Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

"Yes," he said, "but often you sort of… vacate, Mother; you're not really there at all." He had hurt her feelings. He was glad of it only for an instant; then he felt deeply remorseful. His mother raised her head high and looked off toward someone's A-frame cottage, where beach towels flapped on the balcony railing. "Why!" she said. "Wasn't that speedy."

"What was, Mother dear?"

"They've finished construction on the A-frame," she said. "It seems like no time at all." And she jutted her chin* at him with a triumphant, bitter glare.

"So it does, dear heart," he said.

3 Morgan went out to get a pizza for their supper and returned to find that Bonny's brother had arrived. He'd brought his new wife, Priscilla, a pretty girl with short, straight blond hair caught back in a silver barrette. They had been married only a few weeks. They wore similar crisp, new-looking white slacks and pastel shirts, like honeymooners. Morgan hadn't even met Priscilla up till now-or people seemed to assume he hadn't, for Billy introduced her and she shook Morgan's hand formally. Bonny said, "Priscilla went to Roland Park Country School with the Semple-Pearce girls, Morgan."

"Oh, yes," Morgan said, but the truth of the matter was, he could have sworn that Billy had been married to Priscilla once before. He seemed to remember her. He thought she might even have visited this cottage. But she acted as if everything were new to her. "What a sweet place," she said. "What a lot of… character," and she walked around the living room fingering the seashell ashtrays like a stranger, and peering at the photograph of Uncle Ollie's 1934 lacrosse team, and reading all the titles on the Reader's Digest book condensations. Morgan was cagy; he went along with it. Then as soon as possible he cornered Bonny, who had taken the pizza out to the kitchen.

"Bonny," he whispered, "isn't that girl an ex-wife of his?"

"No, dear, she's his present wife."

"But didn't Billy marry her another time, earlier?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I know he did," he said. "He married her and brought her here; it was the same time of year." Bonny straightened up from the oven. She looked hot; the hair around her temples was damp. She said, "Morgan, I am not in the mood for any of your jabs at my brother."

"Jabs? What jabs?"

"Just because he may have a fondness for one particular type of girl-" Bonny said.

"I'm not talking types, Bonny. I mean this. He brought her here several years ago and she had that little dog Kelty, Kilty…. why deny it? There's nothing wrong with marrying her twice. Lots of people go back, retrace, try to get it right the second time around. Why cover it up?" She only sighed and returned to the living room. Morgan followed her. He found Billy and Priscilla on the wicker couch, talking with Morgan's mother. Billy looked old and foolish in his vivid clothes, with his bald pink skull, his pale hair straggling behind his ears. He had hold of one of Priscilla's hands and was stroking it, like something trapped, in his lap. Priscilla was pretending the hand did not belong to her. She leaned forward earnestly, listening to Louisa discuss the drive to Bethany. "I took along a thermos of Lipton tea," Louisa said, "and two nice, juicy nectarines, and a box of arrowroot biscuits that Bonny sometimes buys for my digestion." Priscilla nodded, her face alight with interest and enthusiasm. She was very young. She couldn't possibly have been married several years ago; several years ago she would still have been a schoolgirl in a royal-blue Roland Park Country School jumper, Morgan felt confused. He sat down in a rocking chair.

Louisa said, "Traffic was held up on the Bridge, so we stopped and I got out and sat in the grass by the side of the road. There was a little boy there, just a tot, and I shared one of my nectarines with him and he gave me a nice speckle pear."

"Seckel pear," Morgan murmured. He could not bear to have her laughed at.

"A speckle pear, this one was. I finished half of it and put the other half in a Baggie. Then we got back in the car and drove across the Bridge, but in Delaware we stopped again where the Kiwanis Club was barbecuing chickens and I had half a chicken, a Tab, and a sack of potato chips. They were out of bread-and-butter pickles. At Farmer John's Vegetable Stand…" Priscilla's purse was one of those button-on things with a wooden handle, Bermuda bags, he believed they were called. You could button on an infinity of different covers to match different outfits. He would bet that her suitcase was full of covers-seersucker pink, yachting blue… he lost Ms train of thought. He wondered what had possessed him to leave Ms camera at home, hanging by its leather strap in the downstairs closet. For the first time in twenty years he would not have pictures of their vacation. On the other hand, what was the use of such pictures? They were only the same, year after year. Same waves, same sunburns, same determined smiles…

"After we reached Bethany, I started feeling a little peckish, so I walked to the market with Kate and picked out a watermelon. It was a wonderful melon, really fat and thumpy-sounding, and once we got it back to the cottage all we had to do was touch a knife point to it and it crackled all the way open. But it had no taste. Can you believe it? Had no taste whatsoever. Such a lovely color and not a scrap of taste. I just don't understand that," Morgan's mother said.

Morgan suddenly remembered another of last night's dreams. He'd been standing on a lawn beside a beautiful, graceful woman he'd never seen before. She led Mm toward a child's swing hanging from a tree limb. They settled on it-the woman sitting, Morgan standing, enclosing her with his feet. They started swinging over a cliff. Tiny yellow flowers dotted a field far below them. Morgan knew that when they were swinging high they would leap. He would die. He wasn't upset about It Then the woman tipped her head back against him, and he felt the length of her between his legs-the curve of her ribcage, the satiny coolness of her clothing. He was like a boy again, trembling. He saw that as long as he felt this way, he wanted to go on living, and all at once he was afraid of the leap. He woke abruptly, with his heart beating so hard that his whole body seemed to vibrate.

In the past few years Morgan had become a letter-writer. He couldn't have said exactly why. It just seemed, sometimes, that he grew restless and ill-contained; he couldn't sit still; there was something he wanted to tell someone, but he couldn't think what it was and he had no particular person in mind. Then he would sit down and write letters-although even that was not quite it; it was only second beet. At work, he used his Woodstock typewriter, which produced an uneven, sooty print that danced all over the page. He plodded away with two index fingers, stopping after every word or so to pry up the A key, which wouldn't spring back on its own. At home, he wrote with a leaky fountain pen whose cartridge he refilled with a plastic hypodermic needle. (He'd salvaged the needle from an emergency-room wastebasket during one of the children's accidents. Buying cartridges already filled was an extravagance, he felt.) He wrote all his daughters, even those still living in Baltimore. He wrote the traveling salesmen who came to the store, and his friends Kazan and the Greek tavern-keeper. Because he did not often have anything to say, he gave advice, as a rule. It has come to my attention that your company's plant-sprayer bottles work exceedingly well for dousing fireplace logs at bedtime. Simply fill the bottle with water, adjust the nozzle to setting 4…

Or: Dear Amy, I notice that you appear to be experiencing some difficulty with household clutter.

Understand that I'm not blaming you for this, your mother has the same problem. But as I've been telling her for years, there is a solution.