by Anne Tyler
Pauline collected herself, finally. “Yes,” she said, “it’s going to be hard. I’m so sorry she won’t be here.” And other things, other consoling, murmuring, commiserating things. But her mind was a mischievous animal cavorting elsewhere as she wiped her eyes and tucked her hankie away and started slogging through her crab cake and her coleslaw and green beans.
In spite of everything, she asked him in when he brought her home. She just hated to walk alone into an empty house. She hated the abruptness of it, the sudden contrast. So she said, “Won’t you come in? I’ve got cocoa”—sensing that cocoa would be his beverage of choice.
“Cocoa!” he said. “From scratch?”
“Naturally from scratch.”
It was Nestlé’s Quik, but he would never know.
She settled him on the living-room couch and she made him take off his sport coat, and when she brought him his mug of cocoa she sat on the couch also, even though she had no interest in him and would, in fact, have felt repelled if he’d moved any closer. (Not that there was the remotest chance of that.) His cragginess struck her now as dried-upness; his midwestern accent seemed priggish. But she said, “This has been so much fun! I don’t know when I’ve had such a nice evening.” And when he handed back his mug and said he couldn’t believe he had stayed this late, she said, “It’s just like that song, isn’t it? Like ‘Two Sleepy People.’ I used to think of that song when my husband and I were courting. We’d come in from a date and we’d both be falling on our faces with tiredness but you know how it is; there was still so much to talk about, so much we wanted to tell each other . . . and it always made me think of that song about the couple who couldn’t bear to say good night. Do you remember that?”
“Oh, yes,” Dun said. “I remember it well.” But he was reaching for his sport coat as he spoke.
She phoned Pagan at his dorm. It was only nine o’clock—the shank of the evening, for him. Some other boy answered and then shouted for him raucously. “Anton! Pay Anton?” he bellowed. But finally he said, “Sorry. Guess he must be out.”
“Well,” Pauline said, “tell him that his grandma called, please. No special reason; just wanted to gab.” She didn’t suppose Pagan would ever get the message, though. He lived in a way she couldn’t imagine, boys and girls tumbling all over each other and dreadful music blaring down the halls, although he seemed to be thriving.
She phoned Katie on the pretext of thanking her for lunch. But Katie said, “Oh, you didn’t have to—what, sweetheart? It’s Pauline,” so Pauline knew enough to say a quick goodbye. Katie didn’t even ask how her date had gone; that was how eager she was to get back to her husband.
She phoned Wanda. They could talk about Marilyn. How was Marilyn really doing? Why was she still feeling sick? Shouldn’t she be over that now? But Wanda’s telephone rang ten times without an answer. She must be at one of her daughters’. Wanda was very close to her daughters.
Years ago, so long ago that Michael had still been doing the leg lifts prescribed by the physical therapist, he had told Pauline that if he ever got a terminal illness, a part of him would rejoice because at least then he could stop exercising. Pauline had been scandalized. “What a thought!” she’d said, but he had gone on to add, “And cocktail parties, and dinner parties, and visiting back and forth and talking with meaningless people about politics and the weather—I could give it all up. I could shut myself away and give up, and no one would blame me.”
“I can’t imagine,” Pauline had told him. “Me, I’d be doing the opposite. I’d be trying to cram as much as I could into the time I had left. I’d be dancing till dawn! I’d be greedy for people!”
Well, there you had the difference between them. It seemed unjust that she should be the one who was living on her own now, while he was happily ensconced in another household.
(“You should see the two of them,” Karen had once reported, in the amused and rueful tone she often used for Michael. “Sitting at their kitchen table drawing up their household budget, recording their gas expense and their mileage, sorting coupons for free car washes and carpet-cleaning discounts. Like two peas in a pod.”)
Pauline walked through the house turning off lights. In the bedroom, she adjusted the blinds and changed into her nightgown. The water in the bathroom sink ran plenty hot, she was glad to find. She ought to apply her new Nighttime Renutritive Cream, but it seemed like too much trouble.
She slid under the covers and reached for the magazine she had been reading the night before. An article on . . . what? On how to organize her time. It had put her to sleep, and no wonder. How to fill her time was the problem. She turned the page. She flipped past ads for colognes, for ladies’ razors, for tummy-slimming pantyhose. Her eyelids felt like heavy velvet draperies. A man in a tuxedo fastened a string of pearls around a beautiful woman’s bare neck. A noted nutritionist wrote about the hidden calories in our diet. Calories hidden in salad dressings, in so-called healthful granolas . . . so-called healthful granolas . . .
She woke with a start, and look! It was morning! No, that was just the lamplight. She sighed and flicked the switch off. Then she slid flat in her bed, but wouldn’t you know, now she couldn’t get back to sleep. She was like one of those dolls whose eyes close when they’re laid down, except she’d got it backwards. Lie down and she sprang instantly awake. In the past she had tried sleeping pills, but they had made her so groggy that she had felt helpless and frightened. Better just to struggle toward sleep on her own. Turn onto her side. Turn onto her back. Search for a cooler spot on the pillow.
