What Was Mine: & Other Stories by Ann Beattie Read Free Book Online

me,” I said. “As I meant to indicate, I don’t think we’re going to be here much longer.”
    She looked like a child who’d dropped its toy off a bridge. She frowned and her eyes made a long sweep along the floor, seeming to focus on the corner. She probably saw the dust balls. It was no more my problem to clean than my husband’s. If it was going to be a childless marriage and I wasn’t going to be a traditional wife, then he could clean as well as I could.
    I got her the coffee and had a 7-Up myself, to be polite and drink along with her. Doing that with alcohol had led to the collapse of my first marriage. My second husband no one could have been married to. He went to Vietnam and came back loony. He thought trucks on the highway would blow up if we passed them. He was given three tickets for driving too slow on an interstate. He lied, telling them that he had rheumatism in his foot and that sometimes he just couldn’t push too hard on the accelerator. Actually, he thought everything was going to burst into flames.
    “I’m very sorry to hear that you’re having problems,” Betty said. Her name was Betty. She’d told me that outside, before she came in. Betty what, she didn’t say.
    I lowered my eyes.
    “Don’t abandon hope!” she said so loudly she startled me. I wondered if she was a Christian. A lot of those, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, came around to the apartment my second husband and I occupied.
    “What I mean is, our community needs you,” she said. “Our community needs younger people to restore life to it. There used to be children on bicycles, but no more. Maybe a grandchild or two, on the weekends.”
    “On the highway?” I said. She was pointing to the road again. Actually, the road was a highway.
    “We had rabbits and turtles and squirrels running everywhere. The telephone company came out and put squirrel-proof lines up, and the squirrels were doing acrobatics while the men were packing up their tool kits.” She had a wide smile that showed her fillings. She seemed to be warming up to something.
    “This used to be a regular stop for a traveling carnival. To this day, I’ve got stuffed bears and alligators my husband won me at the carnival. He knocked those monkeys off the shelf with that hardball”—she held her thumb and first two fingers in the air, curled and spread as far as they could go, so that they looked like a meat hook—“and he was so good at it, the man said that he didn’t think he’d ever come back to town with the carnival again. Of course, that wasn’t the reason why the carnival disappeared.”
    I nodded. I was coming to understand that she was suffering too.
    “There used to be two trash pickups a week,” she said. “Now it’s just Monday morning, like we don’t eat and throw things out except after the weekends. I take it to the dump. You can hire a service to come get it, but they want everything wrapped just so. They act like they’re the local post office. Have you tried to mail a package from our local post office? If they sold the supplies, I’d think all that harassment was because they wanted to make a profit selling their own goods, but all they’ve got is manila envelopes.”
    I had never been in the local post office. Our mail was delivered—what there was of it. Except for Christmas, we didn’t get much mail. At Christmas, various people remembered me.
    “I suppose the greenhouse where my husband works had a heyday too?” I said. I was curious. It looked like it had been built at the turn of the century. It certainly didn’t look like it had ever been anything else.
    “It offered a landscaping service the year I moved in,” Betty said. “There was always a dance on the longest day of the year, out on the big lawn leading up to the greenhouse. All the almond bushes and weeping cherry trees were in flower. It was an amazing sight.” She took a sip of coffee. “You know, there are handicapped people in town,” she said. “I’m