Celestial Navigation

by Anne Tyler

  “I think Rachel’s sick,” I said, “but I can’t tell what’s bothering her.”

  He gave Brian a short nod and stretched the baby out on the table. She frowned at him. He prodded her stomach, felt her neck, looked into her nose and mouth and ears and listened to her chest. I held my breath. The skin on my scalp ached from waiting. Then, “Ear infection,” he said. “Both sides.”

  “Oh! Are you sure that’s all?”

  “It’s all I see. She been pulling at her ears lately?”

  “No, she hasn’t.”

  “Usually that’s a sign.”

  “Well, I know that,” I said. Relief made me snappish. I felt he was accusing me of something. Did he think that after six children I wouldn’t notice a thing like ear-pulling? All my children have been susceptible to earaches. I wondered if he disapproved of Rachel’s single, grayish diaper. I became aware suddenly of what I must look like in my dirndl skirt and rubber flip-flops, one shoulder strap slipping out from the sleeveless blouse that I had fastened shut with a safety pin. My purse was patched with a flesh-colored Band-Aid. I turned it to its good side while he was bending to write out a prescription.

  When we were back in the car, loaded down now with penicillin and decongestants and a brand-new thermometer, Brian turned east although it would have been simpler to continue due south. I suppose he thought it would disturb me to pass near my old neighborhood. “Wait,” I almost said. “Let’s go back, can’t we?” What I wanted to do was just confirm that the house existed; it wasn’t that I planned to walk inside or anything. But Brian looked straight ahead and chewed on his pipe, pretending that this route was a natural one, and I didn’t say anything after all.

  His car was air-conditioned—something I hadn’t noticed when I was so upset. For the first time in weeks I could stop fighting the heat, and Rachel actually went to sleep in my lap. “Must be fast-acting medicine,” Brian said. (We had given her the first dose back in the drugstore.) When I told him I thought it was the coolness he frowned. He said, “Now will you believe that shack is no place for children?”

  “Well, I don’t see how the shack comes into this,” I said. “We’re perfectly comfortable there. The children get earaches any old place; it’s something to do with the twists in their ear tubes.”

  “In summer, even?”

  “Any time.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Brian said. “And if they’re sick in summer, what will winter be like? The place is not insulated, you know. There’s no heat, and you will have to turn the water off every night, and I won’t always show up just in the nick of time this way.”

  “No, I know that,” I said. Actually I had thought about winter several times lately, but then I put it out of my mind again. I said, “We’ll work it out when the times comes. I’m sure that everything will—”

  “It’s August, Mary.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Could you tell me what’s going on with you and Jeremy?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly,” I said.

  “Do you still love him?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. Which was easier than describing the exact combination of love and hurt and anger that I had been feeling about Jeremy lately.

  Brian looked over at me for a second, and then back at the road. “I don’t want to step on Jeremy’s toes,” he said, “but I wish that if you’ve really left him you would make it final and get a divorce. Are you considering that?”

  I don’t know why my life always seems more confusing than other people’s. First Jeremy proposed marriage when I wasn’t divorced and now Brian was proposing a divorce when I wasn’t married. I said, “I’m sorry, I really don’t want to think about anything right now.”

  “All right, then. I’m just letting you know that I’m here, Mary, and sooner or later you’re going to want someone to turn to.”

  Did he suppose I hadn’t thought of that?

  My poor, pathetic store of money, which once had seemed the answer to everything, had almost disappeared. I lay awake nights trying to think of people who might help. On the trip home now I dreamed up ludicrous solutions: I could take up with the slimy boat mechanic, I could suddenly reappear at Guy Tell’s front door. I pictured the string of children trailing me like ducklings, Guy’s startled face, his new wife peering out behind him. “I’ve come back to you, Guy!” “Uh, who are all these people with you, Mary?” I nearly laughed, but then I grew serious. I began to see how every move I had made in my life had required some man to provide my support—first Guy when I left my parents, then John Harris when I left Guy, and Jeremy when John Harris left. Now I couldn’t imagine any other way to do it. I had come here on my own, certainly, but it began to look as if I couldn’t keep it up. Underneath, Jeremy and I were more alike than anyone knew. Eventually I would give in and find someone, Brian or someone else, it all came to the same thing. I could see it ahead of me as clearly as if it had already happened. I couldn’t think of any way out. I felt drained and weak suddenly, as if I had shriveled.

