by Anne Tyler
“I’m so hungry, Olivia,” Jeremy said. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes, but wait, I want to ask you something.”
“I don’t believe we had any breakfast.”
“Listen. Which are you, Jeremy? A descendant, or an ancestor. Do you know?”
“What?”
“Do you know what time you’re from? Do you? Think, Jeremy. I want to find this out.”
But all Jeremy said was, “I wish you could learn how to make waffles.”
Then I slammed my hand down on his, which was resting on his knee, and he started and drew back. But instead of removing his hand he left it there, and after a long motionless minute he said in a faraway voice, “How cool you are.”
I thought he must be trying to sound hip.
He slid his hand away. Still leaning back, he reached out and touched the end of a strand of my hair with one fingertip. “You’re so cold,” he said.
Then I understood. It seemed I understood all about him now. “I am always cold,” I told him. “Never warm. Mary was warm.”
“You’re not,” he said.
We stared at each other, not smiling at all.
He liked me in the colors of ice, pale blues and grays and whites, everything smooth, preferably shiny. He never said so, but I knew. He never had to say anything at all any more. Sometimes we went days without speaking or looking at each other, and we never touched, even accidentally. We just moved about side by side, in step. We sat in identical dusty green chairs in the dining room, watching housewives win electrical appliances. When they won they screamed and hugged the emcee and took his face hard between their hands to kiss him on the lips. “I used to win things,” Jeremy said. One woman jumped up and down and landed wrong on her spike heels and twisted her ankle. Jeremy and I watched without changing our expressions, like two goldfish looking out of a goldfish bowl.
I saw that other people were forever rushing somewhere, and nine tenths of what they did would have to be redone the next day. Cleaning, bathing, making conversation. I thought about it a long time, but I didn’t mention it to Jeremy. I didn’t need to. Half of the idea I caught from him, by osmosis; the other half I concluded for myself and passed back to him just as silently. He quit shaving. His whiskers grew out half an inch and stopped. How much time he could have saved all these years, if he had known they would do that! We quit going upstairs. His studio vanished; so did my bedroom. Look at stairs, we thought, silently, together: what a perfect example of pointlessness. They go up and down, both. If you go up you must come down. You undo everything and start over. After The Star-Spangled Banner we fell asleep in our chairs, or out in the living room, or in the downstairs bedroom, side by side on top of the spread. I followed him everywhere but without asking a thing, an un-Mary sharing a pool of chilliness. I taught him to sleep late. Waking, finding me beside him, he would struggle up. “Be still,” I said, and he lay down again and stared, as I did, at the towering white ceiling while noon approached and rolled over us and rumbled away again. Now I was an artist too. In my mind I colored the ceiling with the jagged lightning bolts you see when you squinch your eyes tight; so did Jeremy. We did it together. No strings snagged us to the rest of the world. “Good Lord in heaven!” Mr. Somerset said, shuffling up, stopping in the bedroom doorway. “Look here! What do you two think you’re up to here?” I didn’t answer. Jeremy didn’t hear. Jeremy was farther along, he was nearly out of touch altogether, but I was catching up with him as fast as I possibly could.
I wouldn’t eat, but Jeremy did. He devoured all the food that belonged to Miss Vinton: a loaf of bread, a quart jar of mayonnaise, a pack of wieners. Watching him eat made me feel stuffed. I saw that my fingers were getting knobby and my jeans were loose, but I felt so fat. He stopped chewing and looked over at me. I closed my eyes. He went on eating.
Once he said, “My mother died and so did both my sisters.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Also my father.”
“Your father.”
“Then her. Everybody left me.”
“I haven’t left.”
“Everybody outside me left.”
That was the way he let me know how he felt about me.
I was lying on the bed listening to the pigeons tearing at the ivy on the outside wall. It must be fall. Berries on the ivy. Jeremy was asleep beside me, he had been sleeping for hours while I kept watch. Then Miss Vinton came. She was wearing navy. Such a harsh color. She stood in the doorway a minute, and then she walked into the room and bent over me. She took hold of me by the chin and turned my face to her. “Olivia,” she said.
