by Anne Tyler
She hooked the straw handles of her beach bag over her shoulder and stepped out of the booth. Karen was sitting on the bench as she’d been told, sucking her thumb, but Lindy teetered on the ledge that marked the entranceway, half in and half out, her thin shoulders bright with sunshine while her pipe-cleaner legs stayed in the dark. “Lindy Anton!” Pauline said. “Did I or did I not tell you to sit on the bench?”
Without answering, Lindy shot out onto the deck. Pauline and Karen followed, joined by George as they passed the entrance to the men’s side. Like Karen, George was a minder. He’d been waiting where he was supposed to, pudgy and fair-skinned and docile in his big seersucker trunks. He handed Pauline his towel and asked, “Can I go in now, Mama?” His best friend, Buddy Derby, was waging a water fight against the Drew boys on the other side of the pool.
Pauline said, “Go ahead,” and he took off. “But no running!” she called, too late. Lindy was already in, having cannonballed with a huge splash the instant she reached the deck.
Pauline took Karen’s hand—a silky little cream puff of a hand—and they walked over to the two women. “No husbands today?” she asked as she set down her beach bag.
“Brad’s got one of his migraines,” Mimi said on a long sigh, and Joan said, “Phil had to go in to work.”
“Oh, so did Michael,” Pauline told them.
Mimi Drew was a plump, peach-faced, ordinary woman, but Joan Derby could have been a model—tall and willowy, expressionless behind her cat’s-eye dark glasses, her strapless black maillot sleekly following the lines of her elegant figure. Pauline always felt shy around Joan. She sat on the very end of the recliner to Mimi’s left and gathered Karen between her knees, drawing confidence from Karen’s sturdy little torso. “He promised he’d start staying home on Saturdays,” she said, “but there always seems to be something that requires his going in.”
“Oh, yes,” Joan agreed. She had a voice that matched her looks—a drawling, amused, smoker’s voice. She tipped her face to the sun and said, “Tell Phil the lawn needs mowing and it’s, ‘What a shame, my secretary’s scheduled a very important meeting.’”
“Or cleaning the gutters!” Mimi chimed in. “Any time I bring up the gutters, you can be sure Brad’s head’ll start hurting.”
Michael didn’t know how to clean gutters. When they moved in, last fall, Bob Dean next door had pointed out that the neighborhood’s one full-size tree had managed to litter every gutter on Winding Way and he would be more than happy to lend the Antons his ladder. Till the mention of the ladder, Michael said later, he had assumed Bob was talking about the gutters alongside the street. “Couldn’t we just let the leaves be?” Michael had asked Pauline. “Isn’t that what roof gutters are for—to catch the leaves?”
Pauline had spread her hands helplessly. She was a city girl herself, after all.
“It’s bad enough I’ll have to mow the lawn every week!” Michael had said.
And on Sunday afternoons, when whole families came to the pool, Michael was the husband who didn’t know how to swim. The one whose trunks seemed floppier, whose chest seemed whiter and somehow more exposed-looking than the other men’s.
Karen wriggled away from Pauline and set off toward the pool-side. She wouldn’t so much as dip a toe in, Pauline knew, and anyhow the teenaged lifeguard was watching from his chair; so Pauline slid back in her recliner and closed her eyes. The sun was still gentle, not yet a blast of heat the way it would be later in the day. A breeze was softly brushing her skin, and the smell of warm chlorine made her feel limp and languid, as if she were actually floating in the water.
Mimi was debating what to cook for dinner. “. . . already had tuna fish once this week,” she was saying, “already had hamburgers, hot dogs . . .”
“I don’t mind the work of meals; I mind thinking up what to fix,” Joan said. “Sometimes I wish somebody would just hand me a week’s menus. ‘Here,’ they’d say. ‘It’s Monday; cook this.’”
“I really should use that roast that’s been sitting in the freezer,” Mimi went on. “I’m not even sure it’s any good anymore.”
“Like Alex,” Pauline said. She opened her eyes.
Mimi said, “Alex?”
