The Beginner's Goodbye

by Anne Tyler

  And if I was surprised by myself, I was surprised even more by Dorothy. That she would consent to go shopping for something so prosaic as a vacuum cleaner, for instance—that she deigned to consider the merits of canister over upright—came as a revelation. As did the fact that she made a point of using the phrase “my husband” when speaking to strangers. “My husband thinks our vacuum should have a hypoallergenic filter.” That tickled me no end.

  Also, she turned out to be a cuddler. Who would ever have guessed? She stayed nestled within the scoop of my body all night long, although you might suppose she’d be the brisk type once the sex was over. She kept close to me in crowds, often taking my hand surreptitiously as I stood talking with someone. I would feel those rough, pudgy fingers slipping stealthily between mine and I would have to struggle not to break into a smile.

  I’m not saying that we didn’t encounter a few little bumps in the road. Every couple has to make some adjustments, isn’t that so? Especially when they’ve been accustomed to living on their own. Oh, we experienced our fair share of misunderstandings and crossed signals and faulty timing. On any number of occasions, we disappointed each other.

  For one thing, I hadn’t completely comprehended before that Dorothy had zero interest in food. Zero. Not only did she almost never cook, which was fine with me, but she failed to appreciate what I cooked, which wasn’t fine at all. She would arrive at the table with a sheaf of mail that she opened and read between mouthfuls. “What do you think of the fish?” I would ask her, and she would say, “Hmm? Oh. It’s good,” without lifting her eyes from the letter she was reading.

  And she lacked sufficient respect for physical objects. She gave no thought to their assigned places, to their maintenance and upkeep. She didn’t—how can I put it? She didn’t properly value things.

  If she had properly valued me, for instance, wouldn’t she have taken more care with her appearance? It was true that I had been charmed at first by her lack of vanity, but now and then it struck me that she was looking almost, well, plain, and that this plainness seemed willful. As the months went by I found myself noticing more and more her clumsy clothes, her aggressively plodding walk, her tendency to leave her hair unwashed one day too long.

  And Dorothy, for her part, seemed to find me unreasonably prickly. She’d say, “You’ll probably bite my head off, but …,” and then she’d finish with something innocuous, such as an offer to take a turn driving when we were on a long car trip. I’d say, “Why would you think that, Dorothy? Why would I bite your head off?” But unintentionally, I would be using a biting-her-head-off tone as I asked, because it irritated me when she tiptoed around my feelings that way. So, in fact, I’d proved her right. I could see it in her expression, although she would carefully not say so. And I would observe her not saying so, and I would feel all the more irritated.

  It kills me now to remember these things.

  I felt she expected something of me that she wouldn’t state outright. Her face would fall for no reason sometimes, and I would say, “What? What is it?” but she would say it was nothing. I could sense that I had let her down, but I had no idea how.

  Once, she had a conference in L.A., but she said that she was thinking she might skip it. She didn’t like leaving me to manage on my own for so long, she said. (This was fairly early in our marriage.) I said, “Don’t skip it for my sake,” and she said, “Maybe you could come with me. Would you like that? They always have guided bus tours and such for the spouses during the day.”

  “Great,” I said. “I could bring my knitting.”

  “Oh, why be that way? I only meant—”

  “Dorothy,” I said. “I was joking. Don’t worry about me. It’s not as if I depend on you to take care of me, after all.”

  I meant that as a statement of fact. It wasn’t an accusation; who could read it as an accusation? But Dorothy did. I could tell by her face. She didn’t say anything more, and she got a sort of closed look.

