by Anne Tyler
She turned to the albums below. The pictures there were more distinct, but they documented less interesting times. Claudia, thinner and darker, married a plucked-looking Macy in a ridiculous white tuxedo. Doug stood at a lectern holding up a plaque. Claudia and Macy had a baby. Then they had another. People seemed to graduate a lot. Some wore long white robes and mortarboards, some wore black and carried their mortarboards under their arms, and one, labeled Cousin Louise, wore just a dress but you could see this was a graduation because of her ribboned diploma and her relatives pressing around. All those relatives attending all those ceremonies, sitting patiently through all those tedious speeches just so they could raise a cheer at the single mention of a loved one’s name. It wasn’t fair: by the time of Daphne’s own graduation, most of those people had vanished and Claudia and Macy had moved out of state. The family had congealed into smaller knots, wider apart, like soured milk. Their gatherings were puny, their cheers self-conscious and faint.
“Thomas and me with Mama,” Agatha said, thrusting a color snapshot at Daphne. “I wonder how that got here.”
She had pulled it from the manila envelope: a slick, bright square that Daphne took hold of reverently. So. Her mother. A very young woman with two small children, standing in front of a trailer. Probably she and Daphne looked alike—same shade of hair, same shape of face—but this woman seemed so long ago, Daphne couldn’t feel related to her. Her dress was too short, her makeup too harsh, her surroundings too tinny and garish. Had she ever cried herself to sleep at night? Laughed till her legs could no longer support her? Fallen into such a rage that she’d pounded the wall with her fists?
Daphne used to ask about her mother all the time, in the old days. She had plagued her sister and brother with questions. They never gave very satisfactory answers, though. Agatha said, “Her hair was black. Her eyes were, I don’t know, blue or gray or something.” Thomas said, “She was nice. You’d have liked her!” in his brightest tone of voice. But when Daphne asked, “What would I have liked about her?” he just said, “Oh, everything!” and looked away from her. He could be so exasperating, at times. At times she imagined him encased in something plastic, something slick and smooth as a raincoat.
Agatha held out her hand for the snapshot, and Daphne said, “I think I’ll keep it.”
“Keep it?”
“I’ll get it framed.”
“What for?” Agatha asked, surprised.
“I’m going to hang it in the living room with the other family pictures.”
“In the living room! Well, that’s just inappropriate,” Agatha told her.
Daphne had a special allergy to the word “inappropriate.” A number of teachers had used it during her schooldays. She said, “Don’t tell me what’s appropriate!”
“What are you so prickly about? I only meant—”
“She has just as much right to be on that wall as Great-Aunt Bess with her Hula Hoop.”
“Yes, of course she does,” Agatha said. “Fine! Go ahead.” And she passed Daphne the manila envelope. “Here’s all the rest of her things.”
Daphne shook the envelope into her lap. Certificates. Receipts. A date on one read 2/7/66. She didn’t see any more photos. “Put them away; don’t leave them lying around,” Agatha said, delving into the chest again. Her voice came back muffled. “We’re trying to get organized, remember.”
So Daphne took them across the hall to her room. It used to be Thomas’s room, and although Thomas had to sleep on the couch now he kept his belongings here during his visits. His toilet articles littered Daphne’s bureau and his leather bag spilled clothing onto her floor. Daphne suddenly felt overcome by objects. What did she need with these papers, anyhow? Except for the snapshot, they were worthless. And yet she couldn’t bear to throw them away.
When she returned to her grandparents’ bedroom, she found Agatha looking equally defeated. She was standing in front of Bee’s closet, facing a row of heart-breakingly familiar dresses and blouses. Crammed on the shelf overhead were suitcases and hatboxes and a sliding heap of linens—the linens moved last spring from beneath the leaky roof. It showed what this household had descended to that they’d never been moved back, except for those few items in regular use. “What are these?” Agatha asked, taking a pinch of a monogrammed guest towel.
“I guess we ought to carry them to the linen closet,” Daphne said.
