What Was Mine: & Other Stories by Ann Beattie Page B

reading the newspaper, and when I looked out the window the sun had begun to set and the most amazing streak of pink fading to orange was parallel to the plane. In a gesture that was all reflex, I suddenly realized, I’d put my fingers to the window, like a kid looking into Macy’s window at Christmas.
    Let me digress here: number one, I am not obsessed with Christmas. You won’t hear any more from me about it, and two, what I’m talking about is not my life, so I’ll try to stay out of the story, also. Just one quick thing: a woman sitting on the plane across the aisle from me was telling the man sitting next to her, “I could have saved myself one marriage, and seventeen years, if I’d admitted my disappointment the year we were engaged, when he gave me a pen and pencil set for my birthday.”
    Speaking of pens and pencils, both Claude and I were pretty good students, but his greatest ability seemed to be with mathematics, so I was surprised when he ended up studying art in college. When you’re among artists and you express surprise that they’re often so good at math, everyone chimes in, saying that of course mathematics is all about thinking in three dimensions, and that music is all tied in to mathematics, et cetera. People feel that certain painting is like opera, and that sculpting has to do with poetry. They’re very impassioned when they talk about this, and they will at the drop of a hat. In any case, Claude was generally a good student, particularly bright at math, but I don’t remember him doing anything but trying to imitate Chinese brush paintings when he was about ten or eleven. Maybe other people would have been more perceptive, but I didn’t think he’d become an artist.
    We were always pulling pranks. I’d short-sheet his bed. He’d blow up a balloon just a little bit and put it in the pillowcase so I’d hear squeaking when I laid down my head. Like all kids, we went too far. He once dumped out the antibiotics from my bottle of medicine and replaced them with just vitamin C or whatever vitamin it was, and I got sicker and sicker. I’d put a smear of Vaseline in his underpants, and when he pulled them on in the dark bedroom he’d be startled and look to see if he was bleeding. Better yet, he wouldn’t notice until he sat down, and then the strangest expression would come over his face. I also put marbles in his vegetable soup, which still makes me cringe, because he could have choked to death if he hadn’t found the first one.
    Martha’s pills we didn’t mess with, you can well believe. She took pills to sleep while she was still at the dinner table, and pills with her coffee to wake up. We were the children of addictive parents—thank you for the insight, nephew Raymond. Don’t say male bonding is just a lot of horsing around—look at what got revealed to Claude when he was shooting the shit, as well as the baskets, with his nephew. And do you know how it all fits? The way painting is music and music is mathematics? Because Dad was addicted to Martha . Never left. Renewed the pill prescriptions and never did much of anything constructive, unless you consider turning a seven-year-old over to a ten-year-old constructive. Not only that, but I won Claude playing poker. That was what we were playing for, or at least what Dad announced was the prize once I’d won. I think he even said that old line about “To the victor belong the spoils.” That was because he’d had to get up in the middle of the game because Claude was having a nightmare. I could tell Dad was pissed off. Claude had spilled his milk at dinner and refused to give the baby a kiss on the forehead before Martha put her to sleep, and then, once he was down for the night, he started screaming. Dad had just had it. He gave me the responsibility for Claude once I’d won the poker game.
    It’s probably pointless to go into other lighting I considered for the manhole. I thought about having crossbeams intersecting above it.