A Patchwork Planet

by Anne Tyler

  In the car, my mother said, “Natalie’s gained some weight, don’t you think?” It was her way of acting chummy—showing me she was on my side. I didn’t bother answering.

  “Of course, she always had that wide, smooth face,” Mom went on. “Almost a flat face, some might say. I like a bit of an edge to a person’s face, don’t you?”

  “He had no business taking over lunch like that,” I said, all at once realizing.

  “What, dear?”

  “Lunch was my time. It’s part of my Saturday visit. Then he horns in on it and makes it seem like a favor to ask us along.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t let it upset me,” Mom said, slowing for a stoplight.

  “I should have said, ‘Thanks, but we’ve already made plans to eat with Opal on her own. Reservations,’ I should have said. ‘Reservations for three,’ so they couldn’t say they’d join us. Good grief! It’s not as if we’re all best buddies!”

  “He didn’t mean any harm,” Mom told me. “He seemed like a very nice man. A bit old, though, don’t you agree? Is he a lot older than Natalie?”

  “I wouldn’t have any idea,” I said.

  “Of course, Natalie always did have something of a father fixation.”

  The light changed, but Mom didn’t notice till someone behind her honked. Then she gave a start and drove on. She said, “Remember how she used to phone her father at work every day? She phoned him every morning the whole time you were married, even though you were living not twenty feet away from him.”

  We lived above her parents’ garage—practically in their laps. Which didn’t help the marriage any, believe me. Every little thing I did—take a day off from classes, say, or come home a tad bit late or not at all—they would watch and judge and comment on to Natalie. But hey, it was rent-free; don’t knock it. In fact, I stayed on there after we split up, although it got kind of awkward once I started dating again. Finally her father came over and had a little talk with me; said maybe I should consider moving. I didn’t make it easy for him. I said, “Your daughter was the one who walked out, Mr. Bassett. I fail to see why I should be dislodged from my established residence.” But I did find another place, by and by. Just not the very instant he suggested it.

  Now Mr. Bassett was dead of a stroke, and his widow lived in Clearwater, Florida. Everything seemed to have changed in a flash, when I got to looking back on it.

  “Opal has Jim Bassett’s eyes, have you noticed?” Mom was asking. “His eyes were his best feature—that pale shade of gray. I was thinking after the recital; I looked at Opal and I said to myself, ‘Isn’t that a coincidence! Her eyes are the color of opals.’”

  I pictured Mr. Bassett’s eyes when I’d reminded him his daughter had walked out. “But, Barnaby,” he had said, “what actual choice did she have?” With his upper lids crinkling, honestly perplexed. Then I pictured Opal’s eyes, so measuring and veiled.

  I have a problem, sometimes, after I come away from a place. I’ll start out feeling fine, but just a few minutes later I’ll get to reconsidering. I’ll regret that I’ve said something rude, that I’ve disappointed people or hurt their feelings. I’ll see that I have messed up yet again, and I’ll call myself all manner of names. Freak of the week! Nerd of the herd! And I’ll wish I could rearrange my life so I’d never have to deal anymore with another human being.

  It was nearly two p.m. before I got home. Mom offered to stop for lunch somewhere, but I said no, even though I was starving; so first thing after I walked in the door, I made myself a sandwich. Then I checked my answering machine. Four messages.

  Mrs. Dibble said, “Barnaby, I know it’s a Philadelphia day, but Mrs. Figg has the idea that you’d promised to move her husband’s computer down to their den. I told her she must be mistaken, but you know how she is. Anyway, call me if you get back anytime soon.”

  Then: “Hello, Barnaby. This is Sophia, at eight-fifteen Saturday morning. Just wondered if you’d be taking the train to Philly today, by any chance! I thought I could give you a ride to Penn Station. Oh, well! I’ll try you later, I guess.”

  After that, a cranky-voiced woman: “Now, how do I … oh, I hate these machines!” Mrs. Figg herself, although clients were not supposed to telephone us directly. “Where have you got to, Barnaby? You said you’d come move my husband’s computer!”

