Chilly Scenes of Winter

by Ann Beattie

  “I didn’t think that was out yet,” Pamela says.

  “Supposed to come out sometime soon, isn’t it?” Sam says.

  They turn off the beltway and start down the exit ramp. Sam hums softly.

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” she says. “I got robbed. That was the last straw. I had twenty-five bucks, and a woman with a little kid made me fork it over. She said we were stopping for a Coke, made her kid stay in the car, and walking into the service area she said she was going to stab me in the back if I didn’t give her my money. I couldn’t believe it. She looked so goddamned maternal, in a blue coat and loafers. ‘What are you waiting for, to see the knife?’ she said. ‘It cuts. That’s the first you get to see it.’ I gave her the money, and she left me there.”

  Charles can see Sam’s eyes in the rearview mirror. His eyes are wide.

  “Why didn’t you tell somebody inside? They could have called the cops.”

  “I didn’t want to. I just didn’t want to.”

  “You should have,” Charles says.

  “I should have, but I didn’t want to. I thought: you might as well start doing what you want to do right now; this is as good a time as any other. So I called you.”

  Sam turns the volume up again. “Nope,” he says.

  Charles checks his watch. It is a little after noon, which will give him almost five hours of sleep before he has to go to dinner. His Saturday is shot. Sunday is always a bleak day, with nothing to do. Monday he goes back to work. His boss will come in and want to know what he thought of his son. He will lie. His boss always checks on his reaction: “Did you like those hors d’oeuvres my wife made for the party? I told her it looked pretentious. What did you think?” He has a new orange pencil sharpener he requisitioned, and the Steel City paper clips will be piled up on his desk, awaiting him. Also reports. He will eat alone. Maybe he will go to the Greek restaurant and have a good lunch, have Greek coffee and pudding for dessert. The food there is always very good, but it takes a long time to get served. What the hell. They’re not going to fire him. He’ll tell his boss that his son is a suave son of a bitch and take a long lunch hour. Pasticcio. He is hungry.

  “Why don’t we stop off on the avenue and get something to eat?” he says.

  “Okay with me,” Sam says.

  “I’m starving,” Pamela Smith says.

  “If you were starving, why didn’t you say anything?” Charles says.

  “You’re angry at me,” she says.

  “No I’m not. I’m not mad.” He is a little mad. He is too tired to be really mad.

  “I misjudge you all the time,” she says. “When I came over the other night I thought you’d be very defensive and aloof, and you were very nice.”

  “Don’t start that again.”

  “Can’t a person tell you you’re nice?”

  “No. Absolutely not”

  “Where do you want to stop?” Sam says. “Kentucky Fried Chicken or some place like that?”

  “What do you want?” Charles asks Pamela Smith.

  “Anything.”

  “Then stop at Kentucky Fried.”

  The Saturday traffic is heavy. Charles combs his hair and tries to open his eyes wider. He winces.

  “I guess we’d feel worse if we were J.D.,” Charles says.

  “That’s for sure,” Sam agrees.

  “Is that a friend of yours?” Pamela Smith asks.

  “Guy we met last night … last night? Yeah. In a restaurant.”

  “He was pretty drunk,” Charles says. “What do you think he does with his money?” Sam says. “There’s nothing in that apartment.”

  “Maybe the rent is high.”

  “How high can rent be for a place like that?”

  “I don’t know. How much can he make being a waiter?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam says.

  “Money is worthless anyway,” Pamela Smith says. “I really felt like she might as well take it. What was twenty-five bucks going to do for me?”

  Sam pulls into the Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot. He gets out and lets Charles out of the back seat. Charles goes inside. There is a line. One man has a child sitting on his shoulders. The child is picking a scab off its arm.

  “A family pack,” Charles says when he gets to the counter. “And a large order of french fries.”

  “That’s all?” the girl says. She rings it up on the cash register. He pays, and sits on the edge of a booth to wait for it. He looks around at all the families eating fried chicken. America is getting so gauche. If there’s a McDonald’s in Paris, is the Colonel there, too? Kentucky Fried bones thrown around the Eiffel Tower? He picks up his box, spots of grease dotting the outside, and walks out of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sam gets out of the car again and Charles sits up front, the box on his lap. Pamela Smith begins to eat a leg. Sam takes a breast. So that he doesn’t get both of them, Charles takes the other.

