by Anne Tyler
“I was thinking about my Aunt Grace. She’s in Baltimore; and independent? You wouldn’t believe how independent. But she’s getting hard of hearing, and she’s frail as a stick, besides; has trouble with her bones. She can break a bone in midair, if she’s not careful.”
“Osteoporosis,” I said knowledgeably.
“ ‘Aunt Grace,’ I tell her, ‘you need a companion! Someone live-in, to fetch and haul!’ But oh, no, no. Not Aunt Grace. ‘I prefer to have my house to myself,’ she says, and of course you can’t really blame her.”
“Yes, we see that every day,” I said. Then, trying to get back to the subject, I said, “But anyhow. You believe in intuition.”
“I most assuredly do.” She nodded several times, cradling her coffee cup in both hands.
“You believe a person will just be led to the proper action.”
“Absolutely,” she told me.
I made myself keep quiet a moment. I allowed her a block of silence to fill; I put on an expression that I hoped would seem receptive. She didn’t seize her chance, though. She just took a sip of her coffee. Beyond her head, bare trees skimmed past.
“So,” she said, finally.
I sat up so straight, you’d think I’d been electrocuted.
But all she said was, “Tell me more about your company.”
“My company,” I repeated.
“How many workers does it employ? Would you call it a success?”
“Oh, yes, it’s done very well,” I said.
And then I gave up and just went with the flow—told her about our two newspaper write-ups and our letters from grateful clients and their relatives, their sons and daughters living elsewhere who could finally sleep at night, they said, now that we had taken over their parents’ heavy lifting. Sophia kept her eyes on my face, tilting her head to one side. I could see how she would make an excellent loan officer. She had this way of appearing willing to listen all day.
I described my favorite customers—the unstoppable little black grandma whose children phoned us on an emergency basis whenever she threatened to overdo (“Come quick! Mama swears she’s going to wash her upstairs windows today!”); and our “Tallulah” client, Maud May, who smoked cigarettes in a long ivory holder and drank martinis by the quart and called me “dahling.” Then the weird ones. Ditty Nolan, who was only thirty-four and able-bodied as I was but couldn’t face the outside world; so everything had to be brought to her. Or Mr. Shank, a lonesome and pathetic type, who took advantage of our no-task-too-small, no-hour-too-late policy to phone us in the middle of the night and ask for someone to come right away for some trifling, trumped-up job like securing a bedroom shutter that was flapping in the wind.
By the time we reached Wilmington, I’d progressed to Mrs. Gordoni, who couldn’t afford our fees but needed us so badly (rheumatoid arthritis) that we would doctor her time sheet—write down a mere half hour when we’d been at her house a whole morning. “For a while, none of us knew the others were doing it,” I said. “Then it all came out. Our two girl employees, Martine and Celeste: they weren’t filing any hours at all for her, which is a whole lot easier to catch than just underreporting.”
“Isn’t that nice,” Sophia said. “You don’t often see that kind of heart in the business world.”
“Well, I wasn’t trying to brag,” I said. “I mean, we generally do charge money for our labors.”
“Even so,” she said, and she gave me a long, serious stare and then nodded, as if we had shared a secret. But I didn’t know what secret. And before I could say any more, the conductor walked through, announcing Philadelphia.
Still, even then, I hadn’t quite lost hope for some kind of revelation. I went on weighing and considering her most casual remark, giving her every chance to redirect my course. As we stepped off the train, for instance, she said, “Notice how much faster people move, here,” and I blinked and looked around me. Faster? People? Move? What was the deeper significance of that? But all I saw was the usual crowd, churning toward the stairs in the usual hobbling manner. “It always takes me by surprise, what a different atmosphere Philadelphia has from Baltimore,” she said, and I said, “Atmosphere. Ah,” and stumbled as I started up the steps, I was so intent on analyzing the atmosphere.
In the terminal, I stopped and faced her, wondering if her goodbye, at least, might be instructive. “Well,” I said, “I enjoyed our conversation.”
