by Anne Tyler
On a Saturday morning early in November he went into the older children’s room on the third floor. He braved the tumult that seemed to go on filling the air with noise and movement even this long afterward—circus paintings and laughing dolls and plastic horses and coffee cans overflowing with broken crayons—and he found Abbie’s pink nylon backpack at the bottom of the closet. In the kitchen he made two cheese sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, and he put them into the backpack along with an apple, a flashlight, and all the rent money from the cookie jar. He located a city bus map in the front of the telephone book, and after studying it for a moment he carefully tore out the entire page and folded it over and over and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he was ready to go.
Outdoors he was swept by a sudden coolness that he was not prepared for. He was wearing lightweight clothes, and a cotton windbreaker and his gray tweed golf cap. For warmth he kept his arms tightly folded and he walked with short, brisk steps, with the backpack whispering and bouncing behind him. He traveled several blocks, barely hestitating as he came to street crossings. Someone watching very carefully might have seen him swallow, or brace his shoulders, or look a few too many times to the left and right when a traffic light turned green, but otherwise he seemed no different from anyone else. At one corner he stopped and peered up at the street sign a moment, and then he made a turn and kept walking. He was among crowds now. Women sped past carrying dress boxes and string-handled paper bags, looking purposeful. A stroller with two children in it ran over his left foot. At the doorway of the dimestore, teenagers stood around shoving each other and popping their bubble gum and combing their hair and beginning dance steps they never finished. “Excuse me,” Jeremy kept saying. “Oh, I’m sorry. Excuse me, please.” They didn’t listen. He threaded his way among them, his arms down at his sides now, trying to avoid touching anyone.
The inside of the dimestore smelled of wooden floors and popcorn. It seemed to him that there were far too many people in the aisles. “Excuse me,” he kept saying, but as if he were transparent, no one noticed. He had to make his way to the toy department inch by inch, indirectly. When he finally reached it, he found a girl in a wrinkled smock filing her fingernails behind the counter. “Excuse me, I am going to need six toys,” he told her. She looked up, still filing away. “I need toys to take to my children.”
“Fine with me,” she said.
“Do you have six toys I could take to them?”
She waved the nail file toward the toys, which spilled down not one counter but several and were made up of far too many colors. His eyes began blurring. “Well, I—do you possibly have any suggestions?” he asked her.
“Just look around, is what I suggest.”
Rubber, paper, painted tin, plastic in phosphorescent shades of pink and chartreuse. Everything he saw seemed to make him hungry. He felt hollow and weak. “Perhaps—”he said. His hand hovered over a tiny wind-up metal tricycle, ridden by a metal boy, but when he looked up at the salesgirl she only filed a thumbnail and stared past him, refusing even a hint of encouragement. He sighed and moved on. He traveled down the rows of toys and then beyond them, up other aisles, pausing at a rack of coloring books and then again at infants’ wear but still not buying anything. A terrycloth bib bore a painted picture of a baby who reminded him of Rachel, but the words beneath it said “I’m Daddy’s Little Angel” and none of his children had ever called him Daddy. He wondered why not. He wondered if it were too late now for them to begin. But still, he didn’t buy the bib. He imagined that Mary might give him an odd, considering look when she read the words on it, and the thought of that look made him feel foolish.
At the stationery counter he became fascinated by party favors. They hung on hooks, in little cellophane packets—clusters of tiny paper parasols that really opened, plastic cradles no bigger than walnut shells, tin horns with tassels and decks of cards the size of his thumbnail. He hung over them open-mouthed, reverently touching first one packet and then another. “Help you?” a woman said, but he shook his head. He made himself leave the favors and think of children’s things again—masses of balloons in a plastic bag, striped paper hats, then stationery with pictures of little girls in the upper left-hand corner. Stationery? He wasn’t sure which of his children were literate. He returned to the party favors, and found beneath them a section containing small white spherical packages tied with blue ribbon. “Excuse me,” he said to the woman. “I was wondering what was in these.”
