A Patchwork Planet

by Anne Tyler

  Dreamer.

  While Mom was matching cups to saucers, Wicky remembered my birthday present and took it from her purse: a red silk paisley tie wrapped in red tissue. I hadn’t worn a tie since Grandmother Gaitlin’s funeral, but I put it on right away—knotting it around my bare neck, since my shirt didn’t have a collar. “Thanks, Wicky. Thanks, Jeff,” I said. “Thank you very much, J.P.” Then I said, “Want to see what Opal gave me?” I dug the money clip from my pocket and passed it around. Everyone admired it. I said, “You should have seen the card that came with it. There was a really good drawing of me on the front.”

  “Oh,” my mother said, “that child is just growing up without us! It’s not fair.”

  “I was thinking she might come stay with me for a week or two this summer,” I said. “She’s getting old enough, I figure. I ought to be taking part in her life a little more.”

  “Stay in that basement room of yours?” Mom asked.

  “Well, yes.”

  “I hardly think so, Barnaby. Maybe here, instead.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my place!”

  Mom just pursed her lips and poured me a cup of coffee.

  I’d been planning to mention my angel next. I mean, just jokingly. Tell how I’d half imagined she had instructed me to be more of a father. But somehow the moment had passed. A silence fell. The only sound was the clinking of spoons against cups. Finally Wicky started a story about one of her famous cooking disasters, but she interrupted herself to mop up J.P.’s spilled milk; or maybe she just lost heart. I said, “Mom? Do I get cake, or don’t I?”

  “Well, but what about Len?”

  “Whose birthday is this, anyhow?” I asked.

  “I hate to just go ahead,” she said, but she stood up and went out to the kitchen. She came back with the cake held high in front of her: chocolate icing and a blaze of candles. We’re not much for singing in my family, but Wicky started “Happy Birthday,” and so the others raggedly joined in. “Make a wish! Make a wish!” Wicky chanted at the end. Poor Wicky; she was carrying more than her share of the burden here. Although J.P., banging his spoon on his tray, might be willing to help in a couple more years.

  I blew out all the candles in one breath. (I said I’d made a wish, but I hadn’t.) Then I grabbed the knife. “There’s an extra plate for Len,” Mom told me. “Just set a piece aside, and he can eat it when he gets here.”

  She was watching the path of my knife, sitting on the front two inches of her chair and coiled to spring the instant I flubbed up; but I disappointed her and cut the first slice perfectly. I sent it across to Wicky and said, “Haven’t we been through this before?”

  “Through what before?” Mom asked.

  “Waiting for Wonder Boy and he never showed up? I seem to remember we did the same thing last year.”

  “I don’t know why you always take that tone about him,” Mom said. She waved a slice of cake on to Jeff. “You used to be inseparable, once upon a time.”

  “Once upon a time,” I agreed.

  “I believe you’re jealous of his success.”

  “Success?” I asked. I stopped slicing the cake and looked over at her. “You call it a success, selling off fake plantation houses on streets called Foxhound Footway and Stirrup Cup Circle?”

  “At least he wears a suit to work. At least he makes a decent living. At least he has a college degree.”

  “Well, if that’s what turns you on,” I told her.

  She said, “Did you sign up for that course?”

  “What course?”

  “That night course at the college, remember? I suggested you might sign up for it and earn a few more credits.”

  “Oh, that,” I said.

  “Well, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just never got around to it, I guess.”

  I handed a piece of cake to Dad. He accepted it with a pinched and disapproving expression, his gray eyes pronounced in their sockets; but it would be Mom he disapproved of, not me. He couldn’t abide for people to act upset. And Mom was obviously upset. She was stripping all her rings off, a very bad sign. Setting them at the head of her place in little jingling stacks with trembling fingers: her wedding and engagement rings, Grandmother Gaitlin’s dinner ring, her Mother’s Day ring with its two winking red and blue birthstones. She said, “But the semester must have started already!”

  I gave her a plate and said, “Probably has.”

  She pushed the plate away.

  “Cakies, Jape-Jape!” Wicky caroled, aiming a forkful of crumbs at J.P. But J.P. was staring openmouthed at Mom, a thread of dribble spinning from his gleaming lower lip.

