by Anne Tyler
They passed the house with all the statues in the yard—elves and baby deer and a row of ducks. Agatha wished their own yard had statues, but her mother said statues were common. “Right now,” she said, “the last thing I can afford is looking common.” She talked a lot these days about what she couldn’t afford. Danny hadn’t left them well provided for.
They passed the house that said MRS. GOODE, PALMIST—FORTUNES CHEERFULLY TOLD, but their mother didn’t stop. Agatha was glad. Mrs. Goode was gray all over and her parlor smelled of mothballs. They came to where the shops began, shoe repairs and laundromats. At Luckman’s Pharmacy Thomas and Agatha slowed hopefully, but their mother said, “We’ll go to Joyner’s this time.” She rotated her drugstores because she didn’t want people thinking she bought too many pills. It was a pity, though. Luckman’s had one of those gumball machines with plastic charms intermingled. Thomas and Agatha let their feet drag and sent a longing gaze backward.
Traffic in this area was busier, and the bus exhausts made the heat seem worse. Thomas wore a smudgy mustache of sweat. Each click of their mother’s heels shot something like a little sharp paring knife straight through Agatha’s head.
On Govans Road the long, low front of Rumford & Son’s Office Equipment took up nearly half a block. They stood facing it across the street, waiting for the light to change. Thomas said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if typewriter stores had gumball machines?”
“Well, they don’t, and I don’t want you asking,” their mother said.
“I wasn’t going to ask!”
“Just be very, very quiet, so I won’t be sorry I brought you.”
In the olden days, she didn’t have to bring them places. She’d say, “Oh! I’m going stir-crazy, I tell you.” Or, “I’m getting cabin fever.” She would ask Ian or Mrs. Myrdal to baby-sit, because back then she could afford it. She would go out all afternoon and come home happy and show the children what she had picked up for them—candy bars and lollipops, sometimes even toys if they were small enough to fit in her bag. But now she had to take the three of them everywhere. She took them to her doctor, even, and when she was called inside Agatha had to watch the other two. “Can’t we go back to having sitters?” Agatha would ask, already knowing the answer. The answer was, “No, we can’t. Face the facts, sweetheart: we’re in the Department of Reality now.” Their mother’s favorite thing to say. Agatha hated hearing that and she would cover her ears like Thomas, but when she took her hands away her mother would still be talking. “You think I like having you with me every single second? Think I wouldn’t rather just leave on my own any time I get the notion?”
Their mother loved them, but they kept trying to make her not love them. That was what she told them. “You want me to walk out on you,” she told them, “but I refuse to do it.”
Whenever she said that, Thomas would take hold of some little part of her clothing, down near the hemline where she didn’t notice.
The light turned green and they crossed the street. Their mother’s heels sounded daintier now. When they stepped inside the store, cold air washed over them—lovely, cold, blowing air—and Daphne said, “Ah,” which made their mother laugh. Wasn’t it wonderful how quickly she could change! To laugh like that, her best little husky-throated laugh, the instant she walked through the door! And the typewriter man wasn’t even listening yet, although he came over soon enough. He said, “Why, look who’s here!” You could see how pleased he was. He was a blond, pale man with skin that flushed when he smiled. “What brings you out on such a hot afternoon?” he asked their mother.
“Oh, we were just taking a stroll,” she said. All of a sudden she seemed bashful. “We were passing by and I said, ‘Shouldn’t we visit my typewriter, kids?’ ”
“Absolutely. You don’t want it feeling neglected,” he said.
He beamed down at Agatha. She gave him her biggest smile back, all teeth.
The showroom was filled with desks, and a typewriter sat on each one. Some were big complicated electrics and some were little low-slung manuals. If it were up to Agatha, they’d have a manual. Those looked easier. But her mother’s was electric, with keys that chattered loudly almost before you touched them.
