Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

The stairs inside were narrow and steep, with corrugated rubber treads, and the walls had not been painted for so long that the white had turned custard-yellow. When Katie flung open the door to her apartment, though, it was a whole other story. She had replaced her parents’ dark furniture with the very latest style, all in an automotive motif. Bands of chrome trimmed every edge, the cushions were covered in tangerine vinyl, and the rounded corners gave each piece an aerodynamic sleekness. “Come in! Come in!” she said. “You’re late! I was starting to think you’d forgotten!”

Katie had aged the best of any of them, in Pauline’s opinion. She still had her figure, and the hardships she had been through — the hasty marriage, “premature” baby, and contentious divorce — had given her face an intriguingly embittered look. Of the four women, she was the only one in slacks (capri pants in a chartreuse tropical print). The others seemed overdressed by comparison.

“Donald’s at my aunt’s,” she told them. “She’s keeping him for the night because I’ve got a date this evening and I figured I might as well take him there early and be done with it.”

A date! Imagine. The old ladies in the neighborhood shook their heads over Katie, thankful that her parents weren’t around to see how she’d turned out, but Pauline thought her life was fascinating. The ex-husband was heir to a brewing fortune in Milwaukee, and his alimony payments were how Katie could afford her new furniture and her clothes. She could even buy a better house, if she wanted, and Pauline couldn’t see why she didn’t. Pauline was always urging Katie to move out to Elmview Acres.

To be honest, the canasta game was only an excuse. It was true that they settled immediately around the folding table, and Marilyn shuffled the cards, and Wanda cut the deck… but meanwhile, they were talking a mile a minute. Katie’s upcoming date was an unknown, the brother of a friend; not much material there, at least for now. But she did have news of Janet Witt. Janet was living out in Hollywood, California, of all places. She had married a set designer twenty years her senior. And then Wanda reported receiving a letter from Anna Grant, Pauline’s old school friend, whom Pauline herself had just about lost touch with except for Christmas cards. “Does everybody know that Anna’s pregnant?” Wanda asked. “Finally! You remember she wanted to get her music degree first, but now at long last she’s expecting — in early September, she says.” Which reminded the others to ask Pauline about her sister. “She’s three weeks overdue, going on a month,” Pauline said. “Bigger than a house, and about to lose her mind.”

“Which is this, her third?” Katie asked.

“Her fourth. I don’t know what she was thinking.”

“I told Lukas,” Marilyn said, “I told him, ‘God gave me two hands, only two, to walk my children across the street with. There’s a message there,’ I said.”

“Well, sure, if you can follow it,” Wanda told her. (She herself had five daughters.) “Things don’t always go the way you plan them.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Pauline said, and everybody smiled at her, because they’d been the ones who had to console her when she found she was pregnant with Karen. As a girl she had wanted lots of children, but she had changed her mind after those hard early years with the first two so close together.

“I’ll never forget,” Wanda said, “the summer I was expecting Claire and nobody knew it yet, and my mother-in-law kept bringing me vegetables to put up and I would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not able to at this time of the month,’ because I hated, hated, hated canning and Mother Lipska held to that old-time belief that women shouldn’t preserve food on those certain days. She would say, ‘Still?’ and go away tut-tutting. Once she asked if I thought I should see a doctor. And then when she found out later that I’d been pregnant all along…!”

They laughed, even though they had heard that story before. There was something comforting about going over and over each other’s memories until they seemed like their own.

Marilyn was dealing. “One, one, one, one,” she said. “Two, two, two, two”—laying out each card meticulously, pausing now and then to take a puff of the cigarette that rested in the ashtray standing between her and Katie. Pauline checked her cards as she got them, but the others left them lying facedown while they went on with their conversation.

What they didn’t know, she thought (moving a three of spades next to a four of spades), was that Karen had not actually been an out-and-out mistake. She was the result of a reconciliation — Pauline and Michael flinging themselves together wildly, almost crazily, after one of their terrible fights, letting what happened happen, in fact wanting it to happen, at least at that particular instant. Was that why Karen was the sweetest-natured of the three children? A love child, Pauline called her in her mind. Even though she knew that a love child was something else entirely.

“Eleven,” Marilyn announced at last, and the rest of them picked up their cards.

Nor did Pauline mention Alex Barrow at any point. First off, they wouldn’t have known who he was. But also, she regretted dropping his name at the pool. So she kept quiet, much quieter than usual, and listened more than she talked. She listened to what Wanda’s husband had said about the new carpet; then to what Marilyn’s husband had said about her golabki — both remarks insulting, so that the other women gave scandalized little gasps of laughter. (Never mind that Marilyn’s husband was Wanda’s brother. In this room, he was The Opposite Side.) Did all wives believe they had chosen the wrong course?

When they had finished their game, drunk their coffee, eaten the last of the little sugared pastries from Kostka Brothers and wiped their fingers on Katie’s jazzy Miro-print napkins, it was Pauline who made the first move to leave. “Oh, not yet!” the others cried, but she said, “I’ve got a drive ahead, remember. And no doubt the Anxiety Committee will be wringing his hands at the window.” So they let her go, with hugs and pats and promises to phone.

She descended the wooden stairs feeling the faint sense of bereavement that always overtook her when she parted from her girlfriends.

As usual, the trip home seemed to take less time than traveling in the other direction. And certainly she had less trouble finding her way. Before she knew it she was back on Loch Raven, speeding northward, rolling her window almost shut to stop her hair from blowing. She had a tune repeating in her brain, something her children liked to sing that she hummed in disjointed snatches. I’m sorry, playmates, I cannot play with you…

The entrance to Elmview Acres was a double wrought-iron gate that always stood open, rising in two graceful curves from two square brick pillars. On the right-hand pillar, a black-and-brass sign read ELMVIEW ACRES, EST. 1947.

My dolly has the flu, boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo…

She turned right on Santa Rosa, passing the pool, which was unpopulated now except for the lifeguard silhouetted against the sunset on his high white chair; passing the clubhouse with its glass-encased bulletin board out front (bridge classes, child study classes, Garden Club workshops). She turned right on Beverly Drive and then, for the second time that day, she took an unpremeditated left onto Candlestick Lane.

If he happened to be in his yard, she would stop and roll down her window and call out some friendly question about the progress of his meat loaf. If he was not in his yard, she would drive on.

He was not in his yard. But she didn’t drive on.