  I cut the last slice, my own. A big one. I told my brother, “Not to be piggish or anything …,” and my brother rolled his eyes.

  “Twelve, credits,” my mother said, too distinctly. “Twelve, little, college, credits, and you could kiss Roll-a-Bat goodbye.”

  “Rent-a-Back,” I said. I licked the frosting off a candle.

  “You could buy yourself a decent suit and go to work for your father.”

  “Now, Margot,” my father said. “If college were all that stood in his way, I’d dream up something for him to do tomorrow. Maybe he’d rather work elsewhere; have you considered that?”

  “Of course he’d rather work elsewhere!” my mother cried. “Are you blind? He’s spitting in your face! He’s spitting in the Foundation’s face! He has deliberately chosen employment that has no lasting point to it, no reputation, no future, in preference to work that’s of permanent significance. And he’s doing it purely for spite.”

  I had been steadily chewing, but I couldn’t let that pass. I swallowed twice (the cake might as well have been sand) and turned to my father. “It isn’t spite,” I told him. “It’s only that I feel uneasy around do-gooders. You know? When somebody tells me he, oh, say, spent his Christmas Day volunteering in a soup kitchen, I feel this kind of inner shriveling away from him. You know what I mean?”

  “Barnaby!” my mother cried. “Your own father’s a do-gooder! Think what you’ve just said to him!”

  “And who cares if my job has no future?” I asked him. He was at one end of the table and she was at the other. I could speak to him directly and shut Mom out. “I need to pay my rent and grocery bill, is all. I’m not looking to get rich.”

  He seemed to find this idea startling; or at any rate, he blinked. But before he could comment, I said, “Besides. I wouldn’t call Rent-a-Back pointless. It serves a very useful purpose.”

  “Well, certainly, for a fee!” my mother said triumphantly. “For people who can pay you a fee and then die, and that’s the end of it!”

  J.P was starting to make cranky, whimpering noises. Wicky rose and tried to lift: him from his high chair, but he was fussing and squirming. She said, “Jeff, could you give me a hand here?”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Can’t you get his legs out from under? I shouldn’t have to manage all on my own.”

  “You need to slide the tray off first, for God’s sake,” Jeff told her.

  “Well, you could slide it off yourself instead of just sitting there, dammit!”

  I set down my fork and turned to my mother. “I’ll tell you what’s really bothering you,” I said. (Oh, I always did get sucked in sooner or later.) “You think a thing is worthwhile only if it makes the headlines. Prominent Philanthropist Donates Five Hundred Thousand. You think it’s a waste of time just to carry some lady’s trash out for her.”

  “Yes, I do,” Mom said. “And it’s a waste of money too. Our money.”

  “Well, I knew we’d get around to that sooner or later.”

  “Our eighty-seven hundred dollars,” she said, “that you have never paid us back a cent of because you earn barely a subsistence wage at that so-called job of yours.”

  “Margot,” my father said. “He doesn’t have to pay us back.”

  “Of course he has to pay
us back! It isn’t your average household expense: buying off your son’s burglary victims!”

  “He is not required to pay us back, and you are behaving abominably.!” my father said.

  The silence was that sharp-edged kind that follows gunshots or shattering claps of thunder. J.P. stopped whimpering. Jeff and Wicky froze on either side of him. My mother sat very straight-backed in her seat. It was a lot more obvious now that she was just a Polish girl from Canton, scared to death Jeffrey Gaitlin might find her common.

  Strange how always, at moments like these, the table finally felt full enough.

  I had my brother come out with me and move his car so I could make my getaway. At first he tried to stall, saying they were about to leave themselves if I would just hold my horses. But I said, “I need to go now” and so he came, muttering and complaining.

  “Geez, Barn,” he said as he trailed me down the steps. “You take everything so personally. Mom was just being Mom; it’s no big deal.”

  “I knew she’d bring up that money,” I told him.

  “If you knew, why let it bother you?”

  We stopped beside my car, and I zipped my jacket. “What’s our next occasion? Easter?” I asked. “Remind me to be out of town.”

