by Anne Tyler
A tantalizingly familiar mixture of frustration and bafflement swept through him, and he said, “Suit yourself.”
But Sally said, “Lindy. Please. Reconsider. They’ll be desperate to see you! Couldn’t we just phone them and invite them over? Just for a little visit? A few little minutes, maybe?”
“You know,” Lindy told her, “I really feel I might be about to die of tiredness. I’m sorry. You seem like a very nice person. But all I want to do is go home and go to bed. George, I left my number on your desk pad if Pagan wants it. But he won’t.”
The peculiar thing about it—the unjust thing—was that everybody blamed George. Sally said he’d acted so passive, he’d given up so easily, he had seemed almost pleased when Pagan turned Lindy down. “Pleased!” George said. “Excuse me, but who was it who phoned him, may I ask? Who told him she wanted to speak to him?”
“I swear you looked downright satisfied when you heard he wouldn’t meet her in person. You said, ‘Oh, well, I suppose that’s understandable.’” (Here Sally made her voice sound booming and pompous, really nothing like George’s.) “Admit it: you were on his side. You didn’t think he should meet her, either. You’re an unforgiving person, George Anton.”
“All I meant,” he told her, “was that it might have been anticipated that a three-year-old thrown to the wolves by his mother would possibly not have much to say to her all these decades later.”
“He’s not a three-year-old anymore; he’s twenty-five. And of course he has things to say to her, even if they’re angry things! You should have called him right back, George, and told him to get himself over here. You shouldn’t have left the den in the first place. Lindy probably said everything wrong out of nervousness.”
“I was giving her some privacy, Sally.”
“Privacy, is that what you call it,” Sally said. “The fact is, you’re exactly like your father. You think standoffishness is a virtue.”
And his father? His father, who should have been the most unforgiving of all, behaved as if Lindy had merely been out shopping all these years. “When’s she coming back? Did she say?” he asked when George telephoned. “Why didn’t you let me know about this? Didn’t it occur to you that I would want to see her?” This was a man who’d suffered untold worry and grief, not to mention an entire second round of carpool duty and soccer games and parent-teacher conferences for the sake of somebody else’s child, but now all he wanted to know was “Did she at least ask about me? Did she wonder how I was doing?”
“Naturally she asked,” George said. (Well, more or less she had.)
“Was she upset about your mom?”
“Oh, yes.”
His father gave a ragged sigh. “Poor, poor Pauline,” he said. “It kills me that she didn’t live to see this.”
“I know, Dad.”
“She never gave up hope, I could tell. She never stopped believing that one day, sooner or later . . . Why, that time she had a chance to go on a cruise, remember? She could have gone with a group from her church but she said, oh, she would have to be away so long, she just didn’t think she ought to. And I was arguing with her, do it! We would manage just fine! You were already in college by then and Karen was, what; well, if you were, say, eighteen then I guess Karen would have been . . .”
Ever since his retirement, George’s father had grown more trying. His conversations were so long-winded now, so shapeless and convoluted and pedantic, full of repetitions, qualifiers, self-corrections, pauses to search for just the word he had in mind, dogged attempts to nail down the exact, specific date or street or name even when it made no difference to his story. All due to loneliness, no doubt. The grocery had been his whole social life. Ordinarily, Anna could be counted on to move things along. “Well, June or July, one or the other. At any rate . . .” she would gently suggest. But she couldn’t help over the telephone; so it was up to George to break in, finally, and say, “It’s true that Mom always seemed to be kind of . . . looking out the window for Lindy.”
“She kept every single one of Lindy’s belongings in case she ever came back, did you know that? Her clothes and books and papers and cosmetics and LP records.”
George certainly did know that. It was he and Karen who’d discovered it all, while they were still in that state of disbelief that follows a sudden death. (Marilyn Bryk, his mother’s old friend, had phoned George on a rainy March evening—Marilyn the cancer patient, who should have been the one to die first, by all rights. She’d gotten word before anyone because the police found a birthday card from her in Pauline’s purse.) Imagine how it felt to come upon a faded black turtleneck, a pair of black jeans studded hip to cuff with silver rivets, a voluminous, wrinkled black raincoat bristling with buckles and epaulettes—a sad little time capsule of a wardrobe that George’s daughter Samantha had instantly claimed for her own. Samantha had a kind of crush on Lindy, or so it seemed to George. She hadn’t even been born till years after Lindy left home, but she was always asking questions about her, poring over photographs of her, making her into some mythical, magical being.
