Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

It shows how defeated I felt just then that the thought of staying forever seemed almost tempting.

My room was upstairs, at the rear of the house, next to Nandina’s. (Which had been hers since childhood, although it would have made more sense if she’d taken over our parents’ larger, brighter room after they died.) It was exactly as I’d left it when I went away to college. My model airplanes still lined the shelves; my vinyl recordings of U2 and Tom Petty were still stacked beneath the stereo. I found a pair of old pajama bottoms in the bureau, and I changed into them and then checked the bookcase for something to read myself to sleep with. But there I had less luck. All I saw were tattered collections of math games and logic puzzles. As a child I’d been good at those, although occasionally, when I ran into a wall (which was almost literally what it felt like — a kind of head-butting), I could become quite violent, throwing things and breaking things. When I cast my mind back to those scenes, I saw myself from outside: my spiky, flailing figure, my hair sticking out in all directions, while my mother stood at arm’s length trying to calm me, trying to grab hold of me, murmuring ineffectual phrases. “Aaron, please. It’s only a pastime. Take a little break and come back to it, why don’t you?”

Where had all that passion gone? I wasn’t like that now, thank heaven.

I used to be obsessed with magic tricks. I practiced them for days on end and then I’d start badgering the grownups. “Pick a card. Any card. Don’t show me. Wait! You showed me what it was!”

And I wanted to make my living as a stand-up comic. I memorized jokes from magazines and then tried them out on relatives. “So, this man is walking down the street to the clock-repair shop, all bent over, with this great big grandfather clock on his back. He’s taking it to be fixed, see. And he meets up with a friend, and the friend says — the friend says—”

But I never could get past that part without totally cracking up. I swear, I thought it was the most hysterical joke I had heard in all my life. “The friend says, ‘Have you ever — have you ever—’ ”

I’d be breathless with laughter, weeping with laughter. My cheeks would be streaming with tears and my stomach would ache, and whichever aunts and uncles were listening would be smiling at me quizzically.

“ ‘Have you ever thought of buying a wristwatch ?’ ”

“A what?” they would ask, because by that point I was almost unintelligible. But even repeating it was a struggle, because I’d be rolling on the floor.

That I saw from outside now, too: my gleeful, sputtery self, with my arms wrapped around my rib cage and my whole body screwed up in an agony of hilarity.

It was no wonder I’d never had children. They would have made me too sad.

When Dorothy and I were courting, we barely talked about children. I believe Dorothy mentioned once or twice that she wasn’t interested, but you couldn’t call that a real discussion. So now there would be no next generation, because I didn’t picture Nandina pairing off at this late date. The line would end with the two of us.

It was probably just as well, I figured.

“You didn’t realize anything had changed,” my mother told me. “You rode back from the hospital all happy and bouncy and glad to be going home, and you scrambled out of the backseat before either of us could reach for you—”

“I don’t want to hear,” I said.

“—and your leg just crumpled under you and you sat down hard on the sidewalk, but you didn’t cry. You were trying to smile, but only one side of your mouth turned up, and you looked toward the two of us with this confused expression on your face but you were still trying to—”

I said, “Mom! Stop! I don’t want to hear, I told you!”

She could be sort of obtuse, our mother. I know she wanted only the best for me, but still, it seemed to me I spent my childhood trying to fend her off. It was “No!” and “Go away!” and “I can do it myself!” I never headed out the door without her calling after me, “Don’t forget your cane!”

“I don’t need my cane.”

“You do need your cane. Do you remember what happened last week at Memorial Stadium?”

I would set my teeth and draw to a halt, facing the street, until she arrived behind me with my cane.

She died in 1998, just six months after our father. Heart attacks, both of them. Now, when I looked back to all her fluttering and hovering, it didn’t seem so bad. It seemed touching. But I knew that if she were to appear at that moment and ask what I could be thinking, getting into bed in the T-shirt I’d worn all day, I would snap at her once again: “Back off, I tell you! I’m fine!”

I fell asleep almost instantly, the first time I’d done that since Dorothy died. I dreamed that Jimmy Vantage still lived next door, although in fact he’d moved away at the end of seventh grade. We went to Stony Run to look for turtles. But Jimmy walked too fast for me, and I couldn’t keep up. At one point I was actually crawling on the sidewalk and shouting for him to slow down. Which was odd, because in my dreams I tend to be assertively able-bodied. I practically have wings. But in this particular dream I was twisted into knots, hampered and gasping for air, and when I woke up I thought for an instant that I could still feel the grit from the sidewalk on my palms.

Nandina said she knew just whom to call: Top Hat Roofers. They’d been replacing the slates on our parents’ house for as long as she could remember, she said, and she was sure they would understand that this should be given priority. “I’m going to phone them today,” she told me. “And you, meanwhile, should call your insurance agent. Or have you already done that?”

“Um …”

She gave me an ultra-patient look, an “I know you , buster” look. I was not a fan of that look. We were seated at the kitchen table with tea and cornflakes — our family’s traditional breakfast, which I had exchanged years ago for coffee and toast — and she had a memo pad in front of her that she was making notes on. I was not a fan of her memo pads, either. I said, “Forget it. I’ve got everything under control.”

“What do you mean by ‘everything’?”

“I mean the insurance agent, the roof … and it’s going to be way more than just the roof. Shows how much you know about it. I need a general contractor.”

“And you have one?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She looked unconvinced.

I said, “His name is …” Then I started over again, like someone retracing his steps to take a long, running jump. “His name is … Gil Bryan.”

It was the image of the shining skin beneath his eyes that brought it forth, finally. I said, “I’ll just give him a call today to let him know about the hall ceiling.”

“Well,” Nandina said. “All right, I guess.”

She seemed almost disappointed.

We drove downtown in separate cars, at my insistence. I said, “Who knows? We might want to leave at different times.”

“I don’t mind adjusting my schedule.”

“But also,” I said, “I may run by the house after work for a few of my things.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“No.”

In fact, I had no intention of going to my house. I had cased the bureau and the closet in my old room and found more than enough clothes to suit my purposes, provided I wasn’t too picky: stretched-out, kiddie-looking underpants, and jeans that fit fine although they seemed a bit high in the waist, and a button-down oxford shirt that I remembered from eighth grade. You would think oxford shirts would be timeless, but this one was kind of spindly in the collar. Well, never mind. For shaving, I’d made do with a disposable plastic razor I found among Nandina’s backup supplies in the bathroom. I use an electric shaver, as a rule. I made a mental note to buy a new one on my lunch break.