Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Looks to me like you might’ve brought the wire in this window,” Doug told him.

But Fred shrugged and said, “More far to fall.”

“Oh,” Doug said.

Presumably, Fred was not one of the engineering students.

Fred turned on the radio and music started playing, some Middle Eastern tune without an end or a beginning. He half closed his eyes and nodded his head to the beat.

“Well, I’d better be going,” Doug said.

“You know what means these words?” Fred asked. “A young man is telling farewell to his sweetheart, he is saying to her now—”

“Gosh, Beastie must be wondering where I’ve got to,” Doug said. “I’ll just see myself out, never mind.”

He had thought it would be a relief to escape the music, but after he left — after he returned home, even, and unsnapped Beastie’s leash — the tune continued to wind through his head, blurred and wandery and mysteriously exciting.

A couple of days later, the foreigners tried wiring the radio to speakers set strategically around the house. The reason Doug found out about it was, Fred came over to ask what those U-shaped nails were called again. “Staples,” Doug told him, standing at the door in his slippers.

“No, no. Staples are for paper,” Fred said firmly.

“But the nails are called staples too. See, what you want is …” Doug said, and then he said, “Wait here. I think I may have some down in the basement.”

So one thing led to another. He found the staples, he went over to help, he stayed for a beer afterward, and before long he was more or less hanging out there. They always had some harebrained project going, something he could assist with or (more often) advise them not to attempt; and because they were students, keeping students’ irregular hours, he could generally count on finding at least a couple of them at home. Five were currently living there: Fred, Ray, John, John Two, and Ollie. On weekends more arrived — fellow countrymen studying elsewhere — and some of the original five disappeared. Doug left them alone on weekends. He preferred late weekday afternoons, when the smells of spice and burnt onions had already started rising from Ollie’s blackened saucepans in the kitchen and the others lolled in the living room with their beers. The living room was furnished with two webbed aluminum beach lounges, a wrought-iron lawn chair, and a box spring propped on four stacks of faded textbooks. Over the fireplace hung a wrinkled paper poster of a belly dancer drinking a Pepsi. A collapsible metal TV tray held the telephone, and the wall above it was scribbled all over with names and numbers and Middle Eastern curlicues. Doug liked that idea — that a wall could serve as a phone directory. It struck him as very practical. He would squint at the writing until it turned lacy and decorative, and then he’d take another sip of beer.

These people weren’t much in the way of drinkers. They appeared to view alcohol as yet another inscrutable American convention, and they would dangle their own beers politely, forgetting them for long minutes; so Doug never had more than one. Then he’d say, “Well, back to the fray,” and they would rise to see him off, thanking him once again for whatever he’d done.

At home, by comparison, everything seemed so permanent — the rooms layered over with rugs and upholstered furniture and framed pictures. The grandchildren added layers of their own; the hall was awash in cast-off jackets and schoolbooks. Bee would be in the kitchen starting supper. (How unadorned the Bedloes’ suppers smelled! Plain meat, boiled vegetables, baked potatoes.) And if Ian was back from work he’d be occupied with the kids — sorting out whose night it was to set the table, arbitrating their disputes or even taking part in them as if he were a kid himself. Listen to him with Daphne, for instance. She was nagging him to find her green sweater; tomorrow was St. Patrick’s Day. “Your green sweater’s in the wash,” he said, and that should have been the end of it — would have been, if Bee had been in charge. But Daphne pressed on, wheedling. “Please? Please, Ian? They’ll make fun of me if I don’t wear something green.”

“Tell them your eyes are the something green.”

“My what? My eyes? But they’re blue.”

“Well, if anybody points that out, put on this injured look and say, ‘Oh. I’ve always liked to think of them as green.’ ”

“Oh, Ian,” Daphne said. “You’re such a silly.”

He was, Doug reflected. And a sucker besides. For sure enough, later that night he heard the washing machine start churning.

Most days Ian took the car, but Tuesdays he caught the bus to work so Doug could drive Bee to the doctor. She had to go every single week. Doug knew that doctor’s waiting room so well by now that he could see it in his dreams. A leggy, wan philodendron plant hung over the vinyl couch. A table was piled with magazines you would have to be desperate to read — densely printed journals devoted to infinitesimal research findings.

Two other doctors shared the office: a dermatologist and an ophthalmologist. One morning Doug saw the ophthalmologist talking with a very attractive young woman at the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist must have proposed some time or date, because the young woman shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t make it then.”

“Can’t make it?” the doctor asked. “This is surgery, not a hair appointment. We’re talking about your eyesight!”

“I’m busy that day,” the young woman said.

“Miss Wilson, maybe you don’t understand. This is the kind of problem you take care of now , you take care of yesterday . Not next week or next month. I can’t state that too strongly.”

“Yes, but I happen to be occupied that day,” the young woman said.

Then Bee came out of Dr. Plumm’s office, and Doug didn’t get to hear the end of the conversation. He kept thinking about it, though. What could make a person defer such crucial surgery? She was meeting a lover? But she could always meet him another day. She’d be fired from her job? But no employer was that hardhearted. Nothing Doug came up with was sufficient explanation.

Imagine being so offhand about your eyesight. About your life, was what it amounted to. As if you wouldn’t have to endure the consequences forever and ever after.

Wednesday their daughter dropped by to help with the heavier cleaning. She breezed in around lunchtime with a casserole for supper and a pair of stretchy gloves she’d heard would magically ease arthritic fingers. “Ordinary department-store gloves, I saw this last night on the evening news,” she told Bee. “You’re lucky I got them when I did; I went to Hochschild’s. Don’t you know there’ll be a big rush for them.”

“Yes, dear, that was very nice of you,” Bee said dutifully. She already owned gloves, medically prescribed, much more official than these were. Still, she put these on and spread her hands out as flat as possible, testing. She was wearing one of Ian’s sweatshirts and baggy slacks and slipper-socks. In the gloves, which were the dainty, white, lady’s-tea kind, she looked a little bit crazy.

Claudia filled a bucket in the kitchen sink and added a shot of ammonia. “Going to tackle that chandelier,” she told them. “I noticed it last week. A disgrace! ”

Probably it was Ian’s housekeeping she was so indignant with — or just time itself, time that had coated each prism with dust. She wasn’t thinking how it sounded to waltz into a person’s home and announce that it was filthy. Doug cast a sideways glance at Bee to see how she was taking it. Her eyes were teary, but that could have been the ammonia. He waited till Claudia had left the kitchen, sloshing her bucket into the dining room, and then he laid a hand on top of Bee’s. “Peculiar, isn’t it?” he said. “First you’re scolding your children and then all at once they’re so smart they’re scolding you. ”