  “Any more breasts?” Sam says after a few minutes. There are not.

  Pamela Smith eats a wing. Charles eats a leg.

  “I’m going to get something to drink,” Sam says. “What do you all want?”

  “Coke,” Pamela Smith says.

  “Milk,” Charles says.

  Sam opens the car door and goes into Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  “What am I going to do?” Pamela Smith says. “I don’t have any money. I can’t just eat off of you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Charles says.

  She licks her fingers. “You won’t even let me say how nice you are.”

  “That’s right,” Charles says, dropping a bone into the bag. Sam comes back to the car with a root beer, an orange, and a milk.

  “Your choice,” Sam says. “They were out of Coke.”

  “The orange,” she says.

  “Okay,” Sam says, handing it to her.

  They drop the tabs in the ashtray. Sam turns on the radio to hear what’s playing. It is not Dylan. He turns it off.

  “A watched Dylan never plays,” Charles says.

  They finish the rest of the chicken in silence. Pamela Smith reaches into the french fries box and puts several in her mouth.

  “Give me some of those,” Sam says. He puts several in his mouth.

  “Delicious,” Pamela Smith says.

  “Now that I’ve eaten I’m sleepy,” Sam says. “Got to get you kiddies home before old Sammy falls asleep.”

  “Why don’t you let me drive?” Pamela Smith says.

  Sam starts the car. He turns the radio on again, and he turns it off.

  Charles wonders what they will do with Pamela Smith. Just have her sleep on the sofa, feed her? Suddenly there are two other people in his house. What would his dead grandmother think of a lesbian sleeping on the sofa and an unemployed jacket salesman sleeping in the spare bedroom, all her furniture sold to Best Bird Antiques? Sometimes he wants to move out of the house, move out of town … to Bermuda. He is obsessed with going to Bermuda. He would buy an underwater camera and take pictures of fish. Laura would be with him. Laura in a bathing suit. They would eat papaya or whatever they eat in Bermuda and drink rum. Their drinking rum is always part of his fantasy, so he no longer questions the reality of it. Maybe they don’t drink rum. Whatever they drink. He would run around corners in Bermuda and collide with her. They would fish, pull starfish out of the water. Or whatever fish they have besides sharks in Bermuda. Laura would fix him fresh fish dinners. He would dance as happily as the restaurant menu cookie. They would walk the beach and look at the stars. They would fly to Paris and eat at the McDonald’s because it was très amusant (this would be the reason they would give all their friends), and for a while they would be as happy and nutty as Scott and Zelda. Zelda died in the bin, and Scott drank himself to death. Didn’t he drink himself to death? He fell over in Sheila Graham’s living room. Whatever he died of. Once Scott and Zelda put ladies’ purses in vats of spaghetti sauce because it was très amusant. They were assholes. The fun ended with a bang. He would
be eaten by a shark; Laura would get an inoperable melanoma. Bermuda. It probably rains all the time in Bermuda. There are probably slums all around the beaches, to remind you of the real world. He would never have the nerve to spend a lot of money on an underwater camera. Maybe he should get himself a sunlamp and an aquarium and forget about it. He and Laura would probably be blown up in the plane flying them there. They would never get to Bermuda. The rum would be 151 proof and knock them out—they’d never want to screw. (“You’ve heard of screwing, right?”) Charles sighs.

  “I’ve screwed so many people this past year I don’t even want to remember it,” Pamela Smith says.

  Charles starts. “That’s just what I was thinking,” he says.

  “How do you know how many people I’ve screwed?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about you. I was thinking about my first sex lesson—a talk I had with my father.”

  “I was thinking about a pimply dyke I screwed who climbed out a toilet window and abandoned me.”

  “We must all go to church tomorrow,” Sam says. He takes a bite of chicken leg.

  “Did you ever go to church?” Pamela Smith asks.

  “Me? Sure. I crayoned pictures of Our Lord in Sunday school that still grace my mother’s bedroom wall,” Sam says.

  “What religion were you?”

  “A Methodist.”

