Ann Beattie - Picturing Will

Everyone was pretending there was no foregone conclusion.

Will rolled the little red ball back and forth across the floor as though he were rolling dough. The whole reason he had come to Florida was to see Wag. Why didn’t she know that?

He didn’t know his father.

Corky tried too hard to please.

He would tell his mother — and only his mother — about Spencer and Haveabud in the motel room.

Although he would not tell his mother unless she asked. Sitting at the side of his bed, when he returned, she might ask.

Will looked past his father, out the window. The darkness was a huge mole on a giant’s back. The giant had backed up against the window. Inside was what was happening in houses, and outside sat the giant. What the giant looked at, Will couldn’t be sure. It was possible that the giant could see all of history. That he sat just the way Will sat in a school chair, studying all of history, which moved in front of him like an endless movie. Maybe all the world was a movie, and the giant was looking at dinosaurs snapping up lizards, wading into ponds, pulling up bushes to eat.

Into Will’s suitcase went the ball and jacks, which Corky had put in a Baggie and tied with a yellow twist tie. Also the T-shirt whose front depicted a sandy beach with people stretched out on striped towels, water lapping the shore, seagulls swooping. On the back of the shirt were three more seagulls, but this time, instead of rising up against a blue sky, they hovered on white cotton. Corky had let Will pick out any shirt he wanted, and he had picked the shirt with the seagulls.

Corky bought Will flip-flops to wear to the beach. His mother had not even packed beach shoes. Corky thought she might ask Will whether he would like to keep the flip-flops in the hall closet, along with hers and Wayne’s, but then she thought no: What was his was his. If he wanted to feel that there were things left behind in the house that were his, he would have said so.

Corky put Coets on either side of the pyrite and agate she had bought Will at the gem shop: little white cotton pads, like sandwich bread, to protect the slices and discs.

She was sorry for him. She would have driven him to see Wag — gone back and forth in one day — except that both the other salesgirls were out sick, and she was the only one who could help Marian. She was glad she had not raised the possibility of the trip with Will, because he would have been further disappointed.

Corky and Wayne and Will had watched the fishermen, and seen the sunset, and eaten fried shrimp at the seafood restaurant. Will’s dinner, ordered from the children’s menu, had been called The Captain Nemo. He had been allowed to go to the treasure chest and select a toy. He brought back a plastic camera. Looking into it and pushing the button, you saw first a starfish, then a whale, then a school of silvery fish.

“How do shrimp see?” Will asked.

“They have heads. When they clean them, they take off the heads,” Wayne said.

“When they clean lobsters they don’t take off the heads,” Will said.

“They don’t clean lobsters,” Wayne said.

Now Corky looked at Will, who was sitting on the bed, watching her put things in his suitcase. New York had pigeons and Florida had seagulls and pelicans. Nobody had dinosaurs. What Haveabud and Spencer had been doing might have had something to do with dinosaurs. There were no more dinosaurs, but maybe Haveabud and Spencer were involved in a ritual to bring them back. That was why the ritual had to be private. Secrets had to be whispered. It went without saying that he should have sealed lips. But if his mother asked. Was Haveabud’s ritual similar to what went on between his mother and Mel? Some night ceremony, to bring back the dinosaurs? If he could see what they did. If his mother asked. On television, Perry Mason asked people questions in court. When Perry Mason heard an answer he didn’t like, he looked to the side, with his bird-bright eye. Another, more difficult question followed.

“I’m putting in your flip-flops,” Corky said, a slight question in her voice. Will knocked his toes together in his stocking feet. He was not supposed to wear shoes when his legs were stretched out on the bed. It was really not a bed but a sofa that turned into a bed. At first, he had been afraid of the dressmaker’s dummy in the corner because it looked like a warrior, waiting for the signal to do battle.

G.I. Joe was back in the zippered bag he had been in when he arrived. Like a body bag, Corky thought. She asked Will if she should leave the bag out, so that he could have it on the plane. He nodded that she should. Wayne was trying to help Eddie start his lawnmower.

Lobsters probably got to keep their heads because they were bigger. Lobsters would fight, because they were big, but shrimp wouldn’t fight, because they were small. In a fight between a lobster and a shrimp, the lobster would win. Beady black eyes would win. Haveabud and Spencer had dark eyes. Brown eyes with black pupils. Haveabud was a lobster and Spencer was a shrimp. Spencer would be afraid to fight with Haveabud.

Why couldn’t his mother give the magazine one of the pictures she already had of him?

Corky put Will’s shorts and underwear in the suitcase. She had laundered them. His mother had folded his socks. Corky put them together in a different way, pulling the cuff of one over the ball made by the two rolled socks. That was the way his socks would go home, to show Jody that this was her way.

His mother had packed a white shirt and a bow tie. Corky thought Will would look like a midget businessman if he wore those things. The only pants Jody packed were jeans.

Seersucker pajamas. Little boys would still allow you to put pajamas on them. When they got older, they would sleep in their underwear. When they left their parents’ house, they would sleep naked.

Will watched Corky fold the seersucker pajamas. Running your hand over seersucker was like moving your hands up and down your body when you had insect bites.

Into the suitcase went the plastic camera from the seafood restaurant, which was now stuck on the picture of the whale, and the book about gems that Corky had bought him. A place mat imprinted with a map of the area. A penny that had been pressed into an oval souvenir of Florida. Maybe Mel could think of a way to attach the flattened copper penny to a chain so his mother could wear it as a necklace. Before they left New York, Mel had shown him an ad in a magazine for diamond rings and asked him to guess which one his mother would like best. Mel pointed to the small type at the bottom of the page: All the rings were enlarged to show detail. Mel could buy his mother a diamond ring, and he could give her a bright, thin penny on a chain.

Purple was amethyst. Green was jade. Though pink also could be jade. The man in the crystal store had given him a piece of smooth pink stone. While Corky worked, Will walked through the mall to the crystal store and crayoned a picture for the man on a legal pad. In exchange, the man gave him the smooth stone, which he proudly gave to Corky. In the crystal store, you could buy chains with little discs on top and tubes of glue so that you could make anything they sold into a keyring. Will suggested to Corky that she do that, and she had said that it was an excellent idea.

The dressmaker’s dummy was more like a skeleton than a warrior, as she had shown him, turning the light on and turning the headless body. What harm could it do without a head?

Dinosaurs in the museums were skeletons.

The dummy had no head, like a shrimp whose head had been removed.

It was harmless: a shape, a shadow. Nothing at all.

In the tent in Virginia, he and Wag had made Martian dolls: Kleenex boxes standing upright, with upside-down saucers on the end to look like heads, and strings from an old mop held on to the saucers with masking tape. The boxes did a dance, illuminated by flashlights placed behind them that pointed up, backlighting the forms, which danced on a field of white Kleenex. The flashlights were the sun rising, while the box-Martians had a secret ceremony.