The State We're In

by Ann Beattie

  “So you’ll question Bettina about the diary?”

  “No,” he said, snorting softly. “That isn’t at all likely.”

  “You’ll secretly carry a grudge. That’s what she says about you, you know. That when you’re saying one thing, she can hear all the other things unsaid rolling around in your head like marbles, shooting off in all directions.”

  “We get along,” he said, after a long pause.

  Her tone softened. “I so much appreciate what you and Bettina are doing for Jocelyn. And I’m relieved that at least she’s doing the work. Maybe it will give her more self-confidence when school starts in September.”

  “She’s made some friends. I think things are okay,” he said. He’d decided not to mention Jocelyn’s new bangs, cut jaggedly on a sharp diagonal, or the pink streak in her hair, which he understood to be temporary. Who knew what his own daughter Charlotte Octavia’s hair looked like, or whether she’d shaved her head? Her only overture in many months had been to send a pound of Kenyan coffee beans. It had been excellent coffee. About half the bag remained. He had suggested they store the remaining beans in the freezer, but she thought that unnecessary. In her diary, Bettina had called him prissy. How hugely insulting. It suggested, at least to him, homosexuality.

  “I’ll call again soon,” Myrtis said. “I really am indebted.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, as he hung up.

  “Uncle Raleigh?”

  He jumped. His eyes shot to the mirror hung beside the desk—the mirror whose border was patterned with little ducklings that had once hung in his daughter’s bedroom, where they now stored clothes out of season and where Bettina had set up a little area with a rocker, to read her cookbooks and to reread her beloved Edgar Allan Poe. One would certainly be a good antidote to the other, and Excedrin would not be required. Jocelyn stood in front of him in a voluminous T-shirt hanging over leggings (in July!). She was wearing socks over the tights and Hello Kitty slippers.

  “Was that my mom?” she said.

  “It was. Yes. Come in, Jocelyn. Sit down.”

  “Did she ask if I was doing all my homework? Did you give her a good report?”

  “It wasn’t a report, Jocelyn. We discussed the fact that you were working hard, yes. She’s going to call back soon. Still doesn’t have much energy. No one does, recovering from surgery.”

  The way his niece settled herself in a chair, plunking down with absolute resignation, and without any thought of a moment’s pleasure, always surprised him. He suspected she came by his office so often to ask questions that were pointed and blunt, though perhaps not the issues that were most on her mind.

  “Can you do me a favor, Uncle Raleigh?” she said. “Since you’re an adult, can you maybe call the hospital and find out if one of my friends is there?”

  “Which friend?” he said. “Who is that?”

  “T. G.’s father’s your friend, right? You didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Well, like, he tried to commit suicide.”

  Charlotte Octavia had attempted to take her own life once. Twice, to be honest. Though they’d paid for psychiatrists, he’d never really understood why. He found the whole subject almost paralyzing. “Hank is my friend, yes,” he said. “I can’t believe T. G. would do a thing like that. It wasn’t Nathaniel, you’re sure?”

  “Well, yeah. One person’s T. G. and then there’s his brother Nathaniel,” she said. “It was T. G.”

  “When did you find out about this?”

  “The other day, on the beach,” she said. “If you call the hospital, they hear it in your voice you’re young. I thought maybe you could find something out.”

  “My god, how absolutely terrible,” he said, picking up his cell phone. “The last time I saw Hank or heard anything from him was playing golf last week.” The phone was programmed with the number of the hospital. Also, the police. The surgeon he’d recently consulted about his leg. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. No—none of them existed on his phone. As he’d entered the numbers, he’d dropped out so many names he felt he’d never call again; he didn’t have to scroll down far to find anything. “Patient information,” he said aloud. “Question,” he said. Jocelyn was holding a Scünci in her teeth, unwinding her braid. A small strand of hair pinker than the rest revealed itself, just as a human being came on the phone. He asked about the condition of a patient named Thomas Grant Murrey. Jocelyn ran her fingers through her bangs and felt them flop lightly onto her forehead again. T. G. had liked her pink streak, but not the bangs. She was growing them out. “M-u-r-r-e-y, correct,” her uncle said. “No, but if a family member is there, I’m a close friend of the boy’s father,” he said. He covered the mouthpiece. He whispered to Jocelyn, “Nobody’s there. That’s the good news and the bad news.” He listened for another few seconds. T. G. had been admitted, but there were to be no phone calls to his room. When her uncle thanked the person and hung up, he said, “I don’t know. You might be able to talk to him in the morning.”

