Ann Beattie - Distortions

Lately, throughout all of this, she hasn’t been sleeping with Charlie. When he comes to her apartment, she unbuttons his shirt, rubs her hands across his chest, up and down his chest, and undoes his belt.

She writes more letters. One is to Jean Nidetch, of Weight Watchers. “What if you got fat again, if you couldn’t stop eating?” she writes. “Then you’d lose all your money! You couldn’t go out in public or they’d see you! I hope you get fatter and fatter and die.” The second letter (a picture, really) is to Charlie — a heart with “Cynthia” in it. That’s wrong. She draws another heart and writes “Charlie” in it. The last letter is to a woman she knew when she was married to Pete. “Dear Sandy,” she writes. “Sorry I haven’t written in so long. I am going to get married the tenth of February. I think I told you that Lincoln and I got divorced. I really wish I had you around to encourage me to lose weight before the wedding! I hope everything is well with your family. The baby must be walking now. Everything is fine with me. Well, got to go. Love, Cynthia.”

They are on the train, on the way to visit her parents before the wedding. It is late January. Charlie has spilled some beer on his jacket and has gone to the men’s room twice to wash it off, even though she told him he got it all out the first time. He has a tie folded in his jacket pocket. It is a red tie with white dogs on it that she bought for him. She has been buying him presents, to make up for the way she acts toward him sometimes. She has been taking sleeping pills, and now that she’s more rested she isn’t nervous all the time. That’s all it was — no sleep. She even takes half a sleeping pill with her lunch, and that keeps her calm during the day.

“Honey, do you want to go to the other car, where we can have a drink?” Charlie asks her.

Cynthia didn’t want Charlie to know she had been taking the pills, so when she had a chance she reached into her handbag and shook out a whole one and swallowed it when he wasn’t looking. Now she is pretty groggy.

“I think I’ll come down later,” she says. She smiles at him.

As he walks down the aisle, she looks at his back. He could be anybody. Just some man on a train. The door closes behind him.

A young man sitting across the aisle from her catches her eye. He has long hair. “Paper?” he says.

He is offering her his paper. She feels her cheeks color, and she takes it, not wanting to offend him. Some people wouldn’t mind offending somebody who looks like him, she thinks self-righteously, but you are always polite.

“How far you two headed?” he asks.

“Pavo, Georgia,” she says.

“Gonna eat peaches in Georgia?” he asks.

She stares at him.

“I’m just kidding,” he says. “My grandparents live in Georgia.”

“Do they eat peaches all day?” she asks.

He laughs. She doesn’t know what she’s done right.

“Why, lordy lands, they do,” he says with a thick drawl.

She flips through the paper. There is a comic strip of President Nixon. The President is leaning against a wall, being frisked by a policeman. He is confessing to various sins.

“Great, huh?” the man says, smiling, and leans across the aisle.

“I wrote Nixon a letter,” Cynthia says quietly. “I don’t know what they’ll do. I said all kinds of things.”

“You did? Wow. You wrote Nixon?”

“Did you ever write him?”

“Yeah, sure, I write him all the time. Send telegrams. It’ll be a while before he’s really up against that wall, though.”

Cynthia continues to look through the paper. There are full-page ads for records by people she has never heard of, singers she will never hear. The singers look like the young man.

“Are you a musician?” she asks.

“Me? Well, sometimes. I play electric piano. I can play classical piano. I don’t do much of it.”

“No time?” she says.

“Right. Too many distractions.”

He takes a flask out from under his sweater. “If you don’t feel like the long walk to join your friend, have a drink with me.”

Cynthia accepts the flask, quickly, so no one will see. Once it is in her hands, she doesn’t know what else to do but drink from it.

“Where you coming from?” he asks.

“Buffalo.”

“Seen the comet?” he asks.

“No. Have you?”

“No,” he says. “Some days I don’t think there is any comet. Propaganda, maybe.”

“If Nixon said there was a comet, then we could be sure there wasn’t,” she says.

The sound of her own voice is strange to her. The man is smiling. He seems to like talk about Nixon.

“Right,” he says. “Beautiful. President issues bulletin comet will appear. Then we can all relax and know we’re not missing anything.”

She doesn’t understand what he has said, so she takes another drink. That way, she has no expression.

“I’ll drink to that, too,” he says, and the flask is back with him.

Because Charlie is apparently going to be in the drinking car for a while, the man, whose name is Peter, comes and sits next to her.

“My first husband was named Pete,” she says. “He was in the Army. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

The man nods, affirming some connection.

He nods. She must have been right.

Peter tells her that he is on his way to see his grandfather, who is recovering from a stroke. “He can’t talk. They think he will, but not yet.”

“I’m scared to death of getting old,” Cynthia says.

“Yeah,” Peter says. “But you’ve got a way to go.”

“And then other times I don’t care what happens, I just don’t care what happens at all.”

He nods slowly. “There’s plenty happening we’re not going to be able to do anything about,” he says.

He holds up a little book he has been looking through. It is called Know What Your Dreams Mean .

“Ever read these things?” he asks.

“No. Is it good?”

“You know what it is — right? A book that interprets dreams.”

“I have a dream,” she says, “about being at an altar in a wedding dress, only instead of standing on the floor I’m on a scale.”

He laughs and shakes his head. “There’s no weird stuff in here. It’s all the usual Freudian stuff.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“Oh — you dream about your teeth crumbling; it means castration. That sort of stuff.”

“But what do you think my dream means?” she asks.

“I don’t even know if I half believe what I read in the book,” he says, tapping it on his knee. He knows he hasn’t answered her question. “Maybe the scale means you’re weighing the possibilities.”

“Of what?”

“Well, you’re in a wedding dress, right? You could be weighing the possibilities.”

“What will I do?” she says.

He laughs. “I’m no seer. Let’s look it up in your horoscope. What are you?”

“Virgo.”

“Virgo,” he says. “That would figure. Virgos are meticulous. They’d be susceptible to a dream like the one you were talking about.”

Peter reads from the book: “Be generous to friends, but don’t be taken advantage of. Unexpected windfall may prove less than you expected. Loved one causes problems. Take your time.”

He shrugs. He passes her the flask.

It’s too vague. She can’t really understand it. She sees Lincoln shaking the beads, but it’s not her fault this time — it’s the horoscope’s fault. It doesn’t say enough.

“That man I’m with wants to marry me,” she confides to Peter. “What should I do?”

He shakes his head and looks out the window. “Don’t ask me,” he says, a little nervously.

“Do you have any more books?”