by Anne Tyler
She sighed and resettled her pillow. “All right, have it your way,” she said. “Once upon a time Hansel and Gretel were taking a walk—”
“That’s not how it starts!”
“Who’s telling this: you or me?”
“First there’s their parents! And dropping breadcrumbs on the path! And the birds eat all the crumbs and Hansel and Gretel get lost!”
“Keep your voice down!” Agatha hissed.
Daphne slept on, though. And in the living room their mother’s footsteps continued. Pace, pace. Swish of kimono. Pace, pace.
The night after Danny’s funeral, she had paced till morning. (Back then she didn’t have her pills yet.) The next day when Agatha got up she found the ashtray heaped with nasty-smelling butts and her mother asleep on the couch. Danny’s picture stood on the coffee table nearby—the one she usually kept on her bureau. He was laughing under a beach umbrella. His eyes were dark and curly and full of kindness.
Agatha never thought about Danny anymore.
“I have to pee,” Thomas whispered.
“What, again?”
He slid out of bed and hitched up his pajama bottoms. “It was too much grapefruit juice,” he said.
Agatha leaned against her pillow and folded her arms and watched him go. The cigarette smoke from the living room made her nose feel crinkly inside. Wasn’t it strange how dead butts smelled so dirty, but lighted cigarettes smelled exciting and promising.
Something nagged at her mind, a bothersome thought she couldn’t quite get hold of. Then she noticed what she was hearing: the flushing of the toilet. Oh, no. She threw back her covers and started out of bed.
Too late, though. Thomas shrieked, “Mama! Mama!” and their mother cried, “Thomas?” Her bare feet came rushing down the hall. Her kimono made a crackling sound like fire.
Agatha decided to stay where she was.
“Oh, my God,” her mother said. “Oh, my Lord in heaven.”
She must be standing in the bathroom doorway. Her voice echoed off the tiles.
“What did you put down that toilet?” she asked.
“Nothing! I promise! I just flushed and the water poured everywhere!”
“Oh, my Lord above.”
Agatha wondered if the toilet was still running. She couldn’t hear it. She imagined the house flooding silently with the murky yellow water from Daphne’s diaper.
“Just go, will you?” their mother said. “Go back to bed and stay there. And don’t you dare use this toilet again till I can get hold of a plumber, hear?”
The word “plumber” sounded so knowledgeable. Yes, of course: there was a regular, normal person to take charge of this situation, and that meant it must happen to other people too. Agatha pulled her covers up. She watched Thomas enter the room and trudge to his own bed. He walked like an old man, huddled together across the back of his neck. He lay down and reached for Dulcimer and hugged her to his chest.
It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Maybe he had guessed the toilet was Agatha’s fault.
She said, “Thomas?”
No answer.
“Thomas, is the water still spilling over?”
“Doe,” he said, and the stopped-up sound of his voice told her he was crying.
“You want to come sleep in my bed?”
“Doe.”
In the hall she heard their mother’s bare feet heading toward her bedroom, and then a pause and then hard shoes clopping out again—or maybe boots. Something big and heavy. Clop-clop toward the kitchen, clop-clop back down the hall. The swabbing of a mop across the bathroom floor. Well, so. It would all be taken care of.
Agatha relaxed and let her eyes fall shut. She might even have slept a few minutes. She saw sleep-pictures floating behind her lids—a black cat hissing and then Ian rattling his dice and all at once flinging them into her face and causing her to start. Her eyes flew open. The lights were still on, and the radio was playing a Beatles song. Ice cubes clinked in a glass. The cloppy footsteps came down the hall, and there was her mother outlined in the doorway. From the ankles up she was thin and fragile, but on her feet she wore two huge shoes from Danny’s closet. She came over to Agatha’s bed, shuffling slightly so the shoes wouldn’t fall off. “Are you awake?” she whispered.
Agatha said, “Yes.”
She realized that Thomas must not be. His breathing had grown very slow.
