The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [246]
“What if I said, ‘Close your eyes and imagine either an elephant or a donkey’?”
“If I close my eyes, I see . . . I see a horse’s ass, and it’s you,” she said. “May I continue?”
He snorted. She had a quick wit, his daughter. She had got that from him, not from his wife, who neither made jokes nor understood them. In the distant past, his wife had found an entirely humorless psychiatrist who had summoned Keller and urged him to speak to Sue Anne directly, not in figurative language or through allusions or—God forbid—with humor. “What should I do if I’m just chomping at the bit to tell a racist joke?” he had asked. The idea was of course ludicrous; he had never made a racist joke in his life. But of course the psychiatrist missed his tone. “You anticipate the necessity of telling racist jokes to your wife?” he had said, pausing to scribble something on his pad. “Only if one came up in a dream or something,” Keller had deadpanned.
“I thought you were going to continue, Lynn,” he said. “Which I mean as an observation, not as a reproach,” he hurried to add.
“Keller,” she said (since her teenage years, she had called him Keller), “I need to know whether you’re coming to Thanksgiving.”
“Because you would get a turkey weighing six or seven ounces more?”
“In fact, I thought about cooking a ham this year, because Addison prefers ham. It’s just a simple request, Keller: that you let me know whether or not you plan to come. Thanksgiving is three weeks away.”
“I’ve come up against Amy Vanderbilt’s timetable for accepting a social invitation at Thanksgiving?” he said.
She sighed deeply. “I would like you to come, whether you believe that or not, but since the twins aren’t coming from L.A., and since Addison’s sister invited us to her house, I thought I might not cook this year, if you didn’t intend to come.”
“Oh, by all means don’t cook for me. I’ll mind my manners and call fifty-one weeks from today and we’ll set this up for next year,” he said. “A turkey potpie from the grocery store is good enough for me.”
“And the next night you could be your usual frugal self and eat the leftover packaging,” she said.
“Horses don’t eat cardboard. You’re thinking of mice,” he said.
“I stand corrected,” she said, echoing the sentence he often said to her. “But let me ask you another thing. Addison’s sister lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and she issued a personal invitation for you to join us at her house for dinner. Would you like to have Thanksgiving there?”
“How could she issue a personal invitation if she’s never met me?” he said.
“Stop it,” his daughter said. “Just answer.”
He thought about it. Not about whether he would go but about the holiday itself. The revisionist thinking on Thanksgiving was that it commemorated the subjugation of the Native Americans (formerly the Indians). Not as bad a holiday as Columbus Day, but still.
“I take it your silence means that you prefer to be far from the maddening crowd,” she said.
“That title is much misquoted,” he said. “Hardy’s novel is Far from the Madding Crowd, which has an entirely different connotation, madding meaning ‘frenzied.’ There’s quite a difference between frenzied and annoying. Consider, for instance, your mother’s personality versus mine.”
“You are incredibly annoying,” Lynn said. “If I didn’t know that you cared for me, I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone and let myself in for your mockery, over and over.”
“I thought it was because you pitied me.”
He heard the click, and there was silence. He replaced the phone in its cradle, which made him think of another cradle—Lynn’s—with the decal of the cow jumping over the moon on the headboard and blue and pink beads (the cradle manufacturer having hedged his bets) on the rails. He could remember spinning the beads and watching Lynn sleep. The cradle was now in the downstairs hallway, used to store papers and magazines for recycling. Over the years, some of the decal had peeled away, so that on last inspection only a torso with two legs was successfully