by Anne Tyler
Macon glanced over at Edward. The two of them were in the study, where Macon had managed to type half a page. Edward lay flat on his stomach with his legs straight out behind him—short, pudgy legs like the drumsticks of a dressed Long Island duckling. “He looks all right to me,” Macon said.
“I mean, is he biting?”
“Well, not lately, but he’s developed this new symptom. He gets angry if I leave the house. He starts barking and showing his teeth.”
“I still think he ought to be trained.”
“Oh, you know, he’s four and a half and I suppose—”
“That’s not too old! I could do it in no time. Tell you what, maybe I could just come around and discuss it. You and me could have a drink or something and talk about what his problems are.”
“Well, I really don’t think—”
“Or you could come to my place. I’d fix you supper.”
Macon wondered how it would help Edward to be dragged to supper at some stranger’s house.
“Macon? What do you say?” she asked.
“Oh, why, um . . . I think for now I’ll just try to manage on my own.”
“Well, I can understand that,” she said. “Believe me. I’ve been through that stage. So what I’ll do is, I’ll wait for you to get in touch. You do still have my card, don’t you?”
Macon said he did, although he had no idea where it had got to.
“I don’t want to be pushy!” she said.
“No, well . . .” Macon said. Then he hung up and went back to his guidebook.
He was still on the introduction, and it was already the end of August. How would he meet his deadline? The back of the desk chair hit his spine in just the wrong place. The s key kept sticking. The typewriter tapped out audible words. “Inimitable,” it said. His typing sounded just like Sarah saying “inimitable.” “You in your inimitable way . . .” she told him. He gave a quick shake of his head. Generally food in England is not as jarring as in other foreign countries. Nice cooked vegetables, things in white sauce, pudding for dessert . . . I don’t know why some travelers complain about Englishfood.
In September, he decided to alter his system of dressing. If he wore sweat suits at home—the zipper-free kind, nothing to scratch or bind him—he could go from one shower to the next without changing clothes. The sweat suit would serve as both pajamas and day wear.
He bought a couple of them, medium gray. The first night he wore one to bed he enjoyed the feel of it, and he liked not having to dress the next morning. In fact, it occurred to him that he might as well wear the same outfit two days in a row; skip his shower on alternate evenings. Talk about saving energy! In the morning all he had to do was shave. He wondered if he ought to grow a beard.
Around noon of the second day, though, he started feeling a little low. He was sitting at his typewriter and something made him notice his posture—stooped and sloppy. He blamed the sweat suit. He rose and went to the full-length mirror in the hall. His reflection reminded him of a patient in a mental hospital. Part of the trouble, perhaps, was his shoes—regular black tie shoes intended for dressier clothes. Should he buy sneakers? But he would hate to be mistaken for a jogger. He noticed that without a belt around his waist, he tended to let his stomach stick out. He stood up straighter. That evening when it was time to wash the first sweat suit, he used extra-hot water to shrink out some of the bagginess.
He felt much worse in the morning. It had been a warm night and he woke up sticky and cross. He couldn’t face the thought of popcorn for breakfast. He laundered a load of sheets and then, in the midst of hanging them, found himself standing motionless with his head bowed, both wrists dangling over the clothesline as if he himself had been pinned there. “Buck up,” he said aloud. His voice sounded creaky, out of practice.
This was his day for grocery shopping—Tuesday, when the supermarket was least crowded with other human beings. But somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to get going. He dreaded all that business with the address books, the three tabbed books he shopped with. (One held data from Consumer Reports —the top-rated brand of bread, for instance, listed under B. In another he noted prices, and in the third he filed his coupons.) He kept having to stop and riffle through them, muttering prices under his breath, comparing house brands to cents-off name brands. Oh, everything seemed so complicated. Why bother? Why eat at all, in fact?
On the other hand, he needed milk. And Edward was low on dog food, and Helen was completely out of cat food.
He did something he’d never done before. He telephoned The Market Basket, a small, expensive grocery that delivered. And he didn’t order just emergency rations. No, he called in the whole week’s list. “Shall we bring this to the front or the back?” the clerk asked in her tinselly voice.
“The back,” Macon said. “No, wait. Bring the perishables to the back, but put the dog food next to the coal chute.”
