by Ann Beattie
The author’s note said that Josephine Bower Epping lived with her husband and twin daughters, Mira and Maureen, in Fairfield, Connecticut, where she taught history at a private school. There was no mention of the twin kittens, no mention of the fact that just recently, Josie had seen the doctor’s son again. She must have thought it was fated: that at certain intervals Andrew was bound to reappear, and that there was a silent understanding that she would couple with him. After all, she taught history. She no doubt had some interesting thoughts on how people repeat the past.
It would be an understatement to say that I was stunned. I could not even pretend distance from the piece. I was, of course, going to have to reread it, to see if there were any mistakes of spelling or punctuation—but one go-through was enough for the day. The idea that I might query anything struck me as mordantly funny.Note to author: Did my father really bring flowers?The image of my ten-year-old brother in the hospital room was all too vivid. I’d been allowed to travel back in time to see a scene that had determined the way mybrother approached the world. It was like some old movie about time travel, on late-night TV: the reluctant boy hanging back, the sick girl in the bed; the angry woman fighting with the man. It was instructive, but at the same time it seemed information I shouldn’t have—the way you reflexively avert your eyes if you glimpse a stranger naked, or the way you stare at, but do not quite focus on, a highway accident.
I turned the pages over, putting them facedown on the desk. How many times had he run the odd errand for our father? He had been clever enough to elude “Dr. X,” but how had our father gotten him to go to the hospital in the first place? By playing on his sympathy for a classmate, or by bullying him, which was how he usually got his way? It made me sad to think of Andrew forced to go there, so upset he ran from the room to hide, suffering who knew what punishment afterward.
Josie’s essay had the rather ponderous title “Not Just a Child’s Illness.”
By the time Andrew mentioned another girl from high school, I had been feeling so sympathetic toward him that I’d almost forgotten how exasperating it was that he’d been on his single-minded quest. It had been months since he’d talked about high school girls.
He had rediscovered someone special, he told me. “I know. I know. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I think you’ll be interested to hear who I’ve found,” he said. We were at my house. He’d brought over a movie to watch onthe VCR, and a plastic container of take-out sushi. Little dishes of soy sauce sat on the floor like dying lily pads. We were on the floor because the table was covered with papers from the project I was working on, so Andrew had decided we’d better have a picnic. We had often made ourselves picnics as children, which we ate in the woods behind our house, but they consisted of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and Hershey’s kisses Andrew won in some card game he played at recess. We could hardly wait to finish our sweet sandwiches so we could eat our sweet dessert; if we could have had all our meals in the woods, we would have. This meal he had provided was an adult treat—so adult that there wasnodessert. It had been good of him to get food and bring it over; if I’d told him how much I’d like some Hershey’s kisses, he would probably have gone out to buy them, but I had learned in childhood that you should not ask for things. Old habits died hard. I was also not sure whether it was the candy I wanted or the pleasure of his pleasure: his favorite candy was Hershey’s kisses; mine had always been Mounds bars. Why—when he had done such a nice thing, when he was so happy and relaxed, and when I was, too, really—why all of a sudden was it on the tip of my tongue to mention Serena?
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Rochelle Rogan,” he said.
Rochelle Rogan! RochelleRogan! I let my incredulous expression say it all.
“Oh, come on,” he said, opening a Kirin from a six-pack he’d put on the footstool. He handed the bottle to me and opened another. “Come on, you’re not going to say that you still have some grudge against Rochelle.”
When she was fourteen, she had fainted at her stepmother’s memorial service. It was the first such service to which I had ever been. Behind the flower-flanked podium her voice had quavered and she had fallen like a rag doll to the floor, upstaging her stepmother even in death. Not one girl in the audience thought she had truly fainted. Not one of us believed it, because she had said days before that she was sure she was going to faint. She had announced that she was going to take one of her father’s tranquilizers, but that she was still sure she wouldn’t get through it. Someone suggested that she stay home and not try. Someone else, behind her back, said that she bet Rochelle had already bought new underwear. Rochelle had “fainted” when making out with Richard Lippe and ended up swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills when he found another girlfriend. She had her stomach pumped in the emergency room. If she hadn’t been so silly about her desperation, people might have responded. But as it was, she thought she’d become invisible if, even for a moment, she wasn’t noticed.
“Just don’t marry her,” I said sourly.
He stopped eating. “What do you know about Rochelle? You haven’t seen her in over twenty years. Okay—so maybe she showed off a little. We were all maneuvering for position back then. We all did whatever we needed to get attention. You were perfect?”
Had he invited himself over to insult me? I said: “I wonder-what attracts you to her now, when you could have been with her back then. Any boy could.”
“Women are so vicious about other women. Did you hear what you just said?”
“Women are vicious? Think about how you treated Serena,”I said. “She gave me a little debriefing before she left town, you know. She had a delightful story about the note you left her when you split. She told me about pregnancy number one and pregnancy number two. She was off to have an abortion the same afternoon I had coffee with her.”
“She told you that?” he said. “What did she do that for? She was always trying to insinuate herself with you, but that was going too far.”