I just looked at her.
“Olivia, do you hear me?”
Now Jeremy sighed and muttered. He was dreaming of horses, flocks of wild horses in muddy colors.
“I want you to listen, Olivia. You must pull yourself together. Do you hear me?”
The older you get the more you censor what comes into your head. Big blank spaces grow where you have snipped things out. You get like Miss Vinton and Mr. Somerset; you speak very slowly, spanning all those gaps. “I want … you to take … a good look at yourself, Olivia.”
I just went on looking at her.
“Answer.”
Her hand was like a vise on my chin, like grownups forcing you to confess. “What do you want me to say?” I asked, but I kept my voice flat, to show I wasn’t scared of her. Her hand loosened a little.
“I choose you to speak to because I think you’re more in touch than he is. Surely you must see what you’re doing to yourself. Have you bathed lately? Look at your hair, your lovely long hair! You’re skin and bones, you don’t seem healthy. There’s something funny about your eyes. What is that you’re wearing?”
I wish they would break for commercials in real life.
“I can’t stand watching you harm yourself, Olivia. And you’re making Jeremy all the worse, you know that, don’t you?”
A lie. See, I wanted to tell her, how faithful I am when all others desert him? The last believer left in the church. I’m making him worse?
“I think you are losing your mind, Olivia.”
The vise on my chin again.
“Well, yes, I suppose I am,” I said, “but it’s nothing I can’t bounce back from.”
“Do it, then. Bounce.”
“You don’t believe I can.”
“Oh yes. I believe it. That’s why I’m telling you to do it.”
“I don’t see any reason to,” I said, and then I wrenched free of her hand and turned away from her.
“How about Jeremy, then? Olivia?”
“How about him.”
“He hasn’t worked in weeks. You’ve let him get too removed. Doesn’t that bother you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Olivia?”
She left. I heard her clacking into the kitchen, sighing, clacking out again.
When Jeremy woke up I said, “Why aren’t you working?”
“Working.”
“I didn’t cause you to stop.”
Something made him raise his eyes, maybe some tone in my voice. I was so hurt. I couldn’t understand what had happened.
“I finished the piece,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, then.”
He didn’t say when he was planning to start another.
It must have been a weekday. Miss Vinton was gone and I couldn’t see Mr. Somerset. The cat was hunched on the drain-board in the kitchen, turning his flat green eyes on and off. I felt sick to my stomach. “I don’t want breakfast,” I told Jeremy. “Let’s go look at your piece.”
He was finishing the little finicky toast rims that Miss Vinton had left in her cereal bowl. “Another time,” he told me.
“I want to see it now.”
“Olivia?”
“Now, Jeremy.”
We climbed the stairs. It was like returning to your childhood home—everything looked smaller and dingier. Clothes were overflowing a hamper in the upstairs hallway
and on the windowsill was a vase containing a single brittle flower, stone dead. The closed door of my room seemed pathetic. We went on climbing. I was out of breath and darkness kept swooping in on my eyesight. When we reached the studio I said, “All right,” but all Jeremy did was go straight to his armchair. I had to look at his piece on my own.
Imagine a wooden soft drink crate, only bigger, standing on end. A set of compartments, and in each compartment a different collection of objects. Like an advertisement showing a cross-section of a busy household. Was it the telephone company that used to do those? Yes, Bell Telephone, demonstrating why you need an extension in every room. Or maybe some other utility. Flameless electric heat, maybe. I ought to remember; I certainly pored over them enough as a child. In one room would be Junior with his stamp collection, in another Sis was dressing for a date, in the bathroom Dad was showering and Mother stood over the stove in the kitchen. Only in Jeremy’s piece, there were no people. Only the feeling of people—of full lives suddenly interrupted, belongings still bearing the imprint of their vanished owners. Dark squares upstairs full of toys, paper scraps, a plastic doll bed lying on its side as if some burst of exuberance had flung it there and then passed on, leaving such a vacancy it could make you cry. Downstairs food, wheels, a set of jacks, a square of very bare green carpeting. Other things too fragmented to make out. I had to lean forward and squint, and give up finally, and settle back on my heels and shake my hair off my face.
