Chilly Scenes of Winter

by Ann Beattie

  He takes a shower and watches the eleven o’clock news. He gets in bed with a magazine. At midnight he calls good night to Sam and turns off the light. He thinks back over the day. One thing keeps coming back to him: when he was leaving work he stopped at the blind man’s stand for a Hershey bar. “What have you got?” the blind man said and Charles was suddenly tempted to break into song with, “I’ve got a never-ending love for you.…” He laughed out loud when he thought of singing that to the blind man. “Hershey bar,” he said, and laughed again. The blind man reached out and felt the Hershey bar before he took the money from Charles. He felt all along it, and had his head cocked to one side when Charles left. The blind man is beginning to distrust him.

  ELEVEN

  Standing on the eleventh floor waiting for the elevator, Charles sees Betty out of the comer of his eye. She had her coat on and must have been leaving, but she ducked back in the doorway when she saw him. She has given up on him, doesn’t even want to talk to him. She picked up his reports today without even saying hello. He couldn’t think of anything to say to her, so he didn’t look up. Now she won’t even wait for the elevator with him. He feels sorry that he has been cruel to Betty, but he just can’t get interested. He has been in a bad mood all day because Laura’s phone rang and rang. She never did answer. He stayed at work later than usual, hoping to catch her before Ox got home. He finally stopped dialing, sure that Ox would pick it up. He could have hung up on Ox, but he doesn’t want him suspicious. He doesn’t want Laura blaming him for anything. He has to be very nice and very careful and get her back.

  Betty and another woman walk through the corridor to the elevator. The doors open just as they get there. Charles puts his hand over the edge of the door to make sure it stays open for them. The elevator is packed. He gets on along with ten people from the eleventh floor. Bob White is pressed in the back. He nods hello. Betty is standing next to Charles.

  “How are you?” Charles says.

  “Tired,” Betty says. She turns and talks to the woman next to her about dinner.

  “If you’re not doing anything for dinner, why don’t you two come over to my place,” Charles hears himself say as he walks off the elevator in back of them.

  They stop, looking confused. He has never seen the other woman. She is much prettier than Betty. Sam wouldn’t mind.

  “I was just saying that I couldn’t go at all,” the woman says. I have no baby-sitter.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Charles says.

  “Maybe some other time,” Betty says.

  “Oh,” Charles says. “If you can’t make it.”

  “I’m awfully tired to go out,” Betty says. “But thank you.”

  “Let me walk to your car with you,” he says. Why is he saying this?

  She shrugs. She says good-bye to the other woman at the door.

  “Change your mind,” Charles says to Betty. “Actually, I have no car. It’s in the shop for a valve job. I was walking to the bus stop.”

  “Let me drive you home, then.”

  “All right,” she says. “Thank you.”

  They walk silently to his car. He thinks of his dancing teacher: “Closer, closer.” He is walking six feet away from Betty. He moves over about a foot. She doesn’t seem to notice. Her coat collar is turned up. She looks like a turtle. She has a sharp nose like a turtle. On all fours she might look very much like a turtle.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to stop by for dinner? I have to go to the grocery store anyway. A friend is staying with me and his battery’s dead, so he couldn’t go out to get groceries.”

  “If you’d like me to,” Betty says. “Thank you for inviting me.”

  “What would you like for dinner?” he asks.

  “Whatever you’d planned to have is fine.”

  He never plans dinner. He would have gone home and had water and cookies.

  “I’ll stop and get us some steaks.” He opens the car door for her. Her legs are fat He averts his eyes—shower room etiquette—as she climbs in. He walks around the car and opens his door. She did not pull the lock up for him. She doesn’t like him. He doesn’t want her, and she doesn’t want to come.

  “How long have you worked there?” he asks.

  “Four years,” she says. “I started when I was twenty.”

  This woman is only twenty-four? How could anyone be so … solid at twenty-four? He turns on the radio and catches the end of a plea for money. Just like going home and opening the mail. The Indians want him. The starving orphans in Ghana. The mistreated kittens. He realizes, suddenly, that this was the day Sam was going to drive him to work so Sam could clean out his apartment. They are both so disorganized that nothing gets done. He is amazed by people who can shop for a whole week’s groceries on one day—that they know what to get, and how much of it, and that they will want to eat those things for sure during the next week. He looks in his wallet at the first red light. There is plenty of money. He has forty, and there is a twenty tucked in the back to lend Sam. He could even use that in the grocery store if necessary. Betty looks at him looking in his wallet out of the corner of her eye.

  “I’m fascinated by men who can cook,” Betty says. “My father wouldn’t even open a carton of milk for himself. My mother or my sister or I had to do it. It seems lately that quite a few men cook.”

  “It’s that or go out,” Charles shrugs.

  Betty says nothing. He has botched it. He cut her off, and she was making polite conversation.

  “Your father really wouldn’t open a milk carton?” he asks.

