Ann Beattie - Burning House

Sitting on the deck, I try to explain to Annie that there should be solidarity between women, but that when you look for a common bond you’re really looking for a common denominator, and you can’t do that with women. Annie puts down My Mother/My Self and looks out at the water.

Jerome and I, wondering when she will ever want to swim, go about our days as usual. She’s gone biking with him, so there’s no hostility. She has always sat at the foot of the bed while Jerome was showering at night and talked nonsense with me while she twisted the ends of her hair, and she still does. At her age, it isn’t important that she’s not in love, and she was once before anyway. When she pours for herself, it’s sixty-forty white wine and club soda. Annie — the baby pushed in a swing. The bottom fell out of the birdhouse. Anita really knows how to hit below the belt.

Jerome is sulky at the end of the week, floating in the Whaler.

“Do you ever think that Anita’s thinking of you?” I ask.

“Telepathy, you mean?” he says. He has a good tan. A scab by his elbow. Somehow, he’s hurt himself. His wet hair is drying in curly strands. He hasn’t had a haircut since we came to the summer house.

“No. Do you ever wonder if she just might be thinking about you?”

“I don’t think about her,” he says.

“You read the letter Annie brings you every year.”

“I’m curious.”

“Just curious for that one brief minute?”

Yes, he nods. “Notice that I’m always the one that opens the junk mail, too,” he says.

According to Jerome, he and Anita gradually drifted apart. Or, at times when he blames himself, he says it’s because he was still a child when he married her. He married her the week of his twentieth birthday. He says that his childhood wounds still weren’t healed; Anita was Mama, she was the person he always felt he had to prove himself to — the stuff any psychiatrist will run down for you, he says now, trailing his hand in the water. “It’s like there was a time in your life when you believed in paste,” he says. “Think how embarrassed you’d be to go buy paste today. Now it’s rubber cement. Or at least Elmer’s glue. When I was young I just didn’t know things.”

I never had any doubt when things ended with my first husband. We knew things were wrong; we were going to a counselor and either biting our tongues or arguing because we’d loosened them with too much alcohol, trying to pretend that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t have a baby. One weekend Dan and I went to Saratoga, early in the spring, to visit friends. It was all a little too sun-dappled. Too House Beautiful , the way the sun, in the early morning, shone through the lace curtains and paled the walls to polka dots of light. The redwood picnic table on the stone-covered patio was as bright in the sunlight as if it had been waxed. We were drinking iced tea, all four of us out in the yard early in the morning, amazed at what a perfect day it was, how fast the garden was growing, how huge the heads of the peonies were. Then some people stopped by, with their little girl — people new to Saratoga, who really had no friends there yet. The little girl was named Alison, and she took a liking to Dan — came up to him without hesitation, the way a puppy that’s been chastised will instantly choose someone in the room to cower by, or a bee will zero in on one member of a group. She came innocently, the way a child would come, fascinated by … by his curly hair? The way the sunlight reflected off the rims of his glasses? The wedding ring on his hand as he rested his arm on the picnic table? And then, as the rest of us talked, there was a squealing game, with the child suddenly climbing from the ground to his lap, some whispering, some laughing, and then the child, held around her middle, raised above his head, parallel to the ground. The game went on and on, with cries of “Again!” and “Higher!” until the child was shrill and Dan complained of numb arms, and for a second I looked away from the conversation the rest of us were having and I saw her raised above him, smiling down, and Dan both frowning and amused — that little smile at the edge of his lips — and the child’s mouth, wide with delight, her long blond hair flopped forward. He was keeping her raised off the ground, and she was hoping that it would never end, and in that second I knew that for Dan and me it was over.

We took a big bunch of pink peonies back to the city with us, stuck in a glass jar with water in the bottom that I held wedged between my feet. I had on a skirt, and the flowers flopped as we went over the bumpy road and the sensation I felt was amazing: it wasn’t a tickle, but a pain. When he stopped for gas I went into the bathroom and cried and washed my face and dried it on one of those brown paper towels that smell more strongly than any perfume. I combed my hair. When I was sure I looked fine I came back to the car and sat down, putting one foot on each side of the jar. He started to drive out of the gas station, and then he just drifted to a stop. It was still sunny. Late afternoon. We sat there with the sun heating us and other cars pulling around our car, and he said, “You are impossible. You are so emotional. After a perfect day, what have you been crying about?” Then there were tears, and since I said nothing, eventually he started to drive: out into the merging lane, then onto the highway, speeding all the way back to New York in silence. It was already over. The only other thing I remember about that day is that down by Thirty-fourth Street we saw the same man who had been there the week before, selling roses guaranteed to smell sweet and to be everlasting. There he was, in the same place, his roses on a stand behind him.

We swim, and gradually work our way back to the gunwale of the Whaler: six hands, white-knuckled, holding the rim. I slide along, hand over hand, then move so that my body touches Jerome’s from behind. With my arms around his chest, I kiss his neck. He turns and smiles and kisses me. Then I kick away and go to where Annie is holding on to the boat, her cheek on her hands, staring at her father. I swim up to her, push her wet bangs to one side, and kiss her forehead. She looks aggravated, and turns her head away. Just as quickly, she turns it back. “Am I interrupting you two getting it on out here?” she says.

“I kissed both of you,” I say, between them again, feeling the weightlessness of my legs dangling as I hold on.

She continues to stare at me. “Girls kissing girls is so dumb,” she says. “It’s like the world’s full of stupid hostesses who graduated from Sweet Briar.”

Jerome looks at her silently for a long time.

“I guess your mother’s not very demonstrative,” he says.

“Were you ever?” she says. “Did you love Anita when you had me?”

“Of course I did,” he says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I know,” she says, as angry and petulant as a child. “How come you don’t feed me birdseed?” she says. “How come you don’t feed the carrier pigeon?”

He pauses until he understands what she is talking about. “The letters just go one way,” he says.

“Do you have too much dignity to answer them, or is it too risky to reveal anything?”

“Honey,” he says, lowering his voice, “I don’t have anything to say.”

“That you loved her and now you don’t?” she says. “That’s what isn’t worth saying?”

He’s brought his knees up to his chin. The scab by his elbow is pale when he clasps his arm around his knees.

“Well, I think that’s bullshit,” she says. She looks at me. “And I think you’re bullshit, too. You don’t care about the bond between women. You just care about hanging on to him. When you kissed me, it was patronizing.”