Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

Even their sex life was grounds for dispute. Did he have to start out the same, exact way every single time? The same rote moves, the same one position? Michael had been dumbfounded. “Well, but, I mean, how else…?” he had stammered, and she had said, “Oh, never mind. If I have to say it, forget it.” And then he had forgotten it, to all intents and purposes, for nowadays they didn’t have much of a sex life at all, though he supposed that was understandable in view of her condition.

But the worst quarrels, he reflected (fetching the sugar for Mrs. Golka, who had decided to go on and buy it) were the ones where he couldn’t pinpoint the cause. The ones that simply materialized, developing less from something they said than from who they were, by nature. By nature, Pauline tumbled through life helter-skelter while Michael proceeded deliberately. By nature, Pauline felt entitled to spill anything that came into her head while Michael measured out every word. She was brimming with energy — a floor pacer, a foot jiggler, a finger drummer — while he was slow and plodding and secretly somewhat lazy. Everything to her was all or nothing — every new friend her best friend, every minor disagreement an end to the friendship forever after — while to him the world was calibrated more incrementally and more fuzzily.

Pauline believed that marriage was an interweaving of souls, while Michael viewed it as two people traveling side by side but separately. “What are you thinking about?” she liked to say, and “Tell me what you honestly feel.” She customarily opened his mail. She never failed to ask whom he’d been talking to on the phone. Even her eternal guess-whats (“Guess what, Michael… No, seriously, guess… Come on. Just take a guess… Wrong. Guess again… Come on!”) seemed to him a form of intrusion.

How could two people so unlike ever hope to interweave? Which only proved, Michael felt, that his view of marriage was the right one.

“Well, that’s Michael for you,” he imagined her saying. “Never been wrong in his life, if you ask Michael. ”

He set the sugar carefully upright on the counter. “Anything else?” Mrs. Golka asked him.

He said, “Pardon?”

“‘Anything else I can get for you, Mrs. Golka?’”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

She smiled, shaking her head, and handed him her ration book.

A grocery store’s business comes in waves: the early rush for staples depleted overnight; the late-morning rush for the children’s lunches before they walked home from school; the afternoon rush for supper supplies. By five o’clock, things had slowed to a trickle and only Wanda Bryk stood at the counter. Wanda Lipska, she was now. She had finished all her shopping but she lingered to gossip with Michael. Had he heard that Ernie Moskowicz had been drafted? “Ernie Moskowicz!” Michael said. “He’s just a kid!” And Nick the Greek’s café had caught fire, and Anna Grant had married a colonel and moved to Arizona. “You remember Anna, the girl who played the piano at your wedding,” Wanda said. Michael said, “Sure,” for of course he remembered Anna — her archless, level eyebrows and smooth brown turned-under hair. He was surprised by a twinge of wistfulness. Why couldn’t he have fallen for a woman like Anna Grant? he wondered. His life would have been so simple and serene!

Or Wanda, even. He used to find Wanda irritating, but here she stood, six months pregnant and rosily, bloomingly healthy, hugging her sack of groceries. Her tan cloth coat, which was slightly too short and didn’t quite meet across her stomach, had the well-worn, comfortable look of the clothes that his mother and her friends wore, and her broad Polish face shone with contentment.

“Tell Pauline I asked about her,” she said as she turned to leave. “Tell her I hope she’s feeling — oh, there you are! Hi!”

It was Pauline herself, toting Lindy, entering through the street door with a string shopping bag on one shoulder. She wore her red coat and the hat Michael called her Robin Hood hat — a matching red felt that she normally saved for Sundays, with a narrow, asymmetrical brim and a dashing black feather. He used to look for that shade of red on the street when they were first courting. A flash of it glimpsed in a crowd could make his heart race.

“Hello, Wanda! Hello, Michael!” she said. “I thought I’d come in this way and see if you’re closing up yet.”

“Is she a little sweetheart,” Wanda told Lindy. “Is she a little angel child,” and she made a series of kissing sounds. Lindy was all decked out as well, in a pink wool coat and bonnet. She studied Wanda soberly and then looked toward Michael as if to ask “What’s happening here?” He gazed back at her, not smiling.

“We went to the butcher’s,” Pauline was saying. “I thought I’d buy pork chops for Michael’s supper. Isn’t pork expensive these days! And seven points a pound. But Michael works so hard, I want to be sure he gets enough protein.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Wanda told her, “married to a grocer. I’d love to be in your shoes, with all the coffee and sugar I needed waiting just downstairs.”

Pauline gave her chuckly laugh. “Oh,” she said, “I’m lucky, all right!” and she cocked her head at Michael, waiting for him to laugh too.

He didn’t, though. He just stared at her stonily, till Wanda cleared her throat and announced she’d be running along.

Pauline must think words were like dust, or scuff marks, or spilled milk, easily wiped away and leaving no trace. She must think a mere apology — or not even that; just a change in her mood — could erase from a person’s mind the fact that she’d called him stuffy and pompous and boring and self-righteous. Watch how lightheartedly she moved around the kitchen table, humming “People Will Say We’re in Love” as she forked a pork chop onto each plate. She’d prepared the pork chops the way Michael liked them, a coating of nothing but flour, salt, and pepper and a quick, hard fry in bacon fat. (Ordinarily she had a weakness for experiment, mucking up good food with spices and runny sauces.) And the vegetable was his favorite, canned asparagus spears, and the potatoes were served plain with a pat of real butter. “Isn’t this nice?” his mother said happily, smoothing her napkin across her lap. Lindy crowed in her high chair and squeezed an asparagus spear until it oozed out either side of her fist. Michael said “Hmm” and reached for the salt.

During the course of the meal, Pauline reported all the news she had gathered while she was out shopping. Mr. Zynda’s daughter was visiting from Richmond. Henry Piazy had married an English girl, or maybe just gotten engaged to one. Little Tessie Dobek had been taken to the hospital last night with a burst appendix. “Oh, my land,” Michael’s mother said. “Poor Tom and Grace! First losing their only boy, and now this. They must be worried out of their minds.” Michael just went on eating. To hear Pauline talk, you would think she cared. You would think she actually felt some attachment to the neighborhood, instead of scorning it and maligning it and itching to leave it behind.

His mother said, “How old would Tessie be now, I’m wondering. Twelve? Thirteen? Michael, you must know”—trying to rope him into the conversation.

But Michael just said “Nope” and helped himself to another slice of bread.

“His hip has been acting up,” Pauline explained to his mother. “I’ll bet it’s going to snow. Did you notice how he’s been walking today? And he couldn’t finish his exercises this morning.” As if he weren’t in the room; as if his mother didn’t know the real cause of his behavior.

And his mother went along with it. “Oh,” she said, “I can feel the snow! Every joint in my body is giving me fits.”