Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

Mary returned just before lunch, bringing a new carton of yarn. When Darcy heard she came running out of the kitchen with Mrs. Jarrett close behind, and Jeremy stood up holding his book to his stomach. He thought that now the shrunken feeling would leave him, but it didn’t. Mary’s face was gray and her shoulders sagged. “How’s our career woman?” Mrs. Jarrett asked, clapping her hands together.

“Oh well, I’m all right.”

“You seem a little tired.”

“I had to wait in line a while,” Mary said. “There are a lot of other people doing this work.”

“Is that right? And just think, I never even heard of it before. Did you meet anybody interesting?”

“Oh, trash mostly. Just, you know. Just trash.” She set her carton on the coffee table and sat down. “I didn’t make as much money as I thought I would,” she said.

“Now be sure they pay you what they owe, you hear?”

Jeremy, back in his armchair now, kept nodding his head to show that he agreed. He felt as tired and sad as Mary. He wanted to offer her something — a cup of coffee? She didn’t drink coffee. In his mother’s old books a rich gentleman would come now to rescue Mary from life in the sweatshop, but Jeremy was the only gentleman present and he wasn’t rich and he didn’t believe that Mary had even noticed he was in the room. She spoke solely to Mrs. Jarrett. She said, “Oh, they paid me what they owed. But I had made a few mistakes, and also I’m still slow. Some of these people just whip them out by the dozen, but I don’t. I don’t know why. I thought I was going so fast . I thought I could make up the rent and the grocery and Darcy’s school clothes, all in just a few hours a day.”

“Now, now,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “Give yourself time.”

Jeremy went on nodding. He kept his eyes fixed on the label at the end of the yarn box — a rectangle of glaring yellow, a color he had always disliked. The brightness of it made his eyes ache. He imagined himself winning twenty-five thousand dollars from some soap company and offering it to her, watching her brow slowly smooth and lighten as she looked down and saw what he had put into her hands. “No, no,” he would tell her, “no strings. You don’t even have to be my friend, just please don’t thread those needles any more …” Yet if she had that much money, wouldn’t she leave him?

Well, but hadn’t she left him already? Had she ever really been there?

“Now can we have our ice cream?” Darcy said.

She had been promised a treat. Mary had told her she would come home rich. Mrs. Jarrett said, “Not yet, Darcy, let Mommy rest a while,” but Mary said, “No, I’m all right. Let’s go.” She picked up her pocketbook and they went out the front door. This time there were no slams, no voices calling back and forth outside. The house felt the same when they were out as when they were in, bleak and dark and tired. Mrs. Jarrett settled with a sigh onto the creaking springs of the couch. Jeremy turned a page and smoothed the edges of a Rubens. “It’s a shame, it’s just a shame,” Mrs. Jarrett said. “Do you think they’ll have to go on welfare?”

The word stabbed him. He looked up, open-mouthed.

“And she’s bright as a button. I don’t care what you say. A high school diploma isn’t everything.”

“Welfare?” Jeremy said.

But Mrs. Jarrett was talking to her needlework.

“I said, ‘What you want is a husband, my dear.’ ‘I do, don’t I,’ she said, and just laughed, didn’t take me seriously, but I meant what I said. Now I don’t know what happened there, widowed or divorced or what, but she is a young woman still and on top of that she has that child. Have you noticed how out of hand that child has gotten? She used to be a real little lady. She needs a father, and you can tell it by the number of times that she says a thing over again. Shows she isn’t listened to enough, her mother has worries on her mind and can’t pay attention. Not that I blame her, of course, I realize what a—”

Jeremy blinked down at the Rubens, a fat naked blond lady laughing. He felt that Mrs. Jarrett’s words were twining around him like vines, rooting in the sad darkness inside him. The fat lady reminded him of a student he had once had, a girl named Sally Ann something who had wanted to learn portrait painting. She weighed two hundred pounds; she had told him so herself. She seemed proud of it. Once she asked him, “Would you like a nude model? I could do it.” And then she had come very close and laid a hand on his arm, smiling at him but looking, for some reason, only at his mouth. “No, no,” he had said. He was unprepared. He backed off, shaking his head, and stumbled over a tin can full of brushes. “No, that’s all right, I don’t paint at all, really.” But afterwards he had lain awake regretting his answer, and Sally Ann, whom he had not liked, gained importance in his mind and he began to see that there could be something compelling about a person who was dimpled all over. Only the next time she came to the studio he found that he still disliked her, and he kept himself at a distance even though she never offered again to be his model. Then what happened? Did she stop coming? He couldn’t remember. He stared down at the Rubens, who laughed directly at him with her eyelids lowered, and he felt some sort of wasted feeling, as if he were a very old man realizing for the first time how little was left to him.

“… and then my very own sister was married four times,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “Well, some claimed that was carrying things too far, but I don’t know. I don’t know that I blame her at all, to tell the truth. We do need someone to lean on. I imagine I’ll spend the rest of my life feeling naked on my street side every time I take a walk, and I am sixty-four now and been a widow longer than a wife.”

Jeremy sank lower in his chair, letting the book fall shut, and closed his eyes. He kept them closed for so long that Mrs. Jarrett thought he had gone to sleep. Anyway, she suspected he had not been listening.

In the middle of the night he woke with the feeling that he had just heard his name called, but he found it was a dream. He couldn’t get to sleep again. First he was cold, and he had to kneel in his bed and tug the window shut. Then he discovered he had a headache. He felt his way to the bathroom, found an aspirin tin, and washed two tablets down with a mouthful of lukewarm water from the faucet. In the mirror his silhouette was gilt-edged with moonlight. He studied how his shoulders sloped. He reminded himself of a low hill. There seemed to be no good reason to move any more, even to go back to bed. He stood rooted at the sink. Then far below him he heard a whirring sound, so faint he might have imagined it. He cocked his head, trying to place its source. With his hands stretched before him like a sleepwalker he guided himself out of the bathroom and into his studio, toward the open rear window, where the sound became louder. Even there he took a minute to identify it: the cranking of Mary’s sock machine. He placed both hands on the windowsill and lowered his head, forming a clear image of her in some long flowing flannel nightgown, a shawl around her shoulders, working away by the light of a smoky lantern. Then he turned and went back to his bedroom.

Still in the dark, he opened drawers and slid hangers down his closet rod and rummaged through his shoebag. He found the one dress shirt he possessed, easily recognizable in its crackling cellophane envelope from the laundry. It was limp and sleazy and the collar was frayed, but he thought it would do. He knotted a tie, fumbling a little, trying to remember the complicated set of motions learned from Mr. Somerset’s predecessor many years before. Then his suit — a three-piecer, ordered by mail back in the fifties but it still fit fairly well. Socks that might or might not match — he couldn’t tell for sure and it seemed important not to turn on the light. Pinchy black shoes, also mail-order. A handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket the way his mother had taught him. Then back in front of the bathroom mirror he combed his hair, puffing up the little moonlit cloud skimming his scalp. He set the comb down on the edge of the sink and walked very slowly out of the room and toward the stairs. Every step made him sicker, but he didn’t let himself feel it.