Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

And Emily, in an unbecoming pale blue swimsuit that exposed her thin, limp legs, took pictures that were going to turn out poorly, but she would not yield her camera to Morgan. She worried that he would snap her, she said. Morgan swore he wouldn't. (She was already pasted ID his mind as he would like her to be forever- wearing her liquid black skirt and ballet slippers. He would surely not choose to record this other self she had become.) "All I want to do," he told her, "is photograph some groups. Some action, don't you see." He couldn't bear her finicky delays, the stylized poses she insisted on. Morgan himself was a photographer of great speed and dash; he caught people in clumps, in mid-motion, mid-laugh. Emily picked her way across the sand to one person at a time, stopping every step or so to shake her white feet fastidiously, and then she would take an eternity getting things just right, squinting through the camera, squinting at the sky-as if there were anything that could be done, any adjustments at all to aid a Kodak Instamatic, "Be still, now," she would tell her subject, but then she'd wait so long that whoever it was grew strained and artificial-looking, and more than once Morgan cried, "Just take it, dammit!" Then Emily lowered her camera and turned, eyes widening, lips parting, and had to begin all over again.

Sunday afternoon the Merediths had a quarrel about when they were going home. Emily wanted to wait till Monday, but Leon wanted to leave that evening. "Lord, yes," Morgan longed to say. "Go!" — not only to the Merediths but to everyone. They could abandon him on the beach Fall would come and he'd be buried under drifting threads of sand and a few brown leaves blown seaward. He pictured how calm he would grow, at last. The breakers would act for him, tumbling about while he lay still. He would finally have a chance to son himself out. It was people who disarranged his life-Louisa in her striped beach robe like a hawk-nosed Bedouin, Brindle in an old stretched swimsuit of Bonny's that fell in vacant folds around her hunched body. He sat beneath the umbrella in his sombrero and trunks and his shoes with woolen socks. His bare chest felt itchy and sticky. He chewed a match and listened to the Merediths quarrel, Leon said that if they left Monday, they might very well miss their show. Emily said it was only a puppet show. Leon asked how she could say only. Wasn't it what she'd set her heart on, dragged him into, held his nose to-damn puppets with their silly grins-alt these years? She said she had never held his nose to anything and, anyway, it was Leon's business what he did with his life. She had certainly not forced him into this, she said. Then Leon jumped to his feet and went striding southward, toward town. Morgan watched after him, idly observing that Leon had developed a roll of padded flesh above the waistband of his trunks. He was a solid, weighty man now, and came down hard on his heels. Flocks of slender girls parted to let him pass. He pushed on through them, not giving them a glance.

Possibly, Billy and Priscilla were quarreling too, for they sat apart from each other and Billy drew deep circles in the sand between his feet. The women melted closer together; the men remained on the outskirts, each alone, stiff-necked. The women's soft voices wove in with the rush of the ocean. "Look at the birds," Emily told Gina. "Look how they circle. Look how they're hunting for fish."

"Or maybe they're just cooling off their underwings," Louisa said.

Bonny, gazing at the horizon from behind her dark glasses, spoke in a tranquil, faraway voice. "It was here on this beach," she said, "that I first knew I was a grownup. I had thought of myself as a girl for so long- years after I was married. I was twenty-nine, pregnant with the twins. I'd brought Amy and Jeannie to the beach to play. I saw the lifeguard look over at me and then at some spot beyond me, and I realized he hadn't really seen me at all. His mind told him, 'Lady. Children. Sand toys,' and he passed on. Oh, it's not as if I were ever the kind that boys would whistle at. It's not as if I were used to hordes of men admiring me, even back when I was in my teens. But at least, you see, I had once been up for consideration, and now I wasn't. I was reclassified. I felt so sad. I felt I'd had something taken away from me that I was so certain of, I hadn't even noticed I had it. I didn't know it would happen to me too, just to anyone else." Morgan noticed someone walking toward them: a man in a business suit that was made of some dull gray hammered-metal fabric. Everyone he passed stared after him for a moment. He ruffled their faces like a wind, and then they turned away again. It was Robert Roberts. Morgan said, "Brindle." Brindle seemed to comprehend everything, just from the sound of her name. She hunched tighter on her blanket and hugged her knees and frowned, not looking. It was up to Morgan. He rose and spat his match out. "Why, Robert Roberts!" he said, and offered his hand, too soon. Robert had some distance to travel yet. He came lurching up the slope a little untidily, in order not to keep Morgan waiting. His palm was damp. His face glistened. He was a man without visible edges or angles, and his thin brown hair was parted close to the center and plastered down. It appeared that he was sinking into the sand. There was sand across the creases of his shoes, and more sand filling his trouser cuffs. He gripped Morgan's hand like a drowning man and stared fixedly into his eyes-but that was his salesman's training, no doubt. "It's Bob," he said, panting.

"Beg pardon?"

"I'm Bob. You always call me Robert Roberts, like a joke."

"I do?"

"I came for Brindle." Morgan turned to Brindle. She hugged her knees harder and rocked, staring out to sea.

"It's the same thing all over, isn't it?" Robert said to Morgan. "It's the same old story. Once again she leaves me."

"Ah, well… have a seat, Robert, Bob. Don't be such a stranger." Robert ignored him. "Brindle," he said, "I woke up Thursday morning and you were gone. I thought maybe you were just miffed about something, but it's been four days now and you never came back. Brindle, are we going round and round like this all our lives? We're together, you leave me, we're together, you leave me?"

"You do still have my photograph," Brindle told the ocean.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Brindle got to her feet. She brushed sand off the seat of her bathing suit; she adjusted a strap. Then she went up to Robert Roberts and set her face so close to his that he drew back. "Look," she said, tapping her yellow cheekbone. "This is me. I am Brindle Gower Teague Roberts, All that string of names."

"Yes, Brindle, of course," Robert said.

"You say that so easily! But since you and I were children, I've been married and widowed. I married old Horace Teague next door and moved into his row-house; I bought little cans of ham in the gourmet sections of department stores-"

"You've told me all that, Brindle."

"I am not the girl in the photograph." She was not. The skin below her eyes was the same damaged color as Morgan's. The dimple in one cheek had become a dry crack-something Morgan had never noticed. She was thirty-eight years old. Morgan stroked his beard.

"Brindle, what is it you're saying?" Robert Roberts asked. "Are you saying you don't love me any more?" In the little group of women (all gazing politely in other directions) there was the softest rustle, like a laugh or a sigh. Robert looked over at them. Then he turned to Morgan. "What is she saying?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Morgan.

Louisa said, "If they marry, I hope I won't be sent to live with them."

"They are married, Mother dear," Morgan told her.

"You have no idea how hard it is," Louisa said, "not knowing where you'll be shipped to next,"

"Mother, have we ever shipped you anywhere? Ever in all your life?"