“Coal chute,” the clerk repeated, apparently writing it down.
“The coal chute at the side of the house. But not the cat food; that goes in back with the perishables.”
“Well, wait now—”
“And the upstairs items at the front of the house.”
“What upstairs items?”
“Toothpaste, Ivory soap, dog biscuits . . .”
“I thought you said the dog biscuits went to the coal chute.”
“Not the dog biscuits, the dog food! It’s the food that goes to the coal chute, dammit.”
“Now, look here,” the clerk said. “There’s no call to be rude.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Macon told her, “but I just want the simplest thing, it seems to me: one puny box of Milkbone biscuits up beside my bed. If I give Edward my buttered popcorn it upsets his stomach. Otherwise I wouldn’t mind; it’s not as if I’m hoarding it all for myself or something, but he has this sensitivity to fats and I’m the only one in the house, it’s me who has to clean up if he gets sick. I’m the only one to do it; I’m all alone; it’s just me; it seems everybody’s just . . . fled from me, I don’t know, I’ve lost them, I’m left standing here saying, ‘Where’d they go? Where is everybody? Oh, God, what did I do that was so bad?’ ”
His voice was not behaving right and he hung up. He stood over the telephone rubbing his forehead. Had he given her his name? Or not. He couldn’t remember. Please, please, let him not have given her his name.
He was falling apart; that much was obvious. He would have to get a grip on himself. First thing: out of this sweat suit. It was some kind of jinx. He clapped his hands together briskly, and then he climbed the stairs. In the bathroom, he yanked off the sweat suit and dropped it into the tub. Yesterday’s hung from the shower curtain rod, still damp. There wasn’t a chance it would be dry by tonight. What a mistake! He felt like a fool. He’d come within an inch, within a hairsbreadth of turning into one of those pathetic creatures you see on the loose from time to time—unwashed, unshaven, shapeless, talking to themselves, padding along in their institutional garb.
Neatly dressed now in a white shirt and khakis, he gathered the damp sweat suit and carried it down to the basement. It would make good winter pajamas, at least. He put it in the dryer, wedged the exhaust tube in the window again, and set the dials. Better to consume a little energy than to fall into despair over a soggy sweat suit.
At the top of the basement stairs, Edward was complaining. He was hungry, but not brave enough to descend the stairs on his own. When he caught sight of Macon he lay flat, with his nose poking over the topmost step, and put on a hopeful expression. “Coward,” Macon told him. He scooped Edward up in both arms and turned to lumber back down. Edward’s teeth started chattering—a ticketytick like rice in a cup. It occurred to Macon that Edward might know something he didn’t. Was the basement haunted, or what? It had been weeks now, and Edward was still so frightened that sometimes, set in front of his food, he just stood there dismally and made a puddle without bothering to lift his leg. “You’re being very silly, Edward,”
Macon told him.
Just then, an eerie howl rose from . . . where? From the basement’s very air, it seemed. It continued steadily; it grew. Edward, who must have been expecting this all along, kicked off instantly with his sturdy, clawed hind legs against Macon’s diaphragm. Macon felt the wind knocked out of him. Edward whomped into the wall of damp body bags on the clothesline, rebounded, and landed in the center of Macon’s stomach. Macon set one foot blindly in the wheeled basket and his legs went out from under him. He stepped down hard into empty space.
He was lying on his back, on the clammy cement floor, with his left leg doubled beneath him. The sound that had set all this in motion paused for one split second and then resumed. It was clear now that it came from the dryer’s exhaust tube. “Shoot,” Macon said to Edward, who lay panting on top of him. “Wouldn’t you think that idiot cat would know the dryer was running?”
He could see how it must have happened. Attempting to enter from outside, she’d been met by a whistling wind, but she had stubbornly continued into the tube. He pictured her eyes pressed into slits, her ears flattened back by a lint-filled gale. Wailing and protesting, she had nonetheless clung to her course. What persistence!
