The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [68]
“Balducci’s!” Corinne sometimes murmurs to me, and moves her arm through the air to suggest counters spread with delicacies. I imagine tins of anchovies, wheels of Brie, huge cashews, strange greens. But then I hear voices whispering outside my door plotting to break it down, and angry, wild music late at night that is the kind that disturbed, unhappy people listen to.
Now Corinne is holding Lenny’s hand. I am lying on my side and peeking through the netting of the hammock, and they don’t see me. She stoops to pick a strawberry. He scratches his crotch. They are bored here, I think. They pretend that they make the two-hour drive up here nearly every weekend because they are concerned for my well-being. Perhaps they actually think that living in the country is spookier than living in the city. “You sent your beagle to live in the country, Corinne,” I said to her once. “How can you be upset that a human being wants to live where there’s room to stretch?” “But what do you do here all alone?” she said.
I do plenty of things. I play Bach and Chopin on a grand piano my husband saved for a year to buy me. I grow vegetables, and I mow the lawn. When Lenny and Corinne come for the weekend, I spy on them. He’s scratching his shoulder now. He calls Corinne to him. I think he is asking her to see if he just got a mosquito bite.
Last year when my husband went on vacation without me, I drove from Connecticut to D.C. to visit my parents. They live in the house where I grew up. The crocheted bedspreads have turned yellow now and the bedroom curtains are the same as ever. But in the living room there is a large black plastic chair for my father and a large brown plastic chair for my mother. My brother, Raleigh, who is retarded, lives with them. He has a friend, Ed, who is retarded, and who visits him once a week. And Raleigh visits Ed once a week. Sometimes my mother or Ed’s mother takes them to the zoo. Raleigh’s chatter often makes more sense than we at first suspected. For instance, he is very fond of Ling-Ling, the panda. He was not imitating the bell the Good Humor man rings when he drives around the neighborhood, as my father once insisted. My father has never been able to understand Raleigh very well. My mother laughs at him for his lack of understanding. She is a bitter woman. For the last ten years, she has made my father adhere to a diet when he is home, and he is not overweight.
When I visited, I drove Raleigh down to Hains Point, and we looked across the water at the lights. In spite of being retarded, he seems very moved by things. He rolled down the window and let the wind blow across his face. I slowed the car almost to a stop, and he put his hand on my hand, like a lover. He wanted me to stop the car entirely so he could look at the lights. I let him look for a long time. On the way home I drove across the bridge into Arlington and took him to Gifford’s for ice cream. He had a banana split, and I pretended not to notice when he ate the toppings with his fingers. Then I washed his fingers with a napkin dipped in a glass of water.
One day I found him in the bathroom with Daisy, the dog, combing over her body for ticks. There were six or seven ticks in the toilet. He was concentrating so hard that he never looked up. Standing there, I realized that there was now a small bald spot at the top of his head, and that Daisy’s fur was flecked with gray. I reached over him and got aspirin out of the medicine cabinet. Later, when I went back to the bathroom and found Raleigh and Daisy gone, I flushed the toilet so my parents would not be upset. Raleigh sometimes drops pieces of paper into the toilet instead of into the wastebaskets, and my mother goes wild. Sometimes socks are in the toilet. Coins. Pieces of candy.
I stayed for two weeks. On Mondays, before his friend Ed came, Raleigh left the living room until the door had been answered, and then acted surprised to see Ed and his mother. When I took him to Ed’s house, Ed did the same thing. Ed held a newspaper in front of his face at first. “Oh—hello,” Ed finally said.