Ann Beattie - Picturing Will

Corky filled the sink and took a whore’s bath, squeezing the washcloth and rinsing it after cleaning her armpits and crotch. She let the water out of the basin and soaked the washcloth a final time under a stream of water from the faucet before wringing it out and hanging it on the towel rack. The sink emptied quietly. Something was wrong with the pipes leading to the bathtub; if you showered for more than a minute, it began to sound like someone was playing the bagpipes.

She opened the door, pausing to see whether the creaking hinges had awakened Wayne. The bedroom was quiet. She reached behind her and turned off the lights, then went on tiptoe down the hall. In the bathroom, she had not been tempted to look in the mirror. She knew that after a long day at the store her hair needed to be washed and her makeup would be smeared. The little bump she had first sensed when she was driving home had by now risen under her bottom lip until it came to a head, hard and tingling.

Some days it seemed to Corky that she and Wayne had been married for years, and other days it seemed that she was living with a stranger whose moods she couldn’t predict and whose emotions were never revealed by his actions — only by what he said. She thought he would be angry about her signing on to work Thursdays and Fridays, but when she came home he had embraced her — almost run to put his arms around her. He had pulled down the bedspread like a triumphant magician, eyes aglow, to reveal the secret of mismatched striped sheets, on which he would have her stretch out. Because he was so clearly delighted to see her and to have sex, she now thought that his silence over the last few days might have been because he was worrying over Will’s arrival. If he suffered because he did not see his son more often, she wasn’t aware of it, yet she didn’t think this indicated anything negative about her future with Wayne. She thought that if she and Wayne had a child of their own, Wayne would love the child and probably relax and be quite demonstrative. He and Will were always a little on guard and awkward when they were together, but she supposed that that was quite normal, given how infrequently they saw each other.

Corky caught herself doing what her mother had so often objected to: making everything all right in her mind. All through her adolescence there had been a running argument — no, only her mother’s harangues; it was never an argument — in which her mother urged Corky to expand her horizons (her mother’s term), to look around her at the damage being done to the environment, the inhumanity of man to man, the awful politics of the AMA, the streets filled with people in need, ignored by a society that did not provide enough affordable medical care, a society that created gas-guzzling cars that fell apart, and that provided its citizens with no reasonable candidates in presidential elections. Corky’s mother would have been pleased to have Jane Fonda as her daughter. Adele Davis’s books were her mother’s bible. Sometimes while she waited for dinner to cook, her mother would step into the pantry to toss a few darts at the Richard Nixon dartboard, a disc so pocked that Nixon was almost unrecognizable.

Corky’s father left when she was ten, after overturning every piece of furniture in the ground-floor apartment and dragging the mattress off the bed and throwing it over the porch rail. Corky and her mother were locked in the bathroom, and at the time her mother was shouting insults at her father, she had her hands over Corky’s ears. To this day, Corky could not wear a hat that was pulled over her ears or sleep on her side with an ear against the pillow. She slept on her back, like a corpse in the morgue, Wayne said. She could still remember her feeling of helplessness as her mother, who had a way of fixating on one thing, insisted, after her husband fled, that she and Corky get the mattress back into the apartment. Her mother became as insane as her father had been during his tirade, yelling at Corky even though Corky was a frail child who couldn’t lift her end of the mattress from the ground. None of the neighbors came out to help, but someone called the police. Her mother then fixated on her hatred of the police, insisting that there had been no shouting, and that she was simply airing the mattress. Into this scene walked Corky’s sister, Vera, eight years old, who had been at a Brownies meeting, sewing a crayon pouch. Vera had a way of being absent from the beginning of things and showing up at the very end. As an older girl, she would show up at the movies when the last show was ending. When Vera was sixteen she ran off with a construction worker named Ricky Lattanzi, and nine months later added twin boys to the family he had already provided her with (two girls, from his first marriage). By the time her mother found her sister, she was, as her mother said, “in deep,” so she never enacted the threats she had made in Vera’s absence: to commit her; to send her to a convent; at the very least to have the marriage annulled. During her mother’s long illness, years later, it was one of Ricky Lattanzi’s daughters who nursed her. That was also the only time she ever let Ricky Lattanzi into her apartment. On her deathbed she still maintained that Ricky was too old a man to be a suitable match for her daughter.

Corky and Vera had become closer in recent years because Vera had learned how to type. Every couple of weeks a typed letter from her sister, with a little drawing one of the twins had done, would arrive in the mail. It was the only personal mail Corky ever got, unlike Wayne, whose Army buddies, and even his ex-wife, often sent things to him. Lately, her sister had begun to hint that she would help out with the airline ticket if Corky came to visit. Since she had married Wayne, she had never gone anywhere without him. Wayne didn’t like her working two nights a week, so what would he think about her taking a trip to see her sister?

In the side room, Corky considered all the clutter that remained, even after Wayne had thrown out the newspapers and she had put away her sewing things so Will could color on the table. A year ago, on a rainy day, she and Will had played a game that had amused both of them. Corky would hide things, and Will had to guess where they were, either going on intuition or guessing because she gave him a hint. Will didn’t act like a sissy, but she wondered if he might be a mama’s boy because on the last visit he had wanted her to teach him how to embroider. He and Wayne were both loners: Wayne would stand on the pier with his hands plunged in his pockets, watching the fishermen by the hour; Will would sit on a bench and swing his feet, looking at the pelicans. You never knew what silent men were thinking. Corky expected the worst from silence. The man Corky had dated before she met Wayne had suffered from migraines and always wanted as much quiet as possible. All the time she knew him, the man insisted that people leave their shoes in the hallway when they entered his house, and he bought Squeak-Ease to squirt between the wood strips of the parquet floors. Sometimes when he was suffering from migraines a friend of his who lived next door and taught Buddhism at the local college would come and sit with him. That man had recently opened a small store that sold crystals in the shopping center where Corky worked. Inside was a poster of a smiling blond woman with her hands extended and various crystals placed on each palm. Asterisks floated above her hands like gnats at a backyard barbecue. The various crystals and their powers were identified at the bottom of the poster. Corky had bought a crystal keychain for Vera. The man told her that someone had once come in with a leather steering-wheel cover for her sports car and asked him to stud it with crystals so she could move her hands over them as she drove. The man called this “human folly.” He also studded the wheel cover for her. The crystal shop might be an interesting place to take Will. She wasn’t sure how long Will would be staying, and she was the sort of person — she admitted it; Wayne didn’t have to tease her into confessing — who liked to have plans and alternatives. She thought that this tendency, which Wayne made fun of, would actually be beneficial to good mothering. What was wrong with knowing what you were having for dinner the next night, or what you would do with a child if it rained? The last time Will visited, Wayne had picked up a few things at the last minute, and what an odd assortment of things they had been: a water pistol, a calendar of women in swimsuits, a chocolate bar as thick as a brick, and a hammer — an adult’s hammer, which Corky first saw when Will grasped it in both hands and banged it on the table. It left an indentation and made the biggest part of the chocolate bar fly off to the side, landing in her sewing basket. Later, she was tortured when Will went around the house running the hammer over everything as if it were a feather duster. Wayne had not let her confiscate the hammer because he had given it to Will. Until it was proven that he did damage with it, Wayne thought, it was perfectly fine for him to have the hammer, so Corky just held her breath as he ran it along the Formica counter in the kitchen. It wasn’t that he was destructive — it was just that a hammer was a strange and potentially dangerous thing to give a young child.