by Anne Tyler
“Well!” Pauline said brightly. “It was a real experience being back in the old neighborhood. I know you’re used to it, Michael, going to the store every day, but for me it’s always such a surprise! I think, Did we really live in this place? All the houses are so narrow and skinny!”
“You can buy a spool of thread there, though, and not have to get into a car to do it,” Mother Anton pointed out.
“Well, yes . . .”
“It’s a compromise,” Michael said.
George said, “Mama, me and Buddy—” but Pauline told him, “Hush, George, Daddy was speaking.”
Michael had to finish chewing his mouthful of chicken first. Then he had to swallow. Then he had to take a drink of water. The silence grew so heavy that it was almost visible.
George tried again. “Me and Buddy—”
“There are pluses and there are minuses,” Michael finally said. “We were aware of that when we decided to move out here. Yes, we do have more space now. So in terms of the children, in terms of their . . . oh, shall we say, recreational activities, I admit one could very well argue that . . .”
If he chose the wrong word just once, what difference would it make? If he failed to find the perfect, exactly right terminology, would life as they knew it come to an end?
“. . . and yet sometimes I can’t help feeling that the space is, why, almost a . . . drawback,” he went on. “I mean a, what do I mean, a . . . detriment. I feel that as a family, that is, as a cohesive family unit, if you follow my drift . . .”
Pauline cut into her wedge of lettuce, and her fork went chink! and the lettuce skittered off her plate. George and Lindy giggled. Michael stopped speaking and looked at her.
“Sorry,” Pauline told him.
There was a polka program on the radio that Mother Anton liked to listen to every Saturday night at 8:30. She sat on the living-room sofa with some mending in her lap—a pair of Karen’s footed pajamas, one of the soles coming loose—and nodded as Frankie Yankovic seesawed away on “Don’t Flirt with My Girl.” She didn’t nod in rhythm; it was a slow, stiff, stately nodding, as if she were merely agreeing with the announcer’s taste in music.
On the opposite end of the sofa, Michael sat reading the paper. It was the Saturday paper, slimmer than on other days, with small-print headlines that Pauline couldn’t read from where she sat. She was leafing through a Ladies’ Home Journal in the armchair across the room. All she could see of Michael were his fingers at either edge of the paper and his long, thin, gray-clad legs and heavy brown shoes.
“Maybe I should use a bigger needle for this work,” Mother Anton told Pauline. “These soles are double-layered. I’m having trouble poking through.”
“Shall I bring you one?” Pauline asked. Anyhow, her magazine was failing to hold her attention.
“No, wait a bit; let’s see how it goes.”
Behind his paper, Michael yawned aloud. Pauline could tell that the yawn was manufactured. He folded his paper, set it aside, and stretched extravagantly. “Aaah,” he said, yawning once again. “Hoo, I’m bushed. Guess it’s time for bed.”
Pauline turned a page. A woman in a frilled apron was holding up a pot roast on a platter.
“Pauline? You coming too?”
“Pretty soon,” she said.
She turned another page.
Michael stood up. He hesitated. She could sense his eyes on her. Saturday night was lovemaking night; that was how predictable he was. He liked his set ways of doing things. She pursed her lips and frowned intently at a recipe for Potatoes au Gratin.
“Well, then,” Michael said finally. “So, urn, sleep well, Mama.”
“You too, son,” his mother said.
But he went on standing there. Finally Pauline looked up, making a show of marking her place on the page with an index finger.
“Guess I’ll see you in a minute, huh?” he said.
“Okay.”
She lowered her eyes to her magazine. He turned and limped out of the room.
The radio was playing the “Good Night Polka” now, signaling the end of the program. It must be nine o’clock. Mother Anton bit off the tail of her thread and jabbed her needle into the sofa arm. “All finished?” Pauline asked her.
“Good as new,” Mother Anton said.
She laid Karen’s pajamas on the coffee table and gathered herself to rise, but Pauline suddenly felt an urgent need to keep her there. She grew breathless and trembly; she seemed to have all the symptoms of fear. (Why, though? She was only planning to take an innocent evening stroll.) “Well!” she said. “Thank you for doing that!” Her voice came out oddly thin, but Mother Anton didn’t appear to notice.
