Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

It was a color photograph, with JUN 63 stamped on the border. A tin house trailer with cinder blocks for a doorstep. A pretty woman standing on the cinder blocks — black hair puffing to her shoulders, bright lipstick, ruffled pink dress — holding a scowly baby (him!) in nothing but a diaper, while a smaller, stubbier Agatha wearing a polka-dot playsuit stood alongside and reached up to touch the baby’s foot.

If only you could climb into photographs. If only you could take a running jump and land there, deep inside! The frill at his mother’s neckline must have made pretzel sounds in his ear. Her bare arms must have stuck to his skin a little in the hot sunshine. His sister must have thought he was cute, back then, and interesting.

It was spooky that he had no memory of that moment. It was like talking in your sleep, where they tell you in the morning what you said and you ask, “I did? I said that?” and laugh at your own crazy words as if they’d come from someone else. In fact, he always thought of the baby in the photo as a whole other person — as “he,” not “I”—even though he knew better. “Why were you hanging onto his foot?” he asked now.

“I forget,” Agatha said, sounding tired.

“You don’t remember being there?”

“I remember! I remember everything! Just not why I was doing that with your foot.”

“Where was our father?”

“Maybe he was taking the picture.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“Of course I do! I know. He was taking our picture.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten, too,” Thomas said. “Maybe these aren’t even us.”

“Of course they’re us. Who else would they be? I remember our trailer and our yellow mailbox, and this dirt road or driveway or something with grass and flowers in the middle. I remember this huge, enormous rainbow and it started in the road and bent all the way over our house.”

“What! Really? A rainbow?” Thomas said. He had an amazing thought. He got so excited he slid off the bed, not forgetting to be careful of the picture. “Then, Agatha!” he said. “Listen! Maybe that’s how we could find where we used to live.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could ask for the trailer with the rainbow.”

She gave him a look. He could see he’d walked into something, but he didn’t know what.

“Well, they must have maps of things like that,” he said. “Don’t they? Maps that show where the really big, really famous rainbows are?”

“Thomas,” Agatha said. She rolled her eyes. Clearly it was almost more than she could manage to go on dealing with him. “For gosh sake, Thomas,” she said, “rainbows don’t just sit around forever. What do you think, it’s still there waiting for us? Get yourself a brain someday, Thomas.”

Then she took hold of the picture — with her fingers right on the colored part! — and pulled it out of his hands and carried it back to the closet.

“Thomas?” Ian called from the second floor. “Are you cleaned up?”

“Just about.”

He would never know as much as Agatha did, Thomas thought while he was clomping down the stairs. He would always be left out of things. People would forever be using words he’d never heard of, or sharing jokes he didn’t get the point of, or driving him places they hadn’t bothered to tell him about; or maybe (as they claimed) they had told him, and he had just forgotten or been too little to understand.

“Last night I dreamed a terrible dream,” Aunt Claudia said at dinner. “I think it had something to do with my turning thirty-eight.”

She was twisted around in her seat, feeding baked potato to Georgie in his high chair. Over her shoulder she said, “I opened the door to the broom cupboard and this burglar jumped out at me. I kept trying to call for help but all I managed was this pathetic little whimper and then I woke up.”

“How does that relate to turning thirty-eight?” her husband asked her.

“Well, it’s scary, Macy. Thirty-eight sounds so much like forty. Forty! That’s middle-aged.”

She didn’t look middle-aged. She didn’t have gray hair or anything. Her hair was brown like Ian’s, cut almost as short, and her face was smooth and tanned. Her clothes weren’t middle-aged, either: jeans and a floppy plaid shirt. Whenever Georgie got hungry she would tuck him right under her shirt without unbuttoning it and fiddle with some kind of snaps or hooks inside and then let him nurse. Thomas thought that was fascinating. He hoped it would happen this evening.

“You know what I believe?” she asked now, wiping Georgie’s mouth with a corner of her napkin. “I believe what I was trying to do was, teach myself how to scream.”

Grandpa said, “Why, hon, I would think you’d already know how.”

“I was speaking figuratively, Dad. Here I am, thirty-eight years old and I’ve never, I don’t know, never said anything. Everything’s so sort of level all the time. Tonight, for instance: here we sit. Nice cheerful chitchat, baseball standings, weather forecast, difficult ages eating in the kitchen …”

By “difficult ages,” she meant the older children — ten to fifteen, Agatha to Abbie. The “biggies,” Grandma called them. The people with exciting things to say. Thomas could hear them even from the dining room. Cindy was telling a story and the others were laughing and Barney was saying, “Wait, you left out the most important part!”

Here in the dining room, there were no important parts. Just dull, dull conversation among the grownups while the “littlies” secretly fed their suppers to Beastie under the table. Cicely was holding up a pinwheel biscuit and carefully unwinding it. Ian kept glancing over at her, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Well, Claudia,” Grandma said, “would you prefer it if we moaned and groaned and carried on?”

“No, no,” Claudia said, “I don’t mean that exactly; I mean … oh, I don’t know. I guess I’m just going through the middle-aged blues.”

“Nonsense, you’re nowhere near middle-aged,” Grandma told her. “What an idea! You’re just a slip of a girl still. You still have your youth and your wonderful life and everything to look forward to.” She raised her wineglass. Thomas could tell her arthritis was bad tonight because she used both hands. “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” she said.

Macy and Grandpa raised their glasses, too, and Cicely set aside the biscuit to raise hers. Ian, who didn’t drink, held up his water tumbler. “Happy birthday,” they all said.

“Well, thanks,” Claudia told them.

She thought a moment, and then she said, “Thank you very much,” and smiled around the table and took a sip from her own glass.

The cake was served in the living room, so they could all sing “Happy Birthday” together. But really just the grownups and the little ones sang. The difficult ages seemed to think singing was beneath them, so after the first line Thomas didn’t sing either. Then just as Claudia was blowing out the candles, Mrs. Jordan arrived from across the street along with two of the foreigners. The foreigners brought a third foreigner named Bob who apparently used to live with them. Bob greeted Thomas by name but Thomas didn’t remember him. “You were only so much high,” Bob told him, setting his palm about six inches above the floor. “You wore little, little sneakers and your mother was very nice lady.”

“My mother?” Thomas asked. “Did you know her?”

“Of course I knew her. She was very pretty, very kind lady.”

Thomas was hoping to hear more, but Mrs. Jordan came over then and started filling Bob in on all the neighborhood news: how Mr. Webb had finally gone to be dried out and the newlyweds had had a baby and Rafe Hamnett’s sexy twin daughters were making life a living hell for his girlfriend. Thomas wandered off finally.