Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“Yeah, but you haven’t met Betty. She’s very, well, she’s a zombie. I don’t think she thinks about anything much.”

“Sounds like you’d do well to get her, then.”

“What do I want some dumb woman for?”

“To screw.”

“She’s fat.”

“Get her to lose weight. Once you get her you can start talking that up.”

“I wouldn’t know how to tell a woman to lose weight.”

“Find some way and tell her. Tell her now and wait a few weeks before you ask her out.”

“I don’t want to ask her out. I just have no motivation to do it.”

“I think Susan might have something. That the two of us are depressed all the time. Too bad she didn’t tell us what to do about it.”

“She’s nineteen. You’re going to listen to advice from a nineteen-year-old?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says. “Maybe we shouldn’t have cut her off.”

“Sam, she reads those paperbacks about people who relive their childhood by screaming and things like that and she thinks we should try it”

“Screaming?”

“I mean, just as an example. She thinks we should do something that a book tells us to do, something that’s supposedly made everybody else happy.”

“Well, what book would you read?” Sam says.

“I wouldn’t read any book, and you wouldn’t either if you were in your right mind.”

“We don’t encourage each other. You should urge me to try something,” Sam says.

“It’s 1975, Sam. I urge you to try pizza with green pepper, the way I like it.”

“Hell, you’re paying,” Sam says.

“You really are sounding defeated. I thought you couldn’t stand anything but cheese.”

“I’m not complaining. You’re paying.”

“Shit,” Charles says. “I’m going to order it half plain, half with peppers.”

They drive in silence to the restaurant: a small brick pizza house with the Parthenon jutting out over the front door. It’s a good, cheap place. A large pizza is $3.80. If this were a food store, Charles would be in a panic with only six dollars.

“Maybe I should try green pepper,” Sam says. “I should try again and see if I like something like that”

“Why would you try it? You don’t like it. You can have it plain.”

“I want to try green pepper.”

“Jesus. What am I arguing for? What do I care how you eat your pizza?”

“You’re mad at me,” Sam says.

“Well, what am I supposed to think when you suggest we let Susan straighten us out? She’s my kid sister. She’s so straight it’s pathetic. She doesn’t even drink.”

“She screws,” Sam says.

“That’s straight,” Charles says. “Screwing a doctor is straight.”

“Keep your voice down.” The waitress stands at their booth.

“A large pizza, half green pepper, the other half mozzarella only, and a Coke for me. What do you want?”

“A draft,” Sam says.

“One Coke and one draft,” the waitress says. “Thank you.”

“You missed my point before,” Sam says. “I meant that she seems normal and happy. She must know something.”

“She’s nineteen. She doesn’t know shit. You could be happy too, Sam, if you were nineteen in 1975 and you hadn’t had your eyes opened in the sixties.”

“She was alive then.”

“In 1968 she was twelve years old.”

“Oh,” Sam says, “1968 was the best year. That’s the time I was the happiest.”

“In 1965 when ‘Satisfaction’ came out she was nine.”

“Okay, okay,” Sam says.

“The goddamn sixties,” Charles says. “How’d we ever end up like this?”

The waitress brings a Coke and a draft.

“Who gets the Coke again?” she says.

“The clergyman,” Sam says, pointing.

“He stutters,” Charles says. “She wrote me a note explaining that he speaks so haltingly sometimes because he’s swallowing the stutter.”

“C-c-c-clever,” Sam says.

Charles laughs. Even when Sam is down, he is still funny. Sam even used to make his mother laugh. His mother used to laugh at jokes. “It’s not dirty, is it?” she used to ask Sam. “Filthy,” he’d say, and start in. It was never dirty. His mother used to like Sam. Now she never asks about him. Now she doesn’t know what’s going on. She’s her own joke.

“I’ve got a load of books at my apartment that I’ve got to get out of there,” Sam says. “Drive me to work and you can have the car.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“You don’t think the battery on yours can be charged?” Charles asks. “It’s dead.”

“I swear this is the last time I’ll bring this up, but do you ever think about getting another dog?” Charles says.

“Yeah. I think about it.”

“Why don’t you go to the pound tomorrow and get a dog?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d have a lot of fun with it.”

“It would crap all over your place.”

“Put down newspapers. Keep it in the bedroom with them for a while.”

“I’ve got to sleep in there.”

“How many times a day can it shit?”

“I’ll think about it.”

The waitress puts the pizza down.

“Let me just have a slice with green pepper,” Sam says.

“Take it”

Sam cuts a piece with his knife. He bites off the end.

“Well?”

“I don’t like it. Here.”

Charles takes the piece of pizza and begins eating.

“She’s a good cook, isn’t she? Pamela Smith, I mean.”

“Yeah, pretty good.”

“I mean, she’s not Laura ,” Sam says, “But …”

“Shut up about Laura.”

“That’s what you were thinking when I mentioned Pamela Smith’s cooking. You got that Laura look on your face.”

“I don’t want to hear about Laura.”

“You brought up my dog again.” Charles sighs.

“The new Dylan isn’t on the jukebox, is it? It might be there even if it isn’t in the stores.”

“I doubt it,” Charles says, flipping through. “You want to hear ‘Lay Lady Lay?’ That’s on here.”

“I don’t want to think about screwing.”

“I was just offering,” Charles says, breaking off another piece of pizza.

“I really don’t have any luck with women any more,” Sam says.

“Maybe when you get older you don’t have luck with them.”

“You really think that’s it? My age?”

“No.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. You’re not going to meet any, in the first place, sitting around the house.”

“In 1968 I could pick up the prettiest girl in the park just by walking through.”

“I met a woman in the park the other day. I can’t remember her name.”

“Wouldn’t have done me any good anyway.”

“Yeah,” Charles says. “She was okay.”

“You mean just okay?”

“Yeah,” Charles says. “And she was married.”

“Who cares if they’re married or not?” Sam says. The waitress frowns down at him. “Do you want another draft?” she says. “Oh. Please.” She takes the glass away.

“Nice one,” Charles says, shaking his head. “Glad she didn’t hear the clergyman saying that.”

“Did I tell you Pete called?” Sam says. “Say what he wanted?”

“No. But he sounded okay. Sounded cheerful.”

“Maybe she sank in the tub.”

“Do you think he’d be happy if she died?”

“According to him, what would make him happy would be to have his own kid.”

“I don’t guess he’ll be getting one of those now,” Sam says. “That’s what he says,” Charles says.

“Well, that’s sad, I guess. If you want a kid and you don’t have it.”

“If we don’t get married and have kids we’re going to be up shit creek. What’s going to happen when we’re old?” Charles says.