Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

Laura should be here. What is he going to say to her? He wants, somehow, to convey to her that her husband is a dull man. Since he is also dull, he wants to point out that she wouldn’t be getting into anything unexpected; she would just be swapping a dull person who doesn’t care much about her for one who does. That sounds awful. He will have to think harder. He puts his watch away. It is heavy in his pocket. He pushes it far into the pocket, not wanting to lose it. What would his old puckered-cheeked grandfather think of his rendezvousing with a woman at an elementary school?

She doesn’t come. She’s five minutes late, then ten. He turns on the radio, hoping to find out that his watch is inaccurate. There is a special report about a child’s oven that blows up. Judy Collins. A financial report. He looks up and sees Laura’s car, a black Volvo. Laura pulls up alongside his car, on the other side of the street. “I’m sick,” she hollers. “I just came to tell you. I called, but you had left.”

“What’s the matter with you?” he says. Wind blows in his face.

“The flu,” she says. “I’m really sick. I’ve got to go back to bed.”

He looks at her stupidly. She looks very sick. Her hair is dirty. No question that it is more brown than blond. He stares into her eyes. They are bright. She has a fever. A car honks in back of her and she drives on. He thinks she is gone and can’t bring himself to start the ignition. Her car pulls up alongside his.

“Hi,” he says.

“I’m sorry I’m sick,” she says, leaning across the seat. “I’ll see you another time.”

“Isn’t there anything I can do for you?”

“No. I just want to go back to bed.” She shakes her head. She looks awful.

“You shouldn’t have come out.”

“I thought of you sitting here. I knew you wouldn’t believe I was sick.”

“I would have believed you,” he says, as indignant as she was when she said her husband didn’t open her mail. But he probably wouldn’t have. Even the bread-baking is in question.

“Will you call me?” he says. She nods, rolling the window up. Her car is moving slowly forward.

“I’m going to follow you,” he says. “You’re too sick to drive.”

“I only have a fever,” she says through the crack in the window, but he puts the key in the ignition, and she waits. The car won’t start. It grinds, but nothing happens. When he is about to scream, pound the windshield, holler and curse, it starts. He follows her car. He follows it all the way to her house, which he can barely see from the road. It is a twenty-minute ride from the school, along streets he has never driven. He starts to pull into the drive, but sees another car and backs up, drives on. At the end of the dead-end street he makes a U-turn and coasts slowly past her driveway. What if she is dying? He sees her get out of her car and walk toward the house. He watches her until she disappears, then coasts to the end of the street. There is a lot of traffic, once he leaves her block. He keeps thinking about turning around, going to the house and saying something to her, no matter who’s there. He lacks nerve. He’s not sure what else he lacks, because her husband’s no prize either. He is wondering about that when his car conks out at a stop sign. He tries to re-start it, but nothing happens. Finally, he sits there with the car flooded, cars pulling around him, head on the steering wheel. What the hell — it wouldn’t hurt to grow his hair some.

Eventually the car starts, and he drives back to his house. Sam’s car is out front. Charles pulls into the driveway and gets out, not bothering to put the car in the garage. The piece of junk doesn’t deserve to be covered. He goes up the walk. Sam opens the front door.

“What are you doing here?” Sam says.

“What are you?” Charles says.

“I felt funny. I took off a couple of hours early. The flu’s going around. I hope it’s not that.”

“If you think you’ve got the flu, what are you doing here?”

The wrong thing to say. Sam looks hurt.

“We can take care of you if you get sick,” Charles says. He nods agreement with himself at Sam, whose expression changes.

“What happened to Laura?” Sam says.

“She’s got it. She was awfully sick. I didn’t get to talk to her. I followed her home. That’s all.”

Sam shakes his head. He is drinking wine. A bottle is on the floor by the chair.

“Wine?” Sam says.

“What are you drinking that for if you’re getting sick?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says. “Where’s Susan?”

“Shopping.”

“I could go out and get food for dinner if there isn’t any,” Sam says.

“What would you go out for if you’re getting sick?”

Sam shrugs. “What are we going to eat?” he says.

Charles gets a glass and pours some wine. It is French wine, instead of the Gallo that Sam used to drink. Sam sympathizes with the boycott. Charles feels sorry that he is getting sick.

“I guess I should call the hospital,” Charles says. He gets up and calls. Pete answers on the first ring.

“Mommy did something that was a little silly,” he says. “She had some laxatives in her purse, and she took them. She hasn’t been feeling well today.”

“Laxatives? What for?”

“She’s going to be just fine, and fit as a fiddle for the Windy City,” Pete says.

“Can I talk to her, Pete?”

“Sure you can. She’s right here, and feeling better by the minute.”

There is a lot of rustling and whispering.

“Hello?” his mother says faintly.

“I’m sorry you had a setback,” Charles says. “You okay now?”

“Charles, I was in awful pain. It was like the night you had to come for me. I was going to kill myself this morning and I went into the bathroom and took the laxatives.”

“Made you weak, huh?” Charles says.

“Charles, the woman in the bed next to me died.”

There is a loud rustling, and Pete’s voice. “Charles? Pay no attention. Mommy’s got her facts confused. The woman was discharged. Mommy’s weak as a kitten from all those laxatives.”

“Don’t they watch her? Don’t they know she’s bats?”

There is a long silence. “We’re looking forward to seeing you soon, too,” Pete says. “I most certainly will tell her.” Pete hangs up.

“Oh Christ, ” Charles says, slamming the receiver down.

“What’s the matter?”

“She took herself a bunch of laxatives and she’s talking about death again. He’s there, no doubt telling her to try to foxtrot.” Charles stops. He is surprised to realize that he remembers the name of another dance.

Sam shakes his head, swirls the wine in his glass.

“Nothing goes right,” Sam says.

Charles picks up his coat from the back of the chair. “Come on,” he says to Sam. “We’re going to the store to get some good stuff. Bring those cookbooks with you.”

“All of them?”

“There’s only four or five.”

Sam puts on his coat, picks them up.

“Under desserts,” Charles says, closing the door behind him. “Look up soufflés. See if there’s one that sounds like it’s made out of oranges and cognac.”

Sam cannot find it. Charles looks too, in the parking lot of the Safeway, but nothing even vaguely similar is listed. He ends up buying a Dutch Apple pie.

“I hate that kind,” Sam says.

“I do too. Maybe I’ll save it as a hostess present for Clara’s dinner.”

But on New Year’s Day their mother is in the mental hospital. She is too sedated to have visitors. Pete is there, and Pete’s brother, who flew in from Hawaii. Early in the morning Pete called to say that things were pretty good. The doctor did not think there would be much of a problem, and she’d be back home soon. She was taken to the hospital after she sat propped up in bed crying for an entire night. At noon, when Charles was fixing a bowl of soup to take to Sam on a tray, Pete called again. “You son of a bitch,” Pete said loudly. “I know you don’t like me and you never liked me, and from now on it’s between you and your mother. I’m not calling you again. I’m not feeling guilty any more. You make me feel guilty she’s here, when nobody could have taken better care of her. Talk to the doctors here about that, you son of a bitch.” Charles called the hospital back, but there was no way Pete could be paged, and his mother had no telephone. The soup boiled over on the stove, and Charles tried to dab it up with a sponge, careful not to burn himself on the still-hot burner. The noodles looked disgusting clinging to the sponge. He put a napkin on a tray, the way his mother used to do for him when he was sick in bed, and then the bowl of soup. He could hear Sam coughing in the bedroom. The TV was in there, on a table Charles had moved to the foot of the bed. Even above the noise of the football game, Sam’s coughing could be heard.