Chilly Scenes of Winter

by Ann Beattie

  Charles goes into the kitchen and dials Pete’s number.

  “What are you panting for?” Pete asks.

  “I just moved some furniture around.”

  “Oh,” Pete says. “Well, I’ve been straightening up around here the last couple of days, too. Furniture seems to creep forward in the room for some reason. I shoved it all back against the walls. Not right against them because of the paint, but about an inch away.”

  “How’s Mom?” Charles asks.

  “She’s doing just fine. I know she’d want to talk to you, except that she’s having a bath right now.” Pete whispers, “Door’s open.”

  “Christ, Pete, she’s probably got a heating pad plugged in that she’ll electrocute herself with.”

  “No she doesn’t,” Pete says, sounding hurt. “I told you the”—he lowers his voice—“the door’s open.”

  He can picture it: she is sitting in hot water. She does not put any bubble bath in the water. She just sits there, sinks down in the tub until the hot water is collarbone level. She plays the radio. If she stays long enough (she takes many of these baths a day) she reads movie magazines, and if she stays for a very long time she starts to imagine pains and she cries. Someone has to haul her out. Charles and Pete have told the doctors about her dips. They think it’s a good idea to “soak to relax.” Even when they are told what really happens, they still say that there’s nothing wrong with a hot bath. They think she is clever to have thought of that “to relax.” She used to take Seconal and fall asleep with her chin on her collarbone, the magazines drowned in the tub, heating pads plugged into several sockets, radio blaring. If only one of them was home, they couldn’t lift her. She was angry when they appeared in the bathroom and shook her awake. “I was relaxing! I have no privacy! I had a pain in my back—I was warming the heating pad for that!” The towels always smell bad and need to be washed. There is bath powder all over the bath rug. Movie magazines with moldy covers and curled edges are stacked on the back of the toilet The bathtub and toilet are blue; the tile is brown and white-small brown and white tiles covered with a film of bath powder.

  “What I called about,” Pete says, “is that I thought it might be nice to have a little welcome home celebration for Mommy.”

  “Pete, you always put on that phony diction. When you’re not thinking you call her by her name, or you say, ‘your mother.’ That sounds more dignified.”

  “How I wish I had a flesh-and-blood son I could kill for talking that way,” Pete says. “But you’re all I’ve got. I thought you and I were getting along better now after the—after the drink we had. The very nice time we just had.”

  “Yeah. That was nice. I only mention it, Pete, because I think we might get along better if you knew about the things that bothered me. Then I know you wouldn’t do them and we’d get along even better.”

  “There’s too wide a gap. I don’t think we’d ever get along very well. Maybe if you were my own flesh and blood you’d be indebted to me.”

  “I don’t want you to take offense, Pete. I just want you to know that that’s a little thing that annoys me.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you something that annoyed me. You never even asked me to be a scoutmaster, and you knew I built birdhouses and did stuff like that. All the other kids asked their fathers, and you never even approached me.”

  “I never thought you’d be interested, Pete. We didn’t talk much, so I didn’t think you’d want to deal with a whole troop of boys my age.”

  “Maybe we would have talked more if we had had things to talk about. Birdhouses and things like that. I knew how to build stuff. I would have been a good leader for you boys.”

  “I’m sorry I never asked, Pete. I just assumed wrong.”

  “Well, it’s too late now,” Pete says.

  “Don’t worry about it, then. Just don’t worry about it.”

  “That’s right. What’s that saying? ‘Lord give me patience to change the things I can change and not worry about those I can’t,’ or something like that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I find it very hard to talk to you on the phone, Charles. When I make a comment it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.”

  “I don’t know what else to say, Pete. You remember the saying better than I do, so I don’t have anything to add.”

  “You’re a very impatient person, I think,” Pete says. “But I want to get back to the reason for this call. You’ve got me so flustered I can’t remember if I already said this, but I wanted to ask whether you couldn’t come over on Saturday night for dinner to welcome Clara home.” He punches the “Clara.”

  “Pete … you know she won’t get a dinner together.”

  “I can get the dinner. I’m cooking. All you’ve got to do is grace us with your presence. If I can be blunt, I don’t even want you for dinner myself after this bad phone conversation, but your mother mentioned the idea. I’m going to get a chicken. Anybody can cook chicken.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there.”

  “Okay,” Pete says. “Don’t forget.”

  “It’ll be on my mind all week, Pete.”

  “Talk nice to me! I’m sixty-three years old.”

  “I’ll see you then, Pete.”

  “I hate to hang up this way. I feel like you’ve insulted me, yet I’m on the defensive.”

  “Somebody’s at my door, Pete.”