  I looked over at Brian, but he had dropped the subject when I told him to and now he was just driving along puffing quietly on his pipe.

  In the evenings I tell fairytales, the same old fairytales over and over. The children curl against me, clean and warm in their fresh white underwear, smelling of milk. I close my eyes and take a deep breath of them. I could tell these stories in my sleep. “Another, now another,” the children say. Don’t they ever get tired?

  I see myself on a sagging couch beneath a warped tin roof, braced on each side by my children for lack of firmer support. I understand that from outside I seem to have been leading a fairly dramatic life, involving elopements and love children and men stretching in a nearly unbroken series behind me, but the fact is that when you proceed through these experiences day by day they are not really so earth-shaking. All events, except childbirth, can be reduced to a heap of trivia in the end. When I die I expect I will be noticing a water ring someone left on the coffee table, or a spiral of steam rising from a whistling teapot. I will be sure to miss the moment of my passing.

  Rapunzel. The Princess and the Pea. Rumpelstiltskin. My voice grows croaky. My mind runs ahead of the words. I play silent games with the tired old plots, I like to ponder the endings beyond the endings. How about Rapunzel, are we sure she was really happy ever after? Maybe the prince stopped loving her now that her hair was short. Maybe the Genuine Princess was a great disappointment to her husband, being so quick to find the faults and so forthright about pointing them out. And after Rumpelstiltskin was defeated the miller’s daughter lived in sorrow forever, for the king kept nagging her to spin more gold and she could never, never manage it again.

  8

  Spring through Fall, 1971: Olivia

  You know how I knew she had left him? I found him smoking a cigarette. I went up to his studio on Friday night to ask where the others were, it felt so weird downstairs. I knocked and stuck my head in, and there he sat on this purple velvet couch holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger and blowing out a long careful funnel of smoke. “Mr. Pauling?” I said. “Jeremy? Where’s everyone gone to?” But then I guessed for myself, right while I was asking. Something about the way he was holding the cigarette. I don’t know why. “Good Lord, she’s left you,” I said. He nodded. I wouldn’t say that he looked upset. Just stunned, sort of. He cleared his throat but didn’t say anything, and then he switched the cigarette to a new position between his index and middle fingers and sat there staring at it, and I closed the door again.

  Well, it shouldn’t have surprised me. Actually she was a very ordinary woman, not at all what you’d expect of an artist’s wife. The wonder of it is that she ever had the good sense to marry him in the first place. So earthbound, she was. Always nagging and tidying and bringing him her little domestic problems. Knocking on the door: “Jeremy, the storm window man’s here with an estimate and won’t take any signature but yours. Won’t you please come out. D
o you have any idea what goes into the running of this house?” If they ever start a men’s liberation movement, I’ll join it in a flash. Though of course it’s taken me a while to see her so clearly, I admit it. At first I was just glad to get a roof over my head, someone watching out for me and making me wear my raincoat. But I left a mother just like her up in Pennsylvania, went through all the bother of running away only to end up here in the same kind of stewpot. It’s lucky I finally got wise. When I think how close I came to going over to her side!

  All the same, it was sort of a shock at first to discover she was gone.

  I went downstairs to make a peanut butter sandwich. By then the senior citizens were in the kitchen scrounging for supper. The two of them got on my nerves, shuffling around the way they did. They seemed to be weaving a net across the kitchen floor. “Listen,” I said. “Mary’s taken the kids and left.” That shook them up. Mr. Somerset’s mouth sagged open and he forgot to watch the frying pan. Old lady Vinton went on stirring her eggs but I could tell she was surprised. Her spatula went slower and slower. She kept her eyes on what she was doing. “Took to her heels,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”

  “Perhaps she’s off visiting,” Miss Vinton said.

