Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye

Oh, why, why, why did I have to realize on that particular afternoon? Why could I not have said, “Look. Clearly you’re half starved, and it seems to be making you fractious. Let’s go out to the kitchen and find you something to eat”?

I’ll tell you why: it’s because next she said, “But what would you know about it? You with your nursemaids rushing around brewing your homemade soup.”

“It wasn’t homemade; it was canned,” I said. “And I didn’t ask for soup. I didn’t even eat it. I told Peggy I didn’t want it.”

“How come she was in the kitchen, then?”

“She was making me some tea.”

“Tea!” Dorothy echoed. I might as well have said opium. “She made you tea ?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“You don’t even like tea!”

“This was medicinal tea, for my throat.”

“Oh, for your throat ,” Dorothy said, with exaggerated sympathy.

“I had a sore throat, Dorothy.”

“An ordinary sore throat, and everyone comes running. Why does that always happen? Throngs of devoted attendants falling all over themselves to take care of you.”

“Well, some — some — somebody had to do it,” I said. “I don’t see you taking care of me.”

Dorothy was quiet a moment. Then she dropped her fists from her hips and walked over to her satchel. She picked it up and went into the sunporch. I heard the leathery creak as she set her satchel on the desk, and then the squeak of the swivel chair.

Stupid argument. We had them, now and then. What couple doesn’t? We weren’t living in a fairy tale. Still, this particular argument seemed unusually pointless. In actual fact I hated being taken care of, and had deliberately chosen a non-caretaker for my wife. And Dorothy wouldn’t mind at all if somebody made me tea. Most likely she’d be relieved. This was just one of those silly spats about something neither one of us gave a damn about, but now we were backed in our corners and didn’t know how to get out of them.

I heaved myself from the sofa and crossed the hall to the bedroom. I closed the door soundlessly and sat down on the edge of the bed, where I took off my shoes and my brace. (I wear a polypropylene brace to correct a foot-drop.) The Velcro straps made a ripping sound as I undid them— batch! batch! — and I winced, because I didn’t want Dorothy guessing what I was up to. I wanted her to wonder, a little bit.

I held still and listened for her, but all I heard was another creak. This would not have been her satchel, though. She was too far away for that. It was probably a hall floorboard, I decided.

I stretched out on the rumpled sheets and stared at the ceiling. There wasn’t a chance on earth I could sleep. I realized that now. I had slept all afternoon. What I should do was go out to the kitchen and start cooking something good-smelling, something that would lure Dorothy from the sunporch. How about hamburgers? I knew we had a pound of—

Creak! An even louder one. Or not a creak after all, but a crash, because the creak lasted too long and then it swelled into a slam! with smaller slams following it, and stray tinkles and crackles and thumps. My first thought (I know this was ludicrous) was that Dorothy must be much more miffed than I had supposed. But even as I was thinking it, I had to admit that she was not the type to throw tantrums. I sat straight up and my heart began hammering. I called, “Dorothy?” I stumbled off the bed. “Dorothy! What was that?”

I made it to the door in my stocking feet, and then I remembered my brace. I could walk without it, in a fashion, but it would be slow going. Turn back and strap it on? No; no time for that. And where had I put my cane? That was anybody’s guess. I flung open the bedroom door.

It seemed I was on the edge of a forest.

The hall was a mass of twigs and leaves and bits of bark. Even the air was filled with bark — dry bark chips floating in a dusty haze, and a small bird or a very large insect suddenly whizzing up out of nowhere. Isolated pings! and ticks! and pops! rang out as different objects settled — a pane of glass falling from a window, something wooden landing on the wooden floor. I grabbed on to a broken-off branch and used it for support as I worked my way around it. It wasn’t clear to me yet what had happened. I was in a daze, maybe even in shock, and there was a lag in my comprehension. All I knew was that this forest was thicker in the living room, and that Dorothy was beyond that, in the sunporch, where I could see nothing but leaves, leaves, leaves, and branches as thick as my torso.

“Dorothy!”

No answer.

I was standing near the coffee table. I could make out one corner of it, the egg-and-dart molding around the rim, and wasn’t it interesting that the phrase “egg-and-dart” should come to me so handily. I looked toward the sunporch again and saw that I could never fight my way through that jungle, so I turned back, planning to go out the front door and around to the side of the house, to the outside entrance of the sunporch. On my way toward the hall, though, I passed the lamp table next to the sofa (the sofa invisible now), where the cordless telephone lay, littered with more bits of bark. I picked it up and pressed Talk . Miraculously, I heard a dial tone. I tried to punch in 911, but my hand was shaking so that I kept hitting the pound sign by accident. I had to redial twice before I finally connected. I put the phone to my ear.

A woman said, “Please file an ambulance.”

“What?”

“Please file an ambulance.”

“What?”

“Police?” she said in a weary tone. “Fire? Or ambulance.”

“Oh, pol — pol — or — I don’t know! Fire! No, ambulance! Ambulance!”

“What is the problem, sir,” she said.

“A t-t-t-tree fell!” I said, and that was the first moment when I seemed to understand what had happened. “A tree fell on my house!”

She took down my information so slowly that her slowness seemed meant to be instructive, an example of how to behave. But I had things to do! I couldn’t stand here all day! I had read that 911 operators could detect a caller’s address with special equipment, and I failed to see why she was asking me all these questions she must already know the answers to. I said, “I have to go! I have to go!” which reminded me, absurdly, of a child needing to pee, and all at once it seemed to me that I did need to pee, and I wondered how long it would be before I could attend again to such a mundane task.

I heard a siren from far away. I still don’t know if it was my phone call that brought it. In any case, I dropped the phone without saying goodbye and staggered toward the hall.

When I opened the front door, I found more tree outside. I had somehow expected that once I left the house I would be free and clear. I batted away branches, spat out gnats and grit. The siren was so loud that it felt like a knife in my ears. Then it stopped, and I saw the fire truck as I stepped out from the last of the tree: a beautiful, shiny red, with an ambulance pulling up behind it. A man in full firefighting regalia — but why? — jumped down from the truck and shouted, “Don’t move! Stay there! They’ll bring a stretcher!”

I kept walking, because how would they know where to bring it if I didn’t show them? “Stop!” he shouted, and an ambulance man— not with a stretcher; no sign of a stretcher — ran up and wrapped his arms around me like a straitjacket. “Wait here. Don’t try to walk,” he said. His breath smelled of chili.

“I can walk fine,” I told him.

“J.B.! Bring the stretcher!”

They thought I was the one who was injured, I guess. I mean, recently injured. I fought him off. I said, “My wife! Around — around — around—”