Ann Beattie - The State We're In

“And when it’s settled in and bored a hole in your heart, what then?”

“It’s so pointless! You’re not going to be able to do anything about it!” Jocelyn said. “Do you think what you say matters? Do you?”

“This is very distressing,” Raleigh said. “We can only hope we’ve got the story wrong.”

Jocelyn noticed that his limp was more pronounced as it got later in the day. He went to the best chair and sat down.

“This is what people’s children put them through, not their sisters,” Bettina said. “This is bad for my health. You’re right. Let her mess up her life, but we’ve got to look out for Jocelyn.” There it was again! The noble, passive-aggressive bullshit.

“Like how?” Jocelyn said. “Adopt me? Go deeper into debt to send me to college so I can make Cs and Ds?”

“Your teacher has a strange perspective on what an essay should be,” Raleigh said. “I shouldn’t say this, but she referred me to an essay by Flannery O’Connor about peacocks. Let her admire whatever she wants, but this essay is no masterpiece, let me tell you. It’s slightly witty, but she goes on and on about some peacock walking around in her front yard.”

Jocelyn burst into tears. “Summer school was just about farming me out so she could have a good time,” she said.

“Let’s not give up hope,” Raleigh said. “Let’s drive to Myrtis’s and see her and try to talk this through. I think that’s what we should do tonight.”

“Why?” Jocelyn said. “She doesn’t want to see us, she wants to be with the drug addict.”

“Please don’t cause us more heartache,” Bettina said. “Jocelyn, if you go over to Angie’s, I want you to promise we won’t get a call from the police telling us you’re smoking pot at the beach.”

“I don’t do that! I don’t use drugs! How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Would we all like to go out and get some ice cream?” Raleigh said.

“Go out, in this state? I wasn’t this upset when they carried me away on a stretcher.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down then, Bettina?” He turned to Jocelyn. He was looking at her, but she could tell he didn’t see her. “Do you—” His voice broke. “Maybe we could all go to that auction,” he said. “It’s like some reality show is going on in the living room. I feel like I’ve become a raving idiot in my own house. Worse things than this happen all the time. And don’t ask me what they are.”

Bettina whirled around and walked out of the room. The kitchen door did not slam shut because it was a swinging door. Water ran in the sink. Jocelyn looked at her uncle and his eyes met hers. Somehow, the worst of the spell had been broken. Jocelyn felt like vomiting. She went to the sofa and stretched out, kicking off her flip-flops. “Why did this have to happen?” she said. “I don’t want to see her. I don’t. And can you even imagine being in that man’s presence?” Raleigh said nothing. She could hear him breathing deeply. She said, “I don’t even care if you were CIA and she was the Torturer and you’re hiding yourselves like Nazis in Maine and don’t know anybody, because, okay, you know a couple of people, but basically you don’t know anybody. It’s really obvious.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand one thing you just said, Jocelyn.”

“No?”

“Did you mean that we had no friends?”

Now it sounded stupid. Before the golf game, one of his golf buddies had come in for an iced tea. That same morning, someone named Hedda Rae, or something like that, had called to invite them to dinner, and Bettina had lied her way out of it. She admitted she had. “I can’t spend an evening with somebody that boring,” she’d said. Still, Jocelyn thought there was essential truth to what she’d said about their isolation. Truthiness, as Colbert would say. Colbert, who was selling out. How could he? But you weren’t supposed to think about individuals, you were supposed to worry about the planet. The Earth was so fucked. She went into the bathroom and tried to choke up something that wasn’t quite in her stomach, but not in her throat, either. She splashed cold water on her face. She felt horrible.

Music? When she went back to the living room, Raleigh was standing with his hands in his pockets, jingling change and listening to music: more classical sludge, like whale shit, seen blurrily underwater. Hey — that was pretty good! She gave herself a thumbs-up with her yet-again-gnawed cuticle and sank back into the sofa. Her uncle stood with his back to her, looking out the window.

“Will anyone come with me to the auction?” Bettina said. She must have gotten different clothes from the laundry room adjacent to the kitchen. Her baggy slacks were wrinkled, but earlier she’d been wearing a skirt. The T-shirt was also different: dark blue, which accentuated her blue eyes. Raleigh looked blankly at his wife. “Sure,” he said quietly, shrugging. “What about you, Jocelyn?”

This was what was happening? They were going to go to some stupid auction and try to distract themselves, when he no doubt wanted to have a drink and Bettina probably wanted to eat an extra-large pizza? They were so old, so worried all the time, though they tried to make it appear they were in control. “I’ll go,” she heard someone say. She was the one who’d said it.

“Good,” Raleigh said. Her aunt said nothing. She picked up the section of newspaper that gave the address of the auction. “We would’ve been able to inspect things for the last half hour, and what have we done but miss our great opportunity?” Bettina said.

Jocelyn and Raleigh, avoiding looking at each other, got their jackets from the coat hooks in the hallway. In Maine, you learned to always carry a jacket, no matter how warm the evening — and shuffled out of the house with Bettina behind them, making sure the door was locked, pulling the handle three times. It was a signature gesture, as Angie would say. One of Angie’s mother’s signature gestures was to put her face in her hands and cry for several seconds, after which she’d stop abruptly, take eye drops out of her pocket, and tilt her head back, flooding her face with liquid. The day before, Angie had also let drop a convincing detail about her make-out moment with T. G. She said one of her earrings had gotten caught in his arm hair, and she’d cried out, and he’d stopped immediately. Oh god. It was all so ordinary. There was no discharge date for T. G. that her uncle knew. She’d asked him that morning. The youngest son, Ted, was bouncing off the walls, and the parents were going to cave and let him be put on meds, they were so stressed out.

“The Queen Anne’s lace is blooming,” Bettina said. She turned to Jocelyn, who sat curled in the backseat with her legs tucked to one side. “They often have a little black insect right in the center,” Bettina said. “Did you know that?”

Did I know I was fucked? Jocelyn wondered, re-forming the question. She lied about having noticed the flowers; she nodded yes, but Bettina rushed on, wanting to overwhelm everyone with how much information she had. She said, “And roses attract Japanese beetles. That’s something everyone knows.”

The sky was starting to darken. What would it be like to have her own car, to already have been through college? What would it be like to live in Seattle, where you could go on hikes and not always be sitting around some living room, being miserable?

Bettina told Raleigh he was about to miss his turn, and he said, “Sorry about that. Right.”

When they got to South Berwick, Bettina showed him the map. He said the auction was right where he thought it was. The road had potholes that made Jocelyn a little sick to her stomach, but she was feeling better, which was good, because it would have been really bad to feel worse. An auction. She wished it was a movie. She was the only person who hadn’t seen the 3-D movie. Or it would be great if she’d been able to go to a play. Imagine seeing real actors, instead of having to sit for hours watching that kid Emmet Thornton, who lisped, playing Puck? That guy who’d OD’d — the actor in New York. It would have been great to see him in something before he died, though he wasn’t cute. He looked like one of those big-headed dolls people put on their dashboards to wobble their heads. He’d been a father. He had kids who lived with the mother.