  “You should lighten up,” Jeff said. “They don’t ask all that much of you.”

  “Only that I change into some totally other person,” I told him.

  “That’s not true. If you made the least bit of effort; showed you cared. If you dressed a little better when you came to see them, for instance—”

  “I’m dressed fine!” I glanced down at myself. “Well, so maybe the tie doesn’t go. But the tie wasn’t my idea, was it.”

  “Barnaby. You’re wearing a pajama top.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You noticed?”

  I had thought it didn’t look much different from a regular plaid flannel shirt.

  “And both knees are poking through your jeans, and you haven’t shaved in a week, I bet—”

  “I did have a haircut, though,” I said, hoping he would assume that meant a barber had done it.

  He squinted at me and said, “When?”

  “Look, pal,” I said. “Could we just get a move on here? I’m freezing!”

  And I strode off toward my car, which forced him to go to his car, sighing a big cloud of fog to show how I tried his patience. His car was one of those macho four-by-fours. You’d think he rode the range all day, herding cattle or something.

  A four-by-four, and a Princeton degree, and a desk half the size of a tennis court on the top floor of the Gaitlin Foundation. None of which I wanted for myself, Lord knows. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, as I unlocked my car door, how comfortable it must be to be Jeff. Things just seemed to come easier for him. Me, I’d been in trouble from adolescence on. I’d been messing up and breaking things and disappointing everyone around me, while Jeff just coolly went about his business. It’s as if he were an entirely different race, a different species, more at home in the world. More blessed.

  What I sometimes told myself: I’ll be that way too, as soon as my real life begins.

  But I can’t explain exactly what I meant by “real life.”

  I slid behind the wheel, slammed my door shut, watched in my rearview mirror as Jeff backed toward the street. When I moved to start my engine, though, I heard a honk behind me. I checked in the mirror and found a sleek black Lexus just turning into the driveway and blocking Jeff’s exit.

  Len Parrish, after all.

  I opened my door and climbed out. Jeff was rolling forward again with the Lexus following, barely tucking its tail in off the street before it had to stop short behind our two cars. “Hold it!” I called, waving both arms, but Len went ahead and doused his lights. I walked over to the Lexus. “Don’t park! I have to leave!”

  He lowered his window. “Nice to see you too, Gaitlin.”

  “You’re blocking me in! I’m going. You’ll have to let me by.”

  Instead he got out of his car. A good-looking guy, wide-shouldered and athletic, in a fitted black overcoat. He wore a broad, lazy grin, and he asked me, “How’s the birthday boy?”

  “Fine, but—”

  “Jeff!” he said, because my brother had come to join us.

  “Hello, Len,” Jeff said. The two of them shook hands. (I just stood there.)

  “Guess I’m a little late,” Len said.

  “Well, Mom’s saved a piece of cake for you,” Jeff told him.

  “Come back inside and help me eat it, Barnaby,” Len said.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have to be going.”

  “Aw, now. What’s the rush?”

  Here’s what’s funny: Len Parrish went along with me on every teenage stunt I ever pulled. He was with me the night I got caught, in fact, but he wasn’t caught himself, and I never breathed a word to the police. After the helicopter buzzed us, I tried to jump from the Amberlys’ sunporch roof to the limb of a maple tree. Made a little error in judgment; I’d had a puff or two of pot. Landed in the pyracantha bush below. No injuries but a few scratches, thanks again to the pot, which kept me loose-limbed as a trained paratrooper all the way down. The police got so diverted, they failed to notice Len and the Muller boys slipping out the Amberlys’ back door.

  I didn’t blame Len in the least. I’d have done the same, in his place. But it irked me that my mother thought he was such a winner. Him in his expensive coat and velvety suede gloves. He pulled off one of the gloves now to stroke the hood of my car. In the dark, my car looked black, although it was a shade called Riverside Red. “Grit,” he said. He withdrew his hand and rubbed his fingers together.

  “You want to move your vehicle, Len?”

  “What you need is a garage,” he said. “Rent one or something. Take better care of this baby.”

