Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

I said, “How did we end up with me , all of a sudden?”

“It’s not fair, Aaron. You expect too much of us. We’re not mind-readers! We’re all just doing our best here; we don’t know; we’re just trying to get through life as best we can, like everybody else!”

Then she jumped up and tore out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

Goodness.

I was left gaping, completely at a loss. I had seldom been involved in a conversation so illogical. Point A had led not to Point B but to Point H. Points X, Y, Z, even!

I needed a book called The Beginner’s Demented Secretary .

Had the others overheard? They couldn’t have missed that epic door slam, at least. I listened for voices, but I didn’t hear any. In fact, it was way too quiet.

I picked up the cookie on my blotter and studied it. I felt sort of unsettled. I’d never seen Peggy lose her temper before.

The cookie was oatmeal-chocolate chip. It wasn’t a flat disk, like the kind you buy in stores; it was a big, humped hillock of a thing, lumpy with whole oats and studded with extra-large bits of chocolate, not chips so much as chunks. I took an experimental nibble. The chocolate lay coolly on my tongue a few seconds before it melted. The dough had been baked exactly the right length of time — some might say underbaked, but not I — and it was chewy inside but crisp outside, with some tiny sharp pieces of something that provided a textural contrast. Nuts, maybe? No, not nuts. Harder than nuts; more edgy than nuts. I really didn’t know. I seemed to have finished the cookie while I was deliberating, so I pried the lid off the tin and selected another. I needed to pin this thing down. I bit off a mouthful and chewed thoughtfully. The oats had their own distinct identity; I suspected they were the old-fashioned kind, rather than the quick-cooking. I would have liked a glass of cold milk but you can’t have everything. I finished that cookie and reached for another. Then another. I feel sort of silly saying this, but as I chewed I closed my eyes, in order to savor the different textures and to feel the oases of chocolate melting on my tongue. Then I swallowed and opened my eyes and took another bite.

Peggy’s cookie tin sat on my desk, another thing to savor, somehow nourishing to my vision. For each season, she had an appropriate tin: a shiny red one at Christmas with a Santa Claus on the lid, a pale-green one at Easter featuring a rabbit in a bonnet, and these hydrangeas till fall arrived, when out came her acorn tin. I started on a new cookie. Chewing steadily, I transferred my gaze to the sweater she’d left hanging on the back of the chair. It wasn’t clear to me how a short-sleeved sweater could provide much warmth, but she seemed very fond of this one, which was white and sort of gathered at the shoulders, so that it swung out like a cape. The sleeves were hemmed with narrow knit ruffles (wouldn’t you know), and two more ruffles ran down the straight part where the buttons were. Why, I would bet that even Peggy’s underwear was ruffled. I spent a pleasurable moment picturing that: a bra trimmed with eyelet lace like the cookie tin’s paper doily, stretched flat where it bridged the soft dip between her breasts. I reached inside the tin for another cookie, but it seemed I’d finished them. All I found were crumbs. I pressed a fingertip to the crumbs and licked them off, every last one of them. Then I gave a long, contented sigh and leaned back in my chair and swiveled toward the window again.

This was a rear window, ground-floor level, and filmed with dust, facing the back of a shabby brick building hung with peeling wooden porches. Beneath the porches was a row of trash cans and empty milk crates, and in front of those, so motionless that it took me a second to realize, stood Dorothy.

She was some twenty feet distant from me, on the far side of the alley, and I couldn’t tell if she saw me. She was looking toward my window, though. Her arms hung empty at her sides, and she wasn’t wearing her satchel. This gave her the air of someone who didn’t know what to do with herself. She seemed lost, almost. She seemed uncertain where to go next.

I scrambled to my feet, but before I could get the window open she turned and wandered away.

One night I woke up and heard low murmurs from Nandina’s bedroom. And one morning a few days later, when I was shaving in the bathroom, I chanced to look out the window and see Gil Bryan walking from the house toward the street, climbing into his pickup and starting it and quietly rolling away.

Oh, I was cramping their style, all right. It was time I moved back home.

Work was still going on there, as both Nandina and Gil pointed out when I mentioned my plans that evening. But really I could have returned several weeks ago, if I didn’t mind having the men overlap me a bit in the mornings. When I said as much to Nandina and Gil, they said, “Oh. Well …,” and, “If you’re sure, then …,” and both of them looked relieved. I started packing right after supper. I moved the next afternoon, a Friday, taking off early from the office.

The main part of my house was bare and shiny and echoing, as pristine as an empty dollhouse. But stray furniture and packed cartons filled every inch of my bedroom, so I settled in the guest room, which was small enough to have escaped being used for storage. I was glad to have an excuse not to return to my own bed. I think I was afraid it would bring back too many memories — not from the days of my marriage but from those weeks after the oak tree fell, when I’d lain there alone night after night wondering how to go on.

It wasn’t only for Gil and Nandina’s sake that I moved back when I did. Let’s be honest. The other reason, the main reason, was that I was hoping I would see Dorothy there. In the two weeks since her appearance outside my office window, there had been no sign of her, not a glimmer. I had looked for her in vain on the sidewalks and in crowds and wherever anonymous strangers waited in line. I had spun around without warning as I stood at intersections, hoping to surprise her behind me. I had settled conspicuously on public benches and strained to feel her sleeve brushing my sleeve. Nothing. She was avoiding me.

At home, I focused on the places where she had shown up before: the street and the backyard. On Saturday I got up when it was barely light out, and after a makeshift breakfast — two granola bars from a carton of foodstuffs in the bedroom — I took a stroll around the block, pegging my cane against the sidewalk almost soundlessly so as not to wake the neighbors. All I saw was one black cat, an insultingly paranoid type who shrank off as I drew near. The solitude made me feel too tall. I was glad to get back to the house.

Once the sun was fully up, I dragged a wrought-iron chair from the front yard to the rear. I set it on the back stoop and sat down, facing outward. My God, the lawn was a wreck. We’d had a dry summer, and the grass was more like straw. The azaleas looked stunted and wizened, and the wood-chip circle where the oak tree once stood had sunk in a good foot or more.

I was probably out of my mind to imagine that Dorothy would come here. The backyard was so bald. It lacked camouflage. There weren’t enough dapplings of shadow to break up the flat glare of the sun.

I rose, eventually, and went into the house for my keys and drove to the grocery store, where I gathered a large amount of provisions. You’d have thought I was shopping for a family of ten. (I think I had it in mind to hole up , to wait it out in my cave until Dorothy chose to show herself, however long it might take.) Back home I dug a few kitchen utensils out of the bedroom cartons and I fixed myself a conscientiously balanced lunch — protein, starch, green vegetable — after which I went out and sat in the wrought-iron chair again, for lack of anything better to do. A few minutes of this and I rose to uncoil the garden hose. The grass made a bristly sound under my feet. I placed the sprinkler near the azaleas and turned the faucet on full-blast and sat back down. And that was how I discovered the pleasures of watching a lawn being watered.