by Anne Tyler
Only he didn’t. He didn’t talk at all. First I thought he was waiting for me to prepare myself, and then I thought he was having trouble finding the words. And then, when the silence had gone on for several minutes, I gave him a sidelong glance and saw him sitting perfectly relaxed in the orange light, one hand loose on the tiller and his eyes on the mainsail. He wasn’t looking for words at all.
Well! I was too surprised to be angry. Where were all those thin blondes that came visiting at the gallery or sauntering down to his dinghy in their crisp white bellbottoms? Or was he, perhaps, just laying an arm around me out of bachelor’s habit? I am not the type to jump to conclusions. I moved away, rising to peer off the stern of the boat as if I had seen something interesting. “Come here and sit with me, Mary,” Brian said. I was afraid I might laugh. He seemed so sure of himself, giving directions that way—it was a tone I wasn’t used to. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I stayed where I was, staring at the streamers of the sunset in the water and fighting back the laughter and the tears that were swelling in my eyes. “Well,” said Brian finally. “Shall we head back?”
Going home, he used the motor all the way. Then when he had tied the boat to the mooring again he furled and bound the sails in silence. I wondered if he were angry. The only friend I had nowadays. And with all that I owed him! There suddenly seemed to be so many complications to life, so many tangles and knots and unexpected traps, that I felt too tired to hold my head up. I dropped like a stone into his dinghy, pretending not to notice the hand he held out to me. I sat slumped over with my elbows on my knees while he rowed us ashore. Then as we touched land, as I was stepping past him while he steadied the dinghy, he said, “Mary.”
The sun had set by now. In the twilight his voice seemed closer than it was, a little furry behind the beard. Whatever he was planning to say, I didn’t want to hear it. I spun around and smiled, giving him a good brisk handshake. “I certainly do thank you for the boat ride!” I said. “And I’ll be sure to tend to those sails, Brian, if we happen to have a rainy spell.”
But he held onto my hand and looked straight into my eyes, not smiling back. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to rush you,” he said. And after a minute: “Good night, Mary.”
That’s what they say in soap operas: Don’t worry, I’m not going to rush you. The romantic, masterful hero with the steady gaze. People don’t say it for real. There are no heroes in real life.
I went back into the house and found the children grouped around Rachel, who was standing. Not unsupported, of course—she had two fistfuls of the couch cover—but it was the first time she had managed it and they were all excited. “Come watch,” they told me. “Sit, Rachel. Sit down. Show Mom how you do it.” They uncurled each of her fingers and tried to fold her up, but she wouldn’t bend. She stiffened her legs, refusing to return to her old floor-level existence. I had forgotten how desperately babies struggle to be vertical. Always up, away, out of laps and arms and playpens. Why, in no time she was going to wean herself! All my children lost interest in nursing once they could walk. They took off out the door one day to join the others, leaving me babyless, and for a few months I would feel a little lost until I found out I was pregnant again. Only now, it wasn’t going to be that way. I hadn’t considered that before. I stood staring at Rachel, my very last baby, while she fought off all those grubby little hands that were trying to reseat her. “Look, Rachel,” they said, “we just want you to show Mom. Sit a minute, Rachel.”
For the first time, then, I knew that Jeremy was not going to ask us back.
Now it was deep summer, and the air under the tin roof was so hot that we spent most of our time outside. I bought the younger children an inflatable wading pool. They stayed entire days in it, splashing around in their underpants, but Darcy was too old for that kind of thing and she had trouble amusing herself. I would find her sitting in the scrubby brown grass, under the glaring sun, frowning at the river. She was so serious. “Why don’t you take a walk, honey?” I said. “Pick us some flowers for the dinner table.” Then she would look straight at me, narrowly, as if she were trying to figure something out. I thought probably she wanted to ask what we were doing here. She was old enough, after all, to see how strange it was. She had been yanked out of a school she loved; she had been separated from Jeremy without even telling him goodbye, and in some ways she was closer to Jeremy than any of the others were. But it was the others who asked the questions—when would they see him, and what was he doing that kept him so busy, and could they bring him back a present of some kind? Darcy kept quiet. “Why don’t you head over to the boatyard and see what’s going on?” I asked her. But if she did she took Rachel with her, as if she couldn’t imagine doing anything purely for her own enjoyment. She set the baby on her little sharp hip and walked off tilted, with her head lowered, plodding along on dusty bare feet. The knobs on the back of her neck showed and her legs were all polka-dotted with mosquito bite scabs.
Coming here was the most selfish thing I have ever done.
In the evenings I heated kettles of water on the hot plate and sponged off the little ones. Then I dressed them in fresh underwear—I hadn’t brought anything so inessential as pajamas—and sent them to bed. Darcy sat up reading movie magazines borrowed from the steelworker’s daughter. The whole house had the sharp smell of insect spray. Moths were pattering against the sagging screens and I felt as if I were coated with a thin layer of plastic, I was so salty and sweaty. It was the hardest time of day for me. “I believe I might go for a walk,” I would tell Darcy. “Will you keep an ear out for the baby?” Then I would step into the dark and go down to the water’s edge, and slip the dinghy from its tangle of weeds. All alone I would row out to the ketch—me! so landbound! It was the only place I could get free of the cramped feeling, those masses of hot little bodies tossing in a tiny cube of space, sticking to the red vinyl mats. To escape from that I was even willing to cross the black water and make the climb from the dinghy to the deck, trusting my weight to this mysterious object that somehow managed to keep itself upright fifteen feet above solid earth.
