The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [147]
“Take a picture of that,” Barbara says, putting her hand on top of her husband Sven’s wrist. He is her fourth husband. They have been married for two years. She speaks to him exactly the way she spoke to her third husband. “Take a picture of a kitty licking its paw, Sven.”
“I don’t have my camera,” he says.
“You usually always have it with you,” she says. She lights an Indonesian cigarette—a kretek—waves out the match and drops it in a little green dish full of cherry pits. She turns to me and says, “If he’d had his camera last Friday, he could have photographed the car that hit the what-do-you-call-it—the concrete thing that goes down the middle of the highway. They were washing up the blood.”
Sven gets up. He slips into his white thongs and flaps down the flagstone walk to the kitchen. He goes in and closes the door.
“How is your job, Oliver?” Barbara asks. Oliver is Barbara’s son, but she hardly ever sees him.
“Air-conditioned,” Oliver says. “They’ve finally got the air-conditioning up to a decent level in the building this summer.”
“How is your job?” Barbara says to me.
I look at her, at Oliver.
“What job are you thinking of, Mother?” he says.
“Oh—painting wicker white, or something. Painting the walls yellow. If you’d had amniocentesis, you could paint them blue or pink.”
“We’re leaving up the wallpaper,” Oliver says. “Why would a thirty-year-old woman have amniocentesis?”
“I hate wicker,” I say. “Wicker is for Easter baskets.”
Barbara stretches. “Notice the way it goes?” she says. “I ask a simple question, he answers for you, as if you’re helpless now that you’re pregnant, and that gives you time to think and zing back some snappy reply.”
“I think you’re the Queen of Snappiness,” Oliver says to her.
“Like the Emperor of Ice Cream?” She puts down her Dutch detective novel. “I never did understand Wallace Stevens,” she says. “Do any of you?”
Sven has come back with his camera and is focusing. The cat has walked away, but he wasn’t focusing on the cat anyway; it’s a group shot: Barbara in her tiny white bikini, Oliver in cut-off jeans, with the white raggedy strings trailing down his tan legs, and me in my shorts and baggy embroidered top that my huge stomach bulges hard against.
“Smile,” Sven says. “Do I really have to say smile?”
This is the weekend of Barbara’s sixtieth birthday, and Oliver’s half brother Craig has also come for the occasion. He has given her an early present: a pink T-shirt that says “60.” Oliver and I brought Godivas and a hair comb with a silk lily glued to it. Sven will give her a card and some orchids, flown in from some unimaginably far-off place, and a check. She will express shock at the check and not show anyone the amount, though she will pass around his birthday card. At dinner, the orchids will be in a vase, and Sven will tell some anecdote about a shoot he once went on in some faraway country.
Craig has brought two women with him, unexpectedly. They are tall, blond, silent, and look like twins but are not. Their clothes are permeated with marijuana. When they were introduced, one was wearing a Sony Walkman and the other had a tortoiseshell hair ornament in the shape of a turtle.
Now it is getting dark and we are all having spritzers. I have had too many spritzers. I feel that everyone is looking at everyone else’s naked feet. The twins who are not twins have baby toes that curl under, so you can see the plum-colored polish on only four toes. Craig has square toenails and calluses on his heels which come from playing tennis. Oliver’s long, tan feet are rubbing my legs. The dryness of his soles feels wonderful as he rubs his feet up and down the sticky sweat that has dried on my calves. Barbara has long toenails, painted bronze. Sven’s big toes are oblong and shapeless, the way balloons look when you first begin to blow them up. My toenails aren’t polished, because I can hardly bend over. I look at Oliver’s feet and mine and try to imagine a