by Ann Beattie
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. Is that sherry in that bottle? Do you mind…”
“I’ll get it for you,” Mrs. Esposito says.
“Well, who knows what anybody wants from anybody,” his mother says. “Real love comes to naught. I loved your father and we had a dwarf.”
“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” MacDonald says. He takes the glass of sherry from Mrs. Esposito.
“I shouldn’t? I have to raise a dwarf and take care of him for thirty-eight years and then in my old age he leaves me. Who should I blame for that?”
“James,” MacDonald says. “But he didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I should blame your father,” his mother says, as if he hasn’t spoken. “But he’s dead. Who should I blame for his early death? God?”
His mother does not believe in God. She has not believed in God for thirty-eight years.
“I had to have a dwarf. I wanted grandchildren, and I know you won’t give me any because you’re afraid you’ll produce a dwarf. Clem is dead, and Amy is dead. Bring me some of that sherry, too, Carlotta.”
—
At five o’clock MacDonald calls his wife. “Honey,” he says, “I’m going to be tied up in this meeting until seven. I should have called you before.”
“That’s all right,” she says. “Have you eaten?”
“No. I’m in a meeting.”
“We can eat when you come home.”
“I think I’ll grab a sandwich, though. Okay?”
“Okay. I got the parakeet.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“It’s awful. I’ll be glad to have it out of here.”
“What’s so awful about a parakeet?”
“I don’t know. The man at the pet store gave me a Ferris wheel with it, and a bell on a chain of seeds.”
“Oh yeah? Free?”
“Of course. You don’t think I’d buy junk like that, do you?”
“I wonder why he gave it to you.”
“Oh, who knows. I got gin and vermouth today.”
“Good,” he says. “Fine. Talk to you later.”
MacDonald takes off his tie and puts it in his pocket. At least once a week he goes to a run-down bar across town, telling his wife that he’s in a meeting, putting his tie in his pocket. And once a week his wife remarks that she doesn’t understand how he can get his tie wrinkled. He takes off his shoes and puts on sneakers, and takes an old brown corduroy jacket off a coat hook behind his desk. His secretary is still in her office. Usually she leaves before five, but whenever he leaves looking like a slob she seems to be there to say good night to him.
“You wonder what’s going on, don’t you?” MacDonald says to his secretary.
She smiles. Her name is Betty, and she must be in her early thirties. All he really knows about his secretary is that she smiles a lot and that her name is Betty.
“Want to come along for some excitement?” he says.
“Where are you going?”
“I knew you were curious,” he says.
Betty smiles.
“Want to come?” he says. “Like to see a little low life?”
“Sure,” she says.
They go out to his car, a red Toyota. He hangs his jacket in the back and puts his shoes on the backseat.
“We’re going to see a Japanese woman who beats people with figurines,” he says.
Betty smiles. “Where are we really going?” she asks.
“You must know that businessmen are basically depraved,” MacDonald says. “Don’t you assume that I commit bizarre acts after hours?”
“No,” Betty says.
“How old are you?” he asks.
“Thirty,” she says.
“You’re thirty years old and you’re not a cynic yet?”
“How old are you?” she asks.
“Twenty-eight,” MacDonald says.
“When you’re thirty you’ll be an optimist all the time,” Betty says.
“What makes you optimistic?” he asks.
“I was just kidding. Actually, if I didn’t take two kinds of pills, I couldn’t smile every morning and evening for you. Remember the day I fell asleep at my desk? The day before I had had an abortion.”
MacDonald’s stomach feels strange—he wouldn’t mind having a couple kinds of pills himself, to get rid of the strange feeling. Betty lights a cigarette, and the smoke doesn’t help his stomach. But he had the strange feeling all day, even before Betty spoke. Maybe he has stomach cancer. Maybe he doesn’t want to face James again. In the glove compartment there is a jar that Mrs. Esposito gave his mother and that his mother gave him to take to James. One of Mrs. Esposito’s relatives sent it to her, at her request. It was made by a doctor in Puerto Rico. Supposedly, it can increase your height if rubbed regularly on the soles of the feet. He feels nervous, knowing that it’s in the glove compartment. The way his wife must feel having the parakeet and the Ferris wheel sitting around the house. The house. His wife. Betty.
They park in front of a bar with a blue neon sign in the window that says IDEAL CAFÉ. There is a larger neon sign above that that says SCHLITZ. He and Betty sit in a back booth. He orders a pitcher of beer and a double order of spiced shrimp. Tammy Wynette is singing “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” on the jukebox.
“Isn’t this place awful?” he says. “But the spiced shrimp are great.”
Betty smiles.
“If you don’t feel like smiling, don’t smile,” he says.
“Then all the pills would be for nothing.”
“Everything is for nothing,” he says.
“If you weren’t drinking you could take one of the pills,” Betty says. “Then you wouldn’t feel that way.”
—
“Did you see Esquire?” James asks.
“No,” MacDonald says. “Why?”
“Wait here,” James says.
MacDonald waits. A dwarf comes into the room and looks under his chair. MacDonald raises his feet.
