Digging to America

by Anne Tyler

  Always he'd been a good putterer a competent repairman, woodworker, seat-of-the-pants inventor and this was why he'd assumed that retirement would come easy to him. But one day he was down in the basement replacing a three-way lamp socket and he felt all at once that he couldn't stand another minute of the gloomy, dank, earth-smelling air. The scummy little window above his head reminded him of the painted-over panes in derelict factories, and his workbench with its neatly hung tools, each outlined in white and arranged according to function and size, inhabited a chilly cube of fluorescent lighting with the dark pressing in all around even on this sunny afternoon. He imagined he couldn't breathe. He wondered how long he'd be lying here if he happened to have a stroke.

  Up in the kitchen (airy and almost too bright), he gulped down a glass of water while he studied the replacement socket he'd unthinkingly brought with him. That was when it occurred to him that he could move his workbench upstairs. Well, maybe not the workbench itself, or the larger of the tools, but certainly the smaller items. He could take over the little room they called the study, which led directly off the kitchen and served as a sort of catchall for Connie's sewing supplies and the unpaid bills and the out-of-date magazines. There was no one to object, after all. He felt a flicker of his old zest bestirring itself. Something to do! He set his glass on the counter and went to the study to investigate.

  The house was a rambling Mount Washington place they'd moved into nearly forty years ago when the children were small, and from simple inertia they had allowed the clutter to accumulate. Besides which, Connie had been disorganized by nature. How many times had Dave grumbled about the scissors left on a chair or his best pair of pliers mislaid? One whole corner cupboard was stacked with fabrics, and he knew without looking that some of them were cut up but left unsewn, the tissue patterns still pinned in place; and others had been bought on impulse ten or fifteen years back but never put to use, their folded edges bleached by dust and sunlight. He felt wickedly pleased that finally, finally he could whip this place into shape.

  That afternoon and all the next day, he stuffed objects into plastic trash bags for Goodwill. The fabrics and the knitting supplies, a sheaf of Butterick dress patterns, a wicker sewing basket, a half-finished baby afghan that might very well have been started in their oldest grandchild's infancy. A flat tin of watercolor paints dried into shrunken tablets. A sketchbook, perfectly blank, yellowed around the edges. A leather punch he'd been looking for since the previous Christmas. A book on needlepoint dollhouse rugs due back at the Roland Park Library on May 16, 1989. A manual for an electric typewriter they no longer owned. A box of unused thank-you cards. Twenty years of tax returns, some of the years missing.

  He did keep the tax returns, on second thought. While he was retrieving them he chanced to notice the sewing basket and he retrieved that as well, because after all he might need to sew on a button from time to time. Then he thought of other things, like the green vinyl case of crochet hooks he'd tossed out at the very start. Crochet hooks made very useful tools for small repair jobs. Which trash bag had he put them in?

  By the end of the second day the room was looking much, much worse than when he'd begun. There was hardly any space to walk. The tax returns filled the one armchair and the sofa was heaped with photo albums and fat manila envelopes packed with other photos that he planned to sort through later. He couldn't even sit down. He felt defeated.

  He opened the bottom desk drawer, where he was hoping to store the tax returns, and came upon a cache of sickroom supplies.

  They dated from the earliest days of Connie's illness, he guessed. In the later days her equipment like her disease had spread outward and filled their lives. There'd been a hospital bed in the living room and a wheelchair in the front hall. But the items in the desk drawer were minimal and unobtrusive: a box of alcohol swabs and a digital thermometer and a photocopied information sheet on the side effects of chemo.

  Dave himself never called it chemo. He refused to speak so familiarly about something so horrific. He used the full word: chemotherapy.

  Connie had vowed it wouldn't get to her. She'd intended to breeze right through it. Then one morning Dave had wondered why his shower water was ankle deep and he'd looked down to find handfuls of her hair clogging the drain. She hadn't realized yet; it wasn't till that evening that she noticed her matted comb. And he didn't tell her. It was the start of the widening separation between them. Willy-nilly, he remained in the world of the heedlessly healthy and Connie joined an inner circle of fellow sufferers who sought each other out in waiting rooms, comparing symptoms and discussing alternative treatments and trading nuggets of advice on various coping techniques. (Canned peaches, one man swore by.) The caregivers, hollow-eyed and weary, exchanged sympathetic glances but said nothing.