Now there were fat little orange life vests heaped all over the deck—six of them. Brian had brought them out one Saturday, laying them before me one by one like an Indian warrior laying skins before his maiden’s tent. Five would have been bad enough, but six! That implied we would be here until Rachel was old enough to sail too. “Oh, Brian,” I said. “Well, I—that’s very nice of you but I really think the regular life preservers were fine, it’s not as if they go with you all that—” You would never have guessed how often I pictured five of my children drowning simultaneously. At the moment all that worried me was Brian, his brown eyes so gentle and amused above the beard—so confident.
Jeremy’s eyes were blue. Brown eyes didn’t seem right any more.
In the Gothic novels Guy used to buy me the heroine was always marrying for convenience or money or safety from some danger, and when she was proposed to she took pains to make that clear. “I must be honest, Sir Brent, I do not love you.”
“Oh, I understand that perfectly, my dear.” Then later, of course, she did begin loving him, and everything ended happily. I wish I had been honest. I accepted Jeremy because it was all I could think of to do at the time, and although I believe he knew that we never discussed it in so many words. I was trying to be so delicate with him. My first mistake. One day he said, “Mary, do you love me?” He said, “I need to know, do you?” And I said, “Yes, Jeremy. Of course I do.” Well, I did have a sort of fond feeling. When he brought me that first bouquet of chicory and poison ivy my heart went right out to him, but not in that way. Then after we had been together a while it seemed as if something crept up on me without noticing, and one morning I watched him stooping to fumble with Darcy’s broken shoelace and the love just came pouring over me. Only by then, of course, there was no way to tell him. He thought I had been loving him for months already. Was that why things went wrong?
For we never got it straightened out. When I tried to show how I felt it seemed I flooded him, washed him several feet distant from me, left him bewildered and dismayed. Sometimes I wondered, could it be that he was happier when I didn’t love him back? It seemed all I could do was give him things and do him favors, and make him see how much he needed me. The more he depended on me the easier I felt. In fact I depended on his dependency, we were two dominoes leaning against each other, but did Jeremy ever realize that?
Once he made a piece showing a white cottage with a picket fence and roses on trellises, set on a green hill. At first you might think it was a calendar picture. The hill was so green, the cottage so white. “Oh!” I said when I saw it. “Well, it’s very—it’s not exactly like you, Jeremy, is it?” Then I came closer, and something disturbed me. I mean, it was too green and white, and the sky was too blue. The hill was too perfect a semicircle, and the pickets of the fence marched across the paper like gradations on a ruler. I felt that he had twisted something, and yet I couldn’t say what. I felt that in some way he was insulting me, or protesting against me. Yet I don’t think he knew that he was. “Jeremy—” I said, and turned to look at him, but I found him punching red paper circles to make perfect flowers, and I could tell from his frown that that was all he was thinking about.
He has no sense of humor but I never understood why that should be important. He has always been either too much removed from us (shut away in body and in spirit, cutting burlap) or too much with us (smack underfoot from dawn to dark, when other men are busy in some office). And I won’t try to convince anyone that he is handsome. Nor that he has what they call “personality”—watch some visiting neighbor woman stammer when he fixes her with his worktime gaze, as if he were wondering why she doesn’t leave when in fact he is not even aware that she is there. On top of that we are separated by years and years, although with Jeremy that never mattered as much as it might have with someone else. He is not really a product of his time. When I was a toddler, for instance, other men his age were fighting World War II, but Jeremy wasn’t. I don’t have any proof he even knew about the war—not that one, or the one we are going through now. Nothing outside touches him. Sometimes he seems younger than I am, as if events are what age people. I remember when his sisters came to meet me. We were having tea in the parlor and they were discussing dead friends and relatives. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were so old! They had that reverence for the past—forever returning to skate back around its edges, peering down, fascinated by its cold and pallid face beneath two feet of water. Repeating all they said in that doddery, old-lady way. (Jeremy did that too but I had never noticed before.) I looked from one to another. I felt like a very small girl at a tea party with three ancient relatives. I began to be shy and tongue-tied. What was I doing here? How could I have anything to do with this elderly man? But when they left he stood hugging himself at the door with his face all forlorn and I felt he was a two-year-old in need of comfort. “There now,” I told him, “won’t you come back in? Have another cup of tea.” And I laid my hand on his soft limp home-clipped hair and pressed my cheek against his, and felt far older than he would ever be.