Pauline felt her heart speeding up, as if she were about to do something dangerous. “Alex Barrow,” she said. “That man is never going to get his freezer emptied.”
“Alex Barrow talked to you about his freezer?”
“Why, yes,” Pauline said. Her voice seemed to have a flutter, a breathy faintness. She shaded her eyes and looked toward Karen to give herself some time. “He’s just so bewildered by kitchen things; you know how men are. Karen, honey, don’t get too close to the edge!”
Karen, who was standing a good foot back from the edge, turned and gazed at Pauline over the thumb she was sucking.
“How did he happen to mention this?” Joan asked.
“It just came up once when we were on the phone.”
“You were on the phone with Alex Barrow?”
“Well, sure!”
“Did you call him, or did he call you?”
“He called me, of course,” Pauline said.
But already she was sorry she had mentioned it. She sat up higher in her recliner and called, “Karen? Want your snack now?”
“What else do you talk about?” Joan asked.
“Oh, this and that. Nothing much.”
“I had no idea you two were so close!”
Pauline kept her eyes fixed on Karen.
“Has he told you why his wife left?” Mimi asked.
“Goodness, no!” Pauline said. She bent to rummage through her beach bag. “We never even touch on it. Poor man, it’s the last thing in the world he wants to talk about.”
She raised her head from the beach bag to find both women studying her. Mimi’s mouth was a small, pursed O. Joan had removed her dark glasses and was thoughtfully chewing an earpiece, her naked-looking eyes narrowed and assessing.
“I just think it’s so mysterious,” Mimi said finally. “They were such an attractive couple! Alex all dark and handsome and witty, Adelaide that silver-blond ice-goddess type. I never once saw them fighting. Did you?”
“They didn’t have any children, though,” Joan told her. “Maybe that was the problem.”
Pauline said, “Well, but—” Then she stopped herself. They’d be aghast if she told them she wasn’t so very sure that children really did improve a marriage.
“And then one night,” Mimi continued in a bemused, storytelling tone, “he comes home from work and she’s gone. He’s forced to ask the neighbors whether anyone has seen her. Oh! He must have felt so humiliated! That it was Laura Brown—a stranger, near about—who had to tell him his wife had decided to leave him.”
“And even Laura didn’t know why,” Joan put in. “She said Adelaide had just rung her doorbell and handed over her house keys, told her she was moving back to her parents’ place in Ohio.”
“So mysterious!” Mimi said.
They looked expectantly at Pauline. But Pauline just called, “Here you go, sweetie!” and held up a box of animal crackers.
By the time they left the pool the sun was directly overhead, beating down on their faces like a sheet of blazing metal, and the children were pink-skinned and sweaty and cross. Karen threw a stiff-legged, buckle-backed tantrum in her stroller. George didn’t see why he had to go home when Buddy Derby got to stay. “Well, maybe Buddy Derby doesn’t have a grandma at home waiting for her lunch,” Pauline snapped. Her bra straps were hurting her shoulders where they’d gotten sunburned. Her shoes—white ballerina flats, bought on sale the previous weekend—were scraping blisters on her heels. The thought of fixing lunch in a kitchen still littered with breakfast things, with dirty dishes and food-stained bibs and picture books and parts of toys, filled her with pure despair.
Abruptly, she took a left off Beverly onto Candlestick Lane.
Lindy said, “This is not the way to go home!”
; Pauline didn’t answer. (She was constantly surprised by Lindy’s disconcerting awareness. Neither of the other two gave her that sense she was under a microscope.)
“Why are we taking this street, Mama?”
“I thought you might like a change of scenery,” Pauline told her.
“I don’t care about the scenery! I want to go home. I want my lunch.”
“Well, I care. I’m tired of seeing the same old things day after day,” Pauline said. And then she started humming, pushing the stroller more slowly and gazing ostentatiously left and right to admire the view. Which was not, as a matter of fact, any different from Winding Way’s. Same low-slung ranch houses, lawns that ran into each other like one big golf green, slender saplings tied to stakes with strips of black rubber. George bobbed ahead at an uneven gait, avoiding all cracks in the sidewalk. Lindy lagged behind. Pauline could hear her scuffing the toes of her shoes as she’d been told a million times not to.
