The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [157]
“Actually,” B.B. said, holding on to the window ledge, “I feel very out of control.”
“What does that mean?”
She put From Julia Child’s Kitchen on the night table, picked up her comb, and grabbed a clump of her hair. She combed through the snaggled ends, slowly.
“Do you think he has a good time here?” he said.
“Sure. He asked to come, didn’t he? You could look at his face and see that he enjoyed the auction.”
“Maybe he just does what he’s told.”
“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Come over here.”
He sat on the bed. He had stripped down to his undershorts, and there were goose bumps all over his body. A bird was making a noise outside, screaming as if it were being killed. It stopped abruptly. The goose bumps slowly went away. Whenever he turned up the thermostat he always knew he was going to be sorry along about 5 a.m., when it got too hot in the room, but he was too tired to get up and go turn it down. She said that was why they got headaches. He reached across her now for the Excedrin. He put the bottle back on top of the cookbook and gagged down two of them.
“What’s he doing?” he said to her. “I don’t hear him.”
“If you made him go to bed, the way other fathers do, you’d know he was in bed. Then you’d just have to wonder if he was reading under the covers with a flashlight or—”
“Don’t say it,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“What were you going to say?”
“I was going to say that he might have taken more Godivas out of the box my mother sent me. I’ve eaten two. He’s eaten a whole row.”
“He left a mint and a cream in that row. I ate them,” B.B. said.
He got up and pulled on a thermal shirt. He looked out the window and saw tree branches blowing. The Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted snow at the end of the week. He hoped it didn’t snow then; it would make it difficult taking Bryce back to Vermont. There were two miles of unplowed road leading to Robin’s house.
He went downstairs. The oval table Bryce sat at was where the dining room curved out. Window seats were built around it. When they rented the house, it was the one piece of furniture left in it that neither of them disliked, so they had kept it. Bryce was sitting in an oak chair, and his forehead was on his arm. In front of him was the coloring book and a box of crayons and a glass vase with different-colored felt-tip pens stuck in it, falling this way and that, the way a bunch of flowers would. There was a pile of white paper. The scissors. B.B. assumed, until he was within a few feet of him, that Bryce was asleep. Then Bryce lifted his head.
“What are you doing?” B.B. said.
“I took the dishes out of the dishwasher and it worked,” Bryce said. “I put them on the counter.”
“That was very nice of you. It looks like my craziness about the dishwasher has impressed every member of my family.”
“What was it that happened before?” Bryce said.
Bryce had circles under his eyes. B.B. had read once that that was a sign of kidney disease. If you bruised easily, leukemia. Or, of course, you could just take a wrong step and break a leg. The dishwasher had backed up, and all the filthy water had come pouring out in the morning when B.B. opened the door—dirtier water than the food-smeared dishes would account for.
“It was a mess,” B.B. said vaguely. “Is that a picture?”
It was part picture, part letter, B.B. realized when Bryce clamped his hands over his printing in the middle.
“You don’t have to show me.”
“How come?” Bryce said.
“I don’t read other people’s mail.”
“You did in Burlington,” Bryce said.
“Bryce—that was when your mother cut out on us. That was a letter for her sister. She’d set it up with her to come stay with us, but her sister’s as much a space cadet as Robin. Your mother was gone two days. The police were looking for her. What was I supposed to do when I found the letter?”
Robin’s letter to her sister said that she did not love B.B. Also, that she did not love Bryce, because he looked like his father. The way she expressed it was: “Let spitting images spit together.” She had gone off with the