  “I know you’re just saying that. You always get me in some corner and make me stay there. What can I do but hang up if somebody is knocking at your door? Yet nobody is.”

  The knocking continues.

  “Somebody is, Pete. It’s somebody I was expecting. I’ll see you for dinner.”

  “Aw, good-bye,” Pete says, and hangs up.

  Charles goes to the front door and opens it for Pamela Smith.

  “Charles!” she says. “Plus ça change.”

  “Hi,” he says. “Come in.”

  “I will come in. I feel like I’m home now. You’re the only person I know who’s still living in the same place. People I left in poverty have got glass-topped Parsons tables now. It’s all changed so much.”

  “It’s the same here, all right.”

  “How about family problems? Oh, well, I shouldn’t rush into that.”

  She hands him her coat. A black, long coat. She is wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt and black corduroy jeans and work boots. A knee is torn out of her jeans. The work boots have white paint on them. Why did he wash his hair? He could have washed it for work when she left.

  “Would you like a drink or some coffee or tea?”

  “You don’t have anything to eat, do you?”

  “Cheese,” he says. Does he have cheese?

  “Oh, could I have some cheese?”

  “Sure.”

  He leaves her standing in his living room and goes into the kitchen. She follows him out.

  “I’ve become a vegetarian, and I feel so much better. When I ate meat a week ago, just to try it again, I actually stank afterwards. I could smell myself.”

  “There’s Muenster and Swiss,” he says. “Some of both?”

  “That would be good,” she says.

  The phone rings. Charles picks it up.

  “Hell,” Pete says. “That was nuts of me to say there was nobody at your door. I’m sure there was, and I called back to say that it was just my nuttiness.”

  “That’s okay, Pete. It was a friend of mine from a couple of years ago, just back from California. I was getting her something to eat.”

  “I’d really be a fool if I thought you were making that up,” Pete says. “If I thought the knock and the food was imaginary, all to brush me off.”

  Charles hands the phone to Pamela Smith. “Please say hello to my stepfather,” Charles says. Pamela Smith looks taken aback, holds the phone to her ear as if expecting an explosion, then says a tentative, “Hello.”

  “Why, hello,” Pete says. “Charles says that you’re here from California.”

  “Yes. I ju
st got back.”

  Charles takes the phone away from her. She looks even more surprised.

  “I’ll see you on Saturday, Pete.”

  “Hell,” Pete says. “Down with the phone and off with the pants.”

  “Oh my God,” Charles says, and hangs up.

  “It’s a long story,” Charles says to Pamela Smith. “To make a long story short, he gets his feelings hurt very easily, and he thought I was hanging up on him before when I said there was a knock on the door.”

  “Wow,” Pamela Smith says. “That’s sad.”

  “He’s a sad case. I try to be nice to him, but it’s just not in me.”

  “He might feel better in general if he cleaned out his system. Saunas and a fresh vegetable regime.”

  “He’s stuck in his rut. He’ll never get out of it. My mother is nuts, and he spends all his time coping with that and getting slowly crazier himself.”

  “Have they tried Gestalt?”

  “No. She won’t go out of the house.”

  “Wow,” Pamela Smith says. “Even if she stayed in … she might try eating more fruits and vegetables and so forth.”

  Charles puts the cheese and some crackers on a plate, turns on the water to make coffee. He motions her to the kitchen table.

  “So things are pretty much the same here,” he says.

  “All in all, things are pretty much the same with me, too. I feel a whole lot better, but things are otherwise the same. I’ve got to get a job. I don’t know. Anything beats canning cauliflower in Mendocino. I mean, I just don’t want to can at all any more.”

  “What else were you doing out there?” Charles asks.

  “For a while I was living with this creep. He played the jew’s-harp and had an imitation of Elton John doing ‘Benny and the Jets.’ It really got to me after a while. It was always raining in Mendocino, and I’d go home and he’d be on the bed, naked, twanging the jew’s-harp, going ‘Benny, Benny, Benny aaaaaand the Jets …’ ”

  Charles laughs.

  “I sort of had a thing with a woman out there, who turned me on to curried rice. She was older than me. Forty. Except around the eyes, she looked twenty. She had an amazing body. She fasted on Sunday and ate nothing but curried rice the next day. She was a silversmith.”

  Pamela Smith holds out her hand. There is a silver ring on her middle finger.

  “That’s very nice,” Charles says.

  “For a while I thought I’d be staying with her. She was going to teach me how to be a silversmith, get me out of that factory. She had a daughter. It was a weird scene.”

  Charles nods. He is sure it was. He does not want to hear.

  “The daughter thought Dylan was coming for her. She had substantial proof from the last two records. She played them all the time. I was glad to get out to go to the factory some days.”

