Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“Go, go, go you bastard!” Sam hollers in the bedroom.

“Doesn’t he know if he’s coming or not?” Charles asks.

“He’s coming if he thinks the car will hold out.”

“What’s wrong with his car?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“Then how is he going to decide if it’ll hold out?”

She shrugs. “It’s an old Cadillac,” she says. “It eats gas, but it usually holds out. Except that there’s one hose that always breaks.”

“Wooooooo!” Sam shouts.

“I guess he’s not dying,” Charles says.

Susan unwraps the towel from her head, throws her hair forward and begins brushing it.

“Should we call the hospital later? To see how she is when the tranquilizers wear off?”

“She’ll be nuts. That’s how she’ll be.”

“If Mark makes it, he’ll be here tomorrow. We can all go then.”

“No,” Charles says. “Anyway — I’ve got to go back to work.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot about work.”

“It was sure a swell vacation,” Charles says. “I can’t complain.”

“Do you get another vacation in the summer?”

“I just have two days left. Except for sick leave.”

“Isn’t it awful to have your life measured out like that?”

“I need the money.”

“Couldn’t you paint? You used to be so good at it.”

“Paint? There’s no money in painting. Maybe I could paint houses. I’ve thought about doing something like that. Sam and I kicked around the idea last summer. He’s really going nuts at the store.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I get out of college.”

“It would help to have a major. But if you’re marrying Doctor Mark, I don’t guess you even need to finish.”

“I want to go to school. I mean, I want to finish. I didn’t go there to get a husband.”

“Now that you’ve got one, why don’t you just quit?”

“He’s not even my husband. He’s just my boyfriend.”

“Propose to him,” Charles says. “I wish I could propose to somebody and have them take care of me.”

“I’m not going to propose to Mark!”

“Why not? Don’t women propose to men now?”

“That’s not why I’m not doing it. I just don’t want to do it.”

“Face it. You want him to marry you.”

“Then he can propose,” Susan says.

“How quaint.”

“You deliberately get me on these subjects so you can goad me,” Susan says.

“I know. I can be so unpleasant. Maybe if somebody took care of me I’d be in a better mood.”

“Get that woman to leave her husband.”

“It’s more than a husband. It’s a daughter and an A-frame.”

“That’s nothing. Women walk out every day.”

“Not for me they don’t.”

“You should keep after her.”

“She’s sick.”

“When she’s well.”

“Yeah,” Charles says.

“Don’t sound so defeated. You’ll never be persuasive if you sound like that.”

“What should I do? Read a Dale Carnegie book?”

“Who’s that?” Susan says.

“What a generation. Never heard of Amy Vanderbilt. Never heard of Dale Carnegie. And you think Woodstock was a drag.”

“I know it was a drag. It was nothing but mud.”

“And nobody is into drugs any more, huh?”

“Not many people. I don’t know … maybe I just don’t know them.”

“Have you got a lot of friends at school?”

“A couple that Mark knows are pretty nice.”

“I don’t have any friends. I just have Sam.”

“Why don’t you meet people?”

“Next you’ll be telling me to dance.”

Charles goes into the kitchen, looks through the cabinets to see what there is for dinner. Susan is right; he thinks about food too much. He picks up a package of dried peas, drops them back on the shelf. There is a large bottle of vanilla, a package of dried beans, a box of Tuna Helper, no tuna, a can of baby clams, two cans of alphabet soup, a canister with four Hydrox cookies (what happened to them? They used to be so good. Sugar. No doubt they’re leaving out sugar), a package of Cheese Nabs, and a can of grapefruit juice. There is also a package of manicotti shells. They will have to go out for dinner. It is too cold; it was thirty degrees when he went out early in the afternoon to buy Sam some magazines.

“You don’t have a hair dryer, do you?”

“Of course not. What would I be doing with that?”

“A lot of men blow-dry their hair now.”

“I don’t want all that junk around me. What would I have a hair dryer for?”

He is cantankerous. That’s probably the real reason Susan’s leaving. If Doctor Mark’s Cadillac will start.

“Does Mark use a hair dryer?” he calls.

No answer. The rumble of the television. He looks at the thermometer on the window outside. It is twenty-eight degrees. The thermometer was a Christmas gift from an uncle in Wisconsin. An ornamental squirrel is huddled on top of it. It is made out of some plastic-looking black material. The squirrel looks like it won’t make it. There is a black plastic nut in its paws. Charles goes back to the cabinet, looking for the jar of bird seed. He finds it, shoved to the back of the highest shelf. There is also another box of Tuna Helper there, and a jar of Heinz Kosher Dills. They will definitely be going out for dinner. Charles gets his jacket from the closet in the living room, zips it. Twenty-seven, and he still has trouble zipping his jacket. “You approach it with too much hostility,” Laura told him. “You have to glide it up. You do it all wrong; you jerk it. A zipper will never work if it’s jerked.” Laura used to zip his jacket for him. When she went back to her husband he couldn’t stand to see the jacket. He went out and bought a raincoat, but that wasn’t warm enough, and he had a sentimental attachment to the jacket, so eventually he started wearing it again. One of the girls he had once loved (the one he still sort of loves, but she’s no good for him) gave it to him five years ago as a Christmas present. She got tired of sewing buttons on his blue pea jacket, and on Christmas morning he opened the box with the brown jacket in it. There was a chocolate heart wrapped in red foil inside. Where did she ever find a Valentine’s Day heart in December?

He opens the front door and walks out into the snow with a pie tin full of birdseed. Fearing that the tin will blow away, he goes into the garage and looks for something to weight it down with. The only thing he can find is a shovel, so he takes that out and rests the handle over part of the pie tin. It looks silly — like some socialist emblem. At least now they’ll eat Walking back to the house, he glances over his shoulder. What is he doing in this neighborhood? Who are his neighbors? When he first moved in, a woman a few houses down — he can’t remember any more whether it was the red brick house or the gray one-asked him to a party. He asked whether she’d mind if he brought a friend — the party was on a Friday night, and he always saw Sam on Friday night. He thought that afterwards he and Sam would go out for a few beers. He and Sam went to the woman’s party (her name was Audrey. He’s been trying to remember that for months), and met a couple who lived a few houses across from him (they told him which one — it was either the red brick or the blue with white shutters). They told him to stop by for a drink, but he forgot which house it was and was embarrassed to go knocking on doors. He kept thinking he’d run into them, but he never did, and he never got there for the drink. The party at Audrey’s was pretty nice. At least he enjoyed it, until he began to sense strange looks, until he figured out that Audrey thought he and Sam were queer. Why would she think that? They even sat on opposite sides of the room. Audrey’s husband was very nice. He was in a wheelchair, and had been for five years, after a car accident. He sold books. He also sold life insurance. On Saturday he sold flowers, helped the cashier who was his nephew. “I don’t want to have time to think,” he said. “I’d only come to depressing conclusions.” “He’s the most un-depressed man I’ve ever known,” Audrey said. “He’s a pleasure to be with.” “And it keeps me out of the house,” her husband said. Audrey looked terribly hurt. Later, Charles called (twice) to ask them to dinner, but both times she said they were busy. Once he saw her husband in his wheelchair on the avenue, trying to navigate down a particularly icy stretch of sidewalk that hadn’t been sanded. He wanted to go over and help him, but he was embarrassed. He just went back to his car and drove home.