Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

It seemed to him that his sisters were always calling him on the telephone nowadays. “What are you doing, Jeremy, why haven’t we heard from you? Are you getting out more? Are you eating right?” They no longer phoned only on Sundays but occasionally on weekday evenings as well, on Saturdays and in the middle of lunch. Then one morning they called so early that he was still in the kitchen with Mary and Darcy. “Jeremy, honey, this is Laura,” he heard, and although he had always felt close to Laura he was conscious now of a sudden impatience tightening his fingers on the receiver. In the kitchen Darcy said something and Mary laughed. There was no telling what he was missing. “Is there something — what seems to be the matter?” he asked her.

“Matter? I was just worried about you, dear. You haven’t answered our last letter.”

“But I don’t believe I received any letter this week,” he told her. Then, too late, he remembered the flowered envelope that he had absently stuck in his shirt pocket on the way upstairs the other day. It was probably in the bathroom hamper. “He says he didn’t get any letter,” Laura told Amanda. To Jeremy she said, “Honestly, they can fly to Europe but they can’t get a simple note from Richmond to Baltimore. Well, I knew there was some explanation. Now here is Amanda to say a few words. Amanda?”

“How do you seem to be getting along, Jeremy,” Amanda’s voice said very close to his ear.

“Oh, fine, thank you.”

“I told Laura there was no need to call but she said she had a funny feeling, she gets them more and more these days. Any fool should know you can’t trust the U.S. mail.”

Jeremy stood up straighter. It always occurred to him, when talking on the telephone, that to people at the other end of the line he was invisible. Except for the thin thread of his voice he did not even exist. “Jeremy!” Amanda said sharply, and he said, “Yes, I’m here”—reassuring both himself and her.

“Labor Day is coming up, Jeremy.”

“Oh, yes, is it?”

“Maybe you could make the trip to see us.”

“Well, Amanda …”

“Now I don’t want to go over three minutes here but I’m sending you a train schedule. Let’s not hear any excuses, Jeremy. Why, you’ll just love travel, once you catch on to it. And you don’t want to spend your life just sitting home now, do you. Mother wouldn’t have approved of that at all, she would have wanted you to get out and enjoy yourself.”

He knew that his sisters were all that was left of the world he had grown up with, his only remaining connection with his parents, but sometimes when Amanda spoke of their mother it seemed she meant someone he didn’t even know in passing — someone stern and rigid, not his own sweet-faced mother with her soft, sad smile. “Well, you see,” he said, “I do try to—”

“I have to run, Jeremy. Do please answer our letters, you know how Laura worries.”

“All right, Amanda.”

He laid the receiver carefully in its cradle. There was a damp mark where his hand had been. He went back to the kitchen and found Mary just sponging Darcy’s face, with breakfast finished. He had missed everything. His chances were over until tomorrow. “I’m going to the grocery,” Mary told him. “Do you want anything?”

His despair was so enormous that it gave him courage. He said, “Oh, why, several things. Perhaps I should come along.”

Mary only nodded. She was frowning at a stain on Darcy’s collar. “Oh, Darcy, look at you, it’s your last clean dress,” she said.

“ I don’t care about an old stain.”

“Well, I do. Come along then.”

Words kept rearranging themselves in Jeremy’s head. May I have the honor—? Could you possibly consider—? Is it asking too much for you to marry me? But once they were descending the front steps the only conversation he could think of was an exaggerated squint toward the sun, implying a remark about the weather. Mary didn’t look up. She was reading her grocery list. “I’m going to get a gumball,” Darcy said. “Am I going to get a gumball, Mom? I’m going to get a penny for the gumball machine.”

“I wasn’t aware they had a gumball machine,” said Jeremy.

“Oh yes,” Darcy said. “Perry’s does.”

Would you think me forward if I—?

Perry’s? Why, Perry’s was two blocks away; it was where his mother used to go for soupbones. And no sooner had it hit him than sure enough, they came to Dowd’s grocery and passed it by, with neither Mary nor Darcy giving it a glance. Jeremy did. He gazed longingly at the crates of oranges and peaches and pears slanted toward him behind the fly-specked plate glass window. The tissue paper they nestled in seemed a particularly beautiful shade of green. He thought with love of Mrs. Dowd’s gnarled old hands spreading the tissue just enough, rescuing a runaway peach and setting it back in place with a little grandmotherly pat. Mary and Darcy walked on. “Wait!” he said. “I mean — have you ever tried Dowd’s?”

“They’re more expensive,” Mary said. She went on studying her list. Darcy took Jeremy’s hand in both of hers and swung on it — a clamp on his index finger, another on his little finger. What could he do? He set one foot in front of the other, doggedly, barely managing each step. For Mary Tell’s sake he was slaying dragons, and yet to keep her respect it was necessary that she never even guess it. He wiped his face on his sleeve. They came to the end of the block, where a red light stopped them. Cars whizzed back and forth, but what he was most afraid of was the street itself. Then the light turned green. “Wait!” he said again. Mary looked up, in the act of putting her grocery list in her purse.

“Could we — I mean I don’t believe I—”

“Hurry,” Darcy said, “we’ll miss the light.”

He stepped off the curb. All the comfort he had was Darcy’s grip on his hand, but now Mary said, “Darcy, don’t swing on people. How often have I told you that?” One of Darcy’s hands fell away; only his index finger was secure. He reached out blindly and found Mary’s arm, the crook of her elbow, which he hung onto as he had seen men do on the late show. Did she notice that it was she supporting him and not the other way around? “I certainly wish the price of tomatoes would go down,” Mary said.

Then they had reached the other sidewalk. The air on this block was different. He could have told it with his eyes shut. It was hotter, more exposed, and old Mrs. Carraway’s wind chimes were not tinkling. What was that flat-faced cement building? He didn’t like the look of it. He noticed that the rowhouses ran only in twos and threes, which gave the block a broken-up look. A mean-eyed woman watched him from her front stoop. He saw a commercial printer’s whose black and gold sign must have been here years ago, when he was a boy walking to school. Its sudden emergence in his memory made him feel strange. He lowered his eyes again. Pretend this is only a corridor leading off from the vestibule. Pretend it is just an unusually long room. It will all be over in a while.

Then they reached Perry’s. “Here we are,” said Mary. He looked up to find a window full of dead things stacked in pyramids — tinned vegetables, Nabisco boxes, paper towels. No fruit. “I’ll wait outside,” he said.

“Outside?”

“I’ll just — I do my shopping at Dowd’s.”

Mary seemed about to ask him a question, but then Darcy said, “Can I have my penny now?”

“What penny?” Mary said.

“You said you would give me a penny for the gumball machine. You said you would. You said—”

“Oh, for mercy’s sake,” said Mary, opening her pocketbook. “Here.” Then she went in, and Jeremy chose a place outside the door. First he watched the street, but the unfamiliar buildings opposite made him feel worse. He looked behind him, toward the glass door, and saw Darcy just coming out with a gumball. “Look. Pink,” she said. “My favorite color.”