“Why not just go on and make a dollhouse?” I said.
He rocked in his armchair, staring out the window.
“What do you call it? ‘Ode to the Suburbs’? ‘Hymn to Mary’?”
He kept rocking.
“ ‘In Praise of the Good Life’?”
I went around to the front of his armchair, where he would have to look at me. “Finally I get to where I understand, and then this is the piece you show me,” I said. “But you I don’t understand. Never. Jeremy? Wasn’t I what you needed? Surely you’re not going to say she was. Are you? Was she?”
But even when I stood directly in his line of vision, it didn’t seem that he saw me. His eyes were as flat as that cat’s eyes in the kitchen. He saw beyond me, without even having to try. There was a small trembling smile at the corners of his mouth. Only crazy people smile like that.
All I had to pack were the few things I’d brought in my knapsack—jeans and T-shirts, two of each. I left behind my ice-blue blouse and my shiny white Mexican dress and my white trenchcoat and my gray smock with the shimmery embroidery across the yoke. I packed some fruit and a box of granola. I was starved. I slid into my sandals and went out into the street.
How did it get so cold? All the leaves were down. The wind blew straight through my shirt and I had to hug the knapsack against my chest to keep warm. What I had planned was to walk out a ways and then hitch a ride on some larger street. I was thinking of going south. I didn’t want any two-block errand-runners picking me up. But it was so cold that I started right in thumbing where I was, walking backwards down a line of parked cars. People whizzed past staring sideways, as if they didn’t know what to make of me. Then the traffic light at the end of the block turned red and the cars started coming slower, preparing for the stop. I saw a Cadillac with tinted windows, one lady driving it all alone. A plump cheerful lady wearing a hat. I thought surely she would stop for me. I held my thumb higher, so that the cold air prickled all the little hairs on my arm. I looked straight at her through the windshield as she rolled closer. Please, lady! I’m only eighteen and a girl to boot, and it seems much brighter and colder out here than I had expected. I didn’t know the sky would be so wide today. Won’t you please give me a lift? But the car rolled past. I was so sure she would stop I had already turned, ready to reach for the door handle. She didn’t even look at me. Just slid on by, leaving me standing there with my mouth open and my teeth chattering and my heart about to break. Now, why couldn’t she have let me in? She had so much space! She seemed so nice! Her car looked so warm! Would it have hurt her any just to reach across and give me a smile and open the door? Why did she leave without taking me along?
9
Fall, 1971: Jeremy
First he tried making a woman seated at a sewing machine, but the curve of her back kept coming out wrong and after a while he gave up. Then a child with a cat, but he lost interest halfway through. Then a girl braiding her hair, which he finished because he made himself, but he knew it wasn’t right. Lines came out knotty, angles awkward, flat planes lumpy and uneven. He kept ripping things out and then neglecting to replace them, sitting instead on a stool beside the piece while his hands went on working at useless tasks, at picking a cuticle or creasing the material of his trousers. Why couldn’t I have been a musician, he wondered, and played what other people have already written down? Why not a writer, just giving new twists to words I already know? Yet Miss Vinton, bringing him cocoa, smiled at the statue of the girl and said, “Why, it’s Darcy!” He was only modeling the people he had seen in real life, wasn’t he? No. There was no way to sum people up; he was making new ones. An imaginary family. He stroked the imaginary Darcy’s hand with a touch like a feather. Then he shook his head. “Sorry,” Miss Vinton said. “I thought—here, I brought some cocoa. I won’t keep you from your work.” She went out on tiptoe, protecting his concentration. All she saw of him was the seamless exterior—Sculptor at Work. She never guessed at the cracks inside, the stray thoughts, tangents of memory, hours of idleness, days spent leafing through old magazines or practicing square knots on a length of red twine or humming under his breath while he tapped his fingers on the windowsill and stared down at the people in the street. A morning of half sleep on the couch in the corner, five minutes changing the slant of the statue’s eyes, an afternoon playing with a tube of Christmas glitter powder.
