The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [85]
“You yelled at me,” she says.
“I did not. I asked you not to stand there staring at me while I was on the phone.”
“You raised your voice,” she says.
Soon it will be Tuesday night.
Joanna asks me suspiciously what I do on Tuesday nights.
“What does your father say I do?” I ask.
“He says he doesn’t know.”
“Does he seem curious?”
“It’s hard to tell with him,” she says.
Having got my answer, I’ve forgotten about her question.
“So what things do you do?” she says.
“Sometimes you like to play in your tent,” I say defensively. “Well, I like some time to just do what I want to do, too, Joanna.”
“That’s okay,” she says. She sounds like an adult placating a child.
I have to face the fact that I don’t do much of anything on Tuesdays, and that one night alone each week isn’t making me any less edgy or more agreeable to live with. I tell Dan this, as if it’s his fault.
“I don’t think you ever wanted to divorce Henry,” Dan says.
“Oh, Dan, I did.”
“You two seem to get along fine.”
“But we fought. We didn’t get along.”
He looks at me. “Oh,” he says. He is being inordinately nice to me because of the scene I threw when a mouse got caught in one of the traps. The trap didn’t kill it. It just got it by the paw, and Dan had to beat it to death with a screwdriver.
“Maybe you’d rather the two of us did something regularly on Tuesday nights,” he says now. “Maybe I could get the night of my meetings changed.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Maybe I should give it a little longer.”
“That’s up to you,” he says. “There hasn’t been enough time to judge by, I guess.”
Inordinately kind. Deferential. He has been saying for a long time that our relationship is turning sour, and now it must have turned so sour for him that he doesn’t even want to fight. What does he want?
“Maybe you’d like a night—” I begin.
“The hell with that,” he says. “If there has to be so much time alone, I can’t see the point of living together.”
I hate fights. The day after this one, I get weepy and go over to Dianne’s. She ends up subtly suggesting that I take stained-glass lessons. We drink some sherry and I drive home. The last thing I want is to run into her husband, who calls me “the squirrel” behind my back. Dianne says that when I call and he answers, he lets her know it’s me on the phone by puffing up his cheeks to make himself look like a squirrel.
Tonight Dan and I each sit on a side of Joanna’s tester bed to say good night to her. The canopy above the bed is white nylon, with small puckered stars. She is ready for sleep. As soon as she goes to sleep, Dan will be ready to talk to me. Dan has clicked off the light next to Joanna’s bed. Going out of the bedroom before him, I grope for the hall light. I remember Henry saying to me, as a way of leading up to talking about divorce, that going to work one morning he had driven over a hill and had been astonished when at the top he saw a huge yellow tree, and realized for the first time that it was autumn.
Shifting
The woman’s name was Natalie, and the man’s name was Larry. They had been childhood sweethearts; he had first kissed her at an ice-skating party when they were ten. She had been unlacing her skates and had not expected the kiss. He had not expected to do it, either—he had some notion of getting his face out of the wind that was blowing across the iced-over lake, and he found himself ducking his head toward her. Kissing her seemed the natural thing to do. When they graduated from high school he was named “class clown” in the yearbook, but Natalie didn’t think of him as being particularly funny. He spent more time than she thought he needed to studying chemistry, and he never laughed when she joked. She really did not think of him as funny. They went to the same college, in their hometown, but he left after a year to go to a larger, more impressive university. She took the train to be with him on weekends, or he took the train to see her. When he graduated, his parents gave him a car. If they had given it to him when he was still in college, it would have made things