“You’re very welcome,” she said.
She stood up, first hitching forward on the sofa and then struggling to her feet, pushing off with both palms, but Pauline chattered on. “Let’s just hope Karen gets to wear them again, as fast as she’s been growing lately. By the time the weather’s cool enough, maybe they’ll be too small! Do you suppose?”
“Yes, she’s shooting up, all right,” Mother Anton said absently, moving toward the corridor.
“And that would be a shame, all your hard work going to waste.”
“Well, no matter.”
“Because it’s not as if we’d be having any more children to hand them down to!”
Finally, Mother Anton’s attention was snagged. She paused and turned, greedily curious. “Oh?” she said. “Oh, now, you never can be certain of that.”
“Three is such a handful, though,” Pauline told her. “Don’t you agree? We women are the ones who have to cope with it all; we’re the ones everything falls on. Men don’t have the slightest idea. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Mother Anton cocked her head to consider the question. “You know,” she said, “I don’t believe my John ever had any inkling what-all I went through. I remember once when Danny and Michael both had the scarlet fever. I was so beat I thought I would die! I fell asleep with my clothes on one time, and next thing I knew it was morning and John was standing over me. ‘Hon?’ he was saying. ‘Hon? I don’t see any breakfast on!’”
Pauline laughed. “You know what I mean, then,” she said.
“Yes, and you have the three! All’s I had was the two.”
But then, oh-oh, she seemed to recollect herself. “Well, this is not getting me into bed,” she said, and she turned away again with a flap of one arm and resumed her trip toward the corridor. “Night, dear,” she called back.
“Good night, Mother Anton.”
Pauline closed her magazine and set it aside. She reached over to switch the radio off. She listened to her mother-in-law’s shoes shuffling down the corridor. The trembly feeling came back to her.
The water spots on her clothes had long since dried, and with a little smoothing and straightening she would look acceptable. But she did want to fix her face a bit. Dust her nose with powder, put on lipstick.
Instead, she went on sitting.
The house was so quiet that she could hear the attic fan humming overhead, bringing a drift of lukewarm air through the nearest window. She heard a car whispering past, and the music box in the Dean baby’s bedroom next door tinkling out “Waltzing Matilda.”
The telephone rang.
Her first thought was that it would be Alex. She sprang up and raced toward the kitchen, frantic to cut off the ringing before Michael answered instead. But then she realized that Alex would have known enough not to call at this hour. Fumbling in the dark, she felt for the receiver and lifted it and said, “Hello?”
“Pauline?” her mother said.
“Mom?”
“You didn’t phone!”
“What?”
“You didn’t phone me back, you didn’t phone your sister—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I left a message,” her mother said. “Didn’t Michael tell you? Donna had her baby.”
“She did?”
“A little girl. Jean Marie. Seven pounds, four ounces.”
“He never said a word!”
“Mother and daughter both doing fine. He promised he’d let you know.”
“Wait. When was this?” Pauline asked.
“One o’clock this afternoon. Two and a half hours of labor; a lot less time than she took with—”
“When did you call, though? Where was I?”
“He said you were playing canasta.”
Pauline was silent. A slow, deep wash of blood seemed to be flooding through her whole body.
“Pauline?”
What had she said to Michael, exactly? Had she said in so many words that she was at her mother’s?
Yes, she was almost certain she had.
And he had said . . . The expression on his face had been . . .
“Pauline, are you going to phone Donna? She may be asleep already, but—”
“I’ll call her first thing in the morning,” she said. “Thanks, Mom. Bye.”
She replaced the receiver with the quietest possible click.
The Dean baby’s music box wasn’t tinkling anymore, or at least it wasn’t audible from this end of the house, but she could still hear the attic fan. She looked toward the luminous face of the clock among the stove dials: 9:22. She turned and looked toward the window over the breakfast table. Outdoors it was brighter than indoors. There must be a full moon tonight. She could see the Swensons’ hydrangea bush on the other side of the street—a pale, pearly cloud billowing next to their mailbox—and the gleam along the rooftop of their car. She could see when a man walked by very slowly, paused in front of her house, and walked on. She saw him reappear from the opposite direction a couple of minutes later. He paused again, and walked on again. But Pauline stayed where she was.
