The State We're In

by Ann Beattie

  “Oh, shit! Poor Mom!”

  “Could you favor me with a slightly more profound thought, do you think? Such as, ‘What’s the time frame for her to feel better?’ or ‘What should I do around the house to make things easier on Mom?’ ” She stopped and stared at Jocelyn. “And do you think you could stop acting like someone’s trying to pass you a volleyball and walk at my side, so I don’t have to shout? You are capable of walking in a straight line, I assume?”

  “Aunt Bettina, you’re always on my case!”

  “Well, someone has to try to communicate with you. Your uncle’s gone to California. At least, I think that was his intention before he got a phone call from that brother of your friend, Nathaniel, is it? who acts like T. G.’s condition is of no concern. His father went to McLean’s today with his lawyer, and your father got a call, with what’s his name—Nathaniel—whining that they were lacking a pitcher for their softball game. He thought your uncle should do it.”

  “I don’t understand. He was going to California? Why?”

  “Your uncle used to call these spur-of-the-moment trips his Magical Mystery Tours. He doesn’t give very good explanations, you know that. But wait. I think he’s taking that trip next week. Did he tell you about it?”

  “No,” Jocelyn said glumly. Adults were totally secretive. They wouldn’t tell you the most interesting things, like about a trip somewhere, but they’d ask repeatedly how many washings were still to go before the color came out of your hair, and why you were wearing tights. A robin pulling a worm from the grass got Jocelyn’s attention. It was obvious why Charlotte Octavia had broken off contact with her mother, but it seemed sad that she didn’t have much of a relationship with her father, either. Try as she might, Jocelyn couldn’t imagine Raleigh acting as aggressively as his wife.

  Bettina had parked far away, though there were many closer parking places. When they got to the car, Bettina said, “You’re on your own with those essays from now on. I’ve told Raleigh, he’s off the hook. It’s your future and you can figure out how to proceed. You aren’t helped by his substituting one word for another.”

  “Aunt Bettina, excuse me, but Uncle Raleigh makes me show him my homework.”

  “Well, I personally think he might have gone to McLean with Hank Murrey and his lawyer, that’s where he is, not pitching a softball game, I don’t think.” Bettina raised the cotton vest she was wearing to her face and blotted her forehead. Gross! Anybody knew not to do a thing like that. Her aunt was sweating. She did not turn on the ignition. Finally, talking more to herself than to Jocelyn, she said, “Okay, it’s off to the eye doctor’s.”

  “I didn’t know about this appointment,” Jocelyn said. Her aunt said nothing. She felt like she was in Alice in Wonderland. Nothing made much sense. Next, a white rabbit would appear, but until it did, she stared at the digital clock in the car. She thought if she focused her attention on something, she might not cry. Summer school was exhausting, T. G. was in a hospital somewhere she’d have no way to visit, and her mother had Lyme disease. Just great.

  Parallel-parking, Bettina hit the curb with the back wheels, hard. “For Christ’s sake,” she said. “They build curbs now like they’re soapboxes in Trafalgar Square, like we’re supposed to stand there and rant about something. Just like my trip to England, which I suppose I’ll never see again, it’s so impossible to travel because they have to body-search everyone.”

  Oh, please let me live through this summer, Jocelyn thought, as she followed Bettina into the building. This was the eye doctor’s? Why were they there? She sank into a chair and picked up People magazine, while Bettina charmed the receptionist, thanking her profusely for working her in, her sickly sweet smile at odds with her bizarre body language. The vest she was wearing made her look like she’d gotten tangled in a parachute. And she was sweating like she’d been doing Zumba. She stared at the magazine as her aunt took the clipboard from the receptionist and sat in a chair beside her to fill it out. She skimmed an article about Jennifer Aniston and her new fiancé. Good looking, in a conventional way. It would be so great to be Jen, with totally perfect hair and a flawless complexion and no Aunt Bettina in her life. So what if she’d lost Brad Pitt?

  A man sitting in the waiting room got up and went to the watercooler, pulled a paper cup from the dispenser, and filled it quaveringly with cold water. He sipped. Jocelyn thought that he was aware that her aunt was in a state, he so deliberately avoided looking in their direction.

  “Do you have allergies to medicine?” Bettina asked.

  “Not that I know of,” she muttered.

  “What’s your birthday?”

