by Ann Beattie
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You are one strange character.”
“Come on,” I said. “You’ve never felt the urge to see how somebody turned out?”
“I was glad to get away from that crowd,” he said. “I’d had enough of those people for a lifetime.”
“What about whoever you dated back then? You’re telling me you never once thought about her?”
“Thought, yeah. Drive to Ohio to see Georgia Sheron? No way.”
Hound prided himself on being moderate. This, from thesame person who’d been in analysis for twenty years and still couldn’t admit that my sister was the unrequited love of his life. Which was none of my business, especially since I thought it was inevitable that they’d get together, they were so perfect for each other. It wasn’t even worth teasing him about, he was so adamant about its not being true. His relationship with his wife, Kate, was lousy; she didn’t want to admit she’d made a mistake a second time. And Hound doted on her son. It was hard not to dislike her for manipulating him the way she did, but I was hardly in a position to say anything, since I’d once been lured into having a little something with her. Neither did I think I could occasionally try to nudge things along vis-‡-vis my sister. After Kate confessed our brief affair to Hound, Hound and I had never again been friends in the same easy way.
“What did you expect?” Serena would say. And she would have been right. She was always right those times she pointed out what a bastard I was, but it was a reproach I found hard to accept. It implied such superiority on her part; it suggested that she did not make the kinds of mistakes I made. Other mistakes—perhaps even worse mistakes—but not those particularly pathetic mistakes.
Here’s an easy question: What boy would take pleasure in being his mother’s confidant?
She had a hard time, being married to my father. I was the person she singled out to talk to. Even though she didn’t understand men, she intended to make it her mission to keep trying. If she couldn’t understand my father, then maybe she could understand his son. If she couldn’t impress my fatherwith the difficulty she had raising the children, maybe she could explain herself directly to one of them. Even if she’d had a willing partner, I doubt that she was up to the task. Though my sister and I weren’t very troublesome, we obviously overwhelmed her. My father was absent from the house as often as possible. Since he was a doctor, it was almost always possible. My mother tuned us out and drank. My father had affairs.
I might not think about those years so much, except that women want to know everything about your past. They don’t always take the direct approach by asking for information, the way men do. Instead, they question you relentlessly, until you give them what they want. My mother was that way; she was never direct, but would ask leading questions well enough disguised that you might take them for a statement. They could seem to be simple remarks, so that if the listener got upset, she could pretend that she’d only been making an observation. If you didn’t comment on what she was interested in, however, she’d push like an iceberg.
What she was usually looking for was information about my father. Since I could never anticipate what information she might want, I fell into the habit of taking note of everything, however unimportant. It was good training, ultimately: it kept me on my toes; it sharpened my senses. But it also put me at a remove from situations, made me an observer, rather than a participant. I was a quiet child. As I grew older, there were times I thought I wanted to be a doctor just to prove to myself that I could do it differently than my father. Other times, I was determined to go in the opposite direction: to write, or play music, or paint.
My sister was once a very inventive writer. She ignored her gifts and edits other people’s work, immersing herself in particulars and settling for making adjustments, rather than creating anything. When we were children she wrote stories about fantasy fairies and their adventures. The scathing way my father characterized what he assumed she wrote about (he always derided “Nina and her foolish fantasy fairy friends”) became our perfectly neutral way of speaking about it. Of course, shut up in her room, our mother had no idea what either of us did. She never knew that I stopped taking piano lessons. I doubt that she knew Nina wrote. “What did the fantasy fairies do today?” I’d ask Nina late at night, and snuggle deep under the covers to hear their adventures, which sometimes touched on the ways my sister and I had spent our day and sometimes came from no context I could recognize. For a while I illustrated some of the stories, but as she got older and they became more convoluted, she began criticizing the choices I made about what to illustrate.Looking back, I think she wanted the stories to be entirely her own, without illustrations, but since she didn’t know how to tell me, she criticized my drawings.
I’d been so puzzled. Suddenly she didn’t want to read the stories to me, when she was the one who had instigated the nightly ritual. I thought it was just mean-spiritedness that she found fault with my drawings, because I knew they were good. Her voice had always been an important part of every story; I had learned, when she spoke softly, to pay special attention and to remember to illustrate that moment, because it was obviously one she found particularly significant. I had put so much effort into listening that I was hurtwhen she accused me of no longer understanding what was most important. It was as if she’d suddenly decided to say—in spite of everything I did for her—that we were not close, when we were. I was hurt, so I did what I knew to do back then: I covered my hurt with anger; I told her that her stories were less and less interesting. She took the criticism as a challenge. The story she produced was so ugly, so much not the story of the fantasy fairies, so much not a story that could ever be published in a book, that she could see from my expression how well she’d told it, and how pained I was. I felt betrayed. I told her that if she wrote more stories like those, I would never again listen, and that if she did write them, it would be like Pinocchio’s nose growing as he lied: she would turn ugly; she’d be no different than our sadistic father. She gave me a look then that I will never forget. She never again came into my room late at night and she also punished me by never writing another story. When finally I was overwhelmed by guilt and suggested we work on creating new ones together, she ignored me entirely.
