Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“You sound like Pete.”

“Pete says he doesn’t do stuff, but he does. He’s always doing stuff for your mother. I used to do stuff for my dog. Now she’s dead.”

“Don’t start feeling bad about the dog. Why don’t you get yourself another dog? You’d have time to train it.”

“Great. Get fired, and it gives you time to swat a dog’s ass when it shits in the house.”

“You get sarcastic every time I tell you to get another dog.”

“I liked the dog I had.”

“Go on, get another dog.”

“Get another girl friend.”

“Okay,” Charles says. “Touché.”

Sam slumps in the chair.

“I’ve got a roast beef in the oven. Maybe we ought to go out and get a bottle of wine and celebrate: your loss of a job, my loss of Laura.”

“Maybe we should get a bottle of whiskey, too, and finish it off after the celebration.”

“Come on,” Charles says. “Want to go get some wine?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I haven’t had a decent dinner for so long I can’t remember.”

“Your car or mine?” Charles asks.

“Mine’s okay,” Sam says. He gets up, shakes his head. “I don’t think this is registering yet. I just realized that tomorrow I won’t have anywhere to go.”

They walk out the front door. The door on the passenger’s side is frozen shut; Sam has to push it open from the inside. The upholstery on the front seats is ripped, and the rug has pulled away from the door and curled up on both sides. There is a crack across the windshield that begins in the middle and takes a ninety-degree turn across Charles’s line of vision. A truck threw a rock into the window. Sam’s insurance didn’t cover it Charles thinks about Pamela Smith talking about marriage as ashes — the wind will blow the ashes away. She should have been a poet. She did write poetry, in college, and then again for the feminist newspaper she wrote for. But that was ugly poetry, poetry about slippery tongues and pendulous breasts. He is glad he didn’t sleep with her when she spent the night.

“Which one?” Sam says. “The new one on the avenue?”

“Sure. Whatever’s closest.”

“Do you have money, by the way? I guess it goes without saying that I’m broke.”

“Yeah. I’ve got money.” He knows he has thirty-some dollars. If he were going into the grocery store he would already have checked his wallet a couple of times, but this is just a liquor store. He has a twenty and a ten for sure.

“I actually think I might be doing better temporarily, not having to pay so much money back to that bank for the loan.”

“Like I said — it’s a great way to do better.”

“Yeah, I know. Wait until my father hears about this.”

“Don’t tell him. What’s he got to know for?”

“I don’t intend to tell him.”

Sam’s father lives thirty miles away. He has an apartment. Sam’s mother lives in their house, which is only fifteen minutes from where Sam lives. Although sometimes she moves into Sam’s father’s apartment. And sometimes, rarely, Sam’s father shows up at the house. There are always suitcases all over. Sam’s father retired, then went back to work; his mother took a job, then quit, and at last report was thinking about studying to be a beautician. There was a fight about that, and Sam’s father moved out of the house, back to the apartment.

They should get rid of the house and live together in the apartment and send Sam to law school. Neither one likes him well enough to do it. Sam is their only child. Sam’s mother had a hysterectomy after Sam was born. She tells people that she couldn’t have another child because of a delicate heart She tells them she has had heart surgery. She even buys a salt substitute for her bad heart.

“What do you hear from him lately, anyway?” Charles asks.

“He called to say that my mother was over at his apartment I never call her — I don’t know why he’d think I should know.”

“How long have they been shuttling back and forth?”

“Eight years, I guess. Maybe a little longer.”

“What was Christmas like?”

“Awful, as usual. His sister was invited to dinner, and she showed up at the apartment, and nobody was there. She called from the lobby and made a big thing of it — how they should tell her where they were living. She showed up late and everybody was crabby and hungry. It took her about twice as long to get there as it should have. She made a big thing of saying that all the way over she kept thinking that she should just turn around and go back to her apartment and eat alone.”

“That’s all, though?”

“Well, every time my mother fixes dinner Eleanor makes her feel bad by saying, if there’s no parsnips, how much she likes parsnips, or if there’s no bread, how much she likes bread. And she pretends I’m still in college and asks how I’m doing there. I don’t know why they invite her.”

“Is she still working?”

“Yeah. It’s her last year. She told her boss she was retiring next December and he said, ‘I’ve been in hell so many years I’ve gotten used to it. What will I do without you?’ ”

“How long has she been there?”

“Forty years.”

“Jesus. Imagine typing for forty years.”

“I can’t. My imagination is dead. I don’t even dream any more. I was reading that Fritz Perls book over Christmas. Fritz suggests you sit down and ask your dreams why they are eluding you. You know: you set up two chairs and run back and forth.”

“Tried it?”

“Are you kidding?”

Sam double parks in front of the liquor store.

“Since you’ve got the money …” Sam says.

Charles goes in and buys a bottle of bordeaux. The man behind the cash register has bushy white hair and eyebrows. He always says the same thing: “Should prove drinkable.” Charles gives him the $5.80 and nods. Then the man asks if he wants a bag. He doesn’t. He walks back to the car. Sam has turned on the radio and “Benny and the Jets” is playing. Charles wonders if that guy in Mendocino is still playing his jew’s-harp and singing that song. He is glad he is not on the West Coast. He is too old for the West Coast. He found his Frisbee in the closet a few weeks ago and didn’t even give it a toss.

“Pamela Smith was over at my house the other night.”

“Is that right? I thought she was in California.”

“She came back for some reason. She was working in a canning factory out there and it freaked her out, so she came back. Then she decided to go back out and not work in a canning factory.”

“That girl was nuts. Interesting, though.”

“She’s got a friend out there who’s going to teach her to be a silversmith.”

Sam shrugs. “Beats selling jackets.”

“You don’t think there’s any way you could go to law school, huh?”

“Nope.”

“Well, maybe eventually.”

“Sure. I’ll marry a rich woman. Actually, even if I had the money, I think my brain has atrophied too much to understand what anybody’s talking about.”

“You exaggerate.”

“I got a letter from my landlord last week saying that the rent was going up in March, and I had to read it twice to get it through my head what was being said to me.”

“He probably wrote it that way on purpose.”

Sam shrugs. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if this car falls apart. Hear that? If it’s the carburetor I’m okay, but if it’s the engine, I’m sunk.”

Sinking. Bermuda. The sharks. The fountain.

“It’s probably the carburetor.”

“It’s probably the engine.”

The car turns into Charles’s block. The people in this neighborhood go to bed very early. They are almost all asleep by ten, and some go to bed this early — before eight o’clock. Burglars are always breaking in on sleeping couples.