Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

“Is that right?” said Jeremy. He was glad to see her. He turned outward again, so that he was facing the street. Darcy stood beside him. “They have charms and things too,” she said. “You can see them in the machine but they never come out. Do you think I might get one someday?”

“Perhaps so,” Jeremy said.

“Or are they just to fool people. You think that’s what it is? You think they’re just trying to get your pennies from you?

Jeremy had a terrible thought. He felt that he might become marooned beside Perry’s Grocery. How would he ever get home again? He imagined himself dipping the toe of one shoe into the street, then drawing it out and turning away, unable to cross. “I’m sorry, I just can’t,” he would have to say. He thought of the time he had climbed the crape myrtle tree in his back yard when he was three. He had climbed only to the first fork but then had found it impossible to get back down. Every time he tried, his hair stood on end and the soles of his feet started tingling. “Let him stay,” his father said. “He’ll come down.” Then at night, when he still hadn’t managed it, his father took three long strides to the tree and lifted him off roughly, one arm around his waist, causing Jeremy to scream in that single dizzying moment before his feet touched solid ground again. Now Mary would take him in hand, nudge him out, coax him into one step after another. “Come on, you can do it, you’ll see, when you get to the other side you’ll look back and laugh at how easy it was.” Only he wouldn’t. He would have to back away, and now he was too big to be carried bodily. He imagined spending the rest of his life on this new island, exposed for all the world to see, propped against the wall like a target. “Would you like half of my gumball, Jeremy?” Darcy asked him.

“No, thank you, Darcy,” he said.

“I don’t have a knife, but I could bite it in half.”

Dread rose in him like a flood in a basement, starting in his feet and rapidly filling his legs, his stomach, his chest, seeping out to his fingertips. Its cold flat surface lay level across the top of his throat. He swallowed and felt it tip and right itself. Nausea came swooping over him, and he buckled at the knees and slid downward until he was seated flat on the sidewalk with his feet sticking out in front of him. “Jeremy , you silly,” Darcy said, but when he couldn’t smile at her or even raise his eyes she said, “Jeremy? Jeremy?” She went screaming into the grocery store; her voice pierced all the cotton that seemed to be wrapped around his head. “Mom, come quick, Jeremy’s all squashed down on the sidewalk!” Then he was surrounded by anxious feet nosing in upon him — Darcy’s sneakers, Mary’s sandals, and a pair of stubby loafers almost covered by a long bloody apron. “It’s the heat,” the apron said. Mary said, “Jeremy? Are you ill?”

“Sick,” he whispered.

She set a rustling paper bag beside him, bent to lay a hand on his forehead and then straightened up. Her sandals were the largest thing about her. The hem of her skirt was so close he could see the stitches, he saw the underside of her bosom and the triangle below her jaw. “Will you marry me?” he asked her.

She laughed. “No, but I’ll see you home and into bed,” she said. “Can you stand? You need some air.” And she raised his head herself, and then propped him while he got to his feet. She said, “Walk a ways, now. It’ll clear your head. Here, take this.” From her grocery bag she brought out a navy blue box, and while he swayed against her she tore the wrapper off and handed him a cinnamon graham cracker. “Sometimes it helps to eat a little something,” she said.

“No, no.”

“Try it, Jeremy.”

He only clutched it in his hand. He felt that opening his mouth would cause his last remaining strength to pour out of him. Inch by inch he headed homeward, shaky but upright, leaning on Mary’s arm. The bloody apron receded behind them. Darcy danced ahead. They came closer to the street while Jeremy prayed continuously to the traffic light: oh, please turn red, turn red, let me at least have time to get my bearings. But it stayed an evil green, and Mary led him without a pause off the curb, across a desert of cement, up the other side. They were home. They were on his own block. He straightened and let out a long slow breath. Mary said, “You’re just like Darcy, whenever you don’t eat breakfast you get sick to your stomach. Isn’t that what happened?”

“I meant it seriously, I asked you to marry me,” Jeremy said.

“But you both say no, you couldn’t eat a thing, you don’t want a … ”

She stopped walking. She turned and stared at him across a silence that grew painful, while Jeremy waited with his head down. “Oh, Jeremy,” she said finally. “Why, thank you, Jeremy. But you see, I can’t get married.”

“You can’t?”

“My husband won’t give me a divorce.”

