by Ann Beattie
This was clearly self-serving—Bernie did not strike me as a pathetic person—yet as Dara said it, I understood that she was trying to talk herself into Tom Van Sant. I also thought that maybe they would be fine with each other. I hardly knew him, and we had gotten off to such an odd start.
It wasn’t until we’d said goodbye and hugged each other and promised to talk soon that I realized I had to see Tom Van Sant, in part because Dara was my friend; I might as well try to get to know a person who was important in her life. I turned on the radio and listened to the first few minutes of All Things Considered. Stopped at a light, I was amazed at how the afternoon had slipped away: no typing; no food prepared; nothing. At the same time I found much of what she’d said disturbing, I was still flattered that she’d decided to talk to me. I even thought that it must be only my own insecurity that made me so sure that she had ignored me at Tom’s party for Dowell Churnin. Was it so impossible that someone might see me and want to be friends? Perhaps, like Tom Van Sant, I was too much of a loner, but I didn’t always have occasion to realize that because the family was so large. Dara was my first chance at an outside friend. I admired her for being able to express herself so vividly, and, of course, no one minds having attractive friends. As I drove, I thought over our conversation and felt flattered that she trusted me. She had told me a lot of things about herself finally, and I’d really done nothing but react, except for talking briefly—and no doubt boringly and pragmatically—about Snell’s greenhouse. I was faintly embarrassed to have been concerned so much with mundane problems—really, only with one—when she’d opened up so much. If she was the spider, at least she wanted me to notice that the web was flimsy.
When I got home, the red flag had been lifted again on the mailbox. Inside was an envelope containing handwritten additions to Grace Aldridge’s manuscript. She had remembered several more opinions her second husband had about what grew in the garden. “Parsley is no tastier than Easter basket grass,” I read. “Gelatinous parts of tomatoes are like bedsores that won’t heal.”
Inside, I took off my jacket and hung it up, then went into the kitchen. Almost immediately, the phone rang.
“Sweetie, you are absolutely the most wonderful friend I could have,” Dara said. “Don’t say a word. I just wanted to announce that I feel better about everything. Thanks for the booze and a sympathetic ear.” She hung up. The one-way call from Dara was very unexpected. I looked around, as if someone might be watching. I had the strange, vague sense of some hovering presence. I put on water to make tea, and as the kettle was heating, I realized that the afternoon’s conversation had left me feeling very strange. I spent too much time doing solitary things, I decided, whether those things were errands or typing or simply drifting around the house alone on the days Bob was gone. I was part of the family, yet I was detached. Apparently even more than I thought I was, if I didn’t know what Janey’s real thoughts about her pregnancy had been, and if I’d taken it for granted that Frank would never, ever have a woman friend who wasn’t also a friend of Janey’s.
As I waited for the water to boil, I took out a teacup and put loose tea in a little tea ball. Then almost without thinking, I took the phone book off the shelf and flipped through until I found Tom Van Sant’s number. He picked up the phone on the third ring, and I identified myself, adding—stupidly, I realized, the second it was out of my mouth—that I was Bob Warner’s wife.
“I know who you are, Jean. What’s up?” he said.
“Could we get together to talk sometime next week?”
“Well, sure,” he said. “Is something wrong?”
“I’d rather talk to you in person,” I said.
“You’re going to keep me in suspense?” he said. “What did you have in mind?”
“Wednesday afternoon?” I said. “Maybe at”—I couldn’t think where; I was drawing a blank—“the bakery,” I said. “The new bakery in the shopping center.” I added lamely: “We could have coffee.”
“You’re loyal to the bakery, I see,” he said. “Dara said she was going to meet you there this afternoon. Did you two get together?”
I hadn’t been expecting that. I hadn’t expected any chitchat, for some reason.
“Briefly,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Is she feeling better?”
“She seemed fine,” I said. I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was worried. I hoped he didn’t think that I was calling about his relationship with Dara.
“I’ll find out soon enough,” he said. “She’s on her way over here. I’ve been making spaghetti sauce. You wouldn’t by any chance like to join us tonight for spaghetti and meatballs?”
“Oh. Tonight. No. Thank you. Dinner’s already cooking,” I lied.
“Okay,” he said. “So Corolli’s, on Wednesday. What time?”
“Three o’clock?”
“Three o’clock. Any hint what this is about?”
