by Anne Tyler
He sank back through time until he encountered the faded, powdery face of his mother—a woman who had prayed all day every day, every breath a prayer. (“I don’t have to say my prayers at bedtime, Jeremy, I’ve been saying them since I got up this morning. I said them all last night in my sleep. It’s you I pray for.”) He saw her pouring tea at his tenth birthday party, which he and she had celebrated all alone in the parlor. “Just us would be more fun,” she said, and of course she was right, because his classmates disliked him and if they spoke to him at all they called him Germy. “We don’t need those other children,” she said. She smiled at him over the teapot, with the corners of her mouth trembling slightly the way they always did, making her look uncertain of the smile, uncertain of what she said, uncertain that there was anything less than God Himself that she might have confidence in. The smile grew pale and then transparent. The teapot vanished. He saw her from even longer ago than the birthday party, some distant point in time when hats were covered with starched cloth roses and her limp, watery dress was the height of elegance—the dress that looked exactly like her, its tracery of flowers so faint you could almost wonder if she had put it on inside out. She was taking him to the dentist. She stood in front of a receptionist whose hair seemed to be coated with black shoe polish. “I don’t care what you thought,” the receptionist said, “the appointment was for an hour ago and you’ve missed it. You kept the doctor waiting. He had to go on to another patient.”
“Well, perhaps there was a misunderstanding. Because I couldn’t have made it for an hour ago, you see, Jeremy would still have been in school then. Perhaps we—”
“Are you questioning my word?”
“Please, oh please—”
In front of all those people—a waiting room full of watching people on needlepoint chairs. The receptionist bent her head to the letter she was writing, putting an end to the conversation. Her fountain pen dug angrily into the page and sparks of black ink flew out. “Come, Jeremy,” his mother said finally. Then she gave a little trembling sigh and took his hand to turn him around, to lead him out of the room. On the sidewalk she said, “Don’t feel bad, darling, we’ll get you another appointment.” She patted his cheek, where a muscle was jumping. “We mustn’t waste our lives feeling cross with such people.” But it wasn’t the receptionist he was angry at; it was his mother. Why had she waited there so foolishly, the center of attention, twisting her ridiculous little taffeta evening bag around and around in her hands? Why had she pleaded that way? He imagined the receptionist leaping up suddenly, overturning her chair behind her and stabbing his mother with that sputtery fountain pen. “Take that, you worm! Die!” His mother would only cower lower, and keep that tentative smile on her face. She would crumble into the floor, ground down to powder by the receptionist’s heels, not even raising her arms to protect herself. He felt flooded suddenly with grief and horror and a deep, anguished love. “Jeremy, darling,” his mother said, “shall we go home and have a cup of cocoa?” And he said, “All right, Mama,” but it hurt to speak, even; he had clenched his teeth so hard that his jaw muscles ached.
That was long ago. It was all in the past. He was through with that.
He turned his pillow to the cooler side, lowering his head again very gently so that he would not wake Mary. He began reconstructing his favorite night game. In this game he possessed a sauntering, slap-happy courage that no one else suspected. He was given to acting on impulse. Driving down a city street one day on an errand (never mind that he didn’t know how to drive, and had no car; he would work that out later), he was suddenly taken with the urge to leave town. He would speed along for block after block, at first just toying with the idea and then giving himself over to it as the buoyant feeling of freedom swelled in his chest. All the traffic lights were green and all roads led directly out of Baltimore, without so much as another car to slow him down. The sky was dull and sunless, the best weather for his eyes. He could travel for hours without squinting or straining. He would stop when he got tired. Maybe never. If he ever settled down again it would be in a small, bare, whitewashed cubicle, possibly in a desert. He would change his name—a one-syllable first name, a one-syllable last name. Something crisp. His art would change as well. That would happen automatically. If he changed his name his work would be totally different. He would be childless, wifeless, friendless—all alone, like that silent golden period between his mother’s death and Mary’s arrival. Only this time, of course, he would know enough to appreciate it. Back then, he hadn’t. He had felt then that his life was running out too quickly, and that he should have something more to show for it. Was that what caused all major events in the world? He had felt compelled to take desperate steps before it was too late, but now it seemed that life would stretch on forever and grow more tangled and noisy every day. There had been no need for such a plunge.
He had waited for love like a man awaiting salvation. The secret, the hidden key. Was it love that failed Jeremy, or was it Jeremy who failed love? Was there anything to hope for after love?
The baby started crying, working up to it with sharp little noises that broke into Jeremy’s thoughts. Mary rose from the bed and stumbled over to the crib, maybe still asleep, already murmuring words of comfort. “There now, Rachel. There now, Rachel.” She picked the baby up and Jeremy felt the jolt of the mattress as she returned to bed. “It’s that tooth, I believe,” she said. She spoke without looking at him, taking it for granted that he would be lying awake. She propped her pillow on the headboard, sat back against it and undid the buttons of her nightgown. When Jeremy looked over he found the baby’s shadow blended into Mary’s, and all that emerged clearly was one moonlit breast. “Where is Edward’s old teething ring?” Mary asked him. “I’ll have to find it in the morning.”
