Follies

by Ann Beattie

  It would be great if they issued trench coats. Really: they could camp it up, instead of doing everything possible to make sure no one ever had reason to laugh—their own witticisms on the telephone excepted. Talk to them on the phone in anything but a muted monotone and they’d have someone tail you for a week. He liked being on a plane, where it was difficult even to think that someone who knew him whom he didn’t know could be. He took an Ambien, opening the little pill case for its last possibility, and drifted off, thinking of Paula. Paula, who could be known, to some extent, by what she was not. Not a wife, or a mother, or a good aunt (according to her). When she bought toys she ended up keeping them for herself. She bought booties for a friend’s baby and decided to keep them to store her rings in. Paula got very involved in fashion magazines, though she was allergic to the fragrance sheets and ended up scratching her nose as she flipped. Paula with the teeny permanent “hairs” added to the sparse centers of her eyebrows. The false eyelashes razored apart, applied with glue for special occasions. She’d get up in the middle of the night and puree things and put them on her face: avocado; peaches mixed with milk. There would be a laugh track if there was a Paula sitcom, but he thought she’d be better as her own reality show. How would he figure in? Maybe he could have a monologue in front of the camera and ruin his career by talking about Operation Eagle Pull.

  “May I offer a warm washcloth?” someone in the half-dream said.

  He opened his eyes. The steward stood in the aisle, dangling a washcloth held by tongs in front of his face. No wonder he’d been thinking of the perfumed ads in Paula’s magazine…but that was hours ago, apparently. According to his watch, there was only another hour left in flight. The lady next to him was looking into a compact and powdering her nose. He wondered, nervously, whether he might have spoken when he was dreaming.

  Apparently not. The woman waved away the towel—as did he—though he took a mint she silently offered him from a little tin. The plane dipped, and the captain spoke, his voice too quiet to be heard. He heard “seat belts” and “altitude.” A woman was standing outside the restroom door. The steward gestured for her to sit down, but then the door opened, and she ducked inside. The plane bounced a little before straightening out. The woman leaned toward him and whispered, “Kate Jackson is on this plane.”

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Men,” she said. “She was on Charlie’s Angels.”

  “I know who Farrah Fawcett is,” he said.

  “I don’t doubt that every man alive knows her. Do you know, I was watching you take a pill without water and I thought: Men do not like to take pills with water, and they do not like Band-Aids. A man’s finger can be bleeding profusely, and he’ll refuse to bandage it. Just so you don’t think I’m a sexist, though, women are equally peculiar. They’ll sniffle, rather than blow their nose in public.”

  He was glad he had not stayed awake to listen to this woman’s chatter. A nun from coach came into the cabin and went into the restroom. Why did nuns so often have red cheeks? He saw the steward look at her and decide to let her use the first-class bathroom. As a teenager, Paula had lived for a winter with her mother at the American Academy in Rome, when her mother had a music scholarship. She was full of stories about the nuns in Trastevere: nuns she insisted gave tourists the wrong directions, because they did not care where people ended up, if it was not going to be inside a church. Or out of sheer malicious resentment.

  “Coffee, cognac, or both?” a stewardess said, smiling like a toothpaste ad. “Coffee, cognac, or both?” she said, coming toward them.

  “One day at a time,” the gray-haired lady said.

  He looked at her, wondering if she might just be making a personal confession.

  “Because of the way you looked at the liqueur bottles,” she said. “I’m in recovery, myself. Going on nine years.”

  “Good for you,” he said, confirming nothing.

  “I just wanted you to know that I knew. Now: What are you most looking forward to in London?”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say “Finding some drug-addicted loser.” He thought she could handle the answer. Instead, he said, “I’m going to look for a friend’s son who’s been out of touch with her a little too long.”

  She poked his shoulder. “You’re supposed to ask me what I’m going to do in London, now,” she said. “That’s a tendency we have. To answer, but not to extend ourselves with a question.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Tell.”

  “I’ll be visiting my son’s family. He married the nicest Welsh girl, and they have twin daughters. We’re going to the galleries. The British Museum. The Tate.”

  The stewardess, mesmerized by her own words, droned on and on as she passed up the aisle, as if people didn’t already know what they were being offered.

