by Anne Tyler
He gazed down at the blanks, his hands loose on the arms of the rocker, his knees spread. Muddy waters seemed to be clouding his thoughts. When he moved finally to pick up a coupon, its torn edge depressed him, and he dropped it again and went on rocking.
On the television screen, a shot rang out. “Hot dog!” said Mr. Somerset. He sat sharply forward, but the searching face of the hero was replaced immediately by a full-grown German shepherd bounding toward a bowl of premium-quality beef bits. “Shoot,” said Mr. Somerset. “Wouldn’t you know?”
Jeremy set the file of papers on the floor, rose and moved off to the hall telephone. Then he paused, with his hand upon the receiver. What was he doing here? The telephone rang, an irritated sound, so that he knew it had rung before. He picked it up and said, “Hello?”
“Mary Tell, please,” said a man.
Jeremy waited, thinking hard.
“Are you there? I want Mary Tell. Your new boarder.”
“Oh yes.” He recognized the voice now. The cigarette ad man, sounding as crisp as he looked. He laid the receiver down and returned to the dining room, where he lowered himself carefully into the rocker. For a moment he studied his knees, frowning. Then Mrs. Jarrett said, “Was that the phone?”
He looked up. “The phone, yes,” he said. “For Mrs. Tell.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Mary Tell. She rose and moved out of the room. Her shoes were some special kind that made no sound, or maybe he was just forgetting to listen.
The hero was winged by a bullet. He winced and dropped his gun. “Oh, the poor man,” said Mrs. Jarrett, serenely continuing her motions in the dark. Miss Vinton sighed. Mary Tell returned, flowing gracefully into the room, pausing to listen for her child before she sat down. Jeremy raised his head. He looked up at her and blinked, stunned by a flash that came from nowhere to fix her image on his eyes.
Here is Mary Tell, with the perfect oval of her face expressionless and her back beautifully straight, her smooth hands clasped in her lap. She knows how to sit without moving a muscle; she never fidgets. Her mouth is a wide curve and her eyes are very long and brown and level. Tears run down her face in silvery lines. While Jeremy watches, her cheeks grow wet and shiny, but she continues to stare directly at the television and after a minute, when his private flash has faded, Jeremy decides that he has imagined it all and he goes back to studying his knees.
3
Spring and Summer, 1961: Mary
You would think that once he brought me here he would feel responsible in some way. I try not to ask too much of him but having me come to Baltimore was his idea, after all, and for every one of my objections he had some reasonable answer. “But this is just—I’m a homebody,” I told him. “This is just not like me.” And he said, “Do you always do things exactly in character?” Oh, he knew what would win me. He knew to reach down and pat my daughter’s head and say, “Does she, Darcy?” so that Darcy would smile up at him, all trust and confidence. So one day we slid into his red convertible and rode off to Baltimore, with Darcy nestling between us and John’s arm lying across the back of the seat keeping a constant contact with my shoulder. We talked non-stop, making plans. His divorce was already in progress and he said mine would be no trouble at all; Guy could sue me for desertion. We talked about where we would live, what kind of life we would have, how many children. Our words tumbled out and stepped on each other’s heels, we had so much to get said. I never guessed that this would be the last time he would give me such a block out of his day.