But the linen closet, they discovered, had magically replenished itself. The emptied top shelf now held Doug’s shoe-polishing gear and someone’s greasy coveralls and the everyday towels not folded but hastily wadded. And the lower shelves, which hadn’t been sorted in years, made Agatha say, “Good grief.” She gave a listless tug to a crib sheet patterned with ducklings. (How long since they’d needed a crib sheet?) When they heard Thomas on the stairs, she called, “Tom, could you bring up more boxes from the basement?”
She pulled out half a pack of disposable diapers—the old-fashioned kind as stiff and crackly as those paper quilts that line chocolate boxes. From the depths of the closet she drew a baby-sized pillow and said, “Ick,” for a rank, moldy smell unfurled from it almost visibly. The leak must have traveled farther than they had suspected. “Throw it out,” she told Daphne. Daphne took it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it on top of the diapers. Next Agatha brought forth a bedpan with an inch of rusty water in the bottom—“That too,” she said—and a damp, cloth-covered box patterned with faded pink roses. “Is this Grandma’s?” she asked. “I don’t remember this.”
Both of them hovered over it hopefully as she set the box on the floor and lifted the lid, but it was only a sewing box, abandoned so long ago that a waterlogged packet of clothing labels inside bore Claudia’s maiden name. There were sodden cards of bias tape and ripply, stretched-out elastic; and underneath those, various rusty implements—scissors, a seam ripper, a leather punch—and tiny cardboard boxes falling apart with moisture. Clearly nothing here was of interest, so why did they insist on opening each box? Even Agatha, common-sense Agatha, pried off a disintegrating cardboard lid to stare down at a collection of shirt buttons. Everything swam in brown water. Everything had the dead brown stink of overcooked broccoli. It was amazing how thorough the rust was. It threaded the hooks and eyes, it stippled the needles and straight pins. It choked the revolving wheel of the leather punch and clogged each and every one of its hollow, cylindrical teeth.
Daphne thought of the dress form in the attic storeroom—Bee’s figure but with a waist, with a higher bosom. Once their grandma had been a happy woman, she supposed. Back before everything changed.
“Will these be enough?” Thomas asked, arriving with two cartons. But Agatha flapped a hand without looking. “Shall I pack these things on the floor?” he asked.
“Oh, don’t bother,” Agatha told him, and then she turned and wandered toward the stairs.
“Just leave them here?” he asked Daphne.
“Whatever,” Daphne said.
In fact they remained there the rest of the day, obstructing the hall till Daphne finally stuffed them back in the closet. She piled everything onto the bottom shelf, and she set the cardboard cartons inside and closed the door.
“I dreamed this high-school boy was proposing to me,” Agatha said at breakfast. “He told me to name a date. He said, ‘How about Wednesday? Monday is always busy and Tuesday is always rainy.’ I said, ‘Wait, I’m … wait,’ I said. ‘I think you ought to know that I’m quite a bit older than you.’ Then I woke up, and I laughed out loud. Did you hear me laughing, Stu? I mean, older was the least of it. I should have said, ‘Wait, there’s another thing, too! It so happens I’m already married.’ ”
“I dreamed I was going blind,” Thomas said. “Everyone said, ‘Oh, how awful, we’re so sorry for you.’ I said, ‘Sorry? Why? I’ve had twenty-six years of perfect vision!’ I really meant it, too. I sounded like one of those inspirational stories we used to read in Bible camp.”
“I dreamed I was seeing patients,�
� Stuart said. “They all had some kind of rash and I was trying to remember my dermatology. It didn’t seem to occur to me to tell them that wasn’t my field.”
Agatha said, “I’d never go into dermatology.”
They were having English muffins and juice—just the four of them, because it was ten-thirty and Doug and Ian had eaten breakfast hours ago. Doug was in the dining room laying out a game of solitaire, the soft flip-flip of his cards providing a kind of background rhythm. Ian was moving around the kitchen wiping off counters. When he passed near Daphne he smiled down at her and said, “What did you dream, Daphne?” Something about his crinkled eyes and the kindly attentiveness of his expression made her sad, but she smiled back and said, “Oh, nothing.”
“Dermatology’s not bad,” Stuart was saying. “At least dermatologists don’t have night call.”
“But it’s so superficial,” Agatha said.
