Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

She phoned Wanda. They could talk about Marilyn. How was Marilyn really doing? Why was she still feeling sick? Shouldn’t she be over that now? But Wanda’s telephone rang ten times without an answer. She must be at one of her daughters’. Wanda was very close to her daughters.

Years ago, so long ago that Michael had still been doing the leg lifts prescribed by the physical therapist, he had told Pauline that if he ever got a terminal illness, a part of him would rejoice because at least then he could stop exercising. Pauline had been scandalized. “What a thought!” she’d said, but he had gone on to add, “And cocktail parties, and dinner parties, and visiting back and forth and talking with meaningless people about politics and the weather — I could give it all up. I could shut myself away and give up, and no one would blame me.”

“I can’t imagine,” Pauline had told him. “Me, I’d be doing the opposite. I’d be trying to cram as much as I could into the time I had left. I’d be dancing till dawn! I’d be greedy for people!”

Well, there you had the difference between them. It seemed unjust that she should be the one who was living on her own now, while he was happily ensconced in another household.

(“You should see the two of them,” Karen had once reported, in the amused and rueful tone she often used for Michael. “Sitting at their kitchen table drawing up their household budget, recording their gas expense and their mileage, sorting coupons for free car washes and carpet-cleaning discounts. Like two peas in a pod.”)

Pauline walked through the house turning off lights. In the bedroom, she adjusted the blinds and changed into her nightgown. The water in the bathroom sink ran plenty hot, she was glad to find. She ought to apply her new Nighttime Renutritive Cream, but it seemed like too much trouble.

She slid under the covers and reached for the magazine she had been reading the night before. An article on… what? On how to organize her time. It had put her to sleep, and no wonder. How to fill her time was the problem. She turned the page. She flipped past ads for colognes, for ladies’ razors, for tummy-slimming pantyhose. Her eyelids felt like heavy velvet draperies. A man in a tuxedo fastened a string of pearls around a beautiful woman’s bare neck. A noted nutritionist wrote about the hidden calories in our diet. Calories hidden in salad dressings, in so-called healthful granolas… so-called healthful granolas…

She woke with a start, and look! It was morning! No, that was just the lamplight. She sighed and flicked the switch off. Then she slid flat in her bed, but wouldn’t you know, now she couldn’t get back to sleep. She was like one of those dolls whose eyes close when they’re laid down, except she’d got it backwards. Lie down and she sprang instantly awake. In the past she had tried sleeping pills, but they had made her so groggy that she had felt helpless and frightened. Better just to struggle toward sleep on her own. Turn onto her side. Turn onto her back. Search for a cooler spot on the pillow.

It was thinking that made her nights so long. All the bad old thoughts came crowding to the front of her mind. She had lived her life wrong; she’d made a big mess of it. She had married the wrong man just because that was the track she’d been traveling on and she hadn’t known how to get off; so she’d gone ahead with it and behaved forever after like someone she wasn’t, someone shrewish and difficult. She had let the people she loved slip through her fingers — even Michael, whom she did love, it had turned out, wrong man or not: his patience and his steadiness and his endearingly earnest nature. How could it be possible that Michael really had left her?

And Lindy. Sometimes it seemed to her that Lindy was the one she’d loved most, although of course a mother loves all her children the same. Sometimes when the car radio played one of those old songs (“Are You Going to San Francisco?” was the saddest, so lost and faraway-sounding), she had to blink the tears back in order to see the road. Yet she had failed to keep Lindy from harm. She hadn’t protected her, hadn’t held fast to her, hadn’t even waited up for her when Lindy went out in the evenings. She had felt powerless, was why. She’d had no idea how to deal with it all. Her own girlhood had been so innocent and safe.

Still, other parents had managed. Other parents’ children hadn’t disappeared.

And she should have helped her father more during her mother’s illness. She should have had him to dinner more after her mother died. What could she have imagined to be more pressing than that?

She thought of her mother-in-law, aged and tremulous, whom she’d railed at for her ditheriness and her packrat ways. “Don’t badger me so; I’ll have a stroke,” Mother Anton had told her, and Pauline had snapped, “Fine. Let’s say you’ve already had one and you’re lying on the floor; just tell me from there which of these magazines I can throw out.” This long-ago exchange came back now word for word, and Pauline winced and covered her eyes with one hand.

Now she remembered that it wasn’t Michael, after all, who had stayed up late with her talking. Was it? No, it was someone else, some earlier boy whose name she couldn’t recall. She couldn’t picture his face, even, and she certainly couldn’t say what they had been discussing. All she knew for sure was, the two of them had talked and talked, and Pauline had not been alone.

One cold, gray morning in February of 1990—cold enough to have frosted overnight — George was scraping his windshield when he heard the sound of an engine starting up nearby. He glanced down his block of stately Colonial houses, each with its two or three vehicles parked out front, but the car spitting puffs of smoke belonged to no one he knew. It was a white Ford Falcon, ancient, dulled, rusted, dented, chattering as it idled in place. George turned away and finished scraping his windshield. Then he tossed the scraper onto his rear seat, settled behind the wheel, and started his own engine, which barely whispered as he slid away from the curb. He drove a Cadillac Eldorado — the last of the good decentsized cars, in his opinion.

Braking for a bus at North Charles, he glanced into his rearview mirror and happened to notice the Falcon just behind him. Its windshield was completely cleared, not scraped-looking but gleaming warmly from edge to edge; so he knew the car must have been running for some time. Maybe it had come from elsewhere to drop off a neighbor’s cleaning woman. By now the bus had lumbered on by. George focused forward again and took a right onto Charles Street.

His office was in Towson. He was a vice-president at Jennings, Jensen and had his own parking space, designated by a white wooden sign that read RESERVED GEO. ANTON. After he had locked his car he walked around to the trunk to retrieve his briefcase, and that was when he saw the Falcon backing out of the lot. Apparently it had turned in by mistake, because only members of his firm were allowed to park here. He watched it chug away toward York Road, its rear end unfashionably high off the ground. Then he forgot about it.

Several days passed before he saw the Falcon again. It was parked on Allegheny, a block and a half from his office. He noticed it as he stood saying goodbye to a client he’d had lunch with, and he faltered in mid-sentence when he caught sight of that distinctive rear end and the rust-freckled, crumpled trunk. A CARTER/MONDALE sticker hung in tatters from the bumper. Nobody sat inside, though. He collected himself and turned his attention back to his client.

Late the next Monday afternoon as he was driving home from work he saw the Falcon parked on Greenway, not far from his own street. This time it was occupied. He slowed and peered inside, but the car behind him honked and he was forced to drive on. Anyhow, he had seen enough to reassure him. The driver was a woman, mid-fortyish and nonthreatening and almost certainly a stranger, although he couldn’t swear to that in the half-light. Besides, she’d turned her face away when she saw him looking in. But that was only natural. Nobody likes to be spied on.