by Anne Tyler
Sometimes Alicia’s enthusiasm turned to her children—an unsettling experience. She took them all to the circus and bought them cotton candy that none of them enjoyed. (They liked to keep themselves tidy.) She yanked them out of school and enrolled them briefly in an experimental learning community where no one wore clothes. The four of them, chilled and miserable, sat hunched in a row in the common room with their hands pressed flat between their bare knees. She dressed as a witch and went trick-or-treating with them, the most mortifying Halloween of their lives, for she got carried away as usual and cackled, croaked, scuttled up to strangers and shook her ragged broom in their faces. She started making mother-daughter outfits for herself and Rose, in strawberry pink with puffed sleeves, but stopped when the sewing machine pierced her finger and made her cry. (She was always getting hurt. It may have been because she rushed so.) Then she turned to something else, and something else, and something else. She believed in change as if it were a religion. Feeling sad? Find a new man! Creditors after you, rent due, children running fevers? Move to a new apartment! During one year, they moved so often that every day after school, Macon had to stand deliberating a while before setting out for home.
In 1950, she decided to marry an engineer who traveled around the world building bridges. “Portugal. Panama. Brazil,” she told the children. “We’ll finally get to see our planet.” They gazed at her stonily. If they had met this man before, they had no recollection of it. Alicia said, “Aren’t you excited?” Later—it may have been after he took them all out to dinner—she said she was sending them to live with their grandparents instead. “Baltimore’s more suitable for children, really,” she said. Did they protest? Macon couldn’t remember. He recalled his childhood as a glassed-in place with grown-ups rushing past, talking at him, making changes, while he himself stayed mute. At any rate, one hot night in June Alicia put them on a plane to Baltimore. They were met by their grandparents, two thin, severe, distinguished people in dark clothes. The children approved of them at once.
After that, they saw Alicia only rarely. She would come breezing into town with an armload of flimsy gifts from tropical countries. Her print dresses struck the children as flashy; her makeup was too vivid, like a foreigner’s. She seemed to find her children comical—their navy-and-white school uniforms, their perfect posture. “My God! How stodgy you’ve grown!” she would cry, evidently forgetting she’d thought them stodgy all along. She said they took after their father. They sensed this wasn’t meant as a compliment. (When they asked what their father had been like, she looked down at her own chin and said, “Oh, Alicia, grow up.”) Later, when her sons married, she seemed to see even more resemblance, for at one time or another she’d apologized to all three daughters-in-law for what they must have to put up with. Like some naughty, gleeful fairy, Macon imagined, she darted in and out of their lives leaving a trail of irresponsible remarks, apparently never considering they might be passed on. “I don’t see how you stay married to the man,” she’d said to Sarah. She herself was now on her fourth husband, a rock-garden architect with a white goatee.
It was true the children in the portrait seemed unrelated to her. They lacked her blue-and-gold coloring; their hair had an ashy cast and their eyes were a steely gray. They all had that distinct center groove from nose to upper lip. And never in a million years would Alicia have worn an expression so guarded and suspicious.
Uncomfortably arranged-looking, they gazed out at the viewer. The two older boys, plump Charles and trim Porter, perched on either arm of the chair in white shirts with wide, flat, open collars. Rose and Macon sat on the seat in matching playsuits. Rose appeared to be in Macon’s lap, although actually she’d been settled between his knees, and Macon had the indrawn tenseness of someone placed in a physically close situation he wasn’t accustomed to. His hair, like the others’, slanted silkily across his forehead. His mouth was thin, almost colorless, and firmed a bit, as if he’d decided to take a stand on something. The set of that mouth echoed now in Macon’s mind. He glanced at it, glanced away, glanced back. It was Ethan’s mouth. Macon had spent twelve years imagining Ethan as a sort of exchange student, a visitor from the outside world, and here it turned out he’d been a Leary all along. What a peculiar thing to recognize at this late date.
He sat up sharply and reached for his trousers, which Rose had cut short across the left thigh and hemmed with tiny, even stitches.
No one else in the world had the slightest idea where he was. Not Julian, not Sarah, not anyone. Macon liked knowing that. He said as much to Rose. “It’s nice to be so unconnected,” he told her. “I wish things could stay that way a while.”
“Why can’t they?”
“Oh, well, you know, someone will call here, Sarah or someone—”
“Maybe we could just not answer the phone.”
“What, let it go on ringing?”
“Why not?”
“Not answer it any time?”
“Most who call me are neighbors,” Rose said. “They’ll pop over in person if they don’t get an answer. And you know the boys: Neither one of them likes dealing with telephones.”
“That’s true,” Macon said.
Julian would come knocking on his door, planning to harangue him for letting his deadline slip past. He’d have to give up. Then Sarah would come for a soup ladle or something, and when he didn’t answer she would ask the neighbors and they’d say he hadn’t shown his face in some time. She would try to get in touch with his family and the telephone would ring and ring, and then she would start to worry. What’s happened? she would wonder. How could I have left him on his own?
