Free The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie Page A

parents, sat next to them. They were divorced, and Alice had remarried. She was holding a ten-month-old baby. It had been Sam’s idea that they all get together again, and now they were sitting on a big flat rock not far out into the pond.
    “Look,” the little girl said.
    They turned and saw a very small snake coming out of a crack between two rocks on the shore.
    “It’s nothing,” Richard said.
    “It’s a snake,” Alice said. “You have to be careful of them. Never touch them.”
    “Excuse me,” Richard said. “Always be careful of everything.”
    That was what the little girl wanted to hear, because she didn’t like the way the snake looked.
    “You know what snakes do?” Sam asked her.
    “What?” she said.
    “They can tuck their tail into their mouth and turn into a hoop.”
    “Why do they do that?” she asked.
    “So they can roll down hills easily.”
    “Why don’t they just walk?”
    “They don’t have feet. See?” Sam said.
    The snake was still; it must have sensed their presence.
    “Tell her the truth now,” Alice said to Sam.
    The little girl looked at her uncle.
    “They have feet, but they shed them in the summer,” Sam said. “If you ever see tiny shoes in the woods, they belong to the snakes.”
    “Tell her the truth,” Alice said again.
    “Imagination is better than reality,” Sam said to the little girl.
    The little girl patted the baby. She loved all the people who were sitting on the rock. Everybody was happy, except that in the back of their minds the grown-ups thought that their being together again was bizarre. Alice’s husband had gone to Germany to look after his father, who was ill. When Sam learned about this, he called Richard, who was his brother. Richard did not think that it was a good idea for the three of them to get together again. Sam called the next day, and Richard told him to stop asking about it. But when Sam called again that night, Richard said sure, what the hell.
    They sat on the rock looking at the pond. Earlier in the afternoon a game warden had come by and he let the little girl look at the crows in the trees through his binoculars. She was impressed. Now she said that she wanted a crow.
    “I’ve got a good story about crows,” Sam said to her. “I know how they got their name. You see, they all used to be sparrows, and they annoyed the king, so he ordered one of his servants to kill them. The servant didn’t want to kill all the sparrows, so he went outside and looked at them and prayed, ‘Grow. Grow.’ And miraculously they did. The king could never kill anything as big and as grand as a crow, so the king and the birds and the servant were all happy.”
    “But why are they called crows?” the little girl said.
    “Well,” Sam said, “long, long ago, a historical linguist heard the story, but he misunderstood what he was told and thought that the servant had said ‘crow,’ instead of ‘grow.’ ”
    “Tell her the truth,” Alice said.
    “That’s the truth,” Sam said. “A lot of our vocabulary is twisted around.”
    “Is that true?” the little girl asked her father.
    “Don’t ask me,” he said.
    Back when Richard and Alice were engaged, Sam had tried to talk Richard out of it. He told him that he would be tied down; he said that if Richard hadn’t got used to regimentation in the Air Force he wouldn’t even consider marriage at twenty-four. He was so convinced that it was a bad idea that he cornered Alice at the engagement party (there were heart-shaped boxes of heart-shaped mints wrapped in paper printed with hearts for everybody to take home) and asked her to back down. At first Alice thought this was amusing. “You make me sound like a vicious dog,” she said to Sam. “It’s not going to work out,” Sam said. “Don’t do it.” He showed her the little heart he was holding. “Look at these God-damned things,” he said.
    “They weren’t my idea. They were your mother’s,” Alice said. She walked away. Sam