Macon shook Edward off and rolled over on his stomach. Even so small a movement caused him agony. He felt a lump of nausea beginning in his throat, but he rolled once more, dragging his leg behind him. With his teeth set, he reached for the door of the dryer and pulled it open. The sweat suit slowly stopped revolving. The cat stopped howling. Macon watched her bumbling, knobby shape inching backward through the tube. Just as she reached her exit, the entire tube fell out of the window and into the laundry sink, but Helen didn’t fall with it. He hoped she was all right. He watched until she scurried past the other window, looking just slightly rumpled. Then he drew a breath and began the long, hard trip up the stairs for help.
five
Oh, I’ve erred and I have stumbled,” Macon’s sister sang in the kitchen, “I’ve been sinful and unwise . . .”
She had a tremulous soprano that sounded like an old lady’s, although she was younger than Macon. You could imagine such a voice in church, some country kind of church where the women still wore flat straw hats.
I’m just a lucky pilgrim
On the road to Paradise.
Macon was lying on the daybed in his grandparents’ sun porch. His left leg, encased in plaster from mid-thigh to instep, was not painful so much as absent. There was a constant dull, cottony numbness that made him want to pinch his own shin. Not that he could, of course. He was sealed away from himself. The hardest blow felt like a knock on the wall from a neighboring room.
Still, he felt a kind of contentment. He lay listening to his sister fix breakfast, idly scratching the cat who had made herself a nest in the blankets. “I’ve had trials, I’ve had sorrows,” Rose trilled merrily, “I’ve had grief and sacrifice . . .” Once she got the coffee started, she would come help him across the living room to the downstairs bathroom. He still found it difficult to navigate, especially on polished floors. Nowadays he marveled at all those people on crutches whom he used to take for granted. He saw them as a flock of stalky wading birds, dazzlingly competent with their sprightly hops and debonair pivots. How did they do it?
His own crutches, so new their rubber tips were not yet scuffed, leaned against the wall. His bathrobe hung over a chair. Beneath the window was a folding card table with a wood-grained cardboard top and rickety legs. His grandparents had been dead for years, but the table remained set up as if for one of their eternal bridge games. Macon knew that on its underside was a yellowed label reading ATLAS MFG. CO. with a steel engraving of six plump, humorless men in high-collared suits standing upon a board laid across the very same table. FURNISHINGS OF DECEPTIVE DELICACY, the caption said. Macon associated the phrase with his grandmother: deceptive delicacy. Lying on the sun porch floor as a boy, he had studied her fragile legs, from which her anklebones jutted out like doorknobs. Her solid, black, chunky-heeled shoes were planted squarely a foot apart, never tapping or fidgeting.
He heard his brother Porter upstairs, whistling along with Rose’s song. He knew it was Porter because Charles never whistled. There was the sound of a shower running. His sister looked through the sun porch door, with Edward peering around her and panting at Macon as if he were laughing.
“Macon? Are you awake?” Rose asked.
“I’ve been awake for hours,” he told her, for there was something vague about her that caused her brothers to act put-upon and needy whenever she chanced to focus on them. She was pretty in a sober, prim way, with beige hair folded unobtrusively at the back of her neck where it wouldn’t be a bother. Her figure was a very young girl’s, but her clothes were spinsterly and concealing.
She wrapped him in his bathrobe and helped him stand up. Now his leg actively hurt. It seemed the pain was a matter of gravity. A throbbing ache sank slowly down the length of the bone. With Rose supporting him on one side and a crutch on the other, he hobbled out of the sun porch, through the living room with its shabby, curlicued furniture. The dog kept getting underfoot. “Maybe I could stop and rest a moment,” Macon said when they passed the couch.
“It’s only a little farther.”
They entered the pantry. Rose opened the bathroom door and helped him inside. “Call me when you’re ready,” she said, closing the door after him. Macon sagged against the sink.
At breakfast, Porter was cheerily talkative while the others ate in silence. Porter was the best-looking of all the Learys—more tightly knit than Macon, his hair a brighter shade of blond. He gave an impression of vitality and direction that his brothers lacked. “Got a lot to do today,” he said between mouthfuls. “That meeting with Herrin, interviews for Dave’s old job, Cates flying in from Atlanta . . .”
Charles just sipped his coffee. While Porter was already dressed, Charles still wore his pajamas. He was a soft, sweet-faced man who never seemed to move; any time you looked at him he’d be watching you with his sorrowful eyes that slanted downward at the outer corners.