Her mother sat on the edge of the bed. In one hand she held a glass of Coke and in the other her brown plastic pill bottle, uncapped. Probably that was what had rattled in the dream; not Ian’s dice after all. She tipped the bottle to her mouth and swallowed a pill and then took a sip of Coke. She said, “Do you believe this? Do you believe a person would just have to fend for herself in this world?”
“Won’t the plumber come help?” Agatha asked.
“Everything is resting on my shoulders.”
“Maybe Grandma Bedloe knows a plumber.”
“It’s Howard Belling all over again,” her mother said, which was confusing because, for a second, Agatha thought she meant that the plumber was Howard Belling. “It’s the same old story. Unattached, they tell you. Separated, they tell you—or soon about to be. And then one fine morning they’re all lovey-dovey with their wives again. How come other people manage to have things so permanent? Is it something I’m doing wrong?”
“No, Mama, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Agatha said.
Her mother tipped another pill into her mouth and took another swallow of Coke. The ice cubes sounded like wind chimes. She raised one foot, her ankle just a stem above the clumsy shoe. Agatha thought of “Clementine.” Herring boxes without topses, sandals were for …
“No wonder men aren’t afraid of things!” her mother said. “Would you be afraid, if you got to wear gigantic shoes like these?”
Yes, even then she would be, Agatha thought. But she didn’t want to say so.
Her mother bent to kiss her good night, brushing her face with the soft weight of her hair, and then she rose and left. Her shoes clopped more and more faintly and her ice cubes tinkled more distantly. Agatha closed her eyes again.
She tried to ride away on the beat of rhymed words—herring boxes without topses and Johnny over the ocean, Johnny over the sea, Johnny broke a milk bottle, blamed it on me.
Nibble, nibble, like a mouse, she thought. Who is nibbling at my house?
She kept repeating it, concentrating. Nibble, nibble … She fixed all her thoughts upon it. Like a mouse … But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t push back the picture that kept forming behind her lids. Hansel and Gretel were wandering through the woods alone and lost, holding hands, looking all around them. The trees loomed so tall overhead that you couldn’t see their tops, and Hansel and Gretel were two tiny specks beneath the great dark ceiling of the forest.
3
The Man Who Forgot How to Fly
In his ninth-grade biology class, Ian had watched through a microscope while an amoeba shaped like a splash approached a dot of food and gradually surrounded it. Then it had moved on, wider now and blunter, distorted to accommodate the dot of food within.
As Ian accommodated, over and over, absorbing the fact of Danny’s death.
He would see it looming in his path—something dark and stony that got in the way of every happy moment. He’d be splitting a pizza with Pig and Andrew or listening to records with Cicely and all at once it would rise up in front of him: Danny is dead. He died. Died.
And then a thought that was even worse: He died on purpose. He killed himself.
And finally the most horrible thought of all: Because of what I told him.
He learned to deal with these thoughts in order, first things first. All right, he’s dead. I will never see him again. He’s in Pleasant Memory Cemetery underneath a lilac bush. He won’t be helping me with my fast ball. He hasn’t heard I got accepted at Sumner College. Trees that were bare when he last saw them have bloomed and leafed without him.
I
t felt like swallowing, to take in such a hard set of truths all at one time.
And then he would tackle the next thought. But that was more of a struggle. Maybe it was an accident, he always argued.
He smashes headlong into a wall by ACCIDENT? A wall he knew perfectly well was there, a wall that’s stood at the end of that street since before he was born?
Well, he’d been drinking.
He wasn’t drunk, though.
Yes, but, you know how it is …
Face it. He really did kill himself.
And then finally the last thought.
No, never the last thought.
Sometimes he tried to believe that everyone on earth walked around with at least one unbearable guilty secret hidden away inside. Maybe it was part of growing up. Maybe if he went and confessed to his mother she would say, “Why, sweetheart! Is that all that’s bothering you? Listen, every last one of us has caused somebody’s suicide.”
Well, no.
But if he told her anyway, and let her get as angry as she liked. If he said, “Mom, you decide what to do with me. Kick me out of the house, if you want. Or disown me. Or call the police.”