“Dara will tell you,” I said. I thought she would. If she was going there, I felt sure she’d be telling him everything about our conversation, and it was probably best that she did. I was already convinced that I was going to plead my case—the family’s case—and lose. The conversation would come to nothing, and all the while we were talking I would know what he and Dara had done outside his house, running hand in hand with their Instant Meadow…it was too intimate a thing to know. It was going to make it difficult to talk to him. I flashed on an image of Janey and Bob and Barbara and me, at the carnival. Of meeting Bernie for the first time, and how sweet she’d seemed. I remembered Barbara trying to persuade us to be nice to a newcomer, which I found I still held against her. What did she know about people? She always assumed the best, and if she could find one good attribute, she’d focus on that. Like the rest of the family, though…I was suddenly realizing something…like the rest of them, she didn’t really let people in. There were certain formats for seeing other people socially, and she was always quick to do a favor, but then she retreated. She kept to herself. She belonged to no clubs. Since her husband’s death so many years before, Barbara rarely went out at night, and if she did, it was with someone in the family. She barely knew other women her age in the community, though she’d lived there almost all her life.
I dunked the tea ball in the hot water and watched a brown cloud seep outward. I jiggled the ball so the water would turn uniformly bronze. On the table was the new page to add to the manuscript I was working on. I put it on top of the pile, but then wandered away. I turned on the radio above the sink and listened to the classical-music station, waiting for the tea to darken. I couldn’t erase the image of Tom Van Sant and Dara running. Why did that have to stick in my mind?
When the tea was the right color, I carried the cup upstairs, sipped delicately from it, then put it on Bob’s dresser and, licking my slightly scalded lips, began to take his shoes out of the closet so I could inspect for rogue mothballs. There were more shoes than I’d realized, so I got the cup and saucer and put them beside me on the floor, then sat sideways, reaching in and pulling out shoes. As I lifted one shoe a mothball rolled into the heel. I shook it out, triumphant. Then I continued to remove the rest of the shoes, tilting them, looking on the floor for mothballs. I found two more and then, tipping a slip-on black shoe Bob had worn only once that I could remember, felt something heavier than a mothball slide from toe to heel. It was a small gray cube—a box, I realized, as I lifted it out. A velvet box that contained a diamond ring. In a day of surprises, this was the most startling thing of all. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I flicked the box closed, as if the second time I opened it, something else might be inside. But it was the ring: an antique, probably something from Grandma’s era, with a circular raised diamond that sparkled in the center. I took it out and tried it on. It almost fit the ring finger of my right hand, but I didn’t want to force it. It was lovely, and I could not have been more surprised if I’d found Moses in the bulrushes. Bob was going to give it to me for…what? My birthd
ay, or our anniversary? But that would be Barbaraish to think. What I really thought was that it was something intended for someone else, and that made me feel as if the floor I sat on was about as solid as a deflating raft. Carefully, I got up, leaving the box in the heel of the shoe. With my foot, I pushed the other shoes back onto the closet floor as if they were bumper cars that had been struck from behind, sending them every which way in an impossibly complicated pileup. One black shoe remained, which I picked up and tossed in the direction of its mate. Then I picked up the three mothballs and put them on the saucer. I stood, holding my tea and mothballs. Then I clumsily dropped the cup and saucer. Stupid, stupid: the liquid and the smashed pieces were all over the floor.
The ring couldn’t be for me.
The whole day had been leading up to something bad. Everything Dara discussed had been a clue: that men didn’t act the way you assumed they’d act; that everybody had secrets.
Downstairs, after crying for much longer than I anticipated, I made another cup of tea, but this time I used a tea bag and a mug. I dropped in two ice cubes once the tea was strong enough so I could drink it right away, stirring them into the hot water with my finger, not caring that my finger was being half scalded, half frozen.
“I found the ring,” I said, the minute Bob came into the house.
“You found the ring,” he repeated, slowly. “How did you happen to be reaching around in a pair of my shoes to find the ring?”
“Mothballs,” I said.
“What?”
“The closet smelled like mothballs. I thought some had rolled onto the closet floor. Is this going to be one of those times where you try to turn the tables, in spite of the facts?”
“One of what times?” he said.
“You’re going to pretend now that it was for me,” I said.
“No, actually,” he said.
I waited.
“I have to say I’m really surprised that you’d react this way, without even asking me what the ring was doing there,” he said.
“You’re stalling for time,” I said. “Just tell the truth.”
“The truth,” he said, “is that Drake bought the ring to give to his girlfriend, but then he started to have second thoughts. So he gave it to me so he wouldn’t impulsively give it to her. Call him, if you don’t believe that,” he said, taking off his coat and throwing it over the arm of the sofa. “And hello to you, too,” he said. “Glad to see you, too. It’s a real pleasure to be married to someone who’s so trusting.”
