The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [169]
My mother had said all that to me in the living room, when Ricky was at his wit’s end with Lucy on television and my father was at work. I sympathized with her at once. I liked being with my mother and thinking about something serious that I hadn’t thought about before. But when I was alone—or maybe this only happened as I got older—puzzling things out held no fascination for me. The rug in the room where my mother and I talked was patterned with pink cabbage-size roses. Years later, I’d have nightmares that a huge trellis had collapsed and disappeared and I’d suddenly found the roses, two-dimensional, on the ground.
Lofty
Kate could think of nothing but how she had cheated when she and Philip lived in this house. She had put little daubs of glue on the back of peeling wallpaper and pushed it back into place; she had stuffed the big aqua urns at the back door with rags—they were deep enough to hold twenty pounds of earth—and then poured a foot of soil on top. The pansies, pounded deep into the urns by summer rain, had shot up and cascaded over the rims anyway.
The house belonged to Philip’s Great-Aunt Beatrice, and she had come in person every month for the rent check, but all Kate’s worrying about their tenancy had been for nothing. The woman rarely looked closely at anything; in fact, in winter she often kept her car running in the driveway while she made the call, and wouldn’t even come inside for coffee. In the summer she stayed a few minutes to cut roses or peonies to take back to the city. She was a tall old lady, who wore flowered dresses, and by the time she headed for her ancient Cadillac she herself often looked like a gigantic flower in motion, refracted through a kaleidoscope.
In retrospect, Kate realized that the house must have looked perfectly presentable. When she and Philip first moved in and were in love with each other, they were in love with the place, and when they were no longer in love the house seemed to sink in sympathy. The sagging front step made her sad; a shutter fell from the second story one night, frightening them into each other’s arms.
When the two of them decided to part, they agreed that it was silly not to stay on until the lease was up at the end of summer. Philip’s young daughter was visiting just then, and she was having a wonderful time. The house was three stories high—there was certainly room enough to avoid each other. He was being transferred to Germany by his firm in September. Kate planned to move to New York, and this way she could take her time looking for a place. Wadding newspaper to stuff into the urns for another summer, she had been shocked at how tightly she crushed it—as if by directing her energy into her hands she could fight back tears.
Today, ten years later, Kate was back at the house. Philip’s daughter, Monica, was eighteen now, and a friend of Monica’s was renting the house. Today was Monica’s engagement party. Kate sat in a lawn chair. The lawn was nicely mowed. The ugly urns were gone, and a fuchsia plant hung from the lamppost beside the back door. A fuzz of green spread over a part of the lawn plot that had been newly plowed for a garden. The big maple tree that encroached on the kitchen had grown huge; she wondered if any light could penetrate that room now.
She knew that the spike in the maple tree would still be there. It had been there, mysteriously in place, when they first moved in. She walked up to the tree and put her hand on it. It was rusted, but still the height to allow a person to get a foot up, so that he could pull himself up into the nearest overhead branches.
Before the party, Philip had