Free Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie Page A

who were in love did.”
    “What?” Susan says.
    “Listen to music, go to Chinese restaurants … that kind of stuff.”
    “You always pretend not to know about things. You’re in love with that woman. Do the two of you go to Chinese restaurants?”
    “She eats with her husband.”
    “When she wasn’t with him. You always pretend that that time didn’t exist.”
    “I don’t want to talk about her tonight,” Charles says. “I know she’s not going to call.”
    Susan slowly sips soup. “I feel sort of bad about leaving you,” she says.
    “Why?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. That woman’s sort of rotten to you, and I’ll be leaving you with Sam sick. And her in the hospital.”
    “Your staying wouldn’t make Laura leave her husband or Sam get well, and it certainly wouldn’t spring her from the bin.” Charles doesn’t want her to leave.
    “I guess you’re right. Are you going to be polite to him when he comes?”
    “What do you think I’d do? Act like some outraged lover?”
    “I’m afraid you’ll make wisecracks. I know you don’t want him to like you.”
    “I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”
    “You always put yourself down. You always act dejected.”
    “I’m a mess.”
    She laughs, sucking spinach into her mouth.
    “Hot?” the waiter says, putting the plates in front of them. He puts the dishes on the table, puts his hands on his hips, and says, “Okay?”
    “Fine,” Charles says. “Thank you.”
    “Thank you?” the waiter says, leaving. He stops at the next table. “You’re not German!” the little girl says.
    Once he and Laura went to a Spanish restaurant where the waiters poured a thin stream of white wine into their mouths from a leather wineskin. They ordered saffron rice and mussels and ate large, dark rolls. Laura told him that food started tasting entirely different to her after she stopped wearing lipstick. He wishes he could do something that would make him enjoy his food more. He eats all the time, but most of the time he hardly tastes it. His grandmother used to serve chicken bouillon before the Sunday dinner to “make the tongue buds blossom.” She always invoked strange metaphors: “Think if the earth were a big shoe and all that snow coming down was shoe polish.” To this day, he feels that snow is a call to action.
    “I was thinking about Grandma,” Charles says.
    “I don’t remember her very well.”
    “I remember her smelling things. She always had her nose in the steam from a soup pot, she always thought their cat smelled bad, even when Grandfather had caught it and washed it, she always wore heavy perfume. What do you remember about her?”
    “That her drawers were full of magazines she tied together in bundles and that she never untied the bundles. She always had things tied together. She’d tie two packages of paper napkins together with twine and put it on the kitchen shelf.”
    “She was nice,” Charles says.
    “Yeah. She was very nice. I remember that blue and lavender dress she made me. When it was washed the colors ran and made the lace blue, and she cut it all off and sewed white lace on.”
    Their grandmother died in her seat at a movie theater. There was a special movie about Greece. Men were there to show the movie and talk the audience into going to Greece. Everyone in the audience knew that she had died, and afterwards, their mother heard, more people than the men expected signed up on the spot for the trip to Greece. She was sixty-eight when she died. Their grandfather died two years and one day later. He was crossing the street with a bottle in a brown bag and a loaf of bread in another brown bag when a truck hit him. The truck was full of wheelbarrows that it was on the way to deliver to a hardware store.
    “Almond cookie?” the waiter says, putting down a plate with four cookies on it.
    “Tomorrow we’ve got to go see her, don’t we?”
    “Yeah. I’m not looking forward to running into Pete. He called today and