They had first come to this store in the spring, shortly after Danny died. Their mother had decided to be a secretary. “I have endured my very last of the Fill ’Er Up Café,” she told them. “This time I want an office job.” So one afternoon they had walked to Rumford’s, where their mother asked a lady with squiggly hair if she could use a machine to learn to type. “Do what?” the lady said. Their mother had explained that she wanted to sit at a desk for just exactly twelve days and teach herself out of a book called Touch Typing in Twelve Easy Lessons, and she promised that all three children would be as quiet as mice. “Hon,” the lady said, “this is not a secretarial college.”
“Well, don’t you think I know that?” their mother cried. “But how do you suppose I could manage a real secretarial college? How do you expect me to pay? Who would watch my children?”
“Hon—”
“This is all I’ve got to go on, don’t you understand? I need to find a job of some kind, I need to find employment!”
Then the typewriter man came over. “What seems to be the trouble here?” he asked, and the lady looked relieved and said, “This is Mr. Rumford, the owner. He can tell you,” and she walked away. Mr. Rumford had been much more sympathetic. Not that he let their mother carry out her plan (he was really just the owner’s son, he said, and his father would have a conniption), but he admired her spunk and he suggested that she rent, instead. She could rent from this very store and practice in the privacy of her home. Their mother said, “Oh! I never thought of that,” and she took a Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose.
“Know what I recommend?” the man had said. “An electric. Look at those pretty fingernails! You don’t want to ruin your nails, now, do you?”
Their mother tried to smile.
“A manual, you have to pound down hard,” he told her. “That’s why you see those professional stenographers with their squared-off, ugly, short fingernails.”
Agatha hid her own hands behind her back. Her mother looked up into the typewriter man’s eyes. She said, “But wouldn’t an electric be more expensive?”
“Pennies a day! Just pennies.”
“And heavy, too. I mean an electric must weigh a lot more. And I’m not … I’m all on my own. I don’t have anyone to carry things.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll bring it by myself, after work.”
“You would do that?”
“It’ll be my pleasure,” he told her. “Let me show you the machine I have in mind.” And off he went, leading them through the rows of desks.
The machine he had in mind was a blue metal hulk with a cord so thick that when he brought it that evening, the only outlet they could plug it into was the one behind the refrigerator. He had to move the refrigerator and pull the kitchen table over so the cord would reach, and then he was red in the face and their mother made him sit down and have a beer. While he was drinking his beer, he showed her the special features—the electric return and the keys that would repeat. “This is just so nice of you,” their mother told him. “I know Mrs. Rumford must be having to keep your supper warm.”
“I’d be mighty surprised if she was,” he said. “We’re in the process of a divorce.” Then he placed her fingers in the right position on the keys—what he called “home base”—and taught her to type a sad mad lad, which made her laugh. When he left he gave her his card so she could call him with any questions.
That night she whizzed through the first five lessons in a single sitting. Agatha woke in the dark to hear the clacking of the keys, and when she came out to the kitchen her mother said, “See how far I’ve gone! At this rate I’ll be an expert in no time.” Agatha went back to bed and slept better than she had in weeks.
The next morning the kitchen table was covered with sheets of typ
ing—pat rat sat hat and pop had a top. Agatha poured Coca-Cola into a glass and added a spoonful of instant coffee (her mother’s favorite way to get herself going) and carried it into the bedroom. Her mother was asleep in her slip with an arm hanging over the edge of the mattress, so it looked like one of those times when she would have trouble waking. But she opened her eyes at just the clink of the glass on the nightstand and she thanked Agatha very clearly. She spent that morning on Lessons Six through Eleven while Agatha, who this once was allowed to skip school, watched over Thomas and Daphne. Lesson Twelve was not important, their mother decided. That was only numerals, which she could go on doing hunt-and-peck unless she had to work for an accountant or something, which she certainly wasn’t planning on. She was planning to work for one of the downtown law firms, something at a nice front desk with flowers in a vase, she said, where she would answer the phone in a la-de-da voice and type letters clickety-click while the clients sat in the waiting room waiting. She demonstrated how she would look—nose raised snootily in the air and fingers tripping smartly as if the keys were burning hot. She was still in her bathrobe but you could see she was going to be perfect.
