Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

“This morning I could see my breath.”

“We’re not made of glass, you know.”

“Mary, that cabin is no better than sleeping out. Maybe you’ve forgotten. There’s no heat, no—”

“I remember that,” I said, “but it’s the only place I know of to go.” Then I saw his face close over, braced for me to begin my story. I said, “And I certainly do thank you. Last time we were there the children loved it.”

The closed look didn’t fade. He said, “Tell me this, Mary. How long were you planning to stay?”

“Well, I hadn’t made any definite plans yet.” I mean—

“Probably not long,” I said. I felt I had to help him out.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but do you have enough money?”

“Oh yes,” I said.

“Because if you don’t, now—”

“Brian, you know better than anyone that Jeremy’s just sold four pieces,” I said.

Actually the little money Jeremy had made was still in the bank, and I had left the checkbook on his bureau, where he would be sure to find it. I wasn’t a genuine burglar. What I took was my household-hints money, my money-back-offer money, my coupon money, which I had been saving against trouble all these years as I once promised myself I would. It had mounted up. Fifty dollars for telling how I use old bottle crates to make spice racks, twenty-five for the third-best recipe based on sliced pasteurized processed cheese food and a dollar back for ten labels off canned beans. The money was in a plastic refrigerator container in my purse, and I reached in to touch it and felt strong and competent and too big for the car. Never mind, children; I might carry you away without ever saying why but at least I will be with you, and I will provide for you. I learned my lesson the first time around. Women should never leave any vacant spots for the men to fill; they should form an unbroken circle on their own and enclose each child within it.

We passed barren stretches now, where the fields had been peeled back and naked buildings sat on jagged slabs of concrete, looking as if they had recently been uprooted from some more crowded place. We passed long avenues of service stations and cut-rate tire dealers and machine shops, and then oil refineries and warehouses and strange mechanical monsters standing alone in tangles of dry grass — electrical objects on wiry, spraddled legs, tanks and cylinders, gigantic motors with bolts as big as grown men and twisted black pipes that could suck up a house, all silent and unused. The cars around us now were rusted and crumpled, fantastically finned, driven by gum-chewing men; we were close to the Bethlehem Steel Works. “Look!” said Pippi. “Country!” and she pointed to a matted gray line of tree branches far, far beyond an auto graveyard. “When we get to the river, can we swim?” she asked.

“Philippa Pauling! You’d get pneumonia.”

“Typhoid, more likely,” said Brian. “Bubonic plague.” He looked over at me. I thought he might be about to smile, although it was hard to tell beneath that beard of his. And the children were perking up too — pointing out sights on the road and quarreling over whose turn it was at the window. The junkyards gave way to houses, all tiny and papery-looking but with signs of real people in them, at least. Wooden donkeys pulled wooden carts across the front yards, and there were bird baths and flowered mailboxes and silvery balls on pedestals everywhere we looked. Some people had set up housekeeping in trailers with cement bases built in under them. Now, why would anyone want to do that? All those temporary objects resting on permanent foundations? Well, maybe it was just my mood that made me wonder. I felt like a solid stone house, myself, jacked up on little tiny wheels when I had no business going anywhere.

Now the space between neighbors grew larger and we passed through woods — scrubby and meager, but woods all the same. We turned off onto a gravel road lined with more houses, most of them smaller than the boats that sat in the driveways. Cabin cruisers — ugly things. I never could see why some people like boating so much. I’ve never cared for the water at all, not one way or the other.

To get to Brian’s house you go straight down to the river, through a cluster of bleak shacks and a store and a long shed where they do repair work in the wintertime. There were only a few boats tied up at the docks. The season had hardly begun. We went plummeting along a dirt road that ran alongside the water, and then Brian braked and we looked up to see his cabin: a gray weathered rectangle with a tin roof, and not a perfect right angle anywhere on it. Everything was sagging, leaning, buckling, splitting. The tops of both steps were missing; anyone entering would find himself stepping into wooden boxes, sinking down into cold black spidery caverns. I knew all that ahead of time, of course. I had meant what I told Brian. But still! There are some things you can’t actually summon up in your memory — smells, they say (although I always could) and then the exact atmosphere, the weight and texture and quality of air, that exists in certain places. I knew that Brian’s shack was dismal but I had forgotten how just standing next to it would make you feel dank and chilled, a despairing feeling, and how when you went in some heaviness would press down on your skin and cause your heart to sink. This is not just myself I am talking about. The minute we were inside Brian reached out and touched my arm, unnecessarily, as if the gesture had been startled out of him. “Mary!” he said. “You can’t stay here.”

The children climbed in one by one and fell silent, and stood in a huddle together shivering.

Part of it was the cold, of course. There is nothing so cold as air that has been trapped beneath tin all winter. Then there was the dirt. When Brian bought his ketch the shack came with it, automatically. The previous owner had stayed here whenever he was working on the boat or preparing for an early morning sail. Brian couldn’t have cared less about the shack itself. He let the grit form a film on the table and the mildew grow on the swaybacked couch and the rust trickle down from the faucets in the kitchen sink. Boys broke windows, birds flew in and died after battering themselves against the walls. Why, I could have shoveled the dirt out! I pictured myself with a great garden spade, laboring over the cracked beige linoleum. Then I saw how I would rip down those tatty plastic curtains and scour the sink white again and cover the couch with some nice bright throw, and all my muscles grew springy the way they had the night before when I was planning the packing, and I knew that we would stay.

“You’re not serious about this,” Brian told me.

“Could you bring in our things, do you suppose?”

I set Rachel on my hip and took a tour of the house. Not that there was much to tour. There was a living room with a couch and an armchair, and the kitchen merely took up one end of it — a sink and hotplate, a table and three chairs. The bedroom held a concave double bed and an army cot and a highboy with one drawer missing. In a little cubicle off the bedroom was a toilet with a split wooden seat, its tiny pool of water a coppery color, set squarely beneath the biggest window in the house. Something about that window — the fact that it was curtainless, or the white scum on its panes — made the light passing through it seem cold and eerie. I stood staring out of it for minutes on end, although I knew I should be helping Brian. I watched the children carry things from the car, all of them ghostly behind that cloudy glass. They tottered beneath blurred objects that I could not identify, and in their midst walked Brian, stepping precisely in his narrow Italian shoes, carrying the potty chair and something pink. When they entered the house, they seemed to have just that moment become real. Like people stepping off a television screen into your living room. I heard their voices, warm and high-pitched and louder than I had expected, and then Edward started crying over a scraped shin and I went out to comfort him. I was very glad to see their faces. Their noses were pink from the fresh air and they were sniffing and puffing. “Where shall I put this?” they kept asking. “What do you want me to do with this? Where will we sleep? What will we eat?” I bent to roll Edward’s jean leg up, tilting Rachel on my hip, but Rachel was used to that and she just took a clutch of my blouse and went on smiling in her sideways position, as adaptable as any of them.