Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

It’s as if I have to keep trying different lives out, cheating on the rule that you can only lead just one. I’d had six years of Hot Rod magazine and now I was ready to move on to something new. I picture tossing my life like a set of dice, gambling it, wasting it. I have always enjoyed throwing things away.

Darcy said, “Hurry, John, I got to go to the toilet,” and John laughed and snapped the picture. Then he rose, brushing off his knees, and I took Darcy to the restroom. There was sand in her scalp; I could look down and see it, glinting under the white of her hair. “When I come out,” she said, “I’m going to ride the merry-go-round. Can I?” I said, “All right, baby.” I looked back at John. He was smiling after us, turning some knob on the camera that he knew so well he didn’t even have to look at it. “Come on , Mom,” Darcy said, and she reached up and took me by the hand. Her fingers were cool and sandy, and she smelled like sunshine, and she let me bend down and press my face against her hair for exactly one second before she freed herself and danced off again.

Motherhood is what I was made for, and pregnancy is my natural state. I believe that. All the time I was carrying Darcy I was happier than I had ever been before, and I felt better. And looked better, At least, to myself I did. I don’t think Guy agreed. He was funny about things like that. He didn’t want to feel the baby kick, wouldn’t even touch me the last few months, acted surprised whenever I wanted to go out shopping or to a movie. “Won’t it bother you, people staring?” he asked. “Why would it bother me?” I said. “Why would they stare?” He was the one that was bothered. He didn’t even want to come with me to the labor room the night she was born; my mother had to do it. She had thawed out some since I got pregnant. She stayed with me all through the pains, talking and keeping my spirits up, but most of my mind was on Guy. I thought, Wouldn’t you think he could go through this with me? He’ll worry more, surely, out there in the waiting room not knowing. The doctor had been upset about my age. He had told Guy I was still growing, much too young to have a baby of my own. What if I died? Shouldn’t Guy be there holding my hand? But no—“I’m scared I might pass out or something,” he said, and laughed, with his face sharp and white. Then he whispered, “I’m scared the pain will make you angry for what I done to you.” “Oh, but Guy —” I said. Then my mother said, “Never mind, honey, Mama’s here.” She sat by my bed and rubbed my back, and sponged my forehead, and read aloud from yesterday’s newspaper — any old thing she came across, it didn’t matter, none of it made sense to me anyway. When it came time to wheel me into the delivery room she said, “I’ll be right here praying, honey, everything’s going to be fine,” but I saw that she was worried. I suppose she had taken to heart what the doctor said. Well, doctors don’t know everything they claim to. Having that baby was the easiest thing I ever did. I was meant to have babies. Age has nothing to do with it.

When I think back on it — on my mother reading to me from that newspaper, smoothing the hair off my forehead — it seems that starting right there I began to live in a world made up of women. My mother and Guy’s, the neighbor women who gave me their old baby furniture and their bits of advice — women formed a circle that I sank into. I suppose you have to expect that, once children come along. The men draw back and the women close in. I thought that things would be different once I got Darcy settled in at home, but then Guy just kept to himself more than ever — acted scared of holding her, couldn’t stand to hear her cry, wouldn’t help to name her. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Guyette? That would be kind of cute. But, no, I reckon — I don’t know. You name her, you’re the one that knows.” I named her Darcy, my maiden name. I tried setting her on a pillow in Guy’s lap, with cushions all around so that he wouldn’t worry about dropping her. When she cried I said, “Now, all that’s wrong is she’s hungry, Guy. I’ll feed her; then you’ll see.” But mealtime was another thing he couldn’t stand. I was breast-feeding; he said it gave him a funny feeling. Every time I unbuttoned my blouse he left the room. “Other people use bottles,” he told me. “Why go back to this way, now that they’ve invented something better?” When I got worn out with her nighttime feedings he said, “Switch her to Evenflo. Leave her with Mom and you and me will borrow some money and take a little trip somewheres. You need a rest.” I was touchy back then, tired from all those wakeful nights and worried that I might not have enough milk. “The biggest rest,” I said, “would be for you to just shut up and leave me be , Guy Tell,” and then I cried and the baby cried and Gloria came in and shooed Guy out of the house and put me to bed. Gloria was Guy’s mother, whom we’d been living with ever since we were married. A peroxide blonde forever in shorts and a halter. Her husband had died long ago, I forget just how, and she had a truck-driver friend who came over whenever he was in town, bringing a bottle of Southern Comfort that they would polish off in one evening over the kitchen table. I know that sounds depressing. See it on a TV screen and it would be depressing, but the fact is that Gloria was just wonderful to me and I loved her like a mother. I hate to think what I would have done without her. Before the baby, when Guy had switched to working days and I had nothing to do with myself (there was a rule against married students at school), Gloria was the only reason I didn’t go out of my mind with boredom. She talked non-stop, took me shopping, fixed my hair a dozen ways, brought me up to date on all the soap operas we watched and lent me her confession magazines. Why, I was never even allowed to watch soap operas, and the most I’d read of confession magazines was the covers, surreptitiously, while speeding past the newsstand with my mother. And after the baby! I’m ashamed to say how much I leaned on her. She didn’t interfere, she never tried to take over, but whenever I was feeling lost and too young she was right there handing me hot milk and talking on and on in that airy, fake-tough way she had, appearing not to notice anything was wrong but soothing me all the same. Could a man do that? No man that I know of.

I cried when we moved into the house by the station. By then I had no mother of my own any more. I lost both parents when Darcy was still a baby, within six months of each other: heart attacks. I felt as if Gloria was my only strength, and here I was leaving her. “My Lord, honey,” Guy said, “most women would be tickled pink to get into a place of their own.” He said, “It’s me should be crying, it’s my mama after all.” And finally, “Don’t you want to live alone with me?” “Well, of course I do,” I said. But even so, I missed Gloria. I went on seeing her nearly every day, right up to the time I came to Baltimore. And sometimes even now I think back on how it was when I was pregnant, still someone’s child instead of someone’s mother, peacefully floating through those empty days with Gloria. I remember the books that Guy used to bring me; he liked to tell his friends he had married a brain, and almost daily he brought me a paperback from the drugstore. Sleazy romance novels, beautiful heroines in anguish. I loved them. I close my eyes and see myself on the plastic sofa with a book on my stomach, Gloria beside me snapping her gum, great swells of organ music rising from the television. What does Gloria think of me now? Has she cut me out of her mind, now that I have left her son with no more than a note on the refrigerator door?