Chilly Scenes of Winter

by Ann Beattie

  “I’ve got a load of books at my apartment that I’ve got to get out of there,” Sam says. “Drive me to work and you can have the car.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “You don’t think the battery on yours can be charged?” Charles asks. “It’s dead.”

  “I swear this is the last time I’ll bring this up, but do you ever think about getting another dog?” Charles says.

  “Yeah. I think about it.”

  “Why don’t you go to the pound tomorrow and get a dog?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’d have a lot of fun with it.”

  “It would crap all over your place.”

  “Put down newspapers. Keep it in the bedroom with them for a while.”

  “I’ve got to sleep in there.”

  “How many times a day can it shit?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  The waitress puts the pizza down.

  “Let me just have a slice with green pepper,” Sam says.

  “Take it”

  Sam cuts a piece with his knife. He bites off the end.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t like it. Here.”

  Charles takes the piece of pizza and begins eating.

  “She’s a good cook, isn’t she? Pamela Smith, I mean.”

  “Yeah, pretty good.”

  “I mean, she’s not Laura,” Sam says, “But …”

  “Shut up about Laura.”

  “That’s what you were thinking when I mentioned Pamela Smith’s cooking. You got that Laura look on your face.”

  “I don’t want to hear about Laura.”

  “You brought up my dog again.” Charles sighs.

  “The new Dylan isn’t on the jukebox, is it? It might be there even if it isn’t in the stores.”

  “I doubt it,” Charles says, flipping through. “You want to hear ‘Lay Lady Lay?’ That’s on here.”

  “I don’t want to think about screwing.”

  “I was just offering,” Charles says, breaking off another piece of pizza.

  “I really don’t have any luck with women any more,” Sam says.

  “Maybe when you get older you don’t have luck with them.”

  “You really think that’s it? My age?”

  “No.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. You’re not going to meet any, in the first place, sitting around the house.”

  “In 1968 I could pick up the prettiest girl in the park just by walking through.”

  “I met a woman in the park the other day. I can’t remember her name.”

  “Wouldn’t have done me any good anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Charles says. “She was okay.”

  “You mean just okay?”

  “Yeah,” Charles says. “And she was married.”

  “Who cares if they’re married or not?” Sam says. The waitress frowns down at him. “Do you want another draft?” she says. “Oh. Please.” She takes the glass away.

  “Nice one,” Charles says, shaking his head. “Glad she didn’t hear the clergyman saying that.”

  “Did I tell you Pete called?” Sam says. “Say what he wanted?”

  “No. But he sounded okay. Sounded cheerful.”

  “Maybe she sank in the tub.”

  “Do you think he’d be happy if she died?”

  “According to him, what would make him happy would be to have his own kid.”

  “I don’t guess he’ll be getting one of those now,” Sam says. “That’s what he says,” Charles says.

  “Well, that’s sad, I guess. If you want a kid and you don’t have it.”

  “If we don’t get married and have kids we’re going to be up shit creek. What’s going to happen when we’re old?” Charles says.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. I’m serious.”

  “If we had kids they’d probably have to be taken care of in their old age by us.”

  “If we had a lot we might get one good kid.”

  “Great. You pull off shitted diapers for years, hoping for one good kid.”

  “It’s just an idea,” Charles says.

  “Talk about your sister being straight,” Sam says. “That’s what straight people do—pump ’em out, change the diapers, and sit back waiting for the payoff.”

  Sam takes a drink from his new mug of beer. “This is a miserable topic of conversation,” he says.

  “How did we get onto it?” Charles says.

  “I said that Pete called.”

  “That’s right I wonder what he wanted.”

  “Maybe he got the chicken cooked.”

  “He said he was going to forget about it. He didn’t want her to see it and start again.”

  “That must be hell on earth, living with your mother.”

  “I feel pretty sorry for him lately.”

  Charles takes his money out of his wallet and puts it all on top of the bill. The waitress takes it away.

  “Listen. Would you mind riding over to Laura’s?”

  “That’s pathetic!” Sam says. “What do you want to do something that pathetic for? What’s the point of it?”

