by Anne Tyler
“What? No, no,” Jeremy said, “please, I don’t want it, take it back with you.” Then he was ashamed of his rudeness, and he blushed and looked up at her. In the summertime, stripped of her lavender cardigan, her bony freckled arms gave her a vulnerable look. White strings stood out along the inside of her wrist when she turned the faucet off. “But I’m grateful to you for bringing the book,” Jeremy said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, that’s all right, I never much liked him myself.”
She turned, cheerful as ever, to hang up her dishtowel and take her purse from the table. Meanwhile Mrs. Jarrett ate fruit cup in the dining room, the ladylike clink of her spoon sounding at perfectly spaced intervals. Mr. Somerset put his skillet down silently and gravely, making certain that it sat in the exact center of the circle of the burner, ready to be used at another meal. Was there anyone gentler than old people? Could he ever feel as much at rest as he did sitting in this triangle of muted gray voices?
Then here came the second shift, as if in answer—Darcy slamming the door and pounding down the hallway with a bucket full of dandelions, Mary laughing and calling out warnings and threats and promises, and maybe if it were a weekend Howard’s high-pitched whistle and the squeak of his sneakers. “Where’s the milk I left here?” “Who wants a dandelion?” “You’re going to bump into someone, Darcy!”—which Darcy would almost surely do, as if she had to depend on someone else to break her speed for her. Flunf! into Miss Vinton’s middle. “Oh, Darcy, say you’re sorry.” “No harm done,” said Miss Vinton, and Darcy spun on through the kitchen, ending up with her arms around Howard. “Howard, make me flapjacks, Howard.” “Let him be, Darcy.” “Oh now,” Howard said to Mary, “you’re just jealous because I won’t make you flapjacks.” Then the kitchen splintered into bits of laughter, and Miss Vinton smiled and left while Mr. Somerset turned slowly from the stove, dazed by the laughter, baffled by frivolity. “What?” he said. Mary folded Darcy into the circle of her arms and said, “Milk or apple juice, young lady?” “Both,” said Darcy. “Or wait. Is apple juice what I want?” She turned toward Jeremy as if she expected him to answer, but Jeremy was looking at Mary. He saw the curve of her cheek against Darcy’s tow hair; he noticed how her nearly unarched eyebrows calmed and rested him.
Why hadn’t he been granted the one thing in life he ever hoped for?
At the beginning of September, Darcy started kindergarten and Mary found a job. It was something she could do at home: making argyle socks on a knitting machine. In the morning while Darcy was at school Mary worked alone in her room, but Darcy returned at lunchtime and was in and out all the rest of the day, leaving the door open behind her, and the sock machine soon became part of the household. It consisted of a circle of vertical needles, which first had to be threaded one by one. Threading was the time-consuming part. Then Mary cranked a large handle a prescribed number of times, after which she paused to rethread in another color. Jeremy, passing her doorway, had a glimpse of her huddled in a C-shape and frowning at metal eyes that seemed far too close together. She reminded him of old photographs of life in a sweatshop. But when the threading was done she could straighten up and stand back, and the cranking was so easy that sometimes she let Darcy do it while she herself counted the strokes. Numbers rang out and floated through the house—“Thirty-six! Thirty-seven!” After the tense silence of the threading, her voice and the circular rattle of machinery seemed like an outburst of joy. Wherever he was, Jeremy would raise his head to listen, and he noticed that the whole house appeared to relax at those times and the other boarders grew suddenly talkative, as if they too had held tense during the threading.
At the end of her first week of work, Mary packed the completed socks in a cardboard carton. She left Darcy with Mrs. Jarrett and caught a bus to the factory, where she was supposed to deliver them. “Why can’t I come too?” Darcy asked. “Because it wouldn’t be any fun,” Mrs. Jarrett told her. “The place where Mommy is going is the factory section, all nasty and dirty.” Jeremy felt something shrink in him. As if her absence were one long threading period, he held himself rigid in a parlor chair, scarcely breathing, silently turning the pages of a book of old masters that his mother had given him. “Goodness, don’t you have anything to do?” Mrs. Jarrett asked once. “I thought Saturday your students came.” Jeremy looked up, still turning pages. He had lost his last student a month ago and no others had called yet, but before he could put all this into words his thoughts trailed off again and he forgot to answer.
