by Ann Beattie
“My uncle is very mad. He was mad before I set the fire. I must explain to you that it wasn’t to be bad. I was smoking a cigarette”—she hangs her head—“I was waiting for you, and I had brought you some poems I had written. Then I got embarrassed and ripped them up and put them in your trash. I only wanted to talk to you and to say that I read the books you suggest. I read every night, but no one can read enough to please my uncle. I shook an ash in the trash can, and the things inside went up in flames. I know that it’s wrong to smoke. I’ll never smoke again.”
This is heartfelt, but I’m not entirely sure I believe it. Then again, think of what I asked her to believe: I asked her to believe in a Superman who would fly into buildings.
“Your mother is a very good teacher,” Moriko says to Jason.
I wait for him to tell her what he told the police—to explain that I am not his mother. Instead, he says nothing.
“Please. That is the way it happened,” she says. “My uncle doesn’t believe me. My mother believes me.”
“And Mr. Hamachi,” I say. “He must believe you, if he drove you here.”
“He only thinks it’s unreasonable that my uncle won’t let me talk on the telephone.”
“Ah,” I say.
“Mr. Hamachi says that’s very American. American people hate the telephone.”
The ferret runs from under the sofa. It goes into the hallway and disappears into the glare.
“I appreciate your coming to explain,” I say. “But why couldn’t you explain at school? You’re coming to school tomorrow, aren’t you?”
Outside, I see car headlights. At first I think it’s Carl, and I think how daunting it’s going to be to explain all this to him, but it isn’t Carl; it’s Mr. Hamachi, who taps his horn. Moriko rushes to the door and waves him away. He lingers.
“My uncle will punish me by keeping me home all week. He’s very mad at me.”
“I’m impulsive, too,” Jason says.
Moriko looks at him. She waits for his story. He says nothing, though. He looks over his shoulder, hoping the ferret will reappear. He is acting very proper. Very mature. She must see that he is not the holy terror I described him as; she must wonder why I caricatured him. Everyone in the room seems poised but me.
“I’m sure your uncle is overly protective of you because he has your best interests at heart. I know that doesn’t make it any easier to take, but I know he’s concerned about you.”
“Because when my father died, he was very kind to join my mother and me,” Moriko says, almost as if she’s prompting me.
Jason looks at her, and there is an instant connection. “She did that,” he says. “My mom left us, and then she came,” Jason says, pointing at me.
Moriko looks interested, but when the car reappears outside the window, she jumps up. “Please believe I had no bad idea in mind,” she says, pulling on her coat. “I’ll see you at school, and you are always my favorite teacher.”
Moriko rushes out to the car. The car door on the passenger’s side is pushed open. The two conspirators—an unlikely duo—pull away into the night.
“She likes you,” Jason says.
“Yes. And I appreciate your being so gracious. That was very nice of you, to talk to her and to stay in the room and be so nice.”
“No problem,” he says. “One thing I wanted to ask, though. Would you do me a favor, too? It’s something I did wrong, and I want you to fix it.”
“What’s that?” I say. It has been a long, exhausting day. At this point, I think I’m prepared for almost anything.
“It’s pretty bad,” he says.
I wince. “What is it?” I say quietly.
“It’s not so, so bad, but it’s not good.”
“Just tell me,” I say.
“Tell me you’ll fix it before I tell you,” he says.
I look at him, hearing myself making the same request when I was a child. Trying to get my brother to say he’d do anything for me, since I knew my parents would never bite. Such a large, all-encompassing request, but why not try? To have an automatic guarantee, no matter what, that the other person would do what you wanted….After childhood, who would dare ask?
He looks me in the eye. “I stole money,” he says.
“Money? Where did you steal money?”
“Estelle’s.”
My shock is partly because of what he answers, partly because I’ve never heard him call Estelle anything but Grand-Mam.
“Come on,” he says. “You saw, didn’t you?” He speaks more urgently: “In the flower pot. Underneath the flowers.”