I suppose it is true that you can be cruelest to those you love the most. One thing that could be said on behalf of my father is that at least I could never disappoint him as deeply as I disappointed my sensitive sister. He didn’t want anything from me, including, quite possibly, my existence.
Serena made much of that rift between Nina and me over my illustrations. I don’t know how Nina explained it to her, but I’m sure that whatever she said made a martyr of her. Leave it to my sister to take some simple situation and blow it out of proportion. Because of their talk, Serena saw my opting out of certain complexities that arose in our lives as passiveaggression. In Serena’s opinion I overreacted to the possibility of being overwhelmed every time something difficult entered my life. She was thinking selfishly, of course. When she got pregnant by accident, she wanted to have the child and I didn’t. “Andrew’s having another Michelangelo period, thinking he has to paint every cherub in the sky, lying on his back,” she said sardonically. I assured her that I had never in my life felt like Michelangelo. “Then an indenturedservant. Alackey! Poor put-upon you, being asked to deal with anything difficult.” It began on the platform outside the Harvard stop on the Red Line, and continued through the change to the Green Line at Park. Inside the train, she whispered; changing cars, surrounded by the noise of the trains, mixed with music from whatever scruffy musician was playing on the platform, she raised her voice and berated me. Serena reminded me of a pot come to a boil, subsiding when salt was added, but finally and inevitably bubbling over.
No. Serena was nothing like a pot of water. She was flesh and blood.
Hound was smitten with her. He agreed with me that when she became pregnant, it was not the right time to have a child, but he
had a better way of communicating with her because he had a woman’s ability to persuade. Tactfulness was not something instilled in me by my parents. When someone is drunk, what you hear are declarations. People who’ve had one too many drinks don’t phrase things delicately.Egomaniacs don’t speak tentatively. So Hound was better able to communicate with Serena, acting as my stand-in. You would have thought the sacrifice she was making was entirely for his benefit, not that she granted my point at all.
Hound—like the rest of us, he is all grown up: important to remember that he is Henry now. Hound accompanied her to the clinic. She wanted it that way. I was a little jealous, but mostly I felt relieved. I suppose we all pick friends who are capable of carrying on where we leave off. He carried on very well that day. I sat on a park bench one block away, feeding pigeons. Of course a continuous parade of children passed by, and even the birds seemed to make eye contact. I looked at my watch and looked at my watch, though I had no idea how long such a thing took. I’d bought myself a sandwich and a cup of coffee, but I couldn’t manage more than two bites, and then I began tearing up bread to feed the birds. In that same park, I saw a boy kill a pigeon with a pellet gun. He took aim as he saw me coming. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and he shot the bird. I kept walking. I worried he might shoot me in the back as I went by, but I made it a point—boys learn this early on—not to flinch. I never looked back, and nothing more came of it, except that I’ve thought about what happened over the years. Not the day of the abortion so much as that bleak moment in the park with that stranger. The coldhearted deliberateness of what he did. The meanness.
When I was a child, my mother would call me into her room. She’d do this as if she were making a request, though actually it was a command. Inside the room, nothing terrible happened. Nothing bizarre, nothing that couldn’t have been done with the door open, during the day instead of in the middle of the night, except that ours was not the sort of house where people left their doors open, and having taken so many naps, my mother was more alert at night than she wasin the daytime. Doors were almost always closed, and privacy was tremendously important. Of course, that was because, except for my sister and me, no one wanted to be with anyone else. My mother wanted to drink and to watch TV, and my father wanted to take sleeping pills and sleep, undisturbed, in his own room, where an all-night jazz station played much of the night.
One time my mother agreed to take a friend’s dog for a week. I have no idea why, or even whose dog it was, since as far as I knew my mother’s friends were exclusively people she talked to on the telephone, but anyway: the dog came. A nice, brown mongrel. The dog always wanted to be with someone, but our mother’s door and our father’s door were kept closed, so every time the dog began whimpering, either my sister or I would bring it into one of our rooms, although we had been forbidden to do so. One of us always had the dog, and the person who did would walk it. One night, when I assumed my sister had the dog and she assumed I did, it was sleeping somewhere in the house when we went to bed. It awoke in the middle of the night and began running from door to door, whimpering. Eventually, since no one else seemed to hear it, I got up and put a coat over my pajamas, put on my slippers, and walked the dog and brought it back to my room. My sister had heard it too, though, and when I got back from the walk, she was sitting on my bed, wanting to take the dog into her room for the night. She had gotten it into her head that I was always taking the dog away from her. Since I wasn’t, I told her to go ahead and take it. But then it seemed she did not want to do that, because she knew that the dog would have to be given back soon, so she waspracticingnot caring about it. That was why she had pretended, earlier, to be asleep when it whimpered. I actually had been asleep, and she might have saved me from awakening if she’d just gotten the dog, but in her mind, what she’d done had been completely logical. Then and now, that is the way my sister thinks: whatever she decides is objectively true. I’m sure I was out of sorts with her. That’s how our fight began. She felt that I was—as she put it—“everyone’s favorite,” by which she meant our mother’s and the dog’s, since even my sister could not make a case for my being my father’s favorite. His favorite person was himself. I asked her for evidence, and she told me she knew I went into our mother’s room at night. She must have come looking for me and found me gone—otherwise, since my mother and I whispered so quietly, I don’t see how she could have known.
