Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

If things don’t work out with John, I have nowhere to go. This is the first time I have really thought about that. I left in such a rush, whipping off my apron, hanging my wedding ring on a cup hook, giving not a backward glance to my Corning ware and my potted plants. I seemed to be drunk with the joy of doing something so illogical. Now I have hours and days and weeks to think: I am entirely dependent on a man I hardly know. I have no money, no home, no family to return to, not even a high school degree to get a job with, and no place to leave Darcy if I could find a job. I don’t even know if I am eligible for welfare. What if John stopped loving me? Or if his wife came back — came walking in with her model’s slouch, a mink stole draped over her shoulder. (Well, not in June, but that’s the way I picture her.) I would be lost, then. I would be absolutely helpless, without a shred of hope.

This is what I resolve: if it works out that John and I are married, I am going to save money of my own no matter what. I don’t care if I have to steal it; I will save that money and hide it away somewhere in case I ever have to be on my own again.

Only I won’t be on my own, not if it’s up to me. I won’t leave anyone else ever. It’s too hard. I never bargained for this tearing feeling inside me. I didn’t know I would be so confused, as if I were in several places at once and yet not wholly any place at all. I hadn’t ever considered Darcy: how bewildered she would be or how her food and shelter would become a problem. You would think that much would occur to me. Why, Darcy is the center of my life! And her hair is Guy’s, and her eyes; I’ll be carrying pieces of Guy around forever. There was no point to my leaving. I can say that even while I am looking straight at John, even crossing to where he stands in the sunlight with his camera slung over his shoulder, smiling at Darcy and me so steadily: I love you, John, but if I were smarter I would have stayed with Guy.

I check the mailbox every day but nothing comes from Guy. I keep trying to imagine what a letter from Guy would look like. He has never written me before. Never had to. If ever he needed to write to someone else — say a business letter, or something — he would ask me to do it for him, and his dictation was full of et ceteras and, “Oh, you know, just put it like you think best.” He wasn’t too well educated. I would sit there with my ballpoint pen, waiting for Guy to think up a line, wondering what my mother would have said if she could see me. I was supposed to be unusually intelligent. Now look: “Dear Sir: In regards to the used Honda which I seen advertised in the February issue of …”

I wonder if maybe he is never planning to write at all. If he is dead, or has left home himself, or is so angry he plans to drive to Baltimore and wait in person beside my post office box until I come looking for letters. The minute I enter the building every day, my eyes fly to the corner where my box is. No Guy. No letter. I take Darcy by the hand and turn away, feeling relieved, but meanwhile there are all these unused words backed up in my throat: “Oh Guy, I wish you hadn’t come. I won’t go back with you no matter what, you’re only wasting your …”

It’s true I wouldn’t go back. It just isn’t in me. Even if it doesn’t work out with John, even if there is nowhere else to turn. I can’t explain why. After all, what did Guy ever do to me? He worked hard, made a home, took good care of us. But I stopped loving him. I don’t know which takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world. There are arguments for both sides; I see that. But I made my choice. “Come away with me,” John said. “We love each other, why waste your life? Where is your spirit of adventure?” The first time he said it, he took my breath away with shock. The second time it seemed more possible. He planted a thought in me that grew when he was not around, so that when he stayed away a whole week and then returned I was praying for him to ask me again. It looked as if he might have forgotten. He played all morning with Darcy, didn’t give me a glance. When lunchtime arrived he stood up, still not looking at me, not even touching my hand. “Are you coming?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

To keep Darcy quiet a while I gave her some blunt-nosed scissors and a magazine. I sat on the bed beside her, cross-legged. I pretended that we were in a house that John had built for us, and he was off at work but would be coming home shortly for supper. I even planned what I would cook for him. I love to cook. Lately we have been living on things from cans, heated in Mr. Pauling’s miserable kitchen, and I am starved for the smell of herbs and baking bread. I planned the meal by smells alone: hot dilled biscuits, roast beef, a fresh green salad. John would open the door and the smells would curl around him and draw him in. We would sit down at a table with a white linen cloth, in a house that was stable, calm, warm, clean, built to shelter us a lifetime. It would never even occur to me to run away again.

I cut out squares of paper to make Darcy a dollhouse. I showed her how to Scotch-tape them together. I cut an oval rug and gave it to her to color, and then we made curtains from a flowered shopping bag. Darcy bent over them with her tongue between her teeth, concentrating. The back of her neck was like a little curved stem, and I kept wanting to reach out and touch it but I didn’t.

You hear a lot about teenaged wives, how they’re bound to fail, but nobody mentions teenaged mothers. They are the best in the world; I’m convinced of that. While the neighbor women were nagging their children not to get the house dirty, I was down on the floor playing with mine. I carried her piggyback wherever I went; I dressed up in old clothes with her, read her my favorite storybooks, fixed tea for her dolls. Instead of shipping her off to nursery school I had other children come visit, and sometimes I felt as if I were running a nursery school myself. Six and seven children would stampede through the kitchen, playing tag or hide-and-seek, with me always It. On rainy days we made picnic lunches and ate them on the dining room floor. Gloria said, “Honey, you spoil that child. She won’t know how to amuse herself when her brothers and sisters start coming along.” I never told her about Guy’s not wanting more children. I kept hoping he would change his mind. But he said, “Ain’t this one taking all your time as it is? What you want to go and ruin your figure for?” He said that every time I brought it up. He never changed.

I would stand in front of the mirror and see how wide-hipped and expansive I was, how tall I loomed, bigger than life, full of life, with not enough people to pour it into. My world had turned out narrow after all — different from my parents’, but just as narrow. I looked out the front window and watched the people walking by, and I wanted to climb into every single one of them and be carried off to some new and foreign existence. I pictured myself descending from the sky, all wheeling arms and legs, to sink invisibly into their heads and ride home with them, to see how they arranged their furniture and who their friends were, what they fought about, what made them cry, where they went for fun and what they ate for breakfast and how they got to sleep at night and what they dreamed of. And having found out, I would leave; on to the next one. I wanted to marry a mad genius and then a lumberman and then somebody very rich and cold and then a poet who would dedicate his every word to me and who would have a nervous breakdown when I left him. Which I would do, of course. As soon as I had been absorbed into his world, as soon as it stopped feeling foreign; on to the next one. I didn’t guess back then that moving on would hurt so.