Ann Beattie - Distortions

“I don’t want to talk about Wesley Dutton.”

He wants to talk about what’s going on, but he doesn’t know how to do it. She’s going to get the babies when they move. Is that when he’s supposed to marry her? She looks so pretty. Her hair shines. He thinks about asking why her hair shines. When she stands, her hair covers her shoulders. Her coat is wrinkled because it’s been bunched up underneath her. In high school the girls used to call her “Queen Jean” because her clothes were wrinkled and her sweaters never had enough buttons. It makes him angry to remember her being ridiculed.

“If you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to,” she says, turning and walking across the room. He gets his jacket and follows her down the stairs. When he pushes open the door a wind hits them. She bows her head and starts across the street.

“Not that bar,” he says. “Someplace nice.”

Doesn’t she hear him? He catches up with her, grabs the back of her scarf.

“I don’t notice that that bar smells any particular way,” she says.

“I didn’t say anything about that.”

“You said that was why you wouldn’t go there last night, didn’t you?”

What should he say? He drives past several bars, hoping she’ll be in a better mood when they stop, but she hasn’t spoken since they got in the car. They pass a row of bars, and later another bar pointed to by a red neon arrow shooting through a blue neon waterfall. He can’t tell if she likes any of the bars, because she’s looking at her hands in her lap. At the next bar he pulls in.

All the booths are taken, so they sit at a little wooden table covered by place mats soaking in puddles. They serve food here. He orders two cheeseburgers. Jeannie just looks at hers, so he eats that too. They sit in silence, pouring from a pitcher of beer. There’s a clock advertising Schlitz above the bar. A foam of tiny lights constantly overflows the beer mug. Every so often a man sitting at the bar below the light looks at them — at him, or at Jeannie? Bob Nails decides the man must be looking at her.

They leave the bar at midnight. Tomorrow she starts her job with the telephone company. What’s she going to do with the babies if she gets a job? What makes her hair shine? Couldn’t Wesley have gone to the farm to see what it looked like, the way they did?

“Well?” Bob Nails says.

He’s holding the car door open, but she hasn’t gotten in. She’s looking over his shoulder.

“What do you think that says?”

Jeannie’s looking at a sign across the street. He squints, trying to focus. Jeannie squints too, but walks down the gravel driveway toward it. He wants to call after her to find out if she’s that unsteady from drinking, or if it’s because the driveway is so full of holes. Instead, he follows her.

The sign is in the window of a little house. A light glows in one of the rooms, but the sign has been turned off.

“She’s a fortune teller!” Jeannie says.

“Come on,” Bob Nails says.

“There’s a light inside.”

“Jeannie, it’s late at night.”

But she’s already knocked on the door and is knocking again, harder. He grabs her hand and holds it at his side. Inside the house a dog barks, then is quiet.

“Satisfied?” he says, leaning against the door.

He stumbles for balance when the door is opened. In the corner of his eye he sees an old man with a rifle, but the next second he isn’t sure there was any old man. A young girl is facing them, wearing a quilted robe, her hair rolled in curlers. Her face is very pink. Bob Nails smells incense, or musk perfume. The girl cocks her head.

“Is it too late to have our fortunes told?” Jeannie asks.

The girl’s mouth moves oddly, as if she might be chewing gum. Very softly, very precisely, she says, “You are going to die,” and closes the door.

Spaceship, flying saucer, an hallucination … they don’t know yet. They don’t even notice it until it is almost over their car. Estelle, who has recently gone back to college, is studying Mortuary Science. Her husband, Alvin William “Big Bear” Benton, is so drunk from the party they have just left that he wouldn’t notice if it were Estelle, risen from the passenger seat, up in the sky. Maybe that’s where she’d like to be — floating in the sky. Or in the morgue with bodies. Big Bear Benton thinks she is completely nuts, and people who are nuts can do anything. Will do anything. Will go back to school after ten years and study Mortuary Science. It’s enough to make him get drunk at parties. They used to ask his wife about the children at these parties, but now they ask, subtly, about the bodies. They are more interested in dead bodies than his two children. So is Estelle. He is not interested in anything, according to his wife, except going to parties and getting drunk.

Spaceship, flying saucer, an hallucination … Big Bear concentrates on the object and tells himself that he is just hallucinating. There is a pinpoint of light, actually a spot of light about the size of a tennis ball, dropping through space. Then it is the size of a football … he is trying to think it is a real object, no matter what it is doing up there … but maybe it’s a flying saucer. Or a spaceship. He looks at Estelle, who is also drunk. She is staring at her hands, neatly folded on her lap. Those hands roam around in dead bodies the way coyotes roam around the desert — just for something to do. This is the first time he has ever been glad to concentrate on Mortuary Science. Like reading the stock pages in the bathroom.

“What is that?” Big Bear says, fighting to stay calm.

“Well, you know what it looks like,” Estelle says. “It looks like a spaceship.”

“Yeah, I know. But what is it really?”

Now that Estelle is becoming educated and urbane, he has become more childish. He is always asking questions.

“I don’t know. It’s a spaceship come to take us to Mars.”

Big Bear begins to worry about the car being blown over. The car is a 1965 Peugeot, a real piece of crap that Big Bear would have gotten rid of long ago if it had not belonged to his wife’s brother, who died in Viet Nam. His wife won’t hear of getting rid of the car. She has some of her brother’s underwear that she won’t take out of the drawer. It’s in Big Bear’s drawer, in fact — not hers — and her reason for that is that it’s men’s underwear. But her brother’s car is done for now, because the wind is going to blow it over and mash the roof.

“What’s going on?” Big Bear yells to Estelle. It comes out a whisper. It occurs to Big Bear that this is some kind of joke. He would discuss with Estelle the possibility of the people at the party pulling a joke on them, but it’s too noisy to converse. Through the windstorm he hears, “Earthlings! We are visitors from a friendly planet” and wets his pants.

*

Big Bear hears Estelle in the kitchen, memorizing: “The heart is a hollow muscular pump surrounded by the pericardium.…” Just by the tone of her voice, he understands that there is no hope for the human body. His two children, Sammy and David, stand around the kitchen eating cookies and listening to their mother. They like it better than talking to Big Bear, which makes him brood. His children are interested in intestines, the liver, bones, tissue, the optic nerve. It makes Big Bear sick just to think about it. If he could think of an excuse to stop giving Sammy and David an allowance, he would.