  “Aunt Bettina, it’s the same day as yours. We’ve had, like, ten joint birthday celebrations.”

  “Show some respect when you speak to me,” Bettina said. At this, the man shot Jocelyn a sympathetic look. He picked up a copy of Garden & Gun, leaned back in the orange plastic chair, opened the magazine to the middle, and crossed his legs.

  “Jocelyn?” the receptionist said. “And Dr. Miller? Sir, you’ll be in the first room on the right, and Jocelyn, I’m happy to meet you, I’m Jenny, if you’ll follow me.”

  Jocelyn stood and followed the receptionist and the other man through the door. In her peripheral vision, she saw her aunt draw a large X through an entire section of the form. She drew in a deep breath, then exhaled. “Jenny,” she said. “My aunt’s acting really strange. You’ve got to trust me on this. I’ve got to call my mother. Or no, I should call my uncle. I’ve got to call my uncle.”

  “Really?” Jenny said.

  “Really. She was raving about Girl Scouts on the way over here. She was driving, like, crazy.”

  The toes of Jenny’s black patent leather clogs touched each other. “She did seem a little upset when she called,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t want to intrude,” Dr. Miller said, coming into the room, “but your mother is in a sweat and seems in some distress.” Where did he come from? He thought Aunt Bettina was her mother? She was totally not. Jenny seemed as surprised as Jocelyn that he’d simply walked into their room.

  “What’s the problem out there?” said a man in a white coat—though not the White Rabbit—coming into the room, frowning deeply.

  “We should call an ambulance, I think,” Dr. Miller said.

  “That’s what I thought,” the tall man said. “How do you do,” he said, suddenly, turning to Jocelyn. “I’m Dr. Baird. Are things not so good with your aunt?”

  “I texted him from the waiting room,” Dr. Miller said to Jocelyn. All of this was amazing. Somebody was going to do something. She couldn’t believe her good luck.

  “I’ve never seen her before today,” Jenny said to no one in particular.

  “Ambulance on the way,” Dr. Baird said, dropping his iPhone back into his coat pocket. “And you are Ms.—”

  “Jocelyn,” Jocelyn said.

  “Ms. Jocelyn,” Dr. Baird said. “May I ask how old you are?”

  “Seventeen,” Jocelyn said. “I like to read with a magnifying lens, because it makes the print huge. I can see fine without it. I don’t even wear glasses. She saw me reading with it the other night and—”

  “Is your aunt your legal guardian?” Dr. Baird said, looking at her chart.

  “No. I live with my mother.”

  “I see,” Dr. Baird said. “Well, the ambulance will be here any minute. She’ll be fine. Jenny, shouldn’t we call Jocelyn’s mother?”

  “We have to call my uncle,” Jocelyn said. “My mom’s in Massachusetts. She just had an operation, and she’s got Lyme disease, too. She, like, totally couldn’t do anything about this. She doesn’t even know there is a magnifying lens.”

  “Okay, Jenny, can you help out here?” Dr. Baird said.

  “She’s secretive about everything. My aunt, I mean. Her own daughter doesn’t speak to her, really. She keeps a diary and writes in it in the bathroom. She basically hates me.”

  Dr. Baird
looked at Dr. Miller, who stood mutely in the doorway. “Fridays are always the worst,” he said.

  “Isn’t that the truth,” Dr. Miller said.

  “It’s all going to be fine,” Jenny said. “Excuse me, and I’ll . . .”

  “Is your aunt diabetic?” Dr. Miller asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you think we might look in her handbag?” Dr. Miller said to Jocelyn.

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  Jenny exited and came back holding her aunt’s purse by one strap. It bulged open. On the first rummage, she brought out a bottle of pills and handed them to Dr. Baird.

  “You called it, Ed,” Dr. Baird said to Dr. Miller.

  “Did she, like, see you taking her purse?” Jocelyn asked.

  “She’s having a little rest in her chair,” Jenny said. She could match Angie for false brightness any day.

  “I don’t have any money and I don’t know how to get home,” Jocelyn said.

  “No worries!” Jenny said. “Isn’t that right, Dr. Baird? Trina’s off at four o’clock. She can give you a lift, Jocelyn. Or I can.”

  “You could ride in the ambulance with your aunt to the hospital?” Dr. Baird hinted.

  “I’m afraid of her,” Jocelyn said.