“Yes! Me too!” she told me. But she continued walking, and so I was forced to follow. She said, “I thought that was so fascinating about your company. Where are you headed?”
“Where am I headed,” I repeated, sounding like a moron.
“Does your daughter live nearby?”
“Oh. Yes, she’s off Rittenhouse Square.”
“So’s my mother. Shall we share a cab?”
“Well …”
It hadn’t occurred to me that my actions would be observed at the other end of my trip. I said, “No, thanks; I—”
“Though it is a nice day to walk,” she said.
A nice day?
We followed a group of teenagers through the Twenty-ninth Street exit, but I was dragging my heels, pondering how to get out of this. Suppose, by some horrible coincidence, Sophia’s mother lived in Natalie’s building! What then?
The weather did seem to have improved, I found when we reached the sidewalk. The temperature had risen some, and the sun was trying to shine. I said, “It’s still kind of damp underfoot, though.” I was looking toward the line of taxicabs, hoping she would change her mind and take one. But she walked right past them, and it was true she had those boots on.
On Market Street, she asked, “Are you bringing your daughter a present?”
“No,” I said. I flipped my jacket collar up. (Tweed was not half as warm as leather.) “This was such a sudden decision,” I said. “She’s probably not even home! I should just cut my losses and grab the next train back.”
“Darn,” Sophia said, not appearing to hear me. “If I’d thought, we could have picked up something in the station. They have all those boutiques there.”
“Well, no great loss,” I told her. “I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what to get her, anyhow.”
“You could have bought a stuffed animal. Something of that sort. All little girls like stuffed animals.”
We veered around a man pushing a grocery cart full of rags. Sophia’s pace had grown leisurely and wafting. I had a sense of being dragged backward. “When I was nine,” she said, “my favorite toy was a stuffed raccoon named Ariadne.”
“Ariadne!”
“Well, I was extremely fanciful. I liked the Greek myths and all that. It’s because I was an only child. I was quite the little reader, as you might imagine.”
She had the only child’s elderly way of speaking too, I noticed. But I didn’t point that out to her.
“My father kept forgetting Ariadne’s name,” she was saying. “Most often he called her Rodney. ‘Sophia! Come and get Rodney! She’s out here on the porch, and there’s supposed to be a storm!’”
She laughed.
I looked at her then and knew, for a fact, that she was not my angel. She was an ordinary, middle-class, middle-aged bank employee with no particular life of her own, and it showed what a sorry state my life had come to that I could have imagined otherwise even for an instant.
If I’d had the nerve, I would have turned around then and there. Already half my Saturday had gone to waste. But it would have seemed peculiar, just wheeling and racing off with no good reason. So I dug my hands in my pockets and kept going.
I really hated this city, come to think of it—these wide, pale, bleak sidewalks littered with blowing rubbish, and the bombed-out-looking buildings.
I said, “Where does your mother live, exactly?”
“On Walnut Street,” Sophia said. “How about your daughter?”
“Locust,” I said.
Thank goodness.
A truck roared past, and we
walked awhile without speaking before Sophia asked, “Is your ex-wife a Philadelphian?”
“No,” I said, “but her husband is.”
“Oh, so she’s remarried.”
“Right.”
“That must be difficult for you.”
“Difficult? Why would you say that?” I asked.
“Seeing her with someone else, I mean. I suppose inevitably there’s a bit of—”
“I never give it a moment’s thought,” I said, and then I stopped short, at the corner of Twenty-second Street, and said, “Well, here’s where I’ll be—”
But Sophia turned down Twenty-second and kept walking. I had hoped she would continue east. “It must have been an amicable divorce, then,” she called over her shoulder.
I said, “Oh …,” and took a few extra steps to catch up. “It was sort of amicable,” I said. (No sense going into the gory details.)
“Were you very young when you married?”
“Lord, yes. I was way too young. And she was even younger. We got married on her twentieth birthday.”
