by Ann Beattie
“Are we ready?” I ask. Lyric clips her Walkman to her fanny pack, which she wears pouch forward. She puts on the earphones and turns on the music and does a few dance steps in silent acknowledgment of my question. “I want you to carry me,” Nell says, reaching up. This is because she’s afraid of encountering the fat girl; she usually hates to be carried. Still, I heft all forty-two pounds of her, shift her to one arm, and with my other hand pick up the sack I’ve packed with the daily bagel, the USA Today Nikki always leaves outside our door, with a photocopied note stapled to it reminding us that she does deep tissue massage “by appointment or even on spur moments,” sunblock in two strengths, Evian water in a thermal bottle, Nell’s coloring book and crayons. Janet—my father’s child of his youth, while I was the child of his old age, and don’t I sympathize today, schlepping around a forty-two-pounder…my sister, as I think of her more simply, is in an air-conditioned room at something called the Yarrow, learning how to perfect her screenplay about Sally Hemmings, servant to, and alleged lover of, Thomas Jefferson. Originally, the screenplay began in the present day, with the mounted heads of the animal trophies brought back by Lewis and Clark that were hung on the walls at Monticello talking to each other about the odd goings-on at night, but when I lost it entirely and almost died laughing, she was forced to see what she’d written in a new light. I know she’s changed the beginning, though she’s refused to ever show it to me again. P.O.V. moose. That’s my perspective for the day: P.O.V. moose. You can imagine how strange that makes Park City look, as we exit the condo.
—
But it’s just a place: yuppified, restored, renovated, repainted, recast. One shop dips perfectly good Oreo cookies into dark chocolate and sells them for a markup that might make simple Oreo fanciers faint. At another store you can have your picture taken by a camera attached to a computer, after which it’s put through another machine that fragments the image, then sends it through a tube, and when it emerges, it’s been altered into one of those optical-trick pictures. You have to stare at the maze of indecipherable pattern and let your eyes go out of focus until you see a three-dimensional version of yourself. I had one made my first day in Park City, which I intended to send to Hale, back in the nanosecond of sentimentality when I thought we should probably still stay in touch, but it turned out so frightening that I only showed it to Nikki for corroboration of how awful it was (when it came into—or is it out of?—focus, she put her hands over her mouth and inhaled sharply). The thought occurred to me that an enterprising businessperson might realize that small ones might make excellent, repellent business cards. The picture was of me as I was dressed that day, in a baseball cap turned backward. Giggly Nell had painted a cross on my forehead with the zinc oxide I’d applied to her nose, and I’d forgotten about it when I got in front of the camera, so I looked like some deranged cult person or, at the very least, someone making an untimely protest against Ash Wednesday. As the background, I selected rockets being fired, but when you first looked at the picture it seemed to be just nice abstract shades of red and yellow in a sort of herringbone pattern. I apparently selected some other element I didn’t realize I was choosing, because when I saw the picture, all the rockets were rising as a maze, and I was above the maze, floating 2001-ish, tipped slightly forward. I ended up looking like some monstrous apparition with weird war paint that had already descended from space while the rockets were wasting their time going exploring.
“Check it out,” Lyric says to me from her lounge. Above us, a woman in white and a man are floating in a big balloon. The balloon has descended enough that we can see it’s a bride. She’s cake-ornament small, but I swear: you can see her smile. The dark, tiny groom stands next to her. There they go, borne on the breezes of optimism.
“Do you think they got married in the air?” Lyric says.
“People get married on cruise ships all the time. I suppose they could have,” I say.
“I mean, who’s supposed to throw confetti? The angels?”
She lowers the back of her chaise and turns onto her stomach. She reaches back and unties the string of her bikini top. On the other lounge, Nell has fallen asleep clasping the bagel half near her lips like a big pacifier. Fortunately, I slathered her with sunblock before she fell asleep. The curls that have escaped the barrette blow in the breeze, while the painted Pocahontas kneels resolutely, braced for anything.
Someone’s beeper goes off.
A waitress passes by carrying a tray with two bowls of salad on it with little state-of-Utah flags stuck in them and two bottles of beer. She exaggerates the swing of her hips. That’s because Euro boner is back today, and it turns out he’s a big tipper. She almost swooned a while ago when he said, “Keep the change.”
In Utah, it seems to be a rule that bartenders can only pour five ounces of wine at a time—enough to intoxicate Thumbelina, but a modest half glass for the rest of us—though it seems they can serve a person an entire bottle of beer, which is curious.
A screenplay about Sally Hemmings. Janet’s sincere plan for an organizing principle for the rest of her life seems to be completing this screenplay.
Someone is reading a tabloid. Margaux Hemingway, who has died, is depicted on the cover. Her lips are deep pink, her eyebrows penciled dark. She definitely did not strive for the Clinique natural look.
“May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung,” Dylan sings. I’m actually hearing the song, not just remembering it. It’s floating on the breeze—from where? From somewhere distant.
