by Anne Tyler
“Labor Day is coming up, Jeremy.”
“Oh, yes, is it?”
“Maybe you could make the trip to see us.”
“Well, Amanda …”
“Now I don’t want to go over three minutes here but I’m sending you a train schedule. Let’s not hear any excuses, Jeremy. Why, you’ll just love travel, once you catch on to it. And you don’t want to spend your life just sitting home now, do you. Mother wouldn’t have approved of that at all, she would have wanted you to get out and enjoy yourself.”
He knew that his sisters were all that was left of the world he had grown up with, his only remaining connection with his parents, but sometimes when Amanda spoke of their mother it seemed she meant someone he didn’t even know in passing—someone stern and rigid, not his own sweet-faced mother with her soft, sad smile. “Well, you see,” he said, “I do try to—”
“I have to run, Jeremy. Do please answer our letters, you know how Laura worries.”
“All right, Amanda.”
He laid the receiver carefully in its cradle. There was a damp mark where his hand had been. He went back to the kitchen and found Mary just sponging Darcy’s face, with breakfast finished. He had missed everything. His chances were over until tomorrow. “I’m going to the grocery,” Mary told him. “Do you want anything?”
His despair was so enormous that it gave him courage. He said, “Oh, why, several things. Perhaps I should come along.”
Mary only nodded. She was frowning at a stain on Darcy’s collar. “Oh, Darcy, look at you, it’s your last clean dress,” she said.
“I don’t care about an old stain.”
“Well, I do. Come along then.”
Words kept rearranging themselves in Jeremy’s head. May I have the honor—? Could you possibly consider—? Is it asking too much for you to marry me? But once they were descending the front steps the only conversation he could think of was an exaggerated squint toward the sun, implying a remark about the weather. Mary didn’t look up. She was reading her grocery list. “I’m going to get a gumball,” Darcy said. “Am I going to get a gumball, Mom? I’m going to get a penny for the gumball machine.”
“I wasn’t aware they had a gumball machine,” said Jeremy.
“Oh yes,” Darcy said. “Perry’s does.”
Would you think me forward if I—?
Perry’s? Why, Perry’s was two blocks away; it was where his mother used to go for soupbones. And no sooner had it hit him than sure enough, they came to Dowd’s grocery and passed it by, with neither Mary nor Darcy giving it a glance. Jeremy did. He gazed longingly at the crates of oranges and peaches and pears slanted toward him behind the fly-specked plate glass window. The tissue paper they nestled in seemed a particularly beautiful shade of green. He thought with love of Mrs. Dowd’s gnarled old hands spreading the tissue just enough, rescuing a runaway peach and setting it back in place with a little grandmotherly pat. Mary and Darcy walked on. “Wait!” he said. “I mean—have you ever tried Dowd’s?”
“They’re more expensive,” Mary said. She went on studying her list. Darcy took Jeremy’s hand in both of hers and swung on it—a clamp on his index finger, another on his little finger. What could he do? He set one foot in front of the other, doggedly, barely managing each step. For Mary Tell’s sake he was slaying dragons, and yet to keep her respect it was necessary that she never even guess it. He wiped his face on his sleeve. They came to the end of the block, where a red light stopped them. Cars whizzed back and forth, but what he was most afraid of was the street itself. Then the light turned green. “Wait!” he said again. Mary looked up, in the act of putting her grocery list in her purse.
“Could we—I mean I don’t believe I—”
“Hurry,” Darcy said, “we’ll miss the light.”
He stepped off the curb. All the comfort he had was Darcy’s grip on his hand, but now Mary said, “Darcy, don’t swing on people. How often have I told you that?” One of Darcy’s hands fell away; only his index finger was secure. He reached out blindly and found Mary’s arm, the crook of her elbow, which he hung onto as he had seen men do on the late show. Did she notice that it was she supporting him and not the other way around? “I certainly wish the price of tomatoes would go down,” Mary said.
