The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [23]
They park in front of a bar with a blue neon sign in the window that says IDEAL CAFÉ. There is a larger neon sign above that that says SCHLITZ. He and Betty sit in a back booth. He orders a pitcher of beer and a double order of spiced shrimp. Tammy Wynette is singing “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” on the jukebox.
“Isn’t this place awful?” he says. “But the spiced shrimp are great.”
Betty smiles.
“If you don’t feel like smiling, don’t smile,” he says.
“Then all the pills would be for nothing.”
“Everything is for nothing,” he says.
“If you weren’t drinking you could take one of the pills,” Betty says. “Then you wouldn’t feel that way.”
“Did you see Esquire?” James asks.
“No,” MacDonald says. “Why?”
“Wait here,” James says.
MacDonald waits. A dwarf comes into the room and looks under his chair. MacDonald raises his feet.
“Excuse me,” the dwarf says. He turns cartwheels to leave the room.
“He used to be with the circus,” James says, returning. “He leads us in exercises now.”
MacDonald looks at Esquire. There has been a convention of dwarfs at the Oakland Hilton, and Esquire got pictures of it. Two male dwarfs are leading a delighted female dwarf down a runway. A baseball team of dwarfs. A group picture. Someone named Larry—MacDonald does not look back up at the picture to see which one he is—says, “I haven’t had so much fun since I was born.” MacDonald turns another page. An article on Daniel Ellsberg.
“Huh,” MacDonald says.
“How come Esquire didn’t know about our dwarf house?” James asks. “They could have come here.”
“Listen,” MacDonald says, “Mother asked me to bring this to you. I don’t mean to insult you, but she made me promise I’d deliver it. You know she’s very worried about you.”
“What is it?” James asks.
MacDonald gives him the piece of paper that Mrs. Esposito wrote instructions on in English.
“Take it back,” James says.
“No. Then I’ll have to tell her you refused it.”
“Tell her.”
“No. She’s miserable. I know it’s crazy, but just keep it for her sake.”
James turns and throws the jar. Bright yellow liquid runs down the wall.
“Tell her not to send you back here either,” James says. MacDonald thinks that if James were his size he would have hit him instead of only speaking.
“Come back and hit me if you want,” MacDonald hollers. “Stand on the arm of this chair and hit me in the face.”
James does not come back. A dwarf in the hallway says to MacDonald, as he is leaving, “It was a good idea to be sarcastic to him.”
MacDonald and his wife and mother and Mrs. Esposito stand amid a cluster of dwarfs and one giant waiting for the wedding to begin. James and his bride are being married on the lawn outside the church. They are still inside with the minister. His mother is already weeping. “I wish I had never married your father,” she says, and borrows Mrs. Esposito’s handkerchief to dry her eyes. Mrs. Esposito is wearing her jungle dress again. On the way over she told MacDonald’s wife that her husband had locked her out of the house and that she only had one dress. “It’s lucky it was such a pretty one,” his wife said, and Mrs. Esposito shyly protested that it wasn’t very fancy, though.
The minister and James and his bride come out of the church onto the lawn. The minister is a hippie, or something like a hippie: a tall, white-faced man with stringy blond hair and black motorcycle boots. “Friends,” the minister says, “before the happy marriage of these two people, we will release this bird from its cage, symbolic of the new freedom of marriage, and of the ascension of the spirit.”
The minister is holding the cage with the parakeet in it.
“MacDonald,” his wife whispers, “that’s the parakeet. You can’t release a pet into the wild.”
His mother disapproves of all this. Perhaps her tears are partly disapproval, and not all hatred of his father.
The bird is released: it flies shakily into a tree and disappears into the new spring foliage.
The dwarfs clap and cheer. The minister wraps his arms around himself