  “Why do you think so?” she said.

  It was a reasonable question. My god, what poor Hank Murrey must be going through right now. This was also sure to put Nathaniel into a worse tailspin, to say nothing of Hank’s vain, high-strung wife, who acted like she lived with wild boars rather than with her husband and sons, lavishing all her attention on her only daughter. “Because in hospitals, they really believe in mornings,” he said. “It’s an old cliché, right? Everything might be better in the morning.”

  “You think I might be able to talk to him because of a cliché?”

  At such times—when she seemed to echo what he’d said, yet she’d missed his point—he was never sure if she was mocking him, or whether she truly did not understand what he’d tried to say. Was she a little thickheaded, or was she just, of course she was just, an adolescent.

  “I meant that hospitals trust that most situations change by morning,” he said, a bit dully. She must be very upset about her friend. Why hadn’t she told him immediately? He wished he had something better to offer. He also wished to avoid surgery on his leg. He wished Bettina did not keep a diary—especially one that was so critical of him. He supposed he might also wish for no one to ever go to bed hungry anywhere in the world and for peace.

  “So, you and my dad. You drank together, right?”

  Where did that come from? He said, “We’d have the occasional beer. The drinking problem was mine, not his.”

  “But you hung out together.”

  “Yes. We sometimes worked together.”

  “In a job you can’t talk about because you had a security clearance, but my dad didn’t.”

  “Your father didn’t require a security clearance, no.”

  “So were you smarter than he was?”

  “Brighter? Than your father? I had great respect for your father’s intellect and perceptions. I went to military college, and he didn’t. It made our outlooks somewhat different.”

  “But did you have the same outlook on girls?”

  “What do you mean?” She was often very direct, though he suspected that most such questions were at some remove from what she really wanted to ask. She could certainly be just as difficult to talk to as Myrtis.

  “I mean, did you pick up girls?”

  “Before we were married? You’re asking if we dated women? How would I have gotten to know your aunt if we’d never gone out?”

  She shrugged.

  “That was what you were asking?” he said.

  “Well, not if it makes you mad.”

  “I’m not mad, I’m a little taken aback. True, I didn’t expect such a question. But yes, he and I went on a few double dates together, before I introduced him to Myrtis. As things turned out, I was sorry that I introduced him to her, but if I hadn’t, I suppose we wouldn’t have you, and that would obviously be terrible.”

  “You say things to flatter me,” she said. “Can I ask you one more question? How did you go from your big
important job to selling cars?”

  He frowned. What could she mean? What was underlying that question? “Cars?” he said, genuinely puzzled.

  “Mom said you were a used car salesman.”

  “Then your mother was putting you on. I once had an office above a car dealership, but that’s hardly—”

  “If you weren’t a salesman, then what were you?”

  “It’s nowhere near as interesting as you’d like to think—or maybe as I’d like to think—but it’s not something I can talk about.”

  “I wish I had a security clearance. There’s plenty of stuff I’d rather not talk about,” Jocelyn said. “Uncle Raleigh, does my mom just not tell the truth, or do you think she was confused because of where your office was?”

  “I assume she was being sarcastic,” he said. “But I don’t know.”

  “Whatever,” Jocelyn said. “So you won’t tell me what kind of women they were, either?”

  “Tall and short. Educated and not. As your mother is fond of saying, the whole world is filled with people. If women came up to us in a bar, you could have a drink or a dance and not have sex, you know. It’s only in the movies that men like your father and I have sex all the time.” He might have said too much. “We might revisit this topic in a few years,” he said.

