The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [82]
“I wouldn’t care if their car went off the road,” he says bitterly.
“Don’t say that,” she says.
They sit in silence, listening to the rain. She slides over closer to him, puts her hand on his shoulder and leans her head there, as if he could protect her from the awful things he has wished into being.
Tuesday Night
Henry was supposed to bring the child home at six o’clock, but they usually did not arrive until eight or eight-thirty, with Joanna overtired and complaining that she did not want to go to bed the minute she came through the door. Henry had taught her that phrase. “The minute she comes through the door” was something I had said once, and he mocked me with it in defending her. “Let the poor child have a minute before she goes to bed. She did just come through the door.” The poor child is, of course, crazy about Henry. He allows her to call him that, instead of “Daddy.” And now he takes her to dinner at a French restaurant that she adores, which doesn’t open until five-thirty. That means that she gets home close to eight. I am a beast if I refuse to let her eat her escargots. And it would be cruel to tell her that her father’s support payments fluctuate wildly, while the French dining remains a constant. Forget the money—Henry has been a good father. He visits every Tuesday night, carefully twirls her crayons in the pencil sharpener, and takes her every other weekend. The only bad thing he has done to her—and even Henry agreed about that—was to introduce her to the sleepie he had living with him right after the divorce: an obnoxious woman, who taught Joanna to sing “I’m a Woman.” Fortunately, she did not remember many of the words, but I thought I’d lose my mind when she went around the house singing “Doubleyou oh oh em ay en” for two weeks. Sometimes the sleepie tucked a fresh flower in Joanna’s hair—like Maria Muldaur, she explained. The child had the good sense to be embarrassed.
The men I know are very friendly with one another. When Henry was at the house last week, he helped Dan, who lives with me, carry a bookcase up the steep, narrow steps to the second floor. Henry and Dan talk about nutrition—Dan’s current interest. My brother Bobby, the only person I know who is seriously interested in hallucinogens at the age of twenty-six, gladly makes a fool of himself in front of Henry by bringing out his green yo-yo, which glows by the miracle of two internal batteries. Dan tells Bobby that if he’s going to take drugs, he should try dosing his body with vitamins before and after. The three of them Christmas-shop for me. Last year they had dinner at an Italian restaurant downtown. I asked Dan what they ordered, and he said, “Oh, we all had manicotti.”
I have been subsisting on red zinger tea and watermelon, trying to lose weight. Dan and Henry and Bobby are all thin. Joanna takes after her father in her build. She is long and graceful, with chiseled features that would shame Marisa Berenson. She is ten years old. When I was at the laundry to pick up the clothes yesterday a woman mistook me, from the back, for her cousin Addie.
In Joanna’s class at school they are having a discussion of problems with the environment. She wants to take our big avocado plant in to school. I have tried patiently to explain that the plant does not have anything to do with environmental problems. She says that they are discussing nature, too. “What’s the harm?” Dan says. So he goes to work and leaves it to me to fit the towering avocado into the Audi. I also get roped into baking cookies so Joanna can take them to school and pass them around to celebrate her birthday. She tells me that it is the custom to put the cookies in a box wrapped in birthday paper. We select a paper with yellow bears standing in concentric circles. Dan dumps bran into the chocolate-chip-cookie dough. He forbids me to use a dot of red food coloring in the sugar-cookie hearts.
My best friend, Dianne, comes over in the mornings and turns her nose up at my red zinger. Sometimes she takes a shower here because she loves our