  She traveled farther and farther away from him. She swung into battle against each new malady that popped up now here, now there, just when she wasn't looking, just when some test result or consultation had raised their hopes, while Dave dealt alone with the insurance and the medical bills and prescriptions.

  Sometimes he thought the side effects of chemotherapy were contagious. He lost his appetite and he felt constantly, faintly nauseated and it seemed to him that when he cut himself shaving his blood took longer to clot. He said as much to Connie and she said, Do you have any idea how trivial that sounds to a person in my condition? The jolt of outrage her question gave him was almost enjoyable. For a moment, it freed him of guilt. But only for a moment.

  All my life, he told Bitsy now on the phone, I've been so impatient to get to the next stage. I couldn't wait to grow up, to finish school, to get married; couldn't wait for you children to learn to walk and talk. I hurried things along anyhow I could. For what? I ask myself now. But here's the worst: when I think back on your mother's illness I see I reached the point where I couldn't wait for that to be over with, either. I'm horrified at myself.

  Well, of course you couldn't wait, Bitsy said in a soothing voice. You were imagining she'd be well again.

  No, honey, that's not what I mean, he said, although for one moment he considered pretending that it was. I mean that I was wishing for your mother to go ahead and die.

  The silence stretched out long enough for him to regret telling her. Some things were best kept to oneself. Finally she said, Dad, would you like me and Jin-Ho to come over for a little visit?

  No! he said, because he didn't want her to see what had happened to the study.

  Would you like to come here? You could have lunch with us. Only PBJs, but you know we're always glad of your company.

  Thanks, but I've got some chores to finish around the house, he said, and he told her goodbye.

  It was wrong to burden her. He would have to endure this alone.

  He went to the kitchen and fixed himself a bowl of cold cereal, but he found it too hard to swallow and he gave up after three spoonfuls. He sat dully at the kitchen table and gazed out at the neighbors' backyard, where the tree men were cutting down a huge old gnarly maple. The day before they had lopped off the leafy tip ends and fed them to the chipper, and he could imagine that overnight the maple must have stood there in some botanical version of shock. But only the smallest branches had been removed, after all. A tree so large could adjust to that. This morning, though, the men had moved on to the larger branches, and perhaps that too could have been adjusted to even though the tree had become as stubby and short-armed as a saguaro cactus. But now they were setting their chain saws to work on the trunk itself, and all those earlier adjustments turned out to have been for nothing.

  He stood up heavily and carried his bowl to the sink.

  At night now he welcomed sleep because his dreams had become so vivid. It was like a whole separate life; the paler his waking life grew, the more colorful his sleeping life. He dreamed, for instance, that he owned a giant tiger with a shaggy, yellowed rug of long white hair beneath its chin. The tiger padded into the room and rose silently to set its front paws on
the foot of the bed and survey Dave's sleeping form. Then it appeared to make a decision and leapt up, deeply indenting the mattress, and trod across the blankets to set its nose an inch from Dave's face. Dave could smell its hot, meaty breath and feel the tickle of its whiskers even though they weren't touching him. It was a pleasant, friendly experience, not alarming in the least. But when he awoke the tiger was gone, and he was alone in his bed.

  Maybe his dreams had been influenced by the scrabbling of animals in the attic just a few feet overhead squirrels or raccoons or mice. He should take steps to get rid of them, but there was a companionable intimacy to these nighttime sounds and so he kept putting it off.

  If a nonexistent tiger could visit him, why not Connie? Why couldn't she be watching over him, as nearby as those attic creatures?