The baby gulped softly. Jeremy laid a hand over his eyes.
“The drugstore has something you can rub on their gums but I don’t believe it really works,” Mary said.
Once, one of the few times she had ever referred to her life before she met him, she told him that when Darcy was born she had worried about feeding her. “I thought I wouldn’t have enough milk,” she said. Then she laughed; nursing came as naturally as breathing now, and he had often seen her walking around the house or even cooking with a baby glued to her breast. He tried to imagine her worrying over Darcy. He constructed a scene in which she might worry again—in which she would come to him, on the edge of tears, asking him what he thought was wrong. “Never mind, you’re just tired,” he would tell her. “You must leave things up to me for a while.” He would arrange cushions around her, bring her tea, shepherd the older children to the other end of the house. “Quiet now, leave your mother alone. She needs her rest.” He would form around her a nest of love and safety, and later when he tiptoed in to check on her she would ask him, “What would I do without you?” He had been picturing that for years now. He had ordered a book before Abbie was born, a book for prospective fathers; he had read and memorized all the forms of support that he might offer her. Lighten her load, the book told him. Try to help out as much as you can, shoulder all the burdens that distract her, be prepared for unreasonable tears. None of that advice had come in handy. Mary made her own nest. She sat beside him now relaxed and warm, and the baby gave soft mmm’s of satisfaction on the tail of every swallow.
Then Mary said, “This thing I’ve been meaning to talk to you about—”
The baby stopped nursing and protested, giving away some tension in Mary. Jeremy opened his eyes. He had been aware all day of this news hanging over his head. He even thought he knew what it was. “You’re pregnant,” he said.
“What?”
“I thought—”
“You know I can’t get pregnant when I’m nursing.”
“I was afraid that might not have worked this time,” he said.
“You were afraid?”
He kept quiet. He didn’t know how to take it back.
“Jeremy?” Mary said
, but then she let it rest. “Well,” she said, “I seem to be divorced, Jeremy.”
For a moment he thought she meant divorced from him, and his heart gave a lurch. Just for that one little imaginary game he had played? He hadn’t meant anything by it. But they weren’t even married! What was she talking about?
“Guy has divorced me.”
He had asked her, once, what her husband’s name was. It was the least of what he wanted to know, but he had never dared bring up the real questions and he had thought that maybe, having started with his name, she might go on to tell him more. She hadn’t. “Guy Tell,” she said. “Guy Alan Tell.” After that, nothing. Not even chance clues—not even mention of a trip on which her husband, incidentally, had accompanied her, or reports of some adventure in which he happened to be included. That single fact, “Guy Tell,” had become embedded in him, and he had layered it over with a thousand attempts at forgetfulness, with a literal squinching shut of his eyes whenever any thought of her husband recurred. Now her saying the name stunned him. It was as if she had suddenly entered into some hidden fantasy of his—named, out loud, a product of his most private imagination. “What?” he said. She seemed to understand that she didn’t need to repeat it. She waited, calmly.
“You’re divorced?” he said.
He sat up. He noticed how the air waves seemed to shiver, recoiling from a shocking word: divorce. Such a hard, ugly sound. Nothing like this warm-breasted shadow beside him. “Who was—how did you find out?” he said.
“The lawyer wrote me. They got my address from Gloria.”
“From—? I don’t quite see.”
“From his mother.”
“Ah,” he said. This secret husband had had a mother, then. Also a father, and perhaps a grandmother who knitted him winter scarves. He had friends who called out greetings on the streets, he paid visits to people, he no doubt drove a car and made purchases and worked in some place of employment. He had once lain beside this very same woman, perhaps waiting for her to finish nursing the baby before he reached out for her with absolute, cool confidence. A lump of something like clay, thick and soft, rose up in Jeremy’s throat.
“He divorced me on grounds of desertion,” Mary said. “That’s allowed when he hasn’t known my whereabouts for so long.”
“Well—” said Jeremy. He coughed. “I mean—how did she know your whereabouts? His mother.”
“Oh, that’s just lately. I wrote her a letter.”
“You did?”
“Just a note, really. I wanted to find out how she was getting along.”
“I see,” Jeremy said.
“I was very close to her, you see. She was always very kind to me. And the other day I was thinking, ‘It’s Gloria’s birthday right about now. Couldn’t I send her a card to tell her I still think of her?’ ”
She still thought of her. When was that? At what point in her cheerful, bustling day, behind that tranquil face, did her thoughts turn to her old life? Really, he didn’t know anything about her. She might be thinking about her husband constantly; she might be full of discontent; she might be planning some new love affair far away from him. He suddenly remembered a night last week when she had been braiding Pippi’s hair in front of the television. Some celebrities were appearing on a panel show, among them a movie hero with deep, shadowed eyes. “Why does everyone think that man is so attractive?” Mary asked. Jeremy had been filling out contest blanks, ignoring the program. “What man?” he asked. “That one on the left,” she said, “that tall attractive man beside the blonde.” Jeremy looked up then, puzzled, but Mary had not heard her own words and she merely snapped a rubber band on Pippi’s braid and gave her a pat. “Off you go now. Bedtime.” But it wasn’t until now that he thought to wonder: Was she longing for something more? When she read those romantic novels she liked, with the distraught pretty girls on the covers, was she wishing that she too had a man who would carry her up castle stairs or defend her with his sword or even, perhaps, frighten her a little with his dark, mysterious gaze?
