Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“Sorry to wake you up. Pamela Smith is on the phone. She says that she’s run into trouble and she was on her way back when she got stranded at the Clara Barton Service Area. She doesn’t have any money. She doesn’t sound very good. I said I’d try to get out to get her, but she said she wanted to talk to you.”

“What?” Charles says. “How much did you miss?”

“What do you mean the Clara Barton Service Area? On the New Jersey Turnpike, you mean?”

“Yeah. She came back East. She said there was trouble.”

Charles gets out of bed, taking the quilt off and wrapping it around himself. He walks across the cold tile to the kitchen phone.

“Pamela?” he says.

There is no answer.

“Pamela? Hello?”

“Isn’t she there?” Sam says. He takes the phone. “Pamela?” he says.

There is only silence on the other end.

“Hang up. She’ll call back,” Sam says.

Charles hangs up. They sit in the living room. The phone does not ring.

“Well, I don’t know what the hell to do,” Charles says. “It’s a real storm out there. Did she say what kind of trouble?”

“It was garbled. I don’t know well enough to tell you. The highway will be clear, if we can get off the block. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. She always overreacts. Let’s sit here a minute.”

Charles looks over his shoulder at the falling snow.

“I was having some odd dream,” he says. “I can’t remember.”

“Ask Fritz,” Sam says.

“What garbage,” Charles says.

Sam shrugs. “I don’t know. Somebody’s got to know something.”

Charles gets up, staggers toward the bedroom. “I’m going to get my goddamn clothes on. We can take my car. It’s got studded tires. If you even intend to come, that is.”

“Yeah. I’ll come.”

“Are you awake enough to drive?” Charles asks.

“Yeah. But you will be too, man, when you hit that cold air out there.”

“Pamela Smith,” Charles says. “Pamela Smith doesn’t mean shit to me.”

“Why don’t you wait for another call then? If it’s important there’ll be another call.”

“She’d better goddamn well be there,” Charles says. “You’re sure that’s the service area she said?”

“How could I forget that?”

There is no answer from the bedroom. Charles is putting his dirty slacks back on.

It is a long ride to the Clara Barton Service Area, and it is late Saturday morning before they are close to being home. Pamela Smith will not talk about what went wrong. When they persisted, she cried. “Everything I said to you, everything I talked about was just bullshit. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I think.” She sat in the front seat wedged between them, and when Charles got in the back seat to try to sleep she moved over next to Sam. After half an hour of being bumped on his side, Charles sat up and sat cross-legged in the back seat, looking out the back window at the highway. He was so tired that he was giddy; he thought about waving to oncoming cars, seeing if they’d mistake him for a kid or think he was retarded and wave back. But he was too tired to play games. The morning sun was very bright, and it was tiring to squint so long fighting it. If only the sun warmed something. The radio was on, but it was turned down low, and Charles could only pick out a word or a phrase. Watching the bright highway, with all the cars, Charles felt even more fatigued: all of them going where? And what for? Pamela Smith turned around once and said, “I don’t have any money.” “It’s okay,” he said to her. Or he thinks he verbalized it. Pamela Smith looks very ill, with black circles swollen under her eyes. At the service area they bought her a glass of orange juice — all she would take — and she spilled some on her Wonder Woman T-shirt. She ran to Charles when he came in. He felt like a great savior, like he was really accomplishing something. The good feeling wore away as his body began to give out. Now he sits in the back seat, squinting. Occasionally there is a flurry of snow, and the sky clouds up, but for now it is mostly clear and harsh. The heater never makes the car warm enough.

“We’re getting there,” Sam says, to no one in particular.

Charles nods. Unless Sam was looking in the rearview mirror, he didn’t see him.

“Wonder if J.D. made it through the night,” Charles says. He thinks about the rabbit: a fat, bright-eyed rabbit in an empty room.

Sam did not hear Charles. He was mumbling.

“I figure maybe another half hour,” Sam says. “We’re lucky the snow stopped.”

“How can you think of any of this in terms of luck?” Charles says.

Pamela Smith turns around. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You’re really my only friend.”

“What about your brother?” Charles asks. Nasty, but he’s curious.

“He just gave me the money on the condition he wouldn’t have to see me again.”

“That’s brotherly,” Charles says.

Pamela Smith shrugs. “He didn’t want me to be born. My mother says he never looked at me in my crib. They’d have to call him over when they were giving me my bottle. He didn’t look at me until I started walking.”

“You didn’t get raped, did you?” Charles says.

“No,” she says.

“Are you ever going to tell us?”

“I’ll tell you later. It wasn’t any one thing.”

“A combination of things,” Charles says. That’s why Laura went back to Jim. Not just because he was now making enough money building A-frames to support her, but because of a lot of little things. A combination of things.

He looks out the side window at a big blue truck rolling by. If he were Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces he could hop a truck, start a new life. What new life would he like? The same life, but married to Laura. Or even living with Laura. Or even dating Laura. Or even getting to hear her holler out her car window again. She had looked so fragile, shouting out the window that she was sick. Once at her apartment she had been sick, and he had rocked her. There was no rocking chair, so he sat on the edge of a chair and rocked her by bending forward and back. His stomach muscles were constricted for a week after that She liked to be rocked; she liked to pretend to be a child again. He bought her a mobile of little matchstick ships that he hung from the bathroom light. It was a small apartment, and they were always running into each other. He loved that. He’d quicken his pace when he turned a corner, hoping she’d be there so he could smack into her. He tries to imagine bumping into Betty, turning a corner and running into Betty. He could never take Betty in his arms and apologize for hitting her. There is no way he could even date Betty. He could, but he’d be miserable. What would they do? Go to a movie, or go out to dinner? What for? He stares at the passing cars, slumps lower in the seat.

“Don’t you want me to take over for a while?” he says to Sam.

“Nah. This way I’ll stay awake. If I fall asleep in a car I get sick.”

“I could drive,” Pamela Smith says. Neither of them acknowledges it.

Sam turns up the volume on the radio. He quickly turns it down. “False alarm,” he says. “I thought it was from the new Dylan album.”

“I didn’t think that was out yet,” Pamela says.

“Supposed to come out sometime soon, isn’t it?” Sam says.

They turn off the beltway and start down the exit ramp. Sam hums softly.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” she says. “I got robbed. That was the last straw. I had twenty-five bucks, and a woman with a little kid made me fork it over. She said we were stopping for a Coke, made her kid stay in the car, and walking into the service area she said she was going to stab me in the back if I didn’t give her my money. I couldn’t believe it. She looked so goddamned maternal, in a blue coat and loafers. ‘What are you waiting for, to see the knife?’ she said. ‘It cuts. That’s the first you get to see it.’ I gave her the money, and she left me there.”