  As she walked by, he noticed that she was wearing a necklace similar to one he’d bought Paula: she had been happy with her intertwined rose-gold-and-silver Valentine’s Day necklace, but she’d guessed, correctly, that the saleslady had suggested he buy it, which meant he didn’t really get the same credit for buying it as if he’d selected it himself. The woman next to him put her bookmark in Northanger Abbey: an oversize bronze paper clip, which reminded him that he’d once bought paper clips just to spend the agency’s money on something ridiculous. And then Nancy Gregerson had gone back to the scene—she’d told him about it at the coffee shop—and found some on the street and picked one up, which she’d used later to puncture a balloon. That weird story she’d told him about dinosaurs…His mind was racing, which happened sometimes when he awakened suddenly. Again he thought of Eagle Pull. This many years later, he could remember details of the information he’d been given about land mines in the area. When stepped on, the device shot a meter into the air before sending out its fléchettes, or shrapnel fragments. Then there would be a chain reaction. It did need to be noted, however, that much in life depended upon point of view. To an ant, the spray of shrapnel would be the dream fireworks of a lifetime; a human would, of course, view the Fléchette Follies extravaganza much differently.

  He supposed one reason he was doing what he was doing was because he had survivor’s guilt. He was lucky he’d never had post-traumatic stress disorder, and only used Ambien infrequently to sleep. He was lucky the alcohol had numbed the memories when it had, and also lucky he’d been able to get away from liquor after not too bad a struggle when it turned against him.

  “What is your position on the Elgin Marbles?” she said.

  “What are they?” he said, glad to have his thoughts interrupted.

  “Art. Taken from the Parthenon,” she said. The plane dipped again, and she grabbed the armrest. “They’re in the British Museum, but it looks like they’re going to have to return them.”

  “People don’t want them to go back, I take it.”

  “See?” she said, poking his arm again. “You’re a better conversationalist than you knew. Your point is exactly right. The same way New Yorkers didn’t want to lose Guernica. Look them up in a guidebook. It will make you want to see for yourself.”

  “I’m not big on guidebooks.”

  “Most people wouldn’t think of taking a vacation without reading one!”

  “I like to feel like I’m discovering something,” he said, thinking aloud. “Almost everything’s written about somewhere, but if you don’t do the research, you can think you’re the first one to see something.” What was he saying? His life was one in which he was provided with information, went out, and found what he’d been directed to find. He knew how the things he encountered worked, how they detonated, how chain reactions began, how far shrapnel would fly. What a lie he was telling, just to see what it would feel like.

  It felt frightening, he concluded. He would rather know everything about the marbles, so he could look at them and see what he was expected to see, understand what he was expected to know. He most certainly would read about them before seeing them.

  “
I’ll bet there are plenty of guidebooks that haven’t been written,” she said. “As soon as the climate changes, or fashions change, people set off for different places.” She closed her eyes. She said, “People didn’t know about hell until Dante wrote about it.”

  The joke about the Lazy Day Bagpipe Band was that no one played bagpipes, being too lazy to do so. The band consisted of a senior citizen named Day Lawrence, and his twin niece and nephew, Timmy and Loni, who Nancy guessed must be in their early thirties. They had played at Dolly Madison before, Timmy hitting a tambourine and Loni strumming a guitar. Day Lawrence’s former fiancée had been briefly at Dolly Madison, after a stroke, before leaving to move closer to her daughter. Nancy remembered her as a very nice lady who, afflicted as she was, seemed as embarrassed by Day’s antics as with her own efforts to stand without toppling. He sang a capella songs to her that were popular during World War Two, punctuating some of the lyrics by becoming airborne and clicking his heels in the air. Mrs. Ethridge, the head nurse, was legendary for rarely smiling and even more rarely breaking stride, but she had stood in the corridor and listened to “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” in its entirety, not only smiling, but laughing, when the heel click came. There had been talk of a flirtation between Day and Mrs. Ethridge (her name was Elizabetta, but no one called her that) that extended beyond the fiancée’s relocation; someone had seen them at the frozen custard stand—though it might have been coincidence that they were both there at the same time. Surely they must gossip about her, too, Nancy thought. They must, even if only to say that there was nothing to say.