Mary returned just before lunch, bringing a new carton of yarn. When Darcy heard she came running out of the kitchen with Mrs. Jarrett close behind, and Jeremy stood up holding his book to his stomach. He thought that now the shrunken feeling would leave him, but it didn’t. Mary’s face was gray and her shoulders sagged. “How’s our career woman?” Mrs. Jarrett asked, clapping her hands together.
“Oh well, I’m all right.”
“You seem a little tired.”
“I had to wait in line a while,” Mary said. “There are a lot of other people doing this work.”
“Is that right? And just think, I never even heard of it before. Did you meet anybody interesting?”
“Oh, trash mostly. Just, you know. Just trash.” She set her carton on the coffee table and sat down. “I didn’t make as much money as I thought I would,” she said.
“Now be sure they pay you what they owe, you hear?”
Jeremy, back in his armchair now, kept nodding his head to show that he agreed. He felt as tired and sad as Mary. He wanted to offer her something—a cup of coffee? She didn’t drink coffee. In his mother’s old books a rich gentleman would come now to rescue Mary from life in the sweatshop, but Jeremy was the only gentleman present and he wasn’t rich and he didn’t believe that Mary had even noticed he was in the room. She spoke solely to Mrs. Jarrett. She said, “Oh, they paid me what they owed. But I had made a few mistakes, and also I’m still slow. Some of these people just whip them out by the dozen, but I don’t. I don’t know why. I thought I was going so fast. I thought I could make up the rent and the grocery and Darcy’s school clothes, all in just a few hours a day.”
“Now, now,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “Give yourself time.”
Jeremy went on nodding. He kept his eyes fixed on the label at the end of the yarn box—a rectangle of glaring yellow, a color he had always disliked. The brightness of it made his eyes ache. He imagined himself winning twenty-five thousand dollars from some soap company and offering it to her, watching her brow slowly smooth and lighten as she looked down and saw what he had put into her hands. “No, no,” he would tell her, “no strings. You don’t even have to be my friend, just please don’t thread those needles any more …” Yet if she had that much money, wouldn’t she leave him?
Well, but hadn’t she left him already? Had she ever really been there?
“Now can we have our ice cream?” Darcy said.
She had been promised a treat. Mary had told her she would come home rich. Mrs. Jarrett said, “Not yet, Darcy, let Mommy rest a while,” but Mary said, “No, I’m all right. Let’s go.” She picked up her pocketbook and they went out the front door. This time there were no slams, no voices calling back and forth outside. The house felt the same when they were out as when they were in, bleak and dark and tired. Mrs. Jarrett settled with a sigh onto the creaking springs of the couch. Jeremy turned a page and smoothed the edges of a Rubens. “It’s a shame, it’s just a shame,” Mrs. Jarrett said. “Do you think they’ll have to go on welfare?”
The word stabbed him. He looked up, open-mouthed.
“And she’s bright as a button. I don’t care what you say. A high school diploma isn’t everything.”
“Welfare?” Jeremy said.
But Mrs. Jarrett was talking to her needlework.