  “Trina will take you home,” Jenny repeated.

  “Your uncle? Do you know where he is?” Dr. Baird said.

  “Maybe pitching a softball game, or maybe at a mental hospital?”

  “He might be at a mental hospital?”

  “A friend of mine tried to kill himself,” Jocelyn said.

  “Unbelievable,” Dr. Baird said. “Have we tried to get in touch—”

  “He didn’t answer his phone,” Jenny said to Dr. Baird.

  A red, rotating light on the ceiling let them know the ambulance had arrived without its siren. Dr. Baird excused himself and went to the waiting room. He certainly did not move at White Rabbit speed. Once, playing field hockey, her friend Rachel had tripped on a big rock and broken her ankle. The bone had been sticking out of her foot and there had been blood everywhere when the ambulance arrived. Jocelyn had tried to comfort her by holding her hand and telling her to close her eyes. Which was more than she’d done for Bettina—although Bettina only gave orders, she never listened to anything.

  * * *

  When the ambulance left and she left with Trina, carrying her aunt’s handbag, no one had heard back from Raleigh.

  “You want to know how crazy things can get?” Trina said, starting her car and pulling on her seat belt. Trina had bright blue, squared-off fingernails, which were totally awesome. She was even cooler than Jenny, and Jenny was pretty cool. “Okay, so you tell me where I turn off Route One,” Trina said. “I know York pretty well. One of my friends was there with her boyfriend. Some rich guy didn’t want him to be found because he didn’t want him to be deposed, okay? So they put him in a rental house, and here’s where it turns into a modern-day horror story.” Beep beep. “Damn! Did you hear that? The car keeps unlocking itself. Why would it do that? Like I was saying, though, it’s not exactly Stephen King, but still. You know what the bad guys did? They put yellow jacket nests into the ground, like they were planting flower seeds, because he was way allergic to yellow jacket stings. Aha. So first they relocated the guy, then they had these yellow jackets kill him.”

  “Nests in the ground? How do you do that?”

  “It’s like I said, you put them in like marigold seeds, or something.”

  “No way.”

  “After he died, my friend—the one he was living with? She found out that he’d committed a really bizarre crime in another state. She’d been engaged to him! He might have done the same thing to her. When he died, her parents got her to a shrink. She got something called hysterical blindness, which means you lose your sight but nothing’s wrong with you. It’s a conversion disorder. Besides this, it turns out she’s pregnant with the guy’s kid! About the blindness thing, the shrink called Dr. Baird, because he’d been her doctor, right? I’m sure whatever Dr. Baird did was totally correct, because he’s totally a professional. I wouldn’t mind being married to Dr. Baird and having a million dollars. Anyway, my friend’s doing better and she was even lucky enough to have a miscarriage. Her e-mails aren’t censored anymore, so it all worked out, right?”

  “It sounds pretty fucked up,” Jocelyn said.

  “Well, you have to be really careful of everybody you meet for a really long time. And even then, they lie to you.” Trina reached between the seats and pulled something out of a box. “You can blow these up and pretend they’re cow udders,” she said, holding a latex glove to her lips and blowing into it.

  Jocelyn burst into laughter, then clamped her hand over her mouth.

  “Okay, let me pull over here. Okay, it’s a text from Dr. Baird that your uncle called and he’s on his way to the hospital. See? It’s all working out.”

  “I’m really glad he’s not in California,” Jocelyn said.

  “I’d totally love to live there, but it would take me farther away from Dr. Baird,” Trina said. “He came with me on his lunch hour and helped me figure out financing for my car. He gave me a raise at Christmas. I haven’t had a roommate for a year. It’s totally awesome that I go home and do whatever I want.”

  “What things do you do?”

  Beep beep.

  “A for instance? I defrost marinara sauce and eat it with a spoon, no pasta.”

  “Does it matter that the car keeps locking and unlocking?” Jocelyn said.

  “It’s got a mind of its own. That, or it’s auditioning to be the Road Runner.”

  Jocelyn smiled. “My mother loves pasta. She’d want your marinara sauce with linguini,” Jocelyn said.

  “Okay, so the thing is, you want it, you can have it, but you want to eat sauce with a spoon, that’s cool too, you know?”