A rivulet and puddle of hot tea was ruining the finish on the upstairs floor, and I had let it stay there for the wrong reason. I had hastily accused Bob of something that was totally untrue. I had, that day, solidified a friendship and alienated my husband. It was enough to make me collapse in tears all over again.
“Since you don’t mind telling me what’s the case, let me caution you also,” he said tersely, from the kitchen. “Drake does not want anyone in the family to know that he is serious about his girlfriend, so you shouldn’t repeat anything I just told you.”
I got up and said, meekly, “Can’t you see why I—”
“No,” he said. He was drinking a Coke. He left the unfinished bottle on the counter and went upstairs. In a few minutes, I heard him cleaning up the mess. It was not until days later, when I did the wash, that I saw he had taken one of my favorite blouses and used it to mop up, then had wadded it tightly and thrown it into the laundry hamper.
The morning of the day I was going to meet Tom, I went over to Janey’s to watch Joanna for an hour or so while Janey went to the dentist. The boys were at camp for two weeks. It was their first time away from home, and Frank and Janey missed the boys and worried about them. The director of the camp had told them to stop calling. This made Frank see the light but convinced Janey that any second the boys were likely to forget that they had parents, which, in her mind, was an equal tragedy to her not having—truly not having had—sons. Frank tried to tell her that everything would be fine—that it was the perfect summer for the boys to be away for a while, because they weren’t getting any sleep with the baby crying, and also because they needed some independence. The boys had been delighted to go, which led Janey to think that it was a male conspiracy. She clutched Joanna to her tightly and felt that the house was now divided into Us against Them. Then her hormones—her much-joked-about hormones—elevated or subsided or whatever they did, giving her a reprieve from the delusion that she was living a tragic life, with Joanna her only ally. When she regained her sanity, Frank took her out to the Italian restaurant. They laughed about her misperceptions, and then, eating pizza, she had felt something sharp in her mouth. It was part of a tooth, and the crumbling tooth had depressed her as much as frightened her. When she called to ask me if I could come over the next morning, her voice was so grim that I assumed something terrible had happened. It didn’t help much that, because I was so relieved, I dismissed the broken tooth as nothing. “If you don’t care about me, at least pity Joanna for having a mother so ancient she’s likely to disintegrate,” Janey said.
“Oh, Janey,” I said.
“ ‘Oh, Janey,’ nothing,” she said. “My appointment is at ten-fifteen. Frank called the dentist at home and asked him to work me in because I was hysterical. He’s so sweet sometimes. I tried to get him to call the camp from the pay phone, since he was being so nice and so authoritative, but he wouldn’t do it.”
It was late July. The lilacs were long gone, but the rhododendrons, in their old-lady’s-dress colors of lavender and pink, were blooming everywhere, as were the wild roses. The day before, picking up the newly typed pages of her manuscript, Mrs. Aldridge had brought me a bouquet of cosmos and marigolds. They looked like Mutt and Jeff in the jar: the tall cosmos with their feathery leaves and opalescent flowers; the solid little marigolds with their bristly blooms, their heads barely rising above the glass. Mrs. Aldridge had a few more pages for me, though fortunately they were not about her second husband. They were, she said, about her third husband, but I could fit them into the story wherever I thought best, or else I could append them to the end, after an asterisk. She often suggested asterisks. She thought about individual asterisks with the reverence that schoolchildren had—or had when I was a child—upon discovering that every snowflake was different. I had asked her to stay for coffee, but she said she had to be on her way. “No more pages,” she said, as she was leaving, but I knew better: she had brought additional pages half a dozen times at least. It occurred to me that perhaps the additional writing was an attempt to think things were still ongoing—that as long as she wrote more, the marriages still endured.
Janey was in her nightgown when I got there. She had overslept—something she had forgotten was possible—and was trying to do everything at once: comb her hair; sip coffee; finish writing a check. She put the bundled Joanna into my arms and said, “Wet. She’ll be crying in two seconds,” but Joanna remained silent until I took her off to change her.
