Ann Beattie - Secrets & Surprises

Ah, Banks. Ah, youth — to be twenty again, instead of thirty-two. In class, Banks used to listen to music on his cassette player through earphones. He would eat candy bars while he nailed frames together. Banks was always chewing food or mouthing songs. Sometimes he would forget and actually sing in class — an eerie wail, harmonizing with something none of the rest of us heard. The students who did not resent Banks’s talent resented his chewing or singing or his success with women. Banks had great success with Lorna. He told her she looked like Bianca Jagger and she was thrilled. “Why don’t you get some platform shoes like hers?” he said, and her eyes shriveled with pleasure. He told her a couple of interesting facts about Copernicus; she told him about the habits of gypsy moths. When he left, he kissed her hand. It did my heart good to see her so happy. I never delight her at all, as Mary keeps telling me.

They have written me from the college where I work, saying that they hope all is well and that I will be back teaching in the fall. It is not going to be easy to teach painting, with my right arm gone. Still, one remembers Matisse in his last years. Where there’s a will, et cetera. My department head has sent flowers twice (mixed and tulips), and the dean himself has written a message on a get-well card. There is a bunny on the card, looking at a rainbow. Banks is the only one who really tempts me to go back to work. The others, Banks tells me, are “full of it.”

Now I have a visitor. Danielle, John’s wife, has come up to see me. John is my brother. She brings an opened beer and sets it on the windowsill without comment. Danielle is wearing a white dress with small porpoises on it, smiling as they leap. Across that chest, no wonder.

“Are you feeling blue today or just being rotten?” she asks.

The beginnings of many of Danielle’s sentences often put me in mind of trashy, romantic songs. Surely someone has written a song called “Are You Feeling Blue?”

“Both,” I say. I usually give Danielle straight answers. She tries to be nice. She has been nice to my brother for five years. He keeps promising to take her back to France, but he never does.

She sits on the rug, next to my chair. “Their rotten lawn parties,” she says. Danielle is French, but her English is very good.

“Pull up a chair and watch the festivities,” I say.

“I have to go back,” she says, pouting. “They want you to come back with me.”

Champagne glasses clinking, white tablecloth, single carnation, key of A: “They Want You Back with Me.”

“Who sent you?” I ask.

“John. But I think Lorna would like it if you were there.”

“Lorna doesn’t like me anymore. Mary’s turned her against me.”

“Ten is a difficult age,” Danielle says.

“I thought the teens were difficult.”

“How would I know? I don’t have children.”

She has a drink of beer, and then puts the bottle in my hand instead of back on the window sill.

“You have beautiful round feet,” I say.

She tucks them under her. “I’m embarrassed,” she says.

“Our talk is full of the commonplace today,” I say, sighing.

“You’re insulting me,” she says. “That’s why John wouldn’t come up. He says he gets tired of your insults.”

“I wasn’t trying to be insulting. You’ve got beautiful feet. Raise one up here and I’ll kiss it.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” Danielle says.

“Really,” I say.

Danielle moves her leg, unstraps a sandal and raises her right foot. I take it in my hand and bend over to kiss it across the toes.

“Stop it,” she says, laughing. “Someone will come in.”

“They won’t,” I say. “John isn’t the only one tired of my insults.”

I have been taking a little nap. Waking up, I look out the window and see Danielle below. She is sitting in one of the redwood chairs, accepting a drink from my father. One leg is crossed over the other, her beautiful foot dangling. They all know I am watching, but they refuse to look up. Eventually my mother does. She makes a violent sweep with her arm — like a coach motioning the defensive team onto the field. I wave. She turns her back and rejoins the group — Lorna, John, Danielle, my Aunt Rosie, Rosie’s daughter Elizabeth, my father, and some others. Wednesday was also Elizabeth’s birthday — her eighteenth. My parents called and sang to her. When Janis Joplin died Elizabeth cried for six days. “She’s an emotional child,” Rosie said at the time. Then, forgetting that, she asked everyone in the family why Elizabeth had gone to pieces. “Why did you feel so bad about Janis, Elizabeth?” I said. “I don’t know,” she said. “Did her death make you feel like killing yourself?” I said. “Are you unhappy the way she was?” Rosie now speaks to me only perfunctorily. On her get-well card to me (no visit) she wrote: “So sorry.” They are all sorry. They have been told by the doctor to ignore my gloominess, so they ignore me. I ignore them because even before the accident I was not very fond of them. My brother, in particular, bores me. When we were kids, sharing a bedroom, John would talk to me at night. When I fell asleep he’d come over and shake my mattress. One night my father caught him doing it and hit him. “It’s not my fault,” John hollered. “He’s a goddamn snob.” We got separate bedrooms. I was eight and John was ten.

Danielle comes back, looking sweatier than before. Below, they are playing the first game. My father’s brother Ed pretends to be a majorette and struts with his mallet, twirling it and pointing his knees.

“Nobody sent me this time,” Danielle says. “Are you coming down to dinner? They’re grilling steaks.”

“He’s so cheap he’ll serve Almadén with them,” I say. “You grew up in France. How can you drink that stuff?”

“I just drink one glass,” she says.

“Refuse to do it,” I say.

She shrugs. “You’re in an awful mood,” she says.

“Give back that piggy,” I say.

She frowns. “I came to have a serious discussion. Why aren’t you coming to dinner?”

“Not hungry.”

“Come down for Lorna.”

“Lorna doesn’t care.”

“Maybe you’re mean to her.”

“I’m the same way I always was with her.”

“Be a little extra nice, then.”

“Give back that piggy,” I say, and she puts her foot up. I unbuckle her sandal with my left hand. There are strap marks on the skin. I lick down her baby toe and kiss it, at the very tip. In turn, I kiss all the others.

• • •

It’s evening, and the phone is ringing. I think about answering it. Finally someone else in the house picks it up. I get up and then sit on the bed and look around. My old bedroom looks pretty much the way it looked when I left for college, except that my mother has added a few things that I never owned, which seem out of place. Two silver New Year’s Eve hats rest on the bedposts, and a snapshot of my mother in front of a Mexican fruit stand (I have never been to Mexico) that my father took on their “second honeymoon” is on my bureau. I pull open a drawer and take out a pack of letters. I pull out one of the letters at random and read it. It is from an old girl friend of mine. Her name was Alison, and she once loved me madly. In the letter she says she is giving up smoking so that when we are old she won’t be repulsive to me. The year I graduated from college, she married an Indian and moved to India. Maybe now she has a little red dot in the middle of her forehead.

I try to remember loving Alison. I remember loving Mary’s sister, Patricia. She is dead. That doesn’t sink in. And she can’t have meant to die, in spite of what Mary said. A woman who meant to die wouldn’t buy a big wooden bowl and a bag of fruit, and then get in the car and drive it off the highway. It is a fact, however, that as the car started to go sideways I looked at Patricia, and she was whipping the wheel to the right. Maybe I imagined that. I remember putting my arm out to brace myself as the car started to turn over. If Patricia were alive, I’d have to be at the croquet game. But if she were alive, she and I could disappear for a few minutes, have a kiss by the barn.