by Anne Tyler
“Forecast?” she asked. She was wandering away to some other part of the house. Her voice came threading back to me.
“Is it supposed to snow or something?”
“Not that I know of,” she said.
She returned, holding an envelope. My name was on the front. “Happy birthday,” she said.
“Oh! Well, thanks.”
I should have guessed: the salt was just an excuse. She knew every birthday at Rent-a-Back and never let one pass without notice. I opened the envelope and looked at the card inside. “This was really nice of you,” I told her.
She waved my words away. Long, fragile hands, untouched by the sun. “What a pity you have to work today,” she said. “I hope you’re having a party later on.”
“Just supper at my folks’ house.”
“Is your little girl going to join you?”
“Well, no,” I said. “But look at what she sent.”
From my rear jeans pocket I pulled out Opal’s gift—a leather money clip, the kind you make from a kit. I hadn’t put any money in (if you thought about it, it was kind of an ironic gift), but I liked carrying it around. “The mailman brought this Saturday,” I said, “along with a handmade card with a drawing of me on the front that really did resemble me. You could even see the stitches on my blue jeans.”
“Oh, isn’t that sweet!” Ditty said.
“I was so tickled that I called her up long distance,” I said. “Knocked her mother for a loop, as you might imagine. But I think Opal liked it that I bothered.”
“I’m sure she loved it,” Ditty said.
I put the money clip back in my pocket. “You want me to add the salt to your account?” I asked.
“Yes, please,” she said. “And then maybe when the weather gets bad, you could come sprinkle my walks. I can’t have the UPS man falling down and suing me.”
Ray Oakley always claimed, every year when she gave him his birthday card, that she had a little crush on him. But I knew better than that. She didn’t have a crush on any of us. It’s just that service people were the only human beings she saw anymore.
My parents lived in Guilford, in a half-timbered, Tudor-style house with leaded-glass windows. Out front beside the gas lantern was this really jarring piece of modern sculpture: a giant Lucite triangle balanced upside down on a pole. My mother went after Culture with a vengeance.
I showed up for dinner late, hoping my brother had gotten there first; but no such luck. Mine was the only car in the driveway. So I spent some time locking my doors and double-checking the locks, studying my keys to see which pocket they should go in. Eventually I was detected, though. My father called, “Barnaby?” and I turned to find him standing on the front steps. Against the light from the hall chandelier he looked like a stretched-out question mark, with his stooped, hunched, narrow shoulders. “What’s keeping you?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m just …”
“Come on in!”
I climbed the steps, and he stood back to let me by. He was taller than me and more graceful by far—had a Fred Astaire kind of elegance that my brother and I had totally missed out on. Nor did we get his soft fair hair or his long-chinned parchment face. My mother’s genes had won every round.
“Happy birthday, son,” he told me, giving my arm a squeeze just above the elbow.
“Well, thanks.”
That about wrapped it up. We had nothing further to talk about. As we crossed the hall, Dad sent a desperate glance toward the second-floor landing. “Margot?” he called. “Barnaby’s here! Aren’t you coming down?”
“In a minute.”
The living room had an expectant look, like a stage. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and somebody’s symphony poured from the armoire where the stereo was hidden. Over the mantel hung more of my mother’s Culture: a barn door, it could have been, taken off its hinges and framed in aluminum strips.
“Well, now,” my father said.
He seized the poker and started rearranging embers.
“Which birthday is this, anyway?” he asked, finally.
“Thirtieth,” I told him.
“Good grief.”
“Right.”
Then we heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs. “Happy birthday!” she cried, hurrying in with her arms outstretched.
“Thanks,” I said, and I gave her a peck on the cheek.
She had dressed up, but in that offhand way that Guilford women do it—A-line skirt, tailored silk shirt, navy leather flats with acorns tied to the toes. Her one mistake was her hair. She dyed her hair dead black and wore it sleeked into a tight French roll. It made her look white-faced and witchy, but would I be the one to tell her? I enjoyed it. You see a woman who’s reinvented herself, who’s shown a kind of genius at picking up the social clues, it’s a real pleasure to catch her in a blunder. I watched as she bustled about—snatching my jacket, darting off to the closet, rushing back to settle me on the couch. “We haven’t seen you in ages,” she said when she’d sat down next to me. Then she jumped up: cushion tilted off-center in the armchair opposite. “You’re skin and bones!” she said over her shoulder. “Have you lost weight?”