  They were short-staffed, so Robins, from the kitchen, had stayed overtime to help push wheelchairs to the performance. Several times Nancy had dropped him at the bus stop, so maybe that was the gossip. She thanked him sincerely as he rolled Mrs. Bell toward the Pool Room. It was Nicky who told her that a famous New York restaurant had an area called the Pool Room, and much was determined by whether you ate in that room or another. How Nicky got his information she would never know, though he did have a snob’s ability to keep track of what was happening elsewhere, what party he was missing. The Pool Room at Dolly Madison House was a room at the back of the north wing, where French doors opened onto a kidney-shaped fish pool in which a few fish swam amid many water lilies. A large sculpture of a leaping dolphin had been donated by someone and placed in the middle, which she thought ruined the ambiance. It was a place the nurses went to have a cigarette on break, or where some visitors wheeled their friends or loved ones to have some privacy.

  Accounted for: Mrs. Bell, Mrs. Albaharis, Miss Heller, Mrs. Beaumont, Mr. Freeley, Mrs. Jones and her day nurse, Mrs. Lana-han and her nephew, who was a professor at the university. Several more wheelchairs were being pushed past the nurses’ station. The light went on in Mrs. Dowler’s room, and Nancy stood to respond, because Mrs. Dowler was a screamer. Jenny, wheeling Mrs. McCall past, looked at the light above the door and rolled her eyes. It was a rule that if your hands were on a wheelchair, only in an emergency could you stop pushing the person to aid someone. Mrs. Dowler had somehow gotten herself out of bed, though, Jenny and Nancy saw at the same time. Mrs. McCall asked, “Why aren’t we going anywhere?” as Jenny and Nancy rushed forward to catch Mrs. Dowler before she fell. No such luck: she crumpled at Jenny’s feet. “Why aren’t we moving?” Mrs. McCall said. “Why aren’t we moving?” “Just a minute, Mrs. McCall,” Jenny called. “Why aren’t we moving?” the old lady said. “Just one minute,” Jenny said, all the time looking frantically at Nancy, who was trying to figure out if Mrs. Dowler was hurt. Mrs. Dowler screamed, but rarely spoke. At night, sometimes, when she was dreaming, you might hear a few words, or even a sentence, but mostly she screamed, and it might be a bad sign that she was at this moment silent. “Why aren’t we moving?” Mrs. McCall hollered. She attracted another nurse’s attention, who began pushing her and speaking to her reassuringly, without knowing what was happening in Mrs. Dowler’s room. “Blink if anything hurts,” Nancy said, forcing herself to sound matter-of-fact. “How did you get up, Mrs. Dowler?” Jenny said. Seeing Jenny’s face close to hers, Mrs. Dowler began to scream. Her favorite assertion, which she sometimes alternated with screams that sounded horrified and indignant, rather like an animal who was sprung upon by another, was: “I’ve been shanghaied.” She screamed it loudly several times, then rolled onto her side and began to cry. “All right, we’re going to get you up,” Nancy said. “Here we go,” Jenny said, chiming in. “I’ve been shanghaied!” the old lady screamed. At this point, Katie Shroeder ran into the room, hands clasped nervously. “Oh my goodness, is there anything…” “Here we go, now,” Nancy said, bearing most of Mrs. Dowler’s weight. “Take me to the bank,” someone said loudly, as she was wheeled past. “Tell us if you’re in any pain, Mrs. Dowler,” Nancy said. The old lady was upright, Katie supporting one shoulder and Nancy with a hand firmly around her waist. The old lady had gone stone-faced. “Does Mrs. Dowler understand how she had an accident?” Katie said to Nancy. “I was on my way to punch out,” Sally muttered, rolling the wheelchair up behind her. “I’ve been shanghaied!” Mrs. Dowler screamed. “She’s all right,” Nancy said. “Of course she is!” Katie said. “Were you getting ready for our musical performance, Mrs. Dowler?” “I’m getting out of here,” Jenny said. The voices of the Lazy Day Bagpipe Band could be heard, not yet in harmony, above a strummed guitar that seemed badly out of tune. “Help me, I’ve been shanghaied!” Mrs. Dowler screamed. “Everything is fine,” Katie said. Katie had the nervous habit of quickly licking her bottom lip, so red lipstick was often on her teeth. Nancy pointed to her own lips, to let Katie know. Katie looked in the mirror, and began to run her finger over her front teeth. “In the good old summertime, in the good old summertime,” the voices sang. “Strolling down the avenue…” “Who knows what an avenue is?” Nancy heard, shouted above the music. It was the director, who often blurted out things so unexpectedly that Nancy wondered if he liked to complicate things, or whether it was nervousness. “Take me to the bank!” someone hollered. The music began again: “In the good old summertime…” “I’ve been shanghaied!” Mrs. Dowler screamed, unfastening the bag Velcroed to the arm of her wheelchair. “Mrs. Dowler, you are fine!” Katie said, taking the wheelchair and rolling it into the corridor, tongue moving like a metronome over her bottom lip. Nancy lingered to look at a greeting card on the old lady’s bulletin board. The front was a photograph of a very yellow butterfly flecked with blue. Inside, she read the message: “How does a butterfly fly? / How does a butterfly soar? / How many clouds move ’cross the sky / How many, how many more?” It was signed, in shaky handwriting, “Sister.”

