Ann Beattie
What Was Mine
For Lynn Nesbit,
Priscilla, and Claire
I would like to thank Rallou Malliarakis, whose painting
The Windy Day at the Reservoir inspired my story.
IMAGINE A DAY AT THE END OF YOUR LIFE
Sometimes I do feel subsumed by them. My wife, Harriet, only wanted two children in the first place. With the third and fourth, I was naturally pressing for a son. The fifth, Michael, was an accident. Allison was third and Denise was number four. Number one, Carolyn, was always the most intelligent and the most troublesome; Joan was always the one whose talent I thought would pan out, but there’s no arguing with what she says: dancers are obsessive, vain people, and many of them have problems with drugs and drink, and it’s no fun to watch people disfigure their bodies in the name of art. Allison was rather plain. She developed a good sense of humor, probably as compensation for not being as attractive or as talented as the older ones. The fourth, Denise, was almost as talented at painting as Joan was at dance, but she married young and gave it up, except for creating her family’s Christmas card. Michael is a ski instructor in Aspen — sends those tourists down the slopes with a smile. I think he likes the notion of keeping people at a distance. He has felt overwhelmed all his life.
My wife’s idea of real happiness is to have all the family lined up on the porch in their finery, with their spouses and all the children, being photographed like the Royal Family. She’s always bustled with energy. She gave the rocking chair to Goodwill last spring because, she said, it encouraged lethargy.
Harriet is a very domestic woman, but come late afternoon she’s at the Remington, conjuring up bodies buried in haystacks and mass murderers at masked balls — some of the weirdest stuff you can imagine. She’s done quite well financially writing these mysteries, and every couple of years we hire a driver and set off across the United States, stopping to see friends and family. At night, in the motel room, she puts the typewriter on the bureau, piles pillows on one of the chairs, and starts typing. Nothing interferes with her concentration. At home, she might run off after lunch to examine an animal in the zoo, or even march onto a construction site with her tape recorder to ask questions about ditch digging. She has a lot of anecdotes, and that keeps things lively. We get more than our share of invitations to parties. People would have us to breakfast if we’d go.
Harriet says that I’m spoiled by how much fun we have and that it’s going to be hard to settle for the way life will be when we’re old. At the end of every year we’ve got a dozen new friends. Policemen who’ve taken a liking to her, or whoever’s new at the local library. Last year a man who imported jumping beans lived with us for a month, when he was down on his luck. Those boxes, out in the hallway, sounded like the popcorn machine at the movies.
Some people undervalue what Harriet does, or don’t have sympathy with my having resigned my position on the route, but how many more years are dairies going to deliver, anyway? I got to feeling like a dinosaur, passing the time until the great disaster. I felt like a vanishing breed, is what I mean. And how many people would go on doing what they’ve been doing if they had the means to do otherwise?
The girls are good-natured about their mother, and I think that Allison and Denise, in particular, quite admire her. Things didn’t ever really come together and take shape for those two, but that’s understandable, because no matter how much you try, every parent does have favorites. I was quite taken aback by Carolyn because she was so attractive and intelligent. Maybe instead of saying that she was a real favorite, I should say that she was a real shock. She walked at eight months! Never took time to crawl. One day, outside the playpen, she pulled herself up and took off across the rug. There she went. She married a fool, but she seems happy with his foolishness. Joan is remarried to a very nice man who owns a bank — flat out owns it! — in Michigan. She’s recovered well from her bad first marriage, which isn’t surprising, considering that she’s in her first year of law school and has inherited two daughters. There are three dalmatians, too. Dogs that eat her out of house and home. Allison works as a buyer for a big department store, and she’s pretty close to her younger sister, Denise. All year, Allison thinks about sweaters, contracts with people to knit sweaters, goes to look at the plants where sweaters are manufactured. That’s what we get as gifts: sweaters. She and Denise go on sweater-shopping expeditions in the spring. Harriet and I get postcards telling us what the towns look like, what they ate for dinner, and sometimes anecdotes about how the two of them located some interesting sweater.
Michael, lately, is the problem. That’s the way it is: you hope and hope for a particular child and that’s the one who’s always eluding you. He’ll plan a trip home and cancel it at the last minute, send pictures that are too blurry to see his face. Occasionally I get mad and tell him that he neglects his mother and me, but those comments just roll off his back. He says that he doesn’t cause us any trouble and that he doesn’t ask for anything, which isn’t the issue at all. He keeps bringing up that he offered to teach me to ski and that I turned him down. I’m not athletically inclined. He takes that personally. It’s so often the way that the position you’re in as a parent gets reversed, so that one day you’re the one who lags behind. You’re the one who won’t try anything new. Michael’s always been a rather argumentative boy, but I’ve never believed in fighting fire with fire. Harriet says he’s the apple of my eye, but as I said to her: “What does that mean? That when Michael’s here, I see red?” With the last three, I think, both she and I slacked off.
Live in the present, Harriet’s always telling me. As a joke, she’s named the man who runs the morgue in her mysteries, who’s a worrywart, after me. But I never did hold with the notion that you should have children and then cast them to the wind. They’re interesting people. Between them, they know seven foreign languages. If I want advice about what stock to buy, I can call one son-in-law, and if I want to criticize the president, I can call another. Naturally, my children don’t see eye-to-eye about how to live, and sometimes they don’t even speak to one another, or they write letters I’m sure they later regret. Still, I sense great loyalty between them.
The last time the whole family was here was for our fortieth wedding anniversary. The TV ran night and day, and no one could keep on top of the chaos in the kitchen. Allison and Joan had even given friends the phone number, as if they were going into exile instead of visiting their parents for the weekend. The phone rang off the hook. Allison brought her dog and Joan brought her favorite dalmatian, and the two got into such an awful fight that Allison’s had to spend the night in the backseat of her car. All night long, inside the house, the other dog paced, wanting to get at it. At the end of the visit, when the last car pulled away, Harriet admitted to me that it had been too much for her. She’d gone into the kitchen and stood a broom upside down in the corner and opened the scissors facing the bristles. She’d interviewed a woman who practiced voodoo, and the woman had told her that that was a surefire way to get rid of guests. Harriet felt a little guilty that it had worked: initially, Denise had said that she was going to leave early Monday morning, but by Sunday noon she was gone — and the last to leave.
I have in my possession cassettes of music the children thought their mother and I should be aware of, photocopies of grandchildren’s report cards, California wine with a label saying that it was bottled especially for Joan, and an ingenious key chain you can always find because when you whistle, it beeps. My anniversary present from Allison was a photo album, in a very nice, compact size, called a “brag book.” She has filled it with pictures of the grandchildren and the husbands and cats and dogs, and with some cartoons that she thought were amusing. And then there was another brag book that was empty, with a note inside saying that I could brag about whatever I wanted.