Read Online Distortions by Ann Beattie - Free Book Online

there’s no answer. David is calling her at the foot of the stairs.
    “What?”
    “Someone on the phone for you.”
    She goes downstairs to answer the phone. She sits at a chair by the table. The table is clear. Everything has been cleared away.
    “Hello?”
    The voice is soft. She can hardly hear. It’s the old man’s sister. She’s tired of the old man and his sister, tired of work. She had already dismissed the old man from her mind, like last week’s dreams, but now the old man’s sister has called. His sister is upset. She’s talking about the snow. Apparently she’s snowed in, the snow is deeper than her boots, she’s been trying to reach her husband to tell him. The planes from Florida won’t land. No planes are landing. The old lady is thanking her for taking care of her brother. Why is she whispering?
    “I come every day. I have my umbrella and my high boots so I can do my duty. I always try to bring him things that will please him so he won’t think I only do it because I have to. My niecehas to get away. He’s so demanding. He wants her attention all day and night.”
    She’s still half asleep, squinting against the glare, straining to hear. His sister is at the phone outside his bedroom in the hallway. The plane is still in Florida; it hasn’t left because it can’t land. His sister is asking if there’s any way she can come back.
    As she talks, the runway is buried deeper in snow. They’re trying to clear it, but the snow is heavy, the planes can’t land. The planes from Greece won’t land. Now no one is on the beach in Greece, or at home in the United States; they’re up in the air, up above the snow. She’s sitting in a chair by the table. The table is clear. What was on the table when she came in? David has cleaned the room.
    “You’re so lucky,” the woman whispers. “You can come and go. You don’t know what it’s like to be caught.”

Wally Whistles
Dixie

    W hat an amazing life David has had: born in the Sierras, completely unexpected, his mother in labor only two hours, two and a half months premature, weighing four pounds even. Not much larger than two trout in a pan, his father was fond of saying, staring at his extended flat palm. Given up for dead in India at age ten, he then gained weight, his heart beat normally again, the fever vanished overnight. Married at sixteen—an elopement—in Reno, Nevada, to a thirty-year-old ballerina. But these are facts, and the trivia is more interesting: he can find a mosquito in a room even when it’s not humming, go straight to its hiding place and catch it. Once he lifted his car by the back bumper—not in a moment of terror, nothing pinned under it, just to see … and he did it! He has memorized pages of Fitzgerald’s notebooks: descriptions of pretty girls, F’s thoughts on poetry, things F. will write etc. But he has read no F. novels! A lot of men cook, but David has published a cookbook that was translated into Japanese. The dedication is to the doctor who pronounced him doomed in India. David once played the oboe on a Scott Silver record, and before that time he had only played the violin. He practiced for a couple of days, and bleup bleuuuu buhloo. His wife, Sheila, is interesting too. There aren’t many forty-five-year-old ballerinas who are still with it. She still flies from the floor like a bouncer on a trampoline. She proposed to her husband on impulse, in a place called The Silver Slipper Café in Reno, telling him that he might spend years looking and she might spend years looking, and that they could end all the looking, what the hell. He insisted that they wait twenty-four hours, secretly suspecting that she was drunk. She was a little insulted, and the wait just gave her more time to look, but when he realized that she was and had been sober he took her to The Wedding Chapel by the Pool. After a brief ceremony, witnessed by a drunken fat woman and a weeping thin woman with a Doberman held on a leash that