  I tried to smooth things over. I said, “But thanks for your concern.” It didn’t do any good, though. She stayed quiet throughout the evening, and the next day she left for her conference and I missed her like some kind of, almost, organ out of my body, and I think she missed me, too, because she phoned me from Los Angeles several times a day and she’d say, “What are you doing right now?” and, “I really wish you were here.” I wished I were there, too, and I couldn’t believe I had wasted that chance to be with her. I made a lot of promises to myself about being more easygoing in the future, not so quick to take umbrage, but then, when she came home, the very first thing she did was get mad at me about this thorn I had in my index finger. I’m serious. While she was gone I had cut back the barberry bush that was poking over the railing of our rear balcony, and you know how barberry thorns are so microscopic and so hard to get out. I figured it would just work its own way out, but it hadn’t yet, and my finger had started swelling and turning red. She said, “What is this? This is infected!”

  “Yes, I think it must be,” I said.

  “What is the matter with you?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with me,” I said. “I have a thorn in my finger, okay? Sooner or later I’ll see this little black speck emerging and I’ll yank it. Any objections?”

  “Yank it with what?” she asked.

  “Tweezers, of course.”

  “Yank it with what hand, Aaron? It’s in your left index finger. How are you going to work a pair of tweezers with your right hand?”

  “I can do that,” I told her.

  “You cannot. You should have asked someone for help. Instead you just … sat here, just sat here for a week, waiting for me to come home so I’d have to say, ‘Oh, no, I’m so sorry, how could I have left you on your own to deal with this?’ And everyone else would say, all your family and your office would say, ‘Look at that: she wasn’t even there to take his thorn out and now he has a major infection and maybe even will need an amputation, can you believe it?’ ”

  “Amputation!” I said. “Are you nuts?”

  But she just reached for the matchbox above the stove and went off to find a needle, and when she came back she leaned over my finger, her lips turned disapprovingly downward, my hand squeezed tightly in hers, and she pierced the skin one time and the thorn shot out like an arrow.

  “There,” she said crisply, and she dabbed the wound with disinfectant.

  Then she bent her head and pressed her cheek against the back of my hand, and her skin felt as soft as petals.

  Well, we survived these little glitches. We papered over them, we went on with our lives. It’s true that we no longer had quite the same newborn shine, but nobody keeps that forever, right? The important thing was, we loved each other. All I had to do to remind myself of that was to cast my thoughts back to the moment we met. To my lonesome, unattached, unsuspecting self following the receptionist down the corridor of the Radiology Center. The receptionist comes to a stop and raps on a half-open door. Then she pushes it farther open, and I step through it, and Dorothy raises her eyes from her book. Our story begins.

  I got up from Nandina’s couch and looked around for my cane, which I finally found propped in a corner. I let myself out the front door; I locked it behind me; I set off down the sidewalk.

  Left onto Clifton Lane, left again on Summit and down to Wyndhurst. Then south on Woodlawn a good long way until I reached Rumor Road. My road, only three blocks long and lined with flowering pear trees. It was twilight by now, but I could still hear birds singing. One bird was calling out, “ ’Scuse me! ’Scuse me!” and insects were zipping away, keeping up that background clatter that you never really hear unless you stop to think about it.

  I was developing a bit of an ache in the left side of my lower back, but that always happened when I walked any distance and I paid it no attention. I started walking even faster, because I knew that beyond the slight bend up ahead I would catch my first sight of our house. The bend was marked by a single tree of a different
type from the others; I didn’t know the name. This tree bore huge pink, floppy flowers, and they were so abundant this year that I drew a deep breath as I approached it, expecting a strong perfume. I couldn’t detect one, though. Instead I smelled … Well, it was something like isopropyl alcohol, the faintest, most delicate scent of alcohol floating on the breeze, mixed with plain Ivory soap. The exact scent of my wife.

  Then I rounded the bend, and I saw her standing on the sidewalk.

  She was some ten feet away from me, facing our house and gazing at it, but when she heard my footsteps she turned in my direction. She was wearing her wide black trousers and a gray shirt. Both were the kind of colors that blended into the fading light, and yet she herself was absolutely solid—as solid as you or I, and in fact almost more so, in some odd way; solid and sturdy and opaque. I had forgotten that rebellious little quirk of black hair that stood up from the crown of her head. I’d forgotten how she always stood tipping a bit backward, ducklike, on her heels.