  “No. He wouldn’t. When my mother bought the things, she’d always open and close the milk again, and she’d take the caps off the soda bottles and put on those rubber ones to seal them. He’d pop one of those off. He’d carry on if he had to use a can opener or rip open the milk, though. That’s part of the reason I moved out. That and my mother telling me to use my salary for plastic surgery.”

  “What for?” he says.

  “My nose.”

  “You don’t have a bad nose.”

  Her nose is her worst feature. That and her weight.

  “Thank you. I’m very self-conscious about it.”

  He should say something else: flatter her more. He changes the station on the radio.

  “What did you do before you started working?”

  “I worked at Western Union for a while, and as a checker in a supermarket. I trained to work in a bank, but I quit after the training. The people were so nasty, and the money looked so ugly.”

  “That’s quite an assortment of jobs.”

  “I kept kidding myself that I was going to college. How can you save money working at Western Union? When I had a little extra money at the supermarket I spent it joining a health club. The exercises made me sore, and I got a kidney infection around that time and had to give up on it. So then I went to the bank and started learning the ropes. And then I took the exam to get into the government. I always knew how to type.”

  “When did you get your apartment?”

  “Over a year ago. A girl was living with me, but she quit and went back to Georgia.”

  “She didn’t like the job?”

  “She didn’t like the city. She had me so upset that after she left I was afraid to go out at night, and I had a bolt put on the front door. When you live with somebody who’s always telling you what danger you’re in you start believing it.”

  Betty lights a cigarette. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Go ahead,” he says. Cigarette smoke makes him sick. They are almost at the supermarket, though. He concentrates on not coughing. He always coughed in Laura’s car. Laura, smoking Chesterfields. She will die young. He had better get her in a hurry.

  He pulls into the parking lot. As he walks in, he takes his wallet out of his pocket and checks. The forty is still there. He puts it back. He takes it out again, going through the electric door, and searches for the twenty. Because if it took more than forty, he would need
that money. He knows he is being silly. He knows that steaks for three people don’t cost forty dollars.

  “Do you have enough money?” Betty says.

  “Oh, yes. Checking my wallet is a nervous habit.”

  Betty nods. He is sure she doesn’t believe him.

  He goes to the meat counter and gets three T-bone steaks. “What else do you like?” he asks.

  “Potatoes,” she says.

  “Potatoes. Where would they be?”

  He follows her. He picks up a bag of potatoes. He gets a package of spinach and a large bottle of Coke. They stand in line. He wonders if anyone in the grocery store mistakes her for his wife. People used to mistake Laura for his wife. “Your wife left this,” the woman at the bank said, when Laura left her hat on the table. People used to smile at him when he was with Laura. They don’t smile now.

  “Working makes me so tired,” Betty says.

  “You could do some isometrics,” he says. What is he talking about?

  “Do you know the exercises?” she says.

  “I have a book you can borrow.” Pamela Smith left the book. What is she going to think if all those women’s lib books are still lying around? She’ll think it’s peculiar he reads Germaine Greer and Kate Millett and Simone de Beauvoir. And if she asks for an opinion on any of them he’s sunk. Maybe Sam cleaned. He is sure that Sam did not.

  “I’ll probably be having that party this weekend,” he says. What did he bring that up for?

  She nods. She does not believe him. She has no reason to believe him. There is no possible way he could have a party over the weekend. He could call J.D. J.D. might come to the party if he didn’t have to work. That would make him, J.D., Sam, and Betty. Pete would come for sure. Pete would be so flattered. What a travesty that would be. What would Betty say to Pete?

  “I’d be glad to come over and help you get organized,” she says.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  He pays for the food and is very relieved when he sees that he has enough money. How would a psychiatrist work him through this trauma? Tell him to go to a store and get more food than he has money for and see that it’s not the end of the world? Probably. Shrinks. The indirect approach: “Don’t you think …”

  They get back in his car and start toward the house. Sam is going to be very surprised. Charles himself is very surprised. It would be nice to take all this food home and have dinner with Sam. He pulls into traffic.

  “Where do you live?” she asks.

  “Colony Street”

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  “It’s not far from here.”

  “Is your friend visiting from out of town?”

  “He’s actually staying there. He just lost his job.”

  “Things are awful,” Betty says. “What was he doing?”

  “He had a shit job selling men’s jackets, and last week they fired him.”

  “That’s too bad. Do you think he’ll find another job?”

  “Eventually.”

  “So many people are out of work. My sister’s fiancé says you wouldn’t believe the lines in Detroit for welfare checks.”

  Come on, Charles. Keep the conversation going. He stares straight ahead at the line of cars he is in. When the light changes, the line begins to move. He turns right and is on an almost empty stretch of road that goes to his house.

  “It’s nice out here.”

  “Yeah. My grandmother bought the house I live in not too long before she died, and she left it to me in her will.”

  “Wow. You never hear of things like that happening.”

  “The other house was nicer. Handmade by my grandfather, but she sold that and got this newer one. Still, you’re right. It’s a nice house.”

