Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

Now there were fat little orange life vests heaped all over the deck — six of them. Brian had brought them out one Saturday, laying them before me one by one like an Indian warrior laying skins before his maiden’s tent. Five would have been bad enough, but six! That implied we would be here until Rachel was old enough to sail too. “Oh, Brian,” I said. “Well, I — that’s very nice of you but I really think the regular life preservers were fine, it’s not as if they go with you all that—” You would never have guessed how often I pictured five of my children drowning simultaneously. At the moment all that worried me was Brian, his brown eyes so gentle and amused above the beard — so confident .

Jeremy’s eyes were blue. Brown eyes didn’t seem right any more.

In the Gothic novels Guy used to buy me the heroine was always marrying for convenience or money or safety from some danger, and when she was proposed to she took pains to make that clear. “I must be honest, Sir Brent, I do not love you.”

“Oh, I understand that perfectly, my dear.” Then later, of course, she did begin loving him, and everything ended happily. I wish I had been honest. I accepted Jeremy because it was all I could think of to do at the time, and although I believe he knew that we never discussed it in so many words. I was trying to be so delicate with him. My first mistake. One day he said, “Mary, do you love me?” He said, “I need to know, do you?” And I said, “Yes, Jeremy. Of course I do.” Well, I did have a sort of fond feeling. When he brought me that first bouquet of chicory and poison ivy my heart went right out to him, but not in that way. Then after we had been together a while it seemed as if something crept up on me without noticing, and one morning I watched him stooping to fumble with Darcy’s broken shoelace and the love just came pouring over me. Only by then, of course, there was no way to tell him. He thought I had been loving him for months already. Was that why things went wrong?

For we never got it straightened out. When I tried to show how I felt it seemed I flooded him, washed him several feet distant from me, left him bewildered and dismayed. Sometimes I wondered, could it be that he was happier when I didn’t love him back? It seemed all I could do was give him things and do him favors, and make him see how much he needed me. The more he depended on me the easier I felt. In fact I depended on his dependency, we were two dominoes leaning against each other, but did Jeremy ever realize that?

Once he made a piece showing a white cottage with a picket fence and roses on trellises, set on a green hill. At first you might think it was a calendar picture. The hill was so green, the cottage so white. “Oh!” I said when I saw it. “Well, it’s very — it’s not exactly like you, Jeremy, is it?” Then I came closer, and something disturbed me. I mean, it was too green and white, and the sky was too blue. The hill was too perfect a semicircle, and the pickets of the fence marched across the paper like gradations on a ruler. I felt that he had twisted something, and yet I couldn’t say what. I felt that in some way he was insulting me, or protesting against me. Yet I don’t think he knew that he was. “Jeremy—” I said, and turned to look at him, but I found him punching red paper circles to make perfect flowers, and I could tell from his frown that that was all he was thinking about.

He has no sense of humor but I never understood why that should be important. He has always been either too much removed from us (shut away in body and in spirit, cutting burlap) or too much with us (smack underfoot from dawn to dark, when other men are busy in some office). And I won’t try to convince anyone that he is handsome. Nor that he has what they call “personality”—watch some visiting neighbor woman stammer when he fixes her with his worktime gaze, as if he were wondering why she doesn’t leave when in fact he is not even aware that she is there. On top of that we are separated by years and years, although with Jeremy that never mattered as much as it might have with someone else. He is not really a product of his time. When I was a toddler, for instance, other men his age were fighting World War II, but Jeremy wasn’t. I don’t have any proof he even knew about the war — not that one, or the one we are going through now. Nothing outside touches him. Sometimes he seems younger than I am, as if events are what age people. I remember when his sisters came to meet me. We were having tea in the parlor and they were discussing dead friends and relatives. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were so old! They had that reverence for the past — forever returning to skate back around its edges, peering down, fascinated by its cold and pallid face beneath two feet of water. Repeating all they said in that doddery, old-lady way. (Jeremy did that too but I had never noticed before.) I looked from one to another. I felt like a very small girl at a tea party with three ancient relatives. I began to be shy and tongue-tied. What was I doing here? How could I have anything to do with this elderly man? But when they left he stood hugging himself at the door with his face all forlorn and I felt he was a two-year-old in need of comfort. “There now,” I told him, “won’t you come back in? Have another cup of tea.” And I laid my hand on his soft limp home-clipped hair and pressed my cheek against his, and felt far older than he would ever be.

When I first came here, I would have laughed aloud at the thought of loving him. Yet it is only now that I think to be surprised at myself. While it was coming about I hardly noticed. We have such an ability to adjust to change! We are like amoebas, encompassing and ingesting and adapting and moving on, until enormous events become barely perceptible jogs in our life histories. All I know is that bit by bit my world began to center on him, so that my first thought in the morning and my last at night was concern about his welfare. “Are you all right?” I used to wake and ask him out of nowhere. “Are you — is there anything you need?” I would move to his side of the bed and feel him seep away from me somehow, backing off from my everlasting questions and my face too close to his and my perfume, which — even if it was only the hand lotion I had put on after finishing the dishes — suddenly seemed too rich and full now that I was next to him. “Oh, I’m sorry!” I wanted to say. “I never meant to — I don’t want to overpower you in any way, believe me!” But then he would only have backed off further; saying that would have been overpowering in itself. There was no way I could win. Or I could win only by losing — by leaving bed, reluctantly, to sit up with a sick child or a colicky baby, and then he would come stumbling through the dark house calling my name. “Mary? Where’d you go, Mary? I can’t find you.”

He changed. I changed. He gathered some kind of stubborn, hidden strength while I became more easily touched by anything small and vulnerable — changes that each of us caused in the other, but they were exactly the ones that have separated us and that will keep us separate. If he calls me back he will be admitting a weakness. If I return unasked I will be bearing down upon him and plowing him under. If I weren’t crying I would laugh.

One day in August Rachel started fussing at breakfast time, and she kept it up without a single pause. She wouldn’t eat or sleep. She was flushed and her breath had an ether smell that my children usually get with fever, but no one in the boatyard owned a thermometer and I was too hot myself to be able to gauge the temperature of her skin. By afternoon I had decided I would have to find a doctor. I was going to ask for a ride from Zack — the boat mechanic, a slimy man who whistled whenever he saw me, but still he did have a pickup truck — and then I saw Brian’s car pulling up in our backyard and out he stepped, looking very steady and reliable in his old jeans and a fresh-ironed shirt. “Brian!” I said. “Will you drive me to the doctor? Rachel’s sick.”