“You should see Agatha with her patients,” Stuart told the others. “She’s amazing. She’ll say straight out to them, ‘What you have can’t be cured.’ I think they feel relieved to finally hear the truth.”
“I say, ‘What you have can’t be cured at this particular time,” Agatha corrected him. “There’s a difference.”
Daphne couldn’t imagine that either version would be as much of a relief as Stuart supposed.
“Speaking of time,” Ian said, draping his dishcloth over the faucet, “when exactly does your plane take off, Ag?”
“Somewhere around noon, I think. Why?”
“Well, I’m wondering about church. If I wanted to go to church I’d have to leave right now.”
“Go, then,” she told him.
“But if your flight’s at noon—”
“Go! Grandpa can drive us.”
Ian hesitated. Daphne knew what he was thinking. He was weighing Sunday services, which he never missed if he could help it, against the possibility of hurting Agatha’s feelings. And Agatha, with her chin raised defiantly and her glasses flashing an opaque white light, would most definitely have hurt feelings. Daphne knew that if Ian did not. Finally Ian said, “Well, if you’re sure …” and Agatha snapped, “Absolutely! Go.”
He didn’t seem to catch her tone. (Or he didn’t want to catch it.) He rounded the table to kiss her goodbye. “It’s been wonderful having you,” he said. She looked away from him. He shook Stuart’s hand. “Stuart, I hope you two will come again at Christmas.”
“We’ll try,” Stuart told him, rising. “Thanks for the hospitality.”
“You planning on church today, Daphne?”
“I thought I’d ride along to the airport,” Daphne said.
“Well, I’ll be off, then,”
In the dining room, they heard him speaking to Doug. “Guess I’ll let you do the airport run, Dad.”
“Oh, well,” Doug said. “Seems I’m losing here anyway.”
“And another thing,” Agatha told Daphne. (But what was the first thing? Daphne wondered.) “This business about you not driving is really dumb, Daph.”
“Driving?” Daphne asked.
“Here you are, twenty-two years old, and Grandpa has to drive us to the airport. As far as I know you’ve never even sat behind a steering wheel.”
“How did my driving get into this?”
“It’s a symptom of a whole lot of other problems, any fool can see that. Why are you still depending on people to chauffeur you around? Why have you never gone away to college? Why are you still living at home when everyone else has long since left?”
“Maybe I like living at home, so what’s the big deal?” Daphne asked. “This happens to be a perfectly nice place.”
“Nobody says it isn’t,” Agatha said, “but that’s not the issue. You’ve simply reached the stage where you should be on your own. Right, Stuart? Right, Thomas?”
Stuart developed an interest in brushing crumbs off his sweater. Thomas gave one of his shrugs and drank the last of his orange juice. Agatha sighed. “You know,” she told Daphne, “in many ways, living in a family is like taking a long, long trip with people you’re not very well acquainted with. At first they seem just fine, but after you’ve traveled awhile at close quarters they start grating on your nerves. Their most harmless habits make you want to scream—the way they overuse certain phrases or yawn out loud—and you just have to get away from them. You have to leave home.”
“Well, I guess I must not have traveled with them long enough, then,” Daphne told her.
“How can you say that? With Ian doddering about the house calling you his ‘Daffy-dill’ and spending every Saturday at Good Works—Good Works! Good God. I bet half those people don’t even want a bunch of holy-molies showing up to rake their leaves in front of all their neighbors. And marching off to services come rain or shine; never mind if his niece is here visiting and will have to go to the airport on her own—”
“He gets a lot out of those services,” Daphne said. “And Good Works too; it kind of … links you. He doesn’t have much else, Agatha.”
“Exactly,” Agatha told her. “Isn’t that my point? If not for Second Chance he’d have much more, believe me. That’s what religion does to you. It narrows you and confines you. When I think of how religion ruined our childhood! All those things we couldn’t do, the Sugar Rule and the Caffeine Rule. And that pathetic Bible camp, with poor pitiful Sister Audrey who finally ran off with a soldier if I’m not mistaken. And Brother Simon always telling us how God had saved him for something special when his apartment building burned down, never explaining what God had against those seven others He didn’t save. And the way we had to say grace in every crummy fast-food joint with everybody gawking—”
“It was a silent grace,” Daphne said. “It was the least little possible grace! He always tried to be private about it. And religion never ruined my childhood; it made me feel cared for. Or Thomas’s either. Thomas still attends church himself. Isn’t that so, Thomas? He belongs to a church in New York.”
