by Anne Tyler
He was twenty-two—older than anyone will ever seem to me again. I wouldn’t be sixteen till December. (Sixteen was the age my parents were going to let me start dating. And even then, of course, only boys my own age. Only boys from good families. Only in groups.) All that fall, when the Dewbridge Lake Pavilion was boarded over and school had reopened, I continued to see Guy without anybody’s knowing. I said I was going to the library, or to visit a friend. Then I stood on a corner of Main Street and waited for Guy to come pick me up in a towtruck, and while he was pumping gas I would sit inside the filling station reading his racing magazines. He worked evenings. Daytimes he was free. Afternoons, as I was walking home from school, he slid up alongside me in his battered Pontiac and plucked me from my girlfriends and bore me off to a country road at the edge of town. While we were continuing our contest—he undoing a blouse button, I doing it up again—I felt lost and uncertain and longed to be safe at home, but once he was gone I forgot the feeling and wanted him back. I remembered the things that touched me: the intent look he wore when I told him anything; his habit of remembering every anniversary of our meeting, weekly, monthly, with some small clumsy gift like a gilt compact or a cross on a chain; the swashbuckling way he dressed and the eagle tattooed on his forearm and the dogtags always warm against his chest. Sitting in church on Sunday morning I called up his kisses, which from this safe distance filled me with a dizzy breathlessness that I thought might possibly be love. My mother sat beside me, nodding radiantly at the reading from Job. My father extended the long arm of his collection plate down the pews. I thought, I am never going to be like them, I have already broken free. I thought, Why aren’t they taking better care of me?
On December seventh I turned sixteen. My mother said, “Well, now I suppose you can go out some, Mary.” “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I went to Main Street to wait for Guy, and he brought me a charm bracelet hung with little plastic records to remind me of our first dance. Then he said, “I reckon we could get married now if you want. Don’t look like I am going to get over you any time soon.” So ten days later we eloped. I kept expecting my parents to follow me and take me back, but they didn’t. I had to send them a telegram announcing I was married. And in the motel room, when I cried, Guy said, “Now don’t take on so, you’re tearing me up. You want just for tonight I should sleep in the other bed?” “I’m not crying about that,” I said. “Well, what, then?” Why I was crying was that here I sat, married, and I had never even had a real date. But it didn’t seem the kind of thing that I could tell him.
Last week I took out a post office box and then wrote Guy and asked for a divorce. The box was John’s idea. “You don’t want him coming after you,” he said, “tracking you down to your boarding house and making a scene.” He went with me to the post office, and afterwards we took Darcy to the Children’s Zoo. It was the nicest day I had had in a long time. Darcy played in the sand while John and I sat on a bench nearby in the sunlight, talking over our plans. John said that someone had seen us together in a restaurant and told his wife. “I believe it’s made her jealous,” he said. “You know how she is.” (Although I didn’t know, at all.) “She wants to have her cake and keep another piece waiting in the tin. As soon as she heard she came right over to the house all dressed up, sweet as sugar, asking questions.”
“There’s no law against your taking someone out to supper,” I said.
“That’s what I told her.”
“She goes out with other people. All the time, you said.”
“Let’s not talk about her, shall we?” he said. “It’s too nice a day.”
I feel that way when he talks about Guy, too. I don’t like seeing Guy through someone else’s eyes. Then his leather jacket and tooled boots start seeming ridiculous, and I am aware how his grammar must sound to outsiders and I feel hurt for him and protective. It’s me that’s being insulted as well—six years of my life are tied up with Guy. I changed the subject. I said, “How come you brought your camera?”
“I’m planning to take some pictures of Darcy.”
On the days when John can’t visit I start hating him, even though I know it’s not his fault; but when I see him again he does something like this, thinking up an outing and photographing Darcy, and then I remember why I came away with him in the first place. Guy would never do anything like that. Oh, Guy took her picture, of course—with a camera he got for trading off some motorcycle parts—but he always wanted her dressed up first in those pink organdy frills he liked and he would arrange her hair in artificial-looking curls and seat her on the best piece of furniture. He called her his princess. His doll baby. Darcy is no doll baby. She thinks about everything—I see her thinking—and if there is a mess around she will get into it and she is never still for a second. I don’t believe Guy even knew all that about her. The only time he paid her any notice was when his friends came by and he would show her off like a souped-up car, setting her someplace high and prinking out her skirt just so. “Ain’t she a doll baby? You ever seen anything cuter?” Now John goes down on his knees in the sand, fixing his lens on Darcy, who is sugared over with sand like a doughnut, one of her playsuit straps dangling into a bucket. “Keep still,” I tell her, but he says, “No, no, let her be.” He holds up a light meter, fiddles with mysterious buttons. By profession he is a photographer. He owns a small studio that is still just getting off the ground, which is why it takes so much of his time. Before studying photography he went to college. He is calm and well-ordered and he considers every question from all sides. As far removed from Guy as a man can get. What would have happened if I’d met John before Guy?