Around lunchtime that day they walked to Cold Spring Lane and bought a newspaper. They used to have home delivery but now they couldn’t afford it. Once she was hired, their mother said, they’d have home delivery again and they would sit around the breakfast table reading their horoscopes before she went to her office. Agatha had a thought. She said, “But Mama, who’s going to stay with us?”
“We’ll work that out when we come to it,” her mother said, tipping the stroller up onto a curb.
“Work it out how?”
“We’ll manage, Agatha. All right?”
“You wouldn’t just leave us on our own, would you?”
“Have I ever, ever left you on your own?”
Agatha opened her mouth but then closed it. Thomas looked over at her. His eyes filled with tears.
“Stop it,” Agatha told him.
He stood in the middle of the sidewalk and his face crumpled up.
“What in the world?” their mother asked. She turned to stare at him.
“He’s just … feeling sad,” Agatha explained. She didn’t want to remind her about Danny.
At home, their mother had spread the paper across the coffee table and circled every secretarial ad—dozens of them. The problem, she said, was not finding a job but choosing which one. “If I’d known how easy this was I’d have done it years ago,” she said. Then during Daphne’s nap she took the paper off to the bedroom telephone. For a while her voice murmured: “Da-dah? Da-da-dah? Da-de-dah-da …” Finally a long quiet spell. Thomas and Agatha looked at each other. They were watching soap operas with the sound turned off. Thomas took his thumb out of his mouth and said, “Go see.”
So Agatha went to tap at the door. No answer. She turned the knob and peered through the crack. Her mother was sitting against the headboard with the telephone on her lap. She was staring into space.
“Mama?” Agatha said.
“Hmm?”
“Did you find a job?”
“Agatha, do you have to keep pestering me? Isn’t there any place in this house where I can be private?”
“Maybe there’ll be something tomorrow,” Agatha said.
“Well, even if there is,” her mother said, “I’ll lose out the minute I tell them the truth. These people just want you to lie. They practically beg you to lie. ‘I’ve got thirty years’ experience,’ they want me to say. Even though I’m not but twenty-five.”
“Should I bring you a Coke, Mama?”
“No, just let me get on with this. I’m going to try a couple more.”
Now what they heard from the living room was louder and firmer, though still no easier to make out. “Dah-da. Dah-da-da.” And when she came to stand in the doorway, she was smiling. “Well,” she said, “I’ve set up an interview.”
They could tell it was something they should hug her for.
That evening she practiced her typing—little rushes of clacks separated by pauses when she had to make capital letters. She let Agatha phone Passenger Pizza even though they couldn’t afford it. And the next morning she took them to stay at Grandma Bedloe’s while she went to her interview. Grandma Bedloe said, “Doesn’t Agatha have school today?” but their mother said, “Her head was hurting.” She gave Agatha one of her secret looks—not a wink but more of a twinkle, without a single muscle moving. Then off she went to the bus stop, wearing the rose-colored suit she had married Danny in. Grandma Bedloe said, “She is way overdressed.” This worried Thomas, you could tell. His thumb homed in to his mouth and he glanced at Agatha. But Agatha had seen how perky their mother looked spiking down the front steps with her hair flouncing over her shoulders, so she wasn’t concerned. Anyhow, of all people to talk! Grandma Bedloe in her slacks and a man’s plaid shirt, with the skin beneath her eyes grown so loose and droopy and pleated since Danny died.
When their mother came back, she was walking more slowly. “How’d it go, dear?” Grandma Bedloe asked.
“Fine,” their mother said.
“You got the job?”
“We’ll have to see.”
“When will they let you know?”
“It may be a while,” their mother said, and she didn’t seem to move her lips as she spoke.
She wouldn’t stay for lunch. She said she had to get Daphne home for her bottle. “This is why I think your Aunt Claudia’s so smart to breast-feed,” Grandma Bedloe told the children, and their mother spun around from settling Daphne in her stroller and said, “Well, I don’t breast-feed. All right? I never breast-fed a one of them and I don’t intend to start now!”