Thomas said, “It’s getting on toward eleven, you two. Maybe we should be setting out for the airport.”
“Not to change the subject or anything,” Daphne told him.
He pretended he hadn’t heard. They all stood up, and he said, “Then driving back, you and Grandpa can drop me at the train station. I’ll just get my things together. You want me to put my sheets in the hamper, Daph?”
“Are you serious?” Daphne asked. “Those sheets are good for another month yet.”
Agatha rolled her eyes and said, “Charming.”
“You have no right to talk if you’re not here to do the laundry,” Daphne told her.
“Which reminds me,” Agatha said. She stopped short in the dining room, where their grandfather was collecting his cards. “About the linen closet and such—”
“Don’t give it a thought,” Daphne said. “Just go off scot-free to the other side of the continent.”
“No, but I was wondering. Isn’t there some kind of cleaning service that could sort this place out for us? Not just clean it but organize it, and I could pay.”
“There’s the Clutter Counselor,” Daphne said.
Stuart laughed. Agatha said, “The what?”
“Rita the Clutter Counselor. She lives with this guy I know, Nick Bascomb. Did you ever meet Nick? And she makes her living sorting other people’s households and putting them in order.”
“Hire her,” Agatha said.
“I don’t know how much she charges, though.”
“Hire her anyway. I’ll pay whatever it costs.”
“What?” their grandfather spoke up suddenly. “You’d let an outsider go through our closets?”
“It’s either that or marry Ian off quick to that Clara person,” Agatha told him.
“I’ll call Rita this evening,” Daphne said.
Rita diCarlo was close to six feet tall—a rangy, sauntering woman in her late twenties with long black hair so frizzy that the braid hanging down her back seemed not so much plaited as clo
tted. She’d been living with Nick Bascomb for a couple of years now, but Daphne hadn’t really got to know her till just last summer when a bunch of them went together to a rock concert at RFK Stadium. They’d had bleacher tickets that didn’t allow them on the field, where all the action was; but Rita, bold as brass, strode down to the field anyway. When an usher tried to stop her she held up her ticket stub and strode on. The usher considered a while and then spun around and called, “Hey! That wasn’t a field ticket!” By then, though, she was lost in the crowd. Daphne hadn’t seen much of her since, but she always remembered that incident—the dash and swagger of it. She thought Rita was entirely capable of yanking their house into shape.
On the phone Rita said she could fit the Bedloes into that coming week, so she dropped by Monday after work to “case the joint,” as she put it. Wearing a red-and-black lumber jacket, black jeans, and heavy leather riding boots, she ambled about throwing open cupboards and peering into drawers. She surveyed the basement impassively. She seemed unfazed by the smell in the linen closet. She did not once ask, as Daphne had feared, “What in hell has hit here?” She poked her head into Doug’s bedroom and, finding him seated empty-handed in his rocker, merely said, “Hmm,” and withdrew. This was tactful of her, of course, but Doug’s room had urgent need of her services; so Daphne said, “Maybe after Grandpa’s gone downstairs …”
“I got the general idea,” Rita told her.
“That’s where Grandma’s closet is and so—”
“Sure. Clothes and stuff. Hatboxes.”
“Right.”
“I got it.”
She climbed the wooden steps to the attic, which had a stuffy, cloistered feeling now that it was no longer in regular use. She bent to look into the storeroom under the eaves. When she plucked one of Bee’s letters from a cardboard carton, Daphne felt a pang. “I guess these … personal things you’ll leave to us,” she said, but Rita said, “Not if you want this done right.” Then she added, “Don’t worry, I don’t read your mail. Or only enough to classify it. Stuff like this, for instance: too recent to have historical interest, no postage stamps of value, and the return address is a woman’s so we know it’s not your grandparents’ love letters. I’d say ditch them.”
