by Ann Beattie
The last time the whole family was here was for our fortieth wedding anniversary. The TV ran night and day, and no one could keep on top of the chaos in the kitchen. Jenny and Joan had even given friends the phone number, as if they were going into exile instead of visiting their parents for the weekend. The phone rang off the hook. Jenny brought her dog and Joan brought her favorite dalmatian, and the two got into such an awful fight that Jenny’s had to spend the night in the backseat of her car. All night long, inside the house, the other dog paced, wanting to get at it. At the end of the visit, when the last car pulled away, Harriet admitted to me that it had been too much for her. She’d gone into the kitchen and stood a broom upside down in the corner and opened the scissors facing the bristles. She’d interviewed a woman who practiced voodoo, and the woman had told her that that was a surefire way to get rid of guests. Harriet felt a little guilty that it had worked: initially, Denise had said that she was going to leave early Monday morning, but by Sunday noon she was gone—and the last to leave.
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I have in my possession cassettes of music the children thought their mother and I should be aware of, photocopies of grandchildren’s report cards, California wine with a label saying that it was bottled especially for Joan, and an ingenious key chain you can always find because when you whistle, it beeps. My anniversary present from Jenny was a photo album, in a very nice, compact size, called a brag book. She has filled it with pictures of the grandchildren and the husbands and cats and dogs, and with some cartoons that she thought were amusing. And then there was another brag book that was empty, with a note inside saying that I could brag about whatever I wanted.
For a long while the albums just stayed on the coffee table, buried under magazines or Harriet’s fan mail. Then one day when I was coming up the front walk, I looked down and saw a ginkgo leaf. It was as bright as a jewel. I was amazed, even though the neighbor had had that tree, and the leaves had blown over our property, for years. I put the leaf on the coffee table, and then it occurred to me that I could put it in the brag book—press it between the plastic pages—maybe even add some other leaves.
The next day, I put the leaf underneath the plastic, and then I went out and started to look for other leaves. By the end of the week, the book was filled up. I have no memory of doing anything like that as a child. I did collect stamps for a while, but the leaves were a different thing entirely.
To be truthful, there are a few pages in the book right in the middle that aren’t filled, but it’s getting cold and the leaves are losing their color fast. It may be next year before it’s filled. I worked on the front of the book because I had some sense of how I wanted it to begin, and then I filled the back of the book, because I found the perfect leaf to end with, but I wasn’t sure about the rest. I thought there might be some particularly unusual leaves, if I went far enough afield.
So yesterday I drove out to the woods in Batesville, to look. If I’d been looking for birds, there were certainly enough of them. It was the sort of day—with all that blue sky and with the tree bark almost jumping out at you in the strong light—that makes you think: Why don’t I do this every day? Why isn’t everybody out walking? That’s the mystery to me—not that there are so many duplicitous people and so many schemes and crimes, but that out there, in the real world, people are so rarely where they should be. I don’t usually think about mortality, but the albums were a present commemorating forty years of marriage, which would put anyone in mind of what had happened, as well as what was inevitable. That day in the woods, I thought: Don’t run away from the thought of death. Imagine a day at the end of your life. I wasn’t thinking of people who were hospitalized or who saw disaster coming at them on the highway. I was thinking of a day that was calm, that seemed much like other days, when suddenly things speeded up—or maybe slowed down—and everything seemed to be happening with immediacy. The world is going on, and you know it. You’re not decrepit, you’re not in pain, nothing dramatic is happening. A sparrow flies overhead, breeze rustles leaves. You’re going along and suddenly your feet feel the ground. I don’t mean that your shoes are comfortable. Or even that the ground is solid and that you have a moment when you realize that you are a temporary person, passing. I mean that it seems possible to feel the ground, solid below you, while at the same time the air reminds you that there’s a lightness, and then you soak that in, let it sink down, so that suddenly you know that the next wind might blow you over, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. You might squint in the sunlight, look at a leaf spiraling down, genuinely surprised that you were there to see it. A breeze comes again, rippling the surface of a pond. A bird! A leaf! Clouds elongate and stretch thinly across a silvery sky. Flowers, in the distance. Or, in early evening, a sliver of moon. Then imagine that you aren’t there any longer, but at a place where you can touch those things that were always too dazzlingly high or too far in the distance—light-years would have been required to get to them—and suddenly you can pluck the stars from the sky, gather all fallen leaves at once.
ALSO BY ANN BEATTIE
Perceptive and brilliantly exact…
[Beattie] is a novelist of powerful gifts.”
—Newsweek
ANOTHER YOU
This ingenious psychological mystery is set in a small New England college town, where Marshall and Sonja Lockard are, respectively, contemplating adultery and committing it. Marshall’s colleague Jack is fleeing accusations of rape and an enraged spouse, and mystery man “M.” reports on his wife’s mental breakdown through a series of enigmatic letters.
Fiction/0-679-73464-3
CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER
Chilly Scenes of Winter is the irresistibly funny first novel that launched Ann Beattie’s reputation as one of America’s most exciting voices in fiction. It is the story of love-smitten Charles; his friend Sam, the unemployed Phi Beta Kappa college graduate; and Charles’s mother, who spends much of her time in the bathtub feeling depressed.
Fiction/0-679-73234-9
WHAT WAS MINE
These stories give witness to the depth of Ann Beattie’s writing. What Was Mine is filled with tales that combine painterly detail with an uncanny feel for the submerged rhythms of the heart.
Fiction/0-679-73903-3
ALSO AVAILABLE:
The Burning House, 0-679-76500-X
Distortions, 0-679-73235-7
Falling in Place, 0-679-73192-X
Love Always, 0-394-74418-7
My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, 0-679-78132-3
Picturing Will, 0-679-73194-6
Secrets & Surprises, 0-679-73193-8
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).