When Samantha heard now that she’d missed Lindy’s visit, she was beside herself. “Lindy was here? In this house? The person I’ve most wanted to meet for as long as I’ve been on this earth? I cannot believe that you let her get away before I could see her!”
“Is it my fault you didn’t come home from school till after dark?” George demanded.
“Well, it sure wasn’t my fault! I was waiting for my tennis coach! Mom forgot to tell me he’d canceled! And anyway, how long did Lindy stay here—three and a half minutes? Why did she leave so fast? What did you say to cause her to go? Did you make her feel not welcome?”
Gina was even more accusatory—Pagan’s bossy wife, Gina Meredith, a feminist type who’d kept her last name and refused to shave her legs and breast-fed her baby in public. “Pagan told me his mother’s shown up,” she said when she telephoned. “Is she still there?”
“No, ah, she’s left, Gina.”
“Well, I feel strongly about this, George. I feel he should meet with her. I feel we both should. We all should, as a family.”
“But Pagan himself said—”
“First and foremost, I need to ask if she took drugs in her first trimester.”
“You do?”
“These things can have lifelong effects. We need to be informed.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Gina, but Pagan told her he saw no point in seeing her.”
“You might at least have argued with him,” Gina said.
“I didn’t think I had the right to argue. Nor do you, in my humble opinion,” George told her, gathering steam. “Pagan’s the injured party, after all. He should be the one to decide if he wants to see her.”
“Well, this is just unacceptable,” Gina said.
George said, “Lots of things are unacceptable. That doesn’t mean they don’t happen.”
Although he had a strong suspicion that Gina was still too young to believe that.
Only Karen saw George’s side of things. First she demanded all the details. What Lindy had looked like was tops on her list (could she still fit into those jeans, provided she felt the inclination?), followed by why she hadn’t stuck around till Karen could get there, and what exactly her conversation with Pagan had consisted of. “At least he didn’t hang up on her, did he? Or did he? Do you think he asked her anything about who his father was?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea,” George told her.
“Well, I can’t say as I blame him, if you want to know the truth. She dumps him without a word, disappears, leaves him to fend for himself, and now all at once she says, ‘Dearie me, didn’t I have a child someplace? I wonder what’s become of him.’ Damn right he shouldn’t have to meet her.”
George didn’t talk with Karen very often. Oh, they liked each other well enough, he supposed, but they led such different lives. Also, he sensed that she was not all that fond of Sally, although she had never said anything. Now,
though, he felt a surge of warmth for her. He said, “I wish you’d convince Gina of that.”
“Gina?”
“She just now telephoned me in a huff. Thinks I should have, I don’t know, put Lindy in a hammerlock till Gina could get over here and investigate her gene pool. I believe she was envisioning some big family confrontation.”
“Oh, then,” Karen said. “If Gina wants, I guess it’s going to happen.”
Gina was another subject George and Karen agreed on. George had almost forgotten that.
As if Lindy’s visit had lifted some kind of curtain or partition, George was visited over the next few days by what he would have to call flashbacks. They were more vivid than mere memories, and briefer—just single mental images, really. The wooden cane his father used to walk with, its worn, satiny handle that had filled George with love and sorrow any time he saw it hooked over the kitchen doorknob in the apartment on St. Cassian Street. A geranium plant his mother had rescued from a neighbor’s trash can and nursed into an overgrown monster that sent its segmented, scaly tentacles sprawling across the windowsill. Counting out change for customers from his father’s tall brass cash register. Getting his toes squeezed by the Fitting Lady when his mother took them shoe-shopping before the start of each new school year.
Then he recalled other shopping trips, dragging after his mother as she tirelessly hunted down bargains—the yawning, aching boredom of it. He remembered the time she stepped into a booth to try on a gray cotton dress and called out a few minutes later, her voice breaking up with laughter, “Children? Want to see what your mother would look like as a mental patient?” At the sight of her, Lindy had doubled over with the giggles, but George had felt too anxious to laugh; their mother was so convincing in her institutional gray.