“I’m not sure she was trying to insinuate herself, as you put it. I think she might have felt close to me, and she might have needed a friend,” I said.
“She didn’t leave without tracking me down and telling me what she thought of me. She stalked me, Nina. She waited in the lobby of a friend’s apartment for me to come down in the morning, and the doorman and I had to restrain her.” He had squeezed his hands into fists. He looked at them. He got up quickly, went into the bathroom, and slammed the door. For a long time, I didn’t hear anything. I tried to imagine what it would be like: to have a brother who dwelled for a long, long time in my bathroom, like a mushroom growing under a log.
“Listen,” I said, getting up and walking toward the bathroom door. “Andrew,” I said more loudly. “Listen, I’m on your side. I just don’t want you to make more mistakes, and you’re right: I don’t know her today, I just remember that I couldn’t stand her then.” I couldn’t resist adding: “I was hardly alone.”
Silence.
“Come out,” I said.
“Why did she have to involve you in our problems?” he said sadly.
“You didn’t exactly handle the situation very well,” I said.
He opened the door. “Aren’t women supposed to respond with some story about how they’ve done the same thing or had the same experience?” he said. “What’s this about how badly I handled a complicated situation?” His eyes were red. His hair was a mess.
“I don’t think I can come up with a similar experience,” I said.
“I apologize for her,” he said. “She got together with you to bust my balls.”
“Come back to the living room,” I said, as if coaxing a child. He responded by putting his face in his hands.
“Come on,” I repeated, turning away. I thought it was fifty-fifty whether he’d follow, but he did. “There’s another bad thing I did,” I said, sitting down on the rug again. “I should have gone with her to the clinic.”
“I can understan
d why that would have been difficult,” he said.
We sat in silence. Finally, he curled onto his side: “I wish she hadn’t found it necessary to drag you into this.”
“So drag me in yourself. Tell me about—” I paused for dramatic effect. “Rochelle,” I finished.
“You don’t want to hear.”
“Well, it’s awkward now not to hear about it. So go ahead.”
He sat up again. He picked imaginary lint off his pants. “She’s lost that baby fat,” he said. “She used to look sort of soft, but she’s angular now. Her face. I don’t suppose you care about a physical description.”
I shrugged.
“You know, maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but somany kids nowadays look amorphous. Do you think people want to see more distinct features as they get older?”
It was nonsensical. I shrugged.
“Okay. She was living in Germany. She was married to some guy in the military. I talked her into flying back to see her father. I pretended to have really admired her father. He was her favorite, so I’d pretended back in high school, too. The most meaningful thing the guy and I ever did was to untangle the garden hose. I don’t kid myself that she was dying to see her father, but I planted the idea in her mind as a way to see me.”
There it was again: she’d been happily married, and he’d decided to undo it, as if marriage was nothing but a ball of string.
“And you were worriedSerenasaid things that disturbed me?”
“Rochelle was always the one I couldn’t get out of my mind. You probably thought it was Patty Arthur, didn’t you?” he said. “As a matter of fact, she’d kept in touch with Patty. You know, Patty could never figure you out, because she knew you knew, but you never told anybody. You never even said anything to her about it. She wanted to be your friend, but you wouldn’t let her.”
“I think her interest was in you, if I recall correctly.”
“So what? Did that mean you couldn’t be her friend?”
When I was an adult, and when one of Andrew’s girlfriends particularly liked me—as Serena had—and when that liking went both ways, then sure: I could be her friend. But it would have been awkward in high school.
“Have you noticed that you just don’t answer questions you don’t want to answer?” he said.
“What was the question?” I said.
“I asked if that meant that because Patty was my girlfriend, you couldn’t be her friend.”
“Give me a break. I didn’t know how to act around some girl my brother was in love with. I’ve been friends with quite a few of your girlfriends. You know, making friends with your girlfriends is a little bit like befriending a snowman when the sun is peeking through the clouds.”
“Thank you, Miss Simile,” he said. “You know, you might use your talent for words to write something. Write something of your own, I mean, instead of spending your life correcting me and everyone else.”
“I was honest with you about what I thought, and you’re taking it out on me that I won’t just nod my head and never challenge you.”
“It seems to be a family trait to direct criticism at me,” he said.
“I’m nothing like them. You’re trying to confuse the issue.”
“You know who you’re a little like, with your oh-so understated clothes and your uncombed hair? Rochelle Rogan, you might be amused to know. She’s got your blond hair and your blue eyes, Nina. She has a lot of presence, like you. She’s got your way of being casual and intense at the same time. And she’s like you in one other respect, too. If you cross her, she fights mean.”
