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” she asks.

  “No, I’m originally from Tulsa.”

  “But he was an army brat,” Maren adds. “He’s lived all over the world, just like Dad did when he was young. Tell her, Gary. Tell her some of the places you’ve lived.”

  As Gary rattles off a list of bases, Elinor watches her sister abandon all pretense of platonic friendship and snake her arm through his, the same way she did during their walk from the hotel. It’s clearly the early stage of whatever this is, when neither of them can stop touching the other. They giggle and squeeze and smile and stroke as question after question racks up in Elinor’s head. Who is this guy? How long has this been going on? Does he know that she’s married? That she has kids? How much damage have they already done?

  “So…” Elinor pauses, trying to decide what she can get away with asking. “How did the two of you meet?”

  Gary strokes the stubble on his chin and laughs, revealing perfectly straight yellow teeth. “In Walmart, actually. It was my first week in Avery, and I had to grab a couple of things to make my R
V a little more inhabitable. I was just walking around the store when I saw your sister here.” He looks at Maren and takes her hand. “She was so gorgeous, I followed her around the aisles for nearly an hour, trying to work up the nerve to say something to her.”

  The two of them seem to think this is funny, but Elinor isn’t amused. This man just described stalking her sister in a Walmart. She takes a hard look at Gary, whom she already dislikes. He’s too tan, too muscular, too much of a peacock. His biceps bulge out of the sleeves of his T-shirt, a black one that he probably chose because it’s tight. He’s also wearing a black leather cuff studded with silver around his left wrist. When he turns away, she notices that the skin around his eyes is lighter than the rest of his face, like he’s been wearing goggles. And there’s a one-inch strip of skin directly below his hairline that’s also lighter, right where a helmet might cut off. He’s a biker, she thinks. Her sister is having an affair with a meathead biker. As soon as the thought crosses her mind, she realizes this is exactly the behavior that Maren pointed out earlier. And yet she’s still not sorry. Her judgment has probably saved her from more bad situations than she can count.

  “Maren said you used to be a model in New York. That must have been pretty exciting.”

  She wishes her sister wouldn’t tell strangers this, but of course Gary and Maren aren’t strangers. “Mostly I just did catalog work.”

  “You mean those big phone books they used to send in the mail?”

  She nods. “And then some Internet stuff, when the catalogs went away.”

  His eyes sweep the length of her arms. “I never saw women with ink like that in any Sears catalog.”

  “These came after,” she says, turning at the sound of a bell clanging behind her.

  Their attentions shift to a trio of guys standing at the bar. They’re all shouting “Chug! Chug!” at a young roughneck who’s wearing a lime green T-shirt that says IT’S MY BIRTHDAY. It must be his twenty-first because he barely looks legal with his cherub cheeks and constellation of pimples mapped across his face. He appears to be spilling more beer than he’s actually swallowing, but the crowd doesn’t seem to mind. When he brings his empty mug down on the bar like a gavel, everyone erupts. Gary laughs and gives him a hand.