But oh, Bobecito, we are already no longer young. Which might not be so bad in itself, except that the world doesn’t seem young any longer, either. I mean, self-absorption aside, who thought both things would happen simultaneously? The world really seems to be slipping: global warming; the population explosion. What compounds the problem is that once any group starts to be condescended to in the guise of being catered to—once yuppies say yes, and buy the yuppified Oreos they’re offered—it’s all over. They’re taking the bait, they’re eating saltpeter, they’re becoming impervious to excess, and to surprise. They’re just more people trying to keep up the excitement level by having adventure weddings, adventure honeymoons, adventure babies.
This is the way Janet would prefer I not talk when I can be overheard by anyone who might influence her destiny. Meaning: Damon. She’s every bit as cynical as I am—haven’t we been hearing that heredity explains almost everything?—but she would prefer that I be silent, and that my silence be mistaken for judiciousness. I am, after all, in charge of her most precious possession. I’m her dependable sister whose life has never bottomed out, the slightly introverted, interesting blond counterpart to her extroversion, her slightly horsey, Andie MacDowell–ish beauty. Her looks come from her Brazilian mother: the high cheekbones; the dark, cascading hair. Janet’s mother was so beautiful that my own mother never minded the painting of her that hung over my father’s desk. Of course, the woman in the painting was dead and was therefore no threat, unless someone was far more neurotic than my mother and thought that the painting was hung because he was still in love with his first wife. My mother didn’t think that. All she wondered was whether he ever loved anyone except himself. For a long time in the seventies, it was fashionable for women to think about their husbands that way, though; after a few years of marriage, it came upon them almost the way people get colds when the seasons change.
Lyric turns on her side. “Are you always thinking?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have, like, these deep inner thoughts?” She turns sideways, propping herself on an elbow.
“Does something make you think I do?”
“I wish I had them,” she says. “Do you like, get them when you get older? Damon”—she calls her father by his first name: none of that “Daddy” stuff—“it’s like he’s always trying to come down from sensory overload without totally crashing, you know? He calls it brain buzz. Have you ever heard a buzz?”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s like those diseases that are stored in your nerve cells and they reappear. If you have chicken pox, it can stay dormant for years, and then you might get shingles. But maybe if it’s something inside your brain, the stored stuff gets tired of waiting to break out and it starts to rumble, or something.”
“Run that by me again,” I say.
“You seem, like, really bright. It seems like you’re always thinking. Because, I mean, if people are talkative, they’re not necessarily thinking, they’re just talking, you know? And you don’t seem to be a very talkative person.”
“I was thinking about my father. He died last year,” I say. “While I was sitting here, I heard some music that made me sad. It made me think of him.”
“Ooh,” she says. “I do this all the time. I go fishing, and then I don’t know what to do when I catch a fish.”
“I guess you can put it back in the water,” I say.
She smiles. “You have an interesting way of talking,” she says. “You should talk more.”
Is she right about my not being talkative? If so, I realize for the first time why that might be. “Don’t take this wrong, but part of the problem might be that while I’m very fond of the people I hang out with, I’m thirty-one and you’re fourteen. And Nell is three, and your father is fifty, and my sister is thirty-nine.”
“The age thing is what you think it is? I mean, like, I don’t have any problem talking to people because of what age they are.”
“You’re very gregarious. You talk to everybody.”
“It comes from being self-involved,” she says. “What I’m really doing is projecting my anxiety.”
I look at her, surprised.
“He sent me to a psychologist after the Amsterdam thing,” she says.
“Oh,” I say.
“But you know another thing,” she says. “When you do talk, you probably really want to connect with people. I think I just like to talk.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” I say.
“No. I’ve thought about it.”
I consider what she’s said. “Well, if you’re on to yourself, you’ve got a chance to change,” I say.
“I get discouraged, because my limitations all seem to have sorted themselves out while I was sleeping, or something. I mean, I live with Damon, and unless I run away again and he finds me again, I’m going to be living with him until I go to college—right? That’s a joke. I do not envision college. But what I’m saying is that Damon’s never going to change, is he?”
“People are pretty much the way they’re going to be at that age,” I say.
“Right. So I’m going to have to watch him bait your sister and then send her flying,” she says. “A year from now, no chance I’ll know you people.”
I look at her, startled.
“What?” she says. “You said you had trouble talking to people who weren’t your age, so I’m trying to talk seriously to you.”
“Well…what exactly are you saying?”
“Don’t you know? He’s got a violent temper. He scares the shit out of women. He scared my mother so much and he made her feel so powerless that she decided the only thing she could do was get away from him and also become a man for safe measure. I know that sounds funny, but she used to talk to me about it. She’d be lifting weights she kept hidden under her bed, and she’d talk about him through clenched teeth, with the bedroom door closed.”
“What did he…he has a violent temper?” I shift onto one hip, leaning toward her. “Has he ever hurt you?”
“No,” she says. “I’ve got what’s-it-called. I’ve got immunity. So far, at least, and there have been more than a few times when I’ve really pushed his buttons.”
