Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

When I went out to say goodbye to Brian I could tell that he was still worried. “Well, so long!” I said. “And thanks again, Brian”—singing it out, hoping to cheer him up. But he didn’t seem to hear. “Mary. Look,” he said.

“We’re enjoying this, Brian.”

“Look. Why don’t you tell me the whole story?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said.

He sighed and climbed into the car. He rolled down the window to give me last-minute instructions—“There’s a phone up at the store … you can turn on the water out back beside the … call me if you …”—and I nodded and waved and smiled.

Then his car disappeared down the road, and I turned back to see my children watching me anxiously from the doorway. They were clustered at all heights, smudged from the things they had been carrying, framed by rotting wood with a great hollow blackness behind them. I have seen happier pictures in those ads appealing for aid to underprivileged children. I never thought that any children belonging to me would look that way.

From the little store up at the boatyard we bought cleaning supplies and groceries, and we all cleaned until dark but it hardly showed. Lunch was sandwiches and supper was canned spaghetti, and after supper we fell into bed. Bed: that was a problem. I put the three older ones in the double bed and Edward and Hannah at opposite ends of the couch. Rachel and I used the army cot. We didn’t even have sheets — just the blankets I had brought and one musty old quilt we found in the highboy. The children were tired enough to sleep anywhere, but I lay awake for a long time wondering what I thought I was doing. I tried to call up a picture of Jeremy. Had he missed us yet? I imagined him sitting in front of the TV in the darkened dining room, keeping silent company with the boarders. Whenever he had something to think over he would stare at the television for hours on end. Maybe he was weighing us in his mind that very minute, stacking us up, listing our faults and our virtues. Or mine, at least. Surely he didn’t need to think twice about the children. They might get on his nerves sometimes but at least they were mostly his own flesh and blood. I was the interrupter, the overwhelmer; nobody has to tell me that. I saw how he had to tear his eyes from his work when I climbed the stairs to ask him could he babysit while I went to a kindergarten conference? Would he feed Hannah while I took Edward to the doctor? did he happen to have change for the diaper man? I knew those things weren’t as important as his sculptures, but what did he expect me to do? This is what comes with having children. You don’t just tie off their little navel cords and toss them on their way like balloons. You have to start thinking about adenoids and zinc ointment and the proper schooling, you worry about nutrition and germs, money begins to matter suddenly. Oh, hear how shrill my voice gets. Imagine what it would be like to be interrupted by such a voice just as you were conceiving your finest statue. As for my overwhelming him! Did he think I didn’t know? I never spoke to him without a sense of holding myself in check, trying to keep the reins in. I didn’t want to dominate. When I talked to him with big, wide gestures, with power and energy flooding out of me, I saw how he quailed and then made himself stand firm. He was wishing that I would shrink a little. He never guessed that I already had shrunk, that this was as small as I could get.

I sent him messages through the dark: Come and get us. Call Brian, call the boatyard. Make up some excuse for missing your wedding, anything at all, I’ll believe it: you suffered a stroke or amnesia, you were mugged in the studio, you would never have simply decided that you didn’t want to marry me. I thought up ways that he might get in touch with us. I pictured the storekeeper banging on our door—“Lady? Man up there on the telephone, says it’s urgent, life or death.” Or he might come in person. No. Never. But couldn’t he, just this once? He wouldn’t bang. His knock would be so soft I would wonder if I had imagined it. I would open the door and find him waiting, hidden in the dark, recognizable only by the dear, sad hopefulness in his stance and that hesitant breath he always took before moving toward me. For that moment I would give up anything, half the years of my life even, anything but the children. I made a hundred silent promises, but the night just went trailing on and on and the only sound I heard was the murmuring of the baby in the crook of my arm.

We finished shoveling the dirt out. We scrubbed the floor and dusted the furniture, we replaced the broken steps with cinder-blocks that Abbie found down by the water. Darcy washed the kitchen cupboards and the mismatched dishes she found stacked in them, and scoured the sink. The little ones polished the windows, their favorite job. I taped cardboard patches over the broken panes. We tore down the curtains and the great meshy spiderwebs, we ripped the tacked-on oilcloth off the table and the draggled calico skirt off the sink. From the boatyard store we bought brighter lightbulbs, a bucket of disinfectant, a flashlight for walks in that deep, country dark that is so startling after a life in the city, and finally — three days later, when I stopped thinking we might be leaving at any minute — aluminum cots for the children to sleep on and more blankets to cover them with. The store had no pillows except the life-preserving kind. My children have always slept on pillows. “Never mind,” I told them, “this way is good for the spine. You’ll be healthier.” Not that health seemed to be any problem. They worked hard every day fixing up the house, as if it were a game; they ate enormous meals and slept like rocks every night — pillowless and sheetless, crackling about on the red vinyl pads that came with the cots. I wondered what I would do with them if we had to stay here so long it stopped being a novelty. Should I put them in the local school? But it was so close to the end of the year by now — nearly May. The weather was getting warmer. We peeled off some of the layers of clothing we’d been wearing day and night. And as we slacked up work on the house the children simply took to the outdoors. They lugged Rachel with them through the tall grass and pestered the boatmen and hung around the docks. They weren’t allowed to touch the water, even — it was foul and filmed with grease. “What about summer?” Pippi asked me. “Won’t we get to go swimming?” I said, “Of course not. I’ll get you a wading pool, if it’s hot.”

Summer! Would we still be here when summer came?

Brian stopped by almost every day. I told him not to but he said he had to come anyway — he had his boat moored out on the river, a little blue ketch bobbing in front of our house. “How are things in the city?” I asked him. “What’s happening in Baltimore? Is the show going well? Do you have many buyers?” All except what I wanted to ask most: Why doesn’t Jeremy miss us?

The only time he mentioned Jeremy was once during the first week, when it was still cold. I remember the cold because he asked me to step outside with him a minute, away from the children, just as he was leaving. I came in my sweater, with my arms folded across my chest for warmth, and he said, “Not like that, get a coat. I’ll wait.” Then out beside his car he said, “Mary, I feel I’m in an awkward position here.”

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

What would I have done if he’d said yes?

But what he said was, “No, of course not, but I’d like to know what you expect of me. Am I supposed to be keeping your whereabouts a secret? Because if I am, now—”

“Oh no,” I said. “Jeremy knows where I am.”

“I wasn’t sure that he did.”