Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

"He was not only in fifth grade," said Brindle, "he was also' in fourth, third, second… We used to have to share our reading-skills workbook; he was always losing' his. In kindergarten we went shopping once at Bargain Billy's and be stuck a label on my cheek reading SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT. He also took me to my first school dance and my first car-date and my senior class, picnic." Morgan sighed and tipped his chair back. Bonny helped herself to more salad.

"Then in college I broke it off, " Brindle told Coquette. "I gave him back his high-school ring with the candle wax still in it to make it fit my finger-half a candle's worth, it looked like. I'd probably have drowned if I ever wore it swimming."

"Why'd you break it off?" Coquette asked her. "I got married to someone else."

"But why'd you break it off? I mean, why marry someone else?" Brindle pushed her plate away and set her elbows on the table. She said, "Well, I don't know if… When I talk about him, it sounds so simple, doesn't it? But see, even back in kindergarten he would sometimes act silly and sometimes bore me, and yet other times I was crazy about him, and when we grew up it got worse. Sometimes I liked him and sometimes I didn't like him, and sometimes I didn't even think of him. And sometimes he didn't like me, I knew it; we knew each other so well. It never occurred to me it would be that way with anyone. I mean, he was my only' experience. You understand what I'm trying to say?" Plainly, Coquette didn't — Understand a word. She was growing restless, glancing toward the plate of Oreos on the sideboard. But Brindle didn't see that. "What I did, " she said, "was marry an older man. Man who lived next door to Mother's old house, downtown. It was a terrible mistake. 'He was the jealous type, possessive, always fearing I would leave him. He never gave me any money, only charge accounts and then this teeny bit of cash for the groceries every week. For seven years I charged our food at the gourmet sections of department stores-tiny cans of ham and pure-white asparagus spears and artichoke bottoms and hearts of palm, all so I could save back some of the grocery money. I would charge a dozen skeins of yarn and then return them one by one to the Knitter's Refund counter for cash. I subscribed, to every cents-off, money-back offer that came along. At the end of seven years I said, 'All right, Horace, I've saved up five thousand dollars of my own. I'm leaving.' And I left."

"She bad to save five thousand dollars," Morgan told the ceiling, "to catch a city bus from her house to my house. Three and a half miles-four at the most."

"I felt I'd been challenged," Brindlesaid.

"And it's not as if I hadn't offered to help her out, all along."

"I felt I wanted to show him, 'See there? You can't overcome me, so easily; I've got more spirit than you think,'" Brindle said.

Morgan wondered if supplies of spirit were rationed. Did each person only get so' much, which couldn't be replenished once it was used up? For in the four years since leaving her husband she'd stayed plopped on Morgan's third floor, seldom dressing in anything but her faded lavender bathrobe. To this day, she'd never mentioned finding a job or an apartment of her own.

And when her husband died of a stroke, not six months after she'd left; she hardly seemed to care one way or the other. "Oh, well," was all she'd said, "I suppose this saves me a trip to Nero."

"Don't you mean Reno?" Morgan had asked.

"Whatever," she said.

The only time she showed any spirit, in fact, was when she was telling this story. Her eyes grew triangular; her skin had a stretched look. "I haven't had an easy time of it, you see," she said. "It all worked out so badly. And Robert Roberts, well, I hear he went and married a Gaithersburg girl. I just turn my back on him for a second and off he goes and gets married. Isn't that something? Not that I hold him to blame. I know I did-it to myself. I've ruined my life, all on my own, and it's far too late to change it. I just set all the switches and did all the steering and headed straight toward ruin." Ruin echoed off the high, sculptured ceiling. Bonny brought the cookies from the sideboard; the girls took two and three apiece as the plate went past. Morgan let his chair tip suddenly forward. He studied 'Brindle with a curious, alert expression on his face, but she didn't seem to notice.

Now he and Bonny were returning from a movie. They slogged down the glassy black pavement toward the bus stop. It was a misty, damp night, warmer than it had been all day. Neon signs blurred into rainbows, and the taillights of cars, sliding off into — the fog, seemed to contract and then vanish. Bonny had her arm linked through Morgan's. She wore a wrinkled raincoat she had owned since he first met her, and crepe-soled shoes that made a luff-luffing sound. "Maybe tomorrow," she said, "you could get the car put back together."

"Yes, maybe," said Morgan absently. "We've been riding buses all week." Morgan was thinking about the movie. It hadn't seemed very believable to him. Everyone bad been so sure of what everyone else was going to do. The hero, who was some kind of double agent, had laid all these elaborate plans that depended on some other, unknowing person appearing in a certain place or making a certain decision, and the other person always obliged. Sentries looked away at crucial moments. High officials — went to dinner just when they usually went to dinner. Didn't B ever happen instead of A, in these people's lives? Morgan plodded steadily, frowning at his feet. From out of nowhere the memory came to him of the hero's manicured, well-tended hands expertly assembling a rifle from random parts smuggled through in a leather briefcase.

They reached the bus stop; they halted and peered down, the street. "Watch it take all night," Bonny said good-naturedly. She removed her pleated plastic rain-scarf and shook the droplets from it.

"Bonny," Morgan said, "why don't I own a corduroy jacket?"

"You do," she told him. "I do?"

"You have that black one with the suede lapels."

"Oh, that," he said.

"What's wrong with it?"

"I'd prefer to have rust," he said. She looked over at him. She seemed about to speak, but then she must have changed her mind.

A bus lumbered into view, its windows lit with golden lights-an entire civilization, Morgan imagined, cruising through space. It stopped with a wheeze and let them climb on. For such a late hour, it seemed unusually crowded. There were no double seats left.

Bonny settled beside a woman in a nurse's uniform, and instead of finding someplace else Morgan stood rocking above her in the aisle. "I'd like a red rust jacket with the elbows worn," he told her.

"Well," she said dryly, "you'd have to wear down your own elbows, I expect."

"I don't know; I might find something in a secondhand store."

"Morgan, can't you stay out of secondhand stores? Some of those people have died, the owners of those things you buy."

"That's no reason to let a perfectly good piece of clothing go to waste." Bonny wiped the rain off her face with a balled-up Kleenex from her pocket.

"Also," Morgan said; "I'd like a pair of khaki trousers and a really old, soft, clean white shirt" She replaced the Kleenex in her pocket. She jolted along with the bus in silence for a moment, looking straight ahead of her. Then she said, "Who is it this time?"

"Who is what?"

"Who is it, that wears those clothes?"

"No one!" he said. "What do you mean?"

"You think I'm blind? You think I haven't been through this a hundred times before?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Bonny shrugged and turned her gaze out the window. They were near their own neighborhood now. Lamps glowed over the entranceways of brick houses and apartment buildings. A man in a hat was walking his beagle. A boy cupped a match and lit a girl's cigarette. In the seat behind Bonny, two women in fur coats were having a conversation. "I guess you heard the news by now," one of them told the other. "Angie's husband died."