Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

Anna wore her can’t-budge-me expression. She was still a lovely woman, despite the gray hair and the netting of lines, but when she turned stubborn, something about the angle of her jaw reminded him of a nutcracker. She said, “Teaching is very important to me. I would never give it up willingly.”

“Well, listen to what you just told me,” he said. “Didn’t you say all you could think of was getting back home and collapsing? And I’m saying there is something you can do about it.”

“But I don’t want to do anything about it.”

“Okay,” he said. “I give up.”

“I’ll call if the meeting runs too late for me to walk home,” she said as she got out of the car. “Have a good day, dear.”

“You too,” he said. “Bye.”

But as he reversed and pulled out of the lot and started back down the driveway, he was turning their conversation over in his mind. If a person mentioned a problem, wasn’t it only natural for the other person to offer some helpful suggestion? Particularly when the other person was your spouse! Married couples supported each other. But not according to Anna. Anna needed no one. To her, Michael was merely a frill. A luxury. A dessert.

Well, maybe he should feel liberated. He was under no obligation; it was not up to him to fix things. What a relief, right?

He turned onto Falls Road and said, out loud, “She can be my dessert, too.”

This was not as satisfying as it sounded.

He and Anna would be married twenty-two years come next June. Amazing; it still felt so much like a second marriage. Peaceful though it was, it felt like an extra marriage, not quite the real thing — in fact, maybe just an extreme, extended reaction to one of his fights with Pauline. Although if he lived another eight years after that, he could say that he had actually been married longer to Anna. And the chances were that he would live eight years; it was entirely possible. His doctor had told him he had the heart of a man of sixty. At first, Michael had missed the point. “Sixty!” he’d said. “That’s ancient!” He didn’t see himself as old. He had a stoop to his back, a tremor to his hands, and his face was some stern old codger’s he didn’t recognize in the mirror; but internally he was still twenty, riding off to war while a girl in a red coat waved goodbye.

Today was Pearl Harbor Day, and they were making more of a to-do about it than usual because it was not just the sixtieth anniversary but the first one after the World Trade Center attack. Patriotic movies had been showing all week on TV. Veterans were being interviewed — creaky-voiced old fellows with eyes so hooded in wrinkles that you wondered how they could see. Now the car radio was replaying Roosevelt’s speech. Day of infamy, he said. Michael turned left onto Northern Parkway and found himself behind a rush-hour river of brake lights. Damn, he should have taken Harvest Road. He came to a stop and wriggled out of his wool jacket and laid it on the seat next to him.

It always surprised him that when he and Anna disagreed, the disagreement remained unconnected to the rest of their lives. Anna never linked it to other disagreements, never dredged up past issues or seemed to harbor any ill will afterward. Two minutes later she’d be going about her business again. And even when they out-and-out quarreled, she didn’t appear to imagine that this could mean the end of the marriage. Oh, once or twice in the early days he himself had brought up the possibility, out of a kind of reflex. “You can always get a divorce if you feel so strongly about it.” But Anna’s clear gaze had registered incomprehension. “Divorce?” she had said, wonderingly.

In that dream last night, he was walking through a misty valley trying to find his way home. Somebody was helping him, a beautiful golden-haired woman with a wand. Why, it was the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz. Only now did he recognize her. She told him not to let anyone kiss him behind the left ear, and not to let the sun get behind his left shoulder, and not to listen to footsteps following behind him on the road. “In short,” she said in her buttery voice, “don’t ever look back, if you want to see your home again.” And then he had awakened.

At Schneider’s he decided rope putty was the answer — inexpensive, convenient, hard to mess up. (He was not so adept as he used to be.) After he had chosen a box, he took a look around the rest of the store, which was no bigger than some closets but managed to contain just about everything a person could need. He studied an array of adhesive-backed hooks. Hadn’t he wanted hooks for some purpose just a couple of days ago? He read the fine print on a sack of sidewalk de-icer. Trouble was, so many of these products damaged your grass and your grouting.

The only other customers were a little three-person family — a tall young father in glasses and a tiny, dark-haired mother about half the father’s height and a very small boy in a buzz cut. They were paying for a sled, the old-fashioned wooden kind with metal runners that Schneider’s displayed on the sidewalk out front, and the little boy was beside himself with excitement. Michael couldn’t help smiling at him. “You suppose you’ll actually get to use that?” he asked, and the child stopped his dance of joy just long enough to think the question over.

Nowadays Michael came in contact with so few small children that he had almost forgotten how to talk to them. George’s son and daughter were certainly old enough to have children of their own, but Jojo at thirty was still living the life of a teenager, touring with a rock band called Dark at the End of the Tunnel, and Samantha was single-mindedly pursuing her medical studies with no apparent thought of marriage. Neither one of them seemed likely to produce any little ones, at least not any time soon. As for Pagan’s two, they were way past the toddler stage — twelve and ten, more interesting to talk with now, surely, but no longer all chatter and giggles and unself-conscious glee. Bobby was bristling with braces that made his mouth look bunchy and misshapen. Polly had adopted a very unfortunate hairstyle: two fat, ball-shaped ponytails where a teddy bear’s ears would be, the resemblance magnified by scrunchies of brown fake fur.

Polly’s real name was Pauline.

Why had nobody thought to name a child after Michael?

Sometimes at family gatherings, when people started telling funny stories about Pauline, Michael felt a pinch of jealousy. Didn’t they remember how difficult Pauline used to be? How demanding? How irritating? (“I had to give my homeless person a five today because I didn’t have any ones,” she said on the very last occasion he had seen her, and just that word “my,” its cozy presumption, was enough to make him remember why they had divorced.)

He moved up to the counter and paid for his purchase, handing over exact change to the penny, declining a bag. Outside, he examined an array of snow shovels before proceeding reluctantly to his car. There was something so reassuring about hardware stores. We can help you deal with anything, was the message he drew from them. Drafty windows, icy sidewalks, mildew, moths, weeds… We’ve seen it all! You’ll be okay!

If he were closer to Lindy he might get to know those children — her granddaughters, or step-granddaughters, he supposed they would be: three-year-old twins and an infant. But his relationship with Lindy was little more than polite, an improvement over the old days but still nothing much to brag about. They saw each other just once or twice a year, usually at Pagan’s place when there was some family gathering. Their conversations tended to skate across the surface a while and then break through to dark water with a crash. Last summer, for instance, Lindy had announced that their family used to remind her of an animal caught in a trap. Out of the blue she had said that! With no provocation! They’d been discussing Bobby and Polly’s recent visit to the circus and Michael had asked, merely holding up his end of things, whether Lindy remembered her own circus trips as a child. “Lord, yes,” she’d said. “Good Lord above, those eternal family excursions! ‘Just us,’ Mom would say, ‘just the five of us,’ like that was something to be desired, and I’ll never forget how claustrophobic that made me feel. Just the five of us in this wretched, tangled knot, inward-turned, stunted, like a trapped fox chewing its own leg off.”