Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

I got up from Nandina’s couch and looked around for my cane, which I finally found propped in a corner. I let myself out the front door; I locked it behind me; I set off down the sidewalk.

Left onto Clifton Lane, left again on Summit and down to Wyndhurst. Then south on Woodlawn a good long way until I reached Rumor Road. My road, only three blocks long and lined with flowering pear trees. It was twilight by now, but I could still hear birds singing. One bird was calling out, “ ’Scuse me! ’Scuse me!” and insects were zipping away, keeping up that background clatter that you never really hear unless you stop to think about it.

I was developing a bit of an ache in the left side of my lower back, but that always happened when I walked any distance and I paid it no attention. I started walking even faster, because I knew that beyond the slight bend up ahead I would catch my first sight of our house. The bend was marked by a single tree of a different type from the others; I didn’t know the name. This tree bore huge pink, floppy flowers, and they were so abundant this year that I drew a deep breath as I approached it, expecting a strong perfume. I couldn’t detect one, though. Instead I smelled … Well, it was something like isopropyl alcohol, the faintest, most delicate scent of alcohol floating on the breeze, mixed with plain Ivory soap. The exact scent of my wife.

Then I rounded the bend, and I saw her standing on the sidewalk.

She was some ten feet away from me, facing our house and gazing at it, but when she heard my footsteps she turned in my direction. She was wearing her wide black trousers and a gray shirt. Both were the kind of colors that blended into the fading light, and yet she herself was absolutely solid — as solid as you or I, and in fact almost more so, in some odd way; solid and sturdy and opaque. I had forgotten that rebellious little quirk of black hair that stood up from the crown of her head. I’d forgotten how she always stood tipping a bit backward, ducklike, on her heels.

She watched me intently as I came nearer, with her chin slightly raised and her eyes fixed on mine. I arrived in front of her. I drew in a deep breath. I thought I would never in all my life smell a more wonderful combination than isopropyl alcohol and plain soap.

“Dorothy,” I said.

I’m not sure if I spoke aloud. I have a feeling I may have just thought it, in the very depths of my being.

I said, “Dorothy, my dear one. My only, only Dorothy.”

“Hello, Aaron,” she said.

She looked into my face for a moment, and then she turned and walked away. But I didn’t feel she was abandoning me. I knew, somehow, that she had stayed as long right then as she was able and that she would come again as soon as she could. So I stood still and watched her leave without attempting to follow. I watched her reach the end of the block, take a right on Hawthorn, and vanish.

Then I turned and started back to Nandina’s. I hadn’t so much as glanced at our house. What did I care about our house? I walked in a kind of trance, keeping my gait as nearly level as possible, as if Dorothy had been a liquid and now I was brimful of her and moving slowly and gently so as not to spill over.

I waited. I waited.

For days on end I stayed suspended, waiting for her to come back.

Since our street was where she had shown up, I figured that was where she would be most likely to show up again. In fact, I kicked myself for not going there before now. Had she been wandering Rumor Road all these months, wondering where I was? I could hardly bear to think about all my lost opportunities.

It turned out that in the daytime our little house was Grand Central Station. Workmen came and went; power tools whizzed and hammers pounded. I was lost in all the confusion; nobody knew who I was. When I peered in through the screen at my new Butterscotch floor, a guy in a bandanna head-wrap asked if I had some business there. But once I identified myself, they were all over me. Would I like to take a tour? Would I care to see the sunporch? Gil was not around at the time, but clearly these men knew my story. They spoke to me in the respectful tones of funeral guests. They made me feel elderly, although we were all more or less the same age.

I didn’t really want a tour of the house, but I felt that I shouldn’t say no. (I was bearing in mind Nandina’s remark about how workmen needed to feel appreciated.) And after we got started, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. The guy in the head-wrap led the way, and the others, all five or six of them, dropped what they were doing to trail behind us. They were conspicuously silent at first, listening as the head-wrap guy explained what we were looking at. “Very nice,” I murmured, and, “Mmhmm. I see.” Then, bit by bit, they began to chime in, talking over each other, telling me how this particular molding had been the devil to find a match for, how they’d had to rip out that cornice three times before they got it right. “You guys are doing great,” I told them, and they went into an “Aw, shucks” routine and stuck their hands in their rear pockets and looked down at their shoes.

I felt ashamed of myself for waiting so long to do this. Now my refusal to visit seemed petulant, like a child kicking his bicycle after it’s tipped him over. What had happened wasn’t the house’s fault. And besides, these men had stripped away so much that it didn’t seem like the same place anymore. Even my bedroom, which they hadn’t touched, was unrecognizable, heaped as it was with a jumble of furniture shrouded in white canvas.

I felt all the more ashamed when Gil walked in. He looked so surprised to see me, and so pleased; he actually blushed, and then he had to take me around and show me everything I’d just seen.

So: a good visit, all in all. But what I learned from it was, no point going there during work hours if I hoped to catch sight of Dorothy again.

I took to stopping by in the evenings, therefore, or very early on Sunday mornings, when the neighbors weren’t out and about yet. At 6:30 or 7 a.m. I would park out front and just sit a while, staring through the windshield at the spot where I had seen Dorothy. I would relive every detail of that encounter, the way you’d relive a dream that you were trying to sink back into. Her square gray shirt, her black trousers, the tilt of her chin as she watched me approach, the steadiness of her gaze. My eyes worked so hard to summon her up that they were practically knitting her, but even so, she failed to appear.

Then I’d get out of my car and walk toward the house. Very slowly, though, just in case she wanted to intercept me at any point. I would pause after every few steps and look around me in an elaborately interested way, up at the shards of blue sky showing through the trees, down at the sidewalk with its imprint of old leaf stains like patterned fabric. But she didn’t appear, and so eventually I would unlock my front door, brace myself, and step inside.

The detritus of the workmen’s daily lives — their drink cups and crumpled drop cloths and jar lids full of cigarette stubs — made the house feel populated even though it was empty. I would have to stand still a moment, regaining my sense of solitude. After that I would move through the house from front to back, from hallway to kitchen.

No Dorothy. Smells of fresh-cut lumber, cigarette smoke, damp plaster, but no soap or isopropyl alcohol. In the kitchen I would stand waiting so long that the silence began to echo at me like the silence inside a seashell, but she never said, “Hello, Aaron.”

Had she said those words aloud? Or had they just been in my mind, the same way I’d told her my own thoughts? Had the whole scene been in my mind? Had I been so deranged by grief that I had concocted her from thin air?