Chilly Scenes of Winter Read Free Page B

singing the “la-de-dah, la-de-dah-dah” section of “Bobby McGee.” Janis Joplin is dead. Susan is nothing like Janis Joplin. Susan speaks in precise, clipped rhythms, combs her hair into two carefully brushed sections (part down the middle), does what is expected—or what is unexpected behind people’s backs. Susan does not drink Southern Comfort.
    “Did you like Janis Joplin?” Charles asks.
    “She was okay.”
    “She was great,” Charles says. “All that flapping fringe and that wild hair and those big lips …”
    “I guess men find her more attractive than women do,” Susan says.
    “That was so great—how she left all that money for a party in her honor when she died.”
    “I hope she doesn’t kill herself,” Susan says. “We should have awakened her.”
    Charles makes a left turn, pulls up in front of a car that is coming out of a parking place.
    “I’m taking you to a Mexican restaurant,” Charles says. “It’s a great place.”
    “I’m not very hungry.”
    “Come on,” he says. The song is over. Janis Joplin is dead. Jim Morrison’s widow is dead.
    The restaurant has round wooden tables and place mats with the sun on them. There is a blue glass vase with dried grasses in it. A hippie in a white T-shirt and jeans gives them menus.
    “The chiles rellenos are great,” Charles says. “And black beans.”
    “Fine,” she says.
    “Try to act enthusiastic. She’s not going to kill herself. This is your vacation.”
    “This is your vacation,” she says.
    He is instantly depressed. He orders the first of four Bass Ales with his chiles rellenos . After lunch they decide to go to the art gallery, but on the way there they pass a porn movie and park and go there instead. Charles is a little uncomfortable being there with his sister, but he’s also pretty drunk. He spends the first five minutes of the film looking around the audience. It’s maddeningly light in the theater. His attention wavers between two light-haired boys two rows in front of them and the woman on the screen, caressing the neck of a Great Dane. He thinks that it is all predictable—the movie, the audience, the rest of his vacation. He wishes his father were alive; at least, then, somebody could get a few laughs out of him. If he tells Sam that he took his sister to a porn movie Sam will laugh at him. Sam. Elise. Janis. The Great Dane.
    “What did you mean before when you said she was an alcoholic?” Susan says, walking up the aisle.
    “Can’t anything get your mind off her?” Charles asks.
    Susan looks down, watching her feet leaving the theater.
    “She’s a heavy drinker,” Charles says. “I was just exaggerating.”
    “What do you think happened to her all of a sudden?” Susan asks. “You know—she dyed her hair and started wearing those jersey things.…”
    “If you want to know what I really think, I think that one day she just decided to go nuts because that was easier. This way she can say whatever she wants to say, and she can drink and lie around naked and just not do anything.”
    “Maybe when my sister died it did something to her.”
    “And it took nineteen years to register?”
    “How long has she been crazy?”
    “She was crazy when you graduated from elementary school, and that was … seven years ago.”
    “Maybe when he died …”
    “Oh, who the hell knows? I notice you’re not so concerned that you stick around here to go to school. She calls me almost every night. Or every day at work. How can I sleep? How can I work? I don’t know what to do.”
    “Doesn’t she talk to Pete?”
    “She talks to Pete and then she gets on the horn to me. Sometimes they fight when she calls. She just dials the number and lays the phone on the table, and I pick it up and hear them screaming.”
    “We ought to go home. The doctor must be trying to reach us.”
    “Let’s go to a bar,” Charles says. “Then we can go back to the hospital.”
    “But the doctor won’t be there again. We have