“No, Mom.”
“I’ll bet anything you’re not eating right.”
“I’m eating fine,” I said.
If I’d lost weight every time Mom claimed, I’d have been registering in the negative on the bathroom scale.
Now she was off to pull open a desk drawer. The woman could not sit still. Always something discontented about her, something glittery and overwrought that set my teeth on edge. “Where is it?” she asked, rummaging about. She came up with an envelope. “Here,” she said, and she sat back down and laid it in my hand. “Your birthday present,” she said.
“Well, thanks.”
“Maybe you can find yourself some decent clothes.”
“Maybe so,” I said, not troubling to argue. I folded the envelope in two and slid it into my jeans pocket. (I didn’t need to look to know it was a gift certificate from some menswear store or other, someplace Ivy League and expensive.) “Thanks to you too, Dad,” I said.
“You’re very welcome.”
He was propping the poker against the bricks, and the sight of his thin, sensitive fingers also set my nerves on edge, and so did the music diddling about as if it couldn’t decide where to go. I turned to my mother and said, “So. Are Gram and Pop-Pop coming?” Which was purely to annoy her, because I already knew the answer.
“No, they’re not,” she told me, brazening it out. “But your brother is, of course. And I invited Len Parrish too. He’s stopping by for birthday cake after; he couldn’t make it for dinner.”
No surprise to me. Len was one of those boyhood friends mothers always love, but he had gone on to big doings and left me far behind. I said, “Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you.”
“He told me he’d come, Barnaby. I’m sure he’ll keep his word.”
The doorbell rang. “Oh! Jeff!” my mother said, and she jumped up and rushed to the hall, while Dad and I exchanged relieved grins. Things would proceed more smoothly now. Not only was my brother a better conversationalist, but he had a wife and baby who would help to dilute the atmosphere. Especially the baby.
Or actually, he wasn’t a baby. It shows how out of touch I was. When Jeff and Wicky entered the room, this little kid was toddling between them—a pudgy tyke in a suit like his dad’s and a polka-dot bow tie. “Look at that!” I said, getting to my feet. “Walking! At his age!”
“He’s been walking for months,” Mom said. “He’s nearly two, for heaven’s sake.”
“Happy birthday,” Wicky told me, kissing the air beside my left cheek. She smelled of toothpaste. She and Jeff made a model couple—Wicky an attractive blonde in clothes that were twins to my mother’s, Jeff dark and square-set and handsome in a stockbroker sort of way. He wasn’t really a stockbroker; he worked at the Foundation with Dad. But he had on one of those stockbroker shirts with the
pinstripes and plain white collar.
“Where’d you park?” I asked him. “You didn’t park behind me, did you?”
“The birthday boy!” Jeff said, clapping me on the shoulder.
“Is your car blocking my car in?”
“Relax,” he told me. “I can move it at a moment’s notice.”
“Damn! You are blocking me in!”
But he was already heading toward the cocktail cart, where Dad had started rattling ice cubes. Wicky, meanwhile, bent to scoop up my nephew. “Give your Uncle Barnaby a birthday kiss, Jape,” she said, holding him out in my direction.
Jape? Oh, right: they called him J.P. Jeffrey Paul the Third. J.P. stole a peek at me and then buried his face in Wicky’s shirt-front. “Silly,” she said. “It’s your uncle! Uncle Barnaby! How does it feel to be thirty?” she asked me.
“Feels like hell,” I told her.
“Oh, it does not! Look at me: I’m thirty-three. I feel better than I did at twenty.”
“Well, you probably didn’t drink a case of beer last night,” I told her.
“True enough,” Wicky said.
“Oh, Barnaby!” Mom cried. “A whole case? You didn’t!”
These little rituals were so reassuring. I could always get a rise out of Mom.
