by Ann Beattie
“Are you crying?” Vernon said. They were inside their house now, in the hallway, and he had just turned toward her, holding out a pink padded coat hanger.
“No,” she said. “The wind out there is fierce.” She slipped her jacket onto the hanger he held out and went into the downstairs bathroom, where she buried her face in a towel. Eventually, she looked at herself in the mirror. She had pressed the towel hard against her eyes, and for a few seconds she had to blink herself into focus. She was reminded of the kind of camera they had had when Sharon was young. There were two images when you looked through the finder, and you had to make the adjustment yourself so that one superimposed itself upon the other and the figure suddenly leaped into clarity. She patted the towel to her eyes again and held her breath. If she couldn’t stop crying, Vernon would make love to her. When she was very sad, he sensed that his instinctive optimism wouldn’t work; he became tongue-tied, and when he couldn’t talk he would reach for her. Through the years, he had knocked over wineglasses shooting his hand across the table to grab hers. She had found herself suddenly hugged from behind in the bathroom; he would even follow her in there if he suspected that she was going to cry—walk in to grab her without even having bothered to knock.
She opened the door now and turned toward the hall staircase, and then realized—felt it before she saw it, really—that the light was on in the living room.
Vernon lay stretched out on the sofa with his legs crossed; one foot was planted on the floor and his top foot dangled in the air. Even when he was exhausted, he was always careful not to let his shoes touch the sofa. He was very tall, and couldn’t stretch out on the sofa without resting his head on the arm. For some reason, he had not hung up her jacket. It was spread like a tent over his head and shoulders, rising and falling with his breathing. She stood still long enough to be sure that he was really asleep, and then came into the room. The sofa was too narrow to curl up on with him. She didn’t want to wake him. Neither did she want to go to bed alone. She went back to the hall closet and took out his overcoat—the long, elegant camel’s-hair coat he had not worn tonight because he thought it might snow. She slipped off her shoes and went quietly over to where he lay and stretched out on the floor beside the sofa, pulling the big blanket of the coat up high, until the collar touched her lips. Then she drew her legs up into the warmth.
Such odd things happened. Very few days were like the ones before. Here they were, in their own house with four bedrooms, ready to sleep in this peculiar double-decker fashion, in the largest, coldest room of all. What would anyone think?
She knew the answer to that question, of course. A person who didn’t know them would mistake this for a drunken collapse, but anyone who was a friend would understand exactly. In time, both of them had learned to stop passing judgment on how they coped with the inevitable sadness that set in, always unexpectedly but so real that it was met with the instant acceptance one gave to a snowfall. In the white night world outside, their daughter might be drifting past like an angel, and she would see this tableau, for the second that she hovered, as a necessary small adjustment.
HEAVEN ON A SUMMER NIGHT
Will stood in the kitchen doorway. He seemed to Mrs. Camp to be a little tipsy. It was a hot night, but that alone wouldn’t account for his shirt, which was not only rumpled but hanging outside his shorts. Pens, a pack of cigarettes, and what looked like the tip of a handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket. Will tapped his fingertips on the pens. Perhaps he was not tapping them nervously but touching them because they were there, the way Mrs. Camp’s mother used to run her fingers over the rosary beads she always kept in her apron pocket. Will asked Mrs. Camp if she would cut the lemon pound cake she had baked for the morning. She thought that the best thing to do when a person had had too much to drink was to humor him, so she did. Everyone had little weaknesses, to be sure, but Will and his sister had grown up to be good people. She had known them since they were toddlers, back when she had first come to work for the Wildes here in Charlottesville. Will was her favorite, then and now, although Kate probably loved her more. Will was nineteen now, and Kate twenty. On the wall, above the sink, was a framed poem that Kate had written and illustrated when she was in the fifth grade:
Like is a cookie
Love is a cake
Like is a puddle
Love is a lake
Years later, Will told her that Kate hadn’t made up the poem at all. It was something she had learned in school.
Mrs. Camp turned toward Will, who was sitting at the table. “When does school start?” she said.
“There’s a fly!” he said, dropping the slice of cake back onto his plate.
“What?” Mrs. Camp said. She had been at the sink, rinsing glasses before loading them into the dishwasher. She left the water running. The steam rose and thinned out as it floated toward the ceiling. “It’s a raisin,” she said. “You got me all worried about a raisin.”
He plucked some more raisins out of the pound cake and then took another bite.
“If you don’t want to talk about school, that’s one thing, but that doesn’t mean you should holler out that there’s a fly in the food,” Mrs. Camp said.
A year ago, Will had almost flunked out of college, in his sophomore year. His father had talked to the dean by long distance, and Will was allowed to continue. Now, in the summer, Mr. Wilde had hired Will a tutor in mathematics. Mornings and early afternoons, when Will was not being tutored or doing math problems, he painted houses with his friend Anthony Scoresso. Scoreboard and Will were going to drive to Martha’s Vineyard to paint a house there at the end of August. The house was unoccupied, and although she was a little hesitant about doing such a thing, Mrs. Camp was going to accept Will’s invitation to go with the boys and stay in the house for the week they were painting it. Scoreboard loved her cooking. She had never been to the Vineyard.