  On her way back to the nurses’ station, she overheard someone in one of the rooms helping someone else make a telephone call. “No, I’m not going to do it for you, you just put your finger on the number when I say it. No, you can’t put your finger there, that won’t work. Pick up your finger and put it on the seven, but just…Let’s try again. You aren’t trying. You don’t have to dial the area code. I’ve told you that. This is a local call. Just dial seven . Seven. All right. Now, no, pick your finger up, you know how to push a button. They don’t make rotary phones anymore, I’ve told you that.”

  “I’ve been shanghaied!” Mrs. Dowler hollered. “I need half a glass of water.”

  There was spilled something—coffee?—in the hallway. Since she was right by the broom closet, Nancy opened the door and took out the mop. She cleaned up the spill, then flopped the mop into the sink. “Somebody help me,” came Mrs. Tanley’s tiny voice. Nancy sighed and rinsed the mop and dropped it in the bucket before responding.

  “Yes, Mrs. Tanley?” she said. She was too tired to admonish her for calling out instead of ringing.

  “Honey, look out that window at my bird feeder,” the woman said. “What do you see?”

  “You’ll have to give me more of a clue about what I’m looking for,” Nancy said.

  “On the bird feeder. Do you see th
at dead bird hanging from the bird feeder?”

  “No,” Nancy said.

  “You don’t see it?”

  “Mrs. Tanley, didn’t you want to hear the music?” Nancy asked. Mrs. Tanley was peeking over the top of her afghan, bunched under her chin. The song had changed to “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and the tambourine was shaking wildly. Through the window, Nancy could see that the sky outside was very blue. There were a few clouds, but only a few. Three, that she could see. That was the answer, in response to the question in the greeting card, its nonsensical verse masquerading as a koan.

