Ann Beattie - What Was Mine

“What do you want to ask me?” she says. He can hear the suspicion in her voice. Her hair is pulled back in a fabric-covered rubber band. She has removed the diamond studs from her ears. She looks about twenty-five. She is ten years older than that.

“Believe me when I say I don’t care what you do with your money,” he says. “But don’t you think it’s strange you have to spend so much on makeup and jewelry and clothes to get a job done? Doesn’t it seem a little expensive to you?”

“Everybody who works where I work is extremely intelligent,” she says. “Personal style is what gets noticed. I don’t dress that way in order to get the job done. I dress that way and look that way in order to get promoted. One more promotion is the credential I need to get out of there.”

He shifts onto his elbow. “You’re going to leave this job too?” he says.

“I could make ten thousand dollars more, the next time I jump ship. As long as I’m working for money, I might as well work for real money, right?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “We have enough money, don’t we?”

“What I’m saying,” she says, “is that if I can make more money for doing the same kind of work, I ought to go ahead and make it, shouldn’t I?”

He bites his bottom lip, thinking. “Will there come a time when you’ve risen high enough that you can brush your hair and just put on a dress to go to work?”

She laughs one little laugh. “What’s your sudden concern with fashion?”

“It isn’t a concern with fashion. It’s concern because you get up earlier than you used to so you can use the curling iron on your hair and put on makeup.”

“I’m quiet,” she says. “I don’t disturb you.”

Before she goes to bed, she grinds the coffee beans and leaves the powder in the container until morning. She slips out of bed on the first bing of the alarm. She showers, instead of drawing a bath. It is true she makes no noise. It was a long time before he realized she was spending so much time getting ready for work in the morning.

“But do you like it or hate it?” he says. “Spending that much time on your appearance is new to you. What’s made you do it?”

“I think I actually spend about the same amount of time. For example — since you’re so interested — I’ve started to use a personal shopper to select my clothes, which saves me many hours every month. If you factor that in, getting up at six-thirty instead of seven sort of evens out.”

“A personal shopper?”

She sighs. “I don’t flaunt myself. I don’t go to bed with people to move up the ladder. I just make sure I’m noticed. I have no less respect for myself for taking the time to make sure I’m noticed as I should be.”

“Francine,” he says.

“You love to be a little exasperated with me,” she says. “Think about it. Isn’t that the nature of the attraction?”

“There are different kinds of exasperation,” he says. “Not being willing to marry the father of your child, even though you admit he’s the love of your life and you’re three months pregnant — Francine, I don’t know if I’d even call what I felt then simple exasperation. It seemed like you were intent on punishing both of us.”

“Why do we always have to go back to that? That was years ago. We’re married. We have the child. Whatever I thought, I decided to do what you said, didn’t I?”

“Are you sorry you did it?”

“Stefan, this all happened years ago. The thing I love about you is that our problems always get worked out. It was a problem that I didn’t like staying home with Julie, and we found a way to adjust our lives, didn’t we? As far as I can tell — when you’re not worrying because I put on makeup before I go out — you’ve managed to run your business quite effectively out of the house, and anyone can see that Julie has prospered.”

“And that’s that?”

“What’s what? I thought you weren’t looking for a fight.”

“I’m not. I’m wondering what you felt, when you were so reluctant to marry me.”

“It might have been simple fear of something new, did you ever think of that? Look: I love you. You’re my husband. It would have been a tragedy if we hadn’t had that child. I was wrong and you were right.”

“Do you really mean that, or are you just saying that?”

“I mean it,” she says. “Do you believe anything I tell you? Sometimes it seems like you don’t, which doesn’t make answering your questions a particular pleasure.”

“I wasn’t disputing you,” he says. “I thought maybe we could have a discussion.”

“You thought I’d like to try to remember how I felt six years ago, when we didn’t have enough money between us for anything but a Saturday night pizza? When I woke up every morning with my head spinning? I thought it was a gas leak. A gas leak in that sad little apartment you had on Sixteenth Street. Remember the stewardesses coming in late at night, swallowing aspirin in the elevator, stepping out of their shoes, those baggage carts they were always pulling in and pulling out? It was like those people were damned souls in hell, Stefan. And they were all around us in that building, along with the jackhammer that started at the crack of dawn. I thought what was around me was making me sick. I never thought for a minute I was pregnant.”

He listens, absolutely stunned. Maybe she had mentioned the stewardesses once or twice, but he had no idea they had affected her that way. He could remember her crying on the mattress on the floor — that was what he had, instead of a bed — in fact, he could even remember exactly what she had said the night of the day she found out she was pregnant. He could not remember what he had said to her — something to try to convince her that this was not the end of the world, it was far from the end of the world — but he could remember her turning to him, see the lines mashed on her face by the sheets, her tearstained cheeks, what she said: “You’re right, I’m kind. I’m kind, but I’m not maternal. There’s all the difference in the world between being kind and being maternal.”

Now she was on her side, her face again turned away from him. Her hair had some curl in it, but it looked entirely different from the way it would look in the morning. He took a lax little curl in his hand and kissed the ends of her hair. She put her hand over his. She had told the truth: she was not maternal, but she was kind.

Because Francine is working late — the computers have been down half the morning, so she is working frantically in order to finish a presentation she must make the following day — Stefan goes alone to the meeting with Mrs. Angawa.

It is a cold January day, the sky as gray as cardboard. Big wet snowflakes float around the car, but turn to water the second they hit the windshield. The day before, he had almost kept Julie home, but at the last minute she decided she wanted to go to school because she missed the new bunny. He hopes this bunny has a long and happy life. All it has to do is live until Easter, and it will be given to children at the orphanage. Why is it his daughter’s days seem so tinged with sadness? Has he just forgotten? Was he also, at her age, aware of people dying, and animals dying? Has he just forgotten?

He parks in the plowed lot of the small grocery store on the corner just past the school. Better that than try to parallel park and get stuck in the ice. He ignores the sign that says parking is for customers only, plunges his hands in his pockets. As several fingers go through a tear in the bottom of one pocket, he is suddenly reminded of the straw finger-grips that were so popular when he was Julie’s age: you’d put one finger from each hand in opposite ends and pull, which would tighten the straw and make it impossible to withdraw either finger. You had to keep pulling, though, or the straw would go lax and your fingers would fall out. Such simple games then. A simpler time. No one would have thought to lock up his bike when he went into a store.