In fact, he wished she would call the police. He wished it were something he could go to prison for.
But if he told his mother she would learn it was a suicide, and everyone assumed it was an accident. Driving under the influence. Too much stag party. That was the trouble with confessing: it would make him feel better, all right, but it would make the others feel worse. And if his mother felt any worse than she did already, he thought it would kill her. His father too, probably. This whole summer, all his father had done was sit in his recliner chair.
Once his mother asked, “Ian, you don’t suppose Danny was depressed or anything, do you?”
“Depressed?”
“Oh, but what am I saying? He had a new baby! And a lovely new wife, and a whole new ready-made family!”
“Right,” Ian said.
“Of course, there could have been little problems. Some minor snag at work, maybe, or a rocky patch in his marriage. But nothing out of the ordinary, don’t you agree?”
“Well, sure,” Ian told her.
Was that all it had been? A rocky patch? Had Ian overreacted?
He saw how young he was, how inexperienced, what a shallow, ignorant boy he was. He really had no idea what would be considered out of the ordinary in a marriage.
On Sundays when the family gathered, he sent Lucy sidelong glances. He noticed she was growing steadily paler, like one of his father’s old Polaroid photos. He wanted to believe Danny’s death hadn’t touched her, but there she sat with something still and stricken in her face. Her children quarreled shrilly with Claudia’s children, but Lucy just sat straight-backed, not appearing to hear, and smoothed her skirt over and over across her lap.
Privately Bee told the others, “I wish she had someone to go to. Relatives, I mean. Of course we’d miss her but … if she had someone to tend the children so she could get a job, for instance! I know I ought to offer—”
Doug said, “Don’t even consider it.”
“Well, I’m their grandma! Or one of them’s grandma. But lately I’ve been so tired and my knees are acting up and I don’t see how I could handle it. I know I ought to, though.”
“Don’t give it a moment’s consideration.”
Did Lucy ever think, If only I hadn’t gone out with Dot that night? Did she think, If only Dot’s car hadn’t broken down?
For it was Dot she’d gone out with. And the car had broken down, someplace on Ritchie Highway. That much emerged at the funeral, which Dot had attended all weepy and disbelieving.
Did Lucy ever think, If only I had been a faithful wife?
No, probably not, for Ian couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was the one she blamed. (At the very least, he’d made Danny drive him home that night.) He was almost positive that she slid her eyes reproachfully in his direction as she smoothed her skirt across her lap. But Ian looked elsewhere. He made a point of looking elsewhere.
Only Cicely knew the whole story. He had told her after the first time they ever made love. Lying next to her in her bed (her parents had gone to a Memorial Day picnic, taking her little brother with them), he had thought, Danny will never know I’ve finally slept with a girl. His eyes had blurred with tears and he had turned abruptly and pressed his hot, wet face into Cicely’s neck. “I’m the one who caused Danny’s accident,” he blurted out. But the thing was, she wouldn’t accept it. It was like some physical object that she kept batting away. “Oh, no,” she kept saying. “No, that’s silly. You didn’t do anything. Lucy didn’t do anything. Lucy was a perfect wife. Danny knew you didn’t mean it.”
He should have said, “Listen. You have to believe this.” But her skin was so soft, and her neck smelled of baby powder, and instead of speaking he had started making love again. He had felt ashamed even then at how easily he was diverted.
Or here was something more shameful than that: In the emergency room that awful night, when the doctors said there was no hope, Ian had thought, At least now Cicely can’t stay mad at me for missing our dinner date.
Despicable. Despicable. He ground his teeth together any time he recalled it.
That summer he worked again for Sid ’n’ Ed’s A-l Movers. Lou had been fired for bleeding all over some lady’s sofa after he sat on his own whiskey flask; but LeDon was still there, along with a new man named Brewster, a rough-and-tough, prune-colored type who didn’t have two words to say from one day to the next. That was fine with Ian. He felt grateful just for someplace to escape to, some hard labor to throw himself into.
