by Ann Beattie
“Where is Susan?” Mrs. Reynolds asks.
“She left this morning with her boyfriend for college.”
He is going to call Susan and yell at her about this. Why did she bring that screwed-up girl to his house? What if Mrs. Reynolds tries to do something—call the police or something?”
“You get back in touch if you get worried, Mrs. Reynolds.”
Please don’t get back in touch. Please leave me alone. I didn’t like your daughter. I’m glad she’s gone. You sound like another crazy woman, and I don’t like you either. I will keep the phone off the hook. Laura. I can’t keep the phone off the hook.
“You can tell that I’m concerned, can’t you, Charles? I am concerned. Do I sound drunk to you, or concerned?”
“Naturally you’re concerned.”
“That’s not what I asked! I asked if I sounded drunk.”
“No. You certainly don’t. You only sound concerned.”
“I am concerned. It’s a popular misconception that alcoholics aren’t concerned. If I weren’t concerned, I wouldn’t be an alcoholic, Charles.”
He has no idea what to say to terminate the conversation.
“Some people are unwilling to carry on a conversation once they find out that someone is an alcoholic, but you’ve been most gracious. Naturally, when we tend an egg, we look beyond the crack in the shell. We look to see the infant bird, to care for it, to care that it is all right. And since I haven’t heard from Elise for so long, naturally I am wondering.”
“Certainly you are. And I’m sure she’ll get in touch.”
You bet she will, that bitch, and Susan will see to it. Somehow.
“You can’t know how reassuring it is to discuss this with an adult,” Mrs. Reynolds says.
“Well, I’m sorry I can’t be of more help to you, Mrs. Reynolds, but I’m certain that she’s back at school now. She’s okay, I’m sure of that.”
She will be dead somewhere. Twisted and dead. And the police will find his fingerprints on her coat—he lifted her coat from the sofa when she was here—and they will come to work and arrest him.
There will be a scuffle—he will try to keep his balance when he stands to greet the policemen. He will have a bemused, curious look on his face. And one of them—the big one—will misunderstand and think he is preparing to fight his way out. Why else would he lean to one side, why else that rigid spine, prepared for a fight? The big one will pick him up and throw him through the glass, and he will fall twenty-one stories. Braced briefly and miraculously between two snow-cushioned tree limbs, he will scramble for safety, but lose his grip and fall from the tree to the ground, while the policemen look through the hole in the glass and slap each other on the back. A sex pervert; he deserved that fall, O’Hara.
He calls Sam to see if he knows anything about where Elise might be. Sam reports that his temperature is ninety-nine and that he doesn’t know where Elise is. He did give her fifteen dollars though. “All she was worth—at the most.”
“You paid her for it, you paid for it?” Charles says.
Things are really taking a new turn if Sam paid for it.
“It wasn’t that overt. She told me she needed money. I think she said she needed twenty dollars. I gave her fifteen, which is definitely all she was worth.”
Sam sort of paid for it. Things are sort of taking a new turn.
“But she didn’t say anything about where she was thinking of going?”
“The only thing even remotely related to travel that she talked about was how she envied the Kennedys, except for the amputee who has a bit of trouble with it, for being able to go siding.”
“You don’t think she took off for some ski lodge?”
“Not on fifteen bucks.”
“She might have had more.”
“Not in her wallet. Well, she had about ten or fifteen more in there, I guess.”
“You went through her wallet.”
“She was showing me some pictures. I saw a little bit of money in the back.”
“It could have been hundred dollar bills.”
“I don’t think so. She was really grateful when I gave her the fifteen. She should have been. Even with inflation, that was a five-dollar lay.”
“Okay,” Charles says. “You don’t know anything.”
“Maybe you know whether my snowmobile socks are at your place,” Sam says.
“Yeah, they are.”
“I looked all over the place for them before I left. Ended up going to work in a pair of yours.”
“Bring them back.”
“I will. Why would I want a pair of your socks?”
“They’d better not be the ones Laura gave me.”
“How should I know? They’re a pair of navy blue socks.”
“No. She gave me gray ones.”
“Christ, you’re nuts. My dinner’s getting ready to burn.”
“What are you having?”
“Stouffer’s lasagna.”
“It’s good you’re eating. Keep your strength up.”
“You sound like somebody’s grandmother.”
“You’re as testy as I am. Guess you’ve got a right if you’ve still got a fever.”
“I’ve got a right if I have to stand here gassing to you while my lasagna bums up.”
