Ann Beattie - Distortions

*

On July the twenty-second, Toby and David Warner quarreled. He told her that she should not have allowed Penelope to go to the beach; she said that he was overly protective. Penelope’s measles had been a slight case, and she had been completely well for two days. He said that Penelope had been weepy the night before; she said that was because he always hovered around her. Before the argument began, Toby had been sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the book of photographs. She had attempted to converse with him before they got into the argument; she talked about Diane Arbus’s being influenced by the Chinese belief that people pass through boredom to fascination. It seemed to David that Toby was neither bored nor fascinated; she seemed to be in a fog. He had taken the clothes to the laundromat because it looked like Toby was going to smoke cigarettes and stare at the book all day. There had been several young men in the laundromat. They all looked like the lifeguard to him. Why was she interested in the lifeguard? Why would she be so blunt about it? What could he do about it? He had put too much detergent into one of the machines and it foamed over. The owner had given him a mop-pleasantly, considering the mess he had made. “If you was a hippie I’d feel differently,” the owner had said. David had always been “a nice young man.” Except for dodging the Army, which shocked his parents, he had never even let anyone down. Except Toby. He must have let her down. He folded the clothes crookedly, took some out of the dryer too soon.

“Would you like to go out for dinner?” David asked after the argument.

“Yes,” she said. “That would be nice.” Formal, forced pleasantness.

“Where did you get that book?” he asked.

“At the bookstore.”

“What’s your fascination with it?”

“You still want to fight, don’t you?” she asked.

“I can’t believe you let Penelope go to the beach.”

“Andrew and Randy are with her. They’d bring her back if she felt sick.”

“Randy’s always playing with the Collins’ kids. He’d never notice. What’s his fascination with those little beasts?”

“Tom’s a nice kid.”

“The older one isn’t.”

“The older one’s twelve. He has another set of friends.”

“He got put out of the drugstore today. I was standing there reading a magazine while the clothes were drying, and he and some of his friends lit a pile of napkins on the counter.”

“What happened?”

“The counter girl threw water on it and put it out. The manager put them all out of the store.”

“I don’t know. I can’t forbid Randy to play with Tom because Tom’s brother is screwed up.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that.”

“Then what were you getting at?”

“I was just telling you what happened.”

“You want to be argumentative,” she said. “I told you that before.”

David sighed — a very theatrical sigh — and walked out the kitchen door. He stumbled on the dump truck and twisted his ankle. He sat down and rubbed it, waiting for the bleeding to begin. It didn’t bleed; it just hurt.

“Let’s take a walk down to the beach,” he called to Toby.

In a minute the kitchen door opened and she came out. No lover of the sun, she was quite pale. She was smoking. She had on a red T-shirt and cut-off jeans. She looked very maternal — not for any reason he could name. He was tempted to whine to her that he had hurt himself. Maybe that was what was wrong; the children were always complaining to her. He thought about asking how she felt about the children, but there were three of them. What was he going to do about it? He stepped on something and got a splinter in his foot

“Stop and take it out,” she said.

He sat in the sand on the side of the road, the tall grass tickling his arms, a dragonfly buzzing around him. He held out his foot to her and she removed the splinter. She had long fingernails. They were painted bright red, and because he only looked at what she was doing to his foot for a second, he thought that it was blood on his foot. He thought about how brave he was, back in the road walking on his bleeding foot, until he realized that the flash of red had been Toby’s fingernail.

“We’ll see that lifeguard any second,” he said to her, squeezing her hand.

“You make beeg joke, hah? I love him …”

He suspected a literary allusion; it was either that or a line from some favorite movie of hers, and considering the kind of movies she liked, all hazy and European, he didn’t really think it was a movie. An allusion to what? She read all the time — no way he could keep up with her. And such funny things stuck in her mind. He was always saying, “What’s that from?”

The questions David and Toby would ask in the future would not have to do with how it was best to care for the children, or what book was being alluded to. All that would seem trivial, and they wouldn’t do it In fact, for a long period they would hardly communicate at all. They didn’t know that, though. They expected to walk along the beach — pick up a few shells? — eat dinner, perhaps at the Cliff House, which all the natives said was very good, get their feet wet. They held hands, going up the path to the beach. He whistled softly. “When we leave here I’d like to get a puppy,” Toby said. He was surprised — her idea just came out of the blue, like the rest of the events that day.

