by Anne Tyler
When had she turned into the general population’s one-dimensional, cookie-cutter, cartoonish notion of a middle-aged woman?
And where was that roofer, anyhow? He should have been here last December! You couldn’t rely on anyone nowadays!
She phoned George again but nobody answered. She phoned Mary Kay Bart, who was a nurse in Pauline’s office and whose husband, if Pauline understood correctly, had something to do with kitchen remodeling (which was not unrelated to water heaters, was it?), but nobody answered there either. Everybody was off on jolly, bustling, family-type Saturday-morning pursuits. Well, okay. She hung up and returned to the bedroom for her shoes. No point sitting home moping.
At the Giant on York Road, she bought a few groceries to see her through the week—fruits to take to work for lunch and lo-cal frozen dinners for supper. Then she returned a blouse at Stewart’s. She told the saleslady that her husband hadn’t liked it. Even when she’d had a husband, he had never argued with her taste in clothes, but she didn’t want to give the real reason, which was that the plunging neckline that had looked so enticing in the changing booth had turned all at once pathetic when she got it home. Her cleavage had developed this sort of puckery texture, seemingly overnight.
No wonder she spent less money nowadays! Nothing looked good on her anymore. That made it a whole lot easier to stay within her budget.
One of the cosmetics counters was offering free makeovers. A woman was being swabbed with foundation while several other women watched, and Pauline slowed to watch too but only for a moment. Then she walked out of the store and found her car. She drove home the longer, prettier way; well, partly because it was prettier and partly because she took a wrong turn. The radio was playing oldies that celebrated spring, and she started singing “April Love” in harmony with Pat Boone and forgot to watch where she was going.
As soon as she reached the house she telephoned George again. This time he answered. “Oh! Mom! Hi!”—all surprised and innocent.
“Did Sally tell you about my water heater?” she asked him.
“Water heater? No-o-o. She did leave a note saying to call you and I was going to do that, I was just about to, as soon as I finished—”
“I have absolutely no hot water. It stays cold no matter how long I run it.”
“Ah.”
She waited a moment. “What should I do?” she asked finally.
“Well. That may require a plumber, Mom.”
“A plumber! Oh, God. A plumber on a Saturday; you know what he’s going to say. He’ll say he can’t come till Monday and that means a whole entire weekend without—”
“Of course it could be just the pilot light,” George told her.
“Pilot light?”
“What’s happening in the basement, do you know? Is there water on the floor? Because if there is, you’ll probably need a new unit; but if there isn’t, it might be just the pilot light and that’s a very simple matter.”
“Oh, maybe it’s the pilot light,” Pauline said.
“Is there water on the floor?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure,” George said.
“I’m scared to go see.”
“Mom,” George said, too patiently.
“All right! All right! But you stay on the line, okay?”
She laid the receiver on the kitchen counter and walked down the corridor to the basement stairs. Three steps from the top, she stopped and held her breath and listened, but she didn’t hear anything alarming. The rec-room carpet—a flat, fuzzy green like the surface of a pool table—looked dry from where she stood; so she took heart and descended the rest of the way. She tiptoed across the rec room and peered through the doorway to the left of the bar. There the machinery of the household—the furnace, water heater, washer, and dryer—hulked in the dim light from the single high window. The concrete floor was not even damp. She detected no smell of gas. Maybe things were not so bad after all.
“It must be the pilot light,” she told George when she got back to the phone.
“Well, good. All you have to do is relight it, in that case.”
“Me?”
“You know how to strike a match, Mom.”
“I’m scared it might explode.”
George made her wait through several seconds of silence. Then he said, “All right. I’ll come do it myself.”
“Oh, thank you, sweetie!”
“But first I want to finish up here. I’m trying to get a doghouse assembled before they bring home the puppy.”
“How long will that take?” Pauline asked.
“Couple of hours? I don’t know.”
“The reason I ask is, I’ve got lunch with the girls in . . .” She glanced at her watch. “Just over an hour.”
