Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

“A refrigerator?”

“They say Jeremy won it in a contest.”

Mary raised her head and looked at him. “You should have let me know,” she said.

“But I — how could I? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“They say he got a letter,” said Pippi.

“Oh, Jeremy. Are you not opening letters again?”

“Why, I thought I was. I can’t imagine what—”

“They say you have to come down, Mom,” Pippi said.

“All right, I’m coming.”

She descended the steps without hurry, unruffled as ever, behind Pippi’s clattering shoes. Rachel’s face bobbed over her shoulder. Jeremy followed, wiping his hands on his trousers. He felt pulled in too many directions. Pieces of the statue still crowded his mind along with Mary’s listening face, the thunder of furniture moving downstairs, the news she had never managed to tell him. “Um, Mary,” he said, “can’t they take it back again? This house is getting so full. We surely don’t need another refrigerator.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Jeremy, we’ll put it in the basement.”

“We put the last one in the basement.”

“Well? There’s still room. You know how much food this family eats.”

“But it feels so cluttered,” Jeremy said. “Mary, there are so many things in this house. I just feel so—”

They arrived in the downstairs hallway. Two men in leather jackets were rolling an enormous pink refrigerator along a path they had cleared through the parlor, steering their way between rocking chairs and tricycles and hordes of children. “Look!” said Mary. “It’s a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer, the kind I’ve always wanted.”

“Kitchen?” said one of the men.

“No — well, yes, why not. Then we’ll send the old one down to the basement. Could you move the old one first?”

“Look, we ain’t moving men.”

“I’ll pay you,” Mary said.

“Five dollars is what we would ask for it.”

Jeremy?

Everyone looked at him. He felt embarrassed, as if he were there under false pretences. He wasn’t the one who handled the money. “Well, actually,” he said, “I don’t believe we want this item.”

“Jeremy!”

“You should’ve told the contest people that,” one man said. “All we do is deliver them, like they ask us to.”

“It appears I must have mislaid the letter. Actually I — we have two refrigerators.”

“What you go and enter the contest for, then?”

“I thought I might win money,” Jeremy said.

“Jeremy, you know we can use another refrigerator,” Mary told him. “Especially for this summer, when watermelons come in. Leave the gentlemen alone, Hannah. And you know the boarders need shelves of their own, they don’t want to get—”

“Do we move it or don’t we, lady?”

“Yes!” said the children, and jumped up and down, and clapped, and made Jeremy’s head ache. Mary said, “Of course you do. Empty the old one, will you, children? Everybody help; just put the food on the counter.” She herded them into the kitchen and Jeremy followed. He would feel awkward left alone with the delivery men. He watched from the doorway while children stacked endless cartons of milk on the drain-board, relayed heads of lettuce to the table, tossed an arc of oranges across the room. “Quite a family you got there,” a delivery man said behind him. Jeremy smiled too widely and ducked his head.

Did anyone guess how his children baffled him? He didn’t understand them. He had trouble talking to them. All he could do was watch: drink them in with such speechless, open-mouthed amazement that he was accused of being off in a daze. Mary watched too, but for different reasons. She was checking for danger and germs and mischief; she was their armed guard. What Jeremy was doing was committing them to memory, preparing for some moment far in the future when he could sit down alone and finally figure them out. He knew the exact curl of Abbie’s eyes when she laughed, the way Hannah rubbed the down on her upper lip when she sucked her thumb, the dimples like parentheses in Rachel’s cheeks. It seemed to him that all of his children were miniature Marys. He could find no physical resemblance to himself. He thought that was natural, for Mary’s pregnancies appeared to be entirely her own undertakings. It was she who discovered and announced them, took her calcium tablets, disappeared behind those closed swinging doors at the hospital to give birth. But then he looked at Darcy — still blond and blue-eyed, nearly as tall as her mother now but with someone else’s frail bones. Her father had not been eclipsed. Her father’s genes must have been as recessive as Jeremy’s, all pale and slight; yet they had won out. How come? He turned a puzzled stare on his own children, brown-headed and dark-eyed. He watched his son Edward, who at two and a half wore faded Levis dangling below the pot of his stomach and little cowboy boots. He had not known they made boots as small as that. He had never had boots when he was a boy; and if he had he would not have known how to walk in them with that jaunty swagger or how to hook his thumbs through the belt loops of his Levi’s. Where had Edward learned? Where had all of them learned to march so fearlessly across the teeming streets, to brave their way through the city schools, and shout and cheer and throw oranges without a trace of self-consciousness?

Sometimes he said, “Don’t you think we should see to their last names?”

“They have last names,” said Mary. “Yours. It’s on their birth certificates.”

“Yes, but if anyone were to check or anything. If they asked for proof.”

“Why should they do that?”

“Yes, well.”

He had the feeling that the children were some new type of boarder, just louder and more troublesome. They were not entirely of this house, they were visitors from the outside world. When he was most deeply absorbed in his work, children came seeping up the stairs like the rising waters of a flood, and their noise — strange clangs and hoots and the unbearable pitch of their quarrels — would soak into him slowly, at first unnoticed, then so exasperating that he would fling down his scissors and throw open the door and stand there trembling. “Why are you doing this to me?” he would ask. “Why must you make this noise? Why do you keep, why do you—” Their faces would all be turned up to him. There was something pathetic and yet irritating about their fallen socks, their patched jeans, the damp gray underpants drooping beneath some little one’s dress. They were utterly silent. Silence brought Mary more quickly than any shriek could. She was there in an instant, running up the stairs already asking, “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Mary, I was just trying to do some work here—”

“Yes, all right. Come on, children, Jeremy’s working.”

“It’s just that they keep making so much noise, you see.”

“You can play in the kitchen,” Mary told them. “I know what. Shall we make cookies?”

There was no way to win. He felt depressed at the way she herded them down the stairs, shielding them from him with her back; he felt lonely and guilty now that the third floor was silent again. How could he have scolded them like that? He knew them so little, couldn’t he have let them stay a while? He looked around the hall and saw the traces they had left behind — one roller skate, a homemade doll, a chalky handprint on the newel post. At his feet was a paper covered with purple writing: HANNAH 4 YR OLD I AM HANNAH. A fire engine with a key in its back wound itself down, its little red light blinking more and more slowly and the sound of its engine growing weaker.