“I said, ‘What you want is a husband, my dear.’ ‘I do, don’t I,’ she said, and just laughed, didn’t take me seriously, but I meant what I said. Now I don’t know wh
at happened there, widowed or divorced or what, but she is a young woman still and on top of that she has that child. Have you noticed how out of hand that child has gotten? She used to be a real little lady. She needs a father, and you can tell it by the number of times that she says a thing over again. Shows she isn’t listened to enough, her mother has worries on her mind and can’t pay attention. Not that I blame her, of course, I realize what a—”
Jeremy blinked down at the Rubens, a fat naked blond lady laughing. He felt that Mrs. Jarrett’s words were twining around him like vines, rooting in the sad darkness inside him. The fat lady reminded him of a student he had once had, a girl named Sally Ann something who had wanted to learn portrait painting. She weighed two hundred pounds; she had told him so herself. She seemed proud of it. Once she asked him, “Would you like a nude model? I could do it.” And then she had come very close and laid a hand on his arm, smiling at him but looking, for some reason, only at his mouth. “No, no,” he had said. He was unprepared. He backed off, shaking his head, and stumbled over a tin can full of brushes. “No, that’s all right, I don’t paint at all, really.” But afterwards he had lain awake regretting his answer, and Sally Ann, whom he had not liked, gained importance in his mind and he began to see that there could be something compelling about a person who was dimpled all over. Only the next time she came to the studio he found that he still disliked her, and he kept himself at a distance even though she never offered again to be his model. Then what happened? Did she stop coming? He couldn’t remember. He stared down at the Rubens, who laughed directly at him with her eyelids lowered, and he felt some sort of wasted feeling, as if he were a very old man realizing for the first time how little was left to him.
“… and then my very own sister was married four times,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “Well, some claimed that was carrying things too far, but I don’t know. I don’t know that I blame her at all, to tell the truth. We do need someone to lean on. I imagine I’ll spend the rest of my life feeling naked on my street side every time I take a walk, and I am sixty-four now and been a widow longer than a wife.”
Jeremy sank lower in his chair, letting the book fall shut, and closed his eyes. He kept them closed for so long that Mrs. Jarrett thought he had gone to sleep. Anyway, she suspected he had not been listening.
In the middle of the night he woke with the feeling that he had just heard his name called, but he found it was a dream. He couldn’t get to sleep again. First he was cold, and he had to kneel in his bed and tug the window shut. Then he discovered he had a headache. He felt his way to the bathroom, found an aspirin tin, and washed two tablets down with a mouthful of lukewarm water from the faucet. In the mirror his silhouette was gilt-edged with moonlight. He studied how his shoulders sloped. He reminded himself of a low hill. There seemed to be no good reason to move any more, even to go back to bed. He stood rooted at the sink. Then far below him he heard a whirring sound, so faint he might have imagined it. He cocked his head, trying to place its source. With his hands stretched before him like a sleepwalker he guided himself out of the bathroom and into his studio, toward the open rear window, where the sound became louder. Even there he took a minute to identify it: the cranking of Mary’s sock machine. He placed both hands on the windowsill and lowered his head, forming a clear image of her in some long flowing flannel nightgown, a shawl around her shoulders, working away by the light of a smoky lantern. Then he turned and went back to his bedroom.
Still in the dark, he opened drawers and slid hangers down his closet rod and rummaged through his shoebag. He found the one dress shirt he possessed, easily recognizable in its crackling cellophane envelope from the laundry. It was limp and sleazy and the collar was frayed, but he thought it would do. He knotted a tie, fumbling a little, trying to remember the complicated set of motions learned from Mr. Somerset’s predecessor many years before. Then his suit—a three-piecer, ordered by mail back in the fifties but it still fit fairly well. Socks that might or might not match—he couldn’t tell for sure and it seemed important not to turn on the light. Pinchy black shoes, also mail-order. A handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket the way his mother had taught him. Then back in front of the bathroom mirror he combed his hair, puffing up the little moonlit cloud skimming his scalp. He set the comb down on the edge of the sink and walked very slowly out of the room and toward the stairs. Every step made him sicker, but he didn’t let himself feel it.
All the doors on the second floor were closed and dark. The only sound was a ragged snore from Mr. Somerset’s room. On the first floor, street lights shining in picked up the shapes of the furniture but not its colors. Everything was a different shade of velvety gray, like what he had imagined a color-blind man must see. Jeremy had often tried to picture color-blindness—the worst affliction he could imagine next to blindness itself—and now, as if this were the only reason he had dressed up and come downstairs, he stood for a while letting his eyes blur and swim. Then the whirring sound started up again. He straightened his shoulders and passed through the parlor and into the dining room, where a knife blade of light shone beneath Mary’s door. His first knock was not heard, but at the second knock the machine stopped. There was a moment of silence. Then, “Is someone there?” she asked.
