Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

I looked over at Brian, but he had dropped the subject when I told him to and now he was just driving along puffing quietly on his pipe.

In the evenings I tell fairytales, the same old fairytales over and over. The children curl against me, clean and warm in their fresh white underwear, smelling of milk. I close my eyes and take a deep breath of them. I could tell these stories in my sleep. “Another, now another,” the children say. Don’t they ever get tired?

I see myself on a sagging couch beneath a warped tin roof, braced on each side by my children for lack of firmer support. I understand that from outside I seem to have been leading a fairly dramatic life, involving elopements and love children and men stretching in a nearly unbroken series behind me, but the fact is that when you proceed through these experiences day by day they are not really so earth-shaking. All events, except childbirth, can be reduced to a heap of trivia in the end. When I die I expect I will be noticing a water ring someone left on the coffee table, or a spiral of steam rising from a whistling teapot. I will be sure to miss the moment of my passing.

Rapunzel. The Princess and the Pea. Rumpelstiltskin. My voice grows croaky. My mind runs ahead of the words. I play silent games with the tired old plots, I like to ponder the endings beyond the endings. How about Rapunzel, are we sure she was really happy ever after? Maybe the prince stopped loving her now that her hair was short. Maybe the Genuine Princess was a great disappointment to her husband, being so quick to find the faults and so forthright about pointing them out. And after Rumpelstiltskin was defeated the miller’s daughter lived in sorrow forever, for the king kept nagging her to spin more gold and she could never, never manage it again.

You know how I knew she had left him? I found him smoking a cigarette. I went up to his studio on Friday night to ask where the others were, it felt so weird downstairs. I knocked and stuck my head in, and there he sat on this purple velvet couch holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger and blowing out a long careful funnel of smoke. “Mr. Pauling?” I said. “Jeremy? Where’s everyone gone to?” But then I guessed for myself, right while I was asking. Something about the way he was holding the cigarette. I don’t know why. “Good Lord, she’s left you,” I said. He nodded. I wouldn’t say that he looked upset. Just stunned, sort of. He cleared his throat but didn’t say anything, and then he switched the cigarette to a new position between his index and middle fingers and sat there staring at it, and I closed the door again.

Well, it shouldn’t have surprised me. Actually she was a very ordinary woman, not at all what you’d expect of an artist’s wife. The wonder of it is that she ever had the good sense to marry him in the first place. So earthbound , she was. Always nagging and tidying and bringing him her little domestic problems. Knocking on the door: “Jeremy , the storm window man’s here with an estimate and won’t take any signature but yours. Won’t you please come out. Do you have any idea what goes into the running of this house?” If they ever start a men’s liberation movement, I’ll join it in a flash. Though of course it’s taken me a while to see her so clearly, I admit it. At first I was just glad to get a roof over my head, someone watching out for me and making me wear my raincoat. But I left a mother just like her up in Pennsylvania, went through all the bother of running away only to end up here in the same kind of stewpot. It’s lucky I finally got wise. When I think how close I came to going over to her side!

All the same, it was sort of a shock at first to discover she was gone.

I went downstairs to make a peanut butter sandwich. By then the senior citizens were in the kitchen scrounging for supper. The two of them got on my nerves, shuffling around the way they did. They seemed to be weaving a net across the kitchen floor. “Listen,” I said. “Mary’s taken the kids and left.” That shook them up. Mr. Somerset’s mouth sagged open and he forgot to watch the frying pan. Old lady Vinton went on stirring her eggs but I could tell she was surprised. Her spatula went slower and slower. She kept her eyes on what she was doing. “Took to her heels,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Perhaps she’s off visiting,” Miss Vinton said.

“Who would she visit?”

“Well, now, we don’t know the whole story. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

“Like what, for instance.”

“I’m sure it will all work out in the end.”

People say that when they mean that life will get back to the way it was before. It never occurs to them that a change might be for the better.

I said, “I think I’ll take Jeremy a peanut butter sandwich.”

“I don’t believe Jeremy eats peanut butter,” Miss Vinton said.

“He’s never had mine, then. I make it myself.”

Mr. Somerset said, “Yes, yes, we all know that.” Mr. Somerset doesn’t like me. His voice when he spoke to me was all cracked and peevish. “Don’t think I haven’t heard you,” he said, “running that blender to death the minute I set my head on my pillow for my afternoon nap.”

I ignored him. I spread peanut butter on a slice of whole wheat bread. “At least I imagine he could use the company,” I said.

“Perhaps he would like to be left alone,” said Miss Vinton.

“That’s for him to tell me, isn’t it?”

“People can’t always say what they feel, Olivia. I imagine he might like to think things through a while, and when he gets hungry he’ll come down and—”

I know her type. Always so virtuous about keeping out of the way, letting others be. It’s an excuse, of course. Aloofness is the easy way out; I believe in plunging right ahead. Slamming the sandwich on a tray and adding an orange (artificially colored, but what could I do?) and marching straight upstairs to Jeremy. Knock-knock. “It’s me, it’s Olivia. You hungry?”

No answer. I went in anyway. He was smoking another cigarette. “Here,” I said, setting the tray down, and then I went over to a half-finished piece and said, “I like it.” I pretended not to notice how deserted it looked. I pretended he was just carrying on with the making of it no matter what, which in my opinion is what he should have been doing. “It’s got a good flow to it,” I said. To tell the truth I didn’t have the vaguest idea what comments were required, but I was going to learn. I have the deepest respect for artists. I said, “When are you planning on finishing it?”

“I don’t think I will ever finish it,” Jeremy said.

“Nonsense.”

He put the cigarette to his mouth again. You could tell he wasn’t used to smoking. The filter tip barely touched his lips, and he sucked in very quickly and let the smoke out without inhaling it. The pack in his lap said “True”—Miss Vinton’s, then. A namby-pamby brand. “Look,” I said, “do you mind if I just stay a while and see how you work?”

He stopped watching his smoke and looked at me. His eyes were wide and his mouth fell open. I wasn’t expecting so much attention so suddenly. I smoothed my hair back and said, “Of course, if I would distract you in any way—”

But then he suddenly got to his feet, he lurched to his feet, like someone pulled by strings, and set his fingertips to his mouth and stood swaying there. After a moment he turned and ran to the bathroom and I heard him throwing up. It seemed to go on forever. I sat down on the couch and wound a strand of hair around my finger, waiting for him to come back. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave. I had all the time in the world.