Toward the end of the second block, at the house before Alex Barrow’s house, Pauline came to a stop. She smiled at a woman who was weeding a bed of petunias. “Pretty flowers!” she called.
“Well, thanks.”
“Lovely day to be doing this!”
“Yes, it is nice.”
The woman pulled another weed but then paused and sat back on her heels, perhaps wondering if some further exchange was expected of her. “All in all, it’s been nice weather this whole summer,” she offered.
“Oh, it has, hasn’t it?”
Reluctantly, Pauline resumed walking. She wheeled the stroller inch by inch past Alex’s house—his brick-and-flagstone Plan C, the Maison Deluxe. “This place has a built-in grill on the patio out back,” she told Lindy. “Solid brick, with a cast-iron grate.”
Lindy peered at the house. “How do you know that?” she asked.
“We went there once for cocktails.”
“Can you roast marshmallows on a built-in grill?”
“Well, sure.”
“That’s what I would do, if I lived there.”
“A man named Alex Barrow lives there,” Pauline said.
Just to hear the words spoken aloud—the classy-sounding “Alex” and the easy, rolling “Barrow.”
She stopped again, for a moment. But the house remained closed and blank-faced. Nobody came outside. Finally, she moved on.
Her mother-in-law was watching for them from the living-room window. Pauline saw the fishnet curtain twitch as they approached. By the time they walked in the back door, though, she was sitting in the kitchen with both hands grasping the table edge. “Where have you all been?” she cried. “I was out of my mind with worry!”
“We went to the pool, remember?”
“You weren’t coming from the pool. You were coming from the other direction.”
“We took a different way home,” Pauline said. She set her beach bag in the one clear spot on the counter, and then she started stacking the breakfast dishes under Mother Anton’s radar eyes. The woman wouldn’t venture out the door since they’d moved here for fear of getting hopelessly lost, but she knew exactly what street Pauline should be on at any given moment, it seemed.
“First I thought, Oh, well, I guess they must be enjoying themselves too much to recall it’s my lunchtime. Then I thought, What if one of them’s drowned? What if something dreadful has happened?”
“We had a nice long visit at the pool with the Derbys and the Drews,” Pauline said. “Then we came home by Candlestick Lane so as to get a little exercise.”
“Swimming wasn’t exercise enough?”
Pauline set the stack of dishes in the sink. She dampened a sponge and returned to the table, stepping around Karen, who was crooning to her doll in the middle of the floor. “What kind of soup would you like?” she asked her mother-in-law.
“I don’t know that I can eat anymore. I’ve reached the stage where I got so hungry that I’ve gone beyond hunger. My stomach has that hollow, sickish feeling.”
Pauline finished wiping the table and then chose a tin of chicken noodle from the cupboard. She had cranked the can opener completely around the rim before Mother Anton said, “Maybe vegetable beef.”
“How about chicken noodle?”
“No, I think vegetable beef.”
Pauline briefly closed her eyes. Then she set the chicken noodle aside and went back to the cupboard.
Karen was singing “Rockabye Baby.” George and Lindy were quarreling over a box of alphabet magnets. “Lindy,” Pauline said, “would you get your crayons off of my stove? They’re going to melt into a puddle.”
“I bet you stopped at Joan Derby’s afterwards for a Coke,” Mother Anton said. “That is the world’s idlest woman, I swear. Nothing better to do than loll around the pool all morning and then go back to her house and gossip with her girlfriends.”
“No,” Pauline said, “Joan was still there when we left. The children and I came straight home.”
“Well, not straight home. You just admitted as much not half a minute ago.”
Sometimes, Pauline got a feeling like a terrible itch, like a kind of all-over vibration, and she thought that at any moment she might jump clear out of her skin.
“I used to like a boy from my church who had the nicest mother,” she told Michael.
Michael had returned so late that the lunch things were cleared away, and Karen and Mother Anton were napping, and the older children were playing on the swing set in the backyard. Pauline had to fix a whole separate meal, tuna salad hurriedly assembled and coleslaw left over from yesterday, and although she had eaten with the others she couldn’t stop herself from picking at the tuna as she sat keeping Michael company.
