Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

At dinner, she was seated on my right. (We had place cards this year, to ensure there’d be no mistakes.) However, now that she’d given up on me she addressed the bulk of her remarks to Gil, across the table. She announced to him during the soup course that she had a “very unique” relationship with clocks. “Every time I look at one, just about, you know what the time is? Nine-twelve.”

Gil said, “Ah …,” and wrinkled his forehead.

“And nine-twelve is — Are you sitting down?”

He sent a bewildered glance toward his lap.

“Nine-twelve is the day I was born!”

“Huh?”

“September twelfth! Isn’t that just eerie? It happens way more often than you can explain scientifically. Why, on my very first trip to London, years and years ago, of course I went to see Big Ben, and can you guess what time it was when I got there?”

Gil looked panicked.

I said, “Twelve-oh-nine?”

“What? No, my birthday is—”

“Because you were in England, after all, where they say ‘twelfth September’ instead of ‘September twelfth.’ ”

“No … actually—”

“Aaron,” Nandina broke in, “tell Louise about Beginner’s Jet Lag .”

“I forget,” I said.

“Aaron.”

She thought I was being difficult, but I honestly did forget. I couldn’t think of anything but the endless number of hours before I could make my escape. Till then, we had so much food to plow through. Not just the soup (cream of flour, as near as I could make out), but baked ham in an overcoat of pineapple rings, olive-drab broccoli, and mashed sweet potatoes cobbled with miniature marshmallows, followed by fruitcake for dessert along with — oh, God — a second dessert, which Louise had brought: a platter of cookies shaped like stars and bells and wreaths. I sent Nandina a “See there?” look, because one thing Nandina hated was unexpected contributions to a dinner party, but she was too mad at me to respond. The cookies were dead-white and paper-thin, dusted on top with red and green sugar. I took one for politeness’ sake and bit into it, but it had no taste. Just flat, insipid sweetness. I set it down on my plate and started praying for coffee. Not that I planned to drink any at such an hour, but coffee would signal the end of this interminable meal. It was already late afternoon, and a dull gray twilight furred the corners of the dining room.

In the car as I was driving us home, Nandina gave me a thorough scolding. “Why you can’t behave with plain old common garden-variety civility …” she told me. She was sitting in the rear, and she leaned so far forward to berate me that her chin was all but resting on the back of my seat. “You were literally looking down your nose at that poor woman!”

“Yes,” I said, “and she was looking down her nose. Face it, Nandina, we were oil and water. Imagine, a professional editor saying something was ‘very unique’!”

“Oh, well, she’s only freelance,” Nandina said in a milder tone.

Then Gil said, “Anyhow,” and asked me if the fog was making driving difficult. He always looked unhappy when Nandina and I quarreled.

I dropped them off at Nandina’s with the briefest of goodbyes and drove on. Back home, I changed into comfortable clothes, poured myself a drink, and sat down to read, but I couldn’t seem to concentrate. I felt too depressed; I wasn’t sure exactly why. Here I’d been longing for home ever since we’d arrived at Aunt Selma’s, so shouldn’t I feel relieved now?

It occurred to me that secretly, in the murky depths of my subconscious, I had been hoping that Louise and I would like each other.

Between Christmas and New Year’s, we closed the office and Nandina went into high gear with the wedding preparations. She accomplished it all in a week: pretty efficient, I will say. The ceremony took place on the last day of the year at my parents’ old church, which Nandina still attended. I gave her away; her best friend from junior high was matron of honor; Gil’s cousin served as best man. The only guests were Aunt Selma and her family, and Gil’s three sisters and their families, and the Woolcott Publishing staff. Afterward, we held a modest reception at my house, although I didn’t have much to do with it. Peggy and the matron of honor saw to the food, and Irene did the decorating, and Roger took charge of the drinks. I was just an innocent bystander.

Then Gil and Nandina went away for a week to the Eastern Shore, which seemed a strange choice in midwinter, but to each his own, I guess. This was traditionally a slow time at the office, so it was no problem doing without Nandina to boss us around. I was editing a new vanity title, Why I Have Decided to Go On Living , written by a high-school English teacher. Basically, it was a laundry list of “inspirational” moments, such as Watching the sky turn orange at night behind the Domino Sugars sign . I would read choice bits aloud to the others in the outer office. “Feeling a new baby curl its hand around my index finger,” I’d call out, and Charles would grunt and Irene would give an absentminded “Sss!” and Peggy would say, “Aww. Well, that is a good reason!” They were all so predictable.

Irene flipped through thick magazines that appeared to feature nothing but cosmetics ads. Charles got on the phone and monitored what sounded like very heated quarrels among his daughters, who were still on school holiday while both parents were back at work. Peggy decided to practice touch-typing her numerals and symbols; she said she’d never made it past the standard alphabet keys.

At noon on our last day of freedom, so to speak, we all went out together to the Gobble-Up Café, leaving the office unattended, which theoretically we should not have done, and we ordered wine with lunch, which we almost never did. The Gobble-Up was so unaccustomed to serving alcohol that the wine list read, in its entirety, Chardonnay $5, Merlot $5, Rosé $4 , and when I asked the waitress, “What is your Merlot?” she said, “It’s a red wine?”

I ordered a glass anyway, and the women ordered Chardonnay, and Charles had a beer. Peggy got a bit tipsy on only two sips and told all of us that she thought of us as family. Irene announced that, what the hell, after lunch she was taking off for Nordstrom’s winter-coat sale. Charles answered a cell-phone call, contrary to the posted house rules, and waited way too long before he stepped outside, murmuring, “Now, calm down; slow down; you know I can’t understand a word when you’re crying.” And I picked up the whole check, which probably means I was feeling fairly merry myself.

Walking back to the office (bypassing Charles, still on his phone out front), I told Peggy and Irene how unreasonably Nandina had behaved after Christmas dinner. I think that, in my winy flush of good feeling, I imagined that they would express some indignation on my behalf. “She basically ambushes me,” I said, “she and Ann-Marie; plunks me next to this woman I have nothing to say to, zero—”

“Oh, now. She was just trying to help,” Peggy told me. “She just wants you to find somebody.”

There was a time when I would have said, “Find somebody! Who says I want somebody?” But on that particular day, still under the influence of my post-Christmas-dinner blues, I didn’t bother arguing. All I said was, “Even so. It’s not as if losing a spouse were some kind of hobby we could share.”

Neither Peggy nor Irene showed the proper empathy, though. Peggy just tsk-tsked, and Irene left us abruptly because by then we’d arrived at our building. “Bye, now,” she said, and went off to do her shopping.

“This was a woman so skinny I could have cut a hand on her collarbone,” I told Peggy as I opened the door. “She chewed with just her front teeth. She brought cookies made of shirt cardboard.”