by Ann Beattie
I found this fascinating. My house was filled with hand-me-downs; it was clean, but nothing really shone. I had never given great thought to what surrounded me.
“He freaked me out,” she said, lowering her voice. The sun had come out and was low in the sky, setting through the window, which faced west. She switched off the little amber light. “He was here, last week. You know, he’s got a real thing about that Dowell person. He had been to see him, and he thought he might have pneumonia or TB; cancer is what he really thought. His mother died of cancer, and he’s absolutely terrified of it. He had all these dire predictions about how the old guy wasn’t going to make it much longer, and he was berating himself for taking him Excedrin and meatballs. Not one dish,” she said, smiling. “A bottle of Excedrin because Dowell was in pain when he coughed, meatballs on the side. I said he should have taken cough syrup, and you’d have thought the Oracle had spoken.”
“I think everybody likes Dowell,” I said.
“Oh, I forgot. You married somebody with deep ties to the community.”
“Not because of that,” I said, shifting on the bed. “He was apparently always like a second father, or like an uncle, or something, to the boys. They could turn to him if they needed advice, or got in trouble. And he absolutely adored his son, who—”
“He died in that horrible war,” Dara said, almost inaudibly. Tears suddenly filled her eyes. “That wasn’t the white boy’s war; it was the blacks who got rounded up,” she said. “The blacks, and any white boys who happened not to be from affluent communities, who didn’t have somebody who could help them, or who couldn’t figure out some other way they could get out. That’s the nasty secret we’ve all been let in on by now, isn’t it? We had fodder to fight our battles.”
“Well,” I said, after a pause. “That’s why people are so sympathetic to Dowell.”
“He beat his son,” she said, wiping the tears out of her eyes. “His son ran away to the house Tom was living in with his uncle. He stayed in the loft up above the garage for days. Tom took food to him.”
“Beat him?” I said. “Beat him for what?”
“For saying he wasn’t going to go.”
This was perplexing. As far as I knew, Dowell had always been against the war. His wife had taken the bus to Washington, to march in protest. Dowell had hung a bull’s-eye of LBJ in the school locker room that the principal had made him take down. Bob had told me about it.
“How do you know?” I said, puzzled.
“I only know what Tom told me.”
“Then why would Tom be so fond of Dowell?”
“Because Dowell apologized. Tom says that Dowell knew where Nelson was hiding almost from the first. After Nelson died, he tracked Tom down in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was living, and he apologized to him. Tom said Dowell cried all weekend, and that he was skin and bones. That his wife had left him and his son was dead, and the time had come when he saw everything differently, but it was too late. Tom told me Dowell hung up a bull’s-eye of LBJ in the locker room. It wasn’t because he objected to the war, though. It was because Dowell thought Johnson was a hypocrite; a rich bastard from Texas, who had the worst sort of vanity: he wanted to be thought of as a redneck, when actually he was smart. Dowell thought—as many others have, lest we forget—that there was more than a grain of truth to the rumor that he’d had something to do with JFK’s assassination. Dowell didn’t think the war was wrong. Dowell was a patriot.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“I only know what Tom told me,” she said.
Her tone of voice—the matter-of-factness with which she spoke—shook me out of the subdued, puzzled state I’d sunken into. What a thing to find out about, sprawled on a near stranger’s big bed one late afternoon, when the sun had broken through rain clouds too late to cheer anyone, except as a kind of taunt.
Dara was peeking through the side of the curtain. She let the material fall free. She held out her hand to me. “Life line,” she said, pointing to the palm of my hand.
I held out my hand. She took it, and shook her head. “I’m talking to someone who’s going to live to be one hundred,” she said, folding my fingers forward until my fingernails touched the palm of my hand. She released her grip. Her hand had been smaller and lighter than mine—smaller, yet in control. That was the thing that was so striking about Dara: that while the world she described was very problematic, she was nevertheless convincingly in control. When she curled your fingers, it felt more emphatic than it did when you curled your own. “Haven’t you heard all those ways of analyzing hands?” she said, taking my hand back and opening it. “This one, here, is the life line. Some fortuneteller must have already told you you’ll have a long life.”
I did vaguely remember that. Some girl in fifth or sixth grade had bewitched us all with her knowledge. Now that Dara mentioned it, I did know that I was predicted to have a long life.
“What about you?” I said.
“Me?” she said. “My life line is about as long as a whiff of smoke in an enormous room. We do not have long life in Dara’s cards, sweetie. We are definitely not discussing long life.”
“It’s hocus-pocus,” I said.
“But what else is anything?” she said, snorting a little laugh. “I mean, the Pyramids got there by hocus-pocus. How else did they get there?”
“God,” I said. “You’ve surprised me enough for one day. You couldn’t possibly think I could explain the Pyramids.”