It was thinking that made her nights so long. All the bad old thoughts came crowding to the front of her mind. She had lived her life wrong; she’d made a big mess of it. She had married the wrong man just because that was the track she’d been traveling on and she hadn’t known how to get off; so she’d gone ahead with it and behaved forever after like someone she wasn’t, someone shrewish and difficult. She had let the people she loved slip through her fingers—even Michael, whom she did love, it had turned out, wrong man or not: his patience and his steadiness and his endearingly earnest nature. How could it be possible that Michael really had left her?
And Lindy. Sometimes it seemed to her that Lindy was the one she’d loved most, although of course a mother loves all her children the same. Sometimes when the car radio played one of those old songs (“Are You Going to San Francisco?” was the saddest, so lost and faraway-sounding), she had to blink the tears back in order to see the road. Yet she had failed to keep Lindy from harm. She hadn’t protected her, hadn’t held fast to her, hadn’t even waited up for her when Lindy went out in the evenings. She had felt powerless, was why. She’d had no idea how to deal with it all. Her own girlhood had been so innocent and safe.
Still, other parents had managed. Other parents’ children hadn’t disappeared.
And she should have helped her father more during her mother’s illness. She should have had him to dinner more after her mother died. What could she have imagined to be more pressing than that?
She thought of her mother-in-law, aged and tremulous, whom she’d railed at for her ditheriness and her packrat ways. “Don’t badger me so; I’ll have a stroke,” Mother Anton had told her, and Pauline had snapped, “Fine. Let’s say you’ve already had one and you’re lying on the floor; just tell me from there which of these magazines I can throw out.” This long-ago exchange came back now word for word, and Pauline winced and covered her eyes with one hand.
Now she remembered that it wasn’t Michael, after all, who had stayed up late with her talking. Was it? No, it was someone else, some earlier boy whose name she couldn’t recall. She couldn’t picture his face, even, and she certainly couldn’t say what they had been discussing. All she knew for sure was, the two of them had talked and talked, and Pauline had not been alone.
9. Longtime Child
One cold, gray morning in February of 1990—cold enough to have frosted overnight—George was scraping his windshield when h
e heard the sound of an engine starting up nearby. He glanced down his block of stately Colonial houses, each with its two or three vehicles parked out front, but the car spitting puffs of smoke belonged to no one he knew. It was a white Ford Falcon, ancient, dulled, rusted, dented, chattering as it idled in place. George turned away and finished scraping his windshield. Then he tossed the scraper onto his rear seat, settled behind the wheel, and started his own engine, which barely whispered as he slid away from the curb. He drove a Cadillac Eldorado—the last of the good decentsized cars, in his opinion.
Braking for a bus at North Charles, he glanced into his rearview mirror and happened to notice the Falcon just behind him. Its windshield was completely cleared, not scraped-looking but gleaming warmly from edge to edge; so he knew the car must have been running for some time. Maybe it had come from elsewhere to drop off a neighbor’s cleaning woman. By now the bus had lumbered on by. George focused forward again and took a right onto Charles Street.
His office was in Towson. He was a vice-president at Jennings, Jensen and had his own parking space, designated by a white wooden sign that read RESERVED GEO. ANTON. After he had locked his car he walked around to the trunk to retrieve his briefcase, and that was when he saw the Falcon backing out of the lot. Apparently it had turned in by mistake, because only members of his firm were allowed to park here. He watched it chug away toward York Road, its rear end unfashionably high off the ground. Then he forgot about it.
Several days passed before he saw the Falcon again. It was parked on Allegheny, a block and a half from his office. He noticed it as he stood saying goodbye to a client he’d had lunch with, and he faltered in mid-sentence when he caught sight of that distinctive rear end and the rust-freckled, crumpled trunk. A CARTER/MONDALE sticker hung in tatters from the bumper. Nobody sat inside, though. He collected himself and turned his attention back to his client.
Late the next Monday afternoon as he was driving home from work he saw the Falcon parked on Greenway, not far from his own street. This time it was occupied. He slowed and peered inside, but the car behind him honked and he was forced to drive on. Anyhow, he had seen enough to reassure him. The driver was a woman, mid-fortyish and nonthreatening and almost certainly a stranger, although he couldn’t swear to that in the half-light. Besides, she’d turned her face away when she saw him looking in. But that was only natural. Nobody likes to be spied on.
He parked in front of his house and locked up, took his briefcase from the trunk, and waved to Julia Matthews who was just slipping into her Buick two doors down. As he started up his front walk he heard another car brake and reverse, and something made him turn to look. It was the Falcon, maneuvering itself into the space behind his Eldorado. The space was more than big enough but the driver had to make three passes before she managed to fit in, and even so she ended up about two feet away from the curb. Throughout the whole process, George stood waiting, facing the Falcon squarely and holding his briefcase at his side.
The woman got out and shut her door and started toward him. She was colorless and shabby, one of those people who dress for cold weather by piling on disorganized layers—not a single, appropriate-weight coat but a series of thick sweaters in various competing lengths over a cotton print dress. Wool knee socks and felt clogs gave her a bohemian air. Her dark, straight hair hung to her shoulders (a witchlike style in older women, George had always thought), and her eyes were brown and small and noticeably bright, even at a distance.
