The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie Read Free Book Online

marriages, Cynthia. You are a good girl and know enough now to come home and settle down with your family. We are willing to look out for you, even your dad, and warn you not to make another dreadful mistake.” There was no greeting, no signature. The letter had probably been dashed off by her mother when she, too, had insomnia. Cynthia would have to answer the note, but she didn’t think her mother would be convinced by anything she could say. If she thought her parents would be convinced she was making the right decision by seeing Charlie, she would have asked him to meet her parents. But her parents liked people who had a lot to say, or who could make them laugh (“break the monotony,” her father called it), and Charlie didn’t have a lot to say. Charlie was a very serious person. He was also forty years old, and he had never been married. Her parents would want to know why that was. You couldn’t please them: they hated people who were divorced and they were suspicious of single people. So she had never suggested to Charlie that he meet her parents. Finally, he suggested it himself. Cynthia thought up excuses, but Charlie saw through them. He thought it was all because he had confessed to her that he sewed. She was ashamed of him—that was the real reason she was putting off the wedding, and why she wouldn’t introduce him to her parents. “No,” she said. “No, Charlie. No, no, no.” And because she had said it so many times, she was convinced. “Then set a date for the wedding,” he told her. “You’ve got to say when.” She promised to do that the next time she saw him, but she couldn’t think right, and that was because of the notes that her mother wrote her, and because she couldn’t get any sleep, and because she got depressed by taking off weight and gaining it right back by eating at night.
    As long as she couldn’t sleep, and there were only a few potato chips left, which she might as well finish off, she decided to level with herself the same way she and Charlie had the night they told their secrets. She asked herself why she was getting married. Part of the answer was that she didn’t like her job. She was a typer—a typist , the other girls always said, correcting her—and also she was thirty-two, and if she didn’t get married soon she might not find anybody. She and Charlie would live in a house, and she could have a flower garden, and, although they had not discussed it, if she had a baby she wouldn’t have to work. It was getting late if she intended to have a baby. There was no point in asking herself more questions. Her head hurt, and she had eaten too much and felt a little sick, and no matter what she thought she knew she was still going to marry Charlie.
    Cynthia would marry Charlie on February the tenth. That was what she told Charlie, because she hadn’t been able to think of a date and she had to say something, and that was what she would tell her boss, Mr. Greer, when she asked if she could be given her week’s vacation then.
    “We would like to be married the tenth of February, and, if I could, I’d like to have the next week off.”
    “I’m looking for that calendar.”
    “What?”
    “Sit down and relax, Cynthia. You can have the week off if that isn’t the week when—”
    “Mr. Greer, I could change the date of the wedding.”
    “I’m not asking you to do that. Please sit down while I—”
    “Thank you. I don’t mind standing.”
    “Cynthia, let’s just say that week is fine.”
    “Thank you.”
    “If you like standing, what about having a hot dog with me down at the corner?” he said to Cynthia.
    That surprised her. Having lunch with her boss! She could feel the heat of her cheeks. A crazy thought went through her head: Cynthia Greer. It got mixed up right away with Peterson, Divine, and Pinehurst.
    At the hot-dog place, they stood side by side, eating hot dogs and french fries.
    “It’s none of my business,” Mr. Greer said to her, “but you