  “What were you?” she asks Charles. “I was a Lutheran.”

  “I was an Episcopalian,” she says. “I was going to switch to Catholicism. A long time back.”

  “Remember to pray for guidance on Sunday,” Sam says.

  “When was the last time you were in church?” she says.

  “I think … twelve years ago. At Christmas.”

  “I was in church a couple of months ago. A Catholic church,” she says. “With Marian. Did I ever tell you that was her name?”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “It was her mother’s maiden name.” Pamela Smith winces. “Listen to me; maiden name. As if there are maidens any more.”

  “Maybe there are,” Charles says. “Maybe there are maidens in the jungle.”

  “What does ‘maiden’ mean, exactly?” Sam says. “A broad,” Charles says.

  “It’s funny that women got to be called ‘broads,’ ” Pamela Smith says. “Does it mean they have broad asses?”

  “I guess that’s what it means. Yeah.”

  Sam pulls into the driveway. “Phew,” he says. “Seems like a week ago I shoveled this out. Those cars on the street really got plowed in good.”

  “It does seem like a week ago,” Charles says. “It’ll be good to get some sleep.”

  “Thank you very much for bringing us here,” Pamela Smith says to Sam.

  “Oh,” Sam says. “I live here now.”

  “Oh,” she says.

  “Yeah. I just moved in.”

  “He lost his prestigious, high-paying job,” Charles says.

  “I just realized,” Sam says. “I should have showed up to get the dope after work. Now we don’t have any grass.”

  “What would we do with it anyway?” Charles says. “Jesus. Imagine getting stoned on top of all this.”

  “If this were the sixties, we couldn’t wait to get stoned,” Sam says.

  “Don’t talk about getting stoned. Marian’s daughter was puffing away all the time, listening to Dylan records and saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ to herself.”

  “Get the chicken,” Sam says. Charles leans over and gets the box from the floor. They get out of the car and go to the front door.

  “Look at me,” Sam says, and turns a cartwheel.

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” Charles says.

  “I don’t think I ever had occasion to show you. You remember from grade school though, don’t you?”

  “No,” Charles says. “And what’s the occasion now?”

  “That we get to go to bed,” Sam says.

  Charles puts the key in the front door. “If you hear my alarm and you don’t hear me moving around, shake me,” Charles says. “I’ve got to go over to my mother’s for dinner tonight.”

  “That should top things off nicely,” Sam says.

  Pamela Smith flops on the sofa. She turns over, pulls the pillow under her head.

  “I’ll bring you a blanket,” Charles says. “In a minute.”

  “Never mind. I’m already asleep,” she says.

  “I’ll get you a blanket. Hang on,” Charles says. He hangs up his coat and pulls a blanket off the linen closet shelf. A pale blue blanket. His mother gave it to him. She usually gives him sweaters (the wrong size) and blankets. He has two other blankets in the linen closet: another blue one, and a yellow one. She also brings him light bulbs when she visits. When she used to go out of the house to visit. He puts the blanket over Pamela Smith.

  “Take your shoes off,” Charles says. “You’re gonna wake up and be miserable.”

  He walks into the bathroom. Sam is in there, running water over his wrists. “I froze my goddamn wrists,” Sam says. “Try to wake me up if you hear the alarm,” Charles says. “I will. Good night.”

  “Good night,” Charles says.

  He walks into his bedroom, undresses, leaves the clothes in a pile on the floor, and climbs into bed. He has forgotten to pull the drapes; it is light outside. He pulls the pillow over his head. It is still bright. He gets up and closes the drapes. He has forgotten to set the alarm. He gets up and sets the alarm, pulls the button. He will be getting up in four hours. Impossible. In five hours he will be in his mother’s living room. He laughs. She will serve Hawaiian Punch with rum; Pete will have prepared … chicken. It won’t be as tasty as the Kentucky Fried. They will have nothing to say to each other. That is, assuming he doesn’t have to pull her out of the tub or hold her hand while she twists and turns in bed, during which time they can discuss her illness. She will have on sneakers, and Pete will be all dressed up in a sports jacket and tie. He will have on the damned wing-tip cordovans again. They will sit in the living room, saying nothing, sipping the Hawaiian Punch and rum. A real travesty of the Bermuda dream.