“Oh, I see,” Jeremy said.

“But it was sweet of you to ask, and I want you to know how flattered I am.”

“That’s all right,” Jeremy said.

He stood there a minute more, and then they both began walking again. Up ahead, Darcy leaped and skipped and twirled. Her hair made him think of something metallic falling through the air, catching the sunlight and ducking it and catching it once more. He fixed his eyes on it and stumbled along. When they were within sight of home he lifted his cracker without thinking and took a bite. Mary was right; it helped. His head cleared. His stomach righted itself. He felt cinnamon flowering out of his mouth, taking away the tinny taste, leaving his breath as pure as a child’s. Like a child he let himself be led home while all his attention was directed toward the cracker. Crunching sounds filled his head and tiny sharp crumbs sprinkled his shirt front. He felt limp and exhausted, and something like relief was turning his bones so watery that he could have lain down right there and gone to sleep on the sidewalk.

• • •

Now he no longer came downstairs while Mary was making breakfast. He lay in bed late and rose by degrees, often sitting against his pillow for as much as an hour and staring vacantly out his window. The index card lost its tack and fell behind his bed; he let it lie. He sat in a sagging position, smoothing his sheet over and over across his chest, and if he wanted a change of scenery he raised his eyes from the screened lower portion of the window, which was open, to the closed upper portion where two sets of cloudy panes dulled the morning sunlight. Maybe someday he would wash them. The floors had a frame of dirt spreading out from the baseboards, thinning only where his traffic pattern had worn the dust away. There were little chips of paper everywhere, some so old that they seemed to have become embedded in the wood. If the light was right he could look out toward his studio and find a long glinting red hair snagged on one of the floorboards. It had belonged to a student from two years ago, whose name he had forgotten. He neither swept the hair away nor made any special effort to keep it. It was just there, something he registered in the mornings without considering the possibility that there was anything he might do about it.

When he had finally struggled out of bed there was the bathroom to face — a chilly place even in summer, with all its fixtures crazed and rust-stained and the swinging naked lightbulb pointing out every pore of his skin in the watery mirror. He shaved for hours. He cut one small path across his cheek and then stood looking into his own eyes until it occurred to him to lift his razor again. Even before the mirror he did not bother rearranging his expression. His muscles sagged and the soft skin of his throat pouched outward. He noticed, and disliked what he saw, but only in the detached way that he might dislike a painting or some scene that he witnessed on the street. Then when he was tired of shaving he left, often without rinsing off the last traces of soap, so that his skin felt itchy and dry. He wrapped himself in a bathrobe and put on his crocheted slippers and shuffled into his studio, where he sat on a stool for a long time looking at his latest piece. Too many browns. Not enough distinctions. More and more now he was adding in actual objects — thumbtacks and washers and bits of string and wood, separating the blur of colored papers. Brian hadn’t seen these yet. Jeremy didn’t care whether he saw them or not. He pulled off a piece of twine that was in the wrong corner, leaving a worm of dried white paste behind. He dropped it to the floor and then noticed, beside one leg of his stool, the tin top off a box of cough lozenges, and by the time he had figured where to paste that he had forgotten about dressing. He snipped things apart and fitted things together. He rummaged through the clutter in a bureau drawer, meanwhile holding his bathrobe together by its frayed sash. Till Mrs. Jarrett’s clopping heels mounted laboriously to the second floor and she called up to the third, “Mr. Pauling? I don’t see your dishes here, have you not had breakfast? We’re getting worried about you. Please come.” If he were too absorbed he merely shuffled his feet on the floor, showing he hadn’t died in his sleep. Other times he sighed and laid his scissors down and went to his bedroom for clothes. Most of his clothes seemed to be falling apart nowadays. He kept having to throw away shirts with long rips and trousers with the zippers broken and shorts with the elastic gone, but he didn’t bother sending to Sears for more. He tossed them in the wastebasket almost gladly. Later he would listen with a sense of satisfaction while the garbage men came clanging trashcans and bore his belongings away with them. It felt good to be done with things. He thought of the New Year’s Eves he had sat up for — the relief that came from putting away another year and brushing off his hands and knowing that there were twelve months less to get through. Or of all his life — the hundreds of memories he had closed the files on, the years assigned to him that he had dutifully endured, waiting to reach the bottom of the pile.