by Anne Tyler
But after everyone left again, Bee’s absence seemed almost a presence. Doug spent hours shut away in his room. Ian grew broody and distant. Daphne was working for a florist at the moment, and after she closed shop she would often just stay on downtown—grab a bite to eat and then maybe hit a few bars with some friends, go home with someone she hardly knew just to keep occupied. Who could have guessed that Bee would leave such a vacancy? Over the past few years she had seemed to be diminishing, fading into the background. It was Ian who’d appeared to be running things. Now Daphne saw that that wasn’t the case at all. Or maybe it was like those times you experience a physical ailment—stomach trouble, say, and you think, Why, I never realized before that the stomach is the center of the body, and then a headache and you think, No, wait, it’s the head that’s the center …
July was as dry as June, and the city started rationing water. You could sprinkle your lawn only between nine at night and nine in the morning. Ian said fine; he just wouldn’t sprinkle at all. It just wasn’t worth the effort, he said. The grass turned brittle, like paper held close to a candle flame. The hydrangeas wilted and drooped. When Davidson Roofers arrived one morning to hammer overhead, Daphne wondered why they bothered.
Late in August a gentle, pattering rain began one afternoon, and people ran out of their houses and flung open their arms and raised their faces to the sky. Daphne, walking home from the bus stop, thought she knew how plants must feel; her skin received each cool, sweet drop so gratefully. But the rain stopped short ten minutes later as if someone had turned a faucet off, and that was the end of that.
Then summer was over—the hardest summer in history, her grandfather said. (He meant because of Bee’s death, of course. He had probably not even noticed the drought.) But fall was not much wetter, or much more cheerful either.
October marked the longest Daphne had ever held a job—one entire year—and the florist gave her a raise. Her friends said now that she was making more money she ought to rent a place of her own. “You’re right,” she told them. “I’m going to start looking. I know I should. Any day I will.” No one could believe she still lived at home with her family.
That Thanksgiving was their first without Bee. It wasn’t a holiday Agatha usually returned for—she was an oncologist out in L.A., with a very busy practice-but this time she did, accompanied of course by Stuart. When Daphne came home from work Wednesday evening, she found Agatha washing carrots at the kitchen sink. They kissed, and Agatha said, “We’ve just got back from the grocery. There wasn’t a thing to eat in the fridge.”
“Well, no,” Daphne said, leaning against a counter. “We thought we’d have Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant.”
“That’s what Grandpa said.”
As usual, Agatha wore a tailored white blouse and a navy skirt. She must have a closetful; she dressed like a missionary. Her black hair curled at her jawline in the docile, unremarkable style of those generic women in grade-school textbooks, and her face was uniformly white, as if her skin were thicker than other people’s. Heavy, black-rimmed glasses framed her eyes. You could tell she thought prettiness was a waste of time. She could have been pretty—another woman with those looks would have been pretty—but she preferred not to be. Probably she disapproved of Daphne’s tinkling earrings and Indian gauze tunic; probably even her jeans, which Daphne did have to lie down to get into.
“You know what Grandma always told us,” Agatha said. “Only riffraff eat their holiday meals in restaurants.”
“Yes, but everything’s been so—”
Just then, Stuart came through the back door with a case of mineral water. “Hello, Daphne,” he said, setting the case on the counter. He shook her hand formally. Daphne said, “Well, hey there, Stuart,” and wondered all over again how her sister had happened to marry such an extremely handsome man. He was tall and muscular and tanned, with close-cut golden curls and eyes like chips of sky, and away from the hospital he wore the sort of casual, elegant clothes you see in ads for ski resorts. Maybe he was Agatha’s one self-indulgence, her single nod to the importance of appearance. Or maybe (more likely) she just hadn’t noticed. It was possible she was the only woman in all his life who hadn’t backed off in confusion at the sight of him, which would also explain why he had married her. Look at her now, for instance, grumpily stashing his bottles in the refrigerator. “Really, Stu,” she said, “you’d think we were staying till Christmas.”
“Well, someone will drink it,” he told her affably, and he went to hold open the door for Doug, who was hauling in a giant sack of cat food.
