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

shake her head as she spoke. Then she gave me a map of the community, provided by the local hardware store. There was a smudge of blue eye shadow on her arm. It looked like a dangerously bulging vein.
    As she unrolled the map, I saw that it was a blank piece of paper. She had a huge smile on her face as she peered over the top of it. From my face, though, she could tell that something was wrong. She looked down and saw that there was nothing on the map. She jumped out of the chair, she was so surprised.
    “It can only be one thing,” she said. “When they mail me the tube, there’s a protective wrapper around the maps. I can’t blame this one on my husband. I have to say that in all my years of doing this, this is the stupidest mistake I’ve ever made.”
    I heard the chair crack. Just a small sound, but it meant that the glue my husband used hadn’t worked. I held my breath. As she started to stand, one of the legs bent under, and the chair went down. She staggered, but caught her balance on the chest between the windows. The chest had come with the house. Never in my life had I had money for a cherry-wood chest. The dog had run into the room when the commotion started, and he was nosing the fur on her poncho when I grabbed it off the floor.
    “It’s certainly not our day,” I said. I started to say how sorry I was about the chair, but suddenly she was crying, carrying on about how the community would never again be the wonderful place it once had been. She had smeared the makeup above one eye earlier, and then she rubbed the other one, so that she looked like a clown peering out through rings of soot. She was trying to get herself together, but for a few seconds it looked like a losing battle. I saw as she patted her hair that she was wearing a fall. It had come partially unfastened as she stumbled across the room.
    God, it brought back memories of the days when I drank. Of that awful apartment above the grocery store with the gas leak.
    Then, if you can believe it, Betty was taking me to task. She was saying that she had been unnerved by having to stop by so many times. That it was her job to drop off the items, and that she hoped I was happy that I had finally found time in my busy schedule to receive them. She grabbed up her poncho and moved her foot in such an odd way that I thought she might have been about to kick the dog, then thought better of it.
    When my husband got back from cooking soil, I told him about Betty’s visit, starting at the beginning: the information about the carnival; the outdoor dances at the greenhouse. I left out the part about the retarded people, or whatever they were, because he always accused me of telling him depressing things. I skipped that and went right to the golf ball, the parking ticket, and the map. It was one of the last times my husband and I ever embraced. We had to, or we both would have fallen over laughing.
    During the afternoon, the golf ball dropped off the edge of the table and rolled off to join a dust ball of similar size in the corner of the room. There was space in that house, and some lovely furniture, and sitting in the sunlight at the table that day with Betty, I knew that I was going to miss the place. We knew when we took it that we were going out on a limb financially. We just thought that a nice place might bring us luck—that it might cheer us up, and that then things might start to go our way. Betty’s visit and the chair’s collapse certainly would have become our family story if we’d stayed together, but that didn’t happen, so it became instead a story that I often remember, going over the details silently, by myself.
    The map was useful for wrapping glasses—the one piece of white paper in among the newspaper.
    When we left, we took nothing that wasn’t ours.

T his is a story about Jeanette, who is a working girl. She sometimes thinks of herself as a traveler, a seductress, a secret gourmet. She takes a one-week vacation in the summer to