Ann Beattie - Distortions

The girl with the brown braids calls to them: “Have a good time.”

She doesn’t approve. He goes across the lawn to where the girl is digging in the garden. He picks up a handful of moist dirt, shapes it into a ball and throws it at the front of her dress.

“Whose lover am I?” he hollers.

The girl scrambles, regains her balance and tears off, calling, “You’re her Goddamn lover!”

Exactly right. He raises his eyebrows questioningly to his lover.

“You won’t scare me this time,” she says.

She turns and walks to the car, pulls open the door, and sits down. She leaves the door open for him to close. He does: click. The proper little date.

“Did you do that to scare me?” she asks. “You won’t scare me any more.”

“You feel you understand me well enough now to be my lover?” he asks.

“What is there to understand?” she asks.

She’s trying very hard to act self-assured. The speeding and changing-lanes trick always gets her. She wants to give in. Why else would she have agreed to see him? He looks at her questioningly again. That unnerves her a little; she repeats her question.

III

She suspects her husband, so instead of accomplishing anything, in spite of all the books and articles telling her how she can accomplish everything, she takes a bus downtown and sits in the park across from his office. She once went to a Christmas party at his office. They rode to the top floor. Does he work on the top floor, or is that only where they have parties? It seems as good a place as any to look, because she could not really see him in the building anyway. Sun glints off the glass, so she doesn’t look for too long. She looks up high, then at the door. She does this for about two hours. She doesn’t see her husband. She intends not to do anything so foolish again, but the next day she finds that she has no more work to do, so she drives her car to the bus stop and parks it and gets on a bus. She doesn’t like the downtown traffic. He says she is spoiled, living in the suburbs. He drives downtown every day at rush hour. The park is crowded today, so she goes looking for his car. Foolish, really, because it’s probably in a garage. But she walks up and down several blocks and doesn’t stop doing it until she thinks she might get lost. She doesn’t know her way around the business district well. When she returns to the park it is nearly noon, and she finds a seat next to a man eating his lunch from a bag. He smiles at her. She returns his smile. She wonders if he works with her husband. Was he at the Christmas party? Probably not. She watches the door and once she thinks she sees him, walking next to a short man in a pale-blue suit, but it isn’t him after all when she rises off the bench and can see more clearly. What time does he go to lunch? That night as they eat dinner she asks what time he eats lunch. He says that he never eats lunch at the same time. Today he ate around two.

“Why do you ask?” he says.

“That’s why you’re not very hungry,” she says.

He has eaten almost everything on his plate.

She skips a day and feels good all day, thinking that she will never do it again. But the next day something tells her that she will see him, so she drives downtown without realizing that she hasn’t stopped at the bus stop, as she usually does. She’s downtown in the traffic before she realizes what she’s done. She’s nervous and twice she gets in the wrong lane and has to wait while everyone makes a left turn, but she finally makes it safely to a parking garage. She’s just nervous, so she goes into a drugstore and drinks a cup of coffee. Then she goes, as usual, to the bench. She thinks that she may not see him after all, because she spent a lot of time tied up in traffic, and then more time at the drugstore. She only waits for an hour, then gives up because he must have already been to lunch. So many people pour out of his building that she might not see him anyway. She goes back to the parking garage and finds that she’s lost the ticket. The attendant calls the manager, who comes out to talk to her. He asks her to describe her car and she’s very upset and can’t think well — she almost describes her husband’s car before she realizes her mistake. “Well, decide what you’d like best, lady,” the manager says, laughing. He thinks it’s funny. He asks how long she’s been and she says two hours. He tells the attendant to charge her for three and walks back into his glass cubicle. She thinks about trying to hit him, but she wouldn’t want to be hit back. If he has a sense of humor like that he might hit a woman. She doesn’t want to make any excuses to her husband. She even tips the attendant.

She sits on the bench the next day from about ten o’clock — only an hour after her husband has left the house — until four o’clock. She stops at a store on the way to the bus stop and buys a pretty blouse. She has to stand on the bus all the way to her car. She’s tired when she gets home. Her husband is already there. He asks where she’s been.

“Shopping.”

“That’s why you look so tired,” he says.

Her husband never has much energy himself, but she has nothing to accuse him with. She will. The next day she plans to stand outside the building, to be there when work lets out, right on the side of the street with the building so she won’t miss him.

The next day she arrives early — three-thirty. He doesn’t get out until six. She looks through some stores and looks idly for his car, without much hope of seeing it. She goes to the drugstore again and has a cup of coffee and sits in the park when she gets tired of walking. At five o’clock she gets up and crosses the street and leans against the building. To pass the time she examines the chapped spots on the backs of her hands and twirls her wedding band. She reaches in her purse for her comb to comb her hair and feels for the parking ticket. It isn’t there. She searches thoroughly, even bending down to take things out of her purse. She can’t find it. Thinking that she might have dropped it she retraces her path, but it’s not on the ground. She hurries to the garage. There is a crowd of men — mostly men — waiting for their cars to be brought down. She tells the girl in the cashier’s booth that she’s lost her parking ticket. She talks a little too loudly — the girl leans back on her stool to get away from her voice, and several of the men stare at her. The girl calls the manager.

“Didn’t this happen to you yesterday?”

“I’m very sorry, but I have to have my car back.”

“What does your car look like today?”

She describes her car. It is a blue car. Blue. Yes, the roof is blue, too. A four-door blue car, and she can’t remember the make. A Chevrolet. Blue. About three hours ago.

“Four hours ago,” the manager says.

Tears spring into her eyes.

“Three,” she says.

He shrugs. What is he going to do? He calls an attendant over and tells him to get a blue Chevy. She stands in front of the men, looking up the ramp.

“Move back,” the manager hollers.

She backs into a group of men who quickly spread out to make room for her. She waits while six cars are brought. Seven. Eight. Then hers. She gets in without tipping the attendant and heads home, driving much too fast. She’s home before she realizes that yet another day is ruined, and that she’ll have to go the next day.

“Where were you?” her husband says.

She’s been crying. She never did find time to comb her hair. She’s empty-handed, so she hasn’t been shopping. What’s the point of it? She’ll never catch him.

“Where have you been?” she says.

IV

He calls this woman, who is not his mother, “Mother.” It is her mother. She has come to stay with them not because of poor health or lack of money, but because she is lonely. She makes no trouble, except for the one annoying thing she does, and doesn’t interfere with their life because she is always in her room. His wife thinks it’s abnormal that she shuts her door after breakfast and does not reappear until dinner. Their son loves his grandmother and spends a lot of time in her room, talking to her, drawing pictures for her, and eating her candy when he gets home from school until dinner. There is no good reason for disliking her, except that he does not believe she has come to live with them because she is lonely. If that were true, why would she stay in her room? But he can’t talk to his wife about it. It makes her think he wants her mother out of the house, and that upsets her. He suspects that it upsets her because her mother is necessary-she takes care of their son after school so his wife does not have to be home at three o’clock. In fact, he has called later in the afternoon several times and Mother has told him she isn’t there. He called yesterday at four o’clock and she wasn’t there, and that was the second time this week. He suspects that she is seeing her lover again. At any rate, he has started seeing his lover again. One of the things that nags at him is that his wife has seen his lover and knows she is rather plain and not very young, but he has never seen his wife’s lover. Perhaps the lover used to come to the house when he was gone, but no longer comes because her mother is there. Perhaps things have not worked out so well for his wife after all.