  And finally Sophia again: “Just trying you one more time before I head for the station! I guess you’ve decided to go by car. Well, maybe next time.” Her tone was airy and casual, with a flicker of a laugh behind her goodbye.

  I sighed and punched the Delete button.

  I used to have friends to hang out with on weekends. Ray Oakley at work, before he got married. Martine before she met Everett. Or some of the guys from my old neighborhood, but they’d mostly moved away now, or turned all important and busy like Len. And I hadn’t dated a girl in months. I wanted a girlfriend, but lately it seemed girls were getting younger and younger. They’d begun to seem just plain silly, with their giggly enthusiasm and their surfer-type vocabulary and their twitchy little miniskirts.

  And I never counted my clients as friends—not even the ones I liked. Clients could up and die on you.

  A few years ago, when they were making a public to-do over laying the last stone at the National Cathedral, I read an interview in the paper with a guy who’d seen the first stone laid, in nineteen-oh-something-or-other. He said he’d been just a little boy then, and his father took him to the ceremony. That story caught my fancy, for some reason. I pictured a kid in high button shoes and a ribbon-trimmed hat, hanging on to his father’s hand in a great cobbled square among crowds of cheering people. Then one by one the people started dimming. They grew pale and then transparent, and finally they disappeared. The father disappeared and the men in bowler hats and the women in long cloaks, until the only one left was that little boy standing all, all alone.

  Sunday, I woke up late, because I’d had a bad night. I’d tossed and turned and dreamed sketchy dreams I couldn’t quite remember. It was well past noon before I really got going.

  The weather was gray and cold, with needles of sleet that pricked my face as soon as I stepped outside. Ice glazed my windshield. I scraped it off and let the engine warm up, and then I drove very slowly, braking as easily as possible at each intersection. Almost no other cars were on the road. The radio announcer said the sleet would continue till evening. A good thing it was a Sunday, he said, when most of us could stay home.

  In Penn Station, no more than six or eight people sat far apart on the benches, buried in coats and scarves and looking grumpy.

  First I checked the board. Southbound trains were due in at 1:19, 2:35, and 3:11. It was 1:07 by this time, but the 1:19 was fifteen minutes late, wouldn’t you know; so I went off to the newsstand and bought myself a paper. Then I settled on a bench and started reading. When the first arrivals filed in, I watched both doors but I didn’t stand up, because I doubted this was my train. And I was right. I didn’t see anybody familiar. I went back to reading the sports section.

  By 2:35 I’d finished every shred of the paper, but I held off on a return trip to the newsstand till I’d checked out the next batch of passengers. They came in at 2:43, although the board didn’t warn us about the delay. (These Penn Station folks could be sneaky sometimes.) First an entire family slogged through—parents, grandparents, several kids, dressed to brave a blizzard. I set my paper aside and stood up. Next came a teenage couple in hooded jackets, toting knapsacks. And next came Sophia.

  She was bareheaded—the only one who was, so far. Even in this gray light, her hair had a warm yellow glow. She didn’t see me yet. She shifted her bag to her other hand, and she fastened the top button of her coat. Then she happened to glance in my direction. She came to a stop. We stood about ten feet apart. She said, “Barnaby?”

  “Hi,” I told her.

  “How come you’re traveling today?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well … is something wrong? Is i
t Aunt Grace?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I told her. “I just came to drive you home.”

  Her mouth took on a tentative look, as if she were about to smile, but she stayed serious. She said, “My car, though.”

  “What about your car?”

  “It’s parked here in the lot.”

  “Never mind,” I told her. “We’ll pick it up tomorrow, when the sleet’s stopped.”

  She let herself smile then. And I was smiling too. I cupped her elbow to guide her through the station. Her coat sleeve was as soft against my palm as a kitten’s belly. It made me feel protective, and capable, and determined. It made me feel grown up.

  “WHEN I WAS a young slip of a thing,” Sophia’s aunt said, “I used to have so much trouble adjusting to a new year. We’d change from, oh, 1929 to 1930, but I’d go on writing ‘1929’ at the tops of my letters for months, for literally months. Now, though, it’s no problem whatsoever. I suppose that’s because time has speeded up so, I’ve grown accustomed to making the switch: 1980, 1990 … You could tell me to date this check ‘2000’ and I wouldn’t bat an eye!”

