Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

He was twenty-two — older than anyone will ever seem to me again. I wouldn’t be sixteen till December. (Sixteen was the age my parents were going to let me start dating. And even then, of course, only boys my own age. Only boys from good families. Only in groups.) All that fall, when the Dewbridge Lake Pavilion was boarded over and school had reopened, I continued to see Guy without anybody’s knowing. I said I was going to the library, or to visit a friend. Then I stood on a corner of Main Street and waited for Guy to come pick me up in a towtruck, and while he was pumping gas I would sit inside the filling station reading his racing magazines. He worked evenings. Daytimes he was free. Afternoons, as I was walking home from school, he slid up alongside me in his battered Pontiac and plucked me from my girlfriends and bore me off to a country road at the edge of town. While we were continuing our contest — he undoing a blouse button, I doing it up again — I felt lost and uncertain and longed to be safe at home, but once he was gone I forgot the feeling and wanted him back. I remembered the things that touched me: the intent look he wore when I told him anything; his habit of remembering every anniversary of our meeting, weekly, monthly, with some small clumsy gift like a gilt compact or a cross on a chain; the swashbuckling way he dressed and the eagle tattooed on his forearm and the dogtags always warm against his chest. Sitting in church on Sunday morning I called up his kisses, which from this safe distance filled me with a dizzy breathlessness that I thought might possibly be love. My mother sat beside me, nodding radiantly at the reading from Job. My father extended the long arm of his collection plate down the pews. I thought, I am never going to be like them, I have already broken free. I thought, Why aren’t they taking better care of me?

On December seventh I turned sixteen. My mother said, “Well, now I suppose you can go out some, Mary.” “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I went to Main Street to wait for Guy, and he brought me a charm bracelet hung with little plastic records to remind me of our first dance. Then he said, “I reckon we could get married now if you want. Don’t look like I am going to get over you any time soon.” So ten days later we eloped. I kept expecting my parents to follow me and take me back, but they didn’t. I had to send them a telegram announcing I was married. And in the motel room, when I cried, Guy said, “Now don’t take on so, you’re tearing me up. You want just for tonight I should sleep in the other bed?” “I’m not crying about that,” I said. “Well, what, then?” Why I was crying was that here I sat, married, and I had never even had a real date. But it didn’t seem the kind of thing that I could tell him.

Last week I took out a post office box and then wrote Guy and asked for a divorce. The box was John’s idea. “You don’t want him coming after you,” he said, “tracking you down to your boarding house and making a scene.” He went with me to the post office, and afterwards we took Darcy to the Children’s Zoo. It was the nicest day I had had in a long time. Darcy played in the sand while John and I sat on a bench nearby in the sunlight, talking over our plans. John said that someone had seen us together in a restaurant and told his wife. “I believe it’s made her jealous,” he said. “You know how she is.” (Although I didn’t know, at all.) “She wants to have her cake and keep another piece waiting in the tin. As soon as she heard she came right over to the house all dressed up, sweet as sugar, asking questions.”

“There’s no law against your taking someone out to supper,” I said.

“That’s what I told her.”

“She goes out with other people. All the time, you said.”

“Let’s not talk about her, shall we?” he said. “It’s too nice a day.”

I feel that way when he talks about Guy, too. I don’t like seeing Guy through someone else’s eyes. Then his leather jacket and tooled boots start seeming ridiculous, and I am aware how his grammar must sound to outsiders and I feel hurt for him and protective. It’s me that’s being insulted as well — six years of my life are tied up with Guy. I changed the subject. I said, “How come you brought your camera?”

“I’m planning to take some pictures of Darcy.”

On the days when John can’t visit I start hating him, even though I know it’s not his fault; but when I see him again he does something like this, thinking up an outing and photographing Darcy, and then I remember why I came away with him in the first place. Guy would never do anything like that. Oh, Guy took her picture, of course — with a camera he got for trading off some motorcycle parts — but he always wanted her dressed up first in those pink organdy frills he liked and he would arrange her hair in artificial-looking curls and seat her on the best piece of furniture. He called her his princess. His doll baby. Darcy is no doll baby. She thinks about everything — I see her thinking — and if there is a mess around she will get into it and she is never still for a second. I don’t believe Guy even knew all that about her. The only time he paid her any notice was when his friends came by and he would show her off like a souped-up car, setting her someplace high and prinking out her skirt just so. “Ain’t she a doll baby? You ever seen anything cuter?” Now John goes down on his knees in the sand, fixing his lens on Darcy, who is sugared over with sand like a doughnut, one of her playsuit straps dangling into a bucket. “Keep still,” I tell her, but he says, “No, no, let her be.” He holds up a light meter, fiddles with mysterious buttons. By profession he is a photographer. He owns a small studio that is still just getting off the ground, which is why it takes so much of his time. Before studying photography he went to college. He is calm and well-ordered and he considers every question from all sides. As far removed from Guy as a man can get. What would have happened if I’d met John before Guy?

I met John when he was shopping for motorcycles. He had just become interested in them. He ran into Guy at some rally outside Baltimore and the following week he came all the way to Partha, looking to see what Guy had in stock. I should explain that by then Guy was managing the filling station, but he had more or less branched out into motorcycles. We lived on the first floor of the house next door, and between the house and the station was a shed that Guy kept filled with spare parts and any used bikes his friends were trying to sell or trade. When John came by I was out in the yard hanging clothes. “Like you to meet a friend of mine,” Guy said. “John Harris. He’s thinking of buying him a cycle.” Thinking is right. He was the most well-thought-out man I’d ever seen. For four solid weeks he tested different models, read up on them, asked questions, went off to different dealers, returned to Guy to see if he had anything new. And when he finally did buy it wasn’t from Guy at all, but some man in Baltimore. By then he and Guy were friends, though. Not what you would call close friends; motorcycles were all they had in common. But they did do a lot of trail-biking together, and sometimes Guy would bring John home with him after a rally. Guy would come in all excited, blaming some fool who’d run him off the road, cursing some flaw in his bike (which he had bought in two minutes flat, on impulse, with money he didn’t have). He would yank the cap off a beer and chug-a-lug it, stomping around the kitchen. And meanwhile there stood John in the doorway, remarking on how nice my kitchen smelled and searching through his pockets for Darcy’s present. Dressed like someone in a sports magazine, in slacks and a polo shirt. Now do you see why I say he was so far removed from Guy?