Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

In the dark his mother’s voice was thinner than a thread, weaving its way through a tangle of other people’s words. “Oh, Jeremy, you were always so … I really and truly don’t …” She spoke with that whispery sigh that meant he had done something wrong — a sigh not of anger but of disappointment. Well, of course. Lying here on his back, watching his mistakes roll across the ceiling, he felt he had done everything wrong. “Why, Jeremy?” she used to say (when he spilled his milk, or wrinkled his clothes, or failed to make his bed). “Why are you treating me this way? I’ve been as good to you as I know how to be. Now I see that being good is not enough.” It occurred to him that she had spoken truer words than she knew. Being good was not enough. The mistakes he reviewed were not evil deeds but errors of aimlessness, passivity, an echoing internal silence. And when he rose in the morning (having waited out the night, watching each layer of darkness lift slowly and painfully), he was desperate with the need to repair all he had done, but the only repairs he could think of were also aimless, passive, silent. He had a vague longing to undertake some metaphysical task, to make some pilgrimage. In books a pilgrimage would pass through a fairytale landscape of round green hills and nameless rivers and pathless forests. He knew of no such landscape in America. Fellow pilgrims in leather and burlap would travel alongside him only long enough to tell their stories — clear narratives with beginnings, middles, ends and moral messages, uncluttered by detail — but where would he find anyone of that description? And think of what he would have to carry in the rustic knapsack on his back. The tools of his craft: Epoxy glue in two squeeze tubes, spray varnish, electric sander, disposable paintbrushes. Wasn’t there anything in the world that was large scale any more? Wasn’t there anything to lift him out of this stillness inside? He fumbled for his clothes and picked his way downstairs. He made his breakfast toast and ate it absently, chewing each mouthful twenty times and gazing at the toaster while he tried to find just one heroic undertaking that he could aim his life toward.

On a Saturday morning early in November he went into the older children’s room on the third floor. He braved the tumult that seemed to go on filling the air with noise and movement even this long afterward — circus paintings and laughing dolls and plastic horses and coffee cans overflowing with broken crayons — and he found Abbie’s pink nylon backpack at the bottom of the closet. In the kitchen he made two cheese sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, and he put them into the backpack along with an apple, a flashlight, and all the rent money from the cookie jar. He located a city bus map in the front of the telephone book, and after studying it for a moment he carefully tore out the entire page and folded it over and over and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he was ready to go.

Outdoors he was swept by a sudden coolness that he was not prepared for. He was wearing lightweight clothes, and a cotton windbreaker and his gray tweed golf cap. For warmth he kept his arms tightly folded and he walked with short, brisk steps, with the backpack whispering and bouncing behind him. He traveled several blocks, barely hestitating as he came to street crossings. Someone watching very carefully might have seen him swallow, or brace his shoulders, or look a few too many times to the left and right when a traffic light turned green, but otherwise he seemed no different from anyone else. At one corner he stopped and peered up at the street sign a moment, and then he made a turn and kept walking. He was among crowds now. Women sped past carrying dress boxes and string-handled paper bags, looking purposeful. A stroller with two children in it ran over his left foot. At the doorway of the dimestore, teenagers stood around shoving each other and popping their bubble gum and combing their hair and beginning dance steps they never finished. “Excuse me,” Jeremy kept saying. “Oh, I’m sorry. Excuse me, please.” They didn’t listen. He threaded his way among them, his arms down at his sides now, trying to avoid touching anyone.

The inside of the dimestore smelled of wooden floors and popcorn. It seemed to him that there were far too many people in the aisles. “Excuse me,” he kept saying, but as if he were transparent, no one noticed. He had to make his way to the toy department inch by inch, indirectly. When he finally reached it, he found a girl in a wrinkled smock filing her fingernails behind the counter. “Excuse me, I am going to need six toys,” he told her. She looked up, still filing away. “I need toys to take to my children.”

“Fine with me,” she said.

“Do you have six toys I could take to them?”

She waved the nail file toward the toys, which spilled down not one counter but several and were made up of far too many colors. His eyes began blurring. “Well, I — do you possibly have any suggestions?” he asked her.

“Just look around, is what I suggest.”

Rubber, paper, painted tin, plastic in phosphorescent shades of pink and chartreuse. Everything he saw seemed to make him hungry. He felt hollow and weak. “Perhaps—”he said. His hand hovered over a tiny wind-up metal tricycle, ridden by a metal boy, but when he looked up at the salesgirl she only filed a thumbnail and stared past him, refusing even a hint of encouragement. He sighed and moved on. He traveled down the rows of toys and then beyond them, up other aisles, pausing at a rack of coloring books and then again at infants’ wear but still not buying anything. A terrycloth bib bore a painted picture of a baby who reminded him of Rachel, but the words beneath it said “I’m Daddy’s Little Angel” and none of his children had ever called him Daddy. He wondered why not. He wondered if it were too late now for them to begin. But still, he didn’t buy the bib. He imagined that Mary might give him an odd, considering look when she read the words on it, and the thought of that look made him feel foolish.

At the stationery counter he became fascinated by party favors. They hung on hooks, in little cellophane packets — clusters of tiny paper parasols that really opened, plastic cradles no bigger than walnut shells, tin horns with tassels and decks of cards the size of his thumbnail. He hung over them open-mouthed, reverently touching first one packet and then another. “Help you?” a woman said, but he shook his head. He made himself leave the favors and think of children’s things again — masses of balloons in a plastic bag, striped paper hats, then stationery with pictures of little girls in the upper left-hand corner. Stationery? He wasn’t sure which of his children were literate. He returned to the party favors, and found beneath them a section containing small white spherical packages tied with blue ribbon. “Excuse me,” he said to the woman. “I was wondering what was in these.”

“These here? Surprises.”

“I mean — could you tell me what the surprises are?”

“Now, if I knew that,” she said, “they wouldn’t be surprises, would they?”

“No, I suppose not.”

They were sold in packs of three. He could buy two packs and they would come out even. Also he thought it would be exciting to have gifts that were so mysterious. Who knew what might be hidden inside? Perhaps occasionally they filled a package with a real treasure, something worth far more than the price. As soon as he thought of that, choosing became difficult. He didn’t want to make any mistakes. He picked up a pack and then dropped it, picked another, burrowed deep down to find the bottom-most one. From time to time he looked up at the woman and gave her a small friendly smile, but she never smiled back at him. Still, he felt he was making the right decision. When he had paid for them he took off his backpack to put the surprise balls inside, and the smooth way they fit between his cheese sandwiches gave him a feeling of competence. He had chosen well, unerringly, with all his instincts working for him. He was still smiling when he left the store.