Ann Beattie - Distortions

Now David rolls down the car window. Last-minute news. He tells me that his sister has been staying in his apartment. She aborted herself and has been very sick. “Abortions are legal,” David says. “Why did she do that?” I ask how long ago it happened. A month ago, he says. His hands drum on the steering wheel. Last week, Beth got a box of wooden whistles carved in the shape of peasants from David’s sister. Noel opened the kitchen window and blew softly to some birds on the feeder. They all flew away.

Patty leans across David. “There are so many animals here, even in the winter,” she says. “Don’t they hibernate any more?”

She is making nervous, polite conversation. She wants to leave. Noel walks away from me to Patty’s side of the car, and tells her about the deer who come right up to the house. Beth is sitting on Noel’s shoulders. Not wanting to talk to David, I wave at her stupidly. She waves back.

David looks at me out the window. I must look as stiff as one of those wooden whistles, all carved out of one piece, in my old blue ski jacket and blue wool hat pulled down to my eyes and my baggy jeans.

“ Ciao ,” David says. “Thanks.”

“Yes,” Patty says. “It was nice of you to do this.” She holds up the bag.

It’s a steep driveway, and rocky. David backs down cautiously — the way someone pulls a zipper after it’s been caught. We wave, they disappear. That was easy.

Wesley has gaps between his teeth. When Wesley doesn’t have anything to do, he pokes things in the spaces to see what will fit: stems, pennies, things. Or he takes a walk to the train station, swivels the seat down in the photo-matic, and deposits a quarter. Last winter Wesley took a lot of pictures before he ran out of money. By the time he got more money, his bowler hat, which photographed well, had blown away in the wind.

In one of today’s pictures Wesley has pulled up his lip to expose the gaps between his teeth. The picture pleases him, and he studies it. That’s how he happens to have the picture in his hand to show Bob Nails.

*

Jeannie Regis’ hair is all different colors. In the sunshine it’s one color. At night, when he lights up her hair with the flashlight, it’s like … copper. He shines the flashlight down the back of her hair. In the half-dark she looks like a painting his father used to have in his bedroom. He aims the beam down her spine. Fuzz. Red fuzz when he holds the light close to the skin. She keeps the flashlight on the night table because, when the babies call for her, the bright hall light frightens them. They wake up in the middle of the night, wanting water. Bob Nails thinks about filling the baby bath and putting it on the floor, maybe sailing little plastic boats in the water, putting glasses on the floor beside it.

There are two glasses on the night table. He drinks the last quarter inch of Bourbon and clicks off the flashlight.

*

When you say “the idiot,” everybody knows you mean Wesley. Wesley acted like an idiot long before the tests confirmed it, so Wesley’s mother tells everyone there was no point in the tests. Wesley is “the idiot,” Thomas is “the normal one,” and of course Mrs. Dutton has always been “the poor woman.” She sends him in to shower and finds him sitting on the toilet, afraid to get into the water. She has to throw back the shower curtain and get all wet herself, soaping and rinsing him, turning the water off and on, off and on so that Wesley will stay in the bathtub.

When Wesley’s brother, Thomas, was eighteen, the minister took him aside and told him he should volunteer to wash his brother. Thomas enlisted in the Army instead. He was Bob Nails’s best friend, so Bob Nails thought about joining the Army too. Bob Nails’s father wouldn’t sign the papers, and he told him that if he found a way around it he’d shoot him in the back. Bob Nails told him he didn’t care — he was in love with Jeannie Parater and he didn’t really want to leave. Mr. Nails told him he’d shoot him in the back if he got married. When school was over, Bob Nails went to work in the gas station. At the end of summer, Jeannie Parater left town, and when they tried to draft Bob Nails he was rejected because he couldn’t hear in one ear.

*

“Well, I guess I’m just going to have to scream at you like you was the idiot,” Sam Siddell, Junior, says to Bob Nails. “Army says you can’t hear, I guess that means you don’t have fit hearing. Same thing with a fairy being rejected,” Sam continues, biting off the end of a Chesterfield and tapping tobacco onto his tongue.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only thing it means,” Sam Siddell, Junior, says, lighting the cigarette, “is that the Army says a man’s got something wrong with him, a man’s got something wrong with him.” He smiles at Bob Nails. Sam Siddell, Junior, has two yellow circles of tobacco stain on his front teeth.

“Well, can I have my job back or can’t I?” Bob Nails says.

Sam Siddell rocks back in the green metal chair behind his desk. “If you can hear,” he says.

“When did you notice anything wrong with my hearing?”

“I didn’t bring it up — the Army did. Army brings up things for a reason — only wants fit men. It don’t take people who lost an arm, or people who couldn’t tell when there was orders to follow, or a fairy that wasn’t like other men.”

Bob Nails doesn’t say anything. A man Sam intended to hire to replace Bob Nails keeps looking from the garage into Sam’s office.

“Knew about my brother, didn’t you?” Sam asks.

“What about him?”

“Army sent him home.”

With the toe of his boot, Sam Siddell strokes the calendar girl’s bare legs.

“Sometimes, when you know something about other people’s misfortunes, you’re willing to give them a minute,” Sam says.

Bob Nails goes home and asks his father about Sam’s brother, who works for him at the grocery store.

“That boy got sent home after he lost half his leg when he done something wrong with explosives,” Bob Nails’s father says. “I don’t know what Sam’s excuse is for losing half his mind. He ever talks to you that way, you let me know and I’ll shoot him in the back.”

*

A woman is found dead, on a deserted farm off the highway. Two hunters discover her. First they see the car, a black Chevrolet, sitting in some brambles. It might have hit the tree to one side. The car looks okay — it doesn’t seem to have hit anything. A woman is sitting in the driver’s seat. Such a strange look frozen on her face; running toward her, they both think she’s frightened of them, of the guns. The doors aren’t locked; they open easily — but the police find that out. The men look in but don’t touch the door. One of the hunters has begun to sweat; he’s afraid he might pass out, so he begins to list facts in his mind: the upholstery is red, the car black, there is a woman. The other hunter makes the telephone call and tells these things to the police.

*

Jeannie? No. She’s home, but she’s unbuttoning one of the babies’ coats and can’t answer the phone. What’s wrong with Bob Nails? What’s he doing here in the middle of the afternoon? He’s talking so loudly that the babies wake up and cry. What’s wrong with him? He tells her all he knows: a woman is dead in a Chevrolet. But her Chevrolet is parked outside — didn’t he notice? Bob Nails looks out the kitchen window.

“If you’d miss me so much, why don’t you marry me?” she says.