Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“Your mother issued the invitation?” Sophia asked me.

“Well, she knows it’s probably too short notice,” I said.

“I’d love to come!”

I sighed.

“Would you rather I didn’t?”

“These family things are such a drag, is all,” I told her.

“You wouldn’t think so if you were an only child,” she said.

I could see there was no hope she would decline the invitation.

We went in her car, because we were the ones bringing Opal. (Mom had gone early, to try and wrestle some semblance of a meal out of Wicky’s kitchen. Dad was coming directly from work.) For two days now, I’d been grousing about this whole idea, but as we were driving over I suddenly got in the spirit of things. Here we were, the three of us, traveling through a warm July night, with the fireflies flickering in the woods of Roland Park and faint, old-timey jazz playing on the radio. Sophia smelled of roses. Opal swung her heels in the back seat. And we were headed toward what was almost (if you didn’t look too closely) a genuine family reunion, complete with parents and grandparents, aunt and uncle, cousins. Well, only two cousins. This was kind of a miniature reunion. But even so. When we drew up in front of Jeff’s house, we found a huge tumble of silver balloons tied to the lamppost. Wicky’s doing, clearly. Wicky was not half bad, I decided all at once.

Opal wanted to untie the balloons and bring them in with her. She seemed so impressed by them, you’d think she had never seen a balloon before. So our entrance was fairly crowded. The balloons filled the whole foyer, with the humans having to fit themselves in between them, and then Dad and Jeff arrived on our heels, and a telephone started ringing, and Pop-Pop was asking where my car was. It took several minutes before we got sorted out and seated in the living room, and by that time Sophia had somehow been introduced. I certainly hadn’t introduced her. I was already in the doghouse for getting J.P.’s name wrong. “What’s new, P.J.?” I said when he toddled over, and both Mom and Wicky said, “Who?” Like a fool, I went on with it. “P.J., old buddy! Yes, sir; it’s the Peej,” I babbled, till I felt the disapproval streaming toward me from across the room, and I realized I had messed up yet again.

Jeff and Wicky lived in a very nice house, old-fashioned but modernly decorated, with a long white couch that fit together in an S-curve and Japanesey low tables and such. Still, I always felt it needed something. Maybe books, or pictures. It had this sort of blank feel. I knew my mother had given them a few paintings early in their marriage, but they had never hung them, and my dad absolutely forbade her to ask what had become of them. She said, “But it’s such a waste! Especially the Rankleston, with the barbed wire and the Brillo pads. I could take it back and hang it in your study, if for some reason they don’t like it.” Dad didn’t say what he thought of that idea, but you could guess from his expression.

It helped, at least, that there were so many of us. All the women wore their party clothes — even Gram, decked out in a bag-shaped shift with a rhinestone horseshoe pinned to the front. Pop-Pop had his shirt buttoned up to the collar, which was as dressy as he got, and Dad and Jeff and J.P. were in suits, and I had on my birthday necktie. A fairly festive-looking group, I’d say. The billow of balloons bobbing above Opal’s head didn’t hurt any, either.

And right from the start, Sophia was a hit. Big hit. Of course Gram and Pop-Pop already knew her. They showed off about that a little. “How’s the bank?” Gram asked. “How’s your roommate!” and then Pop-Pop said, “Stell brought the recipe for those nachos you liked so much.” This made my mother go all alert and suspicious. She started edging closer to Sophia on the couch. “Oh?” she said. “You’ve had Mother’s nachos? You’ve been to their house? Barnaby took you to visit?”—firing questions one-two-three, leaving her no room for answers. Meanwhile, Jeff was offering her a choice between white wine, Scotch, and ginger ale, and J.P. was lurching against her knees and trying to reach her pearls.

Not till we were settled around the table did Sophia manage to get a word in. Then she did a wonderful job. She made a little story of our trip to Camden Yards, and everyone came out well in it. (Opal had caught on to baseball so quickly; I’d been so patient in explaining the rules.) I kept saying, “Oh, it was nothing,” and, “Just a routine game, all in all”—rolling my eyes at the other men and looking sheepish. Jeff asked me how Ripken had done. Dad asked if I had noticed any slacking off in attendance after the strike. I felt like some kind of impostor.

When I was a teenager, I would be eating dinner and all at once I’d imagine grabbing hold of the soup tureen and turning it upside down over my parents’ heads. Noodles would snake down Dad’s temples, and carrot disks would stud Mom’s French twist. The image always set me to laughing, and then I couldn’t stop. I’d be laughing so hard I was choking, spewing bits of chewed food, while the two of them sat staring at me grimly.

I don’t know why that memory came back to me just at that moment.

Pop-Pop told Sophia I used to go to ball games with him as a little kid. “Him and Jeff; they’d take turns,” he said. “Barnaby loved that bugle call! Loved it. Always used to say to me, ‘Pop-Pop,’ he used to say, ‘aren’t you glad we don’t have organ music, like those poor other ball teams have?’ ”

It seemed everybody assumed that Sophia would be riveted by the most inconsequential mention of my name. And she did look entertained. She was smiling and nodding, forgetting to eat her canned pineapple ring.

“Just how did you two meet?” Mom asked, and my grandma, showing off again, burst in with, “They met on a train.”

“On a train!”

The phrase gave me a vision of Sophia riding that train: her golden bun, her feather coat, her calm, pale hands accepting the stapled packet. My personal angel at last, I had fancied, but now that seemed an outdated concept. It was like when you’re introduced to someone who reminds you of, say, an old classmate, but then later, when you know him well, you forget about the classmate altogether. Sophia was just Sophia, by this time — so familiar to me, so much a part of my life, that I couldn’t imagine how she appeared to the people sitting around this table.

Except it was obvious they must like her. She was telling them in some detail now about our train ride. “He spilled coffee all over me,” she told them, and they laughed and tossed me appreciative glances, as if I’d done something witty. She said, “First I was annoyed, but when I saw how nice he was, and how well-mannered—”

“Barnaby, well-mannered?” my mother said.

“Oh, he apologized endlessly and helped me clean myself up. And so then we got to talking, and he told me about his work—”

A few resigned expressions here and there, but I don’t think she noticed.

“—and he described his clients so considerately, you know … And the clincher was that in Philly, I got a glimpse of Opal.”

This was exceptionally kind of her. Just by mentioning Opal’s name, sending her a wink across the table, she reminded the others that tonight was really Opal’s night. I watched them all remember that. Gram, who was sitting on Opal’s left, patted her hand and told her, “So you met Sophia before any of the rest of us, you smart little old thing!”

Opal smiled down at her plate.

“And then Barnaby asked for your phone number …,” Wicky suggested to Sophia.

“No, no. It was all left to me. I was the one who phoned, asking for him to come work for my aunt.”