The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [181]
Now Peter slapped her bottom. “I’m going to run,” he said. He took off into the park, his running shoes kicking up clods of snow. She watched him go. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his short leather jacket came just to his waist, so that he looked like an adolescent in ill-fitting clothes. She had on cowboy boots instead of running shoes. Why did she hold it against him that she had decided at the last minute to go with him and that she was wearing the wrong shoes? Did she expect him to throw down his cape?
She probably would not have thought of a cape at all, except that his scarf flew off as he ran, and he didn’t notice. She turned into the park to get it. The snow was falling in smaller flakes now; it was going to stay. Maybe it was the realization that even icier weather was still to come that suddenly made her nearly numb with cold. The desire to be in the sun was almost a hot spot between her ribs; something actually burned inside her. Like everyone she knew, she had grown up watching Porky Pig and Heckle and Jeckle on Saturday mornings—cartoons in which the good guys got what they wanted and no consequences were permanent. Now she wanted one of those small tornadoes that whipped through cartoons, transporting objects and characters with miraculous speed from one place to another. She wanted to believe again in the magic power of the wind.
They went back to the house. Music was playing loudly on the radio, and her father was hollering to her mother, “First we get that damned ‘Drummer Boy’ dirge, and now they’ve got the Andrews Sisters singing ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.’ What the hell does that have to do with Christmas? Isn’t that song from the Second World War? What are they doing playing that stuff at Christmas? Probably some disc jockey that’s high. Everybody’s high all the time. The guy who filled my gas tank this morning was high. The kid they put on to deliver mail’s got eyes like a pinwheel and walks like he might step on a land mine. What about ‘White Christmas’? Do they think that Bing Crosby spent his whole life playing golf ?”
Peter came up behind Cammy as she was hanging his scarf on a peg on the back of the kitchen door. He helped her out of her coat and hung it over the scarf.
“Look at this,” Cammy’s mother said proudly, from the kitchen.
They walked into the room where her mother stood and looked down. While they were out, she had finished making the annual bûche de Noël: a fat, perfect cylinder of a log, with chocolate icing stroked into the texture of tree bark. A small green-and-white wreath had been pumped out of a pastry tube to decorate one end, and there was an open jar of raspberry jam that her mother must have used to make the bow.
“It was worth my effort,” her mother said. “You two look like children seeing their presents on Christmas morning.”
Cammy smiled. What her mother had just said was what gave her the idea of touching the Yule log—what made her grin and begin to wiggle her finger lightly through a ridge, widening it slightly, giving the bark at least one imperfection. Once her finger touched it, it was difficult to stop—though she knew she had to let the wild upsweep of the tornado she might create stay an image in her mind. The consolation, naturally, was what would happen when she raised her finger. Slowly—while Peter and her mother stared—she lifted her hand, still smiling, and began to suck the chocolate off her finger.
In the White Night
“Don’t think about a cow,” Matt Brinkley said. “Don’t think