The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [44]
Sitting on the porch after dinner, May rereads the letter. Her mother’s letters are always brief. Her mother has signed “Mama” in big, block-printed letters to fill up the bottom of the page.
Mrs. Wong comes out of the house, prepared for rain. She has on jeans and a yellow rain parka. She is going back to the library to study, she says. She sits on the top step, next to May.
“See?” Mrs. Wong says. “I told you she’d write. My husband would have ripped up the letter.”
“Can’t you call your son?” May asks.
“He got the number changed.”
“Couldn’t you go over there?”
“I suppose. It depresses me. Dirty magazines all over the house. His father brings them back for them. Hamburger meat and filth.”
“Do you have a picture of him?” May asks.
Mrs. Wong takes out her wallet and removes a photo in a plastic case. There is a picture of a Chinese man sitting on a boat. Next to him is a brown-haired boy, smiling. The Chinese man is also smiling. One of his eyes has been poked out of the picture.
“My husband used to jump rope in the kitchen,” Mrs. Wong says. “I’m not kidding you. He said it was to tone his muscles. I’d be cooking breakfast and he’d be jumping and panting. Reverting to infancy.”
May laughs.
“Wait till you get married,” Mrs. Wong says.
Wanda opens the door and closes it again. She has been avoiding Mrs. Wong since their last discussion, two days ago. When Mrs. Wong was leaving for class, Wanda stood in front of the door and said, “Why go to school? They don’t have answers. What’s the answer to why my husband drowned himself in the ocean after a good dinner? There aren’t any answers. That’s what I’ve got against woman’s liberation. Nothing personal.”
Wanda had been drinking. She held the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other.
“Why do you identify me with the women’s movement, Mrs. Marshall?” Mrs. Wong had asked.
“You left a perfectly good husband and son, didn’t you?”
“My husband stayed out all night, and my son didn’t care if I was there or not.”
“He didn’t care? What’s happening to men? They’re all turning queer, from the politicians down to the delivery boy. I was ashamed to have the delivery boy in my house today. What’s gone wrong?”
Wanda’s conversations usually end by her asking a question and then just walking away. That was something that always annoyed May’s father. Almost everything about Wanda annoyed him. May wishes she could like Wanda more, but she agrees with her father. Wanda is nice, but she isn’t very exciting.
Now Wanda comes out and sits on the porch. She picks up the National Enquirer. “Another doctor, another cure,” Wanda says, and she sighs.
May is not listening to Wanda. She is watching a black Cadillac with a white top coming up the street. The black Cadillac looks just like the one that belongs to her father’s friends Gus and Sugar. There is a woman in the passenger seat. The car comes by slowly, but then speeds up. May sits forward in her rocking chair to look. The woman did not look like Sugar. May sits back.
“Men on the moon, no cure for cancer,” Wanda says. “Men on the moon, and they do something to the ground beef now so it won’t cook. You saw me put that meat in the pan tonight. It just wouldn’t cook, would it?”
They rock in silence. In a few minutes, the car coasts by again. The window is down, and music is playing loudly. The car stops in front of Wanda’s. May’s father gets out. It’s her father, in a pair of shorts. A camera bounces against his chest.
“What the hell is this?” Wanda hollers as May runs toward her father.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Wanda yells again.
May’s father is smiling. He has a beer can in one hand, but he hugs May to him, even though he can’t pick her up. Looking past his arm, May sees that the woman in the car is Sugar.
“You’re not taking her anywhere!” Wanda says. “You’ve got no right to put me in this position.”
“Aw, Wanda, you know the world always dumps on you,” Ray says. “You