Then they had reached the other sidewalk. The air on this block was different. He could have told it with his eyes shut. It was hotter, more exposed, and old Mrs. Carraway’s wind chimes were not tinkling. What was that flat-faced cement building? He didn’t like the look of it. He noticed that the rowhouses ran only in twos and threes, which gave the block a broken-up look. A mean-eyed woman watched him from her front stoop. He saw a commercial printer’s whose black and gold sign must have been here years ago, when he was a boy walking to school. Its sudden emergence in his memory made him feel strange. He lowered his eyes again. Pretend this is only a corridor leading off from the vestibule. Pretend it is just an unusually long room. It will all be over in a while.
Then they reached Perry’s. “Here we are,” said Mary. He looked up to find a window full of dead things stacked in pyramids—tinned vegetables, Nabisco boxes, paper towels. No fruit. “I’ll wait outside,” he said.
“Outside?”
“I’ll just—I do my shopping at Dowd’s.”
Mary seemed about to ask him a question, but then Darcy said, “Can I have my penny now?”
“What penny?” Mary said.
“You said you would give me a penny for the gumball machine. You said you would. You said—”
“Oh, for mercy’s sake,” said Mary, opening her pocketbook. “Here.” Then she went in, and Jeremy chose a place outside the door. First he watched the street, but the unfamiliar buildings opposite made him feel worse. He looked behind him, toward the glass door, and saw Darcy just coming out with a gumball. “Look. Pink,” she said. “My favorite color.”
“Is that right?” said Jeremy. He was glad to see her. He turned outward again, so that he was facing the street. Darcy stood beside him. “They have charms and things too,” she said. “You can see them in the machine but they never come out. Do you think I might get one someday?”
“Perhaps so,” Jeremy said.
“Or are they just to fool people. You think that’s what it is? You think they’re just trying to get your pennies from you?
Jeremy had a terrible thought. He felt that he might become marooned beside Perry’s Grocery. How would he ever get home again? He imagined himself dipping the toe of one shoe into the street, then drawing it out and turning away, unable to cross. “I’m sorry, I just can’t,” he would have to say. He thought of the time he had climbed the crape myrtle tree in his back yard when he was three. He had climbed only to the first fork but then had found it impossible to get back down. Every time he tried, his hair stood on end and the soles of his feet started tingling. “Let him stay,” his father said. “He’ll come down.” Then at night, when he still hadn’t managed it, his father took three long strides to the tree and lifted him off roughly, one arm around his waist, causing Jeremy to scream in that single dizzying moment before his feet touched solid ground again. Now Mary would take him in hand, nudge him out, coax him into one step after another. “Come on, you can do it, you’ll see, when you get to the other side you’ll look back and laugh at how easy it was.” Only he wouldn’t. He would have to back away, and now he was too big to be carried bodily. He imagined spending the rest of his life on this new island, exposed for all the world to see, propped against the wall like a target. “Would you like half of my gumball, Jeremy?” Darcy asked him.
“No, thank you, Darcy,” he said.
“I don’t have a knife, but I could bite it in half.”
Dread rose in him like a flood in a basement, starting in his feet and rapidly filling his legs, his stomach, his chest, seeping out to his fingertips. Its cold flat surface lay level across the top of his throat. He swallowed and felt it tip and right itself. Nausea came swooping over him, and he buckled at th
e knees and slid downward until he was seated flat on the sidewalk with his feet sticking out in front of him. “Jeremy, you silly,” Darcy said, but when he couldn’t smile at her or even raise his eyes she said, “Jeremy? Jeremy?” She went screaming into the grocery store; her voice pierced all the cotton that seemed to be wrapped around his head. “Mom, come quick, Jeremy’s all squashed down on the sidewalk!” Then he was surrounded by anxious feet nosing in upon him—Darcy’s sneakers, Mary’s sandals, and a pair of stubby loafers almost covered by a long bloody apron. “It’s the heat,” the apron said. Mary said, “Jeremy? Are you ill?”
“Sick,” he whispered.
She set a rustling paper bag beside him, bent to lay a hand on his forehead and then straightened up. Her sandals were the largest thing about her. The hem of her skirt was so close he could see the stitches, he saw the underside of her bosom and the triangle below her jaw. “Will you marry me?” he asked her.
