The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [170]
“Climb up so I can look up your skirt,” her husband said.
And then he was surprised when she did.
Ignoring the finger she’d scraped on the bark pulling herself up, she stood on the first high branch and reached behind to tug her skirt free, laughing and letting the skirt drift away from her body. She went one branch higher, carefully, and leaned out to look down. She turned and leaned against a higher branch, facing him, and raised her skirt.
“O.K.,” he said, laughing, too. “Be careful.”
She realized that she had never looked down on him before—not out of a window, not in any situation she could think of. She was twelve or fifteen feet off the ground. She went one branch higher. She looked down again and saw him move closer to the tree, as quickly as a magnet. He was smaller.
“Birds used to peck birdseed from a seeded bell that dangled from there,” she said, pointing to the branch her husband could almost touch. “This tree used to be filled with birds in the morning. They were so loud that you could hear them over the bacon sputtering.”
“Come down,” he said.
She felt a little frightened when she saw how small his raised hand was. Her body felt light, and she held on tighter.
“Sweetheart,” he said.
A young man in a white jacket was coming toward her husband, carrying two drinks. “Whoa, up there!” he called. She smiled down. In a second, a little girl began to run toward the man. She was about two years old, and not steady on her feet where the lawn began to slope and the tree’s roots pushed out of the ground. The man quickly handed the drinks to her husband and turned to swoop up the child as she stumbled. Kate, braced for the child’s cry, exhaled when nothing happened.
“There used to be a tree house,” Kate said. “We hung paper lanterns from it when we had a party.”
“I know,” her husband said. He was still reaching up, a drink in each hand. The man standing with him frowned. He reclaimed his drink and began to edge away, talking to the little girl. Her husband put his drink on the grass.
“Up in the tree!” the little girl squealed. She turned to look over her shoulder.
“That’s right,” the man said. “Somebody’s up in the tree.”
The glass at her husband’s feet had tipped over.
“We didn’t,” Kate said. “I made it up.”
He said, “Shall I come up and get you?” He touched his hand to the spike. Or else she thought he did; she couldn’t lean far enough forward to see.
“You’re so nice to me,” she said.
He moved back and stretched up his arms.
She had never been daring when she was young, and she wanted to stand her ground now. It made her giddy to realize how odd a thought that was—the contradiction between “standing your ground” and being balanced in a tree. There could have been a tree house. And who else but she and Philip would have lived in such a place and not had lawn parties? She didn’t think Monica was wrong about getting married; her fiancé was charming and silly and energetic. Her own husband was very charming—demonstrative only in private, surprised by her pranks to such an extent that she often thought he subtly encouraged her to act up because he admired people who could do such things. He was modest. It wasn’t like him to say, “Climb up so I can look up your skirt.”
“I’ll fly,” she said.
He dropped his hands to his sides. “A walk in the woods,” he said.
At the back of the lawn, where the lawn tapered into the woods, the man and his daughter were crouched, looking at something in the grass. Kate could hear piano music coming from inside the house.
“A drive,” her husband said. “We’ll walk out on the celebration for a few minutes.”
She shook her head no. Then her ribs felt like a tourniquet, and