Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Now, sweetie,” he said.

“We’ve had such extraordinary troubles,” she said, “and somehow they’ve turned us ordinary. That’s what’s so hard to figure. We’re not a special family anymore.”

“Why, sweetie, of course we’re special,” he said.

“We’ve turned uncertain. We’ve turned into worriers.”

“Bee, sweetie.”

“Isn’t it amazing?”

It was astounding, if he thought about it. But he was careful not to.

The weather began to grow warmer, and Doug raised all the windows and lugged the summer clothing down from the attic for Bee. Across the street, the foreigners came out in their shirtsleeves to install an electric garage-door opener they’d ordered from a catalog. Doug found this amusing. A door that opened on its own, for a car that could barely move on its own! Of course he kept them company while they worked, but the door in question was solid wood and very heavy, potentially lethal, and he’d just as soon not be standing under it when calamity struck. He stayed several feet away, watching Ollie teeter on a kitchen chair as he screwed something to a rafter overhead. Then when Doug got bored he ambled inside with the two who were less mechanically inclined, leaving Ollie and Fred and John Two to carry on. He refused a beer (it was ten in the morning) but accepted a seat by the window, where a light breeze stirred the tattered paper shade.

From here the garage was invisible, since it lay even with the front of the house, but he could see Fred standing in the drive with the pushbutton control in both hands, pressing hard and then harder. Doug grinned. Fred leaned forward, his face a mask of straining muscle, and he bore down on the button with all his might. You didn’t have to set eyes on the door to know it wasn’t reacting. Meanwhile Ollie walked out to the street and climbed into the car and started the engine, and John Two removed a brick from under the left rear wheel. Optimistic of them; Doug foresaw a good deal more work before the garage would be ready for an occupant. Through the open window he heard the croupy putt-putt as the car turned in and rolled up the drive and sat idling. “In another catalog,” John One was saying, “we have seen remarkable invention: automatic yard lights! That illuminate when dark falls! We plan to send away for them immediately.”

“I can hardly wait,” Doug said, and then he twisted in his chair because he thought he noticed someone emerging from his own house, but it was only shrubbery stirring in the breeze.

He was a touch nearsighted, and the mesh of the window screen seemed more distinct to him than what lay beyond it. What lay beyond it — home — had the blocky, blurred appearance of something worked in needlepoint, each tiny square in the screen filled with a square of color. Not only was there a needlepoint house but also a needlepoint car out front, a needlepoint swing on the porch, a needlepoint bicycle in the yard. His entire little world: a cozy, old-fashioned sampler stitched in place forever.

The best thing about the foreigners, he decided, was how they thought living in America was a story they were reading, or a movie they were watching. It was happening to someone else; it wasn’t theirs. Good Lord, not even their names were theirs. Here they spoke lines invented by other people, not genuine language — not the language that simply is , with no need for translation. Here they wore blue denim costumes and inhabited a Hollywood set complete with make-believe furniture. But when they went back home, there they’d behave as seriously as anyone. They would fall in love and marry and have children and they’d agonize over their children’s problems, and struggle to get ahead, and practice their professions soberly and efficiently. What Doug was witnessing was only a brief holiday from their real lives.

He was pleased by this notion. He thought he’d examine it further later on — consider, say, what happened to those foreigners who ended up not going home. The holiday couldn’t last forever, could it? Was there a certain moment when the movie set turned solid? But for now, he didn’t bother himself with all that. He was happy just to sit here, letting some of their Time Out rub off on him.

Then Ollie turned toward the house and called, “Come see!” and for courtesy’s sake, Doug rose and followed Ray and John One to the yard. Other neighbors were here too, he realized. It looked like a party. He joined them and stood squinting in the sunshine, smiling at the foreigners’ car which sat half inside the garage and half out like a crumpled beer can, with the door bisecting it neatly across the middle.

Every Saturday morning, the Church of the Second Chance gathered to perform good works. Sometimes they went to an ailing member’s place and helped with the cleaning or the fixing up. Sometimes they went to some stranger. Today — a warm, sunny day in early September — they met at the little house where Reverend Emmett lived with his widowed mother. Reverend Emmett was not a salaried minister. His sole means of support was a part-time counseling job at a private girls’ school. So when his house needed painting (as it sorely did now, with the old paint hanging in ribbons off the clapboards), all his flock pitched in to take care of it.

Ian brought the three children, dressed in their oldest clothes. Thomas and Daphne loved Good Works but Agatha had to be talked into coming. At fifteen she was balky and resentful, given to fits of moody despair. Ian never could decide: should he force her to participate for her own good? Or would that just alienate her further? This morning, though, he’d had an easier time than usual. He suspected her of harboring a certain furtive interest in the details of Reverend Emmett’s private life.

The house was a one-story cottage, more gray than white, lying in a modest neighborhood east of York Road. By the time Ian and the children arrived, several members of the congregation were already setting out paint cans and brushes. Mrs. Jordan (Sister Jessie now, but Ian found it hard to switch) was spreading a drop-cloth over the boxwoods, and Reverend Emmett was perched on a ladder wire-brushing the porch overhang. Ian grabbed a ladder of his own and went to take the shutters down. Reverend Emmett’s mother came out in high heels and an aqua knit dress and asked if there was any little thing she could do, but they all said no. (What could they say? Her cardigan draped her shoulders so genteelly, with the sleeves turned back a precise two inches.)

Partway through the job, someone Ian didn’t know was sent to assist him. This was a cadaverously thin man in his thirties with a narrow ribbon of beard like Abraham Lincoln’s. Ian glanced at him curiously (their church didn’t see many guests), and the man said, “I’m Eli Everjohn. Bertha King’s son-in-law; we’re visiting from over Caro Mill.”

“Ian Bedloe,” Ian said.

He could see now who the man’s wife must be — the strawberry blonde who did resemble Sister Bertha, come to think of it, scraping clapboards with the children. She seemed much too pretty for such a knobby, gangling husband. This Eli handled tools at a remove. He handled his own hands at a remove, as if operating one of those claw arrangements where you try to scoop up prizes. His task was to take the hinges off the shutters and stow them in a bucket, which should have been easy enough; but the screwdriver seemed to confound him and he let it slip so many times that the screw heads were getting mangled. “Tell you what,” Ian said, setting down a shutter. “I’ll see to this and you can have my job.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that!” the man said. “I’m scared of heights.”