Ann Beattie - Burning House

“You’re being ridiculous,” Uncle Cal said. “Where’s the flashlight? I’ll go out and get you a pumpkin.”

Uncle Cal and Ena were both drunk. She had not wanted to make a pie, and he did not want to go outside in the cold to shine a flashlight into the pumpkin patch.

“I was mistaken,” Ena said finally. “I thought you had given him all the pumpkins.”

“He got them himself,” Uncle Cal said. “I didn’t give him anything. I let him round them up.” He cut into his roast beef. “He was just a kid,” he said.

“Olivia hasn’t touched her roast beef,” Ena said.

“You talk about me as though I’m not here,” Olivia said.

“What does she mean?” Ena said.

“I mean that you don’t address me directly. You talk about me, as though I’m not here.”

“I realize that you are here,” Ena said.

“I’m enjoying this roast beef,” Uncle Cal said. “If Morris could see me now, he’d die. Morris is my decorator. Doesn’t eat meat. Talks about it all the time, though, so that you’d think there were plates of meat all over reminding him about how much meat there was in the world.”

“Your decorator,” Olivia said.

“Yes?” Uncle Cal said.

“Don’t be pissy,” Benton said.

“I don’t think anybody even remembers why we’re here. It seems to me that this is just another family gathering where everybody lolls around by the fireplace and drinks.” Olivia took a sip of her wine. Nick winced, because he had seen her taking Valium in the kitchen before dinner.

“That’s uncivilized,” Ena said.

“ This is uncivilized,” Olivia said.

Nick had expected one of them — probably Olivia — to begin crying. But it was Jason who began to cry, and who ran from the table.

Elizabeth had left the table to go after Jason, and Benton had followed her upstairs without saying anything else to Olivia.

“You said what you thought,” Uncle Cal said to Olivia. “Nothing wrong with that.”

Olivia got up and stalked away from the table.

“She did what she felt like doing,” Uncle Cal said to Ena. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“Oh, nothing’s wrong with anything, is it?” Ena said to Cal.

“My heart,” he said. “You should see that last EKG. Looked like an ant’s-eye view of the Himalayas, where there should have been a pretty straight line. Of course you have a straight line, straight as a piece of string, you’re dead. It should have been bumpy, I mean — but not like it was.”

“Then what are you doing yoga for?” Ena said. “You’ll kill yourself twisting into all those stupid positions.”

“Probably going to be dead anyway,” Uncle Cal said, tapping his pocket.

“Stop being morose,” Ena said.

“Might stop being anything,” Cal said.

“Stop worrying about your health, ” Ena said. “It’s what’s in the cards. Wesley was a young man, and he drowned.”

“That was an accident,” Uncle Cal said. “An accident.”

“It wasn’t any accident,” Olivia hollered from the living room.

“It was, ” Elizabeth said. She had come downstairs again, and she looked like she was about to murder somebody.

“Elizabeth—” Nick said.

Elizabeth sat down and smoothed her skirt and smiled to show that she was all right, calm and all right. Then she began to cry.

Nick got up and put his arm around her, sitting on his heels and crouching by her chair. He said her name again, but it didn’t do any good. It hadn’t done any good the night before, either, in the motel room.

Upstairs, Jason was pretending to be a baby. Benton had gotten him into his pajamas and had taken the sheet from the bed and was holding Jason, sheet thrown around him like a huge poncho, facing the window. Jason was afraid, and he was trying to pretend that it was animals he was afraid of. He wanted to know if there were bears in the woods. “Not around here,” Benton said. Fox, then? Maybe—“but they don’t attack people. Maybe none around here, anyway.” Jason wanted to know where all the animals came from.

“You know where they came from. You know about evolution.”

“I don’t know,” Jason said. “Tell me.”

“Tell you the whole history of evolution? You think I went to school yesterday?”

“Tell me something,” Jason said.

Benton told him this fact of evolution: that one day dinosaurs shook off their scales and sucked in their breath until they became much smaller. This caused the dinosaurs’ brains to pop through their skulls. The brains were called antlers, and the dinosaurs deer. That was why deer had such sad eyes, Benton told Jason — because they were once something else.

My favorite jacket was bought at L. L. Bean. It got from Maine to Atlanta, where an ex-boyfriend of mine found it at a thrift shop and bought it for my birthday. It was a little tight for him, but he was wearing it when he saw me. He said that if I had not complimented him on the jacket he would just have kept it. In the pocket I found an amyl nitrite and a Hershey’s Kiss. The candy was put there deliberately.

In the eight years I’ve had it, I’ve lost all the buttons but the top one — the one I never button because nobody closes the button under the collar. Four buttons are gone, but I can only remember how the next-to-last one disappeared: I saw it dangling but thought it would hold. Later, crouched on the floor, I said, “It stands to reason that since I haven’t moved off this barstool, it has to be on the floor right here, ” drunkenly staring at the floor beneath my barstool at the Café Central.

Nick, the man I’m walking with now, couldn’t possibly fit into the jacket. He wishes that I didn’t fit into it, either. He hates the jacket. When I told him I was thinking about buying a winter scarf, he suggested that rattails might go with the jacket nicely. He keeps stopping at store windows, offering to buy me a sweater, a coat. Nothing doing.

“I’m going crazy,” Nick says to me, “and you’re depressed because you’ve lost your buttons.” We keep walking. He pokes me in the side. “Buttons might as well be marbles,” he says.

“Did you ever play marbles?”

“Play marbles?” he says. “Don’t you just look at them?”

“I don’t think so. I think there’s a game you can play with them.”

“I had cigar boxes full of marbles when I was a kid. Isn’t that great? I had marbles and stamps and coins and Playboy cutouts.”

“All at the same time?”

“What do you mean?”

“The stamps didn’t come before the Playboy pictures?”

“Same time. I used the magnifying glass with the pictures instead of the stamps.”

The left side of my jacket overlaps the right, and my arms are crossed tightly in front of me, holding it closed. Nick notices and says, “It’s not very cold,” putting an arm around my shoulders.

He’s right. It isn’t. Last Friday afternoon, the doctor told me I was going to have to go to the hospital on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, to have a test to find out if some blockage in a Fallopian tube has been causing the pain in my left side, and I’m a coward. I have never believed anything in The Bell Jar except Esther Greenwood’s paranoid idea that when you’re unconscious you feel pain and later you forget that you felt it.

He’s taken his arm away. I keep tight hold on my jacket with one hand and put my other hand around his wrist so he’ll take his hand out of his pocket.

“Give me the hand,” I say. We walk along like that.