The Beginner's Goodbye

by Anne Tyler

  “I would hardly call the unknown acquaintance of our first cousin’s third wife a member of the family.”

  “Aaron, for mercy’s sake! It’s Christmas! It’s the time for taking in people who have no place else to go.”

  “What: she’s a homeless person?”

  “She’s, I don’t know. Maybe her family lives on the other side of the country. And the season has especially sad connotations for her, if you’ll recall.”

  Notice the careful omission of such telltale phrases as “so much in common” or “getting you two together.” But I was no dummy. I knew.

  When we arrived at Aunt Selma’s, Louise was already in place, installed at one end of the otherwise empty couch. Roger and Ann-Marie sat in armchairs, and Gil and Nandina took the love seat. So, naturally, I was settled next to Louise.

  She was what I had expected, more or less: a thin, attractive young woman with a slant of short brown hair that swung artfully to one side when she tipped her head. She tipped her head often during our first few minutes together, fixing me with a bright-eyed gaze as we embarked on the usual small talk. It emerged that she was the type who prefaced even the most unexceptional statement with “Are you sitting down?”—a question I’ve always compared to laughing at your own jokes. When I asked what she did for a living, for instance: “Are you sitting down?” she said. “I’m an editor! Just like you! Only freelance.”

  Her thinness was the kind that comes artificially, from dieting. You could tell somehow that she was not the weight that she was meant to be. Her knife blade of a dress had clearly been chosen with an eye to accentuating her prominent collarbones and the two jutting knobs of her hips. I don’t know why this annoyed me. I suppose that if we’d liked each other it wouldn’t have annoyed me, but by now we had both arrived at that despairing stage where you realize that the other person is simply too other to bother with. Louise had stopped prettily tipping her head, and her gaze started veering sideways to conversations elsewhere in the room. I felt a strong urge to excuse myself and go home.

  At dinner, she was seated on my right. (We had place cards this year, to ensure there’d be no mistakes.) However, now that she’d given up on me she addressed the bulk of her remarks to Gil, across the table. She announced to him during the soup course that she had a “very unique” relationship with clocks. “Every time I look at one, just about, you know what the time is? Nine-twelve.”

  Gil said, “Ah …,” and wrinkled his forehead.

  “And nine-twelve is—Are you sitting down?”

  He sent a bewildered glance toward his lap.

  “Nine-twelve is the day I was born!”

  “Huh?”

  “September twelfth! Isn’t that just eerie? It happens way more often than you can explain scientifically. Why, on my very first trip to London, years and years ago, of course I went to see Big Ben, and can you guess what time it was when I got there?”

  Gil looked panicked.

  I said, “Twelve-oh-nine?”

  “What? No, my birthday is—”

  “Because you were in England, after all, where they say ‘twelfth September’ instead of ‘September twelfth.’ ”

  “No … actually—”

  “Aaron,” Nandina broke in, “tell Louise about Beginner’s Jet Lag.”

  “I forget,” I said.

  “Aaron.”

  She thought I was being difficult, but I honestly did forget. I couldn’t think of anything but the endless number of hours before I could make my escape. Till then, we had so much food to plow through. Not just the soup (cream of flour, as near as I could make out), but baked ham in an overcoat of pineapple rings, olive-drab broccoli, and mashed sweet potatoes cobbled with miniature marshmallows, followed by fruitcake for dessert along with—oh, God—a second dessert, which Louise had brought: a platter of cookies shaped like stars and bells and wreaths. I sent Nandina a “See there?” look, because one thing Nandina hated was unexpected contributions to a dinner party, but she was too mad at me to respond. The cookies were dead-white and paper-thin, dusted on top with red and green sugar. I took one for politeness’ sake and bit into it, but it had no taste. Just flat, insipid sweetness. I set it down on my plate and started praying for coffee. Not that I planned to drink any at such an hour, but coffee would signal the end of this interminable meal. It was already late afternoon, and a dull gray twilight furred the corners of the dining room.