“Go slower,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Those flowers outside her door. Outside. I buried it in the flower pot.”
“Oh, my God,” I say. “You took the money from the vase? You took the money, not Nonette?”
He puts his face in his hands. He mumbles something I don’t understand. I’ve drawn back, shocked, but the shock quickly subsides, and I find I’ve put my hand on his back. I rub up and down his spine. “Well, at least you know you did wrong,” I say.
“She can have it back,” he says. “But do I have to tell her it was me? Can’t you pretend you discovered it?”
“Honey—” I falter. “Honey, what would I be doing digging around Estelle’s urn? And if I did find it, what would that prove? Somebody would still have had to put it there. Nonette could have put it there.”
“Nonette would not,” he says, exasperated, rebuking me.
“Jason, the very best thing, I promise you, is to tell Grand-Mam what you did and to say how sorry you are. She’s made mistakes, too. She’ll forgive you. I’ll go with you.” My mind is racing: Nonette—what can ever be done to make it up to Nonette?
“You do it. You tell her,” he says.
“All right,” I say. “As long as you’re there with me, I’ll tell her.”
“Then come on,” he says.
“Now? We can’t go there now. Estelle’s in bed. We’ll have to do it tomorrow.”
“Shhh!” he says. Carl’s car has just pulled in beside mine, in the driveway. It’s almost eleven-thirty. He will not be happy to see Jason up so long past his bedtime. I whisper: “Just forget about Dracula and all the rest of it.”
Carl comes in, under a carapace of cold air. He sees his son sitting on the sofa, dangling his feet, trying to look casual, and raises an eyebrow. His eyes widen, as he looks at his watch.
“We were talking,” I say. “I kept him up too late.”
Jason races past me. At first I think he’s going to throw himself into his father’s arms, but it’s not that: he’s seen Freddie the ferret, and this time he means to get it.
“That was one hellacious job, but just now it all got finished,” he says. “The kitchen is finito. The electrician was there—everybody working overtime.” He looks at me. “The plumber came, too,” he throws in for good measure.
I bite my tongue. Jason is listening with one ear, as he chases after the ferret. In the doorway he looks at me, confused, but when I turn my expressionless face toward him, he, too, adjusts his expression. “Here, fella,” he calls softly to the ferret, in a quiet, pleasant little voice I know is put on, but that Carl probably doesn’t even register. Only in a Walt Disney animation would the ferret make a U-turn and run to his ankles. Jason waits a few seconds, then tiptoes after the ferret. He’s overacting, making his escape from his lying father, wise enough not to chance staying in the room in case there’s a fight.
Later, when Jason is tucked in (I wink, as if whatever happened is not of any great consequence; he’s too smart to be fooled, but his hesitant smile lets me know he appreciates the gesture), I pick up Carl’s discarded clothes from the bedroom chair and hold the shirt against my nose. You’d think the thing was a scratch-n-sniff strip in a glossy magazine, it’s so permeated with perfume. Just like that. Another woman. Some—as Jason would say—“stupid girl.” I smell it and smell it again. Then I drop it on
the chair. I turn back the covers and climb into bed. I have an image of Jason, in his twin bed, stretched out on his favorite sheets patterned with cowboys galloping on horses. A little boy with lassos twirling all around him. What’s it going to be like for Jason, out on that vast open range?
Gloomily, I turn off my light. Just a couple of nights before, I had considered becoming Carl’s wife. Agreeing to a child. Marrying the charismatic carpenter. The odor of the woman’s perfume is still in my nose. It lingers, and I can’t quite manage a sneeze. I sniff, instead, but my lone tear can’t be inhaled. I wipe it away and turn on my side.
“Quite a job,” Carl says, coming back into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around him.
“You weren’t at that house,” I say. “Jason and I went there, and the place was dark.”
The silence is as deafening as if I’d smacked cymbals together, then thrown them to the floor. Considering the usual messiness of the bedroom, they would also be just one more thing.
“I saw an old high school girlfriend. I thought you’d be jealous, so I didn’t tell you where I was going.”
