Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

He thought it took about half an hour to reach Brian’s boat. Maybe more. Another man could no doubt have done it in five minutes. He felt the nudge and scrape of the dinghy against painted wood, and he turned and reached for the ledge that ran around the deck. But how would he secure the dinghy? Slowly, now. He mustn’t rush. He thought for a long time, then passed the end of the dinghy’s rope very cautiously around a cable that rose from the deck of the ketch. Above all, he worried about falling into the gap between the two boats. He would not even stand to fasten the rope. He remained seated, straining upward, tying knot upon knot until he had a long chain of them that would certainly not slip out no matter what. Then he clung to the side of the ketch and rose by inches. He took a deep breath, hoisted himself upward, and there he was — kneeling on the deck of a sailboat, alone, with no more ill effects than the loss of his golf cap to the black greasy water and a tingling echo of fear in the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet.

He rose and made his way toward the sails. Walking on a ketch was no trouble at all, nothing like standing in a dinghy. He felt he could breathe freely again. Still, he didn’t turn to look at his family. The sound of their whistles trilled in his ears — four or five whistles, now, so he knew they must still be there, but he kept his back to them and pretended they were gone. For him, they were gone. He had never felt so isolated. Gulls slid through the air about him as white as drifting ashes, and the water dabbled softly around the edges of the boat while the dinghy scraped rhythmically against its hull. He found ropes twined around the sails, holding them furled, but it wasn’t hard to loosen them or to figure out how to raise them. First the biggest one, then the middle-sized one, then the little triangular scrap out front. They fluttered and flapped and crackled. Jeremy sat down on a deckseat to wait for them to dry. Every time a gust of wind blew up the sails would fill and the boat would move, but it seemed securely moored and Jeremy didn’t worry. He was beyond worry. The boat scudded around its mooring in wider and faster circles and the children on shore piped it on its journey with tin whistles while Jeremy, slumped on his deckseat, blinked his tears away and watched his gray golf cap bob off across a wave and grow dark and heavy and finally sink.

This house is back to its beginnings now. Lonely boarders thumb through magazines in the kitchen while they wait for their canned soup to heat. The television runs nearly all night, hissing its test pattern to a fat man asleep in an armchair. There are yellowed newspapers stacked on the window-seat and candy wrappers in the ashtrays, and this morning when I came down to breakfast I removed a pair of dirty socks from the bottom stairstep and laid them on the newel post, where I suspect they will stay forever.

The house is the same but the street is changing. Getting younger. Old people are dwindling. The few that are left pick their way down the sidewalk like shadows, whispering courage to themselves and clutching their string shopping bags full of treasure. There goes the lame lady who lives above the grocery store in a room full of cats and birds and goldfish. There goes our boarder Mr. Houck, who thins himself to a pencil line when passing a black harmonica player. Miss Cohen, with her widowed mother. The bald man with the ivory-handled cane. All flinching beneath the cool eyes of the boy in dungarees who sits on a stoop fiddling with his ropes of colored beads.

Sometimes I invite Jeremy to come to the grocery store with me. I tell him it will do him good. I call him down from his studio, from his great towering beautiful sculptures, and help him into his jacket and offer my arm for support. We go very slowly. He is not used to walking much. He tends to whisper instead of speaking out, and even once we are inside the grocery store he whispers to Mrs. Dowd. What would be good to buy today? Her day-old pies? Anything will be all right. We head toward home again, arm in arm. We trundle down the sidewalk like two clay ducks, and the boy on the stoop yawns and reaches for a beer. If he looks at us at all he sees only an elderly couple, together no doubt for centuries, arriving at the end of their dusty and unremarkable lives. The woman’s cardigan is drab and frayed. The man wears crocheted bedroom slippers. He seems peaceful but distant, detached from his surroundings. The boy starts whistling a lighthearted tune, and he goes on whistling long after the elderly couple has turned in at the house near the corner and locked the door and drawn the window shades.

ANNE TYLER was born in Minneapolis in 1941 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s sixteenth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons , was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore.