The Amateur Marriage

by Unknown

  He lay wide-eyed on his back with Pauline’s arm flung across his chest and her hair tickling his shoulder. It was a long time since they had slept snuggled so close together.

  All these years, more years even than Lindy had been gone, Michael had spent wondering where they had made their mistake. Had they been too permissive? Too harsh? Neither one of them believed in physical punishment, but he could summon several shameful memories of gripping Lindy’s arm too tightly when she was small or setting her aside too firmly. And Pauline, with her fondness for saying whatever came into her head—oh, she could be a real tongue-lasher when a child made her angry. It was hard not to blame her too for those character flaws he saw in Lindy that seemed Pauline’s direct hand-me-downs: the explosiveness, the extreme emotions, the unpredictability. (Though hadn’t Pauline, more than once, pointed out that Lindy’s dark, glowering expression mirrored Michael’s exactly?) Or maybe their attention had been spread too thin among the three children. Or they’d showered Lindy with too much attention—focused on her too closely, expected more of her than they ought to. What was it? What? What? What?

  Drugs, though. Drugs were so . . . chemical, so physical. They were really not an interesting explanation. The mystery of Lindy Anton should arise from something more complex than a mere handful of pharmaceuticals.

  He fell back into sleep as if sleep were a defeat, as if he were flinging out his hands and saying, “Forget it. I give up.”

  WELCOME HOME LINDY, Sally’s placard read. And George was holding a cone of flowers such as street peddlers sold, and Karen—who should have been in class—was standing so close to the gate that the other arriving passengers had to swerve to avoid her. “Here we are! Over here!” she cried, jumping up and down. She wore a pink-and-orange psychedelic-print minidress, although her usual style was jeans and T-shirts, and her hair seemed to have mushroomed into a giant blond pouf that made her resemble those magazine ads where big photographs of heads were set on tiny pen-and-ink bodies. She must have been working on her appearance since crack of dawn. Michael felt an inner lurch of pity as he watched her search the approaching faces, while George craned his neck to gaze at the passengers beyond. Sally, having no inkling yet, continued to beam vivaciously, but the smiles of the other two were fading. “Where is she?” George asked his parents.

  Instead of answering, Pauline pushed Pagan forward. “Look who we’ve got!” she told them. “This is Pagan, Lindy’s little boy. Pagan, here’s your aunt Karen, your aunt Sally, your uncle George . . .”

  “Where’s Lindy?” Karen demanded.

  “Oh, she’ll be along! But right now she’s staying on a little while in San Francisco.”

  “Why? Is she all right? Did you get to see her?”

  “Well, not in person, exactly, but—”

  “Guess what I have, Pagan!” Sally said. “Ta-da!” and she pulled out a small brown felt kangaroo with a baby kangaroo in its pocket. “For you,” she told him.

  Pagan reached for it, his eyes raised somberly to Sally’s.

  “What do you say?” Pauline prompted.

  “Thank you,” he said distinctly, in his surprising bass growl.

  The women fell upon him with little cries, as if he’d performed a miracle.

  On the ride home—the men in front, the women in back, with Pagan perched on Pauline’s knees—Pauline began constructing the story she would tell from now on about Lindy. Michael watched it taking shape—a fascinating process. “San Francisco was gorgeous,” she began. “You-all will have to go there. And Lindy is in such a fine place! We spoke with the director. Of course we wish we could have brought her home right then and there but they have their procedures, you know, their proven methods for helping people sort out their stresses and tensions. They’re so far ahead of Baltimore in that way! So she’s going to join us later. But meanwhile, we have Pagan! Isn’t that lovely? Our boy Pagan! Don’t you think he resembles Lindy around the eyes?”

  Another time, Michael might have felt annoyed by this rouged and lipsticked version of the truth. Such concern for the looks of things, even within the family! But today, he was touched. It occurred to him that his wife had amazing reserves of strength, that women like Pauline were the ones who kept the planet spinning. Or at least, they made it appear to keep spinning, however it might in fact be wobbling on its axis.