  “But, so, I don’t get it about you and Aunt Bettina. She doesn’t seem anything like you.”

  “At this age, people are nothing but their differences.”

  She pulled the toe of her tights and let it go. Dust streamed into the air. She said, “Can I just call you Raleigh? It makes me feel like a baby, having to always say ‘Uncle.’ ”

  “Fine with me,” he said. “Let’s continue this discussion in the morning, okay?”

  “You’re going to save Mom’s house, right?”

  “Please don’t feel that your home is going to disappear. That’s not going to happen, unless there’s an earthquake or a sinkhole.” He patted her ankle. “It’s summer,” he said. “What’s with the tights?”

  “I’m growing my leg hair, and it’s at sort of an ugly stage.”

  “I see. Well, good night.”

  He was nothing like Bettina, Jocelyn thought. Bettina had given her mother different styles of Spanx for her birthday, which had been a total snark attack, and her mother hadn’t even realized it.

  “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup. They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe,” he half sang. “ ‘Across the Universe,’ by the Beatles. A group from London who became famous and appeared on something called The Ed Sullivan Show.”

  “You’re being retarded. You know I know who the Beatles are,” she said, springing up, then looking back at him over her shoulder. Did any marriages make sense, or was he right about what he’d told her weeks ago, and there was a sort of use-by date stamped on them with an invisible watermark, like semen on the sheets?

  * * *

  In the parking lot outside the school, Jocelyn said to Ms. Nementhal, “I don’t know why I did what I did the other night. I think I was just scared. Like you’d think I was involved in some way.” What she was talking about was not saying hello, let alone offering to drive Ms. Nementhal home after the boys threw bottles from the car and broke the window of the pizza place. It had sort of flipped her out to see Ms. Nementhal so rattled.

  “Thank you for explaining,” Ms. Nementhal said.

  “It’s not a very good explanation, I know. I don’t know why I do some of the things I do. It’s like I caused some problem when I didn’t, but I don’t think anybody will believe me.”

  “Of course it had nothing to do with you,” Ms. Nementhal said.

  “I talked to my uncle, and he said you probably understood everybody was in a panic. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.”

  “We all have limitations,” Ms. Nementhal said.

  “My mom’s recovering from surgery, that’s why I’m in Maine. I could have taken an after-school course in Concord to make up for my F in algebra, but my mom thought I shouldn’t be around after her surgery, so she sent me here, to take your course, and live with my aunt and uncle.”

  “I see. I’m sorry about your mother. Will she be okay?”

  “My aunt’s a whack job. She had a biopsy that turned out negative, but ever since she’s shoveled in food twenty-four-seven, which is what I was doing at the pizza place. I was picking something up for her. She has these constant requests that we just, you know, try to do our best with. Like, at midnight she gets desperate for Neutrogena. Things like that.”

  “Neutrogena soap?”

  “Right. Soap.”

  Ms. Nementhal nodded. She did not have annoying bangs that flopped into her eyes. T. G. had said to her, “What’s the point of bangs, if the second you cut them, you start growing them out?” Ms. Nementhal had said nothing in class about T. G.’s absence, but Jocelyn felt sure she knew what had happened. She watched her teacher’s face for some sign of it, as they walked back toward the building.

  “Is that guy Márquez still alive? You’d really like to meet him, right?”

  “No, sadly. He died pretty recently, though. He was really a genius.”

  “My uncle tested genius in something,” Jocelyn said. “Not that he thinks like Márquez.”

  Ms. Nementhal nodded again. She’d gone to her car to get her cardigan. The school was too highly air-conditioned, but there were signs at the windows saying not to open them.

  “What are your interests, besides my course?” Ms. Nementhal said as they walked up the stairs. She probably knew that Jocelyn had no idea what the course was about until someone else enrolled her.