  “I’ll drop you at home.”

  “Oh, shit, Charles. It’s not that I won’t ride over. I just think it’s pointless.”

  “She might be outside.”

  “Just walking around at the end of the drive, soaking up the cold air?”

  “The light might be on.”

  “Of course the light will be on. She wouldn’t be in bed this early.”

  “Then I want to see the light.”

  “What’s this, The Great Gatsby or something?”

  “Shut up. I said I’d take you to the house.”

  “I’ll come, I’ll come for Christ’s sake.”

  They get up and walk out of the restaurant. The waitress doesn’t look at them. She is standing in front of the cashier, talking.

  “Take me home,” Sam says, “I can’t bear to watch you make a fool of yourself.”

  “It’ll take ten minutes longer than driving straight home.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Sam says.

  “I just want to see what’s going on over there.”

  “All you can see is a house! A lit-up house.”

  Charles heads for Laura’s. He hopes that she will be outside the house. Maybe she went out because … she heard a noise. She wouldn’t, though. She’d mention it to her husband and he’d go outside. Ox. To drive all the way over there to see Ox.

  Eric Clapton on the radio. Layla. Laura. Ox. Ox had better not be in sight. Sam slides down in the seat, sighing and shaking his head.

  “You’re nuts, this is completely nuts,” Sam says.

  Once he and Laura made a fruitcake. It took them all afternoon. They were going to give it to a friend of Laura’s who was sick, but they wanted it when it was done and ate it themselves. It cost a fortune to buy all the things that went into it. They bought a bag of walnuts and he cracked them. They joked—how did that joke start?—about sending the shells to the Smithsonian, writing a letter claiming to be archaeologists, saying that they found these peculiar things on a dig in the Blue Ridge, and did they think it might be petrified caveman shit? He showed her the trick with the Land O’ Lakes butter box—how you could make it look as if the squaw had big tits. They ate the fruitcake and drank the brandy they had bought to use in the fruitcake. It was so rich and delicious that they were almost sick, but they couldn’t stop eating. He put candied cherries in their brandy. In the morning she went out and got a get-well card for the friend. They ate the fruitcake for lunch and after dinner. Weekends were so nice with Laura. The time seemed to go so fast. She had a calendar hung in the kitchen that he insisted she get rid of. He didn’t even want to look at it. “But where will I write down appointments and things?” she said, and he gave her an engagement calendar. “I’m half flattered and I half think you’re crazy,” she said. He wonders if she has a calend
ar in the A-frame. If she and Ox ever do things like making fruitcake. He would like to soak Ox in brandy and beat him well and shove him in the oven. Ox wears size extra-large undershirts. Charles wears medium. Ox would pick him up by the collar and put him in the oven. Does Ox know about him? And if he knows, does he know about the fruitcake they made, about all the giggling they did in Laura’s kitchen? It would take her years to fill him in on all that. He couldn’t know it all. He might even get bored hearing all of it: we baked fruitcake, he showed me a trick with a butter box, we went to the movies, we did the laundry, we ate at a Japanese restaurant and didn’t like the soup, we cleaned his kitchen, we … Maybe Laura left because she was bored. Maybe that was one of the many things. She wouldn’t have been bored in Bermuda. He should have taken off from work, made her go to Bermuda with him. He should have cleaned the kitchen himself. He could go tap on her kitchen window: “Another chance, Laura.” Ox would be in the kitchen. He would walk outside and kill him.

  “I mean it,” Sam says. “This is pathetic. It’s not like you call her and write her and make yourself obnoxious. All you do is slink over there to look at the lights on in her house. If she killed somebody you’d take the rap for her, wouldn’t you? The whole Gatsby trip.”

  “She wouldn’t ever kill anybody.”

  “Yeah, but what if she was driving your roadster along and a woman ran out in front of it?”

  “Okay, okay. Enough.”

  “What can I say that will talk you out of this dreary driving by her house?”

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s no point to it. What does driving by her house prove?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You just intend to do it anyway.”

  “I just intend to do it anyway.”

  “Goddamn it,” Sam says. “You remember how we used to double-date in college, and how we even had girlfriends in elementary school?”