Rose brought the coffeepot from the stove. “Last night, Edward woke me twice asking to go out,” she said. “Do you think he has some sort of kidney problem?”
“It’s the adjustment,” Macon said. “Adjustment to change. I wonder how he knows not to wake me.”
Porter said, “Maybe we could rig up some sort of system. One of those little round pet doors or something.”
“Edward’s kind of portly for a pet door,” Macon said.
“Besides,” Rose said, “the yard’s not fenced. We can’t let him out on his own if he’s not fenced in.”
“A litterbox, then,” Porter suggested.
“Litterbox! For a dog?”
“Why not? If it were big enough.”
Macon said, “Use a bathtub. The one in the basement. No one goes there anymore.”
“But who would clean it?”
“Ah.”
They all looked down at Edward, who was lying at Rose’s feet. He rolled his eyes at them.
“How come you have him, anyway?” Porter asked Macon.
“He was Ethan’s.”
“Oh. I see,” Porter said. He gave a little cough. “Animals!” he said brightly. “Ever considered what they must think of us? I mean, here we come back from the grocery store with the most amazing haul—chicken, pork, half a cow. We leave at nine and we’re back at ten, evidently having caught an entire herd of beasts. They must think we’re the greatest hunters on earth!”
Macon leaned back in his chair with his coffee mug cupped in both hands. The sun was warming the breakfast table, and the kitchen smelled of toast. He almost wondered whether, by some devious, subconscious means, he had engineered this injury—every elaborate step leading up to it—just so he could settle down safe among the people he’d started out with.
Charles and Porter left for the factory, and Rose went upstairs and ran the vacuum cleaner. Macon, who was supposed to be typing his
guidebook, struggled back to the sun porch and collapsed. Since he’d come home he’d been sleeping too much. The urge to sleep was like a great black cannonball rolling around inside his skull, making his head heavy and droopy.
On the wall at the end of the room hung a portrait of the four Leary children: Charles, Porter, Macon, and Rose, clustered in an armchair. Their grandfather had commissioned that portrait several years before they came to live with him. They were still in California with their mother—a giddy young war widow. From time to time she sent snapshots, but Grandfather Leary found those inadequate. By their very nature, he told her in his letters, photos lied. They showed what a person looked like over a fraction of a second—not over long, slow minutes, which was what you’d take to study someone in real life. In that case, said Alicia, didn’t paintings lie also? They showed hours instead of minutes. It wasn’t Grandfather Leary she said this to, but the artist, an elderly Californian whose name Grandfather Leary had somehow got hold of. If the artist had had a reply, Macon couldn’t remember what it was.
He could remember sitting for the portrait, though, and now when he looked at it he had a very clear picture of his mother standing just outside the gilded frame in a pink kimono, watching the painting take shape while she toweled her hair dry. She had fluffy, short, brittle hair whose color she “helped along,” as she put it. Her face was a type no longer seen—it wasn’t just unfashionable, it had vanished altogether. How did women mold their basic forms to suit the times? Were there no more of those round chins, round foreheads, and bruised, baroque little mouths so popular in the forties?
The artist, it was obvious, found her very attractive. He kept pausing in his work to say he wished she were the subject. Alicia gave a breathless laugh and shooed away his words with one hand. Probably later she had gone out with him a few times. She was always taking up with new men, and they were always the most exciting men in the world, to hear her tell it. If they were artists, why, she had to give a party and get all her friends to buy their paintings. If they flew small planes on weekends, she had to start pilot’s lessons. If they were political, there she was on street corners thrusting petitions on passersby. Her children were too young to worry about the men themselves, if there was any reason to worry. No, it was her enthusiasm that disturbed them. Her enthusiasm came in spurts, a violent zigzag of hobbies, friends, boyfriends, causes. She always seemed about to fall over the brink of something. She was always going too far. Her voice had an edge to it, as if at any moment it might break. The faster she talked and the brighter her eyes grew, the more fixedly her children stared at her, as if willing her to follow their example of steadiness and dependability. “Oh, what is it with you?” she would ask them. “Why are you such sticks?” And she would give up on them and flounce off to meet her crowd. Rose, the baby, used to wait for her return in the hall, sucking her thumb and stroking an old fur stole that Alicia never wore anymore.