“But you knew about Dowell, on some level, didn’t you?” she said, touching my hand with her fingers. I thought my fingers would be folded forward again, but her touch was almost ephemeral. A puff of smoke from the imaginary cloud Dara had sent up earlier might have fallen on the back of my hand. The only reason I registered the feeling was because I was looking.
“That Patsy Cline song,” she said suddenly. “You know the one I mean?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She omitted the beginning, about the Pyramids along the Nile, and sang only, “You belong to me.”
She had a beautiful voice. It was a clear soprano, muted, four sung words that dangled in the room like the crystals from a chandelier, catching the last of the day’s suddenly intense light, refracting it.
A moment passed, and then I said, “It’s funny you thought of that song. I thought of it myself today, when I picked up Bob’s Buddy Holly glasses. Those singers were so great, and they died so young.”
“Oh, my darling,” she said, “what will you do with those ugly things? Can you wait for the moment when he leaves them on a seat cushion and then just sit on them?” Her expression changed, and she looked pensive. “Who was it?” she said. “The Big Bopper died, and Patsy Cline and somebody else….”
“Maybe the glasses are cursed.”
“Cursed glasses? Then I am extremely glad I have decided to wear contacts,” she said.
“You wear contacts?”
“I get eyestrain,” she said. “If you have any thoughts that today’s accident was the result of—”
“You didn’t have your glasses on?”
She threw a pillow at me. “I need them only for reading,” she said. “I have an unrestricted driver’s license. Would you care to see it?”
“No,” I said, throwing the pillow back. “I believe you.”
“You do?” she said. “You believe me?”
She was being mock-serious. But what did she really want to hear? The stories had registered. I would never think about Dowell the same way, whether or not what she said was true. More than that, I had subconsciously called into question many things in my own life: the ordinariness of my surroundings; my credulousness when it came to life—and people—in the town. And I also believed that she believed I’d live a long time—enough time to see what materialized and what didn’t, whether it was her relationship with Tom Van Sant or how my own relationship with Bob would turn out. I looked at her, pale in the dwindling light, leaning back against the starchy white pillows. It was a
moment at once casual and intimate, she propped so that she faced forward, me so that I faced backward. It made me think of magnets that would eventually connect, one magnetizing the other through some incremental advantage.
That spring, Bob and I shopped for his mother’s birthday present. Barbara was going to be sixty. Frank had ordered six special French white lilac bushes: a gift from all her children, which he intended to plant in her yard under cover of darkness the night before her birthday. Because breakfast was her favorite meal, Sandra was hostessing a breakfast in Barbara’s kitchen, which would feature her favorites: crepes with scallions, sour cream, and walnuts, as well as homemade biscuits with Sandra’s raspberry preserves. Since Barbara had never understood her children’s desire to drink Coke in the morning, they would smilingly toast and taunt her with their Coke bottles, as she drank fresh-squeezed orange juice. But what to do with the rest of the day? Some playing with Frank and Janey’s children, once they returned from school, but in between breakfast and late afternoon…should be kite flying, Bob decided. It seemed he and Drake and Louise had been flying kites in Boston, and he thought it was wonderful fun, and that Barbara would get in the spirit of it. So we must buy kites and drive to the beach and fly them, and also take a walk up the ice-heaved cement path that curves past the big, private houses and feel torn between envy of the wealthy people who live inside (though most of them will not have arrived yet for the season) and appreciation of our own good fortune: being together, and happy, on a lovely early-spring day.
The kite shop was newly opened, on Route 1, next to a seafood place Bob and I had loved because of its delicious smoked food that had been praised in the Boston Globe, which meant it had been overrun by city exiles the past summer. I rarely drove Route 1, but Bob often used it to get to 95 South to Boston. He’d known that over the winter the seafood restaurant had gone out of business. As we passed it, I said, “Oh, no,” seeing the bright sign in the shape of a cactus with letters that now read, vertically, ARIZONA. The parking lot had been enlarged; another sign advertised a newly constructed back deck. Before, there had been a funky screened porch. There were drink specials listed in the window. It was obviously a place I was unlikely to ever set foot in again, and I felt saddened by the closing. It was unexpected, since the restaurant had seemed to be doing so well, but perhaps the owners had wanted to sell it. Perhaps they’d made a huge profit. Things changed on Route 1 all the time, especially the part that people just sped through; elsewhere, where outlets were springing up, there was also turnover, but a business had to be particularly good to last on the less popular portion of Route 1.
“Did you know the restaurant folded?” I asked Bob.
“Yeah,” he said glumly. “I thought you’d find out soon enough.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Maybe success went to its head,” he said. “I hate the thought of a summer without paella made with those smoked clams.”