Now that they were older, Will and Kate included Mrs. Camp in many things. They had always told her everything. That was the difference between being who she was and being a parent—they knew that they could tell her anything. She never met one of their friends without hearing what Will or Kate called the Truth. That handsome blond boy, Neal, who told the long story about hitchhiking to the West Coast, Will told her later, was such a great storyteller because he was on speed. The girl called Natasha who got the grant to study in Italy had actually been married and divorced when she was eighteen, and her parents never even knew it. Rita, whom Mrs. Camp had known since first grade, now slept with a man as old as her father, for money. It pleased Kate and Will when a worried look came over Mrs. Camp’s face as she heard these stories. Years ago, when she told them once that she liked that old song by the Beatles, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Will announced gleefully that the Beatles were singing about a drug.
Kate’s car pulled into the driveway as Mrs. Camp was rinsing the last of the dishes. Kate drove a little white Toyota that made a gentle sound, like rain, as the tires rolled over the gravel. Will got up and pulled open the screen door for his sister on his way to the liquor cabinet. He poured some gin into a glass and walked to the refrigerator and added tonic water but no ice. In this sort of situation, Mrs. Camp’s mother would have advised keeping quiet and saying a prayer. Mrs. Camp’s husband—he was off on a fishing trip on the Chesapeake somewhere—would never advise her to pray, of course. Lately, if she asked him for advice about almost anything, his reply was “Get off my back.” She noticed that Will noticed that she was looking at him. He grinned at her and put down his drink so that he could tuck in his shirt. As he raised the shirt, she had a glimpse of his long, tan back and thought of the times she had held him naked as a baby—all the times she had bathed him, all the hours she had held the hose on him in the backyard. Nowadays, he and Scoreboard sometimes stopped by the house at lunchtime. With their sun-browned bodies flecked with paint, they sat at the table on the porch in their skimpy shorts, waiting for her to bring them lunch. They hardly wore
any more clothes than Will had worn as a baby.
Kate came into the kitchen and dropped her canvas tote bag on the counter. She had been away to see her boyfriend. Mrs. Camp knew that men were always going to fascinate Kate, the way her tropical fish had fascinated her many summers earlier. Mrs. Camp felt that most men moved in slow motion, and that that was what attracted women. It hypnotized them. This was not the way men at work were. On the job, construction workers sat up straight and drove tractors over piles of dirt and banged through potholes big enough to sink a bicycle, but at home, where the women she knew most often saw their men, they spent their time stretched out in big chairs, or standing by barbecue grills, languidly turning a hamburger as the meat charred.
Kate had circles under her eyes. Her long brown hair was pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck. She had spent the weekend, as she had every weekend this summer, with her boyfriend, Frank Crane, at his condominium at Ocean City. He was studying for the bar exam. Mrs. Camp asked Kate how his studying was going, but Kate simply shook her head impatiently. Will, at the refrigerator, found a lime and held it up for them to see, very pleased. He cut off a side, squeezed lime juice into his drink, then put the lime back in the refrigerator, cut side down, on top of the butter-box lid. He hated to wrap anything in wax paper: Mrs. Camp knew that.
“Frank did the strangest thing last night,” Kate said, sitting down and slipping her feet out of her sandals. “Maybe it wasn’t strange. Maybe I shouldn’t say.”
“That’ll be the day,” Will said.
“What happened?” Mrs. Camp said. She thought that Frank was too moody and self-absorbed, and she thought that this was another story that was going to prove her right. Kate looked sulky—or maybe just more tired than Mrs. Camp had noticed at first. Mrs. Camp took a bottle of soda water out of the refrigerator and put it on the table, along with the lime and a knife. She put two glasses on the table and sat down across from Kate. “Perrier?” she said. Kate and Will liked her to call everything by its proper name, unless they had given it a nickname themselves. Secretly, she thought of it as bubble water.
“I was in his bedroom last night, reading, with the sheet pulled up,” Kate said. “His bathroom is across the hall from the bedroom. He went to take a shower, and when he came out of the bathroom I turned back the sheet on his side of the bed. He just stood there, in the doorway. We’d had a kind of fight about that friend of his, Zack. The three of us had gone out to dinner that night, and Zack kept giving the waitress a hard time about nothing. Sassing a waitress because a dab of ice cream was on the saucer when she brought it. Frank knew I was disgusted. Before he took his shower, he went into a big thing about how I wasn’t responsible for his friends’ actions, and said that if Zack had acted as bad as I said he did he’d only embarrassed himself.”
“If Frank passes the bar exam this time around, you won’t have anything to worry about,” Will said. “He’ll act nice again.”
Kate poured a glass of Perrier. “I haven’t told the story yet,” she said.
“Oh,” Will said.
