Ann Beattie - The State We're In

“You called it, Ed,” Dr. Baird said to Dr. Miller.

“Did she, like, see you taking her purse?” Jocelyn asked.

“She’s having a little rest in her chair,” Jenny said. She could match Angie for false brightness any day.

“I don’t have any money and I don’t know how to get home,” Jocelyn said.

“No worries!” Jenny said. “Isn’t that right, Dr. Baird? Trina’s off at four o’clock. She can give you a lift, Jocelyn. Or I can.”

“You could ride in the ambulance with your aunt to the hospital?” Dr. Baird hinted.

“I’m afraid of her,” Jocelyn said.

“Trina will take you home,” Jenny repeated.

“Your uncle? Do you know where he is?” Dr. Baird said.

“Maybe pitching a softball game, or maybe at a mental hospital?”

“He might be at a mental hospital?”

“A friend of mine tried to kill himself,” Jocelyn said.

“Unbelievable,” Dr. Baird said. “Have we tried to get in touch—”

“He didn’t answer his phone,” Jenny said to Dr. Baird.

A red, rotating light on the ceiling let them know the ambulance had arrived without its siren. Dr. Baird excused himself and went to the waiting room. He certainly did not move at White Rabbit speed. Once, playing field hockey, her friend Rachel had tripped on a big rock and broken her ankle. The bone had been sticking out of her foot and there had been blood everywhere when the ambulance arrived. Jocelyn had tried to comfort her by holding her hand and telling her to close her eyes. Which was more than she’d done for Bettina — although Bettina only gave orders, she never listened to anything.

* * *

When the ambulance left and she left with Trina, carrying her aunt’s handbag, no one had heard back from Raleigh.

“You want to know how crazy things can get?” Trina said, starting her car and pulling on her seat belt. Trina had bright blue, squared-off fingernails, which were totally awesome. She was even cooler than Jenny, and Jenny was pretty cool. “Okay, so you tell me where I turn off Route One,” Trina said. “I know York pretty well. One of my friends was there with her boyfriend. Some rich guy didn’t want him to be found because he didn’t want him to be deposed, okay? So they put him in a rental house, and here’s where it turns into a modern-day horror story.” Beep beep . “Damn! Did you hear that? The car keeps unlocking itself. Why would it do that? Like I was saying, though, it’s not exactly Stephen King, but still. You know what the bad guys did? They put yellow jacket nests into the ground, like they were planting flower seeds, because he was way allergic to yellow jacket stings. Aha. So first they relocated the guy, then they had these yellow jackets kill him.”

“Nests in the ground? How do you do that?”

“It’s like I said, you put them in like marigold seeds, or something.”

“No way.”

“After he died, my friend — the one he was living with? She found out that he’d committed a really bizarre crime in another state. She’d been engaged to him! He might have done the same thing to her. When he died, her parents got her to a shrink. She got something called hysterical blindness, which means you lose your sight but nothing’s wrong with you. It’s a conversion disorder. Besides this, it turns out she’s pregnant with the guy’s kid! About the blindness thing, the shrink called Dr. Baird, because he’d been her doctor, right? I’m sure whatever Dr. Baird did was totally correct, because he’s totally a professional. I wouldn’t mind being married to Dr. Baird and having a million dollars. Anyway, my friend’s doing better and she was even lucky enough to have a miscarriage. Her e-mails aren’t censored anymore, so it all worked out, right?”

“It sounds pretty fucked up,” Jocelyn said.

“Well, you have to be really careful of everybody you meet for a really long time. And even then, they lie to you.” Trina reached between the seats and pulled something out of a box. “You can blow these up and pretend they’re cow udders,” she said, holding a latex glove to her lips and blowing into it.

Jocelyn burst into laughter, then clamped her hand over her mouth.

“Okay, let me pull over here. Okay, it’s a text from Dr. Baird that your uncle called and he’s on his way to the hospital. See? It’s all working out.”

“I’m really glad he’s not in California,” Jocelyn said.

“I’d totally love to live there, but it would take me farther away from Dr. Baird,” Trina said. “He came with me on his lunch hour and helped me figure out financing for my car. He gave me a raise at Christmas. I haven’t had a roommate for a year. It’s totally awesome that I go home and do whatever I want.”

“What things do you do?”

Beep beep .

“A for instance? I defrost marinara sauce and eat it with a spoon, no pasta.”

“Does it matter that the car keeps locking and unlocking?” Jocelyn said.

“It’s got a mind of its own. That, or it’s auditioning to be the Road Runner.”

Jocelyn smiled. “My mother loves pasta. She’d want your marinara sauce with linguini,” Jocelyn said.

“Okay, so the thing is, you want it, you can have it, but you want to eat sauce with a spoon, that’s cool too, you know?”

Jocelyn nodded. Somehow, she didn’t feel convinced she’d ever see her mother again — that was the unformed thought that she’d kept in her head like a headache for hours, though now it exploded like a jack-in-the-box. Oh, her old toy box, filled with what her mother called “my eBay nest egg for old age.” It was on a shelf in the closet and she hardly ever thought about any of the things in it anymore. Since Trina had gotten the text message, though, she did believe she’d see Raleigh. Would he be mad at her for not going with Bettina? Her aunt’s purse felt like a boulder in her lap. Jenny and Trina were nice. She thought she’d like to be a working woman like them — they were way cooler than Ms. Nementhal — though Dr. Baird certainly wasn’t her type.

“What’s the story with living with your aunt and uncle?” Trina said. She turned on the radio, so whatever Jocelyn said was sure to be partially drowned out by heavy metal.

“My mom had a hysterectomy, so she sent me here for the summer,” Jocelyn said.

“She did? That’s no big whoop anymore. I bet they sucked out her uterus using a laparoscope instead of cutting an incision. She’ll be fine.”

“Yeah,” Jocelyn said.

“She can wear her bikini again!” Trina said.

Jocelyn looked at her.

“Are you an only?”

“What?”

“Only child.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“I thought so. So am I. Only children are really bright and sensitive, you know? I’d be totally perfect for Dr. Baird, if he only realized it. Ha!”

“You’ve really got a crush on him,” Jocelyn said.

“Well, yeah ,” Trina said. “But his wife’s this Harvard graduate, and they already have three kids and a Labradoodle. Before they ended the space program, she grew up wanting to be an astronaut.”

“Were you kidding about the bees?” Jocelyn said. “You turn at the light. Left.”

Trina put on her directional signal. “Bees?” she said.

“Yeah. That killed that guy.”

“Yellow jackets, not bees. No, it’s true, he died. He was a freak, though. I don’t know how she hooked up with him. A freak can’t keep it hidden, I don’t think. Though there was that guy who cut people’s lawns and was really a mass murderer.”

“What?”

“BTK. Bind, torture, kill, I think it was. He was married! She divorced him!”

She’d heard something about that, but she tried not to think about such things. There’d also been the guy who lived in his car and thought his dog was telling him to kill people. She’d found out about him reading one of Zelda’s graphic novels. Trina would probably know exactly who that guy had been. She would also have seen the 3-D Planet of the Apes . Of course she would have. And asked for extra butter on her popcorn. Trina seemed to be in her late twenties, maybe early thirties. By the time she herself was thirty, she hoped to have the courage to ask for butter anytime she wanted it — more butter, and more butter. Bettina, who was huge, put little dabs of butter on their corn with a tiny knife, as if she were cleaning someone else’s ear with a Q-tip.