“These here? Surprises.”
“I mean—could you tell me what the surprises are?”
“Now, if I knew that,” she said, “they wouldn’t be surprises, would they?”
“No, I suppose not.”
They were sold in packs of three. He could buy two packs and they would come out even. Also he thought it would be exciting to have gifts that were so mysterious. Who knew what might be hidden inside? Perhaps occasionally they filled a package with a real treasure, something worth far more than the price. As soon as he thought of that, choosing became difficult. He didn’t want to make any mistakes. He picked up a pack and then dropped it, picked another, burrowed deep down to find the bottom-most one. From time to time he looked up at the woman and gave her a small friendly smile, but she never smiled back at him. Still, he felt he was making the right decision. When he had paid for them he took off his backpack to put the surprise balls inside, and the smooth way they fit between his cheese sandwiches gave him a feeling of competence. He had chosen well, unerringly, with all his instincts working for him. He was still smiling when he left the store.
Now he pulled the bus map from his pocket and checked it one last time, although he had already memorized where he should go. It was very important to find the corner where his particular bus stopped. If he forgot, or had misread something, he could be lost for days. He might never get home again. Perhaps he should not have attempted this. But the surprise balls rustled crisply in his pack, and the map pointed out his bus stop very clearly, and if he went home now he knew that he would despise himself forever, he would spend the rest of his life chewing the bitter knowledge that he hadn’t a single spark of courage in him. He set out toward the bus stop, walking more slowly now and holding the map in front of him, blindly folding and unfolding it.
At the corner he wanted he found four people already waiting, which was encouraging. They stood below a blue sign bearing the number of his bus. He checked the number against the map, thought for a moment, and then checked it again. Everything was in order. He smiled at the other people. They looked around him, through him, above him. There was a woman in elastic stockings, a teenaged boy, a soldier, and a younger boy with his hands in his pockets. For some reason their skin appeared to be all the same shade of rough, dry pink and their hair straggled down in identical brown wisps, although they stood separate from each other and were obviously not related. Jeremy felt chilled by them. He thought of his sculptures, in which people like these so often appeared—standard representatives of what Brian called simple humanity, but any time Jeremy went out he was forced to see that humanity was far more complex and untidy and depressing than it ever was in his pieces. The old ladies were rude and sniveling, the men lacked solidity somehow, and the children seemed to carry a threat of violence. Jeremy spent the rest of his wait standing sideways to them—not confronting them but not facing totally away, either, for fear of giving offense—and like them he kept his eyes fixed on an empty spot in the distance.
When finally the bus came, it seemed almost as familiar as home. He climbed into a smell he had remembered without realizing it from thirty years in the past, from the days when he rode to art school or went shopping for clothes with his mother. The air was warm and slightly stuffy. Although he had to ask the driver what the price of a ticket was nowadays, he noticed that the seats still braced his spine at the same unnatural angle, and the doors still pleated themselves open and shut, and the back of the driver’s neck still gave the impression of kindliness and
reliability. Jeremy relaxed and looked out the window. He held Abbie’s pack on his lap now, so that he could sit more comfortably, and as he rode along he kept stroking the slippery pink nylon as he had once stroked the satin binding on his blanket, long ago in childhood, waiting to be borne off to sleep.
Two ladies behind him were discussing someone’s drinking problem. The soldier was whistling. A husband and wife were arguing over a woman named LaRue and up front a tiny black lady was talking to the bus driver. “You ought to seen him when they told him,” she said. “He jumped up and shouted, ‘Where’s my gun? Where’s my gun?’ Planning on shooting his self. Later he wanted to jump into the grave. They had to hold him back by the elbows.”
“Is that right,” the driver said. “Well, I expect he felt mighty close to her.” Jeremy nodded over and over, impressed by the strangeness of what he heard and by the driver’s easy acceptance of it.
