The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [83]
Dan has to work late at his office on Tuesday nights, and a while ago I decided that I wanted that one night to myself each week—a night without any of them. Dianne said, “I know what you mean,” but Bobby took great offense and didn’t come to visit that night, or any other night, for two weeks. Joanna was delighted that she could be picked up after school by Dianne, in Dianne’s 1966 Mustang convertible, and that the two of them could visit until Henry came by Dianne’s to pick her up. Dan, who keeps saying that our relationship is going sour—although it isn’t—pursed his lips and nodded when I told him about Tuesday nights, but he said nothing. The first night alone I read a dirty magazine that had been lying around the house for some time. Then I took off all my clothes and looked in the hall mirror and decided to go on a diet, so I skipped dinner. I made a long-distance call to a friend in California who had just had a baby. We talked about the spidery little veins in her thighs, and I swore to her over and over again that they would go away. Then I took one of each kind of vitamin pill we have in the house.
The next week I had prepared for my spare time better. I had bought whole-wheat flour and clover honey, and I made four loaves of whole-wheat bread. I made a piecrust, putting dough in the sink and rolling it out there, which made a lot of sense but which I would never let anybody see me doing. Then I read Vogue. Later on I took out the yoga book I had bought that afternoon and put it in my plastic cookbook-holder and put that down on the floor and stared at it as I tried to get into the postures. I overcooked the piecrust and it burned. I got depressed and drank a Drambuie. The week after that, I ventured out. I went to a movie and bought myself a chocolate milkshake afterward. I sat at the drugstore counter and drank it. I was going to get my birth-control-pill prescription refilled while I was there, but I decided that would be depressing.
Joanna sleeps at her father’s apartment now on Tuesday nights. Since he considers her too old to be read a fairy tale before bed, Henry waltzes with her. She wears a long nightgown and a pair of high-heeled shoes that some woman left there. She says that he usually plays “The Blue Danube,” but sometimes he kids around and puts on “Idiot Wind” or “Forever Young” and they dip and twirl to it. She has hinted that she would like to take dancing lessons. Last week she danced through the living room at our house on her pogo stick. Dan had given it to her, saying that now she had a partner, and it would save him money not having to pay for dancing lessons. He told her that if she had any questions, she could ask him. He said she could call him “Mr. Daniel.” She was disgusted with him. If she were Dan’s child, I am sure he would still be reading her fairy tales.
Another Tuesday night I went out and bought plants. I used my American Express card and got seventy dollars’ worth of plants and some plant hangers. The woman in the store helped me carry the boxes out to the car. I went home and drove nails into the top of the window frames and hung the plants. They did not need to be watered yet, but I held the plastic plant waterer up to them, to see what it would be like to water them. I squeezed the plastic bottle and stared at the curved plastic tube coming out of it. Later I gave myself a facial with egg whites.
There is a mouse. I first saw it in the kitchen—a small gray mouse, moseying along, taking its time in getting from under the counter to the back of the stove. I had Dan seal off the little mouse hole in the back of the stove. Then I saw the mouse again, under the chest in the living room.
“It’s a mouse.