Now I hardly see him. Darcy and I are staying in a shabby boarding house, the only place we could find that would take children. We have a downstairs room. I know every crack and cranny of that room by now, the stains on the wallpaper and the old-lady smell and the roses worn to strings on the carpet. I have spent whole afternoons staring at a ripple in the window glass, waiting for Darcy to wake from her nap. I have polished the furniture until it seems likely to melt away—not because I am such a good housekeeper, I never was that, but because there is nothing else to do. We sit for hours on the edge of the bed, neatly dressed, careful to keep our voices down, like guests who have risen too early. I am often irritable, and I cry a lot for no good reason. When Darcy gets whiny or boisterous I snap at her. I never used to do that. The most I ever did was shout, “Hey, quit that!” but here there is such a dead feeling, we are so much on our best behavior, that I scold her in a low hissing voice that no one else will hear and I threaten her between my teeth. Once I gave her a slap, something so unlike me that I wondered right away if I were losing my mind. She had been fiddling with the bureau knobs and one came off in her hand. I said, “Darcy Tell, if you don’t stop that fidgeting I am going to scream. Come over here and sit down.” She said, “I don’t want to sit down, I want to go out. When is John going to come take us out? He said he would.” Her voice was high and cracked; it tore at my nerves. I can’t describe it. I hauled off and slapped her, and for a minute she stared at me with her mouth open. Then she started bellowing. I shook her by the shoulders and said, “Stop that. Stop it this instant.” So she stopped, but she was trembling all over and I was too. I live in fear that she will remember that day forever. At night I go over and over it in my mind. Oh, let Darcy forget all this, please. Let this whole entire stage of her life just fade away and be forgotten, because it is just a stage, isn’t it? Things are going to get better, aren’t they?
We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again : my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about. Some days he calls and says, “I can get away tonight. Be ready at seven.” Then I float through the morning singing, I take Darcy out for walks and smile at her a lot although I often fail to hear what she is saying, and far too early in the afternoon I bathe and figure out what dress to wear. I have only three: the one I came away in and two that John bought me after we arrived. We are going to buy more, but for now I am nearly without belongings—a peculiar feeling. Occasionally I find myself going through drawers—“Now, where is that gold barrette I used to wear? Where is my navy cardigan?”—and then I realize that I don’t have them. They are left behind. I am free.
On the nights we go out I put Darcy to bed early and ask Mrs. Jarrett to keep an eye on her. Then John and I go to dinner someplace and talk, although half my mind, of course, is always back with Darcy. That is the worst of this new life. The people I love are scattered, there is no way of gathering them snugly together where I can keep watch over them. When Darcy and I are alone I think about John; with John, I think about Darcy. I worry continually about my friends, my neighbors, my mother-in-law. Do they all hate me now? I wonder if Guy is very angry, and how he has chosen to explain the situation. “Here,” John says. He leans across the table to pass a hand before my eyes. “Are you with me?” “Of course,” I say. I smile at him.
We have no place where we can be alone. His wife left him before we even knew each other, but he is afraid that if he takes me to his house the neighbors will see and that will foul up the divorce proceedings. Sometimes I say, “Let them see. How could a divorce get fouled up any more than it already is?” But I know he’s right. And he can’t afford a house for us, and he knows too many people for a hotel room to be safe. He takes me to dark parking places in his convertible—another thing I thought I would never go through again. Then being out of the reach of a telephone makes me edgy and before too long I always say, “Oh, please let’s go back. I don’t know what Darcy will think if she wakes up and finds me gone.” So he starts the car in a bad temper and drives me home, leaves me at the door, and I find Darcy peacefully asleep after all and I regret coming in so soon and I stand at the window a long time looking out at the dark through the ripple in the pane.
Then sometimes he doesn’t call at all, not all day, or he does call and says he will not be able to make it. He has a business crisis, or a trip coming up, or his wife is stop
ping by for some belongings. I have never seen his wife. I believe that she must be very beautiful, because she works as a model for one of the department stores. When they were first married, John says, she was a homey type. She made all the curtains and cooked and kept house, but then she got restless. She took one of those courses you see advertised in the newspaper and became a model, and after that she was never home at all any more and she got a new set of friends and even her personality seemed to change. “Brittle, sort of,” he told me once. “Not at all like the person I married. I wanted a wifely wife, someone warm and loving that smells like cinnamon.” Which made me feel happy, because he always says I smell like cinnamon. But sometimes in low moods I stare at myself in the mirror, I see how enormously tall I am and how busty I have grown since the baby and how even if I lost weight, I would never have that chiseled look that models have. I haven’t the bones for it. And I think, Does John regret me? Does he wish I were Carol’s type? He did marry her, after all. I take down my hair and fold it under to see how it would look if I cut it. I stand sideways to the mirror and suck in my stomach. It is the days when I know I won’t see him that I go through all this. I have nothing else to do. I file my nails or sew on a button, during Darcy’s nap I open library books that I can’t pin my mind to or I leaf through magazines that I have already worn to tatters. When she wakes up, we go on long walks. I know this street now the way I know our room : every crumple in the sidewalk, every spindly tree, every turret and gable and leaded window of these endless dismal rowhouses. We take Mr. Somerset’s toast crusts and feed the pigeons. We go to the library, where Darcy dallies forever in the children’s section, choosing books and changing her mind and putting them away again. I never hurry her. What use is time now? We have so much of it. When she has decided on her books we walk very slowly home and then I read them to her, over and over, until my mouth is dry and my throat aches from imitating squeaky mice and growly bears. Darcy nestles under my arm, following the pictures with her great blue eyes. She has started sucking her thumb again. Four and a half is too old for that, I tell her, but I never really try to stop her. I figure she might as well take her comfort from wherever she can.