She laughed. “No, but I’ll see you home and into bed,” she said. “Can you stand? You need some air.” And she raised his head herself, and then propped him while he got to his feet. She said, “Walk a ways, now. It’ll clear your head. Here, take this.” From her grocery bag she brought out a navy blue box, and while he swayed against her she tore the wrapper off and handed him a cinnamon graham cracker. “Sometimes it helps to eat a little something,” she said.
“No, no.”
“Try it, Jeremy.”
He only clutched it in his hand. He felt that opening his mouth would cause his last remaining strength to pour out of him. Inch by inch he headed homeward, shaky but upright, leaning on Mary’s arm. The bloody apron receded behind them. Darcy danced ahead. They came closer to the street while Jeremy prayed continuously to the traffic light: oh, please turn red, turn red, let me at least have time to get my bearings. But it stayed an evil green, and Mary led him without a pause off the curb, across a desert of cement, up the other side. They were home. They were on his own block. He straightened and let out a long slow breath. Mary said, “You’re just like Darcy, whenever you don’t eat breakfast you get sick to your stomach. Isn’t that what happened?”
“I meant it seriously, I asked you to marry me,” Jeremy said.
“But you both say no, you couldn’t eat a thing, you don’t want a … ”
She stopped walking. She turned and stared at him across a silence that grew painful, while Jeremy waited with his head down. “Oh, Jeremy,” she said finally. “Why, thank you, Jeremy. But you see, I can’t get married.”
“You can’t?”
“My husband won’t give me a divorce.”
“Oh, I see,” Jeremy said.
“But it was sweet of you to ask, and I want you to know how flattered I am.”
“That’s all right,” Jeremy said.
He stood there a minute more, and then they both began walking again. Up ahead, Darcy leaped and skipped and twirled. Her hair made him think of something metallic falling through the air, catching the sunlight and ducking it and catching it once more. He fixed his eyes on it and stumbled along. When they were within sight of home he lifted his cracker without thinking and took a bite. Mary was right; it helped. His head cleared. His stomach righted itself. He felt cinnamon flowering out of his mouth, taking away the tinny taste, leaving his breath as pure as a child’s. Like a child he let himself be led home while all his attention was directed toward the cracker. Crunching sounds filled his head and tiny sharp crumbs sprinkled his shirt front. He felt limp and exhausted, and something like relief was turning his bones so watery that he could have lain down right there and gone to sleep on the sidewalk.
• • •
Now he no longer came downstairs while Mary was making breakfast. He lay in bed late and rose by degrees, often sitting against his pillow for as much as an hour and staring vacantly out his window. The index card lost its tack and fell behind his bed; he let it lie. He sat in a sagging position, smoothing his sheet over and over across his chest, and if he wanted a change of scenery he raised his eyes from the screened lower portion of the window, which was open, to the closed upper portion where two sets of cloudy panes dulled the morning sunlight. Maybe someday he would wash them. The floors had a frame of dirt spreading out from the baseboards, thinning only where his traffic pattern had worn the dust away. There were little chips of paper everywhere, some so old that they seemed to have become embedded in the wood. If the light was right he could look out toward his studio and find a long glinting red hair snagged on one of the floorboards. It had belonged to a student from two years ago, whose name he had forgotten. He neither swept the hair away nor made any special effort to keep it. It was just there, something he registered in the mornings without considering the possibility that there was anything he might do about it.