“Okay. Good-bye.”
“Bye,” Sam says.
Charles puts the phone back on the hook, taking his hand away slowly, debating whether it might not be wiser to let it dangle. Might as well let her call again, get it out of her system so she doesn’t start that “You murdered her” stuff again. Murder. Jesus. Elise couldn’t drive anybody to murder. Who would bother? Except all those murderers out there … the ones who’ll wear rubber gloves and not have their fingerprints on her coat. In comes Detective O’Hara, out the window goes Charlie. Then she’ll be sorry. Then, too late, she’ll realize that she didn’t want her husband and Rebecca. She’ll go back to work in the same library, just to be in the building where he once cornered her against the bookshelf. Twice. Three times at least.
He puts a box of taco hors d’oeuvres in the oven and finds a beer in the bottom of the refrigerator that he decides to save to go with the tacos. Laura and her husband and daughter are probably having a nourishing dinner. They are having baked ham, sweet potatoes, asparagus, freshly baked bread, milk, and that dessert. Laura used to come home with him sometimes and cook dinner. She’d take off her stockings and go get a pair of the soft gray socks she had given him and stand in the kitchen in the socks, cooking dinner. In her dress and socks she looked like some bobbysoxer. If he had known her in the fifties they would have jitterbugged. She would have worn a ribbon in her hair, and a long pleated skirt, blazer, and white socks and saddle shoes. The socks would have a funny weave that looked like rivulets when they got twisted around a little. Gonna rock, gonna rock around the clock tonight.
The kitchen clock says five-thirty. That gives him enough time for a shower. But does he want a shower? No. He wants that beer. But doesn’t he want it with the tacos? Yes. People’s problems should end when they get home from work. They don’t. No wonder men go home and knock their kids around. There’s only one beer, which will be great with the tacos, but they want it immediately to cool their throat, so when the kid says that a wheel came off his bicycle the father looks at the wheel, picks it up, and pushes it over the kid’s head, the kid goes around yowling, the wheel like a clown’s ruffle, his wife says he’s a beast, separates from him, divorces him. If only Laura would push a wheel over Rebecca’s head. Not very likely. She goes to parent’s day, is “room mother” for the kindergarten, bakes special gingerbread cookies for the kids, who all love her. “She was such a nice woman, you’d never think she’d push a wheel over her child’s head.” And, in fact, she won’t. She’ll just cook a nice nourishing dinner and then tuck Rebecca in, and what she does after that is too painful to think about. Maybe she will call him, though. She won’t.
The phone rings as he is finishi
ng dinner.
“This is a voice from the past,” the caller says.
He swallows the last quarter inch of beer. It tastes foul.
“I have pretty eyes and long hair, and I call you every time I’m in trouble. Who am I?”
“Pamela Smith,” he says, his voice gloomy.
“That’s right!” Pamela Smith says.
“What kind of trouble are you in, Pamela?”
“Spiritual trouble.”
He repeats this.
“I was in California. I got back just a couple of days ago. I called you last night.”
“You were in spiritual trouble last night too.”
Twenty-four hours of spiritual trouble. More or less.
“Was I ever. I’ve been out in Mendocino, working in a canning factory.”
“That sounds like a drag.”
“The whole California thing—I thought it would be wild, but there’s no way to get money in California. I got a ride out with a dyke who ditched me in a bar in San Francisco. She crawled out a toilet window. Women are no better than men. Women are worse. You should have seen the beasts I worked with in the canning factory.”
“Yeah. That sounds awful.”
“I mean, there were some nice things about California. When you order a sandwich out there they bring you fresh fruit with it instead of potato chips. You order a roast beef sandwich, you’re likely to get half a peach and a strawberry. In some ways it’s very civilized. I don’t think I’ll ever eat junk food again.”
He thinks of Laura’s nourishing dinner. The tacos are now sitting in his stomach with the mashed potatoes. That last quarter inch of beer was revolting.
“Yoko Ono was in Mendocino. Not in the canning factory. But around.”
(“… I think John should stay in the U.S.A., because he’s a groovy musician.…”) “Yoko,” he says.
“It’s quitsville for John and Yoko, and believe me, with a woman like that I don’t blame him. Women are yecch. It took me a long time to realize that.”
Silence.
“But how are you? How are you, Charles?”
(“… What have you got?” …)
“I’m fine,” he says. “I’ve been running around a lot over the holidays and I’m pretty wiped out.…”
He hopes to avoid being asked either to go out or to have her come over.