Dad was taking drink orders. Jeff wanted Scotch, and the women wanted white wine. I said, “I’ll have whatever J.P. is having,” because I’d been only half kidding about last night. Then I was struck by the horrible thought that J.P. might still be breast-feeding. But no, he was having ginger ale, in a plastic cup with a bunny decal. Mine came in a glass, though. Dad handed it to me with a flourish.
“So! Barnaby! How’s it feel to turn thirty?” Jeff asked.
“What an original question,” I said. “Did you think it up all by yourself?”
“Oh, touchy, touchy,” he told me. “Don’t worry, it’s not a bad age. Twenty-seven was worse, as I recall.”
“Twenty-seven?”
“That’s when it first hit me that thirty was on the way. By the time it actually came, I’d adjusted.”
Count on Jeff: he plans ahead.
The whole bunch of us were standing, like people at a cocktail party. J.P. began spitting experimentally into his bunny cup. Wicky brought forth a sheaf of Christmas photos to show Mom. (She and Jeff and J.P. had spent Christmas in South Carolina with her folks, pretty much breaking Mom’s heart.) Dad and Jeff talked about, I don’t know, the Deserving Poor, I guess. “Exactly,” Jeff said heavily, rocking from heel to toe. “I couldn’t agree with you more. Exactly.”
I went over to the fireplace and considered the barn door awhile. Then I drifted into my father’s study. I stood sipping my drink in front of his bookcase, pretending to be absorbed by the titles. The Gaitlin Foundations First Quarter-Century, 1911–1936. The Gaitlin Foundation: Fifty Years of Compassion, 1911–1961. Dry as dust, I already knew, and dotted with black-and-white photos of Planning Council members in stiff dark suits.
On the shelf below was the ledger containing Great-Granddad’s epic poem and, next to that, his son’s contribution, done up by some obliging printer to look like a ledger too. Same gray cloth, same maroon leather corners, the title trimmed with spires and dangles of lace. Light of Heaven was the title. Grandfather must have fantasized that someone besides Gaitlins would read what he had to say, because he explained things the family already knew. My wife, Abigail McKane Gaitlin, was exceedingly devout, he wrote. From the sound of it, he had been visited by one of Creation’s dullest angels—a sweet-faced young secretary who arrived for a job interview at a “perilous moment” in his personal life and instructed him to appreciate his wife and children, after which she vanished. Reading between the lines, I always assumed that what we had here was an instance of attempted sexual harassment in the workplace, but that could have been wishful thinking; I was so eager for some sign of colorfulness in my family. The nearest thing to a renegade that we could claim was my great-aunt Eunice, who left her husband for a stage magician fifteen years her junior. But she came home within a month, because she’d had no idea, she said, what to cook for the magician’s dinners. And anyhow, Great-Aunt Eunice was a Gaitlin only by marriage.
Just look at Dad’s ledger; look at Jeff’s. A Possible Paranormal Experience, my father’s contribution, described the woman who stopped him on Howard Street and asked him for a match. While he was explaining that he didn’t smoke, the police arrested the gunman who’d been lurking around the next corner. (But the gunman was only Charles Murfree, the unbalanced grandson of those selfsame Murfrees who’d gone bankrupt after purchasing our Twinform patent, and he’d been stalking my family for decades, off and on. Wouldn’t you say, therefore, that if not for Angel Number One, Dad never would have been endangered in the first place?) My brother called his report A Tradition Repeated, which was appropriate in view of its many redundancies. I guess he was just doing his utmost to stretch a one-sentence encounter into a respectable length. (And a fragmentary sentence, at that. “Looking mighty spooky,” his angel had announced, briskly refolding the stock market page before she stepped off the elevator.)
Close behind me, Wicky said, “Stop right where you are!” I practically jumped out of my skin, till I realized she was talking to J.P. He had padded in without my noticing; he was reaching for the crystal paperweight on the desk. “Don’t touch, Jape,” Wicky said. “What are you up to?” she asked me.
“Oh, just browsing,” I said.
She came over to stand next to me, carrying J.P. in her arms. “A Tradition Repeated” I told her, gesturing toward Jeff’s ledger.
