Ann Beattie - What Was Mine

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 theres no arguing with what she says: dancers are obsessive, vain people, and many of them have problems with drugs and drink, and its 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 familys 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 wifes 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. Shes 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 shes at the Remington, conjuring up bodies buried in haystacks and mass murderers at masked balls some of the weirdest stuff you can imagine. Shes 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 wed go.

Harriet says that Im spoiled by how much fun we have and that its going to be hard to settle for the way life will be when were old. At the end of every year weve got a dozen new friends. Policemen whove taken a liking to her, or whoevers 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 dont 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 theyve 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 didnt ever really come together and take shape for those two, but thats 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. Shes recovered well from her bad first marriage, which isnt surprising, considering that shes 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 shes 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. Thats 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. Thats the way it is: you hope and hope for a particular child and thats the one whos always eluding you. Hell 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 doesnt cause us any trouble and that he doesnt ask for anything, which isnt the issue at all. He keeps bringing up that he offered to teach me to ski and that I turned him down. Im not athletically inclined. He takes that personally. Its so often the way that the position youre in as a parent gets reversed, so that one day youre the one who lags behind. Youre the one who wont try anything new. Michaels always been a rather argumentative boy, but Ive never believed in fighting fire with fire. Harriet says hes the apple of my eye, but as I said to her: What does that mean? That when Michaels here, I see red? With the last three, I think, both she and I slacked off.

Live in the present, Harriets always telling me. As a joke, shes named the man who runs the morgue in her mysteries, whos a worrywart, after me. But I never did hold with the notion that you should have children and then cast them to the wind. Theyre 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 dont see eye-to-eye about how to live, and sometimes they dont even speak to one another, or they write letters Im 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 Allisons 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. Shed gone into the kitchen and stood a broom upside down in the corner and opened the scissors facing the bristles. Shed 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 grandchildrens 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.