Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

Jeremy set the spoonful of egg down and opened the bag, as if he expected to find some answer inside it. “E-Z-Do Embroidery Set,” he said.

“Hush, it’s supposed to be a surprise.”

“I don’t quite see,” he told me. “Have I — is there something the matter, Miss Vinton?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“I had thought perhaps Mary wanted you to bring her home.”

“No, I think she would prefer you to do it.”

He started smiling. He nodded several times and his face grew pink. “Oh, well, then, certainly,” he said. “Thank you, Miss Vinton! I certainly do—”

“Any time,” I said. “Here, give me that,” and I reached for Hannah’s bowl of egg. “Now you’d better hurry. She was due to be released at ten and it’s already five of.”

“Oh yes,” Jeremy said. He rose and held out his hand. For a moment I couldn’t think why, but then I saw that he was beaming at me and I set the bowl on the table and shook his hand. “It’s certainly — it’s just wonderful of you to watch the children this way,” he said. “I really don’t know how to—”

“Oh shoot. Run along, now.”

He picked up the bag of gifts, which I had forgotten all about, and left the kitchen. I heard him in the hallway, scattering hangers and stumbling over rubber boots in the coat closet. A minute later I heard the front door slam. “Where’s he going?” Darcy said, coming into the kitchen. “I thought you were off getting Mom.”

“Jeremy’s doing that,” I told her.

“He is? Then can’t we all go too?”

“Not this time.”

“But Miss Vinton! We always used to!”

“That’s no reason to keep on doing a thing, is it?” I said.

I lifted Hannah out of her high chair and then I went into the parlor, to the front bay window. The lace curtains hid me. I watched Jeremy for as long as he stood waiting there — a radiant, dumpy man holding a paper bag. He leaned forward from time to time and looked for a taxi, first in one direction and then the other (although we live on a one-way street). He kept shifting the bag higher on his stomach. He wore no coat or jacket, nothing but his gray tweed golf cap and that sleazy sweater he had been in all week, but I held back from rushing out to him with an armload of wraps.

Then a taxi stopped for him, but instead of getting in immediately, Jeremy turned and looked back at the house. His face was so open, so happy and hopeful. I saw him take in a breath, maybe planning to call out something. Yet I know that he couldn’t see me. I stayed far back in the room. Finally he climbed into the taxi, and I sat down on the windowseat and reached for Pippi. “You think she hit just a little,” Pippi said. “But she hit me hard, smack in the stomach. She really hurt.” “I know, I know,” I said, barely listening. I put her on my lap and set my face against her head. Her hair had a clean sharp smell. I took a breath of it and felt it fill me like an ache, and I closed my eyes and held on to her for as long as she would allow.

Darcy made a poster: WELCOME EDWARD. We Scotch-taped it to the window. The four girls sat beneath it, freshly dressed and combed, making four steamy o’s on the glass. Then Abbie said, “Here they are! Here they come!” The taxi pulled up, the door opened, out stepped Mary. After her came Jeremy, with the baby in his arms. “See, how little?” I said, but I was talking to an empty room. The children were already fighting their way to the door. “I open it, because I’m the oldest,” Darcy said, but Abbie said, “You always get to do things!” “Hush!” I called. They paid me no attention. I stood alone at the window and smiled down at Jeremy and Mary, who came up the walk side by side, laughing, surrounded by a sea of bobbing heads and small hands waving in celebration.

“I have something to tell you,” Mary said. “Jeremy? Are you listening?”

He wasn’t. He was making a statue. He stood before a circle of tin children, waist-high; he wrung his hands. Like a man in a well, he heard Mary’s voice only dimly. It was necessary to find red. Where was the right red? But then he detected some urgency in what she said, something different from the Muzak of her discussions of washing machines, report cards, DPT shots. “What?” he said. He struggled up from under layers and layers of thought. There was a dry feeling at the back of his throat, as if he had been buried in cotton. He fixed his eyes on Mary but saw, instead, the exact shade of red he needed — very bright, a little fuzzy. It seemed familiar. He turned away from her and dumped out a carton of scraps. Nothing there. He went across the room nearly at a run, bent-kneed. He flung open shelves and pulled out drawers and turned over a wastebasket There was a red lace heart and a red geometric design from a magazine and a piece of red construction paper that smelled like the inside of his grammar school forty years ago. He held the paper to his nose and closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Now children’s voices came singing through his head, over all those decades:

She’ll be wearing red pajamas when she comes,

(Scratch, scratch)

She’ll be wearing …

Red flannel. He saw it clearly now. He even saw the microscopic dots of lint left from laundering. He plowed through the wastepaper and out of the door, across the hall to the girls’ room. “Jeremy?” said Mary. “What are you doing? You said you wouldn’t use their things any more, you promised!”

“I’ll get them new ones,” Jeremy said.

“New what? What are you looking for? You always say that, Jeremy.”

He paused in the middle of a drawer, up to his elbows in pink and white. “Where are their red pajamas?” he asked.

“What red pajamas?”

“Don’t children wear red pajamas any more?”

“They never had any red pajamas.”

He straightened up from the drawer and went over to the closet. Scattered across the floor were dirty socks, blouses, stuffed animals — you would think that somewhere in here would be a tiny piece of red flannel. He opened the closet door and scanned a rack of dresses, all different sizes and colors. “I have something I want to tell you,” Mary said.

Like a string pulling him, some strong piece of twine pulling him away from the picture in his head. Even before he turned to her the red flannel had dissolved and the circle of children had stopped spinning, dropped their hands, and crumbled away. He opened his mouth to protest but saw, suddenly, how the curve of her cheek fitted so exactly to the curve of Rachel’s head — the latest baby, nestled into her mother’s neck like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Mary’s hair had come undone and was tumbling down her back, lit by the sun in the window. The three faint lines beginning at the corner of each eye were lit as well, radiating as precisely as a cat’s whiskers, giving her a look of constant, gentle puzzlement. “What is it, Mary?” he asked.

“Are you really listening to me?”

“Yes, yes.”

But up came the sound of feet, pounding on the stairs. An interruption to the interruption. Was this how life progressed? If he traced his way back through the chain of interruptions, looking for the first act someone had tugged him from, wouldn’t he find himself ten years in the past? In came Pippi, out of breath. “Mom? Where’s Mom?”

“Why, here she is,” said Jeremy.

“Guess what, Mom?”

Mary’s face took on that change that always happened when her children spoke. She bent her head, her eyes grew instantly opaque with concentration and every muscle seemed tensed to listen. “Some men are bringing in a refrigerator,” Pippi told her.