  George Wissone’s dossier on Paula, obtained by inserting a telephone card and calling her sister Jan: Actually, she has been seeing someone else. She actually decided to get out of your orbit for a little while and see what it felt like. Well—more to be alone than to be with someone else, actually. I don’t want to be in the middle. I’ve always liked you. I’ve actually wished she wouldn’t tell me so many personal things, like medicine she orders over the Internet and stuff like that, but what do you do, tell your sister not to confide in you? Actually it might not be a bad idea, meeting someone new. You know, they say true love will stand the test—not that I’d be eager to subject my own husband to temptation, but actually, I don’t think he’d go anywhere if I can’t even get him to the movies unless it’s Julia Roberts. You marry somebody and they’re so lively and then hardly any time goes by and it’s like they get a cold one day, like they’re run down and they get a virus and they aren’t themselves, and weeks pass and before you know it, years have gone by and you’re still waiting for the virus thing to pass. Fred wouldn’t give me a gift for my birthday unless the kids insisted. I mean, we do have too much stuff. That’s not something Paula’s encumbered with, is it? She’s got her laptop and those jackets from France she can wear forever, they’re so classic, and she has zero interest in trinkets and jewelry and things like that. I suppose she does think a lot about how she looks, but at this age, who doesn’t? She’s got those beautiful almond eyes. I used to be so jealous, with my beady little eyes. My skin is my best attribute, I think. That, and the little waist. Everyone in the family has that, except that our older sister looks so much like an hourglass because of her breasts and hips. Paula and I were always happy we didn’t get our mother’s hips because a big butt usually comes along with them, right? And that crazy husband and the four children. I mean, I’ve got two and I certainly didn’t plan the first one, but those things happen and even though they’re a lot of work, you’ve got to love’em. You never met Christie, did you? Christine, as she’s always correcting me now. If they didn’t drive through here to see his mother, I don’t think I’d see as much of her as I do. I love her, but we don’t have much in common, actually. So what should I do if Paula calls? I promised I wouldn’t talk about her, and here I’ve gone on and on—but hey, she must know I like you. She introduced you, after all! And you know. You know how much you move. She used to like that. Well, actually, I think she liked getting out of Manhattan. I mean, she loved the city but for a while all that travel servedits purpose, and now after 9/11 everything’s such a mess, who could possibly want to put themselves through it? She bought a new car. I don’t see the harm in mentioning that. She’s got some notion of driving somewhere. I never actually realized she hadn’t owned a car since college, except for that leased car that was always getting towed. Look, if you want my personal opinion, she’s just a teeny, tiny bit of a bitch, and she’s decided to test your affection. She hasn’t made this man sound particularly important, except that our mother is jumping up and down, because, hey, doesn’t it figure that she thinks it’s the best thing in the world if a woman has a doctor for a husband? Paula is a very loyal person. She went through her wild days and pulled out of it really well, but lately it seems like she just wants a fling or something. I know she loved wherever it was you two were in San Francisco, outside of San Francisco, and then you had to move…it is mysterious, all this moving, though it’s none of my business. It might have been a good idea to go to Manhattan with her just for a while, if you could have. If she hadn’t had such wanderlust, she would have finished college. It wasn’t her grades that caused any problem. Even if she wasn’t there when the Towers went down, it has to have done psychic damage because it was her special place, along with tens of thousands of others, right? When she lived in the Village after her sophomore year, she was very impressionable. The dry cleaner knew you back then. The people at “your” coffee shop. That’s the nice thing about New York: you can feel special there just because of a little nod and a wave. I never thought Paula wanted children. Actually, I feel like she dislikes her nieces and her nephew. It shouldn’t be held against the kids that they have no manners. That’s Christie’s fault. Well, anyway. Paula’s a conservative girl, at heart, and it might just be that all the travel, to say nothing of how mysterious you could be, sort of got to her, and then along came this doctor guy. In no way can I imagine Paula with someone else. She’ll miss the travel and the dislocation. You might have a problem if she’d left in order to be with this man, but hey: it’s just…he had an idea, she decided to go along. She might have felt a little—how should I say this? Pissing in the wind of her own fate, I guess would be the way I’d put it. Paula is a very unique person. I was going to say special, but that has so many PC connotations, you might have thought I was saying she was retarded! We both know Paula is fun-loving and devoted…don’t you think she’s devoted? But she never quite figured out what she wanted to do after she left Bard. She started that novel. Then she took that course at Columbia with that jerk who discouraged her. I mean, what would he have suggested? Not even trying to write? Maybe he had a lot of stuff rejected himself, is what I think now. She got so hurt. She changed then. But San Francisco came along, and she really liked it. She loved the opera. Or am I thinking of the ballet? I shouldn’t talk about her so much. I’ll tell you the truth: I don’t know where she is right now, but people need breathing room every now and then. It’s a shame you couldn’t have lived in the Valley, because I never knew her to be happier. It could all happen again. Even as a child, she’d get disagreeable. She had tantrums, but we weren’t allowed to use that word because you had to pretend the person wasn’t having a tantrum, or you’d be disciplined yourself. You could actually think of it as a growth move: Paula about to find out how good she had it, being lonesome without you, all that. Think of it as a little trip. A little exploration. You could do the same. Though God knows, men don’t have to be told that. They always know it in their bones. Actually, she’ll be lucky if she comes back and you’re not attached to somebody else. From what I understand, you had a very good relationship. She wished you’d talk to her more, but I told her: Dream on. He’s a man.