  She was sweeping the check through the air to dry it, although she’d filled it out with a ballpoint pen. I stood waiting beside her desk till she felt ready to hand it over. Apparently she was one of those clients who preferred not to pay their monthly bills by mail. (No sense wasting a stamp, they’d say, when a Rent-a-Back employee would be coming by the house.)

  “You’ll find out for yourself one day,” she said. “Personal time works the opposite way from historical time. Historical time starts with a swoop—dinosaurs, cavemen, lickety-split!—and then slows and takes on more detail as it gets more recent: all those niggling little four-year presidential terms. But with personal time, you begin at a crawl—every leaf and bud, every cross-eyed look your mother ever gave you—and you gather speed as you go. To me, it’s a blurry streak by now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. It began to seem I would never get hold of this check. “I thought you mistrusted banks, though,” I said. “How come you’re not paying in cash?”

  Mrs. Glynn lowered the check and peered at me over her eye pouches. All I’d done was delay things even further. “You haven’t heard a word I said,” she told me.

  “Yes, I have! I promise! Change of dates, time speeding up, personal versus historical …”

  “You’re still so young, you can’t imagine any of it will ever apply.”

  “Believe me, I’m not that young,” I said.

  She raised the check again, but only to blow on the signature. Then she said, “I do mistrust banks. I wouldn’t dream of using one if it were up to me. However, my monthly allowance comes from my lawyer, and he insists on sending it to an account. Any money left over, it’s my decision where I keep it.”

  Now she was holding the check at arm’s length and studying her signature. She seemed to be having trouble placing the name. I shifted from my right foot to my left.

  “The lawyer and my niece are in collusion, I believe,” she told me. “Sophia’s always nagging me: ‘What if the house should burn down? Or what if you were robbed? Half of Baltimore knows where you stash your money.’ ‘Fine, then, I’ll change the location,’ I say, and she says, ‘You are living in the past, Aunt Grace.’ ‘Indeed I am,’ I tell her. I tell her, and I tell that lawyer too, who’s young enough to be my grandson. ‘You-all don’t remember the Great Depression,’ I say, ‘when banks were falling like building blocks and grown, respectable men were sobbing in the streets.’ ”

  If the lawyer was young enough to be her grandson, he could be Sophia’s age. Were they really in collusion? Did they meet to discuss her problem aunt over drinks, over dinner, in some candlelit restaurant where I myself couldn’t afford to buy her so much as a salad?

  Nowadays it seemed to me that anyone in his right mind would have to want Sophia for his own.

  “But here,” Mrs. Glynn said, all at once passing me the check. “Tatters, say bye-bye to Barnaby.”

  I folded the check and slipped it into my rear jeans pocket. “Thanks, Mrs. Glynn. See you Monday,” I told her, and I was out the door before she could get started on a new topic.

  Down Keswick, down University Parkway, to St. Paul, and then over to Calvert. It was only the middle of March, but there’d been a burst of unseasonably warm weather—highs near eighty, the last few days—and people were jogging or walking their dogs or just standing talking on street corners, looking aimless and carefree. I felt I was back in high school. In high school, when I went out with girls, it always seemed to be spring; the girls were always wearing spring dresses, and I was in short sleeves.

  Sophia lived in a solid old brick row house with wide front steps and a porch. It was just a rental, but she had fixed up the little yard as if she owned it; you could tell even now, when things weren’t blooming yet. And last weekend she’d bought two window boxes and set them on the concrete railing, ready to be filled with petunias as soon as all danger of frost was past.

  It was her roommate who answered the door. Wouldn’t you know Sophia would have a roommate? Roommates are so wholesome. I picture them in quilted white bathrobes, their faces scrubbed and their teeth freshly brushed, although whenever I’d seen Betty she was wearing one of those pink trouser outfits that’re trying not to look like a uniform. She worked in a hospital; she was some kind of pediatric health care person. A bony, spectacled woman with painfully short black hair and paper-white skin. “Sophia will be down in a minute,” she told me, and then she went off somewhere and left me to my own devices. She disapproved of me, I sensed. Well, never mind.

