Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

Dorothy still had her old name, and we were living temporarily in my old apartment, but in all other respects, what he said was true. Everything we did together in our new life was a first-time event, as if we had been reborn. On weekends, especially, when we didn’t go to work, I felt almost shiny, almost wet behind the ears, as we ventured forth upon the day. We ate breakfast together, we went to the supermarket together, we discussed whether we could afford to buy a house together. Could this really be me? Gimpy, geeky Aaron, acting like a regular husband?

And if I was surprised by myself, I was surprised even more by Dorothy. That she would consent to go shopping for something so prosaic as a vacuum cleaner, for instance — that she deigned to consider the merits of canister over upright — came as a revelation. As did the fact that she made a point of using the phrase “my husband” when speaking to strangers. “My husband thinks our vacuum should have a hypoallergenic filter.” That tickled me no end.

Also, she turned out to be a cuddler. Who would ever have guessed? She stayed nestled within the scoop of my body all night long, although you might suppose she’d be the brisk type once the sex was over. She kept close to me in crowds, often taking my hand surreptitiously as I stood talking with someone. I would feel those rough, pudgy fingers slipping stealthily between mine and I would have to struggle not to break into a smile.

I’m not saying that we didn’t encounter a few little bumps in the road. Every couple has to make some adjustments, isn’t that so? Especially when they’ve been accustomed to living on their own. Oh, we experienced our fair share of misunderstandings and crossed signals and faulty timing. On any number of occasions, we disappointed each other.

For one thing, I hadn’t completely comprehended before that Dorothy had zero interest in food. Zero. Not only did she almost never cook, which was fine with me, but she failed to appreciate what I cooked, which wasn’t fine at all. She would arrive at the table with a sheaf of mail that she opened and read between mouthfuls. “What do you think of the fish?” I would ask her, and she would say, “Hmm? Oh. It’s good,” without lifting her eyes from the letter she was reading.

And she lacked sufficient respect for physical objects. She gave no thought to their assigned places, to their maintenance and upkeep. She didn’t — how can I put it? She didn’t properly value things.

If she had properly valued me , for instance, wouldn’t she have taken more care with her appearance? It was true that I had been charmed at first by her lack of vanity, but now and then it struck me that she was looking almost, well, plain, and that this plainness seemed willful. As the months went by I found myself noticing more and more her clumsy clothes, her aggressively plodding walk, her tendency to leave her hair unwashed one day too long.

And Dorothy, for her part, seemed to find me unreasonably prickly. She’d say, “You’ll probably bite my head off, but …,” and then she’d finish with something innocuous, such as an offer to take a turn driving when we were on a long car trip. I’d say, “Why would you think that, Dorothy? Why would I bite your head off?” But unintentionally, I would be using a biting-her-head-off tone as I asked, because it irritated me when she tiptoed around my feelings that way. So, in fact, I’d proved her right. I could see it in her expression, although she would carefully not say so. And I would observe her not saying so, and I would feel all the more irritated.

It kills me now to remember these things.

I felt she expected something of me that she wouldn’t state outright. Her face would fall for no reason sometimes, and I would say, “What? What is it?” but she would say it was nothing. I could sense that I had let her down, but I had no idea how.

Once, she had a conference in L.A., but she said that she was thinking she might skip it. She didn’t like leaving me to manage on my own for so long, she said. (This was fairly early in our marriage.) I said, “Don’t skip it for my sake,” and she said, “Maybe you could come with me. Would you like that? They always have guided bus tours and such for the spouses during the day.”

“Great,” I said. “I could bring my knitting.”

“Oh, why be that way? I only meant—”

“Dorothy,” I said. “I was joking. Don’t worry about me. It’s not as if I depend on you to take care of me, after all.”

I meant that as a statement of fact. It wasn’t an accusation; who could read it as an accusation? But Dorothy did. I could tell by her face. She didn’t say anything more, and she got a sort of closed look.

I tried to smooth things over. I said, “But thanks for your concern.” It didn’t do any good, though. She stayed quiet throughout the evening, and the next day she left for her conference and I missed her like some kind of, almost, organ out of my body, and I think she missed me, too, because she phoned me from Los Angeles several times a day and she’d say, “What are you doing right now?” and, “I really wish you were here.” I wished I were there, too, and I couldn’t believe I had wasted that chance to be with her. I made a lot of promises to myself about being more easygoing in the future, not so quick to take umbrage, but then, when she came home, the very first thing she did was get mad at me about this thorn I had in my index finger. I’m serious. While she was gone I had cut back the barberry bush that was poking over the railing of our rear balcony, and you know how barberry thorns are so microscopic and so hard to get out. I figured it would just work its own way out, but it hadn’t yet, and my finger had started swelling and turning red. She said, “What is this? This is infected!”

“Yes, I think it must be,” I said.

“What is the matter with you?”

“Nothing’s the matter with me,” I said. “I have a thorn in my finger, okay? Sooner or later I’ll see this little black speck emerging and I’ll yank it. Any objections?”

“Yank it with what?” she asked.

“Tweezers, of course.”

“Yank it with what hand , Aaron? It’s in your left index finger. How are you going to work a pair of tweezers with your right hand?”

“I can do that,” I told her.

“You cannot. You should have asked someone for help. Instead you just … sat here, just sat here for a week, waiting for me to come home so I’d have to say, ‘Oh, no, I’m so sorry, how could I have left you on your own to deal with this?’ And everyone else would say, all your family and your office would say, ‘Look at that: she wasn’t even there to take his thorn out and now he has a major infection and maybe even will need an amputation, can you believe it?’ ”

“Amputation!” I said. “Are you nuts ?”

But she just reached for the matchbox above the stove and went off to find a needle, and when she came back she leaned over my finger, her lips turned disapprovingly downward, my hand squeezed tightly in hers, and she pierced the skin one time and the thorn shot out like an arrow.

“There,” she said crisply, and she dabbed the wound with disinfectant.

Then she bent her head and pressed her cheek against the back of my hand, and her skin felt as soft as petals.

Well, we survived these little glitches. We papered over them, we went on with our lives. It’s true that we no longer had quite the same newborn shine, but nobody keeps that forever, right? The important thing was, we loved each other. All I had to do to remind myself of that was to cast my thoughts back to the moment we met. To my lonesome, unattached, unsuspecting self following the receptionist down the corridor of the Radiology Center. The receptionist comes to a stop and raps on a half-open door. Then she pushes it farther open, and I step through it, and Dorothy raises her eyes from her book. Our story begins.