“Mrs. Dimity, her name was,” she said. “Whenever I came by their house, she would serve me tea in her best china cups. She gave me perfume for my birthday, a bottle of Amour Amour that my parents wouldn’t let me wear.”
“Who was this?” Michael asked. He had been reaching for the coleslaw, but he stopped now to look at her.
“I told you. Mrs. Dimity.”
“But whose mother, I meant.”
“This boy from my church named Rodney.”
“You never mentioned any boy from your church.”
“Didn’t I? His mother had seven sons and no daughters. She always said she wished I were her daughter.”
“You never breathed a word about a boy from your church! You claim you’ve told me about everybody you were ever involved with, but I never heard about a boy from your church until this instant.”
“Oh, well, involved,” Pauline said. “We were thirteen years old. You couldn’t really say we were involved.”
“Then why bring him up?” Michael asked.
“I didn’t bring him up; I brought up his mother. His mother was the one I loved. I just wish now I’d kept in touch with her.”
Michael looked at Pauline a moment longer, and then he shook his head and reached again for the coleslaw.
Rodney Dimity! He’d had freckles and a button nose, and he used to blush like a girl any time she spoke to him. She supposed that had been his charm: he was safe. Not too manly or bold. They had never even so much as held hands; just exchanged a few secretive smiles that turned Rodney’s face rosy red. Then she had outgrown him and moved on to other boys. Richard Brand, the first boy she kissed. Darryl Mace, who gave her his gigantic class ring to wear on a key chain beneath her blouse so that her parents wouldn’t notice. Her parents had thought Darryl was too old for her. (He was eighteen to her fifteen.) Pauline had not been allowed to go alone with a boy to the movies yet, even, but already that warm, heavy ring was nestled between her breasts. Oh, she’d long ago left Rodney Dimity behind!
In high school it seemed that each boy she fell for had been more challenging, more daunting than the one before. She would start out assuming that surely this new boy would never give her a glance, but then he did and they would date for a time until gradually she would grow restless, and somebody else would catch he
r eye, someone supposedly unattainable, but even so . . . Now when she reviewed her past it was like gazing down a long flight of stairs. Sweet, nebulous Rodney stood at the bottom, and Roy Cannon—senior class president, football captain, most-sought-after boy in her school—stood at the top, his neck so big and muscular that it was almost indistinguishable from his mighty shoulders. Roy had gone into his uncle’s used-car business after graduation, but by then Pauline’s enthusiasm was fading. She began to notice how loud his voice was; in a suit instead of a football uniform, his neck seemed grotesquely misshapen. When she broke up with him, though, she had no one new on the horizon—a first. (She was out of school herself by that time, and working in her father’s office, where meeting boys was more difficult.) She had no one to say goodbye to when the war began, and although some might say that was fortunate, she didn’t feel fortunate. In that first, feverish rush after Pearl Harbor she saw couples embracing everywhere she looked, boys standing outside recruitment offices with girls clinging proudly, bravely to their arms, but Pauline was all by herself.
Except for Michael.
Was that the whole explanation? That she had just wanted a boy of her own to send off to war?
But also he’d been so kind and so handsome, and she had seen something so fine in his face. Well, he was fine! He was a decent, sober, hardworking man, and she could have done a lot worse, as she often reminded herself.
Still, during their courtship she had begun to notice certain flaws in him. She noticed and yet did not notice; she put them out of her mind. When he didn’t get her jokes, when he sacrificed her feelings to his mother’s feelings, when he showed a lack of imagination, when he criticized one of her friends, she gave a kind of mental blink and persevered in her original vision of him: he was the romance she had been waiting for all her life. And didn’t everyone agree? They were such a perfect couple! So young, so attractive, so star-crossed, so tragic! He was leaving to fight for his country! She was staying home to wait for him! The radio was playing “I’ll Never Smile Again” and the war was raging in Europe and the world was trying to tear them apart, but in the end they would prevail!