We were in the store’s parking lot. Only one other car was there: a black Volvo wagon with a FOR SALE sign in the side window. Inside the store, a wind machine blew a cluster of kites toward the high ceiling. The one that caught my eye was an enormous carp, its mouth gaping as if it intended to feed on the skylight it floated toward. There was also a long-stemmed rose with a flapping green stem, and a billowing Casper the Ghost. There were shelves of kites, with large color photographs tacked to the vertical two-by-fours showing them airborne. We walked for a few moments without commenting. Bob turned and began examining the kites stacked in the next aisle, which seemed to be the snake aisle. There was also a kite meant to be held by several strings: I stared at the picture of a long, silver train. I reached out and lifted one of those packages from the shelf.
“Perfect,” he said.
The kites we selected wouldn’t make any harmonious, peaceable kingdom in the sky. Along with the train, and almost as tall as the train was long, was an enormous cardinal, its yellow beak as big as Bob’s shoes. I couldn’t decide between that and the carp, so we got both—the orange-gold mottling was simply amazing—as well as a snake shooting out its red forked tongue. “Louise loves daisies,” Bob said, putting a package with a huge white daisy under his arm. “And we should also get at least one that isn’t phallic.”
I nodded. I was hoping that Barbara’s birthday would be a beautiful, windy day. The family hadn’t gotten together recently, and Bob’s idea of buying the kites and going to the beach was excellent. I hadn’t seen Janey for a month. I hadn’t sat down to a meal with Barbara, even though I’d offered to cook, for longer than that. Though the truth was, it wasn’t the most thrilling thing I could think of to play hostess at a family dinner. What I really wished was that Bob and I ate out more often, did more things together. I considered Janey almost a sister, but as for the others, there were no surprises. It wasn’t so much that Janey did surprising things, but that she seemed open to things. She was the only person in the family who ever read a serious book, and she was always eager to talk about what she’d discovered. The less Barbara discovered, the better; she was wary and tentative—years before, she had been politely approving, not enthusiastic, about Bob’s marrying me, but I knew from Janey that she worried we hadn’t known each other long enough, and that we were too young. She might have been right, but it bothered me that she had always been so sweet to me, so unconditional in her acceptance, when she had not been sure the marriage was a good idea. What really troubled me was that I suspected Barbara felt sorry for me. She and I had never talked about my parents’ deaths, but I knew that Bob had told her about that almost as soon as he met me, and I suspected he had told her behind my back in order to elicit her sympathy. I felt very uncomfortable with sympathy—or perhaps I was uncomfortable in direct proportion to how much I actually wanted it. At first I thought Bob must have told Barbara not to discuss the situation with me, but through the years, it seemed clear she would not have anyway. It was Barbara’s way not to ask questions, and not to reveal what she knew or thought, except about the most inconsequential things. I didn’t really know how disturbed she still was about her own husband’s death. I intuited that she had never gotten over it, but when Janey told me that, before I joined the family, there were times when she had seen Barbara dissolve in tears for no ostensible reason, I had found it almost impossible to believe. Barbara was like my aunt Elizabeth: she liked everything to be on an even keel, and she had decided to reveal herself less, rather than more, to effect that.
Bob took his Buddy Holly glasses out of his coat pocket and put them on before opening his wallet and taking out the money to pay for the kites. They made him look very earnest, and I suddenly had to smile because it was so wonderfully ridiculous, this big man in his ugly glasses, buying kites of birds and trains and flowers with a very intent look on his face.
“Hey, man,” the only other person in the store said, “look right here.” He was pointing at a small ad in the newspaper. “Right here, it says they give you a giant balloon if you spend twenty-five dollars.”
The woman behind the cash register muttered, “Don’t blame me for not putting in the balloon before I’ve even collected the money.”
Bob nodded, scanning the ad and turning away.
“I bought the silver-bullet train last month, and that was the coolest kite I ever flew, ever,” the boy said. It was the first time I realized something was wrong with him. Just as I did, and hoped the woman behind the counter did, too, a large woman with black hair tied high on her head in a ponytail came up beside the boy. “You picked yet, or are you just bothering people?” she said.
“No bother,” Bob said quickly.
“And there,” the woman said, reaching under the counter and adding something to our bag. “There is your free balloon.” She folded the top twice, stapled the receipt to the bag, and handed it to Bob. He thanked her.
“In Japan the bullet trains run on schedule, and if you have one of those kites, it does, too. You whistle for the wind and the train get
s going, right up in the air, in exactly one point zero second.”
“You were thinking about the palm tree, weren’t you?” the fat woman said, as if he hadn’t spoken. He didn’t answer. “These people have to get on with their day,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you other people went into a store and proceeded with dispatch?”
The last words she spoke to him were so little what I expected that, again, I had trouble hiding a smile. I had Bob firmly by the sleeve. “Goodbye,” I said, to all of them. No one answered.
In the car, Bob shook his head, took off his glasses, and folded the sides, putting them in his breast pocket.