Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

I said, “That wasn’t why we got together.”

“Oh, wasn’t it?” she said.

She turned away to gaze out the window over the sink. Earlier I’d switched the sprinkler back on, and I could see how her eyes followed the to-and-fro motion. “I had a job offer in Chicago,” she told me in a reflective tone. “You never knew that. This was one of my old professors, somebody I looked up to. He offered me a much better job than what I had here — not better paying, maybe, but more prestigious and more interesting. I felt honored that he even remembered me. But you and I had just gone to our first movie together, and I couldn’t think of anything but you.”

I stared at her. I felt as if heavy furniture were being moved around in my head.

“Even after we were married,” she said, “I’d have patients now and then who wore braces or splints or the like with Velcro fasteners, and they’d be undressing in a treatment room, and from my office I’d hear that ripping sound as the fasteners came apart, and I would think, Oh! I would think of you.”

I wanted to step closer to her but I was afraid I would scare her off. And she didn’t seem encouraging. She kept her face set toward the window, her eyes fixed on the sprinkler.

I said, “I probably did save up that barberry thorn.”

I wasn’t sure she would understand what I was referring to, so I added, “Not to make you feel bad about the L.A. trip, though. Just, maybe, subconsciously to … oh, let you know I needed you, maybe.”

Now she did look at me.

“We should have gone to Bo Brooks,” I said. “Who cares if it’s a crab house? We would have gotten all dressed up, you in the beautiful long white gown you were married in and me in my tuxedo, and we’d eat out on the deck, where everybody else was wearing tank tops and jeans. When we walked past they would stare at us, and we’d give them gracious little Queen Elizabeth waves, and they would laugh and clap. Your train would be a bit of a problem — it would catch on the splintery planking — so I’d scoop it up in my arms and carry it behind you to our table. ‘Two dozen of your jumbos and a pitcher of cold beer,’ I’d tell the waitress once we were seated, and she’d roll out the big sheets of brown paper, and then here would come the crabs, steaming hot, dumped between us in this huge orange peppery heap.”

Dorothy still didn’t speak, but I could see that her expression was softening. She might even have been starting to smile, a little.

“The waitress would ask if we wanted bibs but we would say no, that was for tourists. And then we’d pick up our mallets and we’d be sitting there banging away like kindergarteners at Activity Hour, with bits of shell flying up and sticking to your dress and my tux, but we would just laugh; what would we care? We would just laugh and go on hammering.”

Dorothy was smiling for real now, and her face seemed to be shining. In fact she was shining all over, and growing shimmery and transparent. It was sort of like what you see when you swerve your eyes as far to the left as you can without turning your head, so you can glimpse your own profile. First your profile is there and then it’s half not there; it’s nothing but a thread of an outline. And then she was gone altogether.

I never saw Dorothy again after that. I did keep an eye out, at first, but underneath I think I knew that she had left for good. Nowadays, I step into the backyard without the slightest expectation that I’ll meet her. I hoist Maeve into her toddler seat and start her gently swinging, and all I have on my mind is what a beautiful Saturday morning it is. Even this early in the day, the sunshine feels like melting liquid on my skin.

“More, Daddy! More!” Maeve says. “More” is her favorite word, which tells you a lot about her. More hugs, more songs, more tickle-game, more of the world in general. She’s one of those children who seem overjoyed to find themselves on this planet — a sturdy little blond squiggle-head with a preference for denim overalls and high-top sneakers, the better for climbing, running, rolling down hills, getting into trouble.

I have become expert at grabbing the back of the swing seat in the very center, so that, even one-handed, I can send it off perfectly straight. When it returns I push it higher by pressing a palm against the puff of denim ballooning between the slats. (Underneath her overalls, Maeve still wears diapers. Although we’re working on that.) She bends double over the front bar and wriggles her legs ecstatically, skewing her trajectory, but I’m patient; when the swing approaches again, I grab the top slat to restart her. We have a couple of hours to fill before her mother gets home from her errands.

“Here goes,” I say, and Maeve says, “Whee!” I don’t know where she learned that. It’s a word I associate with comic strips, and she enunciates it just that precisely, so that I can almost see it printed inside a balloon above her head.

There was a time when the thought of remarriage seemed inconceivable to me. I could not wrap my mind around it. When Nandina once or twice referred to it as a possibility for my very distant future, I got a lead weight in my stomach. I felt like someone contemplating food right after a heavy meal. “Oh, that will change, by and by,” Nandina said in her all-knowing way. I just glared at her. She had no idea.

The Christmas after she and Gil got engaged, we went to Aunt Selma’s for Christmas dinner as usual, except that this year Gil came, too. And as I was driving the three of us over, Nandina just happened to drop the information that Roger and Ann-Marie would be bringing Ann-Marie’s girlfriend Louise. I cannot tell you how I dislike the word “girlfriend” when it’s used to mean the platonic female friend of a grown woman. Also, I knew perfectly well who this Louise would be. She was the famous Christmas Eve Widow, the one who could presumably have handled her husband’s death just fine if he hadn’t died just before a holiday. Ah, yes, I could see the machinery spinning here.

“This was supposed to be a family occasion,” I told Nandina.

“And so it is!” she said blithely.

“I would hardly call the unknown acquaintance of our first cousin’s third wife a member of the family.”

“Aaron, for mercy’s sake! It’s Christmas! It’s the time for taking in people who have no place else to go.”

“What: she’s a homeless person?”

“She’s, I don’t know. Maybe her family lives on the other side of the country. And the season has especially sad connotations for her, if you’ll recall.”

Notice the careful omission of such telltale phrases as “so much in common” or “getting you two together.” But I was no dummy. I knew.

When we arrived at Aunt Selma’s, Louise was already in place, installed at one end of the otherwise empty couch. Roger and Ann-Marie sat in armchairs, and Gil and Nandina took the love seat. So, naturally, I was settled next to Louise.

She was what I had expected, more or less: a thin, attractive young woman with a slant of short brown hair that swung artfully to one side when she tipped her head. She tipped her head often during our first few minutes together, fixing me with a bright-eyed gaze as we embarked on the usual small talk. It emerged that she was the type who prefaced even the most unexceptional statement with “Are you sitting down?”—a question I’ve always compared to laughing at your own jokes. When I asked what she did for a living, for instance: “Are you sitting down?” she said. “I’m an editor! Just like you! Only freelance.”

Her thinness was the kind that comes artificially, from dieting. You could tell somehow that she was not the weight that she was meant to be. Her knife blade of a dress had clearly been chosen with an eye to accentuating her prominent collarbones and the two jutting knobs of her hips. I don’t know why this annoyed me. I suppose that if we’d liked each other it wouldn’t have annoyed me, but by now we had both arrived at that despairing stage where you realize that the other person is simply too other to bother with. Louise had stopped prettily tipping her head, and her gaze started veering sideways to conversations elsewhere in the room. I felt a strong urge to excuse myself and go home.