Her reason for bringing it up was not what I thought, however. She didn’t want to know what I did there, she only wanted to ask me to use my special position to do her, or us, a favor. “You can make her let us keep the dog,” she said. I asked how she thought I could do that, since it had an owner. She declared that the dog did not have an owner. That it had come from the pound. The proof was that it had not been brought to our house by its so-called owner, but that our mother—who rarely went out—had driven to get it, which my sister was sure she had gotten at the pound, inventing the story of the vacationing owner in order to see how the dog fit into our house. If it didn’t, she could just take it back. My sister told me to wait and went to her room and returned with a flyer from the ASPCA, which had come in the mail addressed to our parents. There was a pictureof a boxer looking soulfully at the camera on the front, and information inside about adopting pets. For the first time, this made me grant the possibility that what she said was true. But even if she was right, what could I say? The dog was curled beside the bed, where we sat talking quietly. Ididlike the dog. My sister’s suggestion was that I point out to our mother how good it was, and how happy we were with it. Then, if she wasn’t evil—a favorite word of my sister’s at the time—she would understand that we should keep it.
I waited to be summoned into our mother’s room. Sometimes weeks would pass without my being called in. I worried that this was one of those times. I also worried that I’d blow it, somehow, and reveal that we knew where the dog had come from. I had come to agree with my sister: it was no accident they got the brochure, and then a dog appeared. Finally, I knocked on our mother’s door. She did not respond. I was reluctant enough, doing it, because I knew a closed door meant Privacy, but still: I might not have much more time. I went into the bathroom, next to her bedroom, and ran the water and flushed the toilet. I thought that might awaken her if she was asleep. Then I knocked again. Still nothing. I whispered, “Mom?”
Our father opened the door. He was wearing pajama bottoms, and his hair was matted. His eyes were red. “What?” he said.
It wasn’t exactly the Wolf impersonating Grandma, but I was still so surprised I couldn’t think what to say. I hadn’t heard him come home. I had no idea he was even in the house. I could not remember ever having seen him go intoher room. I could hear some musician quietly playing a saxophone down the hallway. “I said,What do you want?” he said.
“The dog,” I managed. Behind him, I could see my mother stretched out on the bed. Her eyes were closed, and she never moved. Still, I said: “We want to keep the dog.” I knew she wouldn’t hear, and I knew he wouldn’t care. There was something about saying it, though. Something about saying what I’d come to say. To say nothing of the fact that I could report to Nina that I had made the statement.
“You can’t,” he said, and closed the door.
I stood there, half expecting that my mother would get up and say something. After all, I had never before knocked on her door. But time passed. There was no sound. I didn’t dare knock again. Instead, I went to my sister’s room and reported on what had happened. The dog was sleeping on her bed. It beat its tail a few times, but seemed too sleepy to rouse itself.
“Hewas there?” she said.
I nodded. I said: “She never looked up.”
“She was dead,” my sister whispered, cupping her hands over her mouth after she spoke. “He killed her.”
I knew he hadn’t. I knew it. But my sister had set her jaw, certain she was right.
“He said we can’t keep the dog,” I said. “I tried.”
/> I felt terrible. My eyes had filled with tears. Not because she was dead—shewasn’tdead—but because I’d failed.
I had left Nina’s door ajar when I tiptoed in to tell her. The dog began to bark mightily. My sister and I jumped, in unison. Our father had pushed the door farther open and was standing there in his pajama bottoms, his hair a mess, lookingat us. The dog jumped from the bed and raced toward him and he caught it with his foot and threw it so that it flipped backward. The dog yelped, scrambled to its feet, and dove under the bed. It all happened so fast, we were stunned.
“What are you doing in here?” our father said.
I was almost paralyzed with fear. “I’m telling her we can’t keep the dog,” I said.
He hated our being together, and always had. I could remember him carrying her, when she was still a baby, out of my room, where I had quieted her down, and forcing her to sleep in her own room, terrified.
“Then tell her and go to your room,” he said.
I looked at my sister, who had begun to cry. “We can’t,” I said.
“You can’twhat?” our father said.
“Keep it,” I said.
“A complete sentence, please,” our father said.
I dropped my eyes. Finally, joining Nina in tears—and I hated to cry; I really hated it—I said: “We can’t keep the dog.”
“Yes! I want to keep her! She’s my best friend!” my sister shrieked. Since her days of screaming protest were long over, she always went mute in my father’s presence. My sister never screamed. Our father was taken aback, I could see. He cocked his head. “You don’t want a dog that belongs to your mother’s boyfriend,” he said.
Telepathically, I heard Nina questioning me:Boyfriend?
“Do you know your mother’s boyfriend?” he said. “No? You never met him? The man who was supposedly Mom’s teacher?”
We stared at him, wide-eyed. Neither of us spoke.