Her room was small but very pretty. It was painted light green, and Frank had glued stars and moons that glowed at night to the ceiling over her crib. There were two foam-rubber buffers against the crib railing, tied in place with ribbons. Several toys, all much larger than her hands, were strewn on the mattress. As I put Joanna on the table to change her—actually, it was a wicker table that had once been on Barbara’s porch, now padded with a foam-rubber pillow zipped into a rubber case and covered with a pillowcase; a rather strange, improvised changing table—the top of my head set a mobile fluttering: the cow that jumped over the moon, stars tinkling. This got Joanna’s attention and distracted her for the first few moments of the changing ritual, which I did carefully but slowly, with no pretense that it came naturally. I considered getting them a real changing table, but wondered if the gift would insult them. They were taking all of this less seriously than they had with the boys. Joanna had only been nursed for the first week of her life. Now she was drinking formula. I tried to elicit a smile fro
m Joanna, but she was looking beyond me, to some mid-distance, her eyes baby bright and blue, both hands fisted and moving through air. Was there any chance at all that Janey, pregnant, had gone jogging? I looked at Joanna’s pink skin, and at the network of blue veins below it. My scrutiny made her cry—or I felt as if it had—so I hurriedly finished diapering her and wrapped her, inexpertly, in the receiving blanket again, tugging down her little white shirt.
“Thank you, thank you,” Janey said, standing in the doorway in pants that tied at her still-vanished waist, a T-shirt tucked inside. The nightgown dangled from her hand like a towel. She opened the hamper beside the door and tossed it in. It was so full that the top didn’t close. I resolved to do a wash while she was gone.
“Isn’t she the most adorable baby?” I said. “It has nothing to do with my being her aunt.”
“A girl,” Janey said. “I must admit, I’m pleased.” She came up to us quickly, her thongs slapping, and cupped her hand around one of the baby’s fists. “Are you Mama’s last baby?” she said. “Are you the third, final, forevermore last baby of your mama?” Janey no more than nodded yes and she was gone, her shoes flapping down the stairs. On my way out of the room I took the laundry bag off a hook, one-handed, baby against my left shoulder, my right upper arm bracing her head as my right hand snatched a few pieces of dirty clothing from the hamper and pushed them into the bag. This was not going to work very well. I put Joanna into her crib and had not even turned around when she began to cry. I let her cry for a few seconds before going to her, and by then the bag was half filled. Lifting her out of the crib and returning to plan 1, I dipped deeper and brought up the rest of the laundry piece by piece, while reflecting that this method would certainly not get cotton picked. I had suddenly remembered a picture from a magazine, or from an old school textbook, of women in the field, several with babies papoosed or clutched to their breast, bending, in their big skirts, to pick cotton. Joanna and I would have been whipped and gone sprawling if the hamper had been a row of cotton, and the thought of that outraged me, made my face heat up faster than it had when I’d been bending over. A world of misery and unfairness. I wondered, briefly, if Janey’s raging hormones could have mysteriously set my own hormones going—if she could have communicated her absolute frustration to me as if it were airborne particles of bacteria. With those muddled thoughts, I dragged the bag to the top of the stairs and then bumped downstairs holding it by the cord, the bag as quiet as Janey’s flip-flops had been loud, me following behind her as if to erase the noise. Joanna was quiet in my arm, a tiny weight against my chest. I lightly kissed the top of her head and went up to the alcove near the downstairs bathroom where the washer and dryer were. One-handed, I opened the washer top. I lifted the bag to the top of the dryer and began to pull out pieces, dropping them into the washer. “One, two, three,” I said, aloud, as if giving a two-week-old baby a lesson in counting. “You’re Joanna, I am me,” I said, unable to resist the dual lesson: rhyming. As the washing machine did its work, she and I explored the house, looking at the pretty things (what do babies know about dust? it could be just as pretty as starlight) and returning many times to the windows. Outside, wind chimes blew in the breeze, dangling from the apple tree. There was a squirrel, which was approximately the length of Joanna, and which seemed inordinately complex, compared to the little bundled baby I held: standing on its hind legs; looking around; racing forward; jumping onto a tree. Janey kept a radio on the windowsill above the sink, which led me to think that perhaps instead of religious pictures or statues, the FM radio was the crucial item on the windowsill altars of American housewives. Also on this altar were a box of paper clips, a Brillo pad in a small dish, and a picture of the boys, with their ears cut off in order to fit both faces into the tiny frame. The younger was missing a front tooth or two—you couldn’t tell, because the faces were so small. There was also a broken watchband and Janey’s hospital identification bracelet. I picked it up and read the vital information: Janey’s name, the date, the doctor’s name, and then “7 Commercial O/P,” whatever that meant. Janey had had Joanna in four hours and had left the hospital in seven. Barbara had been as upset about that as she had been excited about the birth. Who knew exactly what “something” might happen; she probably had an exact scenario too horrific to describe—but then, when Barbara had had her babies, everything had been different. She had stayed in the hospital for four days, and she had gone to Grandma’s with each child for a month when she was discharged, and then Grandma had almost lived with Barbara for the first six months, after Barbara returned home.