The bedroom was pitch black, shielded from the moonlight by the heavy curtains. She had to grope her way around the foot of the bed and step blindly toward her closet. Once she’d found it she stripped her clothes off, letting them fall to the carpet, and took her nightgown from its hook and slipped it over her head. It smelled like fresh ironing, a homey smell. She went back to the bed, which was dimly visible now, and stretched out next to Michael.
He was facing away from her, lying on his side and breathing very evenly. She couldn’t tell whether he was really asleep. She moved closer. She wrapped herself around him and pressed her cheek to his back. But he went on lying motionless, and his breath went on rising and falling, and his heart went on beating steadfastly beneath his smooth, unreadable skin.
4. Whispering Hope
Separately, Karen and George both checked to see if Lindy had come home last night. Karen checked first. A worrier by nature, she couldn’t burrow back into her late-Sunday-morning sleep until she had stumbled out of bed and down the hall to Lindy’s room. And then—because she found the bed not slept in and the room silent and empty—she was still awake to hear George check later, returning from a noisy pee in the bathroom. He was more nonchalant about it, slapping his knuckles just once on the door before he twisted the knob, and she knew he would poke just his head in, barely bothering to look, instead of tiptoeing into the room as she herself had done and peering around wide-eyed, wondering where Lindy had got to.
For a long time now, they had been expecting to find her not there someday. She was almost not there as it was—seventeen years old and a senior in high school (when she deigned to attend), riding about with strange kids all in black whole hours past her curfew, coming home with beer on her breath and a weird burnt smell in her clothes and quarreling with her parents, sneering at their “suburban” routine, dreaming aloud of the day when she could begin her real life on the road like her favorite author, Jack Kerook. When Karen thought of Lindy, she pictured her poised on the doorstep, leaning outward, long black hair streaming straight behind her, like a figurehead on a ship. She pictured her cocking her thumb in the wind, or loping down the highway beneath a knapsack bigger than she was. Never just staying at home behaving. That, Lindy left to the other two.
And as if there were set amounts for such things—as if only so much rebelliousness were allotted to each household—the other two did behave. They studied hard, obeyed all the rules, and sat unnaturally straight and quiet at the dinner table, willing Lindy to follow their example, praying that no shouting matches would erupt before dessert, silently pleading with their parents to notice them, the good ones, and not Lindy slouching opposite, chewing on a strand of hair and rolling her crayon-rimmed eyes when anybody said anything.
Karen was assistant secretary of her seventh-grade class. George was a member of the Honor Society. Although he was sixteen, he so far did not have his driver’s license, probably because he hadn’t found a girlfriend yet and therefore could live without one. (Lindy had no license either, but that hadn’t stopped her from taking their mother’s car one night without permission and denting the right front fender against the Deans’ mailbox post.)
There was some kind of progression here; that was why Karen and George had grown so vigilant. Last month, a few weeks after school began, Lindy had failed to come home one afternoon. At first no one had thought a thing about it, but then as it grew later their mother started telephoning all of Lindy’s old girlfriends whom Lindy didn’t even see anymore, asking where she might be. (It wasn’t as if anyone knew the names of those kids in black.) She’d telephoned the store and their father had cut his workday short; no supper had been served; no one had asked Karen whether she’d finished her homework before she started watching TV. The police had been phoned but had stalled, suggesting another call if Lindy wasn’t back by morning. Then along about ten o’clock or so, while their mother was still telling the police what she thought of their attitude, in waltzed Lindy, looking bored, not even taking the trouble to make up a good excuse. She’d been hanging out with some friends, she said. Which friends? Where? She just shrugged.
What the other two suddenly realized was, their parents didn’t have anywhere near the power they’d always claimed to have.