“I was wondering if I could come over?”
“Sure,” he says.
“Good. I can be there in about an hour.”
“Good.”
Good. He can take a shower. Brace himself. He hangs up, goes into the bathroom and runs the water. He takes his clothes off and looks at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Stubble. A double chin? No—he was looking down. His hair is dirty. Why bother to wash it for Pamela Smith? But it has to be washed before work tomorrow. Okay, okay. He drapes his clothes over the toilet seat and gets in the shower.
“I’m singing’ in the tub, just singin’ in the tub, a glorious feeling, I’m showering again …”
He learned that song from Sam. Sam does it complete with twirls and kicks. Charles is sure he’s going to fall in the bathtub and break his legs. Charles holds on to the soap dish and gives a kick. Sam is crazy.
He gets out of the shower in time to answer the phone. It is cold in the kitchen. He jumps off the floor, jogs in place to stop his feet from freezing. “Yeah?” he says. “Hello?”
“Hello, my boy. How are things with you tonight?”
“Hi, Pete. I’ll call you back. Just got out of the shower.”
“You do that, then,” Pete says.
They did not talk long enough for Charles to be able to tell if Pete was drunk. Shivering, Charles goes into the bedroom and throws his towel over a floor lamp he never uses. He puts on a pair of gray socks, a pair of corduroy pants, and a blue button-down shirt. Over that he pulls a sweater with an antelope standing on top of a mountain. He bought the sweater because he thought it was funny: a very realistically knitted antelope on top of a pointed brown mound. Very stark, very ugly. “Hello, little fellow,” the salesman writing up the sale said, stroking the antelope. Charles has not liked the sweater since then, rarely puts it on. He tried to give it to the dog, but she was only interested in sleeping on it once.
He looks around him. His room has looked just the same since the day he moved in. His mother used to have winter and summer bedspreads, winter and summer curtains. When he lived at home, his winter bedspread had been a yellow and brown plaid, a cheap, itchy bedspread that he didn’t like to sit on. The summer bedspread was beige and green crinkle crepe with a large dust ruffle. He had said that he wasn’t having a bedspread with any damn ruffle. She had said that it was a “dust ruffle,” as though that excused it. He had threatened to cut it off. His father had been sent to his room. His father said that it was a bedspread in good taste, one that he wouldn’t mind having on his own bed. “Then take the thing!” Charles had shouted. His father nodded. He removed the bedspread and carried it into the master bedroom, took the bedspread off their double bed and handed it to Charles. Charles was embarrassed; he felt as if he was holding a jar of tonsils, or the blown-off head of a friend. He held the big bedspread reverently. He watched his father put the single bedspread on the double bed. Of course it did not fit. It looked silly. “Do you want me to have this bedspread on my bed?” his father asked. Charles quickly gave him back his own bedspread, left in defeat and humiliation, trailing his green and beige bedspread with him. He put it back on his bed. “I didn’t think you’d want my room to look like that,” his father said, passing his room. His father never fought with him. He played dumb, as he did with the bedspread exchange, or explained patiently (which his mother was incapable of) why something had to be a certain way. Most logical men live a long time, but Charles’s father dropped dead at thirty-nine. He would have been logical in his old age, but there was no old age.
Charles stands in the doorway of his room, thinking about how the room could be changed. Instead of being against the wall, the desk could be moved against the window. And the bed could be moved from the back wall to the side wall. There would be a little more space in the room that way. He no longer even questions that the room must be changed. He takes the things off the top of his bureau and puts them on the bed, shoves the bureau where his desk used to be, at the same time shoving the desk into the middle of the room. A lamp falls over, does not break. He stands it upright on the floor. He moves the dresser into place. He puts all the things back on top, shoved together: a picture of his mother and father on their first anniversary, a picture of him holding Susan when she was an infant (he can still remember his mother arranging the baby in his arms; he had thrust her forward, his arms straight out, so that she blocked his face in the lens, and his mother had rushed to him and crooked his arm and lowered her into it), a glass bowl with pennies, a hairbrush, a dirty ascot that got dirty not from wear but from dust settling on it over a two-year period, a dried-up philodendron, a fountain pen and bottle of ink, several magazines, and a flashlight. He pushes the desk across the rug. Maybe now that it faces the window he will enjoy sitting at it more. What will he ever use it for? He could figure out the bills there. He won’t. He could do what his mother always did with useless pieces of furniture—put a tablecloth over it He does not own a tablecloth. Maybe a sheet. No, that would look silly, to have a desk with a sheet over it. Everybody would know it was a desk. Sam would demand an explanation. Moving the bed is a bigger problem. He pushes hard, bunching the rug underneath the bed. He lifts the bottom of the bed and pushes the rug with his foot. He hopes that he does not get a hernia. There was a boy in the sixth grade who had a hernia that had to be operated on. The class sent him a card. Nobody knew what message to write, so almost everybody wrote: “I am sorry you have a hernia. See you soon.” Some people asked how the food was. One girl refused to sign the card. She told the teacher that her mother would write a note saying she didn’t have to. The teacher said that it wasn’t necessary
.