“But you’re not saying he’d do anything to really hurt Janet, are you?”
“He’s more a bully than a hitter,” Lyric says.
“A hitter? Did he hit your mother?”
“They used to have shoving matches. He didn’t really hit her, I don’t think. But she always lost. He could stay solid as a sandbag, but the energy would just drain right out of her.”
“Jesus. That’s horrible,” I say.
She waves her hand at me dismissively. “You even get upset by violent cartoons.”
My thoughts are bottlenecking; how exactly should I bring this up with Janet? If Lyric was wondering what was going on inside my head, I was naive not to wonder what was going on inside hers.
“He’s been that way with women other than your mother?” I say weakly.
“Yeah, he’s always that way, eventually,” she says.
“I don’t suppose it’s something you’ve ever tried to talk to him about? I mean, I guess you wouldn’t get very far, being fourteen years old.”
“I wouldn’t get very far if I was sixty years old, and he was a hundred and ten. You’ve seen how he shuts down conversation about anything he doesn’t want to hear.”
In fact, I have. When I was complaining about how the fate of Park City indicated the downward spiral of the modern world, I could see from the way he looked right through me that such observations were not appreciated. I close my eyes and envision my sister just the way Lyric described her: small and snagged on a fishhook. Then I see her spiral out, across choppy water. I immediately open my eyes, and all the people around the pool seem very particular, very distinct, very real.
“I’ve had girlfriends who’ve had boyfriends or fathers, or whatever, who’ve really gotten rough with them. I testified against one girl’s stepfather. Some guy came to the house and I gave a deposition. It’s not that unusual. I mean, it’s a lot more likely that one of those lawyer guys, or whatever they are, are going to show up than that they’ll ring your doorbell because you’ve won the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.”
“I don’t think I know anybody personally who was ever beaten up. But it’s so prevalent. It must have happened to someone I know, but no one ever told me that.”
“You seem pretty observant,” Lyric says. “I mean, you seem like the sort of person who’d put two and two together if a friend said she walked into a wall. Just think about Nicole. I mean, no one with half a brain ever had any doubt about whether he really beat up Nicole, right?”
“Right,” I say.
“I don’t want to go so far as to say that Damon’s a Bruno Magli man,” Lyric says.
“But still,” I say.
She sighs again. “You’re right,” she says. “ ‘But still.’ ”
“I want ice cream,” Nell says, touching my arm. I’m so much in another world that when she touches me, I jump. I look at her and think how vulnerable she is. How vulnerable we all are. How long has she been listening?
“Because this bagel got all sweaty, and it tastes like lotion, and I’m tired of bagels, too,” she says. That’s Nell: always developing her thoughts fully in order to convince you. I smile at her fondly.
“If I give you the money, can you go get it yourself?” I say.
She looks at me, perturbed. “I’m not big enough that they can see me,” she says. She looks over at the bar, which is not where she’d go for an ice cream. That’s where she’d go for five ounces of wine, if she were my age. And in need of a drink, which I think I might be.
“No, sweetie, you don’t go to that window. You just ask the waitress.”
“You do it,” she says.
“When the waitress comes by, we’ll get you an ice cream. What kind do you want?”
“Pink,” she says.
“If they don’t have strawberry, what’s the next choice?”
“Find out if they have it!” she says.
“Hel-lo? Am I a ghost?” Lyric says.
“Oh,” I say. “Sorry. What kind do you want?”
“I want pink, too,” she says.
“And I don’t suppose you have a backup if they don’t have pink?”
“Green,” she says.
Great: the alternative is pistac
hio.
When the waitress does appear, Nell is sitting on the edge of her lounge, like the relative of someone in an operating room, frantic for news. The flavors are: Cherry Garcia (pink with cherries and chocolate, I explain: she’ll like it); Swiss almond fudge; and nonfat banana yogurt. I order a Corona, which the man next to Lyric is drinking. Lyric decides on Swiss almond fudge. I cancel my beer and order banana yogurt. Nell, still squinting as she assimilates the information about Cherry Garcia, looks like the doctor has just explained the patient’s condition in language too technical to understand. “Does it have coconut?” she says, worrying aloud. “No,” the waitress and I say in unison. “Jerry Garcia was only about the greatest musician who ever lived,” Lyric says. “I mean, I can understand being a total, absolute Deadhead.”
“What does she say is in it?” Nell says to me.
“No coconut. Believe me, you’ll like it.”
“Okay,” Nell says hesitantly.
“Hey, Cindy, let me have another one of these,” the man next to Lyric says, holding up his empty bottle. The waitress takes his bottle without comment and walks away, not sashaying a bit.
“It is like so weird to be in a state where almost nobody drinks,” Lyric says. “I mean, it’s against their religious beliefs to drink, but at the same time, they think stuff that people with the D.T.’s think, like that there are spirit babies floating around in heaven they’ve got to round up and find a way to give birth to.”