He had said enough. He was antsy to leave, and I didn’t at all mind his going. I let him have the last word; I simply watched him as he got his jacket and picked up his wallet from the floor and turned his back on me and walked out. AsI closed the door behind him I gave serious thought to the fact that my brother was a self-justifying, compulsive, chauvinistic asshole. It also seemed perfectly clear that what he was doing wasn’t satisfying enough if he didn’t drag me in. He was the kid showing Mommy his drawings, as Serena had so aptly put it. And the drawings were of pretty girls, circa the 1970s, about the same age, wearing their mod skirts and their flared pants and their tie-dyed tops that looked like a gigantic burst blood vessel in an eye, and their oh-so demure pearls and their class rings from their football-playing boyfriends, and of course their silver and gold and wooden and filigree and enamel crosses. What did they look like now? But really: did I care what Rochelle Rogan looked like? She must still be pretty, if he was so interested in her. It was all so easy for Andrew: as he said, their marriages were no obstacle, their sisters were fair game, distance meant nothing. As for his own sister, I suspected that deep down he had a patronizing attitude toward me: he thought I was a lost cause. He could plant ideas about how I should comb my hair, or try to make me think I was a tyrant who had to have her own way about things, but the conclusion that underlay all that, which was never articulated, was that I had mourned away my life, while he thoughtfully diverted me from my sorrow by providing me with cheap thrills, filling me in on all his amusing adventures.
“Grow up,” I said, out loud. I directed the remark to myself, not to him. What was I doing, wasting my time conjuring up images of girls from the past, wondering what they looked like in the present? It was as pointless as reading tabloid gossip; it left you swimming in lies and speculation.He was out of control, and what I needed to do was to stop being open to it. Tell him I’d had enough, instead of implying it with my questions. Leaving aside our father, everyone had always trod so delicately with Andrew. Why hadn’t Serena persevered? She should have talked to him; she should have made him explain. He owed her something. Why had she run off like that—run right out of the country?
I finished my beer and opened another. I was surprised at how upset I was. He had a way of doing whatever he wanted, leaving it to others to pick up the pieces. I had let him tell me too many stories about too many women. I was to blame for having been seduced into living vicariously. Maybe that was something I’d been grateful for after Mac’s death, though it had outlived its usefulness. I intended to tell him that. I was going to tell him that he’d been playing a game with more than the high school girls. That I was no longer going to listen, and then be criticized for disapproving.
But before I had a chance to talk to him, he did an Andrew. Doing an Andrew, as it was called, meant simply disappearing. This consisted of not returning calls, so that people wondered what they’d done, worried whether he was all right. Doing an Andrew meant not showing up at arranged places, at arranged times, to underscore the message.
Andrew’s best friend had had enough of that behavior, and so had I. He hadn’t returned Hound’s calls, or spoken to me after hearing how dismayed I was about his looking up Rochelle Rogan. Two weeks later, Hound and I picked up the three tickets we’d reserved the month before and stood outside the ART until the last moment, knowing we were waitingin vain for him to join us, then went inside to see the performance. Earlier that day, Hound and I had made a pact not to talk about it anymore. We’d decided on the phone that our wondering aloud about Andrew was futile—that as long as we talked about the things he did, he was still manipulating us into making him the center of attention. We agreed that this night we wouldn’t talk about anything pertaining to Andrew or to our personal problems, either; no complaints from Hound about his possibly soon-to-be ex-wife; no pithy remarks on my part about the absurdity of my work.
Hound had moved into a two-bedroom condo in Arlington, with high ceilings, cross-ventilation, and a redone bath and kitchen. It left us with not a lot to say. For a little while, we kicked it around about how much we wished we had stock in Starbucks—which was where we went after the play. Then he told me about a book he’d just read about a white guy and some Indians who’d been arrested for stealing orchids from a swamp in Florida. Hound told me about his shrink’s unshakable cough, and how worried he was for the man. Hound, it turned out,
had gone to college with someone whose twin had died of a bee sting.
Outside the noisy Starbucks it was a cool night, so I accepted Hound’s scarf when he offered it. Wound around my throat, it made me warmer, but also left me slightly anesthetized by the faint odor of aftershave. He asked if I wanted to see his condo, but I wasn’t up for the ride; it had been a long day. Hound said he understood, but I could tell I’d disappointed him. The strain of not being in touch with Andrew was something I didn’t intend to mention, but worry had worn me down. After another two blocks we founda bar with an empty table up front. Without either of us saying so, we had both been looking for a place to have a drink. I unwound the scarf as we sat down. “I’m going to try to get back together with her,” Hound said. “Get back together but live apart, if you know what I mean.”
“No,” I said.
“Not give up my condo right away.”
“Oh.”
“She probably won’t do it, anyway,” he said. “Let me ask you something, and I’d appreciate it if you told me the truth. Can you imagine being married to somebody like me?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I’m dull,” he said. “Isn’t the bottom line that I’m dull?”
The waitress put down a dish of nuts. We both ordered scotch on the rocks.
“Hound,” I said, “you’re a nice person and a good friend. If you’re feeling so shitty that you don’t know your good qualities, they include loyalty, generosity, and an ability to take the miseries of life in stride. Also, you still read books.”
“She doesn’t want to be with me because I’m dull,” he said. He ate a nut. “Could I ask you one more thing?” he said.
What was this going to be? The question that changed everything? I had already lived through the statement that changed everything. Every day, since that day when the policeman stood in my doorway at the carriage house, ever since saying, “Yes?” I had been braced against significant moments. “If it has anything to do with being in love with me, which I’m sure you aren’t, please don’t ask,” I said.