Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

We were watching a game show on what had to have been the world’s largest residential television set. The only place it could fit was against the long side wall of the living room. This meant we had to line the couch on the other side wall, with our noses practically touching the screen. Pop-Pop sat at one end, so he had someplace to put his beer can. I sat next to him, Sophia next to me, and Gram on the other end. The rest of the room was filled with plaster statues of the Virgin Mary, and ceramic planters shaped like wheelbarrows and donkeys, and praying hands molded from some kind of resin, and dolls dressed like Scarlett O’Hara. Oh, and I should mention that Pop-Pop wore a V-necked undershirt that showed his scrawny white-haired chest; and Gram was in a tight tank top and baggy army-green shorts. (The thermostat was set at about eighty-five degrees, although outdoors it was winter again.) I was interested in Sophia’s reaction to all this, but I couldn’t tell from her profile, which was edged with blue light from the game show.

Gram said, “Sophia. Would that be an Italian name?”

“It came from a great-aunt,” Sophia told her, turning briefly in her direction.

“Was your great-aunt Italian?”

“No, Scottish.”

“Oh.”

I knew what Gram was aiming at here. She wanted to find out whether Sophia was Catholic. She poked her headful of pink curlers forward for a moment and looked at me.

“Presbyterian,” I told her.

“Oh.”

She sat back again. She sighed. Oh, well, you could see her thinking, her own daughter had married Episcopal and the sky hadn’t fallen in. “It’s a pretty name, anyhow,” she told Sophia.

“Thank you.”

“I like names that end with an a , don’t you? Or other vowels. Well, what other vowels? Most often it seems to be a. But wait: Margo’s name ends with an 0, for mercy’s sake! Barnaby’s mother. Or it used to be 0. Then she met Barnaby’s father and added a t.”

Sophia looked at me. I told her, “Mom thought Margot with at was higher-class.”

“First time I saw it written that way was on the wedding invitations,” Gram said. “She brought them home from the printer’s and I said, ‘Who’s this?’ She said, ‘That’s me.’ Well, I did try to accommodate. Her daddy said it was stuff and nonsense, but I told Jeffrey the next time he came to call, ‘Mar-gott will be down in a minute.’ He laughed because he thought I was joking, but I was serious. I honestly assumed people pronounced the t”

“Watch this next contestant,” Pop-Pop told me. “She knows every fact there is to know about Elvis.”

“She always was a go-getter,” Gram said. “Very energetic. Very brainy. She won so many prizes when she was in school! I can’t imagine where that came from.”

“Margot, we’re talking about,” I explained to Sophia. She was looking puzzled.

“Folks would ask, ‘Is she a changeling?’ Because Frank didn’t even graduate high school, and the only reason I did was to fill in the time till we married. But there must be a smarty gene somewhere in our family. Look at Barnaby! He’s practically an Einstein. Learned to read so young, he used to check in the child development books to see how he ought to be acting.”

“I had a very promising past,” I told Sophia.

She smiled and turned her eyes back to Gram. On the TV, somebody flubbed a question. The audience gave a groan, and Pop-Pop said, “Why, I could’ve answered that one!”

Gram heaved herself from the couch to fetch us a snack, and Sophia rose and followed, asking, “Can I help?” She was doing everything right. Gram ought to love her.

Now it was just me and Pop-Pop, two skinny, puny males taking up the much smaller half of the sofa. We got started on one of those man-to-man talks that are all numerals — which cable channels he was subscribing to these days, how many quarts of oil my car was burning — while in the kitchen, above the clatter of dishes, I heard Gram doing her best to figure out who Sophia was, exactly. If I cocked an ear in their direction, I could keep tabs on them while listening to Pop-Pop reel off last week’s bowling scores. No, she came from Philadelphia. And yes, she had a job; she worked at Chesapeake Bank. And she rented a place on Calvert Street; shared it with a roommate. (Gram would find the fact of the roommate reassuring — less chance we were living in sin.) And it probably did seem odd that a girl like her hadn’t been snapped up yet by some man, but she wanted to be sure she didn’t make any mistakes, because marriage was for life, she’d always felt; and in fact, she had once been engaged and another time almost engaged, but it hadn’t panned out, which now she realized must have been all for the best.

Then she said, “I met Barnaby on the train to Philly a few months back”—volunteering it, without any prodding from Gram. Evidently it told Gram what she wanted to know, because when they emerged with the food, she was treating us like a couple. It was “you two” this and “you two” that, and, “Next time, the two of you will have to come for a meal.”

The snack she’d fixed was a recipe she’d read about in a magazine — Bill Clinton’s favorite, corn chips with a dip made of bottled salsa and Velveeta cheese melted in the microwave. She served it on a tray that showed a head-and-shoulders portrait of John F. Kennedy. “I see we’re going with a presidential theme tonight,” I said, and Gram jabbed an elbow into Sophia’s ribs and asked, “Isn’t he a cutup?”—rolling her eyes and giggling as if they shared a secret.

In the car as we were driving home, Sophia said she had liked my grandparents very much. “They liked you too,” I said. I was partly proud and partly taken aback. I hadn’t expected Sophia to get so into it, somehow. After a moment, I said, “You never told me you had been engaged.”

She shrugged and said, “It didn’t last long.”

“Who was the guy?” I asked her.

“Oh, someone at the bank.”

“And another time almost engaged? What happened?”

“It just didn’t work out,” she told me. “I’m probably too set in my ways. Too, you know. Definite. Too definite for men to feel comfortable with.”

She was wearing the dressy black coat that made her hair look blonder, and the carriage of her head struck me as queenly. I said, “Well, I think definite women are great.” She looked over at me and smiled. “If there’s anything I’m crazy about, it’s definiteness,” I said.

She laughed. I got a little carried away; I said, “In fact, I’ve always dreamed of a having a military wife.”

“Oh?” she said. “You mean a soldier?”

“No, someone whose husband’s a soldier,” I said. “I’ve seen them in the movies. They know how to do everything that needs doing. They could probably build their own houses, if they had to, and deliver their own babies. If that’s not definite!”

“So … would this mean that you’re planning to enlist?” she asked.

“Enlist! God forbid,” I told her.

“Then how …?”

“I only meant …,” I said. “Shoot, I’m just talking out loud.” Which was an expression Mrs. Beeton used to use: Don’t mind me; I’m just talking out loud.

Dummy.

News of all the deaths spread magically among our other clients. I’ve never figured out how that happens. It’s not as if our people know each other, for the most part. But I could sense the agitation in just about every house I went to. Mrs. Rodney got the notion to update her will; so did Miss Simmons. Mr. Shank called on us even more often than he normally did, on even more trumped-up excuses, and one time insisted that I drive him to the emergency room, when as far as I could see there was not one thing the matter with him. I said, “What is it? Are you short of breath? Chest pains? Weak? Dizzy?” All he would say was, he felt “unusual.” For the sake of his unusualness I spent three and a half hours in the Sinai Hospital waiting room, watching homemaking shows on TV. “What I like to do,” this lady on one program said, “I like to place a lead crystal bowl on the credenza in my entrance hall. I fill it with tinted water and I float scented votive candles on the surface, to lend a sense of graciousness when I’m entertaining.” A roomful of sick people — bleak-faced, bleary-eyed, most in threadbare clothes — stared up at her in astonishment. Mr. Shank turned out to be suffering from stress and was sent home with a prescription for some pills.