Now the landscape outside his window was more open and barren, and the streets were less crowded. He was not sure that he had ever been here before. The scrubby trees far at the edge of the horizon had a desolate look, but in his present mood, when he was so proud of this trip and so hopeful at the thought of seeing Mary again, even desolation gave him the feeling of happiness swelling and unfolding inside him. He thought of things that had not occurred to him for years, some of them sad. He thought of his grandmother Amory, whom he had loved very much, and of the gilt-framed picture that hung in her parlor. A crowd of people in a faded forest. “See that forest?” his grandmother said. “Every bit of it is real. It is made of dried plants, the pines are dried ferns and the flowers are dried violets.” “How about the people?” Jeremy had asked, not thinking. “Are they dried too?” He thought of Mrs. Jarrett, his mother’s old boarder. Why, he had never properly mourned Mrs. Jarrett’s passing! Grief flashed through him like a sharp white light. How elegant she had been, with her plumed hats and her white gloves! How hard she must have worked to keep up her appearance! He looked around him at the inside of the bus, at the people nodding and agreeing with each other and the soldier whistling his tripping little tune. Then down at his hands, cupping Abbie’s pink backpack. Even his hands seemed dear and sad, and gave him cause for joy.
Now here was the narrow rutted road to the boatyard, pointed out to him so patiently by the driver. A line of cottages and trailers dotted the wild grass. Jeremy plodded along in the herringbone prints of some truck or tractor, keeping his head bent against a cold breeze that was blowing up. The soil was very soggy, as if it had rained not long ago, and soon his shoes and trouser cuffs were damp. He thought the dampness was pleasant—two cool hands pressing the soles of his feet. After rounding each curve he looked for a glimpse of the boatyard. He had no idea how far it was. But when he failed to find it he trudged on without minding. Some kind of rhythm had been set up, and his legs swung forward in a steady trundling gait that seemed to require no effort. He felt he could have gone on till nightfall and still not have tired.
Then up sprang a cluster of gray shacks and a sheet of water beyond them—silently, eerily. He almost thought he had caught them moving into place just out of the corner of his eye. Above the largest building, which was plastered with soft drink signs, a tin chimney seemed suspended from a thread of smoke. There were several shabby cars scattered about, and a rusty flatbed truck beside a shed, and boats lining the dock and moored out on the water, but he saw no sign of humans. He approached the largest building as slowly as possible. Still, he felt he brought more noise and motion than the rules of this place would allow.
“Al’s Supplies” the sign outside said, with Coca-Cola circles at either end like giant red thumbtacks. Jeremy climbed the hollow wooden steps and went inside. He found a man sitting beside a pot-bellied stove, reading a tabloid. All around him were display cases full of astonishing objects, things made of brass and wood and leather. Coils of very white rope hung from the rafters. In the dimness beyond he saw tinned goods on shelves, and he could smell cheese. “Excuse me,” he said. The man folded his paper very carefully and creased the fold with his thumbnail before he looked up. “I was wondering if you knew where Brian O’Donnell’s house is,” Jeremy said.
“O’Donnell. No such fellow here by that name.”
“But—but there has to be,” Jeremy said.
“Nope.”
“Isn’t this the Quamikut Boatyard?”
“Yes, but there ain’t no—”
“He has a house here. His name is O’Donnell, a man with a beard.”
“Well, I never seen him and I know everybody roundabout, Mister.”
“But surely you—and there’s a woman there now with six children, staying in his house.”
“Oh! You’re talking about Mary Pauling.”
“That’s right, that’s who I mean.”
“She’s here, but I never heard of no O’Donnell before.”
“Well, um, could you tell me how to find her?”
“Sure. You just go on a ways down that road you come in by. Pass the boatyard, you’ll find her place the very last thing. Her and the kids ought to be there right now, it’s Saturday.”
“I see,” said Jeremy. “Well, thank you.”
“You a friend of hers?”
“Friend?”
“I don’t want you going down there if you’re not welcome, now.”
“No, please, it will be all right,” Jeremy said.
He had to endure a long, silent inspection. The man tipped back in his chair and looked him up and down and chewed on his lower lip. Then he said, “Well, okay, get on.”