I met John when he was shopping for motorcycles. He had just become interested in them. He ran into Guy at some rally outside Baltimore and the following week he came all the way to Partha, looking to see what Guy had in stock. I should explain that by then Guy was managing the filling station, but he had more or less branched out into motorcycles. We lived on the first floor of the house next door, and between the house and the station was a shed that Guy kept filled with spare parts and any used bikes his friends were trying to sell or trade. When John came by I was out in the yard hanging clothes. “Like you to meet a friend of mine,” Guy said. “John Harris. He’s thinking of buying him a cycle.” Thinking is right. He was the most well-thought-out man I’d ever seen. For four solid weeks he tested different models, read up on them, asked questions, went off to different dealers, returned to Guy to see if he had anything new. And when he finally did buy it wasn’t from Guy at all, but some man in Baltimore. By then he and Guy were friends, though. Not what you would call close friends; motorcycles were all they had in common. But they did do a lot of trail-biking together, and sometimes Guy would bring John home with him after a rally. Guy would come in all excited, blaming some fool who’d run him off the road, cursing some flaw in his bike (which he had bought in two minutes flat, on impulse, with money he didn’t have). He would yank the cap off a beer and chug-a-lug it, stomping around the kitchen. And meanwhile there stood John in the doorway, remarking on how nice my kitchen smelled and searching through his pockets for Darcy’s present. Dressed like someone in a sports magazine, in slacks and a polo shirt. Now do you see why I say he was so far removed from Guy?
It’s as if I have to keep trying different lives out, cheating on the rule that you can only lead just one. I’d had six years of Hot Rod magazine and now I was ready to move on to something new. I picture tossing my life like a set of dice, gambling it, wasting it. I have always enjoyed throwing things away.
Darcy said, “Hurry, John, I got to go to the toilet,” and John laughed and snapped the picture. Then he rose, brushing off his knees, and I took Darcy to the restroom. There was sand in her scalp; I could look down and see it, glinting under the white of her hair. “When I come out,” she said, “I’m going to ride the merry-go-round. Can I?” I said, “All right, baby.” I looked back at John. He was smiling after us, turning some knob on the camera that he knew so well
he didn’t even have to look at it. “Come on, Mom,” Darcy said, and she reached up and took me by the hand. Her fingers were cool and sandy, and she smelled like sunshine, and she let me bend down and press my face against her hair for exactly one second before she freed herself and danced off again.
Motherhood is what I was made for, and pregnancy is my natural state. I believe that. All the time I was carrying Darcy I was happier than I had ever been before, and I felt better. And looked better, At least, to myself I did. I don’t think Guy agreed. He was funny about things like that. He didn’t want to feel the baby kick, wouldn’t even touch me the last few months, acted surprised whenever I wanted to go out shopping or to a movie. “Won’t it bother you, people staring?” he asked. “Why would it bother me?” I said. “Why would they stare?” He was the one that was bothered. He didn’t even want to come with me to the labor room the night she was born; my mother had to do it. She had thawed out some since I got pregnant. She stayed with me all through the pains, talking and keeping my spirits up, but most of my mind was on Guy. I thought, Wouldn’t you think he could go through this with me? He’ll worry more, surely, out there in the waiting room not knowing. The doctor had been upset about my age. He had told Guy I was still growing, much too young to have a baby of my own. What if I died? Shouldn’t Guy be there holding my hand? But no—“I’m scared I might pass out or something,” he said, and laughed, with his face sharp and white. Then he whispered, “I’m scared the pain will make you angry for what I done to you.” “Oh, but Guy—” I said. Then my mother said, “Never mind, honey, Mama’s here.” She sat by my bed and rubbed my back, and sponged my forehead, and read aloud from yesterday’s newspaper—any old thing she came across, it didn’t matter, none of it made sense to me anyway. When it came time to wheel me into the delivery room she said, “I’ll be right here praying, honey, everything’s going to be fine,” but I saw that she was worried. I suppose she had taken to heart what the doctor said. Well, doctors don’t know everything they claim to. Having that baby was the easiest thing I ever did. I was meant to have babies. Age has nothing to do with it.
