Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

Standing on the eleventh floor waiting for the elevator, Charles sees Betty out of the comer of his eye. She had her coat on and must have been leaving, but she ducked back in the doorway when she saw him. She has given up on him, doesn’t even want to talk to him. She picked up his reports today without even saying hello. He couldn’t think of anything to say to her, so he didn’t look up. Now she won’t even wait for the elevator with him. He feels sorry that he has been cruel to Betty, but he just can’t get interested. He has been in a bad mood all day because Laura’s phone rang and rang. She never did answer. He stayed at work later than usual, hoping to catch her before Ox got home. He finally stopped dialing, sure that Ox would pick it up. He could have hung up on Ox, but he doesn’t want him suspicious. He doesn’t want Laura blaming him for anything. He has to be very nice and very careful and get her back.

Betty and another woman walk through the corridor to the elevator. The doors open just as they get there. Charles puts his hand over the edge of the door to make sure it stays open for them. The elevator is packed. He gets on along with ten people from the eleventh floor. Bob White is pressed in the back. He nods hello. Betty is standing next to Charles.

“How are you?” Charles says.

“Tired,” Betty says. She turns and talks to the woman next to her about dinner.

“If you’re not doing anything for dinner, why don’t you two come over to my place,” Charles hears himself say as he walks off the elevator in back of them.

They stop, looking confused. He has never seen the other woman. She is much prettier than Betty. Sam wouldn’t mind.

“I was just saying that I couldn’t go at all,” the woman says. I have no baby-sitter.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Charles says.

“Maybe some other time,” Betty says.

“Oh,” Charles says. “If you can’t make it.”

“I’m awfully tired to go out,” Betty says. “But thank you.”

“Let me walk to your car with you,” he says. Why is he saying this?

She shrugs. She says good-bye to the other woman at the door.

“Change your mind,” Charles says to Betty. “Actually, I have no car. It’s in the shop for a valve job. I was walking to the bus stop.”

“Let me drive you home, then.”

“All right,” she says. “Thank you.”

They walk silently to his car. He thinks of his dancing teacher: “Closer, closer.” He is walking six feet away from Betty. He moves over about a foot. She doesn’t seem to notice. Her coat collar is turned up. She looks like a turtle. She has a sharp nose like a turtle. On all fours she might look very much like a turtle.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to stop by for dinner? I have to go to the grocery store anyway. A friend is staying with me and his battery’s dead, so he couldn’t go out to get groceries.”

“If you’d like me to,” Betty says. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“What would you like for dinner?” he asks.

“Whatever you’d planned to have is fine.”

He never plans dinner. He would have gone home and had water and cookies.

“I’ll stop and get us some steaks.” He opens the car door for her. Her legs are fat He averts his eyes — shower room etiquette — as she climbs in. He walks around the car and opens his door. She did not pull the lock up for him. She doesn’t like him. He doesn’t want her, and she doesn’t want to come.

“How long have you worked there?” he asks.

“Four years,” she says. “I started when I was twenty.”

This woman is only twenty-four? How could anyone be so … solid at twenty-four? He turns on the radio and catches the end of a plea for money. Just like going home and opening the mail. The Indians want him. The starving orphans in Ghana. The mistreated kittens. He realizes, suddenly, that this was the day Sam was going to drive him to work so Sam could clean out his apartment. They are both so disorganized that nothing gets done. He is amazed by people who can shop for a whole week’s groceries on one day — that they know what to get, and how much of it, and that they will want to eat those things for sure during the next week. He looks in his wallet at the first red light. There is plenty of money. He has forty, and there is a twenty tucked in the back to lend Sam. He could even use that in the grocery store if necessary. Betty looks at him looking in his wallet out of the corner of her eye.

“I’m fascinated by men who can cook,” Betty says. “My father wouldn’t even open a carton of milk for himself. My mother or my sister or I had to do it. It seems lately that quite a few men cook.”

“It’s that or go out,” Charles shrugs.

Betty says nothing. He has botched it. He cut her off, and she was making polite conversation.

“Your father really wouldn’t open a milk carton?” he asks.

“No. He wouldn’t. When my mother bought the things, she’d always open and close the milk again, and she’d take the caps off the soda bottles and put on those rubber ones to seal them. He’d pop one of those off. He’d carry on if he had to use a can opener or rip open the milk, though. That’s part of the reason I moved out. That and my mother telling me to use my salary for plastic surgery.”

“What for?” he says.

“My nose.”

“You don’t have a bad nose.”

Her nose is her worst feature. That and her weight.

“Thank you. I’m very self-conscious about it.”

He should say something else: flatter her more. He changes the station on the radio.

“What did you do before you started working?”

“I worked at Western Union for a while, and as a checker in a supermarket. I trained to work in a bank, but I quit after the training. The people were so nasty, and the money looked so ugly.”

“That’s quite an assortment of jobs.”

“I kept kidding myself that I was going to college. How can you save money working at Western Union? When I had a little extra money at the supermarket I spent it joining a health club. The exercises made me sore, and I got a kidney infection around that time and had to give up on it. So then I went to the bank and started learning the ropes. And then I took the exam to get into the government. I always knew how to type.”

“When did you get your apartment?”

“Over a year ago. A girl was living with me, but she quit and went back to Georgia.”

“She didn’t like the job?”

“She didn’t like the city. She had me so upset that after she left I was afraid to go out at night, and I had a bolt put on the front door. When you live with somebody who’s always telling you what danger you’re in you start believing it.”

Betty lights a cigarette. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead,” he says. Cigarette smoke makes him sick. They are almost at the supermarket, though. He concentrates on not coughing. He always coughed in Laura’s car. Laura, smoking Chesterfields. She will die young. He had better get her in a hurry.

He pulls into the parking lot. As he walks in, he takes his wallet out of his pocket and checks. The forty is still there. He puts it back. He takes it out again, going through the electric door, and searches for the twenty. Because if it took more than forty, he would need that money. He knows he is being silly. He knows that steaks for three people don’t cost forty dollars.

“Do you have enough money?” Betty says.

“Oh, yes. Checking my wallet is a nervous habit.”

Betty nods. He is sure she doesn’t believe him.

He goes to the meat counter and gets three T-bone steaks. “What else do you like?” he asks.

“Potatoes,” she says.