Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

Daphne thought of the dress form in the attic storeroom — Bee’s figure but with a waist, with a higher bosom. Once their grandma had been a happy woman, she supposed. Back before everything changed.

“Will these be enough?” Thomas asked, arriving with two cartons. But Agatha flapped a hand without looking. “Shall I pack these things on the floor?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t bother,” Agatha told him, and then she turned and wandered toward the stairs.

“Just leave them here?” he asked Daphne.

“Whatever,” Daphne said.

In fact they remained there the rest of the day, obstructing the hall till Daphne finally stuffed them back in the closet. She piled everything onto the bottom shelf, and she set the cardboard cartons inside and closed the door.

“I dreamed this high-school boy was proposing to me,” Agatha said at breakfast. “He told me to name a date. He said, ‘How about Wednesday? Monday is always busy and Tuesday is always rainy.’ I said, ‘Wait, I’m … wait,’ I said. ‘I think you ought to know that I’m quite a bit older than you.’ Then I woke up, and I laughed out loud. Did you hear me laughing, Stu? I mean, older was the least of it. I should have said, ‘Wait, there’s another thing, too! It so happens I’m already married.’ ”

“I dreamed I was going blind,” Thomas said. “Everyone said, ‘Oh, how awful, we’re so sorry for you.’ I said, ‘Sorry? Why? I’ve had twenty-six years of perfect vision!’ I really meant it, too. I sounded like one of those inspirational stories we used to read in Bible camp.”

“I dreamed I was seeing patients,” Stuart said. “They all had some kind of rash and I was trying to remember my dermatology. It didn’t seem to occur to me to tell them that wasn’t my field.”

Agatha said, “I’d never go into dermatology.”

They were having English muffins and juice — just the four of them, because it was ten-thirty and Doug and Ian had eaten breakfast hours ago. Doug was in the dining room laying out a game of solitaire, the soft flip-flip of his cards providing a kind of background rhythm. Ian was moving around the kitchen wiping off counters. When he passed near Daphne he smiled down at her and said, “What did you dream, Daphne?” Something about his crinkled eyes and the kindly attentiveness of his expression made her sad, but she smiled back and said, “Oh, nothing.”

“Dermatology’s not bad,” Stuart was saying. “At least dermatologists don’t have night call.”

“But it’s so superficial,” Agatha said.

“You should see Agatha with her patients,” Stuart told the others. “She’s amazing. She’ll say straight out to them, ‘What you have can’t be cured.’ I think they feel relieved to finally hear the truth.”

“I say, ‘What you have can’t be cured at this particular time, ” Agatha corrected him. “There’s a difference.”

Daphne couldn’t imagine that either version would be as much of a relief as Stuart supposed.

“Speaking of time,” Ian said, draping his dishcloth over the faucet, “when exactly does your plane take off, Ag?”

“Somewhere around noon, I think. Why?”

“Well, I’m wondering about church. If I wanted to go to church I’d have to leave right now.”

“Go, then,” she told him.

“But if your flight’s at noon—”

“Go! Grandpa can drive us.”

Ian hesitated. Daphne knew what he was thinking. He was weighing Sunday services, which he never missed if he could help it, against the possibility of hurting Agatha’s feelings. And Agatha, with her chin raised defiantly and her glasses flashing an opaque white light, would most definitely have hurt feelings. Daphne knew that if Ian did not. Finally Ian said, “Well, if you’re sure …” and Agatha snapped, “Absolutely! Go.”

He didn’t seem to catch her tone. (Or he didn’t want to catch it.) He rounded the table to kiss her goodbye. “It’s been wonderful having you,” he said. She looked away from him. He shook Stuart’s hand. “Stuart, I hope you two will come again at Christmas.”

“We’ll try,” Stuart told him, rising. “Thanks for the hospitality.”

“You planning on church today, Daphne?”

“I thought I’d ride along to the airport,” Daphne said.

“Well, I’ll be off, then,”

In the dining room, they heard him speaking to Doug. “Guess I’ll let you do the airport run, Dad.”

“Oh, well,” Doug said. “Seems I’m losing here anyway.”

“And another thing,” Agatha told Daphne. (But what was the first thing? Daphne wondered.) “This business about you not driving is really dumb, Daph.”

“Driving?” Daphne asked.

“Here you are, twenty-two years old, and Grandpa has to drive us to the airport. As far as I know you’ve never even sat behind a steering wheel.”

“How did my driving get into this?”

“It’s a symptom of a whole lot of other problems, any fool can see that. Why are you still depending on people to chauffeur you around? Why have you never gone away to college? Why are you still living at home when everyone else has long since left?”

“Maybe I like living at home, so what’s the big deal?” Daphne asked. “This happens to be a perfectly nice place.”

“Nobody says it isn’t,” Agatha said, “but that’s not the issue. You’ve simply reached the stage where you should be on your own. Right, Stuart? Right, Thomas?”

Stuart developed an interest in brushing crumbs off his sweater. Thomas gave one of his shrugs and drank the last of his orange juice. Agatha sighed. “You know,” she told Daphne, “in many ways, living in a family is like taking a long, long trip with people you’re not very well acquainted with. At first they seem just fine, but after you’ve traveled awhile at close quarters they start grating on your nerves. Their most harmless habits make you want to scream — the way they overuse certain phrases or yawn out loud — and you just have to get away from them. You have to leave home.”

“Well, I guess I must not have traveled with them long enough, then,” Daphne told her.

“How can you say that? With Ian doddering about the house calling you his ‘Daffy-dill’ and spending every Saturday at Good Works — Good Works! Good God. I bet half those people don’t even want a bunch of holy-molies showing up to rake their leaves in front of all their neighbors. And marching off to services come rain or shine; never mind if his niece is here visiting and will have to go to the airport on her own—”

“He gets a lot out of those services,” Daphne said. “And Good Works too; it kind of … links you. He doesn’t have much else, Agatha.”

“Exactly,” Agatha told her. “Isn’t that my point? If not for Second Chance he’d have much more, believe me. That’s what religion does to you. It narrows you and confines you. When I think of how religion ruined our childhood! All those things we couldn’t do, the Sugar Rule and the Caffeine Rule. And that pathetic Bible camp, with poor pitiful Sister Audrey who finally ran off with a soldier if I’m not mistaken. And Brother Simon always telling us how God had saved him for something special when his apartment building burned down, never explaining what God had against those seven others He didn’t save. And the way we had to say grace in every crummy fast-food joint with everybody gawking—”

“It was a silent grace,” Daphne said. “It was the least little possible grace! He always tried to be private about it. And religion never ruined my childhood; it made me feel cared for. Or Thomas’s either. Thomas still attends church himself. Isn’t that so, Thomas? He belongs to a church in New York.”