She stopped a few feet away from him. She said, “George?”
He had a feeling there was something that he was avoiding knowing.
“George Anton?” she said.
He took a breath and said, “Lindy?”
“It is you!” she cried, but she seemed just as disbelieving as he was. She started to step closer but then appeared to change her mind.
He had pictured this moment a million times. Now that it was actually happening, he felt uncomfortably aware of his forty-five-year-old self. Lindy’s own aging he had imagined with each passing decade, at least in a vague, theoretical way, but somehow he had never envisioned himself standing before her in his wide beige camel-hair coat, a chunky, faded-blond businessman with a briefcase in his fist.
“I’ve been following you for days,” she told him. “I hope I didn’t spook you. I was trying to get my courage up.”
“Courage!” he said. “Why would you need courage for me?”
“I found your name in the phone book. You were the only one.”
She was clutching her purse with both hands—some sort of Native American-looking woven cloth pouch. Yes, she did seem nervous. “I looked for Mom and Dad,” she said, “for Karen . . . not a mention. Not even Anton’s Grocery. Where has everyone gone? What’s happened?”
It was he who stepped closer, finally. He thought of giving her a hug or kissing her cheek, but that seemed too intimate for a woman he no longer knew. Instead he took her arm and said, “Come inside, why don’t you.”
She could have pursued her questions, but she didn’t. Maybe she feared the answers. To cover the awkward silence, George made more of the walk to the house than he needed to, at one point steering her elaborately around a minuscule unevenness where a tree root had lifted a flagstone. Her clogs made a padding sound, like paws. Something she wore jingled. She would be the type to favor heavy, non-precious jewelry whose purchase benefited some disadvantaged tribal craftsmen.
He was relieved to hear the burglar alarm beep when he opened the door. Sally and Samantha must be out. Just for now, he would prefer this to be a two-person conversation. He set his keys on the credenza and crossed the hall to punch in the code. “Come on in,” he said, removing his coat. “May I take some of your . . . wraps?”
She didn’t answer. She was gazing around the room at the tapestry he and Sally had brought back from Florence, the little arched leaded-glass window, the French doors leading to the rest of the house. A crystal chandelier directly above her lit the top of her head, pointing out tiny flyaway wires of gray hair that gave her a hectic look. Her face had gone slightly soft, developed a sort of extra layer, and all her sharp angles seemed blunted. (As if she’d been wrapped in a sheet of fondant, George fancied.) But her voice still had the unmodulated, don’t-care-how-I-sound quality that he remembered from their childhood. “This is quite a place,” she said, and the squawking tone she gave “place” was eerily familiar.
He said, “Let’s go sit where it’s comfortable.”
He walked ahead of her, turning on lights, and Lindy followed. In the living room, she plopped herself on the sofa. George sat in the wing chair across from her, a low, glass-topped table between them. He was conscious of keeping his shoulders back, holding his stomach in.
Even so, she said, “You look a lot different.”
“Yes, well, I’ve been meaning to go on a—”
“Are you the last one left?” she asked him. “Tell me. I have to know.”
He said, “No, of course not.”
“In the phone book—”
“Oh, the phone book,” he said. “Karen changed back to Antonczyk; that’s why you wouldn’t have found her. And Dad: after he and Mom divorced—”
“Divorced!” Lindy cried.
“After they divorced, he remarried and moved to his wife’s house and so the telephone listing—”
“But what about Pagan?” Lindy broke in.
“Pagan’s fine.”
It wasn’t till she sank back against the sofa cushions that George realized how tensely she had been sitting. She said, “He grew up okay? He’s happy? He’s all right?”
“He’s fine, I told you. But as I was starting to say—”
“Was it Mom and Dad who raised him? They stayed together long enough?”
“Oh, yes. Or, no . . . I mean, they didn’t stay together long enough but they shared the care of him; so it all worked out. But anyhow, Dad’s listed under Anna’s name, Anna Stuart, and—”
“Anna Grant
Stuart? Mom’s high-school friend?”
“I didn’t realize you knew her.”
“She came to see us once, when we were still on St. Cassian Street. She brought us a box of chocolate turtles.”
“I have no memory of that,” George said.
“Was Anna the reason for the divorce?”
“No, no. Good Lord, no; the divorce was, what, six or seven years earlier,” George said. He paused to remind himself where he was heading. “So, as far as Anton’s Grocery, well, first Dad moved it out to the county and changed its name, and then he sold it to World O’Food, must have been a couple of years ago now . . .”
“Dad hated World O’Food! He said chains would be the ruin of us!”
“. . . and that’s why you wouldn’t have found Anton’s Grocery in the phone book,” George plowed on. “Now, as for Mom, well . . .”
He swallowed.
“Mom, urn, in fact, she . . . died,” he said.
He felt a kind of jagged break in the air between them. He wished that he had thought of some less shocking term, maybe some ambiguous term that Lindy would misunderstand for a moment.