The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [31]
“Are you kidding?” Noel says. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself at dinner. It was a good dinner, wasn’t it?”
“I make you nervous, don’t I?” I say.
“No. You don’t make me nervous.”
Rain splashes under the car, drums on the roof. We ride on for blocks and blocks. It is too quiet; I wish there were a radio. The rain on the roof is monotonous, the collar of my coat is wet and cold. At last we are home. Noel parks the car and comes around to my door and opens it. I get out. Noel pulls me close, squeezes me hard. When I was a little girl, I once squeezed a doll to my chest in an antique shop, and when I took it away the eyes had popped off. An unpleasant memory. With my arms around Noel, I feel the cold rain hitting my hands and wrists.
A man running down the sidewalk with a small dog in his arms and a big black umbrella over him calls, “Your lights are on!”
It is almost a year later—Christmas—and we are visiting Noel’s crazy sister, Juliette. After going with Noel for so long, I am considered one of the family. Juliette phones before every occasion, saying, “You’re one of the family. Of course you don’t need an invitation.” I should appreciate it, but she’s always drunk when she calls, and usually she starts to cry and says she wishes Christmas and Thanksgiving didn’t exist. Jeanette, his other sister, is very nice, but she lives in Colorado. Juliette lives in New Jersey. Here we are in Bayonne, New Jersey, coming in through the front door—Noel holding Beth, me carrying a pumpkin pie. I tried to sniff the pie aroma on the way from Noel’s apartment to his sister’s house, but it had no smell. Or else I’m getting another cold. I sucked chewable vitamin C tablets in the car, and now I smell of oranges. Noel’s mother is in the living room, crocheting. Better, at least, than David’s mother, who was always discoursing about Andrew Wyeth. I remember with satisfaction that the last time I saw her I said, “It’s a simple fact that Edward Hopper was better.”
Juliette: long, whitish-blond hair tucked in back of her pink ears, spike-heel shoes that she orders from Frederick’s of Hollywood, dresses that show her cleavage. Noel and I are silently wondering if her husband will be here. At Thanksgiving he showed up just as we were starting dinner, with a black-haired woman who wore a dress with a plunging neckline. Juliette’s breasts faced the black-haired woman’s breasts across the table (tablecloth crocheted by Noel’s mother). Noel doesn’t like me to criticize Juliette. He thinks positively. His other sister is a musician. She has a husband and a Weimaraner and two rare birds that live in a birdcage built by her husband. They have a lot of money and they ski. They have adopted a Korean boy. Once, they showed us a film of the Korean boy learning to ski. Wham, wham, wham—every few seconds he was groveling in the snow again.
Juliette is such a liberal that she gives us not only the same bedroom but a bedroom with only a single bed in it. Beth sleeps on the couch.
Wedged beside Noel that night, I say, “This is ridiculous.”
“She means to be nice,” he says. “Where else would we sleep?”
“She could let us have her double bed and she could sleep in here. After all, he’s not coming back, Noel.”
“Shh.”
“Wouldn’t that have been better?”
“What do you care?” Noel says. “You’re nuts about me, right?”
He slides up against me and hugs my back.
“I don’t know how people talk anymore,” he says. “I don’t know any of the current lingo. What expression do people use for ‘nuts about’?”
“I don’t know.”
“I just did it again! I said ‘lingo.’ ”
“So what? Who do you want to sound like?”
“The way I talk sounds dated—like an old person.”
“Why are you always worried about being old?”
He snuggles closer. “You didn’t answer before when I said you were nuts about me. That doesn’t mean that you don’t like me, does it?”
“No.”
“You’re big on the one-word answers.”
“I’m big on going to sleep.”
“ ‘Big on.’ See? There must be some expression to replace that now.”
I sit in the car, waiting for Beth to come out of the building