And then the previous Saturday she’d gone somewhere with another girl—a girl with the same raccoon-style eye makeup as Lindy’s, was all they had managed to gather when her car pulled into the driveway—and at seven the next morning she still was not in her bed. Nor at seven-thirty. But Karen must have dozed off after that, because at a little past eight she heard George’s fierce whisper in the hall—“Where’ve you been, you numbskull?”—and Lindy’s curt, unintelligible murmur. And when their mother knocked on Lindy’s door at ten-fifteen and caroled, “Lindy? You coming to church?” Lindy was there to give her an answer, although it wasn’t a very polite one. (She always referred to Heavenly Comforter Church as “Heavenly Quilt,” which George and Karen found hilarious but clearly their mother did not.)
So: that could happen again. The clock radio on Karen’s nightstand read 8:25 now, but Lindy could still show up.
On the other hand, maybe this was the day they’d all been more or less braced for. The day she turned out to be gone for good.
At breakfast they didn’t lie, but neither did they tell the whole truth. “Is Lindy getting up?” their mother asked. “Has anyone heard her stirring?” George beetled his brows and grunted in a way that could have meant anything. Karen fixed her eyes on her pancakes and imperceptibly shook her head.
“But she did come home last night,” their mother said. She shot a quick glance toward their father.
George said nothing. Karen, after a pause, felt forced to offer, “Oh, yes! I peeked into her room.”
If not for the “yes,” she would have been blameless. As usual, she had said too much. She bent lower over her plate. She felt a jab of anger, not just at George (the coward), who was smugly tucking butter pats between his pancakes, but also at her parents. Why hadn’t they checked for themselves, for Lord’s sake? And why hadn’t they stayed up waiting last night? Other parents did, with much less reason for concern.
But here they sat, in
their bathrobes, ignorant as babies. Their father was reading a newspaper section folded into quarters. Their mother was dreamily watching a sparrow at the windowsill feeder. The two of them were in one of those lulls that generally followed their fights—a huge fight, this time, about a check to the Orphans’ Fund that their mother had written without their father’s permission. He had accused her of wastefulness and willfulness and cottoning up to the woman in charge of collecting. “It wasn’t even a cause you cared about!” he had said. “The Holy Shepherd Orphans’ Fund, when we don’t belong to Holy Shepherd! You just gave that money because you wanted Sissy Moss to like you.”
“That is absolutely not true!” she’d cried. “I care deeply about orphans! It doesn’t matter to me in the least which church is helping them!”
“And all for what?” he had asked her. “Does Sissy Moss have the slightest bit of interest in you? Has she ever invited you to her house? Ever called you on the phone?”
“Well, yes, she has, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh? When was that?”
“Well, on Friday when I called her, she told me wasn’t that funny, she’d just been thinking of calling me.”
“Pauline,” their father had said, in a heavy, sighing tone, and after that had come the usual ruffled feathers and sharp words and tears and shouting and slamming and painful, obvious silences followed by (even worse) the icky-poo reconciliation scene a couple of days later, all lovey-dovey and cooing, the bedroom door shut and furtively locked and their shy, foolish faces afterward. Now there would be peace—for weeks, if all went well. Karen prayed that it would. Her father, refolding the paper, hummed beneath his breath. When her mother rose for the coffee, she trailed her fingers across his back in passing.
If Lindy had been here, even the air would have felt different—spiky and unreliable. Lindy had an entire long side of the table to herself, opposite George and Karen, and whenever she made one of her pronouncements she tended to stretch out her arms and grip both corners as she spoke, taking over not just the table but the whole kitchen. This was a skinny, bony girl (deliberately skinny, calorie-obsessed—a girl who weighed all her clothes before deciding what to wear to the doctor’s office), but somehow she managed to loom; she managed to seem bigger than the four others put together. She spat out words like “middle class” and “domestic” as if they were curses. She quoted a line from a poem called “Howl” that got her banished to her room. She urged books upon her parents—her beloved Jack Kerook and someone named Albert Caymus—but when her father asked if they had Language (as he called it), she said, “Oh, what’s the use? Nothing’s going to change you. I don’t know why I bother.”