It was through Darcy that John first got to me. One morning I looked up and there he was, squatting to talk to her and asking her if she knew how pretty she looked. “You’ve got your mother’s mouth,” he said. Most people see only Guy in her. “Bright, too,” he told me. Then he rose and shook my hand. We had met a couple of times before, but this was the first notice that he had taken of Darcy. After that he spoke to her every time he came by, and often brought her something—a jump-rope, or a set of checkers, and once a little dress-up doll that had a lot of extra costumes they sold separately. He brought her those costumes one by one; in the end I believe she had them all. And meanwhile, of course, he and I were getting to know each other. But Darcy was the starting point. I remember the first time I ever thought seriously about John. It was a few months after we had met. He said, “Now that you have this one pretty little girl, are you going to have a whole crowd more?” “Oh, no,” I said, “Guy says one is plenty.” “He’s a fool,” John said, and he looked straight at me for a long time and then turned and left. I don’t know why that stuck with me for so long. I remember that I went back to the house and started washing dishes, and suddenly I stopped with my hands in the suds and looked out the window after him and got this strange springing feeling in the bottom of my stomach. That was how it began.
The man who owns this boarding house is very odd, and at first I was afraid of him. He reminded me of a slug. You see people like that in the newspaper all the time, caught molesting children or exhibiting themselves on picnic grounds or shooting into crowds; there is something curled and lifeless and out of touch about them. But when I had been here longer I saw that he wouldn’t harm a fly, and now I let him talk with Darcy even when I am in another part of the house. You can tell he loves children. He doesn’t know what to say to them, really, but he tries hard and he often takes Darcy up to his studio and lets her cut and paste. It does her good to get away from me for a while. When I think he might be growing tired I climb the stairs to fetch her, and I find them bending over separate tables, Darcy chattering away a mile a minute and covered with paste while Mr. Pauling works silently on those kaleidoscope things he seems to like. “I’ll take her now,” I say, and he says, “Oh, well, oh, no hurry, we were just—she was just—” Then he stands there wringing his hands, the first person I ever saw who truly does wring his hands. He doesn’t appear to like me much, or maybe that’s just his manner. He makes me feel too tall and too loud and too strong. I never know how to act with him. Evenings, watching TV, which is the only time when we boarders are all together, he is so confused and some of what he says is so out of place—things a deaf man would say, having lost touch with the world—that I have to hold down a laugh. The others are very kind to him. They never laugh. They have a habit of bending their heads toward him as they listen, and then straightening to puzzle over what he says, and even if he makes no sense they give him some grave and courteous answer. Because of this all conversation moves slowly, with long pauses, in a sort of circle that is designed to protect him. No wonder the meek will inherit the earth.