He gives the bed a final shove. The rug is a little bunched up, but so what? Sam can help him the next time he’s over. He backs up, sweating, and looks over his work. He picks up the lamp and puts it back on the desk. The room looks much better. He should rearrange the whole house. Except that there is hardly any other furniture. He sold most of it to an antique dealer, a frail old man who went from room to room exclaiming “Staffordshire! Hepplewhite! A gateleg table!” Charles just wanted all the ugly, smelly stuff out of there. The antique dealer gave him a lot of money. At least at the time he thought it was a lot of money. He opened kitchen cabinets. “Peacock Feather!” the old man said, holding a bowl to his chest. He went away and returned with his “assistant,” an enormously fat asthmatic woman who followed him from room to room repeating “Hepplewhite! A gateleg!” reverently. For a while Charles was afraid they’d just keep wandering like some poor damned souls in Dante, but after wheezing and exclaiming through the rooms they went away and came back with a blue truck and a terrier that ran yapping through the house. They did not allude to the dog. Charles could not figure out why it was there. When they did not summon the dog to leave, and it just appeared and ran out the door, Charles thought he might have been hallucinating. The fat woman lowered the antiques into piles of newspapers that she quickly wrapped around them, and the man removed drawers from dressers and tossed cushions onto the floor. “Any Sandwich?” the woman asked breathlessly, and Charles had thought that she was asking for food. She sang Billie Holiday songs as she worked; glass dishes were lowered into crates as she sang “God Bless the Child”; an oil lamp disappeared into a mound of paper as she crooned “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me.” Charles didn’t know what room to stand in—whether he should appear not to notice what was happening or whether he should offer to help. Shouldn’t they discuss money before the things were wrapped in newspaper? “You can help yourself, but don’t take too much,” the woman sang huskily, occasionally breaking off to get her breath. “Oh, Grandma!” she shouted with glee sometimes, when she saw a painted dish or a small colored photograph. The old man worked silently and very quickly. “I need your help, young fellow,” he said, and Charles helped him carry the things out. “I want to tell you something,” he said as they raised a love seat into the blue van. “That woman is my sister.” Charles waited for what he was going to be told. The man nodded once, rubbed his hands together, and said, “Let’s go.” They carried more things out. Later, in the kitchen, the woman talked about her “husband,” saying that the work was getting too rough for him. Their names were Bess and Bert, and their antique business was known as “Best Bird Antiques.” There was a cluster of flying birds painted across the back door of the van with white paint. “Best Bird Antiques” was lettered above the clouds. In three hours they were gone, and Charles had one thousand four hundred dollars. The woman climbed into the back of the van and slammed the door behind her. She was singing “A Fine Romance.” The old man gave him the money in cash. “She can’t bear to see me actually part with money,” the old man said. “I buy antiques on Mondays, if there’s more you want to part with. Can’t tell what you’ll find that you want to part with. Things to part with in the attic, probably. We don’t go into attics. But come to our store on Mondays, which is buying day. She makes that grocery day, because she can’t bear to see me fork over money for antiques! Well, thanks mighty much, and here you go.” He shoved a wad of money into Charles’s outstretched hand. Charles’s hand had been extended to shake the man’s hand good-bye. In all the confusion, he had forgotten about getting paid. The little dog barked in the front seat. The man touched his fingers to his forehead in a salute as the van pulled away. Charles waved. He later took several hand-painted plates he found to the man’s antique store. Sure enough, the fat woman wasn’t there. “Don’t look around the place, the inflated prices will make you sick,” the man said. Charles took his advice, left with twenty dollars. There was a sign in an ornate frame over the cash register that said, “Best Bird Antiques is Your Best Bet.” “We used to have a racehorse named that,” the man said, noticing that Charles was looking at the sign. “It broke its leg. I said, ‘No more racehorses,’ My sister was amenable.”