“I thought everything between us was fine. When he stopped in the doorway, I put the magazine down and smiled. Then he said, ‘Kate—will you do something for me?’ ” Kate looked at Mrs. Camp, then dropped her eyes. “We were going to bed, you know,” she said. “I thought things would be better after a while.” Kate looked up. Mrs. Camp nodded and looked down. “Anyway,” Kate went on, “he looked so serious. He said, ‘Will you do something for me?’ and I said, ‘Sure. What?’ and he said, ‘I just don’t know. Can you think of something to cheer me up?’ ”
Will was sipping his drink, and he spilled a little when he started laughing. Kate frowned.
“You take everything so seriously,” Will said. “He was being funny.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Kate said softly.
“What did you do?” Mrs. Camp said.
“He came over to the bed and sat down, finally. I knew he felt awful about something. I thought he’d tell me what was the matter. When he didn’t say anything, I hugged him. Then I told him a story. I can’t imagine what possessed me. I told him about Daddy teaching me to drive. How he was afraid to be in the passenger seat with me at the wheel, so he pretended I needed practice getting into the garage. Remember how he stood in the driveway and made me pull in and pull out and pull in again? I never had any trouble getting into the garage in the first place.” She took another sip of Perrier. “I don’t know what made me tell him that,” she said.
“He was kidding. You said something funny, too, and that was that,” Will said.
Kate got up and put her glass in the sink. It was clear, when she spoke again, that she was talking only to Mrs. Camp. “Then I rubbed his shoulders,” she said. “Actually, I only rubbed them for a minute, and then I rubbed the top of his head. He likes to have his head rubbed, but he gets embarrassed if I start out there.”
—
Kate had gone upstairs to bed. Serpico was on television, and Mrs. Camp watched with Will for a while, then decided that it was time for her to go home. Here it was August 25 already, and if she started addressing Christmas cards tonight she would have a four-month jump on Christmas. She always bought cards the day after Christmas and put them away for the following year.
Mrs. Camp’s car was a 1977 Volvo station wagon. Mr. and Mrs. Wilde had given it to her in May, for her birthday. She loved it. It was the newest car she had ever driven. It was dark, shiny green—a color only velvet could be, the color she imagined Robin Hood’s jacket must have been. Mr. Wilde had told her that he was not leaving her anything when he died but that he wanted to be nice to her when he was above-ground. A strange way to put it. Mrs. Wilde gave her a dozen pink Depression-glass wine goblets at the same time they gave her the car. There wasn’t one nick in any of the rims; the glasses were all as smooth as sea-washed stones.
As she drove, Mrs. Camp wondered if Will had been serious when he said to Kate that Frank was joking. She was sure that Will slept with girls. (Will was not there to rephrase her thoughts. He always referred to young girls as women.) He must have understood that general anxiety or dread Frank had been feeling, and he must also have known that having sex wouldn’t diminish it. It was also possible that Will was only trying to appear uninterested because Kate’s frank talk embarrassed him. “Frank talk” was a pun. Those children had taught her so much. She still felt a little sorry that they had always had to go to stuffy schools that gave them too much homework. She even felt sorry that they had missed the best days of television by being born too late: no Omnibus, no My Little Margie, no Our Miss Brooks. The reruns of I Love Lucy meant nothing to them. They thought Eddie Fisher’s loud tenor voice was funny, and shook their heads in disbelief when Lawrence Welk, looking away from the camera, told folks how nice the song was that had just been sung. Will and Kate had always found so many things absurd and funny. As children, they were as united in their giggling as they were now in their harsh dismissals of people they didn’t care for. But maybe this gave them an advantage over someone like her mother, who always held her tongue, because laughter allowed them to dismiss things; the things were forgotten by the time they ran out of breath.
—
In the living room, Mr. Camp was asleep in front of the television. Serpico was on. She didn’t remember the movie exactly, but she would be surprised if Al Pacino ever got out of his dilemma. She dropped her handbag in a chair and looked at her husband. It was the first time she had seen him in almost two weeks. Since his brother retired from the government and moved to a house on the Chesapeake, Mr. Camp hardly came home at all. Tonight, many cigarettes had been stubbed out in the ashtray on the table beside his chair. He had on blue Bermuda shorts and a lighter blue knit shirt, white socks, and tennis shoes. His feet were splayed on the footstool. When they were young, he had told her that the world was theirs, and, considering the world her mother envisioned for her—the convent—he’d been right. He had taught her, all in one summer,
how to drive, smoke, and have sex. Later, he taught her how to crack crabs and how to dance a rumba.
It was eight o’clock, and outside the light was as blue-gray as fish scales. She went into the kitchen, tiptoeing. She went to the refrigerator and opened the door to the freezer. She knew what she would find, and of course it was there: bluefish, foil wrapped, neatly stacked to within an inch of the top of the freezer. He had made room for all of them by removing the spaghetti sauce. She closed the door and pulled open the refrigerator door. There were the two containers. The next night, she would make up a big batch of spaghetti. The night after that, they would start eating the fish he’d caught. She opened the freezer door and looked again. The shining rectangles rose up like steep silver steps. The white air blowing off the ice, surrounding them and drifting out, made her squint. It might have been clouds, billowing through heaven. If she could shrink to a fraction of her size, she could walk into the cold, close the door, and start to climb.