I was hoping to get her reaction—her private, unvarnished views on Our Lady of the Stock Market—but she must have thought I was commenting on the whole shelf-load, because she said, “Yes, they’re very inspirational, aren’t they?”
Diplomatically, I took a sip of my drink. Except that the glass was empty and the ice cubes crashed into my nose.
“I feel so bad for your mom,” Wicky said. “Now that angels are the latest thing, she worries you-all’s will look faddish.”
“You feel bad for my mom?” I asked. I was trying to find the connection.
“She was telling me, just the other day: ‘It used to be that angels were unusual, but now they’re in every bookstore; they’re on every calendar and wall motto and needlepointed cushion; they’re little gold pins on every lapel. Ours will be lumped right in with all those tacky newcomer angels,’ she told me.”
“They aren’t hers,” I said. “Mom is not even a Gaitlin! What’s she all het up about?”
“Well, you know how she is.”
I certainly did. If Mom had had her way, she wouldn’t have merely married a Gaitlin; she’d have arranged to have a Gaitlin blood transfusion.
We went back out to the living room, where Dad and Jeff were discussing the new software they’d bought for the office. Mom headed off to the kitchen to see about dinner. J.P. wanted more ginger ale, but Wicky told him no. “It’s the learning curve that worries me,” Dad said, and Jeff said, “Yes, I’m very concerned about the learning curve.”
The symphony on the stereo was building louder and louder, ending and ending forever. It reminded me of some huge, frantic animal crashing around the bars of its cage.
How come I always got the feeling that somebody was missing from our family table? I had thought so from the time I was little, toting up the faces at dinner every night: Mom, Dad, Jeff, me … It was such a pitiful showing. We didn’t make enough noise; we didn’t seem busy enough, embroiled enough. In the old days, I had thought we needed more kids. Two was a pretty lame amount, it seemed to me. Maybe we should have had a girl besides. I’d have liked that. It might have helped me understand women a little better. But my parents never obliged me.
Then later, when I got married, I figured Natalie would liven things up—I mean, at holiday meals and such. She didn’t, though. For one thing, she was too quiet. Too demure, too well mannered; spine never to
uched the back of her chair. Also, she didn’t last all that long. Eighteen months from wedding to bust-up. Opal was out of the picture before she got her own place setting, even. As for my sister-in-law, by the time she appeared I’d quit hoping. It’s not that I had anything against her, but I had come to realize we would never be the kind of family I’d envisioned.
So there I sat at my birthday dinner, just going through the motions. “Great, you made the potato dish.” That sort of thing. “Please pass the rolls.” Mom had to tell her story about the New Year’s Baby That Wasn’t: how I had all but promised to be the very first birth of the year (name in the papers, free diaper service, six-month supply of strained spinach), but then, of course—of course!—had loafed about and procrastinated and shown up three weeks late. And that got Wicky started on Punctual-to-the-Minute J.P. We all turned, synchronized, to beam at J.P. in his high chair. “Not to imply that he was a speedy birth,” she said. Wonderful: the Difficult Delivery Story. The rest of us were excused from inventing another topic for a good quarter hour. We fixed our eyes on her gratefully and nodded and tut-tutted.
Then I started having this problem that afflicts me every so often. I’m listening to someone talk, I’m the picture of attentiveness, and all at once I just know I’m about to burst out with something rude or disgustingly self-centered. I might say, for instance, “You think your labor pains are so interesting? Let me describe this tight feeling that’s seizing up my temples.” Because I did have a tight feeling. I felt overly aware of the art piece above the sideboard—actual knives and forks and spoons, bent into angular shapes and leaning out from the canvas in a threatening manner. “You wouldn’t believe how my nerves are just … jangling!” I might have said. But apparently I didn’t say it, because everyone was still nodding at Wicky.
At the end of the meal, Mom rose to clear the table, shooing away all offers of help. “I won’t serve the cake just yet,” she said as she set out the cream and sugar. “We’ll wait for Len.”
“Or go ahead without him, why don’t we,” I suggested.
“Oh, he’ll be here by the time I get the coffee poured.”