  “I’ll go see to it this instant,” I told him. “Just let me out of the driveway.”

  “At least you ought to wash her every now and then.”

  I slid in behind the wheel and shut the door. Jeff returned to his car, and Len at last ambled toward the Lexus, while I watched in my mirror. The minute the driveway was clear, I shifted into reverse and backed out.

  Len should try this himself, if he thought Corvettes were that great. It just so happened mine was made in 1963, the year they had a split rear window. Stupidest idea in automotive history.

  I was happy enough to be leaving that I returned Len’s wave very cheerfully, before I took off toward home. Now he and Mom could have their little love feast together. Shake their heads about I-don’t-know-what-Barnaby-will-come-to. Cut themselves another slice of cake.

  I thought of my rooftop fall again. It was possible I could have escaped, if the tippy toe of my sneaker hadn’t caught on some kind of metal bracket that was sticking up from the gutter. I remembered exactly how it felt—the barely perceptible hitch as my toe and the bracket connected. I recalled the physical sensation of something happening that couldn’t be reversed: that feeling, all the way down, of longing to take back my one single, simple misstep. But it was already too late, and I knew that, absolutely, even before I hit the pyracantha bush.

  Eighty-seven hundred dollars. It never failed to come up at some point. Mom might say, for instance, that they planned to remodel the kitchen as soon as they could afford it; and while a stranger would find that an innocent remark, I knew better. Of course they could afford it—if they couldn’t, who could?—but she wanted to make it plain that they still felt the effects of that unforeseen drain on their finances. The waste of it, the fruitlessness. The niggling dribs and drabs handed out to neighbors. Sixty dollars for a ballerina music box, which I’d thrown down a storm drain in a moment of panic. Ninety-four fifty to mend the lock on a cabinet door. The most expensive item was an ivory carving of a tiny, naked Chinese man and woman getting extremely familiar with each other. I broke it when I stuffed it between my mattress and box spring. Mr. McLeod said it was priceless but settled for six hundred, grumblin
g. You’d have thought he’d be embarrassed to claim ownership.

  I was heading up Charles Street now, slightly above the speed limit. Racing a traffic light that turned red before I reached it, but I hooked a right onto Northern Parkway without touching the brakes.

  And it wasn’t only the reparation money. Get Mom wound up and she would toss in the tuition at Renascence, besides. A little harder to figure the precise amount, there. As Dad pointed out, they’d have paid for my schooling in any case. But Mom said, “Not a school like Renascence, though, with its four-to-one student-teacher ratio and its trained psychologists.”

  I didn’t count the tuition myself; I reasoned that Renascence was their idea, not mine. First inkling I had of it was, Mom said to pack my clothes because the next day I was leaving for a special school that was perfect for me: roomy accommodations out in the country and a supervised environment. Except I heard “roomy” as “loony.” (“It’s perfect for you: loony accommodations.”) I flipped and said I wouldn’t go. Never did want to go, even after they cleared up the misunderstanding. So I couldn’t be held responsible for the Renascence bill, right?

  Unfortunate name, Renascence. People were always correcting my pronunciation. “Uh, don’t you mean Renaissance?” And nobody got reborn there, believe me—nobody I ever heard of. The aim stated on the school’s letterhead was “Guiding the Gifted Young Tester of Limits,” but what they should have said was “Stashing Away Your Rich Juvenile Delinquent.” The only thing “special” about the place was, they kept us twelve months a year. No awkward summer vacations to inconvenience our families. Also, we had to wear suits to class. (Which explains why I favor pajama tops now.) And every time we cursed, we had to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet. Boy, that’ll clean up your language in a hurry! Not to mention instilling a permanent dislike of Shakespeare.

  I remember this one sonnet I learned, the first week I was at Renascence. It started out, When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes … I thought it was me he was talking about. I swear it just about tore me apart the moment I saw those words on the page.

  Well. As I said, it was my first week. And anyhow, the guy went on to say, Haply I think on thee, which was certainly not about me. I didn’t have any “thee” in my life; no way. The girls I hung out with in those days were more body mates than soul mates, and you couldn’t claim that anyone in my family was my “thee.”