Ian arrived from work earlier than usual, and he hugged Agatha hard and pumped Stuart’s hand up and down. He was always so pleased to have everyone home. And after supper—mostly sprouts and cruciferous vegetables, Agatha’s doing—he announced he’d be skipping Prayer Meeting to meet Thomas’s train with them. Ian almost never skipped Prayer Meeting.
He was the one who drove, with his father up front next to him and Daphne in back between Agatha and Stuart, her right arm held stiffly apart from Stuart’s suede sleeve. (She could not take his looks for granted.) The dark streets slid past, dotted with events: two black men laughingly wrestling at an intersection, an old woman wheeling a shopping cart full of battered dolls. Daphne leaned forward to see everything more clearly, but the others were discussing Agatha’s new Saab. So far it was running fine, Agatha said, although the smell of the leather interior kept reminding her of adhesive tape. Agatha probably thought of Baltimore as just another city by now.
At Penn Station all the parking slots were filled, so Ian circled the block while the others went inside. “What’s happened to Ian?” Agatha murmured to Daphne as they walked across the lobby.
“Happened?” Daphne asked.
But then their grandfather caught up with them and said, “My, oh, my, I just never can get over what they’ve done to this place.” He always said that. He made them tip their heads back to study the skylight, so airily delicate and aqua blue above them, and that was what they were doing when Thomas discovered them. “Gawking at the skylight again,” he said in Daphne’s ear. She wheeled and said, “Thomas!” and kissed his cheek and passed him on to Agatha. Lately he had become so New Yorkish. He wore a short black overcoat that picked up the black of his hair and the olive in his skin, and he carried a natty little black leather overnight bag. But when he bypassed Stuart’s outstretched hand to give him a one-armed bear hug, Daphne could see he was still their old Thomas. He had this way of assuming that people would just naturally love him, and so of course they always did.
Now they had to crowd together in the car, and since Daphne was smallest she sat in front between Doug and Ian. As they drove up Charles Street, Thomas told them all about his new project. (He worked for a software company, inventing educational computer games.) None of them could get more than the gist of it, but Ian kept saying, “Mm. Mmhmm,” looking very tickled and impressed, and Stuart and Agatha asked intelligent-sounding questions. Doug, however, was silent, and when Daphne glanced up at him she found him staring straight ahead with an extra, glassy surface in front of his eyes. He was thinking about Bee, she knew right off. All of the children home again but Bee not there to enjoy them. She reached over and patted his hand. He averted his face and gazed out the side window, but his hand turned upward on his knee and grasped hers. His fingers felt satiny and crumpled, and extremely fragile.
It wasn’t till late that night, after Doug and Ian had gone to bed and the others were watching TV, that Agatha had a chance to ask her question again. “What’s happened to Ian?”
“Nothing’s happened,” Daphne said.
“And Grandpa! And this whole house!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Thomas, you know, don’t you?”
Thomas gave a light shrug—his favorite response to any serious question. He was seated on Agatha’s other side, flipping channels with the remote control. Stuart lounged on the floor wi
th his back against Agatha’s knees. It was after midnight and Daphne was getting sleepy, but she hated to miss out on anything. She said, “How about we all go to bed.”
“Bed? In California it’s barely nine o’clock,” Agatha said.
“Well, I’m ready to call it a day,” Stuart announced from the floor. “Don’t forget, we flew the red-eye.”
“I come home and find this place a shambles,” Agatha told Daphne. “The grass is stone dead, even the bushes look dead. The front-porch swing is hanging by one chain. The house is such a mess there’s no place to set down our bags, and the dishes haven’t been done for days and there’s nothing to eat in the fridge, nothing in the pantry, not even any cat food for the cat, and when I go up to our room both mattresses are stripped naked and all the sheets are in the hamper and when I take the sheets to the basement the washing machine doesn’t work. Grandpa told me it’s been broken all fall. I asked him, ‘Well, what have you done about it?’ and he said, ‘Oh, any time one of us goes out we try to remember to gather a little something for the laundromat,’ and then he said we’re eating our Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant. A restaurant! On St. Paul Street!”