  She watched me intently as I came nearer, with her chin slightly raised and her eyes fixed on mine. I arrived in front of her. I drew in a deep breath. I thought I would never in all my life smell a more wonderful combination than isopropyl alcohol and plain soap.

  “Dorothy,” I said.

  I’m not sure if I spoke aloud. I have a feeling I may have just thought it, in the very depths of my being.

  I said, “Dorothy, my dear one. My only, only Dorothy.”

  “Hello, Aaron,” she said.

  She looked into my face for a moment, and then she turned and walked away. But I didn’t feel she was abandoning me. I knew, somehow, that she had stayed as long right then as she was able and that she would come again as soon as she could. So I stood still and watched her leave without attempting to follow. I watched her reach the end of the block, take a right on Hawthorn, and vanish.

  Then I turned and started back to Nandina’s. I hadn’t so much as glanced at our house. What did I care about our house? I walked in a kind of trance, keeping my gait as nearly level as possible, as if Dorothy had been a liquid and now I was brimful of her and moving slowly and gently so as not to spill over.

  6

  I waited. I waited.

  For days on end I stayed suspended, waiting for her to come back.

  Since our street was where she had shown up, I figured that was where she would be most likely to show up again. In fact, I kicked myself for not going there before now. Had she been wandering Rumor Road all these months, wondering where I was? I could hardly bear to think about all my lost opportunities.

  It turned out that in the daytime our little house was Grand Central Station. Workmen came and went; power tools whizzed and hammers pounded. I was lost in all the confusion; nobody knew who I was. When I peered in through the screen at my new Butterscotch floor, a guy in a bandanna head-wrap asked if I had some business there. But once I identified myself, they were all over me. Would I like to take a tour? Would I care to see the sunporch? Gil was not around at the time, but clearly these men knew my story. They spoke to me in the respectful tones of funeral guests. They made me feel elderly, although we were all more or less the same age.

  I didn’t really want a tour of the house, but I felt that I shouldn’t say no. (I was bearing in mind Nandina’s remark about how workmen needed to feel appreciated.) And after we got started, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. The guy in the head-wrap led the way, and the others, all five or six of them, dropped what they were doing to trail behind us. They were conspicuously silent at first, listening as the head-wrap guy explained what we were looking at. “Very nice,” I murmured, and, “Mmhmm. I see.” Then, bit by bit, they began to chime in, talking over each other, telling me how this particular molding had been the devil to find a match for, how they’d had to rip out that cornice three times before they got it right. “You guys are doing great,” I told them, and they went into an “Aw, shucks” routine and stuck their hands in their rear pockets and looked down at their shoes.

  I felt ashamed of myself for waiting so long to do this. Now my refusal to visit seemed petulant, like a child kicking his bicycle after it’s tipped him over. What had happened wasn’t the house’s fault. And besides, these men had stripped away so much that it didn’t seem like the same place anymore. Even my bedroom, which they hadn’t touched, was unrecognizable, heaped as it was with a jumble of furniture shrouded in white canvas.

  I felt all the more ashamed when Gil walked in. He looked so surprised to see me, and so pleased; he actually blushed, and then he had to take me around and show me everything I’d just seen.

  So: a good visit, all in all. But what I learned from it was, no point going there during work hours if I hoped to catch sight of Dorothy again.

  I took to stopping by in the evenings, therefore, or very early on Sunday mornings, when the neighbors weren’t out and about yet. At 6:30 or 7 a.m. I would park out front and just sit a while, staring through the windshield at the spot where I had seen Dorothy. I would relive every detail of that encounter, the way you’d relive a dream that you were trying to sink back into. Her square gray shirt, her black trousers, the tilt of her chin as she watched me approach, the steadiness of her gaze. My eyes worked so hard to summon her up that they were practically knitting her, but even so, she failed to appear.