  “I never had a girlfriend in elementary school. You had Bess Dwyer.”

  “Are you still denying that you had a crush on Jill Peterson?”

  “I never liked Jill Peterson. That was always just something in your mind.”

  “You’re still denying it. I can’t believe it.”

  “I can’t believe that you’re still going on about it, I never liked her.”

  “Then you’re just not admitting it to yourself.”

  “You’ve brought her up for years. I’m not even clear on which one Jill Peterson was. Was she the scrawny blond kid?”

  “Exactly! You remember just which one she was.”

  “What made you think I liked her?”

  “You bought her a special valentine, don’t you remember that?”

  “She transferred into our school just before Valentine’s Day. I remember that. My box of valentines had all been addressed, and then she showed up, and I thought I’d better …”

  “I’ll be damned! You’re still rationalizing!” Sam breaks in.

  “I’m not rationalizing. I’m trying to set you straight. It doesn’t matter to me if you want to think I liked her, but I never did.”

  “Everybody knew you did.”

  “Even if I did—which I didn’t—she wasn’t a girlfriend.”

  “You’ve always liked thin blondes. Laura is just like Jill Peterson! Didn’t you ever think that?”

  “Laura is twenty-nine. Jill Peterson was a kid I knew in the fifth or sixth grade.”

  “You know it was the sixth.”

  “Okay, I knew it was the sixth. I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Because you always try to pretend to be vague about her. Actually, every woman you’ve liked has been thin like Jill Peterson.”

  “They were all different. All the girls were different. You’re talking nonsense.”

  “Okay, even if they were. Laura is just what Jill Peterson would look like grown up.”

  “You sound like my sister. This is incredible.”

  “She might be right You really might not understand yourself.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I’m trying to help you.”

  But they are already on Laura’s block.

  “There are a million girls with blond hair. Skinny blond girls. Is that all you see by way of similarity?” Charles says.

  Sam is slumped in the seat, disgusted. He won’t speak. Charles sighs.

  “If it were true, why wouldn’t I think about Jill Peterson?”

  At five miles an hour, the car rolls by Laura’s driveway. The light is on in the kitchen again, but the kitchen window is too far from the road to see through. She could be standing right in the window and he wouldn’t know it. If only the house were closer to the road. If only she didn’t live in that house at all. She could live in his house. Did he ever make that clear enough to her? Yes. A hundred times. She even agreed that his house was more spacious. She is in there, somewhere in that house, in one of those lighted rooms. He turns in a driveway and rolls by again, this time even slower. The trees are blowing in the wind. He is nothing like Jay Gatsby. Gatsby waited all his life, and then Daisy slipped away. Charles has only been waiting for two years, and he’ll get her back. He has to get her back. He will get her back and take her to Bermuda. “Bermuda?” she will say. She always thought the things he said were strange. Maybe he was a weird conversationalist. And he can’t blame her for thinking him peculiar when he said the calendar had to go. In general, though, she didn’t think him peculiar. She loved him, in general. If she still loves him, he will get her back. She has to still love him. She just has to. She laughed wildly when he showed her the butter box trick.

  “Jesus Christ.” Sam swears under his breath as they turn back onto the main road.

  “I’ve got to get her back. Wasn’t she great, Sam?”

  “Here we go. I knew. I just knew it.” Sam sighs dramatically. “Yeah, she was a swell woman.”

  “I’m going to get her back.”

  “I hope so.” Sam says. He shakes his head.

  “If she didn’t like me, why would she have driven to school that day she said she’d meet me?”

  Driving home, Charles realizes that it’s too late to suggest going to a movie. Just as well, because he spent all his money at dinner.

  “I sure am waiting for that Dylan album,” Sam says. “I really want to know what Bob Dylan’s got to say in 1975.”

  Charles thinks of the cookies at home and drives faster. Devil’s food cookies. In fifteen minutes they are there. Charles heads for the cookie bag as he goes through the door. He is suddenly starving.

