Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“I don’t know why you always take that tone about him,” Mom said. She waved a slice of cake on to Jeff. “You used to be inseparable, once upon a time.”

“Once upon a time,” I agreed.

“I believe you’re jealous of his success.”

“Success?” I asked. I stopped slicing the cake and looked over at her. “You call it a success, selling off fake plantation houses on streets called Foxhound Footway and Stirrup Cup Circle?”

“At least he wears a suit to work. At least he makes a decent living. At least he has a college degree.”

“Well, if that’s what turns you on,” I told her.

She said, “Did you sign up for that course?”

“What course?”

“That night course at the college, remember? I suggested you might sign up for it and earn a few more credits.”

“Oh, that,” I said.

“Well, did you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Just never got around to it, I guess.”

I handed a piece of cake to Dad. He accepted it with a pinched and disapproving expression, his gray eyes pronounced in their sockets; but it would be Mom he disapproved of, not me. He couldn’t abide for people to act upset. And Mom was obviously upset. She was stripping all her rings off, a very bad sign. Setting them at the head of her place in little jingling stacks with trembling fingers: her wedding and engagement rings, Grandmother Gaitlin’s dinner ring, her Mother’s Day ring with its two winking red and blue birthstones. She said, “But the semester must have started already!”

I gave her a plate and said, “Probably has.”

She pushed the plate away.

“Cakies, Jape-Jape!” Wicky caroled, aiming a forkful of crumbs at J.P. But J.P. was staring openmouthed at Mom, a thread of dribble spinning from his gleaming lower lip.

I cut the last slice, my own. A big one. I told my brother, “Not to be piggish or anything …,” and my brother rolled his eyes.

“Twelve, credits,” my mother said, too distinctly. “Twelve, little, college, credits, and you could kiss Roll-a-Bat goodbye.”

“Rent-a-Back,” I said. I licked the frosting off a candle.

“You could buy yourself a decent suit and go to work for your father.”

“Now, Margot,” my father said. “If college were all that stood in his way, I’d dream up something for him to do tomorrow. Maybe he’d rather work elsewhere; have you considered that?”

“Of course he’d rather work elsewhere!” my mother cried. “Are you blind? He’s spitting in your face! He’s spitting in the Foundation’s face! He has deliberately chosen employment that has no lasting point to it, no reputation, no future, in preference to work that’s of permanent significance. And he’s doing it purely for spite.”

I had been steadily chewing, but I couldn’t let that pass. I swallowed twice (the cake might as well have been sand) and turned to my father. “It isn’t spite,” I told him. “It’s only that I feel uneasy around do-gooders. You know? When somebody tells me he, oh, say, spent his Christmas Day volunteering in a soup kitchen, I feel this kind of inner shriveling away from him. You know what I mean?”

“Barnaby!” my mother cried. “Your own father’s a do-gooder! Think what you’ve just said to him!”

“And who cares if my job has no future?” I asked him. He was at one end of the table and she was at the other. I could speak to him directly and shut Mom out. “I need to pay my rent and grocery bill, is all. I’m not looking to get rich.”

He seemed to find this idea startling; or at any rate, he blinked. But before he could comment, I said, “Besides. I wouldn’t call Rent-a-Back pointless. It serves a very useful purpose.”

“Well, certainly, for a fee!” my mother said triumphantly. “For people who can pay you a fee and then die, and that’s the end of it!”

J.P was starting to make cranky, whimpering noises. Wicky rose and tried to lift: him from his high chair, but he was fussing and squirming. She said, “Jeff, could you give me a hand here?”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Can’t you get his legs out from under? I shouldn’t have to manage all on my own.”

“You need to slide the tray off first, for God’s sake,” Jeff told her.

“Well, you could slide it off yourself instead of just sitting there, dammit!”

I set down my fork and turned to my mother. “I’ll tell you what’s really bothering you,” I said. (Oh, I always did get sucked in sooner or later.) “You think a thing is worthwhile only if it makes the headlines. Prominent Philanthropist Donates Five Hundred Thousand. You think it’s a waste of time just to carry some lady’s trash out for her.”

“Yes, I do,” Mom said. “And it’s a waste of money too. Our money.”

“Well, I knew we’d get around to that sooner or later.”

“Our eighty-seven hundred dollars,” she said, “that you have never paid us back a cent of because you earn barely a subsistence wage at that so-called job of yours.”

“Margot,” my father said. “He doesn’t have to pay us back.”

“Of course he has to pay us back! It isn’t your average household expense: buying off your son’s burglary victims!”

“He is not required to pay us back, and you are behaving abominably.!” my father said.

The silence was that sharp-edged kind that follows gunshots or shattering claps of thunder. J.P. stopped whimpering. Jeff and Wicky froze on either side of him. My mother sat very straight-backed in her seat. It was a lot more obvious now that she was just a Polish girl from Canton, scared to death Jeffrey Gaitlin might find her common.

Strange how always, at moments like these, the table finally felt full enough.

I had my brother come out with me and move his car so I could make my getaway. At first he tried to stall, saying they were about to leave themselves if I would just hold my horses. But I said, “I need to go now” and so he came, muttering and complaining.

“Geez, Barn,” he said as he trailed me down the steps. “You take everything so personally. Mom was just being Mom; it’s no big deal.”

“I knew she’d bring up that money,” I told him.

“If you knew, why let it bother you?”

We stopped beside my car, and I zipped my jacket. “What’s our next occasion? Easter?” I asked. “Remind me to be out of town.”

“You should lighten up,” Jeff said. “They don’t ask all that much of you.”

“Only that I change into some totally other person,” I told him.

“That’s not true. If you made the least bit of effort; showed you cared. If you dressed a little better when you came to see them, for instance—”

“I’m dressed fine!” I glanced down at myself. “Well, so maybe the tie doesn’t go. But the tie wasn’t my idea, was it.”

“Barnaby. You’re wearing a pajama top.”

“Oh,” I said. “You noticed?”

I had thought it didn’t look much different from a regular plaid flannel shirt.

“And both knees are poking through your jeans, and you haven’t shaved in a week, I bet—”

“I did have a haircut, though,” I said, hoping he would assume that meant a barber had done it.

He squinted at me and said, “When?”

“Look, pal,” I said. “Could we just get a move on here? I’m freezing!”

And I strode off toward my car, which forced him to go to his car, sighing a big cloud of fog to show how I tried his patience. His car was one of those macho four-by-fours. You’d think he rode the range all day, herding cattle or something.

A four-by-four, and a Princeton degree, and a desk half the size of a tennis court on the top floor of the Gaitlin Foundation. None of which I wanted for myself, Lord knows. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, as I unlocked my car door, how comfortable it must be to be Jeff. Things just seemed to come easier for him. Me, I’d been in trouble from adolescence on. I’d been messing up and breaking things and disappointing everyone around me, while Jeff just coolly went about his business. It’s as if he were an entirely different race, a different species, more at home in the world. More blessed.