It’s me, it’s Jeremy.
“Jeremy?”
“I’m sorry to bother you at this—”
The doorknob rattled, so loudly and so close to him that he started. Light flooded the dining room and screwed his eyes up, and Mary stood before him in her blue dress with her hair still knotted as if this were daytime. “Was I disturbing you?” she asked him. “I thought while Darcy was sleeping I might turn out a few extra pairs.”
“No, no.”
Darcy lay sprawled in the double bed, taking up more than her share of it. She was shielded from the light by a blue paper Woolworth’s bag that Mary had fitted over the lamp bulb. Now that Jeremy’s eyes were adjusting he saw that the room was actually dim. He couldn’t imagine how anyone would be able to thread a needle here. “I should have thought,” he said. “You don’t have to keep the machine in your bedroom, you can set it up anywhere. No one will mind. I didn’t guess that you would be doing this while Darcy was asleep, you see—”
He whispered, taking care not to wake Darcy, but Mary spoke in a normal tone. “Why, that’s very nice of you, Jeremy,” she said, “but I don’t believe it bothers her. She’s a very sound sleeper.” They both looked at Darcy, who seemed pale and waxy, with her eyes sealed and her arms and legs still for once. “Thank you for thinking of it, though,” Mary said, turning back and giving him a bright, social smile. She thought that was what he had come for—to offer her space. She expected him to go now. “Maybe I’ll quit for tonight anyway,” she said. “I do feel a little tired.”
“But nobody knows you’re still married,” Jeremy said suddenly.
She stopped smiling.
“They think you’re widowed, or divorced. They don’t know you’re not free to remarry.”
“Jeremy, really I—”
“Please listen. That’s all I’m asking, if you say no I won’t ever trouble you again. Listen. You see how well you fit in here. Sometimes we have had new boarders come in one day and leave the next, they just don’t seem to like it. But you didn’t do that. You’ve stayed a whole season with us.”
“Yes, but you see I really didn’t—”
“You fit in here. Everybody wants you to stay. And you know it has a lot of advantages, kitchen privileges and Mrs. Jarrett babysits. As far as money goes, why, I do make a little money from time to time, not very much I know but enough so that you could stop knitting argyles, and besides Darcy needs a father, they say she’s getting out of hand without one—”
“Who says that?” Mary asked, so loudly that Darcy stirred and murmured.
“Mrs. Jarrett does.”
“Well, I’m very surprised at her.”
“So this is what I was considering,” Jeremy said. “Couldn’t we just pre
tend to be married?”
Mary stared at him.
“Oh no, please don’t be angry,” he told her, stumbling to get the words out. “I know how it sounds. But you see, to me it would be marriage. It isn’t as if there were any other way we could do it. We could go out one morning all dressed up and then come in and tell the others we’d been married at City Hall. That’s all we’d have to do. Then we would be married in the eyes of everyone we know, and I would take care of you and you would start another life instead of going along on tag ends the way you are now, you could give all your time to Darcy and have more children if you wanted and never have to leave them to go out and work in sweatshops—”
“Jeremy, dear,” Mary said, “I’m sure you are saying all this with the best of intentions—”
“I am,” he said sadly. He understood now that she would refuse, but still he had to go on. “I am proposing, not propositioning. I mean only the deepest respect,” he told her, and he looked up to find her nearly smiling, no longer so severe but kind-faced and amused, gently shaking her head. “Besides,” he said, beginning to mumble, “I love you.”
“Thank you, Jeremy. I do appreciate it.”
“What hope do you have for a better life, if you keep on saying no to everything new?”
But he was speaking mainly to himself now, offering himself consolation, and he had already turned to go. He saw the dining room lit into color from Mary’s doorway, a clump of dusty strawflowers turning orange on the table. Then her face appeared in his mind as it had looked at the moment of his turning—the smile fading, the eyes suddenly darker and more thoughtful. He turned back again. Mary took a breath, and he knew from the sudden shock and panic flooding through him that she was about to say yes.