  “Is everybody crazy out there?”

  “No. I think everybody’s pretty relaxed. There are a lot of nice things about California. Her daughter, though, was always looking out the window, actually expecting Dylan. Her mother was shooting pictures of her in various stances by the window. She had been a student of Diane Arbus’s. Things were really getting pretty tense when I split. And that’s when I ended up with the guy who did the Elton John imitation. We both needed a place to stay. Marian—that was her name—came over one night with her daughter, and she spent the whole night at the window. It was getting sort of weird.”

  “Do you want coffee?” Charles asks.

  “I’d prefer tea, please.”

  He goes to the cabinet for cups. The cups are very cold from the cabinet. He rinses them in tepid, then warm water before putting the boiling water in.

  “Actually, the daughter had a daughter too, but it was with its father. Its father was some hot shit San Francisco stockbroker.”

  “You mean that this girl was an adult?”

  “She was twenty-one. She claimed she screwed Peter Fonda on the kitchen floor in an all-night health food restaurant, but I don’t believe it.”

  “It probably happened,” Charles says.

  “Well, she says the same thing happened with Ahmet Ertegun, so I don’t believe it.” Charles nods.

  “But it’s not all that crazy out there. Burbank is awfully ugly. I don’t know … I think about going back, but I wouldn’t want to go back to Mendocino.”

  “What did you come back East for?”

  “Oh, I … started to feel I was expanding too quickly—that I’d end up like stretched taffy or something. I came back to compress.”

  Charles nods.

  “But it’s not all that crazy out there. And now it seems so unreal to me here. I think I may be going back there. Work some shit job for a little while and go back.”

  Charles nods.

  “How’s your job?” she asks.

  He shrugs. “Money,” he says.

  “Do you wear a suit to work?” she says.

  “No.”

  “That’s Charles—a rebel at heart.”

  “Nobody wears them,” he says. “What kind of people work there?”

  “Most of them are older than me. Family people. They’re all sort of numb. They’re what everybody says they are.”

  “I guess it could be worse. You should see the conditions in the canning factory in Mendocino.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to work in a canning factory.”

  “I’m lucky to have my fingers,” she says. “After a while it’s hard to tell your own fingers from the cauliflower flowerets.”

  She takes a sip of tea.

  “One day when Marian’s daughter was looking out the window Yoko Ono walked by.”

  Charles nods.

  “I really don’t have much interesting news. Tell me what’s new with you.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you ever get away to go skiing?”

  “I don’t ski,” Charles says.

  “Oh. I must be thinking of George Nimkis.” Charles nods.

  “Did you know Nimkis? Wanda’s husband?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Totally forgettable. Cared about nothing but skiing. He taught Wanda to ski on their honeymoon, had skis hung on their living room wall. There was even an old pair of them in back of the toilet. She finally left him for a skiing instructor. God knows, she was expert enough at skiing, but the ski instructor didn’t talk about skiing all the time. I don’t know what happened to George. How could I have gotten you confused with George? He had ski masks in all colors, and he’d pull them over the lamp shades. It looked like an evil jack o’lantern. I’m glad she got away from George. I wonder where she is now.…”

  “You knew a lot of people around here, didn’t you?”

  “I went to school here for four years and worked here for a year after that. I was a silly little secretary. Well, you knew me then. You know.”

  “I should think that would beat the canning factory.”

  “It did, it did. I had to gouge out the centers of cauliflowers with a knife. It was a wicked thing, and it never got dull. I can’t imagine what that knife was made of. I was terrified of it. I never worked fast enough.”

  “So you’re going to go back to Mendocino, huh?”

  “I don’t know what to do with myself. I really think I could get interested in that woman if it weren’t for her daughter. Besides being crazy, she’s so piggish. She lies on the rug all day, and she eats anything that’s put in front of her, and believe me, she expects regular meals down there. Sonny Bono wrote her a couple of letters. I don’t know how she knew him.”

  “I heard that Dylan showed up at some party with Cher. I wonder what’s gotten into Dylan?”

  “I saw his kids at Malibu. They play with Ryan O’Neal’s kid.”

  “What’s he doing hanging out with Cher? ‘Haff-breed.’ Christ.”

  She puts her plate and cup in the sink. “I can’t remember what you and I used to talk about,” she says.

  “Lesbians,�
�� he says.

  “That’s right,” she says. “I was freelancing for that feminist newspaper. Well, I still feel very strongly that lesbianism is a good alternative. Like everything else, it has problems. Having a child, for one. And I have decided to have a child. If you have them after thirty they might be monsters. Not really monsters, but what do you call them when they have those oriental eyes?”