Secrets & Surprises by Ann Beattie

Author:Ann Beattie [Beattie, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780679731931
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1978-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Starley

H

is full name was Dickie Ray Starley, but he was Starley to everyone but his wife. She called him Dickie, and told close friends that even though it was a silly, little-boy name for a tall grown man, at least it was better than calling him Starley. She didn’t like Starley’s friends, and would have resented anything they called him. She liked Starley’s best friend, Donald, better than the rest, because years before, when their daughter Anita was four, and they were all together for a weekend at the beach at Ocean City, Maryland, he had been very attentive to Anita, brushing sand from her knees before she got on the towel, taking her by the hand and walking with her to the cold gray sand where the water washed in. Alice knew that Donald was nice to Anita not so much because he liked her, but because he liked Starley. She didn’t care what his motives were. Anita was very disagreeable that year. She had held her hand out to Donald, staring up at him and saying, “Kiss me here.” “Wrong side,” he said, and turned the hand over and kissed the palm. “It is not! You kiss the back of the hand! Now kiss it right!” He hated to be ordered around. The only way he knew how to deal successfully with kids was to tease them, and she didn’t want to be teased. She had no sense of humor. He told her about “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” and she squinted and said, “That’s awful. And it’s not true. Anybody can walk wherever they want.” “That’s true,” he said. “This is a democracy, isn’t it? Can you spell democracy?” He had few ways of getting back at her. He knew she was a poor speller.

Donald was not married. He had a son, Bobby, eight years old, living with his mother in North Miami, Florida. He did not get along with him any better than he got along with Anita, although he did not try to antagonize him. He brought his son gloxinia tubers, bubble-blowing liquid with a six-loop blower, a bird’s nest with a speckled blue egg broken into four neat pieces lying inside. He bought him a plastic bird to clip onto the nest, a flower pot for the gloxinia tubers, walked up and down the beach with him as he blew bubbles at the sea gulls, rushing them and shouting between each blow. At seafood restaurants he carefully picked through his son’s filet of sole for those tiny, invisible bones, worrying all through dinner that he might choke and die. Donald and Bobby were both Pisces.

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