“You just made that up,” I say.
“What do you mean? You don’t think I’m telling you the truth? You don’t think it’s possible that I was sparing your feelings because you might have misunderstood what was going on?”
“What might I have misunderstood?”
He is sitting on the side of the bed. From the alcohol I can smell on his breath, I have at least part of my answer, anyway. He says nothing.
“You know, I know it from your perspective,” I say. “I know why you think your marriage ended. But what would your wife say? That you were a devoted husband, and she was just catting around?”
“She would have said I was a womanizer,” he says. “That’s what that drunken, bulimic bitch would have said. That was then, and this is now. But in terms of what she would have said, that’s what she would have said. Satisfied?” he asks, but he’s not looking my way. He’s staring straight across the room, to the closed dresser drawers, to the venetian blind lowered to hang straight across, its slats in place. Order, order. Like water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. That old paradox always presented with a bit of malevolence to children. I say it again, silently, to myself. Strange, the silly things that come to you when you’re convinced your life has ended.
—
“Dear me,” Estelle says, rushing to open the door. “To come on such a snowy day as this! I’m so happy to see you, but I can’t imagine why….”
“I’m your favorite boy in all the world,” Jason says, mocking the concept—how inappropriate that whole concept is soon going to be—though Grand-Mam doesn’t yet know it.
“We have a confession to make,” I say, wasting no time.
“Please, come in and warm yourselves. We can certainly discuss whatever you would like to discuss in one short moment, but right now, wouldn’t someone like hot chocolate? Mint tea?”
Jason looks at me. I unbutton my coat and relinquish it. He unzips the dirty white ski parka, which I have yet to return to the Kniessels. Estelle holds it so close to her face that it seems to me for a moment she might be sniffing it. My heart sinks, as if she were me, about to make a terrible discovery.
“Estelle,” I say, following her to the coatrack. “Estelle, we’ve got some unpleasant business to discuss that I know you’re going to be sad to hear.”
“You’re not leaving?” she says. It comes out so fast, she clamps her hand over her mouth immediately afterward, as if she can push the words back inside.
Am I? I wonder. A person with any pride would. Then again, a person who cared about the young person she’d spent a year with wouldn’t just waltz out the door, would she? But her question has rattled me. I sit on her two-seat sofa, in the kitchen, and don’t know what to say. Jason looks miserable. He squirms against my side like a baby.
“Goodness!” Estelle says. “Well, out with it. What is it?”
“Jason made a mistake. He took the money out of your vase by the stove,” I say, gesturing to the vase, which still holds dried flowers. “He feels awful about it, and he knows it was a very bad thing to do.”
“You did?” Estelle says. Her voice is so high-pitched, it almost squeals. “Why did you do such a thing? Wouldn’t I give you anything you wanted?”
“Not a trail bike,” he says bitterly. The suddenness, the intensity with which he speaks, almost paralyzes me. He wanted a trail bike very much, I realize for the first time.
“This is the sort of news that might provoke a heart attack,” Estelle says. “Here I open my home to you and offer you anything I can give you, and in return….” Tears come to her eyes. “I don’t want to see you for some time,” Estelle says. “You must go home now.”
At this, Jason starts to cry. It’s harsher than what I imagined; Jason has deeply disappointed Estelle, but he’s a child. And he’s come to apologize.
Estelle walks out of the room. She sideswipes his coat and it falls off the coatrack. It lies on the floor, but she doesn’t look back. I hear her bedroom door slam shut. This is not what I imagined.
“It took her aback,” I say lamely. “You know how it is when you’re not expecting something.”
He makes fists and rubs his eyes, hard.
“We’ll give her some time alone, and later I’m sure—”
“We have to dig it up!” he says. “I want to give it back to her. Come on.”
Dig it up. I had never thought about that part. It must still be right where he buried it, in her cement urn.
