Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye

I was in sole charge of editing these, and Irene oversaw the design — even if she did call them “giftie books.” Then Charles ran around marketing them like a man possessed. He was convinced that sooner or later the series would make us all rich, although so far it hadn’t happened.

People often referred to us as The Beginner’s Press, but that was most definitely not our name; good Lord, no. It would hardly have inspired confidence. We were Woolcott Publishing, the words spelled out in tall, slim, sans-serif lettering, all lowercase, considered very modern once upon a time. (But printed only on the front of the Beginner’s books, of course, since the spines were far too narrow.)

In the first weeks after Dorothy died, I happened to be working on The Beginner’s Book of Birdwatching . As usual, an expert had been employed to supply the raw material, an ornithologist from the University of Maryland, and the result was an incoherent overload of information that I was struggling to whip into shape — also as usual.

It was my practice to settle upon a mental image of one individual reader, the way public speakers are told to direct their words toward one individual listener. I had decided that our reader in this case was a young woman who had been invited to go birdwatching with a young man she secretly fancied. It would be their very first date. She would certainly not be expected to know the Latin names of the birds she saw (although my expert was chomping at the bit to provide them), but she needed help in her choices of what clothes to wear, what equipment to bring, and what questions to ask. Or should she stay totally silent? Predictably, my expert had not thought to address this issue. I phoned him for a consultation, several times over. I made handwritten notes in the margins. I crossed out, crossed out, crossed out. I was left with a book that was too slender, and I phoned him yet again.

At the end of every day I put everything away in my desk, reached for my cane, rose to my feet, and approached my office door. There I squared my shoulders and assumed what I hoped was a cheerful, oblivious expression. Then I opened the door and strode out.

“Aaron! Calling it quits?”

“How’re the birds going, Aaron?”

“Would you feel like coming home with me for a bite of supper?”

This last would be Nandina, who had her own private office, much bigger than mine, but somehow contrived, these days, to be standing in the outer room every evening as I walked through. “Oh,” I’d tell her, “I guess I’ll just head back to my place. But thanks.” Peggy would be twisting a lace-edged handkerchief as she gazed at me. Charles would be staring fixedly at his computer, his face a mottled red with embarrassment. Irene would sit back in her chair with her head cocked, gauging the extent of the damage.

“Night, all!” I would say.

And out the heavy oak door and into the street, safe at last.

Back home, I’d find offerings of food waiting on my front stoop. I believe my neighbors had arranged some sort of rotation system amongst themselves, although they were clearly overestimating my daily intake. There were foil baking tins and Styrofoam take-out boxes and CorningWare casserole dishes (which unfortunately would need washing and returning), all lined up in a row and plastered with strips of adhesive tape letting me know whom to thank. Thinking of you! The Ushers . And Bake uncovered at 350° till brown and bubbling, Mimi . I would unlock the front door and bend to maneuver it all inside. From there I conveyed the items one by one to the kitchen, leaving my cane behind whenever I needed both hands for something spillable. I set everything next to the sink before I began adding to the list I kept on the counter. A column of previous offerings nearly filled the page: Sue Borden — deviled eggs. Jan Miller — some kind of curry . The earliest names were crossed out to show I’d already sent thank-you notes to them.

I must remember to buy more stamps. I was using a good many, these days.

After I’d recorded each dish, I dumped it in the garbage. I hated to waste food, but my refrigerator was packed to the gills and I didn’t know what else to do. So the chicken salad, the ziti casserole, the tomatoes with pesto — dump, dump, dump. You could think of it as eliminating the middleman: straight from stoop to trash bin, without the intermediate pause on the kitchen table. Occasionally, abstractedly, I would intercept a drumstick or a sparerib and gnaw on it as I went about my work. While I rinsed out a Pyrex baking dish, I made my way through a cheesecake parked beside the sink, although I didn’t much like cheesecake and this one was getting slimier every time I reached for a chunk with my wet fingers. And then, all at once, I was stuffed and my teeth had that furred feel from eating too much sugar, even though I hadn’t sat down to an actual meal.

I dried the baking dish and set it out on the stoop with a Post-it attached: MIMI. Outside it was barely twilight, that transparent green kind of twilight you see at the end of a summer day, and I could hear children calling and a wisp of music from a passing car radio. I stepped back into the hall and closed the door.

Next, the mail, which shingled the hall floor and posed a hazard to life and limb every time I stepped over it. I gathered it all up and took it back to the kitchen. The kitchen was my living room now. I’d done nothing about my plans to alter the guest room. I used the table as my desk, with my checkbook and my address book and various stationery supplies arranged in a row across one end. Oh, I was keeping up with my responsibilities admirably! I paid my bills the day they arrived, not waiting for the due-dates. I promptly filed catalogues and fliers in the recycling bin. I opened every sympathy note and read it with the utmost care, because there was always the chance that somebody would give me an unexpected glimpse of my wife. Somebody from her workplace, for instance: Dr. Rosales was extremely qualified, and she will be missed at the Radiology Center . Well, that was an added viewpoint that I very much appreciated. Or a former patient: I was so sorry to read about the death of your your lossDr. Rosales in the paper. She was very helpful to me after I had my mastectosurgery, answering all my questions and treating me so normally so ordinarilywith dignity . I suspected that this was a first draft mailed by mistake, but that just made it all the more meaningful, because it revealed the patient’s sincerest feelings. She had valued the same qualities in Dorothy that I had valued: her matter-of-fact attitude, her avoidance of condescension. That was the Dorothy I’d fallen in love with.

I answered each note immediately.

Dear Dr. Adams,

Thank you so much for your letter. You were very kind to write.

Sincerely,

Aaron Woolcott

Dear Mrs. Andrews,

Thank you so much for your letter. You were very kind to write.

Sincerely,

Aaron Woolcott

Then on to the food brigade:

Dear Mimi,

Thank you so much for the ziti casserole. It was delicious.

Sincerely,

Aaron

Dear Ushers,

Thank you so much for the cheesecake. It was delicious.

Sincerely,

Aaron

After that, the housework. Plenty to keep me busy there.

Sweeping the front hall, first. That was unending. Every morning when I woke up and every evening when I came home, a fresh layer of white dust and plaster chips covered the hall floor. At times there were also tufts of matted gray fuzz. What on earth? An outmoded type of insulation, I decided. I stopped sweeping and peered up into the rafters. It was a sight I looked quickly away from, like someone’s innards.

And then the laundry, exactly twice a week — once for whites and once for colors. The first white load made me feel sort of lonely. It included two of Dorothy’s shirts and her sensible cotton underpants and her seersucker pajamas. I had to wash and dry and fold them and place them in the proper drawers and align the corners and pat them down and smooth them flat. But the loads after that were easier. This wasn’t an unfamiliar task, after all. It used to fall to whichever one of us felt the need of fresh clothing first, and that was most often me. Now I liked going down the stairs to the cool, dim basement, where there wasn’t the least little sign of the oak tree. Sometimes I hung around for a while after I’d transferred the wet laundry from the washer to the dryer, resting my palms on the dryer’s top and feeling it vibrate and grow warm.