Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

“Well, perhaps,” said Jeremy. “You may be right.” He gathered glue peelings into a little heap on the floor. He said, “Do you know how to make waffles?”

“No.” I took the glue peels from him and rolled them around in my hand. I had so much I wanted to say to him, and it wasn’t very often he would let me get face to face like this. “Have you ever had something just vanish, with no explanation? And you never found it again?”

“Oh yes.”

“Maybe your descendants took it.”

“They did?”

“The Martians, so-called. Maybe it’s their weakness, sticky fingers. Some of our belongings, you know, will be priceless antiques someday, and of course the Martians know exactly which ones. Know what we should do when we find something missing like that? Buy about twenty more. Like an investment. Why, right now I’ve lost my belt with the fringe. I’ve looked everywhere for it. In the fortieth century they may not even wear belts. Shouldn’t I buy a whole stack and save them up?”

“I’m so hungry, Olivia,” Jeremy said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes, but wait, I want to ask you something.”

“I don’t believe we had any breakfast.”

“Listen. Which are you, Jeremy? A descendant, or an ancestor. Do you know?”

“What?”

“Do you know what time you’re from? Do you? Think , Jeremy. I want to find this out.”

But all Jeremy said was, “I wish you could learn how to make waffles.”

Then I slammed my hand down on his, which was resting on his knee, and he started and drew back. But instead of removing his hand he left it there, and after a long motionless minute he said in a faraway voice, “How cool you are.”

I thought he must be trying to sound hip.

He slid his hand away. Still leaning back, he reached out and touched the end of a strand of my hair with one fingertip. “You’re so cold,” he said.

Then I understood. It seemed I understood all about him now. “I am always cold,” I told him. “Never warm. Mary was warm.”

“You’re not,” he said.

We stared at each other, not smiling at all.

He liked me in the colors of ice, pale blues and grays and whites, everything smooth, preferably shiny. He never said so, but I knew. He never had to say anything at all any more. Sometimes we went days without speaking or looking at each other, and we never touched, even accidentally. We just moved about side by side, in step. We sat in identical dusty green chairs in the dining room, watching housewives win electrical appliances. When they won they screamed and hugged the emcee and took his face hard between their hands to kiss him on the lips. “I used to win things,” Jeremy said. One woman jumped up and down and landed wrong on her spike heels and twisted her ankle. Jeremy and I watched without changing our expressions, like two goldfish looking out of a goldfish bowl.

I saw that other people were forever rushing somewhere, and nine tenths of what they did would have to be redone the next day. Cleaning, bathing, making conversation. I thought about it a long time, but I didn’t mention it to Jeremy. I didn’t need to. Half of the idea I caught from him, by osmosis; the other half I concluded for myself and passed back to him just as silently. He quit shaving. His whiskers grew out half an inch and stopped. How much time he could have saved all these years, if he had known they would do that! We quit going upstairs. His studio vanished; so did my bedroom. Look at stairs, we thought, silently, together: what a perfect example of pointlessness. They go up and down, both. If you go up you must come down. You undo everything and start over. After The Star-Spangled Banner we fell asleep in our chairs, or out in the living room, or in the downstairs bedroom, side by side on top of the spread. I followed him everywhere but without asking a thing, an un-Mary sharing a pool of chilliness. I taught him to sleep late. Waking, finding me beside him, he would struggle up. “Be still,” I said, and he lay down again and stared, as I did, at the towering white ceiling while noon approached and rolled over us and rumbled away again. Now I was an artist too. In my mind I colored the ceiling with the jagged lightning bolts you see when you squinch your eyes tight; so did Jeremy. We did it together. No strings snagged us to the rest of the world. “Good Lord in heaven!” Mr. Somerset said, shuffling up, stopping in the bedroom doorway. “Look here! What do you two think you’re up to here?” I didn’t answer. Jeremy didn’t hear. Jeremy was farther along, he was nearly out of touch altogether, but I was catching up with him as fast as I possibly could.

I wouldn’t eat, but Jeremy did. He devoured all the food that belonged to Miss Vinton: a loaf of bread, a quart jar of mayonnaise, a pack of wieners. Watching him eat made me feel stuffed. I saw that my fingers were getting knobby and my jeans were loose, but I felt so fat. He stopped chewing and looked over at me. I closed my eyes. He went on eating.

Once he said, “My mother died and so did both my sisters.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Also my father.”

“Your father.”

“Then her. Everybody left me.”

“I haven’t left.”

“Everybody outside me left.”

That was the way he let me know how he felt about me.

I was lying on the bed listening to the pigeons tearing at the ivy on the outside wall. It must be fall. Berries on the ivy. Jeremy was asleep beside me, he had been sleeping for hours while I kept watch. Then Miss Vinton came. She was wearing navy. Such a harsh color. She stood in the doorway a minute, and then she walked into the room and bent over me. She took hold of me by the chin and turned my face to her. “Olivia,” she said.

I just looked at her.

“Olivia, do you hear me?”

Now Jeremy sighed and muttered. He was dreaming of horses, flocks of wild horses in muddy colors.

“I want you to listen, Olivia. You must pull yourself together. Do you hear me?”

The older you get the more you censor what comes into your head. Big blank spaces grow where you have snipped things out. You get like Miss Vinton and Mr. Somerset; you speak very slowly, spanning all those gaps. “I want … you to take … a good look at yourself, Olivia.”

I just went on looking at her.

“Answer.”

Her hand was like a vise on my chin, like grownups forcing you to confess. “What do you want me to say?” I asked, but I kept my voice flat, to show I wasn’t scared of her. Her hand loosened a little.

“I choose you to speak to because I think you’re more in touch than he is. Surely you must see what you’re doing to yourself. Have you bathed lately? Look at your hair, your lovely long hair! You’re skin and bones, you don’t seem healthy. There’s something funny about your eyes. What is that you’re wearing?”

I wish they would break for commercials in real life.

“I can’t stand watching you harm yourself, Olivia. And you’re making Jeremy all the worse, you know that, don’t you?”

A lie. See, I wanted to tell her, how faithful I am when all others desert him? The last believer left in the church. I’m making him worse?

“I think you are losing your mind, Olivia.”

The vise on my chin again.

“Well, yes, I suppose I am,” I said, “but it’s nothing I can’t bounce back from.”

“Do it, then. Bounce.”

“You don’t believe I can.”

“Oh yes. I believe it. That’s why I’m telling you to do it.”

“I don’t see any reason to,” I said, and then I wrenched free of her hand and turned away from her.

“How about Jeremy, then? Olivia?”

“How about him.”

“He hasn’t worked in weeks. You’ve let him get too removed. Doesn’t that bother you?”