Grandma Bedloe said, “Why! Lucy? All I meant was—”
“Some people can let themselves get saggy and baggy but I don’t have that luxury. I can’t afford to take anything for granted in this life, I’ve learned. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that. You think I enjoy this? Watching my weight and painting my nails, never letting my guard down, always on the lookout for split ends?”
“Split ends?”
“Oh, forget it. Thanks for keeping the children,” their mother said, and she took hold of the stroller and pushed it through the door.
On the way home, she wouldn’t talk. Or she talked, but only to herself. “Snob!” she whispered once. She stalked behind the stroller awhile and then whispered, “Conceited!” Agatha thought at first she meant Grandma Bedloe (who had never acted like a snob that she knew of and was not a bit conceited). But then their mother said, “Just tell me what words per minute have to do with anything!” So Agatha knew it must be someone at the interview.
At home, their mother left Daphne in her stroller in the middle of the kitchen while she phoned the typewriter man. “You can come and fetch this machine of yours,” she started right in. “Pick it up and haul it back. I’ll be glad to see the last of it. What? This is Lucy Bedloe. You brought me a Smith-Corona day before yesterday.”
He must have said something. She paused. Unsmiling, she made a short laughing sound. “Oh, really. What a thing to say,” she said.
Another pause.
Another laugh, this time a real one.
“You surely know how to brighten up a person’s mood,” she said.
Then she sat down on a kitchen chair and told him about her awful morning, this woman in charge of hiring who’d acted SO uppity and hoity-toity … So anyhow, she said. Would he please come and get his machine? She should have realized she wasn’t the type for an office.
He came after work and he stayed for supper. She made him an omelet. She set two of the least bent candles in the center of the table. “This is delicious,” he said after his first mouthful.
She said, “Oh, no, really, you caught me without any groceries. You should see what I usually fix.”
What she usually fixed was Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, but Agatha knew she didn’t mean it as a lie. It was more
like a politeness. Trying to help her out, Thomas and Agatha kept their eyes on their plates and ate extra neatly.
He took the typewriter away with him when he left, but he told their mother not to feel discouraged. “Want to know what I think?” he asked. “I think someone’s going to jump at the chance to hire a gal like you. All you got to do is bide your time—that and keep your skills up. Sure you don’t want to hang onto this machine?”
“I can’t afford it,” she said.
“Tell you what: I’ll hold it for you. You liked this model, didn’t you? I’ll hold it in the showroom a while in case you change your mind.”
“Well, that’s very thoughtful,” she said.
So now she had her own machine at Rumford & Son’s, which they went regularly to visit. And at first she really did type on it. She sat down at the desk and showed the man she still remembered her pat rat sat hat. But then she started just talking about her typewriter. She asked how it was getting along without her and he said it looked mighty lonesome and she laughed and changed the subject. Today, for instance, she discussed the weather. She said how some people had all the luck, working in an air-conditioned building; how at home she slept with nothing to cool her off but a fan; how she had to slide out of her negligee halfway through every night on account of the heat. She scooted the stroller a few inches forward, a few inches backward, forward, backward, over and over, speaking in her slow, scrapy voice and every so often laughing when the typewriter man said something funny.
Thomas crawled under a desk and told Agatha it was his house. The typewriter on top was so little and cute that Agatha started punching the keys. She had to punch really hard because it wasn’t electric, and Thomas complained about the noise. He said, “This is my house. You go somewhere else.” Agatha pretended not to hear. She typed agatha dean 7 years old baltimore md usa. Thomas shouted, “Stop that racket on my roof!” and reared up and bumped his head. When their mother heard him crying she broke off her conversation and turned. “Oh, Thomas,” she said, “now what?” But the typewriter man didn’t seem cross. He said, “Why, what’s this? Two customers in need of my assistance,” and he helped Thomas out from under the desk. “Something I can show you, sir? Some question I can answer?”