“Fine. I’ll come once you’re back.”
“No! Wait! How will I shower and dress for my lunch? Can’t you come now instead?”
“No, I can’t,” George told her.
“Oh, George.”
“I promised Sally I would do this,” he said. “You call me when you get home again and I’ll come right over, I promise.”
“Well. All right, I guess,” she said.
She hung up very slowly and sadly, as if he could see her.
It was Katie Vilna’s turn to be hostess, and as usual she had gone all out: cocktails with umbrellas in them, and gigantic floral arrangements everywhere you looked. (Katie had a habit of marrying rich. She lived in Ruxton now and her house was a real showpiece.)
They had long ago abandoned any pretense of cardplaying. First they had drinks in the living room (grand piano, Persian rugs, uncomfortable Victorian furniture studded with glass-headed tacks that dug into your back), and then they went into the dining room. The floral arrangement there was so towering that Katie had to remove it so they could see each other. Katie herself sat at the head of the table, wearing a flowing caftan that might have been a bit too eveningy for a ladies’ luncheon. Wanda, who had given up trying, slouched at her right in a baggy denim skirt and a big green cardigan, and across from Wanda sat Marilyn, a shadow of her former self after undergoing chemo for breast cancer. Her hair stuck out all over her head like a baby chick’s feathers, and instead of one of her tony pants sets she wore a sweat suit. Pauline had the seat at the foot of the table. She had stayed in her slacks but exchanged her T-shirt for a dressy red polyester top, with a paisley silk scarf fashioned into a sort of headband that she hoped would hide the fact that she hadn’t shampooed.
At first the talk was all Marilyn’s health; they had to get that out of the way. Was she feeling less tired? What tasted good to her? She really ought to eat more. “I can’t,” she told them. “I try, but even the idea of food makes me want to throw up. Sorry, Katie,” because she hadn’t touched Katie’s famous Crab Salad on Avocado Spokes.
Pauline could see everyone thinking how nice it would be not to feel hungry, and then deciding against voicing the thought. Oh, by now she knew these women so well! It was funny, though, that her closest friends were people from the St. Cassian stage of her life. She used to be tired to death of Poles—their unspellable, unpronounceable names, their oompah music, their heavy food, their folksy costumes on holidays—but now any time she heard the jiggety-jig of an accordion she got all weepy and sentimental.
And Wanda, with her “You should start eating yogurt, Marilyn. I’m going to give you the name of this really healthy brand that’s got special beneficial bacteria . . .” Granted, Wanda could be bossy, and Katie had a trashy streak, and Marilyn was given to boasting too much about her children; but Pauline had lost the ability to pass judgment on these women. She didn’t even know if she liked them, in fact, and perhaps she didn’t like them, but by now it hardly mattered because how would she ever start over with somebody new, at this point?
Katie asked if they had noticed what a wide range of life events the four of them had experienced. “We’ve got a widow here”—nodding toward Wanda—“two divorcees,
one of them remarried and one not, a child who’s died, a child who’s vanished, a hysterectomy, and now a case of cancer.”
“Someday,” Marilyn said, “it will be one of us who dies.”
Only she was brave enough to state it.
And since once again Pauline knew what everyone was thinking (it would be Marilyn herself who died, most likely), she jumped in to change the subject. “Say! Guess what! Tonight I’ve got a date!”
“Who with?” they all wanted to know.
“Well. There’s this man at my church? Dun Osgood? He and his wife moved here a couple of years ago from Minnesota. And his wife died last Christmas—completely out of the blue, a heart attack in her sleep after a nice Christmas meal. So ever since then I’ve tried to make conversation with him, told him how sorry I was, asked how he was managing; and last Sunday he came up after services and invited me out to dinner.”
“So, let’s see,” Wanda said, counting on her fingers. “January, February, March . . . four months. That’s an awfully short mourning period, if you want my honest opinion.”
