Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

I swear that I could feel the grass’s gratitude. The birds seemed grateful, too. A little crowd of them came out of nowhere, as if word had gotten around somehow, and they twittered and chirped and fluttered in the droplets. My chair was too right-angled, forcing me to sit unnaturally erect, and its scrolls and curlicues dug into the knobs of my spine, but even so I felt the most pervasive sense of peace. I tilted my face up and squinted against the sunlight to follow the arc of the spray, which sashayed left, sashayed right, like a young girl swishing her skirts as she walked.

I practically drowned that yard.

Not till early evening, when the gnats started biting, did I turn off the hose. Then I went inside to fix dinner, and after that I tried to read a while in the impractical little slipper chair in one corner of the guest room. But I was so unaccountably, irresistibly sleepy that I laid aside my book fairly soon and went to bed. I slept without so much as a twitch, I believe, until nearly nine the next morning.

The early part of Sunday I spent dragging various cartons from the bedroom to the kitchen, replacing pots and dishes and foods in the cabinets that smelled of fresh paint. I enjoyed establishing just the right locations for things. I never could have done that in the old days — at least not with any hope that they would stay there, not with Dorothy around.

When I caught myself thinking this, I averted my head sharply, as if I could shake the thought away.

Once I’d unpacked what I could, I went out back again, like some kind of sports fan desperate to return to his game. The grass was still a yellowish white, although it no longer crunched. I moved the sprinkler over by the euonymus alongside the alley, sinking into the sodden earth with every step, and I turned the water on and settled back into my chair.

I had learned by now that when the sunlight hit the spray in a certain way I could occasionally, almost, see things. I mean things that weren’t really there. Not Dorothy, unfortunately. But one time I saw this sort of column, an ornate Corinthian column rising up and sprouting apart at the top and then dissolving into particles, and another time a woman in a long beige dress with a bustle. And yet another time — this was the weirdest — I saw an entire swing set, and a man in shirtsleeves was pushing a small child in one of those chair-like swings intended for infants and toddlers. I also saw a good many rainbows, needless to say, and numerous sheets of changeable taffeta unfurling and spreading themselves across the lawn.

But never Dorothy.

I saw a woman with an umbrella but — hey! — she was real. She was Mimi King, hovering by the euonymus bushes and shifting from foot to foot like a girl preparing to enter the arc of a jump rope, until finally she plunged into the spray and emerged on the other side of it, shaking out her umbrella before she collapsed it. “Well, hi there, Aaron!” she called, and she squished toward me in her Sunday heels, no doubt digging little tent-peg holes as she came. When she reached me, I stood up and said, “Good morning, Mimi.”

“At this rate,” she said, “you’ll be growing yourself a rain forest!”

“Got to do my bit for the planet,” I told her.

She placed the tip of her umbrella between her feet and rested both hands on the handle. “Have you moved back in?” she asked.

“I figured it was time.”

“We were all afraid you might be gone for good.”

“ Oh , no,” I said, as if I hadn’t had the same thought myself once.

“I was asking Mary-Clyde just last week; I said, ‘Shouldn’t somebody let him know that that lawn service of his is mowing grass that’s not even there anymore?’ But Mary-Clyde said, ‘Oh, I’m sure he must be aware; he’s got those construction men around; I’m sure they would have told him.’ ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel construction men are very sensitive to lawns.’ ”

“Would you care to sit down, Mimi?” I asked. I felt bad about her shoes, which were plastered with a good half-inch of mud and damp yellow grass blades.

But she was pursuing her own line of thought. “This is just providential,” she said, “because I’ve been thinking I would like to have you over for dinner some night.”

“Oh, well, I’m not — I’m not—”

“I would like for you to meet my niece. She’s had a hard time of it since she lost her husband, and I’m thinking it would do her good to talk to you.”

“I’m not all that social,” I told her.

“Of course you’re not! Don’t you think I realize that? But this is different. Louise lost her husband last Christmas Eve morning, can you imagine? Poor thing has been just devastated.”

“Christmas Eve?” I said. “Haven’t I heard about this person?”

“Oh, well, you know , then! She’d accepted that he had a terminal illness, but it never entered her mind that he would pass on Christmas Eve.”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess she won’t celebrate Christmas ever again without remembering that.”

I was just trying to sound sympathetic, but it seemed I’d succeeded too well, because Mimi gave me a look of surprise and said, “That’s exactly right! See? You would have so much to say to her!”

“No, no!” I hurried to say. “No, believe me, it’s not as if I could offer her any … household hints or anything.”

“Household hints?”

“Besides, for the next little bit I’m going to be busy setting things straight. My golly, the place is a mess! I’ve got everything stuffed in one room: furniture, books, bric-a-brac, lamps, curtains, rugs.…”

I drove her away with words, finally. She gave me a wilted little wave and started back toward the alley, raising her umbrella again as she approached the sprinkler, although I’d gallantly shut the faucet off the instant she turned to leave. Anyhow, I had to admit the lawn was pretty well watered by now.

Having reminded myself of the mess in the bedroom, I went to tackle it after lunch. There wasn’t much point in putting things back in place yet, since they would only hamper the workmen, but I figured I could probably discard some stuff ahead of time. Dorothy’s medical books, for instance, and maybe a few of those decorative doodads that tended to accumulate for no useful purpose.

It turned out that a good many of the books had gotten damp — not just Dorothy’s but mine as well. They had dried in the months since, more or less, but their covers had buckled and they had a moldy, mousy smell. Carton after carton I would open, dig through dispiritedly, and then drag to the front hall for Gil’s men to carry out to the alley. I did try to save a few of my favorite biographies, though, and the family photo albums. I’d appropriated the albums after our mother died, and I felt guilty about the state they were in. I took them to the kitchen and spread them across the table and all available counters, where I pried the faded black pages apart in hopes that they would air out.

With the doodads, I was more callous. What did I care about my bronzed baby shoes? (A pair of tiny Nikes; how witty.) Or the little china clock that always ran slow, or the tulip-shaped vase someone had given us when we got married?

I ate supper standing up, since the table was covered with albums. I cruised around the kitchen studying sepia-colored photos as I munched on my taco. Men in high collars, women in leg-of-mutton sleeves, solemn-faced children whose clothes looked stiff as sandwich boards. Nobody was identified. I guess the album-keeper had thought they didn’t need to be identified; everybody knew who everybody was in those days, in that smaller world. But then the sepia changed to black-and-white, and then to garish Kodacolor, and none of those photos bore any labels, either — not my parents getting married, or Nandina in her christening gown, or the two of us attending a children’s birthday party. Nor did the single snapshot from my own wedding: Dorothy and I standing side by side on the front steps of my parents’ church, looking uncomfortable and uncertain. We were both of us badly dressed — I in a brown suit that left my wrist bones exposed, Dorothy in a bright-blue knit stretched too tightly across the mound of her stomach. Fifty years from now, strangers discovering this album at some parking-lot flea market would glance at us and flip the page, not even interested enough to wonder who we’d been.