  His respect for Pauline persisted over the next few weeks. He was awestruck by her devotion to Pagan and her unflagging energy, not just physical but emotional—her zest and warmth and optimism. Certainly Michael contributed; he read to Pagan every evening after supper or played a baby form of Softball in the backyard. Pauline, however, had the minute-by-minute tasks, and the sad truth was that they weren’t very rewarding. No fault of Pagan’s, of course. He had to have been shaken and confused by all these changes. But he was so unresponsive—so boneless, somehow, and lacking in joy. He had a habit of staring at people with an expression that seemed censorious, his eyes unblinking and peculiarly opaque. He spoke as little as possible and he almost never answered questions. Friendly overtures of any kind appeared to put him on guard; conspicuous shows of enthusiasm turned him as wary as some small animal. “Pagan-boy!” Pauline would cry, swooping in on him in the morning. (He slept in Lindy’s old room. Like an overly timid houseguest, he remained in bed until he was summoned, however long that might take.) “Pay-Pay! Pagan the Perfect! Come see what a yummy breakfast I fixed you!” Pagan merely stared. He was like blotting paper, Michael thought—just that dense and matte-surfaced, absorbing all that came his way and giving nothing back. But Pauline refused to be discouraged. “Egg-in-a-hole, Pay-Pay! And orange juice, freshly squeezed!”

  She was a good person, really. Well, and so was Michael himself, he believed. It was only that the two of them together weren’t good. Or weren’t . . . what was he trying to say, weren’t nice. They weren’t always very nice to each other; he couldn’t explain just why.

  Every evening at seven or so—four p.m. West Coast time—Michael phoned the retreat. He figured that was late enough so a patient’s progress for the day would have been evaluated. “May I speak to Becoming, please,” he would say in a forthright manner. The name had stopped sounding odd to him. Even Lindy’s new name rolled off his tongue without a hitch. “I’m inquiring about Serenity. This is her father.”

  The name “Serenity” had no significance for Pagan, Michael assumed. But something must have alerted him, because midway through Michael’s third phone call he found Pagan at his elbow, mutely attentive, not moving and almost not breathing. “She’s coming along, coming along,” Becoming was reporting. “She knows now you have her little boy; we told her.”

  “And what did she say about that?” Michael asked.

  “Oh, well, ‘say’; she’s not so very talkative yet. But we continue to have faith!”

  When Michael hung up, he told Pagan, “Doing okay, it seems. Be a little while yet.” His wording was deliberately ambiguous, in case Pagan had been standing there only by chance, but he could tell from the sudden droop in the child’s shoulders that he did know—that he’d been listening with all his heart, concentrating fiercely on the news from the other end of the line. What else did he know? How much was he aware of?

  The children’s old pediatrician, Dr. Amble, was still in practice, and after Pagan had been with them several weeks they took him in for a physical. The first thing they learned was that he might not ever have visited a doctor before, because at the start he was unsuspecting—mildly, distantly interested in the waiting room with its toys and puzzles and nursery-rhyme decor—and then outraged and incredulous during the exam. He fought silently to keep his clothes on, scrambled off the scales in horror, and flung away the stethoscope the instant it touched his chest. “Hmm,” Dr. Amble said thoughtfully. Then he told them that Pagan was most likely three years old. “He told us four,” Michael said. “Couldn’t he just be small for his age?” But Dr. Amble said no, he would pretty much stake his professional reputat
ion on three. This gave Michael a new perspective. Replaying Pagan’s “Four” in his mind, he now saw the child’s long pause and knitted brow as preparation for a leap into an inflated and more impressive age. He grinned. It was the first time he felt some hope for his grandson’s . . . oh, sense of self, he supposed.

  At the end of the exam, Dr. Amble had Michael come into his office while Pauline helped Pagan dress. “Well,” Dr. Amble said as he settled into his chair, “there’s lots we can only guess at, of course. I’d say it’s very possible he’s never been immunized. I’ll have my nurse see to that.” He picked up a ballpoint pen and then, looking down at his papers, said, “No birth date, no birthplace, no middle name . . . and we can’t be sure of his last name either, according to your wife.”

  “I’m fairly certain it’s Anton,” Michael said.