  Thinking of Bermuda, he falls asleep and has a dream of a jolly fat man, water-skiing. He must be the fat man, because the fat man is wearing his clothes, except that they are bigger than the clothes he wears, all stretched out of shape. He is water-skiing down a narrow, wavy line—not the real ocean at all, but a line that has been drawn. There are boundaries to Bermuda—to the left and right there are concrete walls, and if the fat man isn’t careful he will smash into one of them. There is nothing on the other side of the walls. The fat man is so jolly that he pays no attention, comes within a fraction of an inch of crashing into the walls. He laughs, soaring through the water in a full suit of clothes. Charles wakes up leaning on one elbow, smirking. “Jesus Christ,” he says out loud, and falls asleep again. In his next dream he and Laura are underwater—without air tanks, though, with no cameras—and they are flopping easily, like fish, her hair billowing behind her. She is very white and beautiful, and the water is blue-green. He can feel the water against his eyeballs. They are turning somersaults, and then Laura doesn’t come out of her somersault, but keeps sinking, bent in half, sinking deeper than he can go. He tries to make his body heavier, to sink with her, but he is light, buoyant, he can’t follow. He wakes up at the bottom of the bed, his feet pressing against the bedboard. He pulls himself up to the top of the bed, taking hold of the sheet to pull himself. He feels dizzy. The sun is so bright. What was he dreaming? He reaches for the pillow, sees that it is on the floor. Leave it there. Sun shining through the drapes, he falls asleep again, and this time the jolly fat man is following Laura down, laughing, cackling. There are bubbles as the fat man sinks. He can no longer see Laura, only the fat man’s head, grown immense, and the gush of bubbles. He wakes up with a headache. He sits on the side of the bed, after retrieving the pillow, but he’s afraid to shut his eyes. He leaves them open, pressed into the pillow. His throat is aching. He has
a sore throat. He puts one hand across the front of his throat and somehow falls asleep again, sitting on the side of the bed, falls backward. He is sprawled lengthwise across the bed, naked, when he feels a hand on his arm. He is trying to catch the fat man’s arm, to hold him back, but he is sinking fast, and Charles is buoying upward, frightened, realizing that he has no air tank, that he will drown. He has to get to the top fast.

  “Charles.…”

  But Laura. And the fat man. What does the fat man want with Laura? Why isn’t he floating? Everybody knows fat people float easily, but Charles is floating upward, neck craning for the top, for air.…

  “Charles.…”

  He snaps his head forward and sees Sam sitting on the side of the bed.

  “Charles … the phone. I called you, but you didn’t answer.”

  “What? The phone?”

  “Yeah. It’s Pete. I said I’d have you call back, but he insisted.”

  “What time is it? I was dreaming something horrible.”

  “I figured you were. I couldn’t get you to wake up.”

  “I was in Bermuda. Pete. Pete’s on the phone now?”

  “Yeah. He says he’s got to talk to you.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Four o’clock,” Sam says, looking at the clock. The alarm is still pulled. The hand is going around and around. The clock. Dinner. Pete. He walks into the kitchen naked, forgetting Pamela Smith. But she’s fast asleep, arms thrown open, feet hanging off the sofa.

  “Pete?” Charles says. “What?”

  “I’m sorry to be bothering you, Charles. Sam said you two had a rough night. I had to talk to you, though, because I know you were expecting to come to dinner. At least I don’t imagine you forgot about dinner.”

  “No. What is it, Pete?”

  “Well, I was washing the chicken. I had planned on a chicken dinner. Stuffed. I was rinsing it, and Mommy—Clara—got a little upset, saying that she was going to prepare the meal. I thought that was great. I went out for a bottle of wine and left her there, and when I got back she seemed pretty confused. She was sitting on the kitchen stool holding the chicken. She said she wasn’t feeling well. She wanted to make the dinner, but she wasn’t feeling well. I told her I’d do it, to go lie down. She wouldn’t get off the stool. She was sitting there holding this damned chicken. She refused to let me fix it. I finally got her to put it back in the refrigerator, but if she doesn’t let me fix it, there isn’t going to be any dinner, because she’s not going to fix it.”