  “Have some,” he says to Sam, then sees the note next to the bag: “My brother is driving me to California. It’s a long story. I had intended to stay with you, but I realized talking to my brother that I really had to head west. I can never thank you enough for coming out that night to get me. I’m leaving some books here that you and Sam might like, and when I get to California, I’ll call with a longer explanation. My brother is waiting. Long explanation later. Love, Pamela.”

  “Oh no,” Sam says, reading over his shoulder.

  Charles shoves another cookie in his mouth. “I’m actually disappointed,” Charles says through the cookie.

  “Why?” Sam says.

  “After all we went through to get her, it seems like she should have stuck around for a while.”

  “I know what you mean,” Sam says.

  “She left her sweater,” Charles says, looking at the kitchen chair. “She left in a hurry.”

  “You think that’s true? About her brother?”

  “Maybe he figured he’d transport her himself, be sure to get rid of her.”

  “Yeah. That could be it.”

  “Wow. It really seems strange that she’s gone,” Charles says. Sam takes another cookie. “Well, back to cooking for ourselves,” he says. “Yeah.”

  “We still might hear from her before she hits the West Coast, knock on wood,” Sam says, rapping his knuckles on the kitchen cabinet “Women,” Charle
s says.

  “She’s a very odd one,” Sam says. “Do you remember when women didn’t use to be odd? I’d pick up some girl in the park and she’d be a nice, normal chick.”

  “I’ve got to get Laura back” Charles says, putting another cookie in his mouth.

  The phone rings.

  “Don’t tell me,” Sam says. “Should I answer it?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Hello?” Sam says. “Yes. Just a minute.” He covers the mouthpiece. “Pete,” he says. “Hello?” Charles says. “How’s my boy? Did I disturb you?”

  “No. We just got in.”

  “Get into those pants, ha ha ha?”

  “She’s gone back to California.”

  “That’s the breaks,” Pete says. Silence.

  “I don’t have anything major to report,” Pete says. “I think sometimes that you must dread a call from me, because it might bring word of your mother being in trouble. It’s too bad I can’t just call you and we can’t chat without that hanging over us.”

  “Yeah,” Charles says. “What’s new?”

  “Well, the reason I called, I’ve been to two hardware stores today, and damned if I can find Turtle Wax. You know, that’s the stuff you want to take to your car. Get it waxed up while it’s new, you’ll never have a problem. But I can’t find the stuff anywhere. Now, it’s not what the manufacturer recommends, but I know my car wax, and I want to go over it with Turtle Wax. If in your travels you come across it, why, buy the stuff and I’ll reimburse you.”

  “Sure,” Charles says. “I’ll look.”

  “Cooked the chicken and it went fine,” Pete whispers.

  “Good,” Charles says. “Things are looking up.”

  Silence.

  “I’ll hang up now and let you get on with it,” Pete says. “Good to talk to you, and thanks for keeping an eye out.”

  “Sure,” Charles says. “Good-bye.”

  It is nine-fifteen. He puts on a record that has always been one of his favorites: The New Lost City Ramblers with Cousin Emmy. Cousin Emmy has her red-painted mouth open wide. She looks like his mother being hauled out of the tub. He gets up and moves the needle to “Chilly Scenes of Winter.” Sing it, Emmy. He eats a cookie and tries to think what to do to get Laura. Sam is right; he can’t keep driving by her house. He will call her. Tomorrow. He’ll call her and ask to see her again, ask whether he can meet her at the school for just five minutes. Or maybe that doesn’t seem self-assured enough. He’ll ask if he can see her and put no time limit on it. He’ll be a little casual. He won’t say it’s important the way he did the other time. He will just say that he’d like to see her. He won’t tell her he loves her on the phone—nothing to scare her away, nothing to give her an excuse to say no. And then he’ll see her. What will he say? What will he say to persuade her never to drive home again? He gets up and walks around the house. Pamela Smith’s things are everywhere. He will have to box them and send them. He hates wrapping things for mailing. Maybe there’s a way to get Sam to do it. Sam has more time than he does. Get Sam to do it. He opens the Lido cookies. They are wonderful. He gets a glass of water and paces the kitchen. What can he say to her? What can he say to Laura?