Onlookers: Stories by Ann Beattie

Author:Ann Beattie [Beattie, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Overdrive
ISBN: 9781668013670
Amazon: B0BHTPPBCN
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

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YEARS LATER, when I returned to town, she no longer lived in the house. My father and mother had arranged for her to go to a nursing home, after the third or fourth time she went out walking and couldn’t find her way home. He hired a company to make repairs, and a new roof was put on. Then, because prices were appreciating, he decided that he’d keep the place and rent it out. Alice insisted she’d soon return. But of course at some point things only move in one direction, and that was just a delusion. She lived in a room at a new facility said to be even nicer than Westminster Canterbury: Solace House. The name came as a cue—a sort of stage whisper to actresses who’d forgotten their lines.

Because my mother asked me to, I went to visit Aunt Alice. I’d returned because my mother was undergoing chemotherapy, and my father, who’d by then retired from the university, had flown to Belgium to be feted for his contribution to the development of a low-calorie, nutritional microbrew. (“To each, according to his abilities. We can’t all be Paul Farmer.”) Before my mother got the news that she had cancer, they’d moved to a tall, glassy building near the west side of the downtown mall, the same year I graduated with a degree in literature from the University of Michigan. Afterwards, I’d lived for a year with a man I’d met who was getting his PhD, though the relationship hadn’t worked out.

Charlottesville was a changed town when I got back. The entire nation knew what had happened at Lee Park. It was hard to think of it by any other name. After what was in retrospect a too-long period of contemplation, it had been decided that the statues must be removed. There was even greater pressure to do the same thing in Richmond. It was going on all over. In Charlottesville, everybody had an opinion—living in the South was synonymous with having an opinion—though the bottom line had become that the provocative reminders of the South’s shameful status quo of slavery must disappear.

On the day I went to visit Alice, I’d heard on the news about a plan: Lee’s statue would be taken away and melted down. (“If climate change doesn’t just do the job itself,” as my mother said.) With my father in Belgium, she’d adopted his wry cynicism.

When I left the condo after talking with the visiting nurse and assuring my mother I’d get her a container of Bodo’s Italian wedding soup for dinner (which I forgot), I’d walked down the mall to pick up the book she’d ordered from New Dominion, hoping, all the while, that my mother would be in less discomfort than she’d experienced the day before. She had friends in the building, a lawyer in one of the penthouses who was himself recovering from recent surgery, and his seemingly very nice wife. My father and mother had also both befriended a

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