  She used to believe that her ancestors were taking care of her. She'd been more spiritual than he, if not conventionally religious, and she used to quote a pagan saying, Gratitude is the root of all virtue, which she interpreted to mean that people should be mindful of those who had gone before. She imagined that her grandparents were cheering her on and guiding her through the hard parts, as well as the great-grandparents she had never known and the great-greats and so forth, all the way back. So why couldn't Connie herself be taking care of Dave? That this was a non sequitur occurred to him only belatedly. Connie wasn't his ancestor. They weren't even related. But he kept forgetting that. He thought of the medical consultation where, briefly and hypothetically, a doctor had mentioned a bone-marrow transplant. She can have my marrow! Dave had said, and only at the doctor's quizzical glance had he realized his mistake.

  He closed his eyes again and willed her, willed her. He summoned up her most concrete details: her long spongy earlobes, the sparrow's-egg speckles on the backs of her hands, the slight croakiness of her voice that always made her sound so appealingly unselfconscious and lacking in vanity. Do you remember what it was like to have a date on a spring evening? she asked. It wasn't Dave she was talking to; it was someone on the phone. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a trowel in her lap; evidently the call had interrupted her gardening. Every year when spring comes, I find myself thinking of that. The boys would come up the front walk in their short-sleeved shirts that still smelled of their mothers' ironing, and we girls would be wearing flowered dresses and ballet slippers and no stockings and there was something so fresh and so ... free about the first bare legs of the season . . .

  Dave was in the living room with his two sons and someone else. Who? Some neighbor woman, a friend of Connie's who had stopped by for a visit. Connie's on the phone, Dave told her, but she ought to be off any second. He cocked his head to listen for a winding-up note in Connie's voice, but she wasn't speaking just then and he realized now that she had been silent for several minutes. Then he understood that the silence was real the silence in the actual bedroom and that Connie wouldn't be speaking ever again.

  The oldest photo album showed women in rigid dresses and complicated hairdos, men in collars so high that their chins were buried, and stern-faced babies smothered in white lace. These people might have interested him if he had known who they were, but he didn't. The captions inked on the back were frustratingly evasive. Sunday, September 10, 1893, just before a delicious meal treat, one read. Or, With the beautiful amaryllis Mother gave us at Christmas. It seemed no one had imagined that the day would come when these people would be strangers.

  The later albums were more clearly labeled, but even if they had not been he would have recognized his paternal grandparents, sitting on a wide lawn with their firstborn, who grew up to be his Aunt Louise. Poor Aunt Louise: she had lost her only love to TB and died mindless in a nursing home at eighty-eight, but in the photo she was toddling triumphantly toward the camera with both little arms outstretched, and her parents were watching her progress with the proudest, happiest smiles.

  In the forties people looked surprisingly glamorous, even his mother in her house dress with the slantwise stripes. In the fifties they took on color, mostly jarring pinks and blues, but they were dowdy now and rumpled and the men's haircuts were too short. Had Connie really consented to be seen in a shiny rose-colored sheath that narrowed at mid-calf so you wondered how she could walk?

  After that, life must have grown more rushed, because the later photos weren't mounted. Dave opened each manila envelope to peer inside: Bitsy in her bucktoothed stage, before braces; Abe with a terrier puppy who'd been run over soon after they got him; Abe again, at his college graduation. In the bottom-most, thinnest envelope Jin-Ho and Susan were blowing soap bubbles at each other, but even they seemed long ago, their faces rounder than nowadays and less definite, less specific.

  Oh, what was the point, what was the point, what was the point?

  He wiped out the corner cupboard (three separate dust rags, that took) and placed the albums and the envelopes on the lowest shelf. He put the tax returns in the desk drawer where the sickroom supplies had been kept. From the basement he brought up his boxed set of miniature tools, his compartmented chest of screws and nails and his repair manuals and his tin of adhesives, and he arranged them on the upper shelves of the cupboard along with the crochet hooks and Connie's sewing basket. He lugged the trash out to the alley, the Goodwill bags to his car trunk. He dusted the desk and the lamp tables. He stuffed his cleaning rags into the hamper. He vacuumed the floor and the sofa, which was littered with specks of paper.