He had heard that suffering made great art, but in his case all it made was parched, measly, stunted lumps far below his usual standard.
In his sleep he worked so hard that sheer exhaustion woke him up. He dreamed of cutting scraps of moonlight, strips of rain-spangled air, long threads of wind. Arranging them took such effort that he could feel his brain knotting. It seemed that he was aiming for some single solution, as in a mathematical problem. “Is this it? Is this it?” No answer. No click in his head to tell him he was finally right. He awoke feeling strained and damp, hoping that morning had arrived, but it hadn’t. He always found himself in an opaque darkness, behind drawn shades and closed curtains, swaddled in grayish bedclothes. His life, he thought, was eye-shaped—the tight pinched corners of childhood widening in middle age to encompass Mary and the children, narrowing back now to this single lonely room. The silence hummed, and sometimes voices leaped out of it and startled him. He knew they were not real. They were accidental, something like the cells formed by molecules colliding and combining. He heard his sister Laura praising a friend’s needlework, Pippi talking to a lady-bug, a long-forgotten medical student requesting a new study lamp—all those separate eras weaving themselves together in his head. Mary asked if he needed new pajamas. Had her voice really been that young, once upon a time? Why, when they first met she must have been barely twenty-two. He had never thought much about that before. To him she had always been calm and stately, ageless, classical. Only now he remembered her flashing laughter and the pounding of her feet up the stairs and the whimsical, pigtailed paper dolls she used to make for Darcy. Her easy tears, her tempers with the children and the sudden way those tempers would disappear in swift, impulsive hugs that reminded him of reunions after journeys. How had he managed to overlook all that? He had loved her for the wrong qualities, the ones that were least important or that perhaps she did not even possess. He had ignored the ones that mattered. “How’s your supply of socks?” she asked him. Behind her words he heard sparks and ripples, maybe even laughter, maybe directed at the absurdity of the subject they were discussing.
In the dark his mother’s voice was thinner than a thr
ead, weaving its way through a tangle of other people’s words. “Oh, Jeremy, you were always so … I really and truly don’t …” She spoke with that whispery sigh that meant he had done something wrong—a sigh not of anger but of disappointment. Well, of course. Lying here on his back, watching his mistakes roll across the ceiling, he felt he had done everything wrong. “Why, Jeremy?” she used to say (when he spilled his milk, or wrinkled his clothes, or failed to make his bed). “Why are you treating me this way? I’ve been as good to you as I know how to be. Now I see that being good is not enough.” It occurred to him that she had spoken truer words than she knew. Being good was not enough. The mistakes he reviewed were not evil deeds but errors of aimlessness, passivity, an echoing internal silence. And when he rose in the morning (having waited out the night, watching each layer of darkness lift slowly and painfully), he was desperate with the need to repair all he had done, but the only repairs he could think of were also aimless, passive, silent. He had a vague longing to undertake some metaphysical task, to make some pilgrimage. In books a pilgrimage would pass through a fairytale landscape of round green hills and nameless rivers and pathless forests. He knew of no such landscape in America. Fellow pilgrims in leather and burlap would travel alongside him only long enough to tell their stories—clear narratives with beginnings, middles, ends and moral messages, uncluttered by detail—but where would he find anyone of that description? And think of what he would have to carry in the rustic knapsack on his back. The tools of his craft: Epoxy glue in two squeeze tubes, spray varnish, electric sander, disposable paintbrushes. Wasn’t there anything in the world that was large scale any more? Wasn’t there anything to lift him out of this stillness inside? He fumbled for his clothes and picked his way downstairs. He made his breakfast toast and ate it absently, chewing each mouthful twenty times and gazing at the toaster while he tried to find just one heroic undertaking that he could aim his life toward.