  “Music? Beyoncé, and everything? I’d like to see the Grand Canyon. My uncle said he’d go with me when I graduated from high school. You can walk out over it on some glass platform, or whatever. It’s all there, right below you.”

  “I’d be scared to death,” Ms. Nementhal said. “Well, some of my other interests are tossing pots and French cooking, but I’m just learning about cooking. When I go to graduate school, I’m going to try to find a way to combine my interests in Egyptian art and poetry writing, and maybe I’ll take a course in French literature.”

  Who would ever have thought Ms. Nementhal was anything but an overachiever? “Cool,” Jocelyn said. “Where did you go to school?”

  “Yale.”

  “That’s really hard to get into, isn’t it? Someone in the class is like dying to go to Yale.”

  “I suspect I know who that is.”

  Ms. Nementhal held open the side door. Jocelyn trotted ahead of her, her ears a little zingy, for some reason. Just listening to Ms. Nementhal had been exciting. She seemed to think she could do anything. If Jocelyn ever got into any college, it would be a miracle. Her mother said that tutoring for the SAT was too expensive, and she couldn’t disagree. All you could do was read stuff on the Internet and get pointers from your friends, the most helpful so far being that the questions were essentially simple, but they pointed you in a direction that made you question your own perceptions, so you’d change things at the last second and answer wrong.

  They were already in the classroom, so there was no time to ask Ms. Nementhal a final question. It would have been: if Magical Realism was in poems—as they’d learned that morning, for what seemed like five hours—why had she made them read so many passages from Márquez? The Charles Simic poems were fun and went zooming around your head in all directions as if they were hummingbirds.

  When class let out, Angie caught up with Jocelyn, who’d just been texted by her mother on her iPhone: T. G. was being moved to McLean, some mental institution outside Boston. It was the same place where Girl, Interrupted took place—which was a book she’d read in the bathroom, because her mother refused to let her read it.

  “Jocelyn—isn’t that your aunt?” Angie said, looking up.

  Oh, yes, it was: Bettina, coming their way, taking big strides, her face absolutely
without expression, which was weird and whacked.

  “Hi, Aunt Bettina!” she called, but she felt as if someone else had shouted her name. She’d only said hello because her aunt would have felt dissed if she hadn’t.

  “We’ve been asked to preorder Girl Scout cookies, which really isn’t the point of Girl Scout cookies,” BLT said. She seemed a little out of breath. Why would her aunt have come to pick her up? Her mother always objected to people just jumping into a conversation. Bettina had not really greeted them and seemed to be very worked up. Was something wrong with her mother?

  “Is everything okay?” Jocelyn said.

  “I forgot your eye doctor appointment. I’ve got too much going on. We’ve got to hurry. It’s in Kittery. Anna, how are you?” Bettina said to Angie. Jocelyn watched as Angie opened and closed her mouth, then said, “Fine, thank you.”

  “I suppose I should ask if we can drop you off, but we can’t go out of our way,” Bettina said to Angie. “Do you take the bus or walk?”

  “Oh, thank you very much, but I like to walk home because it clears my mind and I can think about how I’ll start writing the next assignment,” Angie said, superpolitely.

  “These assignments! You girls think about nothing else!”

  Angie flashed her I’m-glad-we’re-all-girls smile. She actually blew a kiss with her fingertips as she turned in the opposite direction. Her Toms shoes made of silver, sparkly material that looked like she’d stomped through Christmas tree tinsel were totally great. Jocelyn watched her go, envying her. When Angie got home, there would be fresh-baked cookies. They were from a roll of store-bought dough, but still: her mother tried.

  “Aunt Bettina, is everything okay with my mom?”

  “Well, she has Lyme disease, it turns out, so I can hardly say everything’s fine. She called just a while ago. It’s in an early stage, though, so let’s hope she has a quick recovery.”

  “Lyme disease? OMG. We had a unit on that at school.”

  “Please use the English language and don’t act like you’re texting me,” Bettina said. “We’ve discussed that before.”