Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

His breakfast was other people’s lunch. Mrs. Jarrett ate in the dining room with everything just right, dishes set on one of his mother’s linen placemats and a matching napkin in her lap. Mr. Somerset wolfed a lacy fried egg straight from the skillet. Miss Vinton, home from the bookstore on her lunch hour, read publishers’ brochures while she ate health bread at the kitchen table. “There’s a new Klee in, Mr. Pauling,” she might say, without looking up. “I put it on the sideboard.”

“Oh, why, thank you, Miss Vinton.”

He ate whatever took the least trouble — a box of day-old doughnuts or a can of cold soup. After every mouthful he wiped his hands carefully on the knees of his trousers before turning a page of the Klee. It would have to go back with Miss Vinton, spic and span, before her boss noticed it was missing. The cover of the book was a glossy white, promising him something new and untouched and wonderful. At the beginning there was a long jumble of words, a résumé of Paul Klee’s life, which Jeremy skipped. What did he care about that? He plunged into the pictures; he drank them up, he felt how dry and porous he was, thirsty for things to look at. At every page he wanted to pause and spend hours, even when he had seen the pictures before in other books, but he felt a pull also to turn to the next one quickly so that he would be sure to finish in time. Sometimes he said, “Miss Vinton, I wonder if I might—?” “Oh, why surely, Mr. Pauling,” she said, refolding the bread wrapper. “I can always take it back tomorrow. Mr. Mack won’t notice.” She had never once hurried him or shown any concern over his handling of the books, although Jeremy knew that Mr. Mack was unreasonably strict about such things. And for all of August, when Jeremy’s life seemed duller and sadder than he had ever noticed before, she managed to bring a new book for him almost every day, as if she guessed that he needed comfort. Klee, a collection of impressionists, Miro, Renoir. A book of American primitives whose dollhouse landscapes and lack of perspective filled him with a kind of homesickness. If only he could just step inside them! If only he lived in a place where a man could go any distance and yet never grow smaller! Miss Vinton brought him Braque, a man he disliked. He sat through her lunch hour testing the anxiety that each picture called forth in him, the discomfort caused by some clumsiness in the shapes. Years before, when he was in high school, an art teacher explaining cubism had made Jeremy’s class copy one of Braque’s paintings line for line. Jeremy had felt sick all the while he was doing it. It seemed that he might melt away to nothing, letting himself get absorbed into another man’s picture that way. Now he found the picture again — a still life involving a musical instrument — and stared at it until he couldn’t stand it any more and had to turn the page. “Would you care to keep it till tomorrow?” asked Miss Vinton, rising to rinse her dishes. “You seem to like him.”

“What? No, no,” Jeremy said, “please, I don’t want it, take it back with you.” Then he was ashamed of his rudeness, and he blushed and looked up at her. In the summertime, stripped of her lavender cardigan, her bony freckled arms gave her a vulnerable look. White strings stood out along the inside of her wrist when she turned the faucet off. “But I’m grateful to you for bringing the book,” Jeremy said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, that’s all right, I never much liked him myself.”

She turned, cheerful as ever, to hang up her dishtowel and take her purse from the table. Meanwhile Mrs. Jarrett ate fruit cup in the dining room, the ladylike clink of her spoon sounding at perfectly spaced intervals. Mr. Somerset put his skillet down silently and gravely, making certain that it sat in the exact center of the circle of the burner, ready to be used at another meal. Was there anyone gentler than old people? Could he ever feel as much at rest as he did sitting in this triangle of muted gray voices?

Then here came the second shift, as if in answer — Darcy slamming the door and pounding down the hallway with a bucket full of dandelions, Mary laughing and calling out warnings and threats and promises, and maybe if it were a weekend Howard’s high-pitched whistle and the squeak of his sneakers. “Where’s the milk I left here?” “Who wants a dandelion?” “You’re going to bump into someone, Darcy!”—which Darcy would almost surely do, as if she had to depend on someone else to break her speed for her. Flunf! into Miss Vinton’s middle. “Oh, Darcy, say you’re sorry.” “No harm done,” said Miss Vinton, and Darcy spun on through the kitchen, ending up with her arms around Howard. “Howard, make me flapjacks, Howard.” “Let him be, Darcy.” “Oh now,” Howard said to Mary, “you’re just jealous because I won’t make you flapjacks.” Then the kitchen splintered into bits of laughter, and Miss Vinton smiled and left while Mr. Somerset turned slowly from the stove, dazed by the laughter, baffled by frivolity. “What?” he said. Mary folded Darcy into the circle of her arms and said, “Milk or apple juice, young lady?” “Both,” said Darcy. “Or wait. Is apple juice what I want?” She turned toward Jeremy as if she expected him to answer, but Jeremy was looking at Mary. He saw the curve of her cheek against Darcy’s tow hair; he noticed how her nearly unarched eyebrows calmed and rested him.

Why hadn’t he been granted the one thing in life he ever hoped for?

At the beginning of September, Darcy started kindergarten and Mary found a job. It was something she could do at home: making argyle socks on a knitting machine. In the morning while Darcy was at school Mary worked alone in her room, but Darcy returned at lunchtime and was in and out all the rest of the day, leaving the door open behind her, and the sock machine soon became part of the household. It consisted of a circle of vertical needles, which first had to be threaded one by one. Threading was the time-consuming part. Then Mary cranked a large handle a prescribed number of times, after which she paused to rethread in another color. Jeremy, passing her doorway, had a glimpse of her huddled in a C-shape and frowning at metal eyes that seemed far too close together. She reminded him of old photographs of life in a sweatshop. But when the threading was done she could straighten up and stand back, and the cranking was so easy that sometimes she let Darcy do it while she herself counted the strokes. Numbers rang out and floated through the house—“Thirty-six! Thirty-seven!” After the tense silence of the threading, her voice and the circular rattle of machinery seemed like an outburst of joy. Wherever he was, Jeremy would raise his head to listen, and he noticed that the whole house appeared to relax at those times and the other boarders grew suddenly talkative, as if they too had held tense during the threading.

At the end of her first week of work, Mary packed the completed socks in a cardboard carton. She left Darcy with Mrs. Jarrett and caught a bus to the factory, where she was supposed to deliver them. “Why can’t I come too?” Darcy asked. “Because it wouldn’t be any fun,” Mrs. Jarrett told her. “The place where Mommy is going is the factory section, all nasty and dirty.” Jeremy felt something shrink in him. As if her absence were one long threading period, he held himself rigid in a parlor chair, scarcely breathing, silently turning the pages of a book of old masters that his mother had given him. “Goodness, don’t you have anything to do?” Mrs. Jarrett asked once. “I thought Saturday your students came.” Jeremy looked up, still turning pages. He had lost his last student a month ago and no others had called yet, but before he could put all this into words his thoughts trailed off again and he forgot to answer.