As if she had guessed at all the cracks of uncertainty running through him, she turned to look at him over the baby’s head. In the dark her face seemed like a piece of felt. The baby made sucking noises in her sleep, lying on Mary’s arm as limp as a beanbag. Only Jeremy felt some brittle crumbling sensation inside him that kept him sitting upright.
“Jeremy? I guess maybe we could be married now,” Mary said.
“Well, if you wanted to.”
“Do you?”
“I do if you do,” he said.
“You don’t sound very sure.”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“We’ll have to do it in secret, then,” she said. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me, Jeremy. For real, this time.”
“Oh, certainly. Anything you say.”
“But I’ll make all the arrangements. Would you like to get married this Thursday? Olivia’s home on Thursdays, she can babysit.”
“All right,” he said.
The crumbling sensation went on. Bits of him kept breaking away and falling, but Mary didn’t seem to notice.
All through the next day, while he sat in his studio filing down the metal edges of a statue, he kept thinking about this mother-in-law whom Mary still remembered after so many years. He saw her as fat, blowsy, good-natured—an open-hearted woman who could give Mary some indefinable quality that he was not up to. He pictured her holding Mary’s letter in enormous, motherly hands. He tried to imagine what Mary would have written. It was polite, it was almost obligatory, to ask a woman about the welfare of her son. “How is Guy doing? I think of him often.” Oh, he could almost see those words in Mary’s round, looped handwriting. “I live with someone else now but Gladys (or Dolores or whatever her name was), it’s not the same at all, he’s so wishy-washy and spends so much time in his studio, and at first he wanted to make love too often and now he doesn’t want to hardly ever.” Jeremy winced and dropped a bolt and picked it up again. He imagined the mother-in-law’s answer. “Guy has a divorce since he gave up hope but you could come back any time, any time at all, Mary. Things have never been the same here since you left.”
He knew that was what she would say. Things would never be the same any place that Mary left.
At noon one of the children climbed the stairs to tell him lunch was ready, but he called through the door that he was too busy to come. In actual fact he was finishing the ring-around-the-rosy statue. He was working slowly, as he always did near the end of a piece, putting in small touches with long pauses for deliberation. He could easily have stopped for lunch. It was just that the thought of going downstairs made him feel so tired, somehow. All that noise! That tumult of emotion, rising in billows around him as he tried to swallow his food! Even from here he could hear the clatter of silverware, the children’s endless contests for their mother’s attention and the sudden clamor over some domestic accident—as if, overturned, those peanut butter glasses painted with nursery rhyme characters had spilled forth shouts and laughter and scoldings instead of milk. Above it all Mary’s voice rode, like a ship on waves. He could not understand how she managed this, speaking at such a low and steady pitch. He himself was drowned out, every time. “Children? Oh, children,” he would say, “couldn’t you please—” Now Mary laughed, a rich soft laugh that carried effortlessly to every corner of the house. A few minutes later he heard her climbing the stairs. Dishes rattled gently on a tray. “Jeremy,” she called, “I’ve brought your lunch up.”
“Come in,” he said, but she couldn’t; he had absent-mindedly locked the door. First the knob turned and then she knocked. He had to put down his file and get off his stool and let her in—a task that seemed larger than it was, like having to rearrange every cell of his body within some thick dark sac of concentration. “Egg salad,” she said. He stared at her dimly. She carried the tray in past him and began laying his lunch out on the table in front of the statue—a glass of milk, a salad bowl, a sandwich o
n a plate. Every time she set a dish down she had to move something of his out of the way. A glue bucket was pushed aside, a paintbrush was laid across the top of it (not where it belonged). A horseshoe magnet clanged to the floor. “Sorry,” Mary said cheerfully. He felt that a long tail of noise and energy was pluming out behind her, brushing objects in his room as she turned. Although he had been thinking of her all morning, this seemed to be a different Mary from the one in his thoughts—clearer, sharper, more brightly colored. She changed the air in his studio, stirring up the center of it and making the corners look darker and dustier. The room appeared to be hers now. When she stepped back to look at the statue, he had the feeling that that was hers too. He imagined how efficiently she would make a statue: fitting it together in no time, without a wasted motion or a single revision, relying upon some rich lode of intuition that he did not possess. When she was done she would give the statue a loving smack on the rump, as if it were a child sent out to play after she had tied its shoelaces. “Very nice,” she said now. “I like it.”
She turned and kissed him. She wound her arms around his neck. He said, “I should get back to work, Mary.”
But then when she was gone the other Mary returned, the silent floating one of his thoughts, and the image of her writing to her mother-in-law continued to pain him so much that he sat on his stool bent over and clutching his chest, like a man suffering a heart attack.