Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“This is fine,” she told me.

“I could take it back and exchange it, if you’d rather.”

“No, this is great. Really.”

“Well. Okay,” I said.

Opal put the hedgehog back in the box and replaced the lid. Then she picked up the gift card and looked at it again. Even turned it over to look at the other side, which was blank.

“So,” she said. “Did you and Sophia, like, go halfsies on the money for this?”

“No, it was more that she helped me pick it out.”

“Oh.”

“You do remember her,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. Then she said, “I guess.”

“You guess? You saw her every day of your visit, almost!”

“But I thought she was just a lady,” she said.

“Just a …?”

“I mean, is she, like, your girlfriend or something?”

“Well, yes, she is,” I said. “I thought you knew that. We’ve been seeing each other for eight or nine months now.”

“Seeing as in dating?” Opal asked.

“Didn’t you realize?”

She shook her head. She wore this stony, set expression that made me uneasy.

“Ope?” I said. “Does that bother you?”

She just went on shaking her head.

“Did you not like Sophia, Ope?”

She said, “I liked her okay.” Then she clamped her mouth tight shut again.

“So what’s the problem?”

“Nothing’s the problem!” she told me. She stood up, hugging the box to her chest. The wrapping paper wafted to the ground, but she seemed not to notice. “Could we go eat now?” she asked.

“Eat? Well, all right,” I said.

Although it was nowhere near lunchtime yet.

I bent to retrieve the paper and tossed it into a trash bin, and then we walked out of the Square and headed toward a diner I knew of, a couple of blocks away. I figured we could order some sort of semi-lunch, semi-breakfast dish — French toast or something. I wondered what time it was. I kept trying to get a glimpse of people’s watches, but everybody wore long sleeves and I didn’t have any luck.

Then just as we started to cross the street, I caught sight of Natalie. She was standing on the opposite corner in her red coat and a long black scarf, and she must not have noticed that the light had changed to WALK, because she was gazing off to her left. I don’t know why I felt so startled. This was her neighborhood, after all. She was probably running a few last-minute errands before the birthday party. But I thought to myself, What is this? She pops up everywhere —as if she’d materialized not just once or twice but anytime I turned around, flashing in and out of view like a glimmer in a pond. I stopped short and said, “Oh! There’s—!” and Opal followed my eyes and said, “Mom.”

We crossed to where she stood. When she saw us, she didn’t seem surprised. Natalie never seemed surprised. She surveyed me imperturbably, holding her head very level on account of the scarf, which gave her a sort of madonna-like aspect. I said, “Hi there, Nat.”

“Hi,” she said. Her gaze dropped to Opal. “Are you having a good time?” she asked.

“I’m cold,” Opal told her.

“Cold?”

This was the first I’d heard of it, and I was about to say so if Natalie accused me of negligence. All she said, though, was, “What’s in the box?”

“Barnaby gave me a hedgehog.”

“Stuffed,” I explained, as if I needed to. “A stuffed toy , I mean; not taxidermy, ha ha …”

“Shall I carry it home, Opal, so you won’t have to lug it around?”

But Opal clutched the box tighter and said, “Maybe I could come with you.”

Natalie’s eyes returned to me.

I told Opal, “I thought we were having lunch at the diner.”

“Yes, but I’m so cold,” she said. “And besides, I’ve got my party dress on. I don’t want to spill food on my party dress. We could maybe go next time, instead. Another time we could go! I promise!”

Natalie and I studied each other a minute longer.

“Another time. Sure,” I said finally.

Then I gave Opal a little, like, cuff to the shoulder to show there were no hard feelings. But even so, when I turned to leave, she called after me, “Barnaby? You’re not mad at me, are you?”

I lifted an arm as I walked and then let it flop, not looking around.

Back in the Square, I sat on a bench and stretched my legs out in front of me. It was cold. A woman in a plaid hat and cape was feeding the squirrels. A teenage boy loped past, and I said, “Hey, guy? You got the time?” Too late, I saw he was wearing a headset and couldn’t hear me. I felt kind of foolish, with my question left hanging in the air like that.

Probably I had two hours to kill. Or two and a half, even, before I could head back to Locust, where Sophia was picking me up. I ought to go to the diner after all. Order something time-consuming. But instead I kept on sitting there, expressionless as the men on the benches all around me.

This wasn’t just about Opal.

I have to say, it was Natalie who weighed more heavily on my mind.

“Could I interest you in some lemonade?” she had asked on that first afternoon, and her face had been so peaceful. Her back had been so straight; her gaze so steady. But after we’d been married awhile, she turned irritable and brisk. Any little thing I did wrong, flounce-flounce around the apartment. And I did tend to do things wrong. This weird kind of sibling rivalry set in; I can’t explain it. I just had to defeat her, had to prove my own brash, irresponsible, rough-and-tumble way of life was better. And yet I’d married her because her way was better. Just as some people marry for money, I had married for goodness. Ironic, if you stopped to consider.

When she left me, I thought, Well, finally! I stopped attending classes, and I did some serious drinking, and I slept till noon or two P.M., and nobody was around to nag or look disapproving.

Now I see that I went a little crazy, even. Like, the kitchen sink in our apartment had this spray-hose attachment. If you pressed the button while the faucet was running, the faucet cut off and the hose cut on; and I remember standing there on many an occasion, pressing the button and releasing it, alternating between faucet and hose, marveling at how polite they were. The faucet stopped to let the hose talk; the hose stopped to let the faucet talk. So mannerly, so genteel. I thought, All these years, I’ve underestimated the qualities of inanimate objects.

Or the view outside my bedroom window: a big, tall spruce tree leaning over the alley. Every morning, waking up, I noticed once again that it leaned at the exact same angle as the pine tree in the highway signs — those signs showing a tree and a table to indicate a picnic ground. And every morning, I went on to wonder why the tree in those signs was tilted. Was there some special significance? Was it meant to imply protection, shelter? I mean, I thought this every single damn everlasting morning. You try doing that sometime. It seemed my mind got into a rut, and it wore the rut deeper and deeper, and I couldn’t yank it free again.

And some nights I brought a girl home and we’d be going through the preliminaries, carrying on some artificial oh-isn’t-that-interesting conversation on the couch, and she would give me this sudden puzzled look, and I’d lift a hand to my face and find my cheeks were wet. Water just pouring out of my eyes. I won’t say tears, because I swear I wasn’t crying. But my eyes were up to something or other.

So many things, it seemed, my body went ahead and did without me.

Well, that stage passed, by and by. I moved out of the apartment, developed a new routine, forgot about Natalie altogether. I’d see her when I collected Opal and when I brought Opal back, but she was never really present in my mind. Not that I was aware of, at least. Not consciously.