by Ann Beattie
Eventually the car starts, and he drives back to his house. Sam’s car is out front. Charles pulls into the driveway and gets out, not bothering to put the car in the garage. The piece of junk doesn’t deserve to be covered. He goes up the walk. Sam opens the front door.
“What are you doing here?” Sam says.
“What are you?” Charles says.
“I felt funny. I took off a couple of hours early. The flu’s going around. I hope it’s not that.”
“If you think you’ve got the flu, what are you doing here?”
The wrong thing to say. Sam looks hurt.
“We can take care of you if you get sick,” Charles says. He nods agreement with himself at Sam, whose expression changes.
“What happened to Laura?” Sam says.
“She’s got it. She was awfully sick. I didn’t get to talk to her. I followed her home. That’s all.”
Sam shakes his head. He is drinking wine. A bottle is on the floor by the chair.
“Wine?” Sam says.
“What are you drinking that for if you’re getting sick?”
“I don’t know,” Sam says. “Where’s Susan?”
“Shopping.”
“I could go out and get food for dinner if there isn’t any,” Sam says.
“What would you go out for if you’re getting sick?”
Sam shrugs. “What are we going to eat?” he says.
Charles gets a glass and pours some wine. It is French wine, instead of the Gallo that Sam used to drink. Sam sympathizes with the boycott. Charles feels sorry that he is getting sick.
“I guess I should call the hospital,” Charles says. He gets up and calls. Pete answers on the first ring.
“Mommy did something that was a little silly,” he says. “She had some laxatives in her purse, and she took them. She hasn’t been feeling well today.”
“Laxatives? What for?”
“She’s going to be just fine, and fit as a fiddle for the Windy City,” Pete says.
“Can I talk to her, Pete?”
“Sure you can. She’s right here, and feeling better by the minute.”
There is a lot of rustling and whispering.
“Hello?” his mother says faintly.
“I’m sorry you had a setback,” Charles says. “You okay now?”
“Charles, I was in awful pain. It was like the night you had to come for me. I was going to kill myself this morning and I went into the bathroom and took the laxatives.”
“Made you weak, huh?” Charles says.
“Charles, the woman in the bed next to me died.”
There is a loud rustling, and Pete’s voice. “Charles? Pay no attention. Mommy’s got her facts confused. The woman was discharged. Mommy’s weak as a kitten from all those laxatives.”
“Don’t they watch her? Don’t they know she’s bats?”
There is a long silence. “We’re looking forward to seeing you soon, too,” Pete says. “I most certainly will tell her.” Pete hangs up.
“Oh Christ,” Charles says, slamming the receiver down.
“What’s the matter?”
“She took herself a bunch of laxatives and she’s talking about death again. He’s there, no doubt telling her to try to foxtrot.” Charles stops. He is surprised to realize that he remembers the name of another dance.
Sam shakes his head, swirls the wine in his glass.
“Nothing goes right,” Sam says.
Charles picks up his coat from the back of the chair. “Come on,” he says to Sam. “We’re going to the store to get some good stuff. Bring those cookbooks with you.”
“All of them?”
“There’s only four or five.”
Sam puts on his coat, picks them up.
“Under desserts,” Charles says, closing the door behind him. “Look up soufflés. See if there’s one that sounds like it’s made out of oranges and cognac.”
Sam cannot find it. Charles looks too, in the parking lot of the Safeway, but nothing even vaguely similar is listed. He ends up buying a Dutch Apple pie.
“I hate that kind,” Sam says.
“I do too. Maybe I’ll save it as a hostess present for Clara’s dinner.”
But on New Year’s Day their mother is in the mental hospital. She is too sedated to have visitors. Pete is there, and Pete’s brother, who flew in from Hawaii. Early in the morning Pete called to say that things were pretty good. The doctor did not think there would be much of a problem, and she’d be back home soon. She was taken to the hospital after she sat propped up in bed crying for an entire night. At noon, when Charles was fixing a bowl of soup to take to Sam on a tray, Pete called again. “You son of a bitch,” Pete said loudly. “I know you don’t like me and you never liked me, and from now on it’s between you and your mother. I’m not calling you again. I’m not feeling guilty any more. You make me feel guilty she’s here, when nobody could have taken better care of her. Talk to the doctors here about that, you son of a bitch.” Charles called the hospital back, but there was no way Pete could be paged, and his mother had no telephone. The soup boiled over on the stove, and Charles tried to dab it up with a sponge, careful not to burn himself on the still-hot burner. The noodles looked disgusting clinging to the sponge. He put a napkin on a tray, the way his mother used to do for him when he was sick in bed, and then the bowl of soup. He could hear Sam coughing in the bedroom. The TV was in there, on a table Charles had moved to the foot of the bed. Even above the noise of the football game, Sam’s coughing could be heard.
“You ought to have me call a doctor,” Charles says, standing in the doorway with the tray. He feels his own nostrils unclogging as the steam from the soup rises.
“Everybody’s got the flu. I don’t need one.”
“That cough sounds awful.”
“Are you bringing me my lunch or not?”
Charles walks into the room. The announcer screams. The Dolphins have the ball. Sam sneezes.