  He felt too tired to fix himself supper. Instead he drank two glasses of Scotch and went to bed. His sleep was a drugged sleep, cottony, like a cloth laid over his face. He dreamed he was out in the country, walking through a vast field that he understood to be a furniture graveyard. Abandoned pieces of furniture were grouped by category an acre of beds, an acre of bureaus, an acre of dining-room tables. Dozens of armchairs sat beneath a mulberry tree, their seats empty except for the weeds growing up through their cushions, and the fact that they were facing each other made them seem all the lonelier. How can they stand this? he asked, and somebody off in the distance, some man in faded clothes, caroled, Ooh, how can they stand this? in a mocking, cruel voice. He stopped in his tracks, stricken. Then he felt a hand slipping into his, and he turned to see Maryam Yazdan calmly surveying the chairs. They are thinking of all they have lived through, she told him. They like to remember that. He found this consoling, for some reason, and so when she said, Shall we go? he tightened his hand around hers and followed her out of the field.

  He woke up and lay for a long while staring into the dark.

  By the time Maryam heard about Sami and Ziba's new house, they had already made a down payment and arranged a settlement date. She said, A new house? I didn't know you were looking!

  Oh, we hardly knew it ourselves, Sami said, and Ziba said, We weren't sure we would find what we wanted; so why tell anyone?

  Maryam was not just anyone, though, and it puzzled her that they had been so secretive. They must have pored over real-estate listings, taken numerous tours, debated the merits of one place compared with another. And yet they'd never breathed a word to her!

  But she said, Well, this is wonderful. Congratulations. And she patted Susan on the knee. They were sitting in Maryam's living room, Susan on the sofa beside her with a picture book in her lap. Are you excited? Maryam asked her. Have you seen your new room?

  It's got a window seat, Susan told her.

  A window seat! Really!

  You lift up the cushion part and there's space underneath for my toys. Me and Jin-Ho climbed all the way inside it, even.

  Jin-Ho had been to the house?

  They'd already told the Donaldsons?

  Sami cleared his throat and said, We mentioned this place to Brad and Bitsy because it's in their neighborhood.

  Ah. In Mount Washington, she said.

  I hope you aren't disappointed we're not moving nearer you, Mom. We did think about Roland Park, but the general atmosphere of Mount Washington seemed more, I don't know...
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br />   The general atmosphere of Mount Washington seemed more Donaldsonian, Maryam thought. Better not say it, though. Well, still you'll be very close, she said. Five or ten minutes away! I'm delighted.

  Then Sami and Ziba leaned forward at the same moment to pick up their teacups, as if they felt suddenly unburdened. And Maryam picked up her own teacup and smiled at them.

  She thought she knew now why they hadn't told her. They were embarrassed to be observed copying the Donaldsons yet again. Oh, those Donaldsons, with their blithe assumption that their way was the only way! Feed your daughter this and not that; let her watch these programs and not those; live here and not there. So American, they were.

  But Sami and Ziba thought the Donaldsons were unique, and Maryam didn't feel that she should be the one to set them straight.

  The new house was on Pettijohn Street, just three blocks from Brad and Bitsy's. It had a big front porch, lofty old trees, and a spacious backyard. There was only one guest room, though; so Ziba said they would have to buy a foldout couch for the relatives. She invited Maryam to come along when she went shopping. Of course she knew all the furniture stores because of her work, and she spoke knowledgeably about styles and fabrics and projected delivery times. Oh, please! Nothing from Murfree-Mainsburgh, she told a salesman. They take forever with their orders. Maryam was impressed, even though she privately questioned Ziba's taste. Ziba said that her long-range goal was to outfit the house entirely in American Colonial, and she pointed out lace-canopied four-poster beds, velour-lined life chests for memorabilia, revolving stools on barley-twist pedestals, and scallop-trimmed entertainment centers, all in a high-gloss, cocoa-colored wood that seemed not quite real. But what did Maryam know?

  They moved on a Friday in late April a nonworking day for Ziba and a working day for Maryam, so that all Maryam had to do was step down the hall to collect Susan from preschool when it was time to go home. She had volunteered to keep Susan till that evening.