  He fought off the urge to remind Dr. Amble that none of this was bis doing, or Pauline’s. They themselves had taken their children in for checkups religiously, and arranged for every possible vaccination!

  Then Dr. Amble said, “One good thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He does relate, you notice. You saw how he clung to your wife when he was upset.”

  “Well, but . . . he doesn’t talk to us much. It’s been nearly a month now. He’s been awfully slow to get comfortable with us.”

  “That could be a good sign too. It proves he misses his mother, which means she must have behaved like a mother. Evidently they’d formed an attachment.”

  It was pathetic, how little it took to fill Michael with pride.

  “May I speak to Becoming, please.”

  “This is Becoming.”

  “It’s Michael Anton, calling about Serenity.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  Michael waited.

  “Well, Serenity is no longer with us,” Becoming said.

  Michael’s heart stopped. He said, “What?”

  “Last evening when we looked into her room we found she’d left.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She decided to turn her back on what we offer here, it seems.”

  “But . . . you mean, she walked out? You told me she wasn’t capable of making it down the front steps!”

  “Oh, she had been progressing, though. She was attending our meetings; she was talking about starting over with her boy. She was moving forward, all of us thought! Now this: a willful refusal to proceed with her rebirth. It happens, sometimes. We’re never sure just why.”

  Becoming’s voice was mournful and slightly deeper than usual, like a record spun too slowly. Michael, on the other hand, felt his spirits rising by the second. Lindy had been attending meetings! She’d been talking about her boy!

  Of course she had left. She was her normal self again, and she would be wanting her son back. She was coming home to Baltimore to claim him.

  He asked Pauline if she remembered how to get in touch with Destiny. She didn’t, but she reminded him that the number must be on one of those old telephone bills he always insisted on keeping. Yes, and now she knew why he insisted, he could have pointed out; but he was too busy plowing through the desk, digging up the bill, searching for the number. “You should be the one to call. You’ve had more dealings with her,” he told Pauline. “Ask if Lindy’s shown up at the rooming house. Tell her that if she has, she should stay on there until we can wire money for her ticket.”

  Pagan had gone to a baseball game with George and Sally, as luck would have it. He wasn’t around to witness the general upheaval—the desk drawer struck by a hurricane, Michael’s hair standing on end where he’d torn his fingers through it, Pauline so flustered she fumbled the dialing and had to begin again. And then it was all for nothing. Destiny told Pauline she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Lindy. Yeah, sure, she would pass on the message if Lindy happened by, and she’d telephone with any news, of course reversing the charges. But to be honest, she didn’t hold out much hope for a person who walked away from her own rebirth.

  Pauline went into sort of a low spell after she hung up. “Now look! We’re back to where we were before,” she said. “Our daughter’s out loose in the world and we have no idea where!”

  It was Michael who was the optimist, for once. “You know how young people are these days. Hitchhiking, catching rides with friends or finding rides on bulletin boards. She’s probably halfway here already! I give her till . . . when. Today’s Saturday. I bet she’s here by Monday. Maybe even sooner, but definitely by Monday.”

  When Pagan returned from the ball game, solemnly sporting an Orioles cap, he couldn’t have guessed that anything out of the ordinary had happened. Pauline was as chipper as ever. Michael was as calm, sustained by his clear, bright vision of Lindy heading steadily toward them. He saw her walking down the middle of a two-lane highway, looking at him directly, smiling. He was picturing her the wrong age, he knew, but he allowed himself that small gift: Lindy as a child, eight or nine years old. Her hair was caught up in two parenthesis-shaped ponytails above her ears. She wore shorts underneath her dress so that she could do cartwheels and handstands anywhere she liked. Her knees were scabby. She was his own funny, feisty, rough-and-tumble Lindy, and she was almost home now.

  For one brief period in the Antons’ lives, they had owned a dog. An overbred collie, this was, unimaginatively named Lassie—a flibbertigibbet, yappy and hysterical. Any time one of the children left the house, Lassie would race to the picture window and hop up on her hind legs to nudge aside the curtain with her needle of a nose. Hour after hour she kept a frantic vigil, whimpering and quivering and all but wringing her paws.