One move he helped with was obviously upward, from a tiny house in Govans to a much nicer one in Cedarcroft. Workers were swarming around the new place, patching the roof and resodding the lawn and measuring for window screens. In the kitchen he found a man installing wooden cabinets, and he stood watching as one was fitted precisely into place. The man plucked nails out of nowhere. (Maybe he had a mouthful, like Bee with her sewing pins. His back was turned so Ian couldn’t tell.) He hammered them in with quick rat-a-tats. And he didn’t act the least self-conscious, not even when Ian said, “Looks good.” In fact, he didn’t bother answering. Or maybe he hadn’t heard. Ian said, loudly, “Nice piece of work.”
Then he understood that the man was deaf. It was something about his head—the way he held it so steady, not troubling to keep alert for any sounds. Ian stepped forward and the man glanced over at him. He had a square-jawed, deeply lined face and a bristly gray crew-cut. “Looks good,” Ian repeated, and the man nodded briefly and returned to his hammering.
Ian felt a twist of envy. It wasn’t just the work he envied, although that was part of it—the all-consuming task that left no room for extraneous thoughts. It was the notion of a sealed-off world. A world where no one traded speech, and where even dreams, he supposed, were soundless.
He dreamed Danny stood in the doorway jingling a pocketful of change. “I nearly forgot,” he told Ian. “I owe you.”
Ian caught his breath. He said, “Owe me?”
“I never paid you for baby-sitting that evening. What was it—three dollars? Five?”
Ian said, “No, please,” and backed away, holding up his palms. He woke to hear his own voice saying, “No. No. Please.”
His parents drove him to school on a hot day in September. Cicely had already left for her own school, near Philadelphia, but since that was just an hour from Sumner College there had not been any big farewell scene. In fact, they were planning on meeting that weekend. And Andrew was close by too, at Temple. But none of Ian’s friends were attending Sumner, and he was glad. He liked the idea of making a new beginning. His mother said, “Oh, I hope you won’t be lonesome!” but Ian almost hoped he would be. He saw himself striding unaccompanied across the campus, a mysterious figure dressed all in black. “Who is that person?” girls would ask. Although he didn’t actually own anything black, come to
think of it. Still, he had his plans.
They dropped his belongings at the freshman dorm, where the only sign of his roommate was a khaki duffel bag and a canvas butterfly chair printed to resemble a gigantic hand. (At least Ian assumed the chair was his roommate’s. All the other furniture was blond oak.) Then they walked over to the Parents’ Reception. Ian was in favor of skipping the reception and so was his father, but his mother insisted.
At the college president’s house they were given three paper cups of 7-Up with orange sherbet floating foamily on top, and they stood in a clump by a blond oak table trying to make conversation with each other. “Quite a crowd,” his father said, and his mother said, “Yes, isn’t it!” Ian started eating spice cookies from a plate on the table. He ate one after the other, frowning and chewing intently as if he could have made many interesting comments if only his mouth weren’t full. “Are these all parents of freshmen, do you suppose?” his father asked. “Well, maybe some are transfers’ parents,” his mother said.
She stood among these ruffly people in her ordinary navy dress, and her shoes were plain flat pumps because of her knees. Without high heels she seemed downtrodden, Ian noticed, like somebody’s maid. And his father’s suit was rucked up around his calves with static cling or something. He had the crazy appearance of a formally attired man standing shin-deep in ocean breakers. Ian swallowed a sharp piece of cookie and felt it hurting all the way down his throat, all the way to his chest where it lodged and wouldn’t go away. He wanted to say, “Take me back to Baltimore! I’ll never complain again, I promise.” But instead he joined in the small talk, and he noticed that his voice had the same determined upward slant as his mother’s.
They left the reception without having spoken to another soul, and they walked together to the parking lot. The family car looked dusty and humble. Ian opened the door for his mother, but she was used to opening her own door and so she got in his way and he stepped on her foot. “Sorry,” he said. “Well …”She kissed his cheek and slid hurriedly inside, not looking at him. His father gave him a wave across the roof of the car. “Take care of yourself, son.”