“Don’t get so close to me,” Sam says.
“You’ve got a fever,” Charles says. “I could feel the heat when I leaned over.”
“Too bad the nursie isn’t still here,” Sam says.
“I’ll bet she’d tell you to go to a doctor.”
“I’ll bet she’d jump into bed. Nurses are all amazing. I think nursing students are more remarkable than real nurses.”
“Eat your soup.”
“The last time I went to the doctor I had had a cough for two weeks—I’d shoot up in bed in the middle of the night, choking with it. He could hear me coughing. I coughed the whole time I was there. I told him that nothing worked but streptomycin. Naturally he wouldn’t give me any. He said, ‘Oh! You like that stuff, huh?’ When the cough didn’t get any better, I went back and asked for it again. He gave me some blue pills. That pissed me off, so I said, ‘Isn’t heroin good for coughing? Could you prescribe some of that?’ Doctors. The hell with doctors.”
Sam blows on a spoonful of soup, sips it. “Who was on the phone?”
“Pete. I guess he’s loaded somewhere.”
“Are you still going to have to go over there for dinner?”
“It doesn’t look that way,” Charles says.
“It’s sort of pathetic,” Sam says. “He tries to be nice to you and Susan now, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Charles says. “He tries to be nice.”
Charles is sitting at the foot of the bed. Sam leans around him to watch the huddle.
“You want me to move?”
“No. Stay where you are.”
Charles gets up, wanders out into the hallway. Susan’s clothes are thrown over a chair. She is taking a shower. When she gets out, he’ll have to tell her that the shower had symbolic importance. Right after her boyfriend called she went in there. He picks up her sweater. Purple. Janis Joplin wouldn’t have been caught dead in it. Laura wouldn’t either. If Susan were Laura, he could throw off all his clothes, jump into the shower, say, “I love you, I love you, I love yo
u.” He sits down on the clothes-covered chair, thinking that he might be going out of his mind. If she doesn’t call, he probably will. He goes into the living room and opens a drawer where there is a picture of Laura. It has a cheap silver frame around it—the kind that comes with photo-booth pictures. There is a white streak just under her chin. But her face is perfect She has a heart-shaped face. She has large, white teeth that don’t show in the picture. Her mouth is closed. She isn’t smiling. “Why didn’t you smile?” he said when she gave it to him. “I don’t know. Everything’s so complicated. It’s all such a mess.” Susan is right; he should have said how delighted he was to get the picture instead of criticizing her expression. She gave it to him when they were sitting at a drugstore counter, having a cup of coffee. She pulled it out of her wallet without comment. He thought that she was reaching for money, said “No, no.” They never really understood each other. Most people can read signals; they never could. She’d be feeling good, and he’d think she was worried and not talk so she could think it out, when actually she was in a good mood until he stopped talking, and she thought there was something wrong with him. He tries to convince himself that the relationship was always doomed. They didn’t understand each other, they didn’t have a lot in common, she never said she was going to divorce her husband and never changed her mind, even after she said she loved him too.… It isn’t working; he keeps picturing her on the carousel, sitting on a blue and gold horse, her hands tight around the brass pole, smiling at him. Well, he tells himself, that’s a pretty rotten thing, if that’s the best you can remember. It’s not very significant. But it’s as significant as anything else that’s ever happened to him. He puts the picture back in the drawer. There’s something wrong with putting her picture with unpaid bills. He takes it out and puts it on top of another table, against a vase.
“Finished,” Sam calls. Charles goes into the bedroom.
“Sorry to yell,” Sam says. “I didn’t know where to put this.”
“I’ll take it. Is there anything else you want?”
“I feel like puking now. No offense.”
“No,” Charles says. He carries the tray out to the kitchen. The phone rings.
“Hello?” he says. It is Laura. It has to be Laura.
“Hello,” Pete says.
“Leave me alone, goddamn it,” Charles says. “I didn’t put her there either.”
“That’s not why I called,” Pete says. “I called to say that when I called before I was a little upset. I wanted to ask you something.”
“What?” Charles says.
“Do you think she’ll ever get right again?” Pete asks.
“I don’t know. What do the doctors say?”
“I can’t understand them. There’s something wrong with me, but I can’t make any sense out of the things they say. Some young doctor—the one who lifted her wrist and said, ‘What have we got here?’ to her—talked to me all the time we were together about placem, placento, placenta research.”
“You’ve got to be nuts to want to help nuts,” Charles says.
“I think she senses that we all feel that way, so she has no incentive to recover,” Pete says.
“Pete, before you even knew her she’d dance in the kitchen naked with the broom at night.”
“She danced?” Pete says. “Yeah?”
“She seemed to be dancing. I don’t know. I was so spooked that I got out of there fast.”
“She senses that. She senses that we avoid her, and has no incentive to get well.”
“Pete, you ought to try to forget all this for a while if you can and go back to the house and get some sleep.”
“I’m in the house. It’s a mess. I’ve got to clean it up, but I don’t know where to start. She threw stuff all over.”
“Go to sleep and forget it.”
“I’m too loaded to go to sleep. Listen, I want you to know that I didn’t mean what I said before. I’m sorry to have said it.”