Lately, Macon had noticed he’d begun to view Sarah as a form of enemy. He’d stopped missing her and started plotting her remorsefulness. It surprised him to see how quickly he’d made the transition. Was this what two decades of marriage amounted to? He liked to imagine her self-reproaches. He composed and recomposed her apologies. He hadn’t had such thoughts since he was a child, dreaming of how his mother would weep at his funeral.
In the daytime, working at the dining room table, he would hear the telephone and he’d pause, fingers at rest on the typewriter keys. One ring, two rings. Three rings. Rose would walk in with a jar of silver polish. She didn’t even seem to hear. “What if that’s some kind of emergency?” he would ask. Rose would say, “Hmm? Who would call us for an emergency?” and then she would take the silver from the buffet and spread it at the other end of the table.
There had always been some family member requiring Rose’s care. Their grandmother had been bedridden for years before she died, and then their grandfather got so senile, and first Charles and later Porter had failed in their marriages and come back home. So she had enough right here to fill her time. Or she made it enough; for surely it couldn’t be necessary to polish every piece of silver every week. Shut in the house with her all day, Macon noticed how painstakingly she planned the menus; how often she reorganized the utensil drawer; how she ironed even her brothers’ socks, first separating them from the clever plastic grips she used to keep them mated in the washing machine. For Macon’s lunch, she cooked a real meal and served it on regular place mats. She set out cut-glass dishes of pickles and olives that had to be returned to their bottles later on. She dolloped homemade mayonnaise into a tiny bowl.
Macon wondered if it ever occurred to her that she lived an odd sort of life—unemployed, unmarried, supported by her brothers. But what job would she be suited for? he asked himself. Although he could picture her, come to think of it, as the mainstay of some musty, antique law firm or accounting firm. Nominally a secretary, she would actually run the whole business, arranging everything just so on her employer’s desk every morning and allowing no one below her or above her to overlook a single detail. Macon could use a secretary like that. Recalling the gum-chewing redhead in Julian’s disastrous office, he sighed and wished the world had more Roses.
He zipped a page from his typewriter and set it face down on
a stack of others. He had finished with his introduction—general instructions like A subway is not an underground train and Don’t say restroom, say toilet—and he’d finished the chapter called “Trying to Eat in England.” Rose had mailed those off for him yesterday. That was his new stratagem: sending his book piece by piece from this undisclosed location. “There’s no return address on this,” Rose told him. “There’s not meant to be,” Macon said. Rose had nodded solemnly. She was the only one in the family who viewed his guidebooks as real writing. She kept a row of them in her bedroom bookcase, alphabetized by country.
In midafternoon, Rose stopped work to watch her favorite soap opera. This was something Macon didn’t understand. How could she waste her time on such trash? She said it was because there was a wonderfully evil woman in it. “There are enough evil people in real life,” Macon told her.
“Yes, but not wonderfully evil.”
“Well, that’s for sure.”
“This one, you see, is so obvious. You know exactly whom to mistrust.”
While she watched, she talked aloud to the characters. Macon could hear her in the dining room. “It isn’t you he’s after, sweetie,” she said, and “Just you wait. Ha!”—not at all her usual style of speech. A commercial broke in, but Rose stayed transfixed where she was. Macon, meanwhile, worked on “Trying to Sleep in England,” typing away in a dogged, uninspired rhythm.
When the doorbell rang, Rose didn’t respond. Edward went mad, barking and scratching at the door and running back to Macon and racing again to the door. “Rose?” Macon called. She said nothing. Finally he stood up, assembled himself on his crutches, and went as quietly as possible to the hall.
Well, it wasn’t Sarah. A glance through the lace curtain told him that much. He opened the door and peered out. “Yes?” he said.
It was Garner Bolt, a neighbor from home—a scrawny little gray man who had made his fortune in cleaning supplies. When he saw Macon, every line in his pert, pointed face turned upward. “There you are!” he said. It was hard to hear him over Edward, who went on barking frantically.
“Why, Garner,” Macon said.
“We worried you had died.”
“You did?”
Macon grabbed at Edward’s collar, but missed.
“Saw the papers piling up on your lawn, mail inside your screen door, didn’t know what to think.”
“Well, I meant to send my sister for those,” Macon said. “I broke my leg, you see.”
“Now, how did you do that?”
“It’s a long story.”
He gave up blocking the door. “Come on in,” he told Garner.
Garner took off his cap, which had a Sherwin-Williams Paint sign across the front. His jacket was part of some long-ago suit, a worn shiny brown, and his overalls were faded to white at the knees. He stepped inside, skirting the dog, and shut the door behind him. Edward’s barks turned to whimpers. “My car is full of your mail,” Garner said. “Brenda said I ought to bring it to your sister and ask if she knew of your whereabouts. Also I promised your friend.”
“What friend?”
“Lady in pedal pushers.”
“I don’t know any lady in pedal pushers,” Macon said. He hadn’t realized pedal pushers still existed, even.
“Saw her standing on your porch, rattling your doorknob. Calling out, ‘Macon? You in there?’ Skinny little lady with hair. Looked to be in her twenties or so.”
