Free Secrets & Surprises by Ann Beattie

“real” camera, except that he did not have the time to teach her about it), so she wanted him to be patient. He sat on the footstool in her living room, still in coat and scarf, and told her how a stick shift operated. He moved his hand through the air. The motion he made reminded her of the salute spacemen gave to earthlings in a science-fiction picture she had recently watched on late-night television. She nodded. “How much—” she began, but he interrupted and said, “You can decide what it was worth when you’ve learned.” She was surprised and wondered if he meant to charge a great deal. Would it be her fault and would she have to pay him if he named his price when the lessons were over? But he had an honest face. Perhaps he was just embarrassed to talk about money.
    He drove for a few blocks, making her watch his hand on the stick shift. “Feel how the car is going?” he said. “Now you shift.” He shifted. The car jumped a little, hummed, moved into gear. It was an old car and didn’t shift too easily, he said. She had been sitting forward, so that when he shifted she rocked back hard against the seat—harder than she needed to. Almost unconsciously, she wanted to show him what a good teacher he was. When her turn came to drive, the car. stalled. “Take it easy,” he said. “Ease up on the clutch. Don’t just raise your foot off of it like that.” She tried it again. “That’s it,” he said. She looked at him when the car was in third. He sat in the seat, looking out the window. Snow was expected. It was Thursday. Although Larry was going to visit his parents and would not be back until late Friday afternoon, she decided she would wait until Tuesday for her next lesson. If he came home early, he would find out that she was taking lessons, and she didn’t want him to know. She asked the boy, whose name was Michael, whether he thought she would forget all he had taught her in the time between lessons. “You’ll remember,” he said.
    When they returned to the old lady’s driveway, the car stalled going up the incline. She had trouble shifting. The boy put his hand over hers and kicked the heel of his hand forward. “You’ll have to treat this car a little roughly, I’m afraid,” he said. That afternoon, after he left, she made spaghetti sauce, chopping little pieces of pepper and onion and mushroom. When the sauce had cooked down, she called Mrs. Larsen and said that she would bring over dinner. She usually ate with the old lady once a week. The old lady often added a pinch of cinnamon to her food, saying that it brought out the flavor better than salt, and that since she was losing her sense of smell, food had to be strongly flavored for her to taste it. Once she had sprinkled cinnamon on a knockwurst. This time, as they ate, Natalie asked the old lady how much she paid the boy to bring the paper.
    “I give him a dollar a week,” the old lady said.
    “Did he set the price, or did you?”
    “He set the price. He told me he wouldn’t take much because he has to walk this street to get to his apartment anyway.”
    “He taught me a lot about the car today,” Natalie said.
    “He’s very handsome, isn’t he?” the old lady said.
    She asked Larry, “How were your parents?”
    “Fine,” he said. “But I spent almost all the time with Andy. It’s almost his birthday, and he’s depressed. We went to see Mose Allison.”
    “I think it stinks that hardly anyone else ever visits Andy,” she said.
    “He doesn’t make it easy. He tells you everything that’s on his mind, and there’s no way you can pretend that his troubles don’t amount to much. You just have to sit there and nod.”
    She remembered that Andy’s room looked like a gymnasium. There were handgrips and weights scattered on the floor. There was even a psychedelic pink hula hoop that he was to put inside his elbow and then move his arm in circles wide enough to make the hoop spin. He couldn’t do it. He would lie