“That’s okay,” Charles says.
“I wish I had a boy of my own. I think we’d be more alike than you and me. What you were saying.”
“Yeah,” Charles says.
“But it’s too late now,” Pete says.
“Yeah,” Charles says. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”
He hangs up and feels very guilty that he didn’t offer to go over and help him clean up the mess. In the living room, he looks at Laura’s picture. He is afraid the sun will fade it, so he puts it back in the drawer. He has looked at the picture for so long that when he sees Laura he’s always surprised. Laura, for him, is always wearing a checked shirt, her hair always looks a particular way, she always has a deadpan expression. Not that he sees her much any more to be surprised. He looks down at an open magazine on the rug. “How Seriously Do You Take Yourself?” is printed in big black letters. Susan has taken the quiz, checking off the answers with small, neat checks. Susan doesn’t have fits of depression; she doesn’t buy expensive camera equipment only to discover she prefers skiing. He looks away. At the vase, where the picture was.
“That was Mark on the phone earlier,” Susan says. “He’s probably going to drive down and get me.”
“Mark,” Charles says. “Mark the doctor.”
Her hair is wrapped in a turban. She is wearing slacks and a white shirt. She looks very clean and fresh. She will finish college, marry Mark, have children. Maybe even have an A-frame to vacation in. In Vermont. Or upstate New York. There might even be a maid to cook lamb chops.
“Go, go, go you bastard!” Sam hollers in the bedroom.
“Doesn’t he know if he’s coming or not?” Charles asks.
“He’s coming if he thinks the car will hold out.”
“What’s wrong with his car?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“Then how is he going to decide if it’ll hold out?”
She shrugs. “It’s an old Cadillac,” she says. “It eats gas, but it usually holds out. Except that there’s one hose that always breaks.”
“Wooooooo!” Sam shouts.
“I guess he’s not dying,” Charles says.
Susan unwraps the towel from her head, throws her hair forward and begins brushing it.
“Should we call the hospital later? To see how she is when the tranquilizers wear off?”
“She’ll be nuts. That’s how she’ll be.”
“If Mark makes it, he’ll be here tomorrow. We can all go then.”
“No,” Charles says. “Anyway—I’ve got to go back to work.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot about work.”
“It was sure a swell vacation,” Charles says. “I can’t complain.”
“Do you get another vacation in the summer?”
“I just have two days left. Except for sick leave.”
“Isn’t it awful to have your life measured out like that?”
“I need the money.”
“Couldn’t you paint? You used to be so good at it.”
“Paint? There’s no money in painting. Maybe I could paint houses. I’ve thought about doing something like that. Sam and I kicked around the idea last summer. He’s really going nuts at the store.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do when I get out of college.”
“It would help to have a major. But if you’re marrying Doctor Mark, I don’t guess you even need to finish.”
“I want to go to school. I mean, I want to finish. I didn’t go there to get a husband.”
“Now that you’ve got one, why don’t you just quit?”
“He’s not even my husband. He’s just my boyfriend.”
“Propose to him,” Charles says. “I wish I could propose to somebody and have them take care of me.”
“I’m not going to propose to Mark!”
“Why not? Don’t women propose to men now?”
“That’s not why I’m not doing it. I just don’t want to do it.”
“Face it. You want him to marry you.”
“Then he can
propose,” Susan says.
“How quaint.”
“You deliberately get me on these subjects so you can goad me,” Susan says.
“I know. I can be so unpleasant. Maybe if somebody took care of me I’d be in a better mood.”
“Get that woman to leave her husband.”
“It’s more than a husband. It’s a daughter and an A-frame.”
“That’s nothing. Women walk out every day.”
“Not for me they don’t.”
“You should keep after her.”
“She’s sick.”
“When she’s well.”
“Yeah,” Charles says.
“Don’t sound so defeated. You’ll never be persuasive if you sound like that.”
“What should I do? Read a Dale Carnegie book?”
“Who’s that?” Susan says.
“What a generation. Never heard of Amy Vanderbilt. Never heard of Dale Carnegie. And you think Woodstock was a drag.”
“I know it was a drag. It was nothing but mud.”
“And nobody is into drugs any more, huh?”
“Not many people. I don’t know … maybe I just don’t know them.”
“Have you got a lot of friends at school?”
“A couple that Mark knows are pretty nice.”
“I don’t have any friends. I just have Sam.”
“Why don’t you meet people?”
“Next you’ll be telling me to dance.”
Charles goes into the kitchen, looks through the cabinets to see what there is for dinner. Susan is right; he thinks about food too much. He picks up a package of dried peas, drops them back on the shelf. There is a large bottle of vanilla, a package of dried beans, a box of Tuna Helper, no tuna, a can of baby clams, two cans of alphabet soup, a canister with four Hydrox cookies (what happened to them? They used to be so good. Sugar. No doubt they’re leaving out sugar), a package of Cheese Nabs, and a can of grapefruit juice. There is also a package of manicotti shells. They will have to go out for dinner. It is too cold; it was thirty degrees when he went out early in the afternoon to buy Sam some magazines.