And then the Christmas their father gave her the nightgown—black, with black lace cups at the bosom that were almost transparent. “Why, Michael!” she had said, and their father had looked sweetly foolish, lowering his eyes and grinning. She’d gone immediately into the bedroom to try it on. They were living in Elmview Acres by then, where the master bedroom lay just across the corridor from the living room, but instead of reappearing, their mother called softly, “Michael? Could you come here a minute?” Their father had set aside a box of socks he’d been fiddling with and risen and left, eyes still lowered, and the bedroom door had latched shut again and there hadn’t been another sound for ages. At the time the children were, oh, probably twelve, eleven, and seven or so—old enough to send each other embarrassed sidelong glances, although now the memory made George smile.
Well, so much about their parents had been embarrassing. Or did all children feel that way? But it seemed to George that the Antons’ lives were more extreme than other people’s. That very same nightgown, for instance, had only hours later given rise to a major battle when their mother thought to ask their father how he had known what size to buy. He’d taken Katie Vilna shopping with him, their father said, since he’d guessed that Pauline and Katie were more or less the same build. And then all hell broke loose. Whether it was their father’s colluding with another woman or their mother’s belief that Katie was flatter-chested than she was, George couldn’t say; but at any rate, their mother had exploded, and their father had called her crazy, and their mother had stuffed the nightgown into the waste-paper basket . . .
People didn’t stay on an even keel in the Anton family. They did exaggerated things like throwing out their clothes or running away from home or perishing in spectacular crashes.
Or showing up after twenty-nine years and wondering where everyone was.
Well, they did all get together eventually, just as Karen had predicted. Once Gina fixed her sights on something, watch out. She called Anna, she called Karen, she called George for Lindy’s telephone number, and then, by some unknown means, she persuaded Pagan to change his mind. Or maybe persuading Pagan came first. At any rate, it worked out that the family met at Anna’s house for lunch on a Sunday in March. Everyone attended but Jojo, who was away at school. Pagan brought Gina and the baby; Lindy brought her husband. A pork roast was served, along with an eggplant lasagna for Gina, who didn’t eat meat. Nothing particular happened. Nobody threw a scene or stalked out or burst into tears. Lindy did get a little shiny-eyed over her grandson—a standard-issue six-month-old who evidently reminded her of Pagan at the same age—but otherwise she behaved with restraint, and so did Pagan. In fact, they didn’t really have much to do with each other. Lindy seemed to have transferred all her feelings to the baby. She avoided talking with Pagan or even looking at him, if possible, and Pagan was his usual courteous, unforthcoming self. At the end of the afternoon the customary pleasantries were exchanged: must do this again, so good to have seen you, must come to our place next time . . . and then everybody went home. It was a perfectly civilized occasion.
So why was it that George had such a wretched time?
Slumped glumly on Anna’s piano bench before the meal, arms folded, chin on his chest, he surveyed the goings-on through a scrim of cynicism. Every remark called forth in him a silent, acidic “Yeah, right.” When Lindy said, “Just herbal tea for me, please, if you have it. I avoid all unnatural stimulants,” he rolled his eyes and exhaled a little too loudly. (She sounded like that simpering girl in Beauty and the Beast: “Just a single perfect rose for me, please, Father.”) And Michael’s response—”Oh, certainly! Coming right up!”—was so pitifully ingratiating, his face so eager and highly colored beneath his thin white hair.
Yes, even people’s looks were an irritation. Lindy’s husband turned out to be a caricature of the male English teacher, with his clipped salt-and-pepper beard you could mistake for the shape of his jaw and his mild gray gaze and suede elbow patches. Anna’s smooth pageboy, still mostly brown, seemed expressly designed to flaunt her self-possession. (George had a theory that hairdos revealed personalities—that people with flat, docile hair, for example, tended toward meekness while those with frizzy hair were uncontrolled and disorganized.) Gina was too lush and plummy, the damp spot over each nipple a disgrace. And how about Samantha, all in washed-out black and strung with ropes and ropes of nuts and beads and astrological symbols? A costume straight from Lindy’s old bureau drawers, but if Lindy recognized it she gave no sign. Conventional by comparison in a rough-woven peasant dress and fringed shawl, she was too busy mooning over the baby. Samantha, hovering next to her, might as well not have existed.
