Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

“I simply cannot figure,” Mother Anton said, “how my son could be in the grocery business and still we never seem to have any food in the house.”

Pauline made a face at a box of Grape-Nuts.

“And where is Michael, anyhow? It’s Saturday! Didn’t he promise he would start staying home on Saturdays?”

“Oh, you know how he is,” Pauline said. “He refuses to believe that anyone could take his place. He got a call from Eustace about some problem with the fridge, and nothing else would do but that he go straight down and see to it.”

“And rightly so,” Mother Anton said, suddenly reversing herself. “Whoever heard of leaving your business in the total care of a darky?”

“Here,” Pauline said. “All-Bran. Can’t ask for any more roughage than that!”

Mother Anton poked her lips out in a discontented way, but she sat back in her chair and let Pauline pour her a bowl.

“Go get your towel and swim trunks,” Pauline told George. “Karen, honey, finish your Wheaties. It’s almost time for the pool to—”

The telephone rang again.

“I’ll get it!” she cried.

She flew out of the kitchen and back down the corridor, down the stairs to the rec room. Each time she heard another ring she thanked her lucky stars, because you never knew when Mother Anton (seemingly deaf to phones and doorbells, as a rule) might take it into her head to pick up the receiver.

“Hello?” she said.

“Pauline?”

She said, “Oh! Alex! Hi!”

Very offhand and surprised, as if he’d been the farthest thing from her mind.

“I hope you’re not up to your elbows in something.”

“No, no.”

“I know Saturday’s a family day.”

“Actually, Michael’s gone into town,” she said. “It’s no different from any other day, for me.”

“Well, I had this little research question I was hoping you could help me with.”

“Shoot!” she told him.

She seemed to have become a different person all at once — somebody slangy and athletic, the type of woman you might find in a flippy little skirt on a golf course.

“It appears that my basement freezer has got these various meats in it,” he said, “and they’ve been there quite a while. Ever since before… you know, the famous departure. So I was wondering, do you suppose it would kill me to eat them?”

“Oh. We-e-ell…” she said. She was drawing out her answer so as to make the conversation last longer.

“I’m not ready to leave this earth yet,” he told her, “heartbroken though I may supposedly be.”

“I should say not!” she agreed. “But your freezer hasn’t been off at all, has it? Hasn’t had any malfunctions or power interruptions.”

“Not so far as I know.”

“And Adelaide’s been gone since…”

As often as they’d talked lately, this was the first time she had referred so directly to his wife’s leaving. She felt very daring to be speaking the name out loud.

“Since May,” Alex was saying. “But she was one of those far-sighted types. She could have bought that meat any number of weeks before then.”

“Still,” Pauline told him, “I imagine it would be safe.”

“You think?”

“Maybe a slight loss of flavor, but—”

“I’m going to risk it, then,” Alex said.

“Well, don’t take my word for it!”

“Why not?” he asked her. “Who would know better? Gosh, you’re Madame Betty Crocker! I haven’t forgotten that dip you brought to the Fourth of July picnic.”

“My Hawaiian Luau Dip,” she said. She couldn’t help feeling pleased.

“That was pretty amazing,” he told her.

“Michael said it tasted too foreign.”

“But that was what was good about it!”

“He asked me, he said, ‘Why on earth for Independence Day would you serve a dish with soy sauce in it?’”

Lindy said, “Mom.”

Pauline spun around so sharply that she knocked her elbow against the edge of the bar. “Well, hi!” she said.

Lindy was standing at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the newel post. She had changed into a halter top that tightly banded her flat little chest. Pauline said, “What is it, honey?” but Lindy just went on looking at her, her eyes so dark that Pauline couldn’t read them.

On the other end of the line, Alex was still speaking. “… got to admire a woman with cosmopolitan tastes,” he was saying. Pauline interrupted him. “Oops!” she said gaily. “Here’s my daughter!”

“Oh. Okay,” Alex said.

“Bye-bye for now!”

“Goodbye, Pauline.”

She hung up. Lindy said, “Who was that?”

“A friend.”

“What friend?”

“Just a friend, Lindy, asking, you know, a freezer question.”

“Freezer question?”

“A cooking question. You know.”

Lindy went on studying her. “Let’s get going,” Pauline told her, and she walked briskly toward the stairs, rubbing the point of her elbow where she’d hit it against the bar.

Someday they would have two cars, the way the people on the corner did, but right now they couldn’t afford it. Pauline had to take the children everywhere on foot, or else drive Michael downtown and pick him up after work. Still, to her, Elmview Acres was worth it. It was so green and safe and peaceful, so structured, so beautifully organized!

Michael had been against moving here, at first. He had said it was too expensive, and too far from everybody they knew. But how long could they have gone on living in that little bitty apartment where the children had to sleep three to a room? Where Pauline and Michael didn’t have a room, even — just a pull-out couch in the parlor? And anyone who visited had to enter through the kitchen?

Plus George and Lindy playing in the streets. That was the clincher. The two of them coming home grimy and gray, their knees dented with cinders. While out in Baltimore County every house had a lawn and every new development a swimming pool of its own.

The pool in Elmview Acres was a graceful blue guitar shape with folding chairs and recliners grouped around the shallow end for the women with young children. Today only two women sat there, though — just Mimi Drew and Joan Derby — because it was a Saturday morning, when most of the wives were running errands with their husbands. Pauline gave Mimi and Joan a wave and then wheeled the stroller toward the changing rooms. After her usual argument with George—”No, you cannot come to the ladies’ side; you’re old enough to go to the men’s side on your own now”—he trudged off with his rolled-up towel beneath his arm. She parked the stroller at the entrance to the ladies’ side and took her beach bag from the rear basket. Then she led Lindy and Karen into a chilly twilight that smelled of damp cement. A wooden bench ran the length of the room, and rough wooden booths lined the far wall. In one of the booths, she dressed Karen in a red-and-white swimsuit with rhumba ruffles across the seat to hide the bulkiness of her diaper. Lindy, meanwhile, clambered into a pair of boy’s trunks and a sleeveless knit undershirt — the only bathing costume she would agree to. Pauline had given up on that particular battle.

She sent the girls out of the booth—”But don’t leave the changing room, hear? You two sit right there on the bench and wait for me”—and got into her own suit, a blue gingham with wide, cuffed legs that were meant to be slimming. Lately it seemed she’d developed these bulges at the tops of her thighs.

If Alex Barrow should ever see those!

It often struck her as unfair, what a short time she’d been young and halfway decent to look at. Although Michael, bless his heart, contradicted her whenever she said so. “You’re still young! You’re not even thirty! You’re still the prettiest girl in town.” Which just went to show how little he noticed. Her face seemed to be growing heavier at the jowls, almost square, and only the unruly thickness of her hair could hide the fact that it was turning… not gray, quite yet, but duller, and crumblier in texture.