When I first came here, I would have laughed aloud at the thought of loving him. Yet it is only now that I think to be surprised at myself. While it was coming about I hardly noticed. We have such an ability to adjust to change! We are like amoebas, encompassing and ingesting and adapting and moving on, until enormous events become barely perceptible jogs in our life histories. All I know is that bit by bit my world began to center on him, so that my first thought in the morning and my last at night was concern about his welfare. “Are you all right?” I used to wake and ask him out of nowhere. “Are you—is there anything you need?” I would move to his side of the bed and feel him seep away from me somehow, backing off from my everlasting questions and my face too close to his and my perfume, which—even if it was only the hand lotion I had put on after finishing the dishes—suddenly seemed too rich and full now that I was next to him. “Oh, I’m sorry!” I wanted to say. “I never meant to—I don’t want to overpower you in any way, believe me!” But then he would only have backed off further; saying that would have been overpowering in itself. There was no way I could win. Or I could win only by losing—by leaving bed, reluctantly, to sit up with a sick child or a colicky baby, and then he would come stumbling through the dark house calling my name. “Mary? Where’d you go, Mary? I can’t find you.”
He changed. I changed. He gathered some kind of stubborn, hidden strength while I became more easily touched by anything small and vulnerable—changes that each of us caused in the other, but they were exactly the ones that have separated us and that will keep us separate. If he calls me back he will be admitting a weakness. If I return unasked I will be bearing down upon him and plowing him under. If I weren’t crying I would laugh.
One day in August Rachel started fussing at breakfast time, and she kept it up without a single pause. She wouldn’t eat or sleep. She was flushed and her breath had an ether smell that my children usually get with fever, but no one in the boatyard owned a thermometer and I was too hot myself to be able to gauge the temperature of her skin. By afternoon I had decided I would have to find a doctor. I was going to ask for a ride from Zack—the boat mechanic, a slimy man who whistled whenever he saw me, but still he did have a pickup truck—and then I saw Brian’s car pulling up in our backyard and out he stepped, looking very steady and reliable in his old jeans and a fresh-ironed shirt. “Brian!” I said. “Will you drive me to the doctor? Rachel’s sick.”
“Of course,” he said, and turned on one heel without a second’s pause and went back to the car. I felt better already. I grabbed up Rachel and my purse, called out instructions to Darcy, and slid into the front seat. “Her doctor is on St. Paul,” I said, “just a few blocks away from us. Away from Jeremy.”
“What’s the matter with her?” Brian asked.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Rachel was quieter now, maybe from the shock of being in a car, but she still whimpered a little. Brian said, “Could be a tooth.”
“Oh, no, she wouldn’t make this much fuss.”
“Are you sure? It’s my understanding that—”
“Will you please just drive?” I said.
He stopped talking. We sped down the gravel road I had nearly forgotten, between rows of neat little flower-decked houses and trailers. After a minute I said, “Sorry, Brian.”
“That’s all right.”
“It’s just that I’m afraid he’ll close his office soon, you see, and then I wouldn’t know how to—”
“Sure, sure, I understand.”
We turned onto the main highway. It seemed to me that Brian was driving faster than I had ever gone before. Fields and factories and junkyards skimmed past, and then came the first gray buildings of the city and the long unbroken walls of rowhouses. Brian dodged in and out between slower cars, honking like an ambulance, scarcely ever putting on his brakes. I felt that I was in good hands.
In front of the doctor’s office, he double-parked and got out of the car. “Oh, don’t come with me,” I said. “You’ll get a ticket, Brian.” I was expecting him just to drop me off and then pick me up later. But he had already opened the door on my side and reached for the baby, and I let him take her. Freed of her weight, I felt light and cool. I floated behind him across the sidewalk, which seemed very crowded, through the revolving door of a surprisingly tall dark building. In the lobby I was hit by the cold smell of marble, which I had forgotten about. I had also forgotten the doctor’s office number. Imagine, after ten years of school checkups! It was as if I had been away for decades. My eyes had trouble focusing on the tiny white letters in the showcase. Even my hand, skimming a straight line between his name and his number, looked like a stranger’s hand, brown and chapped, bigger-boned. “Four thirteen,” I told Brian.
“We won’t wait for the elevator.”
I followed him up the stairs. Rachel peered at me over his shoulder; all this speed had startled her into silence.
In the waiting room Brian told the nurse, “We don’t have an appointment, but it’s an emergency. This baby is very ill.”
The nurse looked at Rachel. Rachel grinned.
We were shown into a cubicle at the front of the building. Above the examining table was an enormous, sooty window overlooking the street. I could peer down and see cars threading their mysterious paths below us, stopping and starting magically. I felt I was observing them from another planet. “You can undress her now, I’ll send the doctor in immediately,” the nurse said. But all Rachel wore was a diaper, a damp one. I left it on her. I stayed at the window, remembering other, happier times when I had come here with three or four children for their shots. Then my only worries had been how to keep them out of the cotton swabs, and how to calm the one who was scared of tongue depressors, and what to fix Jeremy for supper that night.
The doctor came in with his white coattails billowing—a young man, dark-skinned. “Now! Mrs. Pauling,” he said. “What seems to be the problem here?”
