Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I’m serious.”

“If we had kids they’d probably have to be taken care of in their old age by us.”

“If we had a lot we might get one good kid.”

“Great. You pull off shitted diapers for years, hoping for one good kid.”

“It’s just an idea,” Charles says.

“Talk about your sister being straight,” Sam says. “That’s what straight people do — pump ’em out, change the diapers, and sit back waiting for the payoff.”

Sam takes a drink from his new mug of beer. “This is a miserable topic of conversation,” he says.

“How did we get onto it?” Charles says.

“I said that Pete called.”

“That’s right I wonder what he wanted.”

“Maybe he got the chicken cooked.”

“He said he was going to forget about it. He didn’t want her to see it and start again.”

“That must be hell on earth, living with your mother.”

“I feel pretty sorry for him lately.”

Charles takes his money out of his wallet and puts it all on top of the bill. The waitress takes it away.

“Listen. Would you mind riding over to Laura’s?”

“That’s pathetic!” Sam says. “What do you want to do something that pathetic for? What’s the point of it?”

“I’ll drop you at home.”

“Oh, shit, Charles. It’s not that I won’t ride over. I just think it’s pointless.”

“She might be outside.”

“Just walking around at the end of the drive, soaking up the cold air?”

“The light might be on.”

“Of course the light will be on. She wouldn’t be in bed this early.”

“Then I want to see the light.”

“What’s this, The Great Gatsby or something?”

“Shut up. I said I’d take you to the house.”

“I’ll come, I’ll come for Christ’s sake.”

They get up and walk out of the restaurant. The waitress doesn’t look at them. She is standing in front of the cashier, talking.

“Take me home,” Sam says, “I can’t bear to watch you make a fool of yourself.”

“It’ll take ten minutes longer than driving straight home.”

“This is ridiculous,” Sam says.

“I just want to see what’s going on over there.”

“All you can see is a house! A lit-up house.”

Charles heads for Laura’s. He hopes that she will be outside the house. Maybe she went out because … she heard a noise. She wouldn’t, though. She’d mention it to her husband and he’d go outside. Ox. To drive all the way over there to see Ox.

Eric Clapton on the radio. Layla. Laura. Ox. Ox had better not be in sight. Sam slides down in the seat, sighing and shaking his head.

“You’re nuts, this is completely nuts,” Sam says.

Once he and Laura made a fruitcake. It took them all afternoon. They were going to give it to a friend of Laura’s who was sick, but they wanted it when it was done and ate it themselves. It cost a fortune to buy all the things that went into it. They bought a bag of walnuts and he cracked them. They joked — how did that joke start? — about sending the shells to the Smithsonian, writing a letter claiming to be archaeologists, saying that they found these peculiar things on a dig in the Blue Ridge, and did they think it might be petrified caveman shit? He showed her the trick with the Land O’ Lakes butter box — how you could make it look as if the squaw had big tits. They ate the fruitcake and drank the brandy they had bought to use in the fruitcake. It was so rich and delicious that they were almost sick, but they couldn’t stop eating. He put candied cherries in their brandy. In the morning she went out and got a get-well card for the friend. They ate the fruitcake for lunch and after dinner. Weekends were so nice with Laura. The time seemed to go so fast. She had a calendar hung in the kitchen that he insisted she get rid of. He didn’t even want to look at it. “But where will I write down appointments and things?” she said, and he gave her an engagement calendar. “I’m half flattered and I half think you’re crazy,” she said. He wonders if she has a calendar in the A-frame. If she and Ox ever do things like making fruitcake. He would like to soak Ox in brandy and beat him well and shove him in the oven. Ox wears size extra-large undershirts. Charles wears medium. Ox would pick him up by the collar and put him in the oven. Does Ox know about him? And if he knows, does he know about the fruitcake they made, about all the giggling they did in Laura’s kitchen? It would take her years to fill him in on all that. He couldn’t know it all. He might even get bored hearing all of it: we baked fruitcake, he showed me a trick with a butter box, we went to the movies, we did the laundry, we ate at a Japanese restaurant and didn’t like the soup, we cleaned his kitchen, we … Maybe Laura left because she was bored. Maybe that was one of the many things. She wouldn’t have been bored in Bermuda. He should have taken off from work, made her go to Bermuda with him. He should have cleaned the kitchen himself. He could go tap on her kitchen window: “Another chance, Laura.” Ox would be in the kitchen. He would walk outside and kill him.

“I mean it,” Sam says. “This is pathetic. It’s not like you call her and write her and make yourself obnoxious. All you do is slink over there to look at the lights on in her house. If she killed somebody you’d take the rap for her, wouldn’t you? The whole Gatsby trip.”

“She wouldn’t ever kill anybody.”

“Yeah, but what if she was driving your roadster along and a woman ran out in front of it?”

“Okay, okay. Enough.”

“What can I say that will talk you out of this dreary driving by her house?”

“Nothing.”

“There’s no point to it. What does driving by her house prove?”

“Nothing.”

“You just intend to do it anyway.”

“I just intend to do it anyway.”

“Goddamn it,” Sam says. “You remember how we used to double-date in college, and how we even had girlfriends in elementary school?”

“I never had a girlfriend in elementary school. You had Bess Dwyer.”

“Are you still denying that you had a crush on Jill Peterson?”

“I never liked Jill Peterson. That was always just something in your mind.”

“You’re still denying it. I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe that you’re still going on about it, I never liked her.”

“Then you’re just not admitting it to yourself.”

“You’ve brought her up for years. I’m not even clear on which one Jill Peterson was. Was she the scrawny blond kid?”

“Exactly! You remember just which one she was.”

“What made you think I liked her?”

“You bought her a special valentine, don’t you remember that?”

“She transferred into our school just before Valentine’s Day. I remember that. My box of valentines had all been addressed, and then she showed up, and I thought I’d better …”

“I’ll be damned! You’re still rationalizing!” Sam breaks in.

“I’m not rationalizing. I’m trying to set you straight. It doesn’t matter to me if you want to think I liked her, but I never did.”

“Everybody knew you did.”

“Even if I did — which I didn’t — she wasn’t a girlfriend.”

“You’ve always liked thin blondes. Laura is just like Jill Peterson! Didn’t you ever think that?”

“Laura is twenty-nine. Jill Peterson was a kid I knew in the fifth or sixth grade.”

“You know it was the sixth.”

“Okay, I knew it was the sixth. I don’t know why I said that.”

“Because you always try to pretend to be vague about her. Actually, every woman you’ve liked has been thin like Jill Peterson.”