Ann Beattie - The State We're In

Bettina was riveted. Jocelyn was biting her bottom lip. Good god, was her aunt going to bid on it? No one was bidding. The set was already down to two hundred dollars. Jocelyn looked at Raleigh, who was looking at Bettina. He was clutching her hand so she didn’t raise it. It was at one eighty. Bettina’s card flew into the air. “Thank you kindly, and who gives one-ninety? One ninety? One ninety-five! Thank you, sir. At one ninety-five. Going once… thank you sir, two hundred. And two ten, yes, ma’am, lovely furniture — you got yourself a sweetheart, you plunk down on any of these pieces and it’ll be a memorable evening… two twenty’s the bid I’m looking for. Hold that chair up, Donald. I’m at two ten. Who’ll make it two twenty? Real velvet upholstery. Going once, twice.” The gavel came down.

Two hundred and ten dollars was the final bid, from someone behind them. Jocelyn’s stomach turned over. It was Ms. Nementhal, she knew it. How could it not be? It was too perfect. Shit! Her aunt was craning her neck around to see who’d won it, but she’d never seen Ms. Nementhal, Raleigh had. Oh, please let me get out of here without having to speak to Ms. Nementhal, she prayed, and she didn’t even believe in God, though what could you lose by saying a prayer? For weeks, she’d been thinking silent prayers. Her mother often talked about the Hand of Fate, which was even more ridiculous than believing in God.

A brass bed sold, and a chamber pot got a surprising number of bids. A birdcage with bird toys still in it went to the man in the wheelchair, who unlocked the chair’s brakes and wheeled away to pay for it immediately. A floor lamp sold, its lightbulb still working. When the gavel came down for the last time, she turned to her aunt and said, “I don’t feel so good. Can we leave?”

“I don’t know why I let it get away,” Bettina said. “It hardly went higher than the first bid. Why didn’t I try harder?”

“You won’t even remember it tomorrow,” Raleigh said. “What would we do with furniture like that, Bettina?”

“I’ll see you outside,” Jocelyn said, forcing a smile and standing. It was true; she felt queasy. The smell of popcorn stung the air. They must be selling it at the concession stand. The salty smell was revolting. Okay, she could do it. Up and out. Head down. Ms. Nementhal would never know.

Except that Ms. Nementhal, bare feet in her clogs, arm linked with her girlfriend’s (were they crazy to do that in a place like this?), looked up with her mouth full of popcorn as Jocelyn walked by, and her eyes widened with such shock that it was clear her girlfriend was worried. Her girlfriend stood there holding the bag of popcorn, Ms. Nementhal’s fingers searching inside, the half-naked doll in her other hand.

“Hi,” Jocelyn said.

“Maura, this is one of my students,” Ms. Nementhal said. “Some popcorn, Jocelyn?” She was trying to pretend everything was cool. Her girlfriend was extremely pretty, a lock of hair falling forward. She was holding the doll’s arm as if it were a specimen of something she’d picked up with tweezers. Its messy, golden hair went in all directions. “Nice to meet you,” her girlfriend said in a friendly way, with what might have been an Italian accent. Jocelyn exhaled and thought she might live through the moment.

“See you tomorrow,” Jocelyn managed to say. She made it far enough away that she didn’t think Ms. Nementhal saw her gag, though nothing came up.

What was it that made Jocelyn revise her essay that night? It could be fiction, so that was what she wrote, though she thought journalism was cool and fiction was sort of retarded. She wrote about someone who went to an auction with her husband, and they came home with (she couldn’t do it; she couldn’t say it was the doll) two Elvis lamps and had an argument about whose was better. The flash-forward part (which was required) was that five years later, when they were still arguing about the Elvis lamps, which they drove around in the backseat, they died in a car crash (please; enough of the Rapture!) and went to Heaven. God, who was sort of a joker, at first said he wouldn’t let Elvis in, but then the lamps started singing and God relented, and decided which Elvis was better, then twerked with the winning Elvis like an actor at the end of a Bollywood movie. Jocelyn wrote the transition from the car crash to Heaven this way: “What they didn’t know and wouldn’t for some time was that they were dead, and that meant they could have what they wanted. Not what they feared… not what they said silent prayers hoping to ward off… but anything they wanted.” Jocelyn wasn’t sure about the three dots for punctuation, whatever they were called, but she’d tried a colon first and that didn’t look right. She continued: “So they decided on Heaven and before they blinked they’d arrived though it took them years to realize it because time goes very slowly there, and God did not at first appear.” She knew the last comma was correct because it was a compound sentence joined by the word and . It got her a B.

Here’s what the Hand of Fate wrote: Jocelyn had to go forward, she couldn’t look back. Not even at the indentation in the sand where they’d had sex. The sand wouldn’t look different, and if you bothered to turn around and look, who wouldn’t want what met their eye to be worthy of their hesitation, their double take, special? Sand was ordinary. So was the face of her friend Zelda, who’d shown up that night, running down the beach, trailing her scarf, sensing something was up. She and T. G. never talked about having sex that one time. He wasn’t her first. Not long afterward, he tried to kill himself, though the two things were unrelated. She went to an auction with her aunt and uncle when she was seven weeks pregnant. The auction was a sad affair, and all the time she sat there, she had a feeling that she knew what was wrong. Not just what was wrong with her but what was wrong all around her, with people bantering and wasting time, sitting passively in a converted barn that denatured everyone who entered, because it wasn’t a working barn. It was repurposed — there’s the word of the age — and the goings-on inside were hectic, because hectic equaled fun. That was underscored by the auctioneer’s kidding about things that weren’t really funny. Summer was almost over. The auction ended. Money was spent — maybe money that shouldn’t have been — and prayers and worries lifted up to the rafters and got stuck there like a dust mote, or a bird feather. The night started one way and ended another. Jocelyn became Everywoman. That’s where the story ends.

© SIGRID ESTRADA

ANN BEATTIE has been included in four O. Henry Award collections, in John Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century , and in Jennifer Egan’s The Best American Short Stories 2014 . In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. She was the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine and Key West, Florida.