Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“Gaitlin,” I said.

Someone honked in the street behind me, no doubt wanting me to move my car, but I didn’t turn around.

Sophia’s mother asked, “Just what is your line of business, Mr. Gaitlin?”

“I’m, ah, employed by a service organization,” I told her.

It came out sounding sort of smarmy, for some reason. Sophia must have thought so too, because she raised her eyebrows at me. Then she gave a sharp hitch to the shoulder strap of her bag. She said, “He works for a place called Rent-a-Back, Mother, lifting heavy objects.”

“Lifting?” Mrs. Maynard asked.

I said, “Well, there’s more to it than—”

“What kind of heavy objects?”

“Oh …,” I said. “In fact! I’ve been helping Mrs. Glynn some. Sophia’s aunt. I don’t know if you and she are in touch or—”

“I met him on the train a couple of months ago,” Sophia broke in. “I guess you could call it a pickup.”

“Pickup?” Mrs. Maynard asked faintly, at the same time that I said, “Pickup!” I stared at Sophia.

Sophia kept her gaze fixed levelly on her mother. She said, “He sat in the seat next to me, and before I knew it I had agreed to go out with him.”

“Really,” Mrs. Maynard said.

I wanted to explain that it hadn’t been that way at all; that things had happened a good deal more inch by inch than that. But I could see what Sophia was up to here. I recognized that triumphant tilt of her chin. And I couldn’t much blame her, either. With a mother like Mrs. Maynard, I’d have done the same.

Besides, the situation did work to my advantage. Because when Sophia said goodbye to me — walking me to my side of the car, ignoring the honking traffic — she kissed me on the lips and whispered, “When I get back to Baltimore, I want to come to your place.”

Then she gave me a deliberate, slow smile that turned my knees weak, and she went to rejoin her mother.

BY THE END of April I’d saved eight hundred and sixteen dollars. I had hoped to be farther along, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to meet my goal of a hundred extra per week. Well, at least it was a start. I got myself a savings account and a little cardboard booklet to record all further deposits.

For most of May I had this very lucrative short-term client — a young guy who’d broken his leg in four places while mountain biking. He lived alone in a two-story house, and I had to be there first thing every morning to help him down the stairs and drive him to his law office. Then I’d pick him up at quitting time, come back again at bedtime … Not to mention the groceries he needed bought, the shirts he needed taken to the cleaner’s, and so on. When his cast was shortened to shin length and he could get around on his own, he gave me a goodbye gift of a hundred dollars. Rent-a-Back employees are not supposed to accept tips ever, under any conditions, and I told him that, but he said I had no choice. He said, “It’s take it now or have it come to you in the mail, which would cost me the price of a stamp.” So I took it. I confess. It would let me hit eighty-seven hundred that much sooner.

Sophia knew I was in debt. She even knew the amount, but not the reason. (Why get into the particulars? The Chinese carving and all that.) She was very understanding about it. She never expected me to buy her presents or take her anywhere fancy. Instead she ferried her Crock-Pot meals to my place after work. (We’d given up on her place, now that we needed more privacy.) First we’d go to bed and then we’d have our supper, tangled in a welter of sheets, leaning against the propped pillows that bridged the gap between my mattress and the back of the couch. I’d be in my jeans again, but she would stay naked, like that painting I have never understood where the men are picnicking fully dressed but the woman doesn’t have a stitch on. Me, I tend to feel kind of undefended without my clothes, but Sophia seemed astoundingly at ease. She’d drape a napkin across her stomach and nibble on a stewed pork chop, then wipe her fingers on the napkin and toss back the loose coils of hair streaming over one shoulder. And meanwhile, I would be asking her questions. There was so much I needed to know about her. No piece of information was too small: her favorite color, favorite crab house, favorite television show … I guess really I was asking, What does it feel like, being you?

And maybe she was asking the same. She was interested in my parents. She was curious about my brother. She wondered if he and I were anything alike. (“Not a whit,” I told her.) And especially, she wanted to know about my marriage. Where had it gone wrong? Why had Natalie and I split up?

“Why’d we get together in the first place, is more to the point,” I said. “A weirder combination you can’t imagine. Natalie with her good-girl forehead and me fresh out of reform school.”

“Oh, now,” Sophia chided me. “It wasn’t a reform school.” But she was wearing her thrilled look, as if she hoped to be contradicted.

“Well, it was a rich-guy variation on the theme, at least,” I said. “Certainly my neighbors thought as much. They pretended not to know me that whole summer after I graduated — everyone but Natalie. Natalie’s family had moved in across the street while I was gone, and one afternoon I’m mowing the lawn and Natalie comes over with a pitcher and two glasses set just so on a tray. Says, ‘Could I interest you in some lemonade?’ Could I interest you: such a quaint way to put it. ‘Why not,’ I tell her, and I swig down a glass, and that might have been the end of it, except then my mother pokes her head out the door and invites us in for iced tea. As if Natalie weren’t already operating her own refreshment service in the middle of our yard! Well, poor Mom; I guess the sight of a respectable girl was a little too much excitement for her. I tell Natalie, ‘Cripes, let’s get out of here,’ and I leave the mower where it is and we walk off, just like that. So everything that happened after was my mother’s fault, you might say.”

“Your mother did approve of her, then,” Sophia said.

“Oh, sure. Both my parents approved. It was Natalie’s who objected. They’d heard stories about me, of course. Also, I was wearing my hair about halfway down my back that summer. Natalie’s father called me Jesus. ‘Will you and Jesus be going to the movies tonight?’ This was when they were still allowing her to see me. Later, we had to sneak. I’d hired on at Rent-a-Back by then, and she would ride along on my jobs — spend the day with me while her parents thought she was swimming at their club.”

“Oh, forbidden fruit! No wonder you two were attracted,” Sophia said.

I was about to go on, but then a sort of hallucination stopped me in mid-breath. I swear I saw Natalie’s arm, just her arm, resting on the window ledge of my car. She was waiting in the passenger seat while I was with a client. And I was stepping out the client’s front door, walking down a flagstone path, heading through brilliant sunlight toward Natalie’s bare, tanned arm.

Sophia said, “What happened next?”

“Oh …,” I said. “We got married.”

“That seems awfully sudden,” Sophia said.

“Well, she was about to go off to college, see. She was leaving in September.”

Sophia hesitated. Then she asked, “Did you have to?”

“Have to? Oh. Have to get married. No,” I said, “we didn’t have to. I’m sure all the neighbors thought we did, though. To the neighbors, I was the bad guy. Natalie was ‘that lovely sweet innocent Bassett girl.’ It must have disappointed the hell out of them when Opal didn’t come along till fourteen months after the wedding.”