“Well, I can’t imagine who it was.”
“Squinching in and shading her eyes.”
“Who could it be?”
“Tripping down the porch steps in her great tall pointy high heels.”
“The dog lady,” Macon said. “Jesus.”
“Kind of young, ain’t she?”
“I don’t even know her!”
“Going round the back of the house to call out, ‘Macon? Macon?’ ”
“I barely met her!”
“It was her that told me about the windle.”
“Windle?”
“Windle to the basement, all broke out. Fall sets in and it’ll turn your furnace on. Waste all kinds of energy.”
“Oh. Well. Yes, I suppose it would,” Macon said.
“We thought you might’ve been burglarized or something.”
Macon led the way to the dining room. “See, what happened,” he said, “I broke my leg and I came to live at my family’s till I could manage for myself again.”
“We didn’t see no ambulance though or nothing.”
“Well, I called my sister.”
“Sister’s a doctor?”
“Just to come and take me to the emergency room.”
“When Brenda broke her hip on the missing step,” Garner said, “she called the ambulance.”
“Well, I called my sister.”
“Brenda called the ambulance.”
They seemed to be stuck.
“I guess I ought to notify the post office about my mail,” Macon said finally. He lowered himself into his chair.
Garner pulled out another chair and sat down with his cap in his hands. He said, “I could just keep on bringing it.”
“No, I’ll have Rose notify them. Lord, all these bills must be coming due and so forth—”
“I could bring it just as easy.”
“Thanks anyway.”
“Why don’t I bring it.”
“To tell the truth,” Macon said, “I’m not so sure I’ll be going back there.”
This hadn’t occurred to him before. He placed his crutches together delicately, like a pair of chopsticks, and laid them on the floor beside his chair. “I might stay on here with my family,” he said.
“And give up that fine little house?”
“It’s kind of big for just one person.”
Garner frowned down at his cap. He put it on his head, changed his mind, and took it off again. “Look,” he said. “Back when me and Brenda were newlyweds we were awful together. Just awful. Couldn’t neither one of us stand the other, I’ll never know how we lasted.”
“We aren’t newlyweds, though,” Macon said. “We’ve been married twenty years.”
“Brenda and me did not speak to each other for very nearly every bit of nineteen and thirty-five,” Garner said. “January to August, nineteen and thirty-five. New Year’s Day till my summer vacation. Not a single blessed word.”
Macon’s attention was caught. “What,” he said, “not even ‘Pass the salt’? ‘Open the window’?”
“Not even that.”
“Well, how did you manage your daily life?”
“Mostly, she stayed over to her sister’s.”
“Oh, then.”
“The morning my vacation began, I felt so miserable I like to died. Thought to myself, ‘What am I doing, anyhow?’ Called long distance to Ocean City and booked a room for two. In those days long distance was some big deal, let me tell you. Took all these operators and so forth and it cost a mint. Then I packed some clothes for me and some clothes for Brenda and went on over to her sister’s house. Her sister says, ‘What do you want?’ She was the type that likes to see dissension. I walk right past her. Find Brenda in the living room, mending hose. Open my suitcase: ‘Look at here. Your sundress for dining in a seafood restaurant,’ I tell her. ‘Two pairs of shorts. Two blouses. Your swimsuit.’ She don’t even look at me. ‘Your bathrobe,’ I say. ‘Your nightgown you wore on our honeymoon.’ Acts like I’m not even there. ‘Brenda,’ I tell her. I say, ‘Brenda, I am nineteen years old and I’ll never be nineteen again. I’ll never be alive again. I mean this is the only life I get to go through, Brenda, so far as I know, and I’ve spent this great large chunk of it sitting alone in an empty apartment too proud to make up, too scared you’d say no, but even if you did say no it can’t be worse than what I got now. I’m the loneliest man in the world, Brenda, so please come to Ocean City with me.’ And Brenda, she lays down her mending and says, ‘Well, since you ask, but it looks to me like you forgot my bathing cap.’
And off we went.”
He sat back triumphantly in his chair. “So,” he said.
“So,” Macon said.
“So you get my point.”
“What point?”
“You have to let her know you need her.”
“See, Garner, I think we’ve gone beyond little things like letting her know I—”
“Don’t take this personally, Macon, but I got to level with you: There’s times when you’ve been sort of frustrating. I’m not talking about myself, mind; I understand. It’s just some of the others in the neighborhood, they’ve been put off a little. Take during your tragedy. I mean people like to offer help at occasions like that— send flowers and visit at the viewing hour and bring casseroles for after the service. Only you didn’t even have a service. Held a cremation, Lord God, somewheres off in Virginia without a word to anyone and come home directly. Peg Everett tells you she’s put you in her prayers and Sarah says, ‘Oh, bless you, Peg,’ but what do you say? You ask Peg if her son might care to take Ethan’s bike off your hands.”
Macon groaned. “Yes,” he said, “I never know how to behave at these times.”
“Then you mow your lawn like nothing has happened.”