  In the car as I was driving us home, Nandina gave me a thorough scolding. “Why you can’t behave with plain old common garden-variety civility …” she told me. She was sitting in the rear, and she leaned so far forward to berate me that her chin was all but resting on the back of my seat. “You were literally looking down your nose at that poor woman!”

  “Yes,” I said, “and she was looking down her nose. Face it, Nandina, we were oil and water. Imagine, a professional editor saying something was ‘very unique’!”

  “Oh, well, she’s only freelance,” Nandina said in a milder tone.

  Then Gil said, “Anyhow,” and asked me if the fog was making driving difficult. He always looked unhappy when Nandina and I quarreled.

  I dropped them off at Nandina’s with the briefest of goodbyes and drove on. Back home, I changed into comfortable clothes, poured myself a drink, and sat down to read, but I couldn’t seem to concentrate. I felt too depressed; I wasn’t sure exactly why. Here I’d been longing for home ever since we’d arrived at Aunt Selma’s, so shouldn’t I feel relieved now?

  It occurred to me that secretly, in the murky depths of my subconscious, I had been hoping that Louise and I would like each other.

  Between Christmas and New Year’s, we closed the office and Nandina went into high gear with the wedding preparations. She accomplished it all in a week: pretty efficient, I will say. The ceremony took place on the last day of the year at my parents’ old church, which Nandina still attended. I gave her away; her best friend from junior high was matron of honor; Gil’s cousin served as best man. The only guests were Aunt Selma and her family, and Gil’s three sisters and their families, and the Woolcott Publishing staff. Afterward, we held a modest reception at my house, although I didn’t have much to do with it. Peggy and the matron of honor saw to the food, and Irene did the decorating, and Roger took charge of the drinks. I was just an innocent bystander.

  Then Gil and Nandina went away for a week to the Eastern Shore, which seemed a strange choice in midwinter, but to each his own, I guess. This was traditionally a slow time at the office, so it was no problem doing without Nandina to boss us around. I was editing a new vanity title, Why I Have Decided to Go On Living, written by a high-school English teacher. Basically, it was a laundry list of “inspirational” moments, such as Watching the sky turn orange at night behind the Domino Sugars sign. I would read choice bits aloud to the others in the outer office. “Feeling a new baby curl its hand around my index finger,” I’d call out, and Charles would grunt and Irene would give an absentminded “Sss!” and Peggy would say, “Aww. Well, that is a good reason!” They were all so predictable.

  Irene flipped through thick magazines that appeared to feature nothing but cosmetics ads. Charles got on the phone and monitored what sounded like very heated quarrels among his daughters, who were still on school holiday while both parents were back at work. Peggy decided to practice touch-typing her numerals and symbols; she said she’d never made it past the standard alphabet keys.

  At noon on our last day of freedom, so to speak, we all went out together to the Gobble-Up Café, leaving the office unattended, which theoretically we should not have done, and we ordered wine with lunch, which we almost never did. The Gobble-Up was so unaccustomed to serving alcohol that the wine list read, in its entirety, Chardonnay $5, Merlot $5, Rosé $4, and when I asked the waitress, “What is your Merlot?” she said, “It’s a red wine?”

  I ordered a glass anyway, and the women ordered Chardonnay, and Charles had a beer. Peggy got a bit tipsy on only two sips and told al
l of us that she thought of us as family. Irene announced that, what the hell, after lunch she was taking off for Nordstrom’s winter-coat sale. Charles answered a cell-phone call, contrary to the posted house rules, and waited way too long before he stepped outside, murmuring, “Now, calm down; slow down; you know I can’t understand a word when you’re crying.” And I picked up the whole check, which probably means I was feeling fairly merry myself.

  Walking back to the office (bypassing Charles, still on his phone out front), I told Peggy and Irene how unreasonably Nandina had behaved after Christmas dinner. I think that, in my winy flush of good feeling, I imagined that they would express some indignation on my behalf. “She basically ambushes me,” I said, “she and Ann-Marie; plunks me next to this woman I have nothing to say to, zero—”

  “Oh, now. She was just trying to help,” Peggy told me. “She just wants you to find somebody.”