Then I happened to glance down the street, and who was walking toward us? Natalie. She was wearing a red coat and holding Opal’s hand. It was unsettling, because I’d just had a flash of how she had looked on our wedding day: all dressed up for the registry office, so pale and prim and solemn in a red coat that was not this same one, I guess, but close enough; close enough.
She hadn’t seen me yet. She was speaking to Opal, turning to look down at her, and it was Opal (gazing straight ahead) who spotted me first. Opal wrenched her hand free and cried, “Barnaby!” and ran to meet me. There was enough of a breeze so she had lost that careful, prissy look. Her hair was tumbled, her cheeks were pink, and her jacket was flying behind her. She barreled into me and threw her arms around my waist, which she wouldn’t ordinarily have done. She wasn’t a very warm child, in my limited experience. But she said, “It’s not true you’re stopping your visits, is it?”
“Who, me?” I asked, and I looked past her to Natalie. She approached more slowly, with a hair-thin line of puzzlement running across her forehead as she noticed Sophia. (Maybe she imagined we were together.) I said, “Hey there, Nat.”
“Mom said you weren’t going to come anymore,” Opal told me. She grabbed hold of one of my thumbs and started tugging on it, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet in an edgy, agitated manner I’d never noticed in her till now. “She said you’d talked it over and you’d be stopping your visits. But I knew you wouldn’t do that. Would you? You’d want to keep on seeing me! Wouldn’t you?”
“Well, sure I would,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would take this so personally. I felt kind of touched. In a funny way, I felt almost hurt. My throat got a hurtful, heavy feeling halfway down to my chest.
And Natalie must have felt the same, because she said, “Oh, honey. Of course he would! I didn’t realize you would mind so much.”
Then a hand arrived on my arm, so light it took a moment to register, and I turned and found Sophia smiling into my eyes. It was the most serene and radiant smile; the most seraphic smile. “Goodbye, Barnaby,” she said, and she dropped her hand and walked away.
I never did explain her presence to Natalie. I honestly don’t know what I would have said.
MY FAVORITE MOMENT of the day comes before the sun is up, but conditions have to be right for it. I have to be awake then, for one thing. And the weather has to be clear, and the lights lit in my room, and the sky outside still dark. Then I switch the lights off. If I’m lucky, the sky will suddenly change to something else—a deep, transparent blue. There’s almost a sound to it, a quiet sound like loom! as the blue swings into focus. But it lasts for only a second. And it doesn’t happen that often.
It happened on my thirtieth birthday, though. I took that for a good omen. My thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday, which was garbage day for more than half our clients. I hadn’t gotten around to setting out their trash cans the night before, because I’d indulged in this private little one-man birthday bash, instead. So there I was, up before dawn in spite of myself, just opening my door, which is the only place in my apartment I can even see the sky from; and I switched my lights off, and loom!
I decided turning thirty might not be so bad, after all. I thought maybe I could handle it. I went off to work whistling, even though I had that balsa-mouth feeling that comes from too many beers.
It was a bitter-cold day, the kind that turns your feet to stone, and after I’d dealt with the trash cans I went home and wrapped myself in a blanket and tried to get back to sleep. Only trouble was, the telephone kept ringing. I let the machine answer for me. First call, Mrs. Dibble wanted me to take the Cartwrights grocery shopping. Second call, she needed a sack of sidewalk salt run over to Ditty Nolan. Third call was my grandparents. “Barnaby, hon,” my grandma said, “it’s me and Pop-Pop, just wanting to wish you a—”
I leaned over the edge of the bed and picked up the phone. “Gram?” I said.
“Well, hey there! Happy birthday!”
“Thanks. Is Pop-Pop on too?”
“I’m here,” he said. “Hope you got plans to celebrate.”
“Oh, yeah; well, yeah,” I said in this vague sort of way, because I couldn’t tell if they knew about the dinner Mom was fixing. I never could be certain. Some years she invited them, but other years she thought up reasons not to. (My grandpa had driven a laundry truck till poor vision forced his retirement, and Gram still clerked in a liquor store. “God gave” them—their wording—only one child, my mother, and they were very proud of her, but the feeling didn’t seem to be mutual.) I said, “Probably I’ll just, you know, drop by home for dinner or something.”