  “Who would she visit?”

  “Well, now, we don’t know the whole story. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

  “Like what, for instance.”

  “I’m sure it will all work out in the end.”

  People say that when they mean that life will get back to the way it was before. It never occurs to them that a change might be for the better.

  I said, “I think I’ll take Jeremy a peanut butter sandwich.”

  “I don’t believe Jeremy eats peanut butter,” Miss Vinton said.

  “He’s never had mine, then. I make it myself.”

  Mr. Somerset said, “Yes, yes, we all know that.” Mr. Somerset doesn’t like me. His voice when he spoke to me was all cracked and peevish. “Don’t think I haven’t heard you,” he said, “running that blender to death the minute I set my head on my pillow for my afternoon nap.”

  I ignored him. I spread peanut butter on a slice of whole wheat bread. “At least I imagine he could use the company,” I said.

  “Perhaps he would like to be left alone,” said Miss Vinton.

  “That’s for him to tell me, isn’t it?”

  “People can’t always say what they feel, Olivia. I imagine he might like to think things through a while, and when he gets hungry he’ll come down and—”

  I know her type. Always so virtuous about keeping out of the way, letting others be. It’s an excuse, of course. Aloofness is the easy way out; I believe in plunging right ahead. Slamming the sandwich on a tray and adding an orange (artificially colored, but what could I do?) and marching straight upstairs to Jeremy. Knock-knock. “It’s me, it’s Olivia. You hungry?”

  No answer. I went in anyway. He was smoking another cigarette. “Here,” I said, setting the tray down, and then I went over to a half-finished piece and said, “I like it.” I pretended not to notice how deserted it looked. I pretended he was just carrying on with the making of it no matter what, which in my opinion is what he should have been doing. “It’s got a good flow to it,” I said. To tell the truth I didn’t have the vaguest idea what comments were required, but I was going to learn. I have the deepest respect for artists. I said, “When are you planning on finishing it?”

  “I don’t think I will ever finish it,” Jeremy said.

  “Nonsense.”

  He put the cigarette to his mouth again. You could tell he wasn’t used to smoking. The filter tip barely touched his lips, and he sucked in very quickly and let the smoke out without inhaling it. The pack in his lap said “True”—Miss Vinton’s, then. A namby-pamby brand. “Look,” I said, “do you mind if I just stay a while and see how you work?”

  He stopped watching his smoke and looked at me. His eyes were wide and his mouth fell open. I wasn’t expecting so much attention so suddenly. I smoothed my hair back and said, “Of course, if I would distract you in any way—”

  But then he suddenly got to his feet, he lurched to his feet, like someone pulled by strings, and set his fingertips to his mouth and stood swaying there. After a moment he turned and ran to the bathroom and I heard him throwing up. It seemed to go on forever. I sat down on the couch and wound a strand of hair around my finger, waiting for him to come back. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave. I had all the time in the world.

  Once last winter when I was on my way to work I looked across a street and saw Mary walking her kids home from school. She was heading toward a very busy corner where a crossing guard usually stands, but that day for some reason the crossing guard was absent. A crowd of school children milled about on the curb looking scared. At the moment I happened to glance over, Mary was just arriving in their midst. She carried the baby and held Edward by the hand, and her little girls were around her in a circle. Then the light changed. Down she stepped, into the street. Little hands reached out from all directions; strangers’ children clutched at the hem of her coat or the edge of her sleeve or the corner of her purse or even the baby’s one dangling, bootied foot; and if they couldn’t reach her they hung onto the coat of a child who could, and off she sailed with her beautiful white face looming high above them keeping watch on all sides for runaway cars and rough boys on bicycles and any other unexpected dangers. What do you suppose it feels like to be so certain of your role? To have such a clear sense of place? I’d been waiting a long time to learn what my role was. I kept going to different towns, as if what I looked for were a physical object. At night I dreamed eerie dreams. Voices floated in and out, offering solutions and promises and answers, but when I woke up I could never remember what they had said. Every morning I took Jeremy some nuts and fruit for breakfast, and at noon a sandwich, and at suppertime another, and although he didn’t appear to notice me I stood waiting anyway, hoping to be defined.