“Well, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Daphne told her. “There’s been a drought, for one thing. I mean, the grass isn’t really our fault. And the swing is probably fine; it’s just that Ian needs to check the porch ceiling-boards that buckled in the floods.”
But she could hear how lame this was sounding—drought and floods both. And to tell the truth, she hadn’t realized about the mess. She looked around the living room (newspapers so outdated they’d turned yellow, dead flowers in a dusty vase, cat fur from the carpet clinging to Stuart’s corduroys) and she felt ashamed. A memory swam back to her of her most recent drop-in visit to the laundromat, during which she had spotted, on one of the folding tables, a hardened mass of Bedloe plaids that some stranger had removed from a washing machine and left to dry in a clump, possibly several days back.
“Also, Ian needs a haircut,” Agatha told her.
“He does? But I gave him a haircut,” Daphne said. (Ian hated barbershops.) “I gave him one just last—”
Oh, Lord, way last summer. All at once she saw him: the long, limp tendrils drooping over his collar, dull brown mixed with strands of gray, and the worn lines fanning out from his eyes.
“He looks like some eccentric, middle-aged … uncle,” Agatha said.
“He does not!” Daphne protested, so loudly that Stuart, slumped against Agatha’s knees, jolted upright and said, “Huh?” and Thomas raised the volume on the remote control.
“And Grandpa has food stains down his front,” Agatha said, “and you’ve got dirty fingernails.”
“Well, I do work in a florist shop,” Daphne told her. She darted a glance at her left hand, which rested on the arm of the couch.
“Is it Grandma?” Agatha asked. “But it can’t be, can it? I know we all miss her, but Ian’s been in charge of the house for ages, hasn’t he?”
“It’s true we miss her,” Daphne said, and just then she heard Bee calling her for supper on a long-ago summer evening. “Daaph-ne!”—the two notes floating across the twilight. Surreptitiously, she started cleaning her nails. “But we get along,” she said. “We’re fine! And no way is Ian middle-aged. He’s forty; that’s not so old! He’s even got this sort of girlfriend. Clara. Have you met Clara? No, I guess not. Woman at our church. She’s okay.”
“Is she coming for Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Who, Clara?” Daphne asked stupidly. As a matter of fact, she had never given the woman much thought. “Well, no, I don’t believe he invited her,” she said.
“How about you?”
“How about me?”
“Are you seeing anyone special?”
“Oh. No,” Daphne said, “I’m between boyfriends at the moment.”
“What happened to … was it Ron?”
“Rich,” Daphne said. “He was getting too serious. I think I’m more the one-night-stand type, if you want the honest truth.”
She didn’t know why she had this urge to shock, sometimes, when she was talking to Agatha. It wasn’t even that effective, for Agatha merely raised her eyebrows and made no comment.
The TV said, “Drop us a postcard stating—female deposits her eggs in—not thirty-nine ninety-five, not twenty-nine ninety-five, but—”
“Stuart does that too,” Agatha told Thomas. “Just hand him a remote control and he turns sort of frantic. It must be hormonal.”
“Say what?” Stuart asked, snapping his head up.
“Tomorrow afternoon we clean house,” Agatha told Daphne.
“All right,” Daphne said meekly.
“We’ll have a regular, normal, home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner; I bought an eighteen-pound turkey at the grocery store, and I’ve invited Mrs. Jordan and the foreigners. Then afterward we’ll start cleaning and sorting. Discarding. Do you know Grandma’s cosmetics are still on her bureau?”
“Maybe Grandpa likes them there,” Daphne suggested.
“Her arthritis pills are still in the medicine cabinet.”
“Maybe—”
“Past their expiration date!” Agatha said, as if that settled it.
Stuart said, “Aggie, can’t we go to bed now?”
“Now?” Agatha said. She checked her watch. “It’s not even nine-thirty.”
Daphne was so sleepy that the room was misting over, and Thomas had been yawning, but they all settled back obediently and fixed their eyes on the screen.