  Jocelyn nodded. Somehow, she didn’t feel convinced she’d ever see her mother again—that was the unformed thought that she’d kept in her head like a headache for hours, though now it exploded like a jack-in-the-box. Oh, her old toy box, filled with what her mother called “my eBay nest egg for old age.” It was on a shelf in the closet and she hardly ever thought about any of the things in it anymore. Since Trina had gotten the text message, though, she did believe she’d see Raleigh. Would he be mad at her for not going with Bettina? Her aunt’s purse felt like a boulder in her lap. Jenny and Trina were nice. She thought she’d like to be a working woman like them—they were way cooler than Ms. Nementhal—though Dr. Baird certainly wasn’t her type.

  “What’s the story with living with your aunt and uncle?” Trina said. She turned on the radio, so whatever Jocelyn said was sure to be partially drowned out by heavy metal.

  “My mom had a hysterectomy, so she sent me here for the summer,” Jocelyn said.

  “She did? That’s no big whoop anymore. I bet they sucked out her uterus using a laparoscope instead of cutting an incision. She’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah,” Jocelyn said.

  “She can wear her bikini again!” Trina said.

  Jocelyn looked at her.

  “Are you an only?”

  “What?”

  “Only child.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “I thought so. So am I. Only children are really bright and sensitive, you know? I’d be totally perfect for Dr. Baird, if he only realized it. Ha!”

  “You’ve really got a crush on him,” Jocelyn said.

  “Well, yeah,” Trina said. “But his wife’s this Harvard graduate, and they already have three kids and a Labradoodle. Before they ended the space program, she grew up wanting to be an astronaut.”

  “Were you kidding about the bees?” Jocelyn said. “You turn at the light. Left.”

  Trina put on her directional signal. “Bees?” she said.

  “Yeah. That killed that guy.”

  “Yellow jackets, not bees. No, it’s true, he died. He was a freak, though. I don’t kno
w how she hooked up with him. A freak can’t keep it hidden, I don’t think. Though there was that guy who cut people’s lawns and was really a mass murderer.”

  “What?”

  “BTK. Bind, torture, kill, I think it was. He was married! She divorced him!”

  She’d heard something about that, but she tried not to think about such things. There’d also been the guy who lived in his car and thought his dog was telling him to kill people. She’d found out about him reading one of Zelda’s graphic novels. Trina would probably know exactly who that guy had been. She would also have seen the 3-D Planet of the Apes. Of course she would have. And asked for extra butter on her popcorn. Trina seemed to be in her late twenties, maybe early thirties. By the time she herself was thirty, she hoped to have the courage to ask for butter anytime she wanted it—more butter, and more butter. Bettina, who was huge, put little dabs of butter on their corn with a tiny knife, as if she were cleaning someone else’s ear with a Q-tip.

  They were almost to the house. Two people in a silvery blue Solara convertible passed by, and Trina gave them the thumbs-up. The world belonged to Trina. Which was better than it belonging to her uncle or Bettina. Her mother, of course, wasn’t even in the running. Her mother would be happy if her own life was a constant time-out—she wouldn’t consider such a thing punishment if she could sit in a chair and not speak and not move and, most of all, not check her phone. She loved turning it off. Then the bill collectors went to voice mail and her daughter couldn’t ask for anything and Raleigh wouldn’t always be checking up on her. Raleigh. She was very glad he was still in Maine, instead of California. He’d told her a story recently and sworn her to secrecy. It was that her father, back when he still wanted to impress his wife, sometimes came back from a fishing trip with lots of trout he hadn’t really caught. He’d bought them at the fish market. One time her mother had said, “Why are these so cold?” and he’d supposedly said to Jocelyn, “Remember this all your life, my little one. Your mother thinks that fish swim in warm water.”

  DUFF’S DONE ENOUGH

  Duff Moulton changed his nickname from Chip to Duff when the old block he was supposedly chipped from died at age 103. Mrs. Terhune, who had no nickname, and whose first name was rarely spoken, had supplied him with homemade soup and oyster crackers over the last few years, receiving a handsome check from Duff’s cousin at the beginning of each month for her efforts. She was seventy-four and quite able to continue making soup and doing everything else she was doing, thank you very much. She said this in response to a kindly phrased note that had come recently with one of the checks, Duff’s cousin politely inquiring whether—especially considering the very bad winter they’d endured—it was too much for her to go to Duff’s every day.