  “Are your neighbors nice?”

  “I don’t know my neighbors.”

  “That’s what Ginny—the girl who lived with me—complained about. That everything was so impersonal. In Georgia everybody knew everybody else, I guess.”

  He turns into his driveway. She opens her own door and gets out He carries the grocery bag, walking in front of her. Sam opens the door.

  “Prepare yourself,” Sam says. “Oh—hello,” he says to Betty.

  “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing bad.”

  “Betty, this is Sam.”

  “How do you do?” Sam says. He has on a pair of ripped pants and his snowmobile socks and a black sweater with a hole over the left nipple.

  “Hello,” Betty says.

  Sam turns and pushes open the door. A black dog is sitting in the kitchen. It wags its tail and walks up to Charles. It is one of the ugliest dogs he has ever seen.

  “Oh, a dog,” Betty says.

  “I can explain why I got him. It was next in line, if you know what I mean. It cost me five dollars.”

  “Look at it,” Charles says. “It’s a male?”

  “Wait until you hear what they told me it was a mixture of. Can you guess?”

  “Dachshund?”

  “Right. And what else?”

  “God. I have no idea.”

  “Cocker spaniel. It’s seven months old.”

  The dog does, on close inspection, have some cocker spaniel features. It has long curly ears and the sharp nose of a dachshund. Its fur is curly and a little long, but its body is all chest and no rear, like a dachshund. It is definitely one of the oddest dogs Charles has ever seen. It looks like a very old dog. There is white in its coat.

  “Are you sure this is a puppy?”

  “Yeah. They told me.”

  “It’s …”

  “I know. I just got it because it was so ugly I knew it would never be saved before nine A.M. tomorrow. I know,” Sam says, shaking his head.

  “I think it’s a nice puppy,” Betty says.

  “It is nice. It follows me around, and it’s not at all wild.”

  Charles shakes his head. He picks it up and examines it in his arms. Its narrow rat-tail looks doubly awkward coming out of the soft, curly hair. He cannot believe that there is such a dog.

  “Well. You got a dog.”

  “You’ll get to like it. You really will. I like it already, and I’ve carried out the newspapers twice.”

  Charles puts it back on the floor. “Got a name for it?”

  “No. Can you think of anything?”

  Charles shakes his head. “Well, come in,” he says to Betty. He leads the way into the living room and takes her coat He hangs it over Sam’s coat on the ironing board.

  “Have a seat,” he says. She sits in the chair. On the footstool in front of it is The Female Eunuch.

  “I’ll get the steaks ready to broil,” he says. “Excuse me.”

  Sam is in the kitchen, stroking the dog. The dog is a terrible genetic mistake. And he urged Sam to get a dog.

  Charles gestures with his thumb. “Go in there,” he mouths. Sam gets up and carries the dog into the living room.

  “So. You work with Charles?” he says.

  “Yes,” he hears Betty say.

  He rummages around for the broiling pan. He unwraps the steaks and puts them in the pan. He takes the spinach out of the package and dumps it in a pot. He runs water over it, pours the water out, runs more water over it, pours that out, fills the pot with water and puts it on the stove. He rinses three potatoes and puts them in another pot and turns the fire on under them. He takes them out and slices them in half so they will cook more quickly. He drops them in. He goes back to the counter to get the cellophane to throw away and picks up a lottery ticket. Sam has bought a lottery ticket. He looks at the lottery ticket and feels very sad. He is embarrassed to have seen it It reminds him of another thing he saw by accident: a bloody Kotex of his mother’s that tumbled out when he dumped the trash. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t touch it. He pushed it back of the trash cans with a stick.

  “No,” he hears Sam say. “I was born here.”

  He gets three plates down and stacks them on th
e counter. He pushes the lottery ticket away with his elbow.

  “Yeah,” Sam says. “Jackets.”

  Charles goes into the dining room and begins to clear the table. He takes The Second Sex into Sam’s room and throws it on the bed. The dog runs into the dining room and looks at Charles.

  “Hi,” Charles says.

  The dog wags its tail. It goes into Sam’s room, in pursuit of The Second Sex. Charles hears it skidding on the newspaper. Charles takes several record albums off the table, and his pajamas. He puts them on a chair they won’t be using, Sam seems to be conversing very easily with Betty. They are talking about Marvin Mandel. How did they get on that? He would never have the ingenuity to talk to Betty about Marvin Mandel, Maybe Sam is regaining his old touch with women. The dog stands at Charles’s feet, looking up. “Hey, did you feed this dog?”

  “They had fed it. They said to try again tonight. When they’re scared they like to eat.”

  “The dog doesn’t seem scared.”

  “I didn’t think so either. That’s good, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Charles says. He pats the dog. He has nothing else to do, so he goes into the living room.

  “Betty was saying that she worked in a bank with a woman who grew up with Mandel’s new wife.”

  “She let everybody know she was her friend, too,” Betty says. “She brought it up all the time and said she didn’t think it was scandalous.”