The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [258]
Anyway, all the preliminaries to my story are nothing but that: the almost inevitable five minutes of hard rain midway through the trip; the beautiful bridge; the damned trucks expelling herculean farts. I drove to Venice, singing along with Mick Jagger about beasts of burden. When I got to my mother’s street, which is, it seems, the only quarter-mile-long stretch of America watched directly by God, through the eyes of a Florida policeman in a radar-equipped car, I set the cruise control for twenty and coasted to her driveway.
Hot as it was, my mother was outside, sitting in a lawn chair flanked by pots of red geraniums. Seeing my mother always puts me into a state of confusion. Whenever I first see her, I become disoriented.
“Ann!” she said. “Oh, are you exhausted? Was the flight terrible?”
It’s the subtext that depresses me: the assumption that to arrive anywhere you have to pass through hell. In fact, you do. I had been on a USAir flight, seated in the last seat in the last row, and every time suitcases thudded into the baggage compartment my spine reverberated painfully. My traveling companions had been an obese woman with a squirming baby and her teenage son, whose ears she squeezed when he wouldn’t settle down, producing shrieks and enough flailing to topple my cup of apple juice. I just sat there silently, and I could feel that I was being too quiet and bringing everyone down.
My mother’s face was still quite pink. Shortly before my father’s death, after she had a little skin cancer removed from above her lip, she went to the dermatologist for microdermabrasion. She was wearing the requisite hat with a wide brim and Ari Onassis sunglasses. She had on her uniform: shorts covered with a flap, so that it looked as if she were wearing a skirt, and a T-shirt embellished with sequins. Today’s featured a lion with glittering black ears and, for all I knew, a correctly colored nose. Its eyes, which you might think would be sequins, were painted on. Blue.
“Love you,” I said, hugging her. I had learned not to answer her questions. “Were you sitting out here in the sun waiting for me?”
She had learned, as well, not to answer mine. “We can have lemonade,” she said. “Paul Newman. And that man’s marinara sauce—I never cook it myself anymore.”
The surprise came almost immediately, just after she pressed a pile of papers into my hands: thank-you notes from friends she wanted me to read; a letter she didn’t understand regarding a magazine subscription that was about to expire; an ad she’d gotten about a vacuum cleaner she wanted my advice about buying; two tickets to a Broadway play she’d bought ten years before that she and my father had never used (what was being asked of me?); and—most interesting, at the bottom of the pile—a letter from Drake Dreodadus, her neighbor, asking her to move in with him. “Go for the vacuum instead,” I said, trying to laugh it off.
“I’ve already made my response,” she said. “And you may be very surprised to know what I said.”
Drake Dreodadus had spoken at my father’s memorial service. Before that, I had met him only once, when he was going over my parents’ lawn with a metal detector. But no: as my mother reminded me, I’d had a conversation with him in the drugstore, one time when she and I stopped in to buy medicine for my father. He was a pharmacist.
“The only surprising thing would be if you’d responded in the affirmative,” I said.
“ ‘Responded in the affirmative!’ Listen to you.”
“Mom,” I said, “tell me this is not something you’d give a second of thought to.”
“Several days of thought,” she said. “I decided that it would be a good idea, because we’re very compatible.”
“Mom,” I said, “you’re joking, right?”
“You’ll like him when you get to know him,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is someone you hardly know—or am I being naive?”
“Oh, Ann, at my age you don’t necessarily want to know someone extremely well. You want to be compatible,