When he had finally struggled out of bed there was the bathroom to face—a chilly place even in summer, with all its fixtures crazed and rust-stained and the swinging naked lightbulb pointing out every pore of his skin in the watery mirror. He shaved for hours. He cut one small path across his cheek and then stood looking into his own eyes until it occurred to him to lift his razor again. Even before the mirror he did not bother rearranging his expression. His muscles sagged and the soft skin of his throat pouched outward. He noticed, and disliked what he saw, but only in the detached way that he might dislike a painting or some scene that he witnessed on the street. Then when he was tired of shaving he left, often without rinsing off the last traces of soap, so that his skin felt itchy and dry. He wrapped himself in a bathrobe and put on his crocheted slippers and shuffled into his studio, where he sat on a stool for a long time looking at his latest piece. Too many browns. Not enough distinctions. More and more now he was adding in actual objects—thumbtacks and washers and bits of string and wood, separating the blur of colored papers. Brian hadn’t seen these yet. Jeremy didn’t care whether he saw them or not. He pulled off a piece of twine that was in the wrong corner, leaving a worm of dried white paste behind. He dropped it to the floor and then noticed, beside one leg of his stool, the tin top off a box of cough lozenges, and by the time he had figured where to paste that he had forgotten about dressing. He snipped things apart and fitted things together. He rummaged through the clutter in a bureau drawer, meanwhile holding his bathrobe together by its frayed sash. Till Mrs. Jarrett’s clopping heels mounted laboriously to the second floor and she called up to the third, “Mr. Pauling? I don’t see your dishes here, have you not had breakfast? We’re getting worried about you. Please come.” If he were too absorbed he merely shuffled his feet on the floor, showing he hadn’t died in his sleep. Other times he sighed and laid his scissors down and went to his bedroom for clothes. Most of his clothes seemed to be falling apart nowadays. He kept having to throw away shirts with long rips and trousers with the zippers broken and shorts with the elastic gone, but he didn’t bother sending to Sears for more. He tossed them in the wastebasket almost gladly. Later he would listen with a sense of satisfaction while the garbage men came clanging trashcans and bore his belongings away with them. It felt good to be done with things. He thought of the New Year’s Eves he had sat up for—the relief that came from putting away another year and brushing off his hands and knowing that there were twelve months less to get through. Or of all his life—the hundreds of memories he had closed the files on, the years assigned to him that he had dutifully endured, waiting to reach the bottom of the pile.
His breakfast was other people’s lunch. Mrs. Jarrett ate in the dining room with everything just right, dishes set on one of his mother’s linen placemats and a matching napkin in her lap. Mr. Somerset wolfed a lacy fried egg straight from the skillet. Miss Vinton, home from the bookstore on her lunch hour, read publishers’ brochures while she ate health bread at the kitchen table. “There’s a new Klee in, Mr. Pauling,” she might say, without looking up. “I put it on the sideboard.”
“Oh, why, thank you, Miss Vinton.”
He ate whatever took the least troub
le—a box of day-old doughnuts or a can of cold soup. After every mouthful he wiped his hands carefully on the knees of his trousers before turning a page of the Klee. It would have to go back with Miss Vinton, spic and span, before her boss noticed it was missing. The cover of the book was a glossy white, promising him something new and untouched and wonderful. At the beginning there was a long jumble of words, a résumé of Paul Klee’s life, which Jeremy skipped. What did he care about that? He plunged into the pictures; he drank them up, he felt how dry and porous he was, thirsty for things to look at. At every page he wanted to pause and spend hours, even when he had seen the pictures before in other books, but he felt a pull also to turn to the next one quickly so that he would be sure to finish in time. Sometimes he said, “Miss Vinton, I wonder if I might—?” “Oh, why surely, Mr. Pauling,” she said, refolding the bread wrapper. “I can always take it back tomorrow. Mr. Mack won’t notice.” She had never once hurried him or shown any concern over his handling of the books, although Jeremy knew that Mr. Mack was unreasonably strict about such things. And for all of August, when Jeremy’s life seemed duller and sadder than he had ever noticed before, she managed to bring a new book for him almost every day, as if she guessed that he needed comfort. Klee, a collection of impressionists, Miro, Renoir. A book of American primitives whose dollhouse landscapes and lack of perspective filled him with a kind of homesickness. If only he could just step inside them! If only he lived in a place where a man could go any distance and yet never grow smaller! Miss Vinton brought him Braque, a man he disliked. He sat through her lunch hour testing the anxiety that each picture called forth in him, the discomfort caused by some clumsiness in the shapes. Years before, when he was in high school, an art teacher explaining cubism had made Jeremy’s class copy one of Braque’s paintings line for line. Jeremy had felt sick all the while he was doing it. It seemed that he might melt away to nothing, letting himself get absorbed into another man’s picture that way. Now he found the picture again—a still life involving a musical instrument—and stared at it until he couldn’t stand it any more and had to turn the page. “Would you care to keep it till tomorrow?” asked Miss Vinton, rising to rinse her dishes. “You seem to like him.”