  There was a time when I would have said, “Find somebody! Who says I want somebody?” But on that particular day, still under the influence of my post-Christmas-dinner blues, I didn’t bother arguing. All I said was, “Even so. It’s not as if losing a spouse were some kind of hobby we could share.”

  Neither Peggy nor Irene showed the proper empathy, though. Peggy just tsk-tsked, and Irene left us abruptly because by then we’d arrived at our building. “Bye, now,” she said, and went off to do her shopping.

  “This was a woman so skinny I could have cut a hand on her collarbone,” I told Peggy as I opened the door. “She chewed with just her front teeth. She brought cookies made of shirt cardboard.”

  “You are mean,” Peggy told me severely. She set her purse on her desk and slipped her coat off.

  I hesitated.

  “Peggy,” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “You know your oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Those big, lumpy ones you brought in a while back?”

  “What about them?”

  “You know how there were bits of things in them? Little crispy bits? Not chocolate chips, not nuts, but something kind of sharp? Like stones?”

  “Soy grits,” she said. She hung her coat on the coat tree.

  “Soy grits,” I repeated.

  “For the supplemental protein,” she said.

  Then she said, “Count on you to suspect stones in a gift cookie.”

  “I didn’t say I suspected stones. I said they were like stones.”

  “You are so, so wasteful, Aaron,” she told me. She settled at her desk.

  “I’m what?”

  “Anyone else would be glad when a person tries to be close. You’re too busy checking out her motives.”

  I said, “Whose motives are you talking about?”

  “You can’t even see it. You don’t even notice. You just let her go to waste.”

  “Let who go to waste?” I asked. “Are you talking about Louise?”

  Peggy threw both hands in the air.

  “Oh,” I said. “Wait.”

  But she spun toward her computer and started furiously typing. I stood looking at her a moment, and then I walked into my office. I hung my jacket up and settled behind my desk. I didn’t return to work, though. I had left my door open and I could still see her—the gilt edging of her ruffled hair beneath the overhead lights, the two waterfalls of white lace flowing from her correctly positioned, dutifully level elbows.

  I had known Peggy since we were in first grade; I remembered the extra cubby she’d needed for her stuffed animals. I remembered the pantalettes that had frilled below her skirts in junior high. (Some of our ruder classmates used to call her Bo Peep.) And then of course I knew her from all her talk, talk, talk at the office; bear in mind that she was very fond of talking.

  On weekends, she had once told us, she liked to go to Stebbins hardware and ask the gray-haired men who clerked there how to fix a sagging door, or what to do about a curling wallpaper seam. She really did need their advice, she said; but also, she found it a comfort. It took her back to the time when her father was alive.

  The present that she gave herself after a trying day was to skip the evening news and watch Fred Astaire movies instead.

  And she didn’t think her clothes were so odd, she said. (This was in response to a less-than-tactful question from Irene.) They were her way of making an effort—doing something special for the sake of the people around her.

  And she took great pleasure in cooking, I knew. She said cooking felt like dancing: it had the same timely moves and the same sense of system and sequence. I could understand that. I pictured her preparing a perfect little meal without a single misstep, humming beneath her breath as she moved around the kitchen. She would arrange a pottery bowl of fresh flowers for the table. She would set out linen napkins that she’d folded into tepees.

  I pictured being served such a meal, with the fork at my left and the knife and spoon at my right, instead of all in one hasty clump the way I did it myself. The plate deposited deftly in front of me, positioned exactly so, the fork perhaps moved a bit farther left to make room. The soft warmth of the food rising gently toward my face.

  Peggy untying her apron before sitting down across from me.

  I got up and went to stand beside her chair. I cleared my throat. I said, “Peggy?”

  “What.”

  “Would you ever be willing to—would you ever like to go out someplace with me?”

  Her fingers paused on the keys. She turned and looked up at me.

  “Someplace, like, on a date,” I said. (In case I hadn’t made myself clear.)

  She studied me a moment. Then, “Why don’t you ask Irene?” she said.

  “Irene!”

  “I thought Irene was the one you admired so much.”