Thursday afternoon Agatha and Daphne washed all the dishes, even those in the cupboards, and Thomas vacuumed downstairs while Ian tried to reduce the general disorder. Stuart, who turned out to be fairly useless around the house, watched a football game with Doug.
Thursday night at ten they had turkey sandwiches (in California it was seven) and then Agatha dusted the downstairs furniture, Daphne scrubbed the woodwork, and Thomas polished the silver.
Friday Daphne went back to Floral Fantasy, and by the time she got home the upstairs had been vacuumed and dusted as well and the washing machine repaired and all the laundry done. Bee’s little walnut desk in the living room stood bare, its cubbyholes dark as missing teeth; and when Daphne opened the drawers below she found only the essentials: a box of envelopes, a photo album whose six filled pages covered the past twenty-two years, and the document transforming those two strangers, Thomas and Agatha “Dulsimore,” into Bedloes and tucking them into Ian’s safekeeping along with Daphne herself. This last was so familiar she could have quoted it verbatim, but she scanned it yet again and so did Agatha, breathing audibly over Daphne’s left shoulder. “What’s disturbing,” Agatha told her (not for the first time), “is we don’t know a thing about our genetic heritage. What if we’re prone to diabetes? Or epilepsy?”
Diplomatically, Daphne refrained from pointing out that she herself did know her heritage, at least on her father’s side. She shook her head and put the document back in the drawer.
Saturday Ian went to Good Works, but Daphne stayed home to continue with the cleaning. “Grandpa,” Agatha said, “today we’re sorting through Grandma’s belongings. Anything you want to keep, you’d better let us know now.”
“Oh,” he said, and then he said, “Well, her lipstick, maybe. Her perfume bottles.”
“Lipstick? Perfume?”
“I like her bureau to have things on top of it. I don’t want to see it all blank.”
“Couldn’t we just put a vase on top?”
“No, we couldn’t,” her grandfather said firmly.
“Well, all right.”
“And I’d like her robe left hanging in her closet.”
“All right, Grandpa.”
“But you might ship her jewelry to Claudia. Or at least what jewelry is real.”
“Well, you’re going to have to tell us which is which,” Agatha said, for of course they wouldn’t know real from Woolworth’s.
But later, when they h
ad packed all Bee’s limp, sad, powdery-smelling lingerie into the cartons Thomas brought up from the basement, they called for Doug to advise them on the jewelry and he didn’t answer. They’d assumed he was watching TV, but when they checked they found only Stuart, channel-hopping rapidly from golf to cartoons to cooking shows. Daphne said, “I bet he’s at the foreigners’.”
“Honestly,” Agatha said.
“The foreigners have a VCR now, did you know? They own every Rita Hayworth movie ever made.”
“Run get him, will you?” Agatha asked Thomas.
But Thomas said, “Maybe we should just let him stay there.”
“Well, what’ll we do about the jewelry?”
“Send Claudia the whole box, for heaven’s sake,” Daphne said. She told Thomas, “Wrap the whole box for mailing. You’ll find paper and string in the pantry.”
“But it isn’t just the jewelry,” Agatha said. “We need him here to answer other questions, too.”
“Agatha, will you drop it? He doesn’t want to be around for this.”
“Well. Sorry,” Agatha said stiffly.
They went back upstairs to their grandparents’ bedroom, and while Thomas bore the jewelry box off to the pantry Daphne and Agatha started on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. They had assumed this part would be easy—just sweaters, surely—but underneath lay stacks of moldering photo albums Daphne had never seen before. “Oh, those,” Agatha said. “They used to be downstairs in the desk.” She picked up a manila envelope and peered inside. Daphne, meanwhile, flipped through the topmost album and found rows of streaky, pale rectangles showing ghostlike human faces with no features but pinhead eyes. “Polaroid, in its earliest days,” Agatha explained.
“Well, darn,” Daphne said, because the captions were so alluring. Danny at Bethany Beach, 1963. Lucy with the Crains, 8/65. Her father, whom she knew only from a boringly boyish sports photo hanging in the living room. Her mother, who was nothing but the curve of a cheek above Daphne’s own newborn self on page one of her otherwise empty baby book.