Here sat the long-lost Lindy, the central mystery of their lives, the break at the heart of the family, and what were they all doing? Discussing when babies’ eyes changed color. Placing orders for sherry and club soda and ginger ale, and debating a phone call to Jojo though would he in fact be awake yet? Should they postpone it till after lunch?
“I keep thinking we’re just at this normal party,” Karen murmured in George’s ear. “There’s this normal woman guest here, only she happens to be Lindy.” What she said came closest to what George himself was thinking. Wasn’t this too easy? Could Lindy really slip back amongst them so seamlessly?
Now Gina was zeroing in. “Lindy, I have to ask. What kind of medical heritage did Pagan’s father have?”
Lindy said, “Why, I honestly couldn’t . . . heritage?” She looked around at the others. “He was just a drummer from some little town in Texas. We were never really a couple, I mean not so as you would notice.”
It didn’t seem that Pagan even heard this, or cared if he did hear. He sat comfortably at Gina’s side and watched as she, oh, Lord, opened her button-down nursing flap and hauled out a breast for the baby. “A drummer!” Gina told Pagan, sidetracked at least for the moment from her medical concerns. “That’s where you get your musical talent!”
Pagan said, “Could be,” without much interest.
Sally—too obviously changing the subject—asked why so many holiday wreaths were still up. She said, “How much trouble could it be just to pluck a wreath off a door, I’d like to know?”
�
��I guess it’s one of those things that people tend to stop seeing,” Lindy’s husband ventured.
“They don’t stop seeing their Christmas trees, do they? They don’t stop seeing their yard decorations! So why is it that a wreath, a simple, lightweight wreath—”
“Oh, Mom. Let them keep their durn wreaths till June, if they want,” Sam said. “Why get all in a swivet about it?”
“Well, I’m just curious, Samantha. I’m certainly not in a ‘swivet.’ I’m just curious about human nature, is all.”
George realized that if he closed his eyes, he could have sworn it was his mother talking.
Speaking of which: over lunch they somehow got to telling “Pauline stories,” as George called them in his head. He wasn’t sure how this tradition had developed—trading reminiscences of his mother’s zanier moments while his father chuckled affably and Anna looked on with a tolerant smile. As a rule George would participate, but today he sat quiet while Karen led off with a description of Mimi Drew’s birthday dinner at Haussner’s—huge old Haussner’s Restaurant with its acres and acres of tables. “It was hosted by a woman Mom had never met,” Karen told Lindy, “and when she got there she found she didn’t know a soul. But she sat down anyhow and started a conversation, till it dawned on her that not even Mimi was there. She thought, Oops, I’m at the wrong party, and right then she spotted Mimi clear across the room, but she was having such a good time that she decided to stay where she was.”
“She was always doing things like that,” Sally said as she passed the lasagna to Lindy. (Who didn’t eat meat either, it turned out.) “Once when we were downtown she gave a dollar to a homeless person, except he wasn’t homeless after all; he was a tenured professor. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I’m a tenured professor,’ but Pauline waved a hand and said, ‘Oh, well, keep it anyhow,’ and I said, ‘Pauline . . . !’”
Lindy’s husband gave one of his furry, bearded heh-hehs.
And then the driving stories. The time Pauline got lost in her own alley and the time she confused the brake with the accelerator and the time she backed into a pedestrian, knocked him down, stuck her head out the window, called, “I’m sorry!” and pulled forward, put her car in reverse, backed up and knocked him down again. It was Sam who told this last tale but it was George who’d lived it, as a mortified fourteen-year-old, and even though it had happened more or less the way she said, somehow it sounded untrue. His mother had not been some fluffy-headed I Love Lucy dingbat; she’d been—at different times—scared and scary, angry, bitter, remorseful, unhappy, jealous, hurt, bewildered, at a loss. He said, “That’s not how it was!” but Sam caroled, “Oh, well, close enough,” and the others went on laughing.