Ann Beattie - Burning House

He sat at the foot of the bed. She had not pulled the shade. The streetlight, streaming light through the curtains, blotched her body — luminous shapes that were almost a triangle, almost a circle. If she had opened her eyes and seen him sitting there, smiling fondly, whatever he told her about being unsure of whether they should stay together would be discounted. Her version of it would be that he thought about her so much and stared so often because he was in love. It would be like the story the neighbor told his aunt and uncle all summer: how he had loved those bees, how he had been mesmerized by them. And how, being a gentle boy, he had not wanted to make a move if it might possibly hurt them.

Bryce was sitting at the kitchen table in his father’s house, cutting out a picture of Times Square. It was a picture from a coloring book, but Bryce wasn’t interested in coloring; he just wanted to cut out pictures so he could see what they looked like outside the book. This drawing was of people crossing the street between the Sheraton-Astor and F. W. Woolworth. There were also other buildings, but these were the ones the people seemed to be moving between. The picture was round; it was supposed to look as if it had been drawn on a bottle cap. Bryce had a hard time getting the scissors around the edge of the cap, because they were blunt-tipped. At home, at his mother’s house in Vermont, he had real scissors and he was allowed to taste anything, including alcohol, and his half sister Maddy was a lot more fun than Bill Monteforte, who lived next door to his father here in Pennsylvania and who never had time to play. But he had missed his father, and he had been the one who called to invite himself to this house for his spring vacation.

His father, B.B., was standing in the doorway now, complaining because Bryce was so quiet and so glum. “It took quite a few polite letters to your mother to get her to let loose of you for a week,” B.B. said. “You get here and you go into a slump. It would be a real problem if you had to do anything important, like go up to bat with the bases loaded and two outs.

“Mom’s new neighbor is the father of a guy that plays for the Redskins,” Bryce said.

The scissors slipped. Since he’d ruined it, Bryce now cut on the diagonal, severing half the people in Times Square from the other half. He looked out the window and saw a squirrel stealing seed from the bird feeder. The gray birds were so tiny anyway, it didn’t look as if they needed anything to eat.

“Are we going to that auction tonight, or what?” Bryce said.

“Maybe. It depends on whether Rona gets over her headache.”

B.B. sprinkled little blue and white crystals of dishwasher soap into the machine and closed it. He pushed two buttons and listened carefully.

“Remember now,” he said, “I don’t want you getting excited at the auction if you see something you want. You put your hand up, and that’s a bid . You have to really, really want something and then ask me before you put your hand up. You can’t shoot your hand up. Imagine that you’re a soldier down in the trenches and there’s a war going on.”

“I don’t even care about the dumb auction,” Bryce said.

“What if there was a Turkish prayer rug you wanted and it had the most beautiful muted colors you’d ever seen in your life?” B.B. sat down in the chair across from Bryce. The back of the chair was in the shape of an upside-down triangle. The seat was a right-side-up triangle. The triangles were covered with aqua plastic. B.B. shifted on the chair. Bryce could see that he wanted an answer.

“Or we’ll play Let’s Pretend,” B.B. said. “Let’s pretend a lion is coming at you and there’s a tree with a cheetah in it and up ahead of you it’s just low dry grass. Would you climb the tree, or start running?”

“Neither,” Bryce said.

“Come on. You’ve either got to run or something . There’s known dangers and unknown dangers. What would you do?”

“People can’t tell what they’d do in a situation like that,” Bryce said.

“No?”

“What’s a cheetah?” Bryce said. “Are you sure they get in trees?”

B.B. frowned. He had a drink in his hand. He pushed the ice cube to the bottom and they both watched it bob up. Bryce leaned over and reached into the drink and gave it a push, too.

“No licking that finger,” B.B. said.

Bryce wiped a wet streak across the red down vest he wore in the house.

“Is that my boy? ‘Don’t lick your finger,’ he takes the finger and wipes it on his clothes. Now he can try to remember what he learned in school from the Book of Knowledge about cheetahs.”

“What Book of Knowledge? ”

His father got up and kissed the top of his head. The radio went on upstairs, and then water began to run in the tub up there.

“She must be getting ready for action,” B.B. said. “Why does she have to take a bath the minute I turn on the dishwasher? The dishwasher’s been acting crazy.” B.B. sighed. “Keep those hands on the table,” he said. “It’s good practice for the auction.”

Bryce moved the two half circles of Times Square so that they overlapped. He folded his hands over them and watched the squirrel scare a bird away from the feeder. The sky was the color of ash, with little bursts of white where the sun had been.

“I’m the same as dead,” Rona said.

“You’re not the same as dead,” B.B. said. “You’ve put five pounds back on. You lost twenty pounds in that hospital, and you didn’t weigh enough to start with. You wouldn’t eat anything they brought you. You took an intravenous needle out of your arm. I can tell you, you were nuts, and I didn’t have much fun talking to that doctor who looked like Tonto who operated on you and thought you needed a shrink. It’s water over the dam. Get in the bath.”

Rona was holding on to the sink. She started to laugh. She had on tiny green-and-white striped underpants. Her long white nightgown was hung around her neck, the way athletes drape towels around themselves in locker rooms.

“What’s funny?” he said.

“You said, ‘It’s water over the—’ Oh, you know what you said. I’m running water in the tub, and—”

“Yeah,” B.B. said, closing the toilet seat and sitting down. He picked up a Batman comic and flipped through. It was wet from moisture. He hated the feel of it.

The radio was on the top of the toilet tank, and now the Andrews Sisters were singing “Hold Tight.” Their voices were as smooth as toffee. He wanted to pull them apart, to hear distinct voices through the perfect harmony.

He watched her get into the bath. There was a worm of a scar, dull red, to the left of her jutting hipbone, where they had removed her appendix. One doctor had thought it was an ectopic pregnancy. Another was sure it was a ruptured ovary. A third doctor — her surgeon — insisted it was her appendix, and they got it just in time. The tip had ruptured.

Rona slid low in the bathtub. “If you can’t trust your body not to go wrong, what can you trust?” she said.

“Everybody gets sick,” he said. “It’s not your body trying to do you in. The mind’s only one place: in your head. Look, didn’t Lyndon Johnson have an appendectomy? Remember how upset people were that he pulled up his shirt to show the scar?”

“They were upset because he pulled his dog’s ears,” she said.

She had a bath toy he had bought for her. It was a fish with a happy smile. You wound it with a key and then it raced around the tub spouting water through its mouth.