Free Distortions by Ann Beattie

was expelled from school, along with another boy; the two had forced a younger boy to pick up a stick and peel off the bark and eat it. Two years later, when he began junior high school, he told his father he wanted permission to marry another thirteen-year-old. “Where would you live?” David asked. “In a tent,” Wally said. “Where would you live in the winter?” David asked. David won his point, but Wally did not speak to him for two months. Then he asked again for David to sign the necessary papers, and for David to give him enough money to live in an apartment during the winter with his bride. “You owe it to me for exploiting me,” Wally said. “I never exploited you,” David told him. Again, Wally did not speak for a long time. His silence was now as predictable as his mimicry when he was younger. Apparently he also refused to speak in school, and a new teacher thought that he was deaf. They would not allow him to continue school until a doctor had tested his hearing. This made Sheila and David angry, and they told Wally that he was being ridiculous. He ran away. He lived in a tent not far from home. He was dirty. He said he wanted to take a trip to New York when David went to the tent to talk to him. “Here, take it,” David said, giving him the money. “I’m sick of all this.” Wally went to New York, then returned to the tent. He never returned to school.
    There was a family meeting when Wally dropped out of school. It was the second family meeting they had ever had; the first—when his mother felt that they were drifting apart because of their separate interests, shortly before Wally left for the tent—had not been very successful. Wally explained how to pitch a tent, and his father talked about the virtues of homemade pasta,and after his mother insisted that store-bought pasta tasted exactly the same and that when you bought it in a store you didn’t have to spend half a day scraping crap out of a pasta machine, she did a plié. One plié. Then, no more energy left, sat down. That night she slept in the same chair, and the following day she clawed the upholstery on the chair arm before she left it.
    “We did not get to the essence of Wally’s problem,” David said to Sheila as they cleaned up the restaurant.
    “He doesn’t have any real problem. He’s just a selfish son of a bitch like you,” she said.
    “Why do you say he’s selfish?”
    “I’m not going to clean that pasta machine tonight or any other night as long as I live,” Sheila screamed, and ran ungracefully from the restaurant.
    David began keeping a journal. Mostly it was criticism of Sheila or worries about Wally, and when David realized this he made an effort to say more about his own feelings and life. His feelings were so clichéd that he couldn’t go on with them, though: “I am a nothing,” “Nobody loves me,” “Some days I wonder why I’m alive.” So after a while the book began to fill up with receipts, bills he still had to pay, snapshots, even letters from Wally’s former child psychologist, who was now a severely disturbed man.
    “What is that thing?” Sheila asked.
    “Unpaid bills,” David said.
    “Then why don’t you pay them?” she asked.
    Wally began seeing the sister of his second-grade sweetheart, Susan Leigh. They ate out of cans in Wally’s tent. She hung an Escher print in the tent and told Wally he should paint and draw again. Her name was Dianna Leigh. Susan visited the tent once or twice, when she was in town. She was appearing sporadically in off-off-Broadway plays and living with another woman who was in the process of being changed surgically into a man. The woman-man liked the Escher print. Susan declined an offer of Spam on a roll. “Aren’t you vegetarians?” the woman-man asked.
    “No. Are you?” Dianna Leigh asked.
    “I’m going to become a vegetarian when I become a man,” the woman-man said.
    “Why are you waiting until then?” Wally asked.
    “She’s going