In the kitchen, I find a spoon that isn’t a good spoon. I hand it to Jason. We proceed grimly to the back door, and as we approach I remember the rattan chair Estelle got for us. The andirons. The dizzying rug. Her kind offerings. She put her trust in us, and at the moment it has not worked out very well.
A squirrel jumps off the stone wall, something clamped in its teeth. A male cardinal flashes by, a small plume of red. Everything is quiet, except for the rustle of wind through the snow-covered branches. Jason walks to the urn on the right. He moves like an animal trainer approaching a dangerous beast for the first time, trying to appear self-confident at the same time he intuits he should hesitate. The cosmos have become a mass of frost-frozen stems with congealed flower heads. They grew tall before the frost bit them, though; now, they are tangled and deflated: seaweed washed ashore; fallen scaffolding.
He tries to dig with the spoon, but the soil is frozen. He tries to dig with his hands, but the soil is too solid. I pitch in to help, lowering the urn from the pedestal, turning it on its side and chipping away at the soil with the heel of my boot. Big, white snowflakes fall. Our breath clouds the air.
To my surprise, my heel makes some progress. After a few minutes, a big clump of roots drops out, trailing bits of rock and clotted dirt. Something that looks like a taproot—but what would that be, since cosmos are always delicately rooted?—stretches out, and I see that it is the dirt-smeared paper bag Jason apparently rolled tight and stuffed in the urn. We lift it together, withdrawing it slowly. Inside is the money. I clasp the bag to me, doubling over as if protecting it, somehow, racing back into the house, trailing dirt.
“That’s it,” he says. “That’s all of it.”
“Let’s clean up a bit,” I say. “Let’s clean this whole part of the house, as a matter of fact.”
I look for Estelle’s vacuum in the hall closet, find it, and wheel it out. Jason stands holding the money, relieved but still ashamed. His bright pink cheeks are not only the result of windburn, it seems to me. He’s learned something about how difficult it is to undo a wrong. He is still learning all the time I vacuum.
“Knock on her door. Tell her again that you’re sorry, and that we’re leaving it on the kitchen counter,” I say.
He shakes his head no. I can tell that he is sincere: he cannot bring himself to do this. I walk away from him, feeling gradually calmer as I make my way down the corridor. Calmer, or more r
esigned. “Estelle,” I say. “I know you don’t want to see us now, but please think about talking to us later on the phone. I’ll call you.”
Nothing from her room. No tears, nothing.
“He’s sorry,” I whisper. “I am, too.” I put my head against the door. Silence. I take my head away.
When we are almost to the car, she opens the front door. She has taken off her wig, the too-brown wig with what Carl calls her Mamie Eisenhower bangs. The top of her head is hazed with long strands of hair, like a balding man’s. The hair is a mixture of brown and gray, with gray predominating. She has no bangs of her own. There is only her high, bony forehead. She is wearing glasses, instead of her contact lenses. It is the first time I have ever seen Estelle with her own hair, without her contacts. She stands on the walkway defiantly, and then she speaks: “Maybe you wouldn’t know what it’s like to find yourself with a child to raise because you were a stay-at-home and your glamorous neighbors took off into the wild blue yonder,” she says. “You know what it was? It was hard work and sacrifice. My life changed. I hope you never know what it’s like to have your own life changed that drastically.” She stares at us, hard, then turns and walks back to the house, the wan glare from the sun illuminating shiny skin visible through thin wisps of hair streaming down the back of her head.
“She’s never going to forgive me, is she,” Jason says in a tiny voice. He isn’t asking a question; he’s telling me.
“You know what she’s upset about, don’t you?” I say, once we’re seated in the car.
“The money,” he says.
“Well, yes, but she’s upset because she expected something nobody ever gets. She thought that because she did certain things—that because she was a good person—things would turn out well.”
Whether he understands this or not, he nabs his bottom lip with his front tooth and turns and stares out the window. It’s a snow day, or we wouldn’t have been able to make the visit until school let out. But it’s still only eleven in the morning: there’s the chance of brighter sun as the day goes on.
“Why did she ask if you were leaving?” he says.