Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“Well, I’ll tell you something that annoyed me. You never even asked me to be a scoutmaster, and you knew I built birdhouses and did stuff like that. All the other kids asked their fathers, and you never even approached me.”

“I never thought you’d be interested, Pete. We didn’t talk much, so I didn’t think you’d want to deal with a whole troop of boys my age.”

“Maybe we would have talked more if we had had things to talk about. Birdhouses and things like that. I knew how to build stuff. I would have been a good leader for you boys.”

“I’m sorry I never asked, Pete. I just assumed wrong.”

“Well, it’s too late now,” Pete says.

“Don’t worry about it, then. Just don’t worry about it.”

“That’s right. What’s that saying? ‘Lord give me patience to change the things I can change and not worry about those I can’t,’ or something like that.”

“Yeah.”

“I find it very hard to talk to you on the phone, Charles. When I make a comment it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.”

“I don’t know what else to say, Pete. You remember the saying better than I do, so I don’t have anything to add.”

“You’re a very impatient person, I think,” Pete says. “But I want to get back to the reason for this call. You’ve got me so flustered I can’t remember if I already said this, but I wanted to ask whether you couldn’t come over on Saturday night for dinner to welcome Clara home.” He punches the “Clara.”

“Pete … you know she won’t get a dinner together.”

“I can get the dinner. I’m cooking. All you’ve got to do is grace us with your presence. If I can be blunt, I don’t even want you for dinner myself after this bad phone conversation, but your mother mentioned the idea. I’m going to get a chicken. Anybody can cook chicken.”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

“Okay,” Pete says. “Don’t forget.”

“It’ll be on my mind all week, Pete.”

“Talk nice to me! I’m sixty-three years old.”

“I’ll see you then, Pete.”

“I hate to hang up this way. I feel like you’ve insulted me, yet I’m on the defensive.”

“Somebody’s at my door, Pete.”

“I know you’re just saying that. You always get me in some corner and make me stay there. What can I do but hang up if somebody is knocking at your door? Yet nobody is.”

The knocking continues.

“Somebody is, Pete. It’s somebody I was expecting. I’ll see you for dinner.”

“Aw, good-bye,” Pete says, and hangs up.

Charles goes to the front door and opens it for Pamela Smith.

“Charles!” she says. “ Plus ça change.”

“Hi,” he says. “Come in.”

“I will come in. I feel like I’m home now. You’re the only person I know who’s still living in the same place. People I left in poverty have got glass-topped Parsons tables now. It’s all changed so much.”

“It’s the same here, all right.”

“How about family problems? Oh, well, I shouldn’t rush into that.”

She hands him her coat. A black, long coat. She is wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt and black corduroy jeans and work boots. A knee is torn out of her jeans. The work boots have white paint on them. Why did he wash his hair? He could have washed it for work when she left.

“Would you like a drink or some coffee or tea?”

“You don’t have anything to eat , do you?”

“Cheese,” he says. Does he have cheese?

“Oh, could I have some cheese?”

“Sure.”

He leaves her standing in his living room and goes into the kitchen. She follows him out.

“I’ve become a vegetarian, and I feel so much better. When I ate meat a week ago, just to try it again, I actually stank afterwards. I could smell myself.”

“There’s Muenster and Swiss,” he says. “Some of both?”

“That would be good,” she says.

The phone rings. Charles picks it up.

“Hell,” Pete says. “That was nuts of me to say there was nobody at your door. I’m sure there was, and I called back to say that it was just my nuttiness.”

“That’s okay, Pete. It was a friend of mine from a couple of years ago, just back from California. I was getting her something to eat.”

“I’d really be a fool if I thought you were making that up,” Pete says. “If I thought the knock and the food was imaginary, all to brush me off.”

Charles hands the phone to Pamela Smith. “Please say hello to my stepfather,” Charles says. Pamela Smith looks taken aback, holds the phone to her ear as if expecting an explosion, then says a tentative, “Hello.”

“Why, hello,” Pete says. “Charles says that you’re here from California.”

“Yes. I just got back.”

Charles takes the phone away from her. She looks even more surprised.

“I’ll see you on Saturday, Pete.”

“Hell,” Pete says. “Down with the phone and off with the pants.”

“Oh my God,” Charles says, and hangs up.

“It’s a long story,” Charles says to Pamela Smith. “To make a long story short, he gets his feelings hurt very easily, and he thought I was hanging up on him before when I said there was a knock on the door.”

“Wow,” Pamela Smith says. “That’s sad.”

“He’s a sad case. I try to be nice to him, but it’s just not in me.”

“He might feel better in general if he cleaned out his system. Saunas and a fresh vegetable regime.”

“He’s stuck in his rut. He’ll never get out of it. My mother is nuts, and he spends all his time coping with that and getting slowly crazier himself.”

“Have they tried Gestalt?”

“No. She won’t go out of the house.”

“Wow,” Pamela Smith says. “Even if she stayed in … she might try eating more fruits and vegetables and so forth.”

Charles puts the cheese and some crackers on a plate, turns on the water to make coffee. He motions her to the kitchen table.

“So things are pretty much the same here,” he says.

“All in all, things are pretty much the same with me, too. I feel a whole lot better, but things are otherwise the same. I’ve got to get a job. I don’t know. Anything beats canning cauliflower in Mendocino. I mean, I just don’t want to can at all any more.”

“What else were you doing out there?” Charles asks.

“For a while I was living with this creep. He played the jew’s-harp and had an imitation of Elton John doing ‘Benny and the Jets.’ It really got to me after a while. It was always raining in Mendocino, and I’d go home and he’d be on the bed, naked, twanging the jew’s-harp, going ‘Benny, Benny, Benny aaaaaand the Jets …’ ”

Charles laughs.

“I sort of had a thing with a woman out there, who turned me on to curried rice. She was older than me. Forty. Except around the eyes, she looked twenty. She had an amazing body. She fasted on Sunday and ate nothing but curried rice the next day. She was a silversmith.”

Pamela Smith holds out her hand. There is a silver ring on her middle finger.

“That’s very nice,” Charles says.

“For a while I thought I’d be staying with her. She was going to teach me how to be a silversmith, get me out of that factory. She had a daughter. It was a weird scene.”

Charles nods. He is sure it was. He does not want to hear.

“The daughter thought Dylan was coming for her. She had substantial proof from the last two records. She played them all the time. I was glad to get out to go to the factory some days.”

“Is everybody crazy out there?”

“No. I think everybody’s pretty relaxed. There are a lot of nice things about California. Her daughter, though, was always looking out the window, actually expecting Dylan. Her mother was shooting pictures of her in various stances by the window. She had been a student of Diane Arbus’s. Things were really getting pretty tense when I split. And that’s when I ended up with the guy who did the Elton John imitation. We both needed a place to stay. Marian — that was her name — came over one night with her daughter, and she spent the whole night at the window. It was getting sort of weird.”