“Well, maybe he’s just looking for companionship. That’s all right! I don’t mind that! We could get on a comfortable footing and then, you know, on down the line . . .”
“You have the most amazing luck finding men, Poll,” Katie said. “Here I am, scraping the bottom of the barrel—went six years without a serious feller, last time, till I met Gary—and you’ve been seeing men by the dozens!”
“Well, hardly dozens,” Pauline said. “And a lot of them were disasters, believe me.”
“Still. What’s your secret? Remember the day she met Michael?” Katie said to Wanda. “She walked in the door and—wham! He never looked at us that way.”
“Pauline had cut her forehead,” Wanda told Marilyn, “and we took her to Michael’s mom’s grocery store for a Band-Aid.”
Marilyn, who had surely heard this story any number of times, peered obligingly at the threadlike white scar Pauline revealed on her temple.
“She was bleeding like a stuck pig! I mean, she didn’t look very romantic right then. But Michael went into this, you’d have to say, trance. Insisted on bandaging her himself, walked her out of the store, and stayed with her forever after.”
“Not quite forever,” Pauline said drily.
“We all thought she’d slipped him a potion! We studied her clothes, her hairdo, her laugh—remember, Katie? For a while we painted little perky points on our upper lips; we thought maybe that was her secret. Except hers were real and stayed and ours kept rubbing off. And then Richard; remember Richard?”
“Richard was the dentist,” Marilyn said.
“No, Norm was the dentist. See what I mean? We can’t keep count of them all! Norm was the dentist she saw while she was still just separated, and Richard came afterward. He was the ophthalmologist.”
“Optician, actually,” Pauline said.
“He was the longest-lasting; he wanted to get married. Or sounded like it, at one point, the way he started talking.”
“He was too critical and judgmental,” Pauline said.
“Listen to you!” Katie cried. “Do you know how many women your age would jump at the chance to marry a man like Richard?”
“They’re welcome to him, is all I can say.”
Katie flung out both hands and rolled her eyes at the others in a way that made Pauline feel reckless and dashing.
Driving home, though, she was grim-faced, and when “April in Paris” began drifting from her car radio she switched it off. Things were never the way they seemed from outside. All those men supposedly thronging around her; well, yes, there had been a few. But Norm the dentist wore gold neck chains and his fingernails were buffed—two things Pauline couldn’t stand. And the one who came after him (Bruce, who’d had real potential) had stopped calling; she wasn’t sure why. She suspected it might have had to do with an argument they’d had one evening when he arrived late for dinner. Some men just wanted people to keep all their feelings bottled up and festering.
As for Richard: he hadn’t started out judgmental. At first he had been so admiring; he had complimented traits in her that everyone else took for granted. She had such a green thumb! She was the most creative cook! He loved her laugh and her enthusiasm. Of course she’d realized that such a state of affairs couldn’t continue forever. Eventually the newness would wear off. Still: he had asked one day if she would switch from vinegar to lemon juice on her salads so they wouldn’t keep clashing with the wines he brought, and although she knew he meant no harm she had felt slightly offended. Vinegar clashed with wine? He’d disapproved of her salads all this time but bitten his tongue? Suddenly she’d felt less desirable, less certain of her powers.
Then his daughter in Ohio invited him for Christmas. He told Pauline he would decline because he wanted to celebrate with her instead. “Although,” he said, “it’s true my daughter’s marriage is in trouble and I know she’s probably hoping for support at a difficult time . . .”
So of course Pauline said oh, he should go then; children came first; she understood. And then he let slip that he had already bought his plane ticket. He had been counting all along on her pressing him into going!
Pauline had not been able to hide her sense of injury. “I see,” she had said. “Is that how it is. Okay! I get the picture!”
And he’d said, “Now, now, you’re making too much of this.”
Which had had the ring of one of Michael’s pet phrases. “Making too much of this.” “Overly emotional.” “Get ahold of yourself, Pauline.”