*

The tragedy was the fault of “the mad boy.” The natives, slow-moving, quick-thinking people, understood the situation in the correct perspective. “The mad boy,” Duncan Collins, twelve, took his brother Tom (the natives’ eyes lit up for a second — you understand that the family named their son Tom Collins?) and two other children, Penelope and her twin Andrew, out in a boat he had made — he had been forbidden to go out in the boat by his father after an incident at the drugstore, but Duncan got it out of the garage without his father noticing that Duncan had even left his room, where he was being punished — and set fire to the boat Duncan, Tom and Andrew died in the water. Penelope lived for a few minutes. The diver who was called to search the area (what for? There had been four children, and all were accounted for) brought a life jacket ashore. Duncan, who did not know how to swim, always wore a life jacket. What was he doing without it? Reasonably, the natives assumed that it was intentional. Suicide. Penelope was an excellent swimmer, but she was weak from a recent illness. Half her body was badly burned. Why didn’t she get out of the boat before she got so badly burned? It was anybody’s guess (the natives differed). Andrew was hardly burned at all, but the coroner said that he was the first to die. Tom died second. (Why did they compare the times of death? Just to have the facts? To have more to talk about?) The specifics of the incident were well-known, but nobody could really account for them. What did the other children think when Duncan Collins put a can of gasoline in the boat with them?

The lifeguard whistled for the boat to come in a little later than he should have, perhaps, but when he really started to go crazy at the police station later that night, they backed down about that. But to be honest — and the lifeguard always thought he was honest with himself — he should have whistled about two minutes before he did. He kept thinking for two minutes that the people in the boat would see that it was going out too far and come in. Two minutes, for Christ’s sake — not too long to wait, expecting they’d see their error. He blew the whistle and thought he saw the boat edge in a little. He waited. Then the boat began to go out to sea quickly. He realized that the people were deliberately taunting him. The world was full of them — people who want the lifeguard to get wet. He blew the whistle and looked through his binoculars. They were kids! He felt very uneasy when he saw that, and he blew the whistle loudly, one long blow, scrambling down from the chair. He was untying the boat, so he did not see the exact moment the boat burst into flames. He did see a child jump overboard. He was totally confused when he saw the fire. But yes — one did jump overboard. The waves were very rough, and although he was an excellent rower, he had trouble getting up speed. Some man from the beach ran into the water just behind the rowboat — everyone else just stood there — and jumped in before the lifeguard could tell him to get lost. Later he was glad he had let the man in, because with each of them working an oar, the rowboat moved quickly. It was that man who pulled Penelope out of the water and rowed her to shore — almost pushed the lifeguard out of the boat, because of course someone had to get the others, and rowed into shore with Penelope. The man’s name was Eugene Anderson. He was thirty-nine years old. He lived in Bangor, Maine. When Eugene Anderson disappeared with the boat, the lifeguard, in the icy water, swam around the fire. He saw no one inside the fire, which was by now dying out. He was extremely confused. He dived under about ten times … well, maybe fifteen … and heard a roar in the water that confused and frightened him more. Later, he realized that it was the sound of his heart. He found Andrew and Tom, and a diver who arrived, much to the lifeguard’s surprise, from the main beach, got Duncan. Eugene Anderson and the diver tried to get Duncan to breathe on the beach, but he was dead. He was naked. His chest was charred. What in the hell was happening? the lifeguard kept thinking. He was exhausted from all the diving and couldn’t do anything but support himself on one arm. He stared into the crowd. He was dizzy; it seemed like the people were standing at an odd angle. He reached toward them — he didn’t know why he was doing it — and a woman rushed forward and grabbed his hand. She’s breaking it, he thought, but couldn’t do anything about it. By the time his breath started to come back, he saw that his leg was cut. He never figured out how he cut it — a cut about four inches long, down his shin. The police were there. The diver, when it was clear that Duncan was dead, picked up heaps of sand and threw them into the crowd, into the lifeguard’s eyes, the policemen’s eyes. The diver did not even act as well as the life-guard, and the lifeguard was given Thorazine at the police station. They did something with the diver — took him somewhere. Eugene Anderson was a big help to the police. He was an accountant and a Boy Scout leader. The lifeguard kept interrupting his story, asking questions that he already knew the answers to. “That was a hell of a fire. But it went out so quickly, didn’t it?” Eugene Anderson answered calmly. His bottom lip kept jerking, though. “They set it on fire deliberately. Boats don’t just explode in the middle of the ocean,” the lifeguard said to Eugene Anderson, and Eugene Anderson answered him as if it had been a question.