Ann Beattie: The State We're In

The summer school assignment, the fucking fucking summer school third paper of ten, and if you didn’t get at least a C on the first nine, you had to write eleven papers, the fucking teacher wadding up her big fat lips so they looked like a carnation, her lips that she’d use to pout at your inadequacy… this paper, to hold their interest, was supposed to be about Magical Realism, and although you didn’t have to read all of the Márquez book the teacher sooooooo loved, she had distributed several paragraphs from the book in which weird things happened, and your paper was supposed to go on forever, like the writer, then have the clouds howl, or something. “Not a metaphor! Or, not merely to be thought of metaphorically!” she’d exclaimed. “The psychological state has to matter. You have to embody emotion in the stretch you make.” She gestured with her gangly arms. The woman was at least six feet tall, every bit as tall as Jocelyn’s uncle. Writing essays was retarded. It completely was. Summer with her aunt and uncle was torture, from start to the yet-to-come finish, which would end when the days were no longer long and when the flowers began to droop and the water was totally too cold to swim in at the York Harbor beach, where summer brides who were way too old to get married came out onto the lawn and stuff blew all around them, their veils, their hair, their bouquets, everything airborne. One bride sprained her ankle running after her stupid pink lilies and baby’s breath — she went down like Humpty Dumpty and a seagull swooped up the bouquet and dropped it, but too far out over the rocks for anybody to retrieve it, although the best man tried. But that — real life — you couldn’t write. You had to write Magical Realism, in which no doubt the seagull could recite Latin proverbs while it was being philosophical about the flowers not being fish.

Now was the hour: Uncle Raleigh would look at what she’d written and offer advice and encouragement, while she mentally corkscrewed her finger outside her ear and pitied him because he had no job, and he limped, and he was a nice man, but also sort of an idiot. In any case, he — her mother’s brother — was a lot nicer than his dim wife, Aunt Bettina Louise Tompkins, whose initials were BLT. Hold the mayo.

“Lovely evening on the porch. Sorry you couldn’t join us, but what you’re doing is more important,” Uncle Raleigh said. “You know, you have an intelligent expression, you’ve got those expressive eyes of your mother’s. I never doubted your intelligence for a second, from the day you were born. You do have all my sympathy for not being able to be with your friends this summer, but you’ll show ’em all, including Bettina, who’s been on your case for nothing, I know. You want to cornrow your hair, what of it? Not like you’re coming home with ‘Satan’ tattooed on the back of your hand.”

“I’m afraid of needles. Thanks for saying something nice to me.”

“That’s because I believe you deserve niceness, Jocelyn. Well — Bettina’s insisting I scan your essay, so if you don’t mind, could you print it out, because I can’t read that little screen, as you know. And as I tell you every single night.”

She got up from his office chair, where she’d been slumped, writing and picking at her pedicure. She turned on his printer. When it printed out, it was not quite two pages.

“Yesterday’s was three pages,” he said immediately.

“She’s tired of reading long papers.” Jocelyn lied to Raleigh and Bettina — certainly to Bettina — and to her sort of best friend, who was lucky enough to be in Australia this summer, even if it did have to be with her family and her retarded — really, actually retarded — brother, the challenged Daniel Junior, who picked his nose right in front of you.

“Looks good to me,” Raleigh said, nodding in agreement with himself. “You see that colon, though. I thought that was the punctuation mark when you’re going to have a whole list of things, and you’ve only got one, so maybe you could say, ‘Such as a turtle’ rather than ‘Such as: turtle.’ ”

She made the correction. His bad leg was the result of a motorcycle accident when he was in his twenties, not much older than she was now. At least somebody in her family had done something .

“Can I borrow the car tonight for an hour? Some kids from the summer program are getting together down at the beach at low tide. There’s no drugs, alcohol, or sex. We’re all too depressed to bother.”

“I don’t see why not, though Bettina certainly will,” he said. “I’ll tell her once I hear the ignition start. Remember, though: an intermediate license means none of your friends can be in the car. A word to the wise is that I’d head out of the driveway pretty fast.”

He was scanning the second page of the essay (damn!). “Well, it gets a little drifty in the last paragraph, which is supposed to sum up what you’ve said before, isn’t it?”

“No. There’s new thinking about that now. You don’t repeat yourself.”

“I see. But it’s not grammatically correct to say, ‘Desideratum were what this field of flowers was.’ I don’t even really know what that big word means.” He looked at her. “Not nasturtiums, you don’t mean?”

“The purply flowers everywhere,” she said. She was holding his keys now.

“Lupine,” he said. “Loves to grow wild, but you get it into your garden, most of the time it won’t take. It keeps to itself and that’s how it prospers. A metaphor, to your teacher’s way of thinking. I shouldn’t make fun of her. I never knew so much until this summer.”

“I’ll change it when I get home. I promise.”

“Fine, then. But tell me, what exactly does that big word mean?”

“It means, ‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste,’ ” Bettina said. She was standing in the doorway, wearing her apron with the chicken head on it. She had two years of college and had worked for city government. She had about as much fashion sense as Jocelyn’s mother, which began and ended with an underwire bra. Both of them were quite overweight. Jocelyn and Uncle Raleigh weren’t, which gave them at least something in common beyond the fact that both of them were trapped in the house, except for his stupid golf night.

“So you got the keys to the car, you be careful. Only people with beach parking stickers can park on the paved road, I’m sure you know that. I don’t want to pay any fifty-dollar fine,” BLT said. “Raleigh okayed your essay?”

“He loved it,” she said. He smiled benignly at his wife. He didn’t look in her direction.

“On the way home maybe you could pick up a pizza at River Bend,” she said. “They’re open in the summer until ten, and I can phone it in at nine thirty. I don’t feel like ice cream, I feel like a small regular pizza,” she said. She’d had a cancer scare at Christmas. Since then, she’d gained considerable weight and often made announcements about what she wanted. Among these things was Neutrogena soap at midnight , so all she could do was have Jocelyn order it for her from Amazon Prime. Which her mother had already made clear she was not going to subscribe to anymore, once they raised their rates. That would last about a week. Her mother even relied on Amazon for crackers.

“You know,” Raleigh said at the front door, “sometimes, to my way of thinking, big words just stick out and they’re like a red flag in front of a bull. There might be a much simpler, straightforward way of concluding. Something to think about when you get home.”