“Excuse me,” the dwarf says. He turns cartwheels to leave the room.
“He used to be with the circus,” James says, returning. “He leads us in exercises now.”
MacDonald looks at Esquire. There has been a convention of dwarfs at the Oakland Hilton, and Esquire got pictures of it. Two male dwarfs are leading a delighted female dwarf down a runway. A baseball team of dwarfs. A group picture. Someone named Larry—MacDonald does not look back up at the picture to see which one he is—says, “I haven’t had so much fun since I was born.” MacDonald turns another page. An article on Daniel Ellsberg.
“Huh,” MacDonald says.
“How come Esquire didn’t know about our dwarf house?” James asks. “They could have come here.”
“Listen,” MacDonald says, “Mother asked me to bring this to you. I don’t mean to insult you, but she made me promise I’d deliver it. You know she’s very worried about you.”
“What is it?” James asks.
—
MacDonald gives him the piece of paper that Mrs. Esposito wrote instructions on in English.
“Take it back,” James says.
“No. Then I’ll have to tell her you refused it.”
“Tell her.”
“No. She’s miserable. I know it’s crazy, but just keep it for her sake.”
James turns and throws the jar. Bright yellow liquid runs down the wall.
“Tell her not to send you back here either,” James says. MacDonald thinks that if James were his size he would have hit him instead of only speaking.
“Come back and hit me if you want,” MacDonald hollers. “Stand on the arm of this chair and hit me in the face.”
James does not come back. A dwarf in the hallway says to MacDonald, as he is leaving, “It was a good idea to be sarcastic to him.”
MacDonald and his wife and mother and Mrs. Esposito stand amid a cluster of dwarfs and one giant waiting for the wedding to begin. James and his bride are being married on the lawn outside the church. They are sti
ll inside with the minister. His mother is already weeping. “I wish I had never married your father,” she says, and borrows Mrs. Esposito’s handkerchief to dry her eyes. Mrs. Esposito is wearing her jungle dress again. On the way over she told MacDonald’s wife that her husband had locked her out of the house and that she only had one dress. “It’s lucky it was such a pretty one,” his wife said, and Mrs. Esposito shyly protested that it wasn’t very fancy, though.
The minister and James and his bride come out of the church onto the lawn. The minister is a hippie, or something like a hippie: a tall, white-faced man with stringy blond hair and black motorcycle boots. “Friends,” the minister says, “before the happy marriage of these two people, we will release this bird from its cage, symbolic of the new freedom of marriage, and of the ascension of the spirit.”
The minister is holding the cage with the parakeet in it.
“MacDonald,” his wife whispers, “that’s the parakeet. You can’t release a pet into the wild.”
His mother disapproves of all this. Perhaps her tears are partly disapproval, and not all hatred of his father.
The bird is released: it flies shakily into a tree and disappears into the new spring foliage.
The dwarfs clap and cheer. The minister wraps his arms around himself and spins. In a second the wedding ceremony begins, and just a few minutes later it is over. James kisses the bride, and the dwarfs swarm around them. MacDonald thinks of a piece of Hershey bar he dropped in the woods once on a camping trip, and how the ants were all over it before he finished lacing his boot. He and his wife step forward, followed by his mother and Mrs. Esposito. MacDonald sees that the bride is smiling beautifully—a smile no pills could produce—and that the sun is shining on her hair so that it sparkles. She looks small, and bright, and so lovely that MacDonald, on his knees to kiss her, doesn’t want to get up.
SNAKES’ SHOES
The little girl sat between her uncle Sam’s legs. Alice and Richard, her parents, sat next to them. They were divorced, and Alice had remarried. She was holding a ten-month-old baby. It had been Sam’s idea that they all get together again, and now they were sitting on a big flat rock not far out into the pond.
“Look,” the little girl said.
They turned and saw a very small snake coming out of a crack between two rocks on the shore.
“It’s nothing,” Richard said.
“It’s a snake,” Alice said. “You have to be careful of them. Never touch them.”
“Excuse me,” Richard said. “Always be careful of everything.”
That was what the little girl wanted to hear, because she didn’t like the way the snake looked.
“You know what snakes do?” Sam asked her.
“What?” she said.
“They can tuck their tail into their mouth and turn into a hoop.”
“Why do they do that?” she asked.
“So they can roll down hills easily.”
“Why don’t they just walk?”
“They don’t have feet. See?” Sam said.
The snake was still; it must have sensed their presence.
“Tell her the truth now,” Alice said to Sam.
The little girl looked at her uncle.
“They have feet, but they shed them in the summer,” Sam said. “If you ever see tiny shoes in the woods, they belong to the snakes.”
“Tell her the truth,” Alice said again.
“Imagination is better than reality,” Sam said to the little girl.
The little girl patted the baby. She loved all the people who were sitting on the rock. Everybody was happy, except that in the back of their minds the grown-ups thought that their being together again was bizarre. Alice’s husband had gone to Germany to look after his father, who was ill. When Sam learned about this, he called Richard, who was his brother. Richard did not think that it was a good idea for the three of them to get together again. Sam called the next day, and Richard told him to stop asking about it. But when Sam called again that night, Richard said sure, what the hell.