  That was how Michael felt, those days they were waiting for Lindy. He kept gravitating toward the front of the house, gazing out at the street. Every car, every approaching pedestrian caused something to leap inside him. By Sunday he was stationed at the window almost nonstop, although he tried to hide it from Pauline. (Pauline seemed to have her own expectations. With her, it was the phone, and she made obvious attempts to keep the line free at all times.) George and Sally came for Sunday supper but Michael repeatedly left the table, wandering almost against his will in the direction of the living room. Several times that night he got up and checked again, pretending to head toward the bathroom. And Monday he stayed home from work. He said it was time he gave his manager more responsibility. But then, because his manager had not proved all that competent during the San Francisco trip, Michael kept phoning the store to see how things were going, and Pauline kept saying, “Good grief, Michael, will you please get off the line?” Pagan had been invited to play with Wanda Lipska’s grandson, but when Pauline asked Michael to drive him there, Michael said he’d better not; it might turn out that he was needed at the store. Pauline said, “Oh, for—!” and left in a huff, irately jangling her keys. Michael spent the whole time she was gone standing at the picture window. Not one person walked by. No traffic passed but delivery vans, till Pauline’s car pulled into the driveway again and Michael dropped the curtain.

  Tuesday he didn’t work either. He said he had a scratchy throat.

  Wednesday he went down to the store at his usual hour.

  They didn’t speak about it. There was no particular moment when one of them turned to the other and said, “I guess she isn’t coming after all.” They just grew quieter and more subdued.

  And Pagan? For a while, any time Michael made a phone call he would find Pagan magically stationed beside him. But that stopped, by and by. Pagan started going to the swimming pool. He made friends with the little girl two houses down. Pauline enrolled him in day camp. His room became a tumult of train tracks and picture books, Matchbox cars, front-end loaders, the fire engine long since freed from its box, the brown felt kangaroo with her baby, Cracker Jack prizes, crumbled pretzels, plastic dinosaurs, and random arms and eyeballs from a Mr. Potato Head.

  Michael had imagined that someday, when things had settled down some, Pagan would tell them a little bit about his life with Lindy. Bits and
pieces would emerge, filtered of course through a child’s capricious memory but still revealing, still instructive. That never happened, though. Instead, Pagan’s past seemed to fall away behind him, and there came a moment when Michael realized that they would never know any more about it than they knew now. It had dissolved, as untraceable as Lindy herself. And Pagan was here to stay.

  Driving him to day camp one morning, Michael lost patience when it turned out that for the second time that week, Pagan had left his blanket at home and wanted to go back for it. “Maybe you could do without it, just this once,” Michael said, and Pagan said, “But I need it, Grandpa. I have to have it.” So Michael slammed on the brakes and swerved into someone’s driveway, and just as he was reversing he had a sudden recollection of a book he used to read to his daughters. Heidi, it was called. Heidi was a little girl who was sent to live with her grandfather high in the Alps. As near as he could remember, the whole focus had been on Heidi’s adjustment to her new surroundings. Lots of goat milk and fresh air, new roses in her cheeks . . . But what occurred to him now was, How about the grandfather? Did anyone ask what the grandfather felt, adjusting to life with a child again?

  Now the old man’s grace seemed heroic, and Michael was filled with a mixture of admiration and envy.

  On Labor Day they gave their traditional barbecue. It had become just a family event, over the past few years, but even so the guest list was a long one. Karen would be there, having finished with her summer job in Ocean City, and George and Sally, of course, and Pauline’s father and her sisters and brothers-in-law, as well as those of their children who still lived in the area. Pauline had Michael set out the extra lawn chairs from the garage. Then she went into one of her preparty frenzies. She started worrying that they wouldn’t have enough food, and so she fixed a second batch of coleslaw and she telephoned George and asked him to bring more ground beef when he came, and minutes later she phoned him again and added hamburger buns. “I don’t know why we go on doing this,” she told Michael. “It’s not as if we enjoy it. I’m a frazzle!” And her face did have a strained, lined, wired look to it.