  “Oh, well, she was,” I said. “She is. But you’re the one I’d like to go someplace with.”

  She went on studying me. I stood a little straighter and tried to look my best. I said, “Couldn’t you give me a chance?”

  After another long moment, she said, “Well. I could. I would like to give you a chance.”

  And she did.

  · · ·

  I take Maeve inside for apple juice, and while she’s drinking it I settle at the kitchen table with the morning paper. But then Maeve spots my cane leaning beside the back door. She drops her sippy-cup with a clunk and toddles over to grab the cane and bring it to me, like a puppy bringing its leash. “Walk?” she says.

  “Walk?”

  “Finish your apple juice first.”

  She lets the cane clatter to the floor, abandons it without a glance and picks up her juice and downs it, glug-glug, with her eyes fixed on me the whole time—brown eyes, like mine, but disproportionately large and rayed by sunbeam lashes, like Peggy’s. (It always amazes me how two very disparate people’s genes can melt together so seamlessly in their offspring.) She slams the cup on the table and claps her hands, all business. “Walk, Daddy,” she says.

  “Okay, Maevums.”

  Next door, Mary-Clyde Rust is kneeling in her petunia bed. As we pass she calls, “Morning, Miss Maeve!” and sits back on her heels, clearly prepared for some chitchat, but Maeve waves a hand and keeps going, face set due south, making a beeline for the park. I shrug at Mary-Clyde, and she laughs and returns to her weeding.

  The Ushers have a little tin-can trailer in their driveway. Ruth Usher’s sister and brother-in-law are visiting from Ohio. Yesterday Maeve was given a tour of the trailer and she was extremely impressed, so I worry she’ll insist on stopping today, but she is too intent on getting to the park. The central attraction there is a creek that’s good for grubbing around in. I don’t think we’ve ever gone to that park without returning soaked, both of us.

  A couple we don’t know is approaching—a dark-haired young woman and a young man in a Phillies cap. Maeve is about to zip on by when the man says, “Why, hello there,” and she pauses and raises her face to him and flutters her eyelashes, beaming. I’ve never fi
gured out how she decides which people she’ll cotton to. Not two minutes later we meet a jogger who also says hello, and Maeve doesn’t give him a glance.

  As we’re nearing Cold Spring Lane, a car slows instead of passing. I look over to see Nandina’s Honda drawing up next to us. “Robbirenna!” Maeve shouts. That’s how she refers to the twins when she’s excited. (Robby was named for Gil’s father; Brenna for our mother.) The two of them survey Maeve stolidly from the backseat, and Nandina leans across to call through the passenger window, “See you at the park?”

  “See you,” I say.

  If it were Gil, he would offer us a ride, but Nandina is a stickler for the child-seat law. She takes off again, and Maeve sits ker-plunk on the sidewalk and starts wailing.

  “We’ll see them in a minute, Maeve.”

  “See them now!”

  I reach down for her hand to lift her to her feet. Her hand is a fist, a tight satin knot, and she tries to pull it away, but I keep a firm hold.

  Every so often, I reflect on that story Gil told me: how his father came back from the dead to check on Gil’s construction work. I know Gil felt it was his father’s unfinished business that brought him, but what’s occurred to me lately is, couldn’t it have been Gil’s unfinished business? Couldn’t Gil have been thinking, I wish to God I could have settled things with my pop?

  I haven’t mentioned this to Gil, though, because I suspect he might be embarrassed he ever told me that story.

  Robby and Brenna are older than Maeve by several months, and it shows. They’re more reserved, more self-contained, and they have that social presence that day-care centers seem to confer. When we get to the park we find them deeply absorbed in watching a father and son’s batting practice—the boy connecting with a solid thwack, his mother and his little sister cheering from the sidelines. “Hi, Robby! Hi, Brenna!” Maeve calls out. They each raise an index finger infinitesimally without taking their eyes from the ballplayers. I feel a tug of pity for Maeve, but she’s philosophical about it. She sets off on her own through the weeds along the creek bank. “Butterfly, Daddy!” she calls. “I see it, honey.”