Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

Next to the curb, Danny’s blue Chevy stood waiting. The bride and groom were driving to Williamsburg for their honeymoon — just a three-day trip because that was the longest Lucy felt comfortable leaving the children. Some of the neighborhood teenagers had tied tin cans to the rear bumper and chalked JUST MARRIED across the trunk. Married! Ian thought, and he realized, all at once, that Danny really had gone through with it. He was a husband now and would never again stop by Ian’s bedroom door at night, his suit coat hooked over his thumb, to talk about the Baltimore Colts. Ian felt a rush of sorrow. But Cicely’s parents wouldn’t stay at the reception forever, so he said, “Let’s go,” and they started walking toward her house.

That summer, Ian got a job with Sid ’n’ Ed’s A-l Movers — a very local sort of company consisting of a single van. Each morning he reported to a garage on Greenmount, and then he and two lean, black, jokey men drove to some shabby house where they heaved liquor cartons and furniture into the van for a couple of hours. Then they drove to some other house, often even shabbier, and heaved it all out again. Ian managed to enjoy the work because he thought of it as weight lifting. He had always been very conscious of muscles. As a small boy, admiring Danny and his friends at sports, he had focused upon their forearms — the braiding beneath the skin as they swung a bat or punched a volleyball. There, he thought, was the telling difference, more than whiskers or deep voices. And he had examined his own reedy arms and wondered if they would ever change. But when it happened he must have been asleep, for all at once two summers ago he had noticed as he was mowing the lawn — why, look at that! The ropy muscles from wrist to elbow, the distinct blue cords of his veins. He had flexed a fist and gazed down, hypnotized, till his mother hallooed from the porch and asked how long he planned to stand there.

Well, like a lot of other things, muscles had turned out to be no big deal after all. (Now he thought it might be sleeping with a girl that made the difference.) But even so, he continued to work at building himself up. He deliberately chose the heaviest pieces of furniture, pushing ahead of Lou and LeDon, who were happy to lag behind with the bric-a-brac. Then in the evenings he came home hot and sweaty and swaggery, and his mother would say, “Phew! Go take a shower before you do another thing.” He stood under the shower till the water ran cold, after which he dressed in fresh jeans and a T-shirt and went off to eat dinner at Cicely’s. His mother hardly cooked at all that summer. Claudia was sick as a dog with her latest pregnancy, so often as not Bee would have spent the day baby-sitting. Sometimes she said, “What, you’re eating at the Browns’ again ?” But he could tell she was just as glad. She and his father would have a sandwich in front of the TV, or they’d walk over to Lipton’s. She said, “Mind you don’t wear out your welcome, now.” Then she forgot about him.

He and Cicely twined their feet together under the table while her mother served him double portions of everything. Cicely slid a hand secretly up his thigh, and Ian rearranged his napkin and swallowed and told Mrs. Brown how much he liked her cooking. Mr. Brown was usually absent, out selling insurance to homeowners who could be reached only in the evenings, but Cicely’s little brother was there — a pest and a nuisance. He would tag along after dinner, boring Ian to death with baseball questions. He hung around the two of them on the screened back porch. “Stee-vie!” Cicely would say, and Stevie would ask, “What? What am I doing?”

“Don’t you have any friends of your own?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Ma, Stevie’s being a brat again.”

“Stevie, come along inside, now,” Mrs. Brown would call.

Then Stevie would leave, kicking the glider as he passed and lowering his prickly, white-blond head so no one could see his face.

Ian and Cicely had been going together since ninth grade. They were planning to get married after college, although sometimes Cicely teased him and said she’d have to see who else asked her, first. “Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and not for better,” she said. But then she would move over into Ian’s lap and wrap her arms around his neck. She smelled of baby powder, warm and pink. She wore pink underwear, too — a slippery pink bra with lace edges. Sometimes when they had been kissing a while she would let him unfasten the hook at the back, but he had to be careful not to tickle. She was the most ticklish person he had ever met. Things would just be getting interesting when all at once she would pull away and fall into peals of helpless laughter. Ian felt like a fool when that happened. “Oh, great. Just great,” he would say, and she would say, “It’s not my fault if your hands are cold.”

“Cold? It’s ninety-eight degrees out.”

“That’s not my fault.”

Did other girls behave like this? He would bet they didn’t. He wished she were, oh, more womanly, sometimes. More experienced. He said, “This is supposed to be a moment of romantic passion, must I remind you.” He said, “We’re not in kindergarten, here.” Once he said, “Have you ever considered wearing stockings that have seams?” But when Cicely started laughing she just couldn’t seem to stop, and all she did was shake her head and wipe the tears from her eyes.

One August afternoon, he came home from work to find a note on the hall table: Claudia in hospital, Dad and I staying with kids . At first he didn’t think much about this. Claudia was nearly always in the hospital, it seemed to him, giving birth to one baby or another. He dropped the note in the wastebasket and climbed the stairs, with the dog panting hopefully behind him. But then while he was showering, it occurred to him that Claudia couldn’t be having her baby yet. She didn’t even look very pregnant yet. He’d better call his mother and find out what was wrong.

As soon as he was dressed, he bounded back downstairs to use the phone. But on the next-to-last step he heard somebody crossing the dining room. Beastie, following close on his heels, uttered a low growl. Then Lucy appeared in the doorway. “Ian?” she said.

“Oh,” he said.

She wore a big white shirt of Danny’s and a pair of red pedal pushers, and her hair was tied back in a red bandanna. She looked about twelve years old. “Have you talked with your mom yet?” she asked him.

“No, but she left a note. What’s the matter with Claudia?”

“Oh, nothing all that serious. Just, you know, a little bleeding …”

Ian began studying an area slightly above her head.

“So anyway,” she said, “I thought I’d fix you some supper. Ordinarily I’d invite you to our place, but we’re going out so I brought something over. There’s potato salad, and ham, and I’ve put some peas on the stove to warm up.”

He didn’t tell her he usually ate at Cicely’s. All summer the family had tactfully left her and Danny alone, allowing them to get past the honeymoon stage, so they met only on special occasions like Bee’s birthday and the Fourth of July. Lucy must not have any notion about their day-to-day lives.

He followed her through the dining room to the kitchen, where he found Thomas and Agatha sitting in two straight-backed chairs. There was something eerie about children who kept so quiet you didn’t realize they were in the house. Thomas held a large, naked doll with a matted wig. Agatha’s hands were folded tidily on the table in front of her. They looked at Ian with no more expression than the doll wore. Ian said, “Well, hi, gang,” but neither of them answered.