She dropped Richard cold. She was unavailable when he returned from Ohio; she wouldn’t answer the phone and she blandly, breezily brushed him off when he showed up at her door. He thought it was because he’d gone ahead and made the trip, but it wasn’t that. It was his, “Now, now . . .”
She refused to let history repeat itself, even if it meant living out the rest of her life alone, dealing with water heaters alone, driving her car alone over roads that mysteriously ended up where she least expected or turned into other roads, wrong roads, completely unfamiliar roads . . . Oh, Lord, it was like swimming through fog! This was such a big planet and she was drifting about on it, entirely unprotected!
She saw a traffic light up ahead and she took a left and then, thank goodness, all at once she knew where she was. A few blocks more and there was Stewart’s, dear old dowdy Stewart’s. She was so relieved that she turned into the lot and parked and went inside.
At the cosmetics counter they were still doing makeovers. A young girl examined the results in a mirror: black-lashed eyes, glowing cheeks, a mouth like strawberry jam. Pauline slowed to look too and the woman behind the counter said, “How about you? Would you care to try our products?”
Pauline owned drawersful of products—blushes, glosses, powders, and potions, many of which she’d used only once. Even so, she found herself saying, “Oh, well, why not?” She did have a date that evening. It wouldn’t hurt to doll up a bit.
And there was something so soothing about the pat-pat of the saleslady’s fingertips, dabbing cream onto the tired, hot skin beneath Pauline’s eyes. The cream smelled like rose petals. The saleslady’s fingers were cool and smooth, and while she worked she hummed to herself in a cozy, unself-conscious way, her sweatered pillow of a bosom inches from Pauline’s face. Now and then she offered a compliment. “Don’t you have a nice browline!” And “I think I’ll just accent these lovely blue eyes with blue shadow.” The final outcome was not exactly miraculous—same old Pauline, only shinier—but it did lift her spirits, and the three or four other customers who had paused to watch murmured appreciatively. She ended up buying an entire skin-care regimen, along with a set of “her” customized colors cleverly packaged in what looked like an artist’s paintbox. The saleslady threw in a free travel kit with the company logo on the side. Pauline needed two shopping bags to carry everything home.
George said it was the pilot light, just as he had though
t. He’d relit it and she ought to have hot water in half an hour. He closed the basement door behind him, looking fat-cheeked with satisfaction, and tucked a matchbook into his shirt pocket with two fingers. “You could have done that,” he told her.
“I know, dear heart, I’m very silly,” she said. “I shouldn’t be so dependent.” She waited a beat, in case he cared to contradict her. Then she said, “But why was it the pilot light?”
“Why?”
“I mean, what caused it to go out? How can we be sure it won’t go out again the minute you leave?”
“Well, if it does, you need a plumber.”
“Are you saying that it might?” she asked. She straightened up from the counter she’d been leaning against.
“I’m not saying anything, Mom. The pilot was out; I relit it; everything should be fine. You’re the one who’s talking about its happening again.”
“It’s just that if there wasn’t any reason the first time, you see, then there’s nothing to prevent it a second time. If you follow me.”
He sighed. He said, “Why go borrowing trouble, Mom?”
“Well, you’re right. You’re perfectly right! I’m just a worrywart, is all. This house is solely my responsibility. You can’t blame me for being anxious.”
“We’ve said for years you ought to move to an apartment.”
“Oh, George, I raised you children here! It’s my home! I would die if I had to live in some little dinky apartment!”
“Dad did it, for a while,” George said.
“Well, that was your dad’s own choice,” she said huffily. “Besides, he’s a man. Men don’t have the same feeling for houses.”
George was making sure he had his billfold, the way he always did when he was getting ready to go. She could read him like a book. She said, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“I can fix it in a jiffy. Or a soft drink? Juice? A beer?”
“The kids will be expecting me,” he said. He chuckled. “That puppy’s a handful.”
“What about now, where your dad’s living now?” she asked in a rush. “Anna’s house. Is it homey?”
