Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye

“Maybe this is exactly who I was meant to be,” I said.

She just sighed. I was never going to understand.

“Anyhow,” I said, “you did call the pediatrician. You told me. You called as soon as my fever went up.”

“That man was an imbecile,” she said, off on another tack. “He claimed fevers were nature’s cure-all. He claimed they didn’t do half as much harm as all those hysterical mothers dunking their children in ice water.”

“Mom. Get over it,” I said.

But she never did.

She was a homemaker (as she termed it), from the last generation of women who married straight out of college. She graduated in June of 1958 and married in July. Then had to wait ten years for her first baby, poor woman, but even so she didn’t get a job. How did she fill that time, I wonder? Nandina and I were her entire occupation, once we came along. She built our science projects with us, and our dioramas. She ironed our underwear. She decorated our rooms in little-girl style and little-boy style — rosebuds for Nandina and sports banners for me. Never mind that Nandina was not the rosebud type, or that any time I took part in a sport my mother had apoplexy.

I was a rough-and-ready kind of kid, despite my differences. I was clumsy but enthusiastic, eager to join whatever pickup game was happening on our block. Mom would literally wring her hands as she watched from the front window, but my father told her to let me do whatever I felt capable of. He wasn’t as much of a worrier. But of course he was off at the office all day, and middle-aged by then besides. He was never the kind of father I could toss a football with on weekends, or ask to coach my Little League team.

So I mostly spent my childhood fending off the two women in my life — my mother and my sister, both of them lying in wait to cosset me to death. Even that young, I sensed the danger. You get sucked in. You turn soft. They have you where they want you then.

Is it any wonder I found Dorothy a breath of fresh air?

The first time she saw me, she said, “What’s wrong with your arm?” She was wearing her white coat and she asked in a brusque, clinical tone. When I explained, she just said, “Huh,” and went on to another subject.

The first time she rode in my car, she didn’t so much as glance over, not even at the very start, to check how I was driving. She was too busy huffing on her glasses and polishing them with her sleeve.

And the first time she heard me stammer (after I fell in love with her and grew flustery and awkward), she cocked her head and said, “What is that ? The brain injury, or just nerves?”

“Oh, just — just — nerves,” I said.

“Really? I wonder,” she said. “When you’re dealing with the left hemisphere … Damn.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think I left my keys in my office,” she said.

· · ·

She was unique among women, Dorothy. She was one of a kind. Lord, she left a hole behind. I felt as if I’d been erased, as if I’d been ripped in two.

Then I looked down the street and saw her standing on the sidewalk.

Here is how she died.

It was August. Early August of 2007, oppressively hot and muggy. I happened to have a cold. Summer is the very worst time for a cold, I always think. You can’t just pile on the blankets and sweat it out the way you would in winter. You’re already sweating, only not in any way that’s beneficial.

I went in to work as usual, but the air conditioning made my teeth start chattering as soon as I got settled. I hunched over my desk shivering and shaking, sneezing and coughing and blowing my nose and heaping used tissues in my wastebasket, till Irene ordered me home. That was Irene for you. She claimed I was contaminating the office. The others — Nandina and the rest — had been urging me to leave for my own sake. “You look miserable, poor thing,” our secretary said. But Irene took a more self-centered approach. “I refuse to sacrifice my health to your misguided work ethic,” she told me.

So I said, “Fine. I’ll go.” Since she put it that way.

Nandina said, “Shall I drive you?” but I said, “I’m still able to function, thank you very much.” Then I gathered my things and stalked out, mad at all of them and madder still at myself, for falling ill in the first place. I hate to look like an invalid.

Alone in the car, though, I allowed myself some moaning and groaning. I sneezed and gave a long-drawn-out “Aaah,” as if I were a good deal sicker than I was. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that my eyes were streaming with tears. My face was flushed and my hair had a damp and matted look.

We lived just off Cold Spring Lane, in an unkempt, wooded area a few minutes’ drive from downtown. Our house was a little white bungalow. Not what you would call fancy, but, then, neither Dorothy nor I was the Better Homes and Gardens type. The place suited us just fine: all on one floor, with a light-filled sunporch tacked onto the living room where we could stash the computer and Dorothy’s medical journals.

It was my intention to proceed directly to the sunporch and get some work done. I had brought a manuscript home with me for editing. Halfway through the living room, though, I found myself making a detour to the sofa. I sank onto it and groaned again, and then I let my papers drop to the floor and stretched out full-length.

But you know how a cold reacts to a horizontal position. Immediately, I stopped being able to breathe. My head felt like a cannonball. I was hoping to sleep, but I seemed to be filled all at once with a brittle, edgy alertness. I found the normal clutter of our living room intensely irritating — the apple core browning on the coffee table, the unsorted laundry heaped in an armchair, the newspapers on the sofa interfering with the placement of my feet. One part of my mind grew suddenly ambitious, and I imagined springing up and whipping things into shape. Dragging out the vacuum cleaner, even. Doing something about that stain on the carpet in front of the fireplace. My body went on lying there, dull and achy, while my mind performed over and over the same frenetic chores. It was exhausting.

Time must have passed somehow or other, though, because when the doorbell rang, I checked my watch and found that it was past noon. I got up with a sigh and went out to the front hall to open the door. Our secretary was standing there with a grocery bag on her hip. “Feeling any better?” she asked me.

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, I’ve brought you some soup,” she said. “We all just knew you wouldn’t be fixing yourself any lunch.”

“Thanks, but I’m not—”

“Feed a cold, starve a fever!” she caroled. She nudged the door wider open with her elbow and stepped inside. “People always wonder which it is,” she said. “ ‘Feed a cold and starve a fever,’ or ‘Starve a cold and feed a fever.’ But what they don’t realize is, it’s an ‘If, then’ construction. So in that case either one will work, because if you feed a cold then you’ll be starving a fever, which you most certainly do want to do, and if you starve a cold then you’ll be feeding a nasty old fever.”

By now, she was walking right past me down the hall — one of those women who feel sure they know what’s best for you in all situations. Not unlike my sister, in fact. Except where Nandina was long and gawky, Peggy was soft and dimpled — a pink-and-gold person with a cloud of airy blond curls and a fondness for thrift-store outfits involving too many bits of lace. I liked Peggy just fine (we’d gone through grade school together, which may have been what led my father to hire her), but the softness was misleading. She held our entire office together; she was way, way more than a secretary. Any time she took a day off, the rest of us fell apart — couldn’t even find the stapler. Now she headed unerringly toward the kitchen, pad-pad in her Chinese silk slippers, although as far as I could recall she had never been in our kitchen. I trailed after her, saying, “Really, I’m not hungry. I’m really not hungry. All I want to do is—”