  Then I’d get out of my car and walk toward the house. Very slowly, though, just in case she wanted to intercept me at any point. I would pause after every few steps and look around me in an elaborately interested way, up at the shards of blue sky showing through the trees, down at the sidewalk with its imprint of old leaf stains like patterned fabric. But she didn’t appear, and so eventually I would unlock my front door, brace myself, and step inside.

  The detritus of the workmen’s daily lives—their drink cups and crumpled drop cloths and jar lids full of cigarette stubs—made the house feel populated even though it was empty. I would have to stand still a moment, regaining my sense of solitude. After that I would move through the house from front to back, from hallway to kitchen.

  No Dorothy. Smells of fresh-cut lumber, cigarette smoke, damp plaster, but no soap or isopropyl alcohol. In the kitchen I would stand waiting so long that the silence began to echo at me like the silence inside a seashell, but she never said, “Hello, Aaron.”

  Had she said those words aloud? Or had they just been in my mind, the same way I’d told her my own thoughts? Had the whole scene been in my mind? Had I been so deranged by grief that I had concocted her from thin air?

  I left the house. I walked back to the street. (But, again, very slowly.) I got in my car and drove away.

  Where she showed up next was the farmers’ market.

  Of all places, the farmers’ market! The one in Waverly. I’d gone there on a Saturday morning to buy salad greens for Nandina. I looked up from the butter lettuce to find Dorothy at the next stall, examining the beets.

  She used to act politely bored at farmers’ markets. She would accompany me, but just tolerantly, forbearingly, and she would stand around swallowing her yawns while I chose our vegetables for the week.

  Also: beets? Beets are so labor-intensive. And they require a certain amount of culinary know-how. Besides which, she didn’t much like them. She only agreed to eat them because of the beta-carotene.

  But there she stood, lifting a rubber-banded cluster of beets from the heap and studying it seriously, turning it over several times as if trying to learn it before setting it back down and picking up another.

  I moved toward her as cautiously as if she were some skittish woodland animal. My feet made no sound at all. And when I reached her, I didn’t speak. I turned toward the beets myself and selected a bunch of my own. We were standing side by side, so close that even a breath caused our sleeves to whisper together. I could feel the warmth that her skin gave off through the cotton. It warmed my very soul; I can’t describe the comfort I felt. I wanted to stand there forever. There was nothing more I could have asked for. />
  The woman tending the stall said, “Help you?”

  I shook my head, almost imperceptibly.

  “You’ll want to use the tops of these, too,” she said. “Notice how fresh and green they are. All you do is boil them up first in a little salted water, say five or so minutes, and then melt you a lump of butter in a …”

  Hateful woman. Hateful, loud, prattling, cackle-voiced woman. I felt a coolness at my right side, and I knew without looking that Dorothy was gone.

  Then she came to Spindle Street.

  To the street where my office is.

  I’d been to lunch with Peggy and Irene at the little café on the corner. Irene went shoe-shopping afterward, but Peggy and I headed back to work, strolling at a leisurely pace because it happened to be an especially nice day. It was sunny but not too hot, with a little bit of a breeze. And Peggy chose that moment, wouldn’t you know, to attempt a heart-to-heart conversation. She must have figured she should seize her chance, since for once we had no audience. She said, “So.” And then she said, “Aaron.” She said, “So, how has your life been going, Aaron?”

  I said, “My life.”

  “Would you say that you’ve moved past the very worst of your grief? Or is it still as bad as ever.”

  “Oh,” I said, “well …”

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking.”

  “No,” I said.

  Which was true, I found. At that particular moment, I honestly did want to tell somebody what I was feeling. (Share with somebody, I very nearly just said—not my usual language at all.)

  “In a way,” I told Peggy, “it’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are … muffled, sort of. Then, every now and then, I lift a corner of the blanket, just to check, and—whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.”