The State We're In by Ann Beattie

Author:Ann Beattie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

MAJOR MAYBE

The red-haired lady was hospitalized after she fell in the street and a taxi almost ran over her. Just before her mad dash (who could account for her actions?) she’d accused a black dog on a leash of being the devil, an opinion that had been strenuously objected to by the dog’s owner. The dog’s name was Major Maybe, and his story was better known than the red-haired lady’s. The breeder had called the dog Major, and the family who got him tried to name him something similar in order to avoid confusing the dog (they’d tried such names as Mark and Mason). However, the dog would not respond to any name beginning with M until the family’s four-year-old daughter, who talked to her dolls a lot and told them that maybe they could go to Barneys and maybe they would go to the park and maybe they would get a cookie if they were good . . . as you will already understand, little Corey Leavell came up with the only new name the dog would accept. Later, it was thought funny to call him Major Maybe.

My roommate during this time was an acting student named Eagle Soars. His English father had married an American who claimed her great-grandmother had Indian blood. Eagle Soars had been Eddie in school, but his birth certificate really did give his first and middle names as Eagle Soars (his last name, which he later dropped, was Stevens), and by the time he was twenty, he thought the name might be useful if he intended to act. He made extra money by giving Major Maybe his four p.m. walk down to Tenth Avenue, then up either Twenty-first or Twenty-second Street, down Eighth Avenue, then down Twentieth to home.

In those days, Chelsea was more of a mom-and-pop neighborhood. No art galleries, just a few sex clubs way west. There was a nice florist called Howe. I sometimes bought a single flower to take back to the apartment and make part of my little altar to the far left side of the deep windows that overlooked the backyard: a picture of my mother and father on their wedding day, in a little heart-shaped frame; my sister lying on a fur rug, looking dazed, the day they brought her back from the hospital; a badly faded snapshot of my first pet, Doris the cat; the deteriorating wrist corsage I’d worn to the senior prom, inside a Plexiglas box; one of my wisdom teeth dangling from a chain around the casement window handle. These things were grouped together in solidarity with Eagle Soars, whose own display featured a double photo frame showing both his high school graduation picture and a snapshot of the boy he had a crush on in high school, with a big bandage across his face after reconstructive surgery on his nose (bicycle accident); a pencil sharpener with a tutu-skirted hippopotamus in second position; a teaspoon stolen from the Plaza; the framed eviction notice from his previous landlord in Columbus, Ohio.

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