Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“We women can sense these things,” Martine said knowingly. I had to laugh. (She was wearing Everett’s parka today, the hood trimmed with matted fake fur, and her little face poked out of it like some sharp, quick, rodenty animal.) “I saw how she was eyeing you!” she said. “Lolling around the sun-porch, getting underfoot. Asking those made-up questions in that … lilting way of hers. ‘Ooh, Barnaby, do you think they’ll all fit in one truckload?’ ‘Ooh, Barnaby, won’t you strain your back lifting that great heavy box?’ ”

Sophia had asked nothing of the sort; Martine was imagining things. I said, “You’re just envious, is all.”

“Envious!”

“You wish you could act so well bred and refined.”

“Like hell I do,” Martine said. She started back up the front walk, calling over her shoulder, “So obvious and flirtatious is more like it.”

“Sh!” I said, glancing toward the house. I caught up with her and said, “She’s being a good niece; what’s wrong with that? Watching out for her aunt.”

“Committing her aunt to five hours a week just to have you around,” Martine said.

“Now wait,” I said. “I really need these extra hours, Martine.”

“Well, sure, you need them.”

Martine was the only person I’d told about my plan to pay back the eighty-seven hundred. (She’d made a bet with me that my parents wouldn’t accept it—“They’re not exactly poverty-stricken,” she’d said — but that just showed how little she knew Mommy Dearest.) “The question is,” she said now, “does the aunt need them?”

But before I could argue my case any further, Sophia stepped out the front door. “Guess what, Barnaby!” she called. “In the attic are boxes and boxes of books! More than there were in the sunporch, even!”

Her voice had a kind of caroling tone — a kind of, yes, lilting tone, I had to admit. And she tipped her head against the doorframe in this picturesque, inviting way and flashed me a white-toothed smile.

I felt my heart sink. I glanced over at Martine. She didn’t meet my eyes; just climbed the porch steps alongside me. But I saw the smug little kink at the corner of her mouth. I heard the humming sound she made beneath her breath. “Hmm-hmm-111™,” she hummed, high-pitched and airy and innocent, clomping up the steps in her motorcycle boots.

ON THE LAST Saturday in February, Opal had a ballet recital. This meant I had to share my monthly visit with my mother. Mom phoned and said she’d been sent an invitation. “I’ll do the driving,” she told me. “I don’t trust that car of yours as far as I can throw it.”

“Or here’s an idea,” I said. “Why don’t I just meet you there?”

“You mean, not ride up together?”

“Well …”

“Barnaby,” she said. “I would hardly suppose you’re in any position to buy gas when you don’t need to.”

Which was when I could have told her, “That’s my business, isn’t it?” so she could come back with, “Not as long as you still owe us eighty-seven hundred dollars, it isn’t.” For once, though, I kept quiet. I thought about Opal’s money clip and I held my tongue. This seemed to throw Mom off her stride. She waited just a beat too long, and then she cleared her throat and said, “I’ll pick you up at eight a.m. sharp. You be waiting out front.”

I said, “Well. Okay.”

“Don’t make me come into that place of yours and haul you out of bed. Set your alarm clock. Promise.”

“Sure thing,” I told her.

I tried to look on the bright side after I hung up. At least now I’d have an ally along — or someone people would assume was my ally. Though myself, I had my doubts.

Saturday morning turned out so clear that I checked the sky for the color-change trick after I got up, but the sun had beaten me to it. And then I found I was out of instant coffee; so I had to make do with a Pepsi; and then my mother came early. I swear I would have been ready by eight, but she came five minutes before. Stalked across the patio in her brisk black wool pantsuit, all spiny-backed and indignant. “Where are you, Barnaby?” she asked — and this was after I’d opened the door and was standing in plain view.

“Eight o’clock, you said,” I told her. “What are you doing here at five of?”

“Well, come along; don’t waste more time arguing,” she snapped, and she turned on her heel and marched off again. She knew she was in the wrong.

Her car was a Buick, very posh and plushy. Power windows you couldn’t roll down unless she had turned the ignition on. She drove well, though; I had to hand her that. She slung that thing around like a grocery cart — slithered out of town and started cruising up I-95 in no time flat. “Of course, at this rate we’ll hit the recital way too early,” I said when we’d been traveling awhile. “We’ll have to sit there making small talk with Natalie and Mr. Wonderful.”

“If you didn’t want her remarrying, you shouldn’t have gotten divorced,” Mom told me.

“Did I say I didn’t want her remarrying? What do I care what she does? I’d just rather not mingle socially with the guy; that’s all.”

“At least we were invited,” Mom said. “Oh, when I read those letters to Ann Landers, I could cry: those poor bewildered souls who lose all touch with their grandchildren after the divorce. Why should they have to suffer? It’s no fault of theirs if their sons can’t manage to sustain a serious relationship!”

“You certainly have a way with words,” I told her.

“Hmm?” she asked, and she veered around a tour bus. “What did I say?” she asked me.

I kept quiet and drummed my fingers on my knees.

“I suppose it’s merely your generation,” Mom said in a placating tone. “Everybody in your generation seems to view marriage so lightly.”

“Generation!” I said. “I don’t belong to a generation!”

Oops. The trick was to dodge to one side here; resist a head-on argument. I tried for a save. “Anyhow,” I said, “generations nowadays seem to change over about every three years or so, have you noticed? Why is that, I wonder.”

But Mom refused to get diverted. She said, “Mind you, I don’t exempt Natalie’s parents. Jim and Doris Bassett were at least as much to blame as you two were, I always felt. They actively encouraged that divorce!”

I just whistled a tune through my teeth and gazed out the side window. We were crossing a body of water. It looked very broad and peaceful.

“Say what you will,” Mom told me, “but at least your father and I accepted your marriage graciously. I treated Natalie like my own! That’s why she still asks me to Opal’s recitals and such. Even if she does send just a standard mimeographed invitation with my name filled in on the blank.”

She treated Natalie better than her own, I wanted to say. Miss High-Class Good-Girl Natalie, the daughter of Mom’s dreams. But I let it rest. I watched a train skim across a railroad bridge in the distance, and I pondered whether it really was possible, these days, to get something mimeographed.

The recital was in the basement of a church on Chestnut Street. We had the devil’s own time finding parking — ended up in a space several blocks away. “Now you see why I wanted to start out early,” Mom told me. She tossed the words over her shoulder as she strode ahead of me, her purse clamped in a paranoid way between her arm and her rib cage. All the women around us looked just like her, tailored and crisp, with shoes that you just knew, somehow, had cost a whole lot of money. All the men were homeless. They sat huddled under ragged blankets on top of the grates in the sidewalk, and I couldn’t help thinking that I had more in common with them than with my mother.