When I think back on it—on my mother reading to me from that newspaper, smoothing the hair off my forehead—it seems that starting right there I began to live in a world made up of women. My mother and Guy’s, the neighbor women who gave me their old baby furniture and their bits of advice—women formed a circle that I sank into. I suppose you have to expect that, once children come along. The men draw back and the women close in. I thought that things would be different once I got Darcy settled in at home, but then Guy just kept to himself more than ever—acted scared of holding her, couldn’t stand to hear her cry, wouldn’t help to name her. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Guyette? That would be kind of cute. But, no, I reckon—I don’t know. You name her, you’re the one that knows.” I named her Darcy, my maiden name. I tried setting her on a pillow in Guy’s lap, with cushions all around so that he wouldn’t worry about dropping her. When she cried I said, “Now, all that’s wrong is she’s hungry, Guy. I’ll feed her; then you’ll see.” But mealtime was another thing he couldn’t stand. I was breast-feeding; he said it gave him a funny feeling. Every time I unbuttoned my blouse he left the room. “Other people use bottles,” he told me. “Why go back to this way, now that they’ve invented something better?” When I got worn out with her nighttime feedings he said, “Switch her to Evenflo. Leave her with Mom and you and me will borrow some money and take a little trip somewheres. You need a rest.” I was touchy back then, tired from all those wakeful nights and worried that I might not have enough milk. “The biggest rest,” I said, “would be for you to just shut up and leave me be, Guy Tell,” and then I cried and the baby cried and Gloria came in and shooed Guy out of the house and put me to bed. Gloria was Guy’s mother, whom we’d been living with ever since we were married. A peroxide blonde forever in shorts and a halter. Her husband had died long ago, I forget just how, and she had a truck-driver friend who came over whenever he was in town, bringing a bottle of Southern Comfort that they would polish off in one evening over the kitchen table. I know that sounds depressing. See it on a TV screen and it would be depressing, but the fact is that Gloria was just wonderful to me and I loved her like a mother. I hate to think what I would have done without her. Before the baby, when Guy had switched to working days and I had nothing to do with myself (there was a rule against married students at school), Gloria was the only reason I didn’t go out of my mind with boredom. She talked non-stop, took me shopping, fixed my hair a dozen ways, brought me up to date on all the soap operas we watched and lent me her confession magazines. Why, I was never even allowed to watch soap operas, and the most I’d read of confession magazines was the covers, surreptitiously, while speeding past the newsstand with my mother. And after the baby! I’m ashamed to say how much I leaned on her. She didn’t interfere, she never tried to take over, but whenever I was feeling lost and too young she was right there handing me hot milk and talking on and on in that airy, fake-tough way she had, appearing not to notice anything was wrong but soothing me all the same. Could a man do that? No man that I know of.
I cried when we moved into the house by the station. By then I had no mother of my own any more. I lost both parents when Darcy was still a baby, within six months of each other: heart attacks. I felt as if Gloria was my only strength, and here I was leaving her. “My Lord, honey,” Guy said, “most women would be tickled pink to get into a place of their own.” He said, “It’s me should be crying, it’s my mama after all.” And finally, “Don’t you want to live alone with me?” “Well, of course I do,” I said. But even so, I missed Gloria. I went on seeing her nearly every day, right up to the time I came to Baltimore. And sometimes even now I think back on how it was when I was pregnant, still someone’s child instead of someone’s mother, peacefully floating through those empty days with Gloria. I remember the books that Guy used to bring me; he liked to tell his friends he had married a brain, and almost daily he brought me a paperback from the drugstore. Sleazy romance novels, beautiful heroines in anguish. I loved them. I close my eyes and see myself on the plastic sofa with a book on my stomach, Gloria beside me snapping her gum, great swells of organ music rising from the television. What does Gloria think of me now? Has she cut me out of her mind, now that I have left her son with no more than a note on the refrigerator door?
If things don’t work out with John, I have nowhere to go. This is the first time I have really thought about that. I left in such a rush, whipping off my apron, hanging my wedding ring on a cup hook, giving not a backward glance to my Corning ware and my potted plants. I seemed to be drunk with the joy of doing something so illogical. Now I have hours and days and weeks to think: I am entirely dependent on a man I hardly know. I have no money, no home, no family to return to, not even a high school degree to get a job with, and no place to leave Darcy if I could find a job. I don’t even know if I am eligible for welfare. What if John stopped loving me? Or if his wife came back—came walking in with her model’s slouch, a mink stole draped over her shoulder. (Well, not in June, but that’s the way I picture her.) I would be lost, then. I would be absolutely helpless, without a shred of hope.
This is what I resolve: if it works out that John and I are married, I am going to save money of my own no matter what. I don’t care if I have to steal it; I will save that money and hide it away somewhere in case I ever have to be on my own again.
Only I won’t be on my own, not if it’s up to me. I won’t leave anyone else ever. It’s too hard. I never bargained for this tearing feeling inside me. I didn’t know I would be so confused, as if I were in several places at once and yet not wholly any place at all. I hadn’t ever considered Darcy: how bewildered she would be or how her food and shelter would become a problem. You would think that much would occur to me. Why, Darcy is the center of my life! And her hair is Guy’s, and her eyes; I’ll be carrying pieces of Guy around forever. There was no point to my leavi
ng. I can say that even while I am looking straight at John, even crossing to where he stands in the sunlight with his camera slung over his shoulder, smiling at Darcy and me so steadily: I love you, John, but if I were smarter I would have stayed with Guy.
I check the mailbox every day but nothing comes from Guy. I keep trying to imagine what a letter from Guy would look like. He has never written me before. Never had to. If ever he needed to write to someone else—say a business letter, or something—he would ask me to do it for him, and his dictation was full of et ceteras and, “Oh, you know, just put it like you think best.” He wasn’t too well educated. I would sit there with my ballpoint pen, waiting for Guy to think up a line, wondering what my mother would have said if she could see me. I was supposed to be unusually intelligent. Now look: “Dear Sir: In regards to the used Honda which I seen advertised in the February issue of …”