  I went in one day with a bowl of granola and an apple, and I found him nailing boards together into a sort of box. He was working very slowly, and not on the statue he was on before. That surprised me a little. Mary told me once that he always finished everything he started, even if it wasn’t turning out to be what he wanted; he seemed to think pieces came out of him like olives out of a bottle, and he had no choice but to let the first one out before he could get to the second. Well, I don’t know, maybe this particular olive was only a fragment all along. I set his breakfast down and he said, “Oh. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  “You will?”

  “Just find your things. Where are your things?”

  “What things?”

  He straightened up and looked at me. “Aren’t you here for a lesson?” he said.

  I didn’t know what to think. As far as I knew he didn’t even give lessons. I wondered if he were losing his mind. “Wait, now,” I said. “I’m Olivia. Remember?”

  Then his whole face got pink and he began fumbling with the hammer. “Oh,” he said. “I’m so—I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I must have been—you appear to be somewhat the student type, you see.”

  “Well, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not at all.”

  Then he said, “No one is purely what they seem on the surface.”

  It was the first real thing he had ever said to me. Well, all right, it wasn’t much. But it was a beginning.

  He gave me a list of supplies to buy for him at an art shop. The shop bowled me over, I’d never been in such a good place before. It was very small and cozy and it smelled of glue and wood and canvas. The old man behind the counter came about to my waist. He said, “Yes? Can I help?”

  “I’d like half a dozen cans of spray adhesive,” I read off the list, “and two tubes of liquid solder and five pounds of scrap stained glass.” I had no idea what I was ordering, but it seemed to make sense to the old man. He kept scurrying around, coming back to set things on the counter
. “This is for an artist friend of mine,” I told him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Maybe you know him. Jeremy Pauling, he had a one-man show at the O’Donnell Gallery.”

  “Pauling, yes,” the man said. He started penciling a column of figures onto a sheet of brown wrapping paper. “We often see his wife,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “I’ll just put this on the account, shall I?”

  “Account?”

  He stopped adding the figures and looked up at me.

  “Oh. Okay,” I said.

  I don’t know why I was so surprised. Sears and Roebuck doesn’t carry everything, after all; she’d have had to run errands for him now and then. Still, it sort of spoiled my mood. Especially when the man gave me the package and said, “I hope Mrs. Pauling isn’t sick. She’s such a lovely person.”

  Of course, he was only a salesman. Salesmen always have to sound complimentary.

  By the time I got home again I was feeling better. I climbed the stairs pretending to be in a movie. Maybe someday there would be a movie made, right in this house. Some Hollywood actress pretending to be me would bring supplies to an actor pretending to be Jeremy. An American Toulouse-Lautrec. What theme music would they choose? I made up something and hummed it as I went. I was only a side character but powerful, a major influence, and the last scene would show me holding his head as he died. Some major transformation in his art would be dated from the time he met me. I tried to imagine what that transformation would be. When I walked into the studio his new piece was the first thing I looked at, but to tell the truth it didn’t seem much different from anything he’d done in the past. Complicated. Involved. Like one of those poems you give up on after the first couple lines, because even though you know it must be good it takes so much work to read it. He had stood his box construction on end and set in boards horizontally and vertically, as if he were making a cabinet with lots of different-sized cubbyholes, and now he was painting the inside of each cubbyhole a different color. Oh, well. Still in the movie, I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I think you’ve hit on something this time.” He shied away and blinked up at me. “Anyway,” I said. “Here’s the stuff I got you.”