Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

From behind her Darcy said, “Can I talk? If it’s John can I talk?”

“No, you may not” Mary said. Jeremy had never heard her speak so sharply to Darcy. She said, “Keep her a minute, will you, Jeremy?” and walked off to the telephone. “Why can’t I talk?” Darcy asked Jeremy.

“Oh, well …” said Jeremy. The knot in his stomach had grown larger. He backed into the dining room and sat down on a chair, limply, with his hands on his knees. “How are you today, Darcy?” he asked. Even to himself, his voice sounded foolish. He made himself smile at her. “When are you coming to my studio again? You haven’t been all week.”

But he was listening, meanwhile, to Mary out in the hall. She said, “No, no, I understand. You don’t have to call ever , John. It’s not as if you’re obligated.”

“But she always let me talk to him before,” Darcy said.

“Maybe another day,” said Jeremy. He tried a different smile. Mary said, “Look. I’m fine. No I don’t need money.”

“Shall we cut out paper dolls?” Jeremy asked Darcy.

“Not right now, Jeremy.”

“You don’t owe me anything, I’m managing fine. I’m fine. I still have some of what you lent me,” Mary said. And then, “What’s it to you how much is left? It was a loan , you don’t have any business asking that. I’m planning to pay you back. I want to. As soon as I find a job I will.”

“If I go and shout into the phone John will talk to me,” Darcy said. “He likes me. I know he does.”

“No, no, Darcy—”

But she was off, skating on her stocking feet into the hallway with Jeremy at her heels. From this close they could hear Mary’s friend arguing or protesting or explaining, a thin violent squawk. “—for Darcy’s sake,” he said, and Darcy gave a little leap. “Hello John!” she shouted. “Hello John!” Mary held up the flat of her hand, but kept her face turned into the receiver. “All right,” she said. “You win.”

“Can you hear me, John?”

“Uh, Darcy,” Jeremy said.

“All right,” said Mary, “but it’s a loan, and I want you to know that. I don’t want any — Darcy! Look, John, it’s hard to talk right now—”

Darcy was tugging at her mother’s skirt, and Jeremy was stooped over trying to loosen her fingers. The squawk continued on the telephone, another form of tugging. Mary’s skirt had the same cool, grainy feeling that her hands had had, that time on the couch. Why, after all, she was only a collection of textures. Her muscles slanted over her bones exactly as in his anatomical drawing class; her lips were yet another texture, otherwise no different than her fingers had been or this clutch of skirt in Darcy’s scampering hands. “No, I mean this,” Mary said. “I want you to mail it. Don’t bring it. You are under no — John?”

She put the receiver down very slowly. “Oh, Mom, I wanted to talk,” Darcy said. Then Jeremy straightened and looked into Mary’s face. Her expression was cheerful and she was even smiling slightly, but tears were running down her cheeks. “I’m sorry—” she said. She started back toward the bedroom, with Jeremy and Darcy stumbling over each other trying to follow. “You must think I make a habit of this,” she said in her doorway. She turned, and Jeremy was so close behind her that before he thought, he had found the strength to lean forward on tiptoe and kiss the corner of her mouth. Then he took a step back, and she looked his way for a moment before her eyes seemed to focus on him. “Thank you, Jeremy,” she said. “You are a very sweet man.”

She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand, giving a little laugh at herself as if they embarrassed her. She shook out her apron and said, “Come along, Miss Chatterbox, let’s get you some breakfast, shall we?” Then they went off toward the kitchen, leaving Jeremy smiling so hard that he could barely see. He thought he might just inflate and float away like a balloon at a birthday party.

In magazine cartoons, a suitor proposing marriage always knelt on the floor at his sweetheart’s feet. Now, was that an accurate reflection of the way things were done? He suspected not. Nevertheless he kept picturing himself looking up at Mary from a kneeling position, finding her even more frightening at this angle — her sandals the largest part of her, her waist at eye level, the never-before-seen underside of her bosom and the white triangle of skin beneath her jaw. “I don’t have much money,” he should tell her (the speech owed to her father, he believed, but he had no idea who her father was). “I wouldn’t be able to support you in very good style but at least it would be a little easier, I do have my pieces and a little from my mother and sometimes I win a contest and I always seem to have enough for groceries.” He prepared himself for the way the hem of her dress would loom, and for the difficulty of judging her expression from so far beneath it. Yet every night he went to bed with nothing resolved, feeling thin and strained as if this balloon of hope he had become had been kept too fully inflated for too long a time. He dreamed of losing things — unnamed objects in small boxes, the roof of his house, pieces of art that he would never be able to re-create. He woke feeling anxious, and over and over again read the index card tacked to the windowsill beside him.

In his imagination this proposal always took place outdoors somewhere, although of course that would be too public. Could he be thinking of a park? The nearest park was several blocks from home. He pushed away the outdoor images and in the mornings, while he sat with his orange juice and she poured cornflakes, he tried to think of some natural way to lead in to what was on his mind. He couldn’t. Mary talked about her daughter and the weather and library books, nothing more personal. “Now Darcy is shooting out of all her clothes. I’ve never seen a child grow the way she does. I thought as soon as I got a job I would buy some material and borrow Mrs. Jarrett’s sewing machine, but sewing has never been my strong point and I’m not at all sure that I—” How could he bring love into a conversation like that? She gave him no openings. He sometimes thought that she might be sending him some silent warning, telling him not to ask even the simplest things that occurred to him: Where do you come from? Why are you here? Who was your husband? What are your plans?

“At home Darcy used to beg for cornflakes,” Mary said once. “I’ve never seen a child so contrary.”

“Where was that?” Jeremy asked her.

“What?”

“Where was your home?”

“Oh, well — and now she wants bacon and eggs, wouldn’t you know? I believe she just thinks up these things to devil me.”

Jeremy didn’t press her. He contented himself with the surface that she presented to the world, and it was only inside him that the questions continued. What happened to your husband? Why did you cry with that man John? What is his significance?

Will you marry me?

Now each morning that he failed to propose he saw them to the door, tagging after them in the hope that somewhere along the way — in the dining room, the hall, the vestibule — he might gather his courage. He took to going out on the steps and waving after them. “Goodbye! Goodbye! Have a nice walk!” Turning back afterward was worse than being left in the kitchen. He always felt oppressed by the sudden dark coolness as he stepped inside. He started accompanying them farther — to the second house, to the third. Maybe, given time, he could follow Mary all the way off his island. Gradually: wasn’t that the key? Oh, if there were any god he believed in, it was gradualness! If people would only let him go at things his own way, step by step, never requiring these sudden leaps that seem to happen in the outside world! But every day he was overtaken by some magnetic force that seemed to affect only him. It dragged him back with a tug at his spine; it caused him to slow and then to halt, damp with exhaustion. “Goodbye! Goodbye! Have a nice walk!” Mary and Darcy waved and grew smaller. They separated cheerfully at the approach of total strangers, they talked aloud without fear of being heard, they crossed the wide street against the light. Dogs with enormous grinning mouths sniffed at Mary’s skirt and she never even noticed. Oh, he had undertaken too much. He could never keep up with a woman like that. He turned and trudged homeward, stumbling over cracks in the sidewalk and muttering words of encouragement to himself, and before he started the day’s work he had to lie on the couch in his studio a while catching his breath and trying to still the twitching of his leg muscles.