“That’s my boy!” Gram said. “That’s what I like to hear! A visit’ll mean the world to them, hon.”
“Yes, Gram,” I said.
Then Pop-Pop asked, “How’s the car doing?”
“Oh, chugging along just fine,” I said. “Had to take it in and get the steering linkage tightened, but no big deal.”
“Why, you could have done that yourself!” he said. “That’s what I always did, when she was mine!”
“Maybe next time,” I told him.
I’d given up trying to convince him I wasn’t a born mechanic.
The way the conversation ended was, I would stop by and see them later in the week. They had a little something for me. (A book of coupons good for six take-out pizzas, I already knew. It was their standard birthday gift, and one I counted on.) Then after I hung up I called Mrs. Dibble, because my conscience had started to bother me over the Cartwrights. They tended to feel rushed when somebody else took them shopping. “So,” I said. “Cartwrights’ groceries, Ditty Nolan’s salt. What: she’s expecting snow?”
“I have no idea,” Mrs. Dibble told me. “We’re just the …”
We’re just the muscles, not the brains. I said goodbye and stood up to unwind myself from my blanket.
The Cartwrights were a good example of why Rent-a-Back was so sought after. They weren’t all that old—early sixties, which in this business was nothing—but Mr. Cartwright had permanently ruined his right ankle several years before while stepping off a curb in Towson. So he couldn’t drive anymore, and Mrs. Cartwright had never known how and did not intend to learn, she said, at this late date. Nor could they afford a chauffeur. Rent-a-Back offered just what they needed: somebody (usually me) to drive their big old Impala to the grocery store, and unfold Mr. Cartwright’s walker from the trunk when we got there, and follow behind as the two of them inched down the aisles debating each and every purchase. I could have just waited at the front of the store, but I got a kick out of listening to their discussions. Today, for instance, Mr. Cartwright expressed a desire for sauerkraut, but Mrs. Cartwright didn’t feel he should have it. “You always think you want sauerkraut,” she told him, “and then you’re up half the night with indigestion and it’s me who has to bring you the Turns. You know how cabbage in any form g
ives you indigestion.”
Mr. Cartwright said he knew no such thing, but I knew it. And I knew green peppers repeated on him too, and I knew what their shoe sizes were and their grandchildren’s video game preferences, and I had advised on the very coat that Mrs. Cartwright was wearing today. (It was this navy one or a gray, almost white, which I had pointed out would show the dirt.)
In the window bays near the registers I noticed big sacks of sidewalk salt, and I thought of picking one up for Ditty Nolan. But the Cartwrights might feel slighted, seeing me attend to another customer on their time. So what I did was drive them home (Mr. Cartwright next to me, Mrs. Cartwright perched in the rear but leaning forward between us to advise on traffic conditions) and carry in their groceries, and then I got in my own car and drove back to the store for salt. Then I went to Ditty Nolan’s.
I don’t know why Ditty Nolan was scared to go out. She hadn’t always been that way, if you could believe Ray Oakley. Ray Oakley said Ditty’s mother had fallen ill with some steadily downhill disease while Ditty was off in college, and Ditty came home to nurse her and never left. Even after the mother died, Ditty stayed on in the Roland Park house where she had grown up—must have had a little inheritance, or how else would she have managed? For sure, she didn’t go out to work. And when I rang her doorbell, she had to check through the front window first and then undo a whole fortress of locks and sliding bolts and chains before she could let me in. “Barnaby!” she said.
She was thin and pretty and unnaturally pale, with wispy tow hair that hung to her shoulders. Her dress was more a spring type of dress—flower-sprinkled and floaty—which wasn’t so unreasonable for someone who avoided all weather.
“I brought your salt,” I told her.
“Oh, good,” she said, stepping back. “Come on inside.”
I followed her in and dropped the sack to the floor. I said, “Has there been some kind of forecast I haven’t heard about?”