Darcy’s eyes are blue like Guy’s, and her hair is his fine, white-blond color and not much longer—Guy always did wear it long. I remember when I first saw him, he was swimming in Dewbridge Lake and every time he came up for air he had to give his head a sharp flick to get the hair off his face. Wet, it came nearly to his chin. When it snapped back spangles of water flew out from him like jewels. Then he climbed onto this old fallen tree that people used for a diving board. Other people used it; I wasn’t allowed to, for fear of stobs and hidden branches. I wasn’t allowed to do anything back then. I was fifteen, a nice quiet girl who didn’t even wear lipstick yet, and I had come with my parents and we were sitting on an oilcloth with a picnic lunch that would feed an old folks’ home and great quantities of insect repellent and sunburn ointment and wet cloths wrapped in cellophane in case of spills. This boy with the long slick hair (I didn’t know his name then) seemed to have brought nothing but himself, barely covered by one of those tight satin bathing suits that I always thought were so tacky. He stood on the farthest limb that would bear his weight and then flung himself up and out, and he cut through the water like a knife and came up flicking that hair and laughing. I just stared. I thought he was fascinating. Now I am not talking about love at first sight or anything like that—why, he scared me half to death! He and all his friends, with their horseplay and their great splashing butterfly strokes and the wolf howls they gave toward the girls out on the barrel raft. They didn’t howl at me. I was just sitting there in the shade with my parents, watching out for sunburn, shrinking when any of them came too close. And when my mother said, “This lake would be right fine if it weren’t for the rougher element,” I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and meant it. But that didn’t stop me from staring at Guy Tell.
My father was the principal of Partha High School in Partha, Virginia. My mother was an English teacher. They were middle-aged when they had me and I was an only child, which may be why they guarded me so well—that and their being religious. They were Baptists. My father passed the collection plate on Sunday mornings. At one point I was religious too, and had thoughts of growing up to be a missionary and eventually getting martyred, but that all passed away in time. I don’t know why. I just turned out not to be a believer, that’s all. But I continued to go to church with my parents. I sat folding my program into a fan, feeling chafed inside by some irritation that extended even to the starchy smell of my mother’s best dress and the way my father kept tugging his shirt cuffs down when he didn’t need to. Yet I loved them. I was very close to them, especially to my mother. What bothered me was not my parents or even their way of living, but the fact that it seemed to be the only way open to me. I would grow up, of course, and go to college and marry and have childr
en, but those were not changes so much as additions. I would still be traveling their single narrow life. There was no hope of any other. At least, not till Dewbridge Lake.
Is Dewbridge Lake still there? Well, it must be. But after that one summer I have never been back. It’s as if the lake had fulfilled its purpose and then vanished from the face of the earth. Its mildewed gray pavilion was erected overnight for me to do the bunnyhop in with my girlfriends, the only dance I was allowed. Its rainbow-colored jukebox was expressly filled with Pat Boone songs so that one day, at the end of a bunnyhop, Guy Tell might step up to me and say, “This here is for me and you to dance to, honey,” and fold me up in a long walking clinch because I was too scared to say no. That pine forest with its shiny hot floor was grown for the two of us to hide in, leaning against a spruce trunk, Guy perpetually sliding a swimsuit strap off my shoulder while I perpetually slid it back up. His kisses tasted of tobacco. I had never been kissed before and found it tiring; my neck ached and my mouth felt bruised. Drawing back from me, he would smile with his eyes half-veiled as if he had won some contest. I was the loser, and I didn’t even know I was in a contest. Then we would separate and I would return to my parents, leaving the pine trees shimmering behind me. Now I imagine that the entire forest has fallen, giving off no sound, like that tree they always bring up in science classes. All that will remain of it is a little golden dust floating upward in the sunlight. Yet there is a thirty-nine-cent strawberry-flavored lipstick in the dimestore whose smell can still, to this day, carry me back to the ladies’ changing rooms at Dewbridge Lake. Hot pine needles will always make me feel pleasantly endangered and out of my depth. The trashy taste of orange Nehi fills me even now with a longing to break loose, to go to foreign places, to try some adventure undreamed of by my father in his baggy plaid trunks and my mother in her black rayon bathing suit with the pleated skirt. Oh, I would do it all over again, if I were fifteen. Even knowing how it would end up, I would continue to glide across that splintery dance floor with Guy Tell’s hand clamping the back of my neck.