  I liked Sophia’s living room—the staidness of it, the good, worn furniture handed down from relatives. When I sat in her grandfather’s big recliner, it gave out a weary wheeze. Through the arched doorway I could see the dining room (claw-footed table, antique breakfront), and I knew that the kitchen, too, was comfortably old-fashioned. The upstairs I had to guess at, but I was willing to bet that she slept in a four-poster bed.

  Now I heard her footsteps descending the stairs. When she walked in, I jumped up and said, “Oh! Hi!” as if she’d taken me by surprise. I don’t know why I behave like such an idiot, sometimes.

  “Hi,” she said.

  We kissed, and she stepped back.

  She was wearing a navy skirt and a flowered blouse. She had this way of looking into my eyes and then quickly glancing down at her own bosom and smiling.

  “Come into the kitchen,” she told me. “Supper’s almost ready.”

  The kitchen table was set for two, and the Crock-Pot on the counter gave off the smell of tomato sauce. In the mornings before she went to work, Sophia would put supper in the Crock-Pot. Then when she got home all she had to do was fix a vegetable. I don’t know when the roommate ate. She never joined us, although if she happened to walk through the kitchen Sophia always offered to lay a place for her.

  “How was your day?” Sophia asked, emptying a box of frozen peas into a saucepan.

  “Oh, pretty good.” I sat in a chrome-and-vinyl chair that must have dated from the forties. “Your Aunt Grace had me take down her storm windows,” I said. “I told her it was too early, but she insisted. ‘Mark my words,’ I told her, ‘winter will be back before next week is out,’ but you know how she is. Monday, I’m putting her screens in.”

  “I can’t imagine why she bothers,” Sophia said. “She never opens her windows anyway.”

  “No; most of that age group doesn’t. Scared of burglars.”

  “With her, it’s she’s eternally cold. You’ll see: she’ll be wearing a sweater in July.”

  I liked the thought that I’d be seeing Mrs. Glynn in July. That meant I’d be seeing Sophia too. I studied the back of her neck as she worked, and her smooth, netted bun. I hadn’t seen a hair net on a bun in years, and now I wondered why; this one was so seductive. All I could think of was slipping it off, letting her hair tumble out of it.

  She filled our two plat
es and then sat down across from me, smoothing her skirt beneath her. Her thighs, I thought, would be very pale and soft and fleshy. I stared at her like someone in a trance, till she asked me, “How’s the stew?”

  “Oh! Delicious,” I said, although I hadn’t yet tasted it.

  She raised her wineglass. “To us,” she said.

  “To us,” I repeated.

  The way she served wine tickled me: one glass for each of us with each dinner, already poured beforehand. Me, I was used to drinking either not at all or far too much. This moderation business was a whole new approach.

  Upstairs, the roommate’s shoes were creaking back and forth. I heard a door slam, then a drawer bang shut. “Is she mad about something?” I asked Sophia.

  Sophia shrugged, which was answer enough.

  “She thinks I’m a loser, doesn’t she.”

  “Heavens, no! Why do you say that?”

  I sliced into a chunk of potato and said, “She’s pointed out to you that I’m basically no more than a manual laborer. That I have the fashion sense of a Hell’s Angel, and my prospects for advancement are flat zero. Right?”

  Sophia flushed and looked down at her bosom again.

  “Not to mention I hold the title of World’s Oldest Living Undergraduate,” I said. Then I said, “Hey. You didn’t tell her about the Renascence School and all that, did you?”

  “Certainly not,” Sophia said.

  Even Sophia didn’t know everything; just the more dashing highlights. We were in that stage where we were formally presenting each other with our pasts: Sophia’s prim, Mary-Janed childhood, my nefarious adolescence. I liked the fondly nostalgic way she said, “When I was a little girl…,” and she liked the fact that I’d have struck her as slightly scary if she had met me in my teens. “You were one of those boys who hung around the corner in packs,” she’d surmised. “Who piled twelve deep in a car and hooted out the windows. Who smelled of cigarettes when they brushed by me on the sidewalk.”