They sat on the rock looking at the pond. Earlier in the afternoon a game warden had come by and he let the little girl look at the crows in the trees through his binoculars. She was impressed. Now she said that she wanted a crow.
“I’ve got a good story about crows,” Sam said to her. “I know how they got their name. You see, they all used to be sparrows, and they annoyed the king, so he ordered one of his servants to kill them. The servant didn’t want to kill all the sparrows, so he went outside and looked at them and prayed, ‘Grow. Grow.’ And miraculously they did. The king could never kill anything as big and as grand as a crow, so the king and the birds and the servant were all happy.”
“But why are they called crows?” the little girl said.
“Well,” Sam said, “long, long ago, a historical linguist heard the story, but he misunderstood what he was told and thought that the servant had said ‘crow,’ instead of ‘grow.’ ”
“Tell her the truth,” Alice said.
“That’s the truth,” Sam said. “A lot of our vocabulary is twisted around.”
“Is that true?” the little girl asked her father.
“Don’t ask me,” he said.
—
Back when Richard and Alice were engaged, Sam had tried to talk Richard out of it. He told him that he would be tied down; he said that if Richard hadn’t gotten used to regimentation in the air force he wouldn’t even consider marriage at twenty-four. He was so convinced that it was a bad idea that he cornered Alice at the engagement party (there were heart-shaped boxes of heart-shaped mints wrapped in paper printed with hearts for everybody to take home) and asked her to back down. At first Alice thought this was amusing. “You make me sound like a vicious dog,” she said to Sam. “It’s not going to work out,” Sam said. “Don’t do it.” He showed her the little heart he was holding. “Look at these goddamned things,” he said.
“They weren’t my idea. They were your mother’s,” Alice said. She walked away. Sam watched her go. She had on a lacy beige dress. Her shoes sparkled. She was very pretty. He wished she would not marry his brother, who had been kicked around all his life—first by their mother, then by the air force (“Think of me as you fly into the blue,” their mother had written Richard once. Christ!)—and now would be watched over by a wife.
The summer Richard and Alice married, they invited Sam to spend his vacation with them. It was nice that Alice didn’t hold grudges. She also didn’t hold a grudge against her husband, who burned a hole in an armchair and who tore the mainsail on their sailboat beyond repair by going out on the lake in a storm. She was a very patient woman. Sam found that he liked her. He liked the way she worried about Richard out in a boat in the middle of the storm. After that, Sam spent part of every summer vacation with them, and went to their house every Thanksgiving. Two years ago, just when Sam was convinced that everything was perfect, Richard told him that they were getting divorced. The next day, when Sam was alone with Alice after breakfast, he asked why.
“He burns up all the furniture,” she said. “He acts like a madman with that boat. He’s swamped her three times this year. I’ve been seeing someone else.”
“Who have you been seeing?”
“No one you know.”
“I’m curious, Alice. I just want to know his name.”
“Hans.”
“Hans. Is he a German?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in love with this German?”
“I’m not going to talk about it. Why are you talking to me? Why don’t you go sympathize with your brother?”
“He knows about this German?”
“His name is Hans.”
“That’s a German name,” Sam said, and he went outside to find Richard and sympathize with him.
Richard was crouching beside his daughter’s flower garden. His daughter was sitting on the grass across from him, talking to her flowers.
“You haven’t been both
ering Alice, have you?” Richard said.
“Richard, she’s seeing a goddamned German,” Sam said.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“What are you talking about?” the little girl asked.
That silenced both of them. They stared at the bright orange flowers.
—
“Do you still love her?” Sam asked after his second drink.
They were in a bar, off a boardwalk. After their conversation about the German, Richard had asked Sam to go for a drive. They had driven thirty or forty miles to this bar, which neither of them had seen before and neither of them liked, although Sam was fascinated by a conversation now taking place between two blond transvestites on the bar stools to his right. He wondered if Richard knew that they weren’t really women, but he hadn’t been able to think of a way to work it into the conversation, and he started talking about Alice instead.
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I think you were right. The air force, Mother, marriage—”
“They’re not real women,” Sam said.
“What?”
Sam thought that Richard had been staring at the two people he had been watching. A mistake on his part; Richard had just been glancing around the bar.
“Those two blonds on the bar stools. They’re men.”
Richard studied them. “Are you sure?” he said.
“Of course I’m sure. I live in N.Y.C., you know.”
“Maybe I’ll come live with you. Can I do that?”
“You always said you’d rather die than live in New York.”
“Well, are you telling me to kill myself, or is it okay if I move in with you?”
“If you want to,” Sam said. He shrugged. “There’s only one bedroom, you know.”
“I’ve been to your apartment, Sam.”
“I just wanted to remind you. You don’t seem to be thinking too clearly.”
“You’re right,” Richard said. “A goddamned German.”
The barmaid picked up their empty glasses and looked at them.
“This gentleman’s wife is in love with another man,” Sam said to her.
“I overheard,” she said.
“What do you think of that?” Sam asked her.