Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

When we were back in the attic, Martine said, “Ray had better not be sick tomorrow, I tell you.” We were struggling at the time with the top half of the desk — Martine’s hair sticking out in spikes around her face — but I knew it wasn’t the lifting that concerned her. We needed someone more hardhearted here, was what.

Thursday, Ray returned, greenish under the eyes and still not good for much, and we stationed him downstairs with Mrs. Alford. While he shoved items from pile to pile and listened to her stories, we did the hauling. Even then, we got waylaid a time or two. We brought down a piano bench, and Mrs. Alford wanted it placed in front of her so that she could sort the sheet music stored inside. When she lifted the lid, the smell of mice floated out. “ Tm Always Chasing Rainbows,’ ” she said. She spoke so wistfully, so regretfully, that it took me a second to realize she was only quoting a song title. “ ‘Don’t Bring Lulu.’ ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.’ ” Once, the house key Martine wore around her wrist clinked against a metal foot-locker we were carrying, and the sound must have touched off a memory in Mrs. Alford’s head. Out of the blue, she said, “I used to have a wind chime made of copper circles, but then my neighbor came and told me, ‘Please take down your wind chime; please. A wind chime was tinkling the whole entire time I tended my daughter’s last illness, and now I can’t bear to hear it.’”

We set the footlocker on the floor. “Well, of course I took it down,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ray said. “Ernie’s pile, or your daughter’s?”

Martine and I scooted back upstairs.

Friday, we found Mrs. Alford’s brother eating breakfast with her — a tufty-haired, plump old man in a business suit. He’d arrived the night before for the Easter weekend. And Mrs. Alford was her merry self again, graciously introducing us all, ticking off our names perfectly. The three of us went up to the attic and finished clearing it out in no time, after which Mrs. Alford came to the glassed-in porch and said, “This goes to Ernie, this to Valerie, this to Goodwill,” zip-zip-zip. She didn’t even bother sitting in her armchair. We were done by midafternoon.

I gave Martine a lift home, because she still didn’t have the truck. Neither one of us talked much. I was calculating the time, wondering if I could fit some other assignment in before I went to Mrs. Glynn’s. Martine was hanging her head out the window and humming to herself. Then all at once she pulled in her head and said, “Know what happened the other day? I was playing catch with my nephews in their backyard. And they were having this discussion — about my brother, I thought it was. ‘He says this, he says that.’ So I ask, ‘What time’s he due home tonight?’ and they get quiet and sort of embarrassed and they look at each other and I’m thinking, What? What’d I say? And one of them tells me, ‘Uh …’ And the other says, ‘Uh, actually, we were talking about our baseball coach.’ I said, ‘Oh. Sorry. I thought you meant your dad.’ But it gave me this sudden picture of what it must feel like to be old. I mean, so old that people imagine you’ve gone dotty. I wanted to say, ‘Wait! I just heard you wrong, is all. It was a natural, normal mistake to make, okay?’”

Then she hung her head out the window again, and we went back to our separate lines of thought.

Sophia and I drove up to Philadelphia on the last Saturday in April. This was my second trip to Philly since we’d started dating, but she hadn’t come with me before because her mother had spent the past six weeks at a cousin’s condominium in Miami. So here we were, taking our first long car ride together on a sunny blue-and-yellow morning with a little bit of a breeze, and I felt like a million dollars. Sophia did too; I could tell. She said, “I should always go by car! You get to see so much more countryside than you do when you take the train.”

I hadn’t told Sophia about watching her on the train that day. I guess I thought it would make me look sort of, I don’t know, sly, the way I’d engineered our meeting afterward. And besides, I was curious to see if she would bring it up on her own. In her place, I’d have bragged about it straight off. (“Want to hear how a total stranger singled me out and approached me and entrusted me with a mission?”) But she never did. Either she considered it not worth mentioning or she’d forgotten it altogether. Probably things like that happened to her all the time. She must have just taken them for granted.

A lot of our trip was spent discussing her mother, who didn’t sound very likable. “Every weekend of my life,” Sophia said, “she expects me to stay with her, unless of course she has plans, in which case she lets me know at the very last minute: ‘Oh, by the way, don’t bother coming this week,’ when I’ve practically bought my ticket already….”

She was listing her mother’s physical ailments when we entered the city limits. Don’t I know that kind of old lady! I drove up Broad Street and turned onto Walnut, while Sophia cataloged aches and pains and palpitations, doctor appointments, midnight phone calls … She interrupted herself to point out her mother’s apartment building, which had a green-striped awning. I double-parked in front of it. “Oh!” she said. “There’s Mother now!”

Sure enough, a big-boned, white-haired woman in a sweater set and matching skirt stood twisting her hands together on the curb. “Come and say hello,” Sophia told me.

I have never been the meet-the-parents type. I said, “Oh, I’d better not. I’m blocking traffic.”

But Sophia was calling, “Yoo-hoo! Mother!” as she slid out of the passenger seat, leaving her door wide open behind her.

Mrs. Maynard turned, blank-faced. Then she said, “Sophia? What on earth! You came by auto? You’re so late!”

While they were pressing their cheeks together, I made a lunge across the seat and tried to shut Sophia’s door without being seen. But no: “I’d like to introduce you to someone,” Sophia told her mother.

So I was forced to show myself. I left my engine running, though. I stepped out and rounded the front of the car and said, “How do you do. Sorry, but I’m double-parked; I really have to be going.”

“This is Barnaby Gaitlin,” Sophia told her mother. “My mother, Thelma Maynard.”

“I said to myself,” Mrs. Maynard told her, “ ‘Well, that’s it. Sophia’s met with some accident, I don’t know what accident, and the police will have no idea that I’m her next of kin. I’ll be sitting in my apartment Saturday, Sunday, Monday, without anyone to shop for me or fetch my prescriptions. I’ll run out of food, run out of pills; just get weaker and weaker, and they’ll find me who-can-say-how-long after, shriveled up like a prune and lying on my—’ ”

“Barnaby and I have been seeing quite a lot of each other,” Sophia said.

Mrs. Maynard stopped speaking and looked over at me. She had one of those rectangular faces, pulled downward at the corners by two strong cords in her neck.

“How do you do,” I said again. I would have shaken hands, except that she didn’t hold hers out.

See why I hate meeting parents? I don’t make a good first impression.

Mrs. Maynard turned back to Sophia and said, “You might at least have telephoned and warned me you’d be late. You know perfectly well what tension does to my blood pressure!”

We hadn’t been that late. Maybe half an hour or so. But Sophia didn’t bother arguing. She said, in this forthright manner, “Barnaby has become a very important part of my life.”

I froze. So did her mother. She gave me another look. “Oh?” she said. Then she said, “Mr….?”