Ann Beattie - Another You

“Oh, great!” Beth yelled, as he rang the doorbell and “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. “Great, great, great,” she yelled, rushing to greet him.

As he remembered, she was short and thin, but her hair was now very pale blond, streaked with pink. She was wearing enormous gold earrings and a silver choker. She had on a tightly knotted white halter top that revealed half her rib cage, and striped sultan pants. Her toenails were painted bright pink. She leaped into his arms.

“Don’t say you didn’t get a warm welcome,” she said. The earrings swayed, making a cacophonous noise inside his head.

“Well, I appreciate it,” he said, returning her hug with slightly less strength.

“What is this, are you having some crisis like Gordon says? He’s gone to get briquettes to cook your dinner. You missed the clam pizza with white sauce last night. Best you’ll ever eat, brought all the way from Miami. Come in. I’m a little wired because I just got out of my step class. Come in, Gordon would hate me for holding you in the doorway.”

His first thought was that it was good Sonja wasn’t with him. His second thought was that he was surprised — inside, the house was in very good shape. He followed her through a long pine-panelled hallway with a central ceiling fan. He glanced into several small rooms on the right side of the hallway as he walked past. In the first, where the door was propped open with an iron Scottie dog, he saw a dressing table and mirror on a white shag carpet and several white folding chairs. That was the Mary Kay room, he thought. Next was a dark room with the door almost closed. After that, the bathroom, the track lights glowing, steam on the mirror, a pleasant, fresh, wet smell. The largest area of the house was the main room, a room about twenty by thirty, at the end of which were sliding screen doors, through which he could see a raised hot tub and black iron benches with flowered cushions. She pushed open the screen and motioned for him to follow. In several large terra-cotta pots on wheeled platforms, variously colored bougainvillea bloomed. A seven-foot-high wall surrounded the back deck, hung at intervals with mirrors, in ornate picture frames, that needed to be resilvered. Several orchids hung in pots suspended from a tree limb that stretched from the bodega’s backyard to overhang the deck. Standing beside him, she smiled brightly as he looked around. Beside the steps leading up to the hot tub he saw the mate to the high heel in the puddle outside the house. An aluminum garbage can held discarded liquor bottles and beer cans. On the redwood table, a pitcher held birds-of-paradise.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “A real surprise.”

“We’re going to eat out here tonight,” she said, ducking back into the house and turning down the volume of the boom box that sat on the kitchen counter. “He wants it so picture perfect, he even keeps the grill behind that fence, there.” She pointed to a bamboo screen.

“This is amazing,” he said. “How long did it take you to do this?”

“Helped along by my winning at blackjack,” she said. “No kidding. They might get me later, but that time I had the sense to take the money and run.”

“Well,” he said. “It’s really wonderful. You’d never think this was back here.”

“He wants to keep the front looking like shit so people won’t break in. I’ve got to get you to persuade him that stuff has got to go. There was a bathtub there until the day before yesterday. If people are going to break in, they break in. You can’t spend your life trying to protect yourself.” A little lizard darted from the hot tub to the bamboo screen and disappeared. Above them, the sky was a cloudless, deep blue. “I don’t see any point in fighting obstacles,” she said. “The climate here is perfect, as far as I’m concerned. And in the summer you just go from air-conditioning to air-conditioning. The bedroom’s air-conditioned,” she said. “So are we going to convert you to Key West? If everything goes right, your brother could be retired and a rich man and you could sit around on the back deck with him, shoot the breeze. I’m going to get you a drink. What kind of drink would you like?”

He began to think the parrot pitcher hadn’t been a joke.

“Corona,” she said, before he could answer. She walked to the long narrow kitchen bordering the living room. The floor was tiled a deep green-blue; a counter divided the kitchen from the rest of the room. A big ceiling fan stirred the air.

“Are you upset about Evie’s death?” she said, coming toward him, holding two opened beers. “Is that a subject I should avoid?” she said, before he had time to answer.

“No, not at all,” he said. “I mean, it isn’t a subject you should avoid. We both — I’m glad we found a nursing home that seemed like a good place. Sonja visited her often. I’m afraid I didn’t go as often as I should have.”

“I’m always making mistakes in what I’m not supposed to say,” Beth said. “Remember when I gave her a makeup kit? I knew when she wasn’t wearing makeup on her birthday, when we first walked in, that I’d made a mistake.” She relinquished one of the beer bottles to him. “I hope she used the lotion,” she said.

“I don’t really know if she used it,” he said.

“I like you,” Beth said. “That’s a good answer.” She fingered the silver choker. “She was very kind to remember me,” she said. “Is this something that has a history in the family? I asked Gordon, but according to him, he doesn’t remember anything.”

“The necklace?” he said, following her back outside.

She nodded.

“You mean it’s Evie’s?”

“Yes,” she said, a little put out. “You don’t remember it either?”

“I’m not the right person to ask. I don’t notice things like jewelry, usually.”

“Well, that makes two of you. You and your brother.”

She sat on the black iron bench. He sat in a chair. In the distance, he heard a dog yapping. A plane passing overhead.

“When did Evie give you the necklace?” he said.

She fingered it. “When she died. There was a nurse friend of hers who packaged some things from her room and sent them to us. I hope I haven’t said something I shouldn’t have said. This nurse said she was supposed to pass on things to both you and Gordon. She said Evie reminded her all the time, and they had a joke: the nurse would pretend to scold her, saying, ‘Is that the only thing you keep forgetting? You mean that’s the one and only thing you’re senile about?’ She’d promised her a hundred times she’d do it, she said.” She sipped her beer. “She seemed quite nice on the phone,” she said.

“Yes. I know who you mean. She was very nice. She did bring us things, come to think of it, on the day of the funeral.”

“I feel bad we didn’t come to Evie’s funeral,” Beth said.

He shrugged. “To come all that way for someone you didn’t really know,” he said.

“I know, but I was surprised Gordon didn’t go. He went and sat on the floor of the ocean. That’s what he spent the day doing.”

“Well,” he said, “that would have been a long way to come just for the funeral.”

“He doesn’t like to face some things,” she said.

“No, I suppose none of us do,” he said.

“But he just doesn’t do it. I had a lump in my breast biopsied last year. Everything was fine, but the day he was supposed to go to the doctor’s office — we weren’t even going to hear right then, it was just a biopsy — he had somebody call from work to say he’d gotten tied up. He didn’t even call me himself!”

“That’s unfortunate,” Marshall said.

“It is unfortunate. He has more capabilities than he calls on.”