Jeremy hitched his backpack higher on his shoulders and walked out again. Some of his confidence had faded. Mary’s house was stamped with her name already, her schedule was familiar to people Jeremy had never laid eyes on, her safety was guarded by total strangers. And all in such a short time, a period he would have called sufficient for merely a visit. What was her secret?
He continued down the road past the shacks, alongside the water, across a gravel parking lot. What he was looking for was a vacation cottage, perhaps one of those shingled A-frame things that he had often seen advertised in the resort section of the Baltimore Sun. Instead he found a tipsy gray shanty with cinderblocks for a doorstep. Not here, surely. He moved around it, hoping for something more suitable just beyond. On the other side, standing on a wooden crate beneath a window, he found Mary. She was humming a cheerful, meandering tune and rolling up a sheet of newspaper. The wind whipped her skirt around her knees, and in spite of the cold she wore no sweater. While he watched she laid the tube of newspaper along the lower crevice of the windowframe, reached down to her feet for a wheel of masking tape, and taped the tube in place. Then she bent for another sheet of newspaper, which was anchored beneath her foot. As she straightened she caught sight of Jeremy. She stopped humming. He thought her face grew pale, but her voice was perfectly calm. “Hello, Jeremy,” she said.
“Hello.”
He shifted his weight to the other foot.
“Well!” she said finally. “Have you come for a visit?”
“Yes, I—no. I thought—”
His awkwardness made him feel overheated. From one pocket he pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his forehead, and while he was doing that she stepped down off the crate and came over to him. “Jeremy?” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“How’d you get here?”
“By bus, and then I walked,” he said.
“Walked! You poor soul!”
She laid a hand on his arm. “Really, it was nothing,” he told her. “I’m not at all tired.” Then he was sorry he said it, because she let go of him and moved away again. He felt he had lost some opportunity that he had noticed only too late. Where her hand had rested, his arm seemed to have become more sensitive. He concentrated on it, re-creating the pressure of her fingers, wishing that his arm possessed some sort of magnetic power. All he saw of her now was her back, the springy tend
rils of hair escaping from her bun and her skirt whipping and flattening in the wind. “You’ll want to see the children I guess,” she called back.
“Why, yes, I—”
She led the way to the front of the house. He still couldn’t believe that she would live in such a place. The cinderblocks made a gritty sound beneath his feet, the doorknob was a globe of solid rust and a bald patch in the linoleum nearly tripped him as he entered. At first all he could see was layers of diapers hanging up and down the length of the room. “Sorry,” said Mary, “we’ve had a rainy spell lately, I had to hang them inside.” She went ahead of him, parting diapers. He felt like a blind man. It was impossible to tell what kind of room he was in. He smelled laundry detergent and cold, stale air. He heard the children’s voices but could see no sign of them. “Seven of hearts,” one said. “Eight.” “Nine, ten.” “Jack? Anyone got the pack?” “Children, Jeremy’s here,” Mary said. Then they broke the last diaper barrier and stood in a doorway, looking into a tiny bedroom. The four oldest girls were playing cards on a caved-in double bed. Edward sat beside them stirring up a deck of cards of his own, and over by the window stood Rachel—could that be Rachel? standing?—holding onto the sill and turning to smile up at him, wearing unfamiliar pink overalls and showing several teeth that he had never seen before. “Jeremy!” Darcy said. They piled off the bed and came to hug him. He felt a tangle of arms around his chest, another pair around his knees. Everywhere he reached out, he touched heads of hair so soft it seemed his fingers might have imagined them. “What are you doing here?” they asked him. “Did you come to stay?” “Did you miss us?” He was amazed that they were so glad to see him. After all, they might have forgotten him, or never even noticed his absence. “Well, now,” he kept saying. “Goodness. Well, now!”
“How come you’re wearing my backpack?” Abbie asked.
“Oh, I hope you don’t mind, I borrowed it to carry my supplies.”
“No, that’s okay.”
