Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet

Oh, what makes some people more virtuous than others? Is it something they know from birth? Don’t they ever feel that zingy, thrilling urge to smash the world to bits?

Isn’t it possible, maybe, that good people are just luckier people? Couldn’t that be the explanation?

THE COMPANY I work for is called Rent-a-Back, Inc. How I got into it is a whole other story, but basically we provide a service for people who are old or disabled. Any load you can’t lift, any chore you don’t feel up to, why, just call on us. Say you want your lawn chairs piled in your garage in the fall. Or your rugs rolled up and stored away in die spring. We can do that. A lot of our customers have a standing order — like, an hour a week. Others just telephone as circumstances arise. Whatever.

On the Saturday of my dud trip to Philadelphia, I came home to find a message from my boss on my answering machine. “Barnaby, it’s Virginia Dibble. Could you get back to me as soon as possible? We have an urgent request for this evening.”

I really liked Mrs. Dibble. She was this dainty, fluttery lady a whole lot older than my mother, but I’d seen her tote a portable toilet down two flights of stairs when we were shorthanded. So even though I wasn’t in such a great mood, I dialed her number. “What’s up?” I asked her.

“Oh, poor, poor Mrs. Alford,” she started right in. “She needs a Christmas tree put together.”

“A what?”

“An eight-foot artificial Christmas tree. It’s in her attic, she says, and she needs it brought down and assembled.”

“Mrs. Dibble,” I said. “It’s New Year’s Eve.”

“Oh, you have plans?”

“I mean, it’s a week after Christmas. What does she want with a tree?”

“She says her seven grandchildren are stopping by for a visit. They’re spending the night on their way home from skiing, and she wants the house to look cheery, she says, and not old-ladyish and glum.”

“Ah.”

Grandchildren ruled the world, if you judged by most of our clients.

“She needs it decorated too,” Mrs. Dibble was saying. “She says she can’t manage the upper branches, and if she climbed onto a step stool, she’s scared she might break a hip.”

Breaking a hip was what else ruled the world — the fear of it, I mean. Big bugaboo, in the circles I traveled in.

I said, “Couldn’t she tell her grandchildren she did have a tree but took it down? Plenty of folks get rid of their trees on December twenty-sixth, tell her!”

But I knew what Mrs. Dibble’s answer would be (“We’re the muscles, not the brains,” she always said); so I didn’t wait to hear it. “Besides,” I said, “my car is in the shop and I won’t have it back until Monday.”

“Oh, Martine can drive,” Mrs. Dibble told me. “I thought I’d send the two of you, so as to finish that much faster. Can you do it if Martine picks you up?”

“Well,” I said. “I guess.”

“All the others have New Year’s plans. I’ll call Martine back again and tell her to come fetch you.”

There were eleven full-time employees at Rent-a-Back. That meant nine people that I knew of had New Year’s plans. And these were not particularly successful people. Several might even be looked upon as losers. But still, they’d found something to do with themselves on New Year’s Eve.

I lived in the eastern part of the city, in the basement of a duplex out Northern Parkway. Martine lived down on St. Paul. It would take her twenty-some minutes to reach me; so I had time to fix myself a peanut butter sandwich. (My only meal all day had been a bag of chips in Penn Station.) Then I grabbed a Coke and went to eat on the patio, where I could see a sliver of the driveway. I never hung around my apartment if I could help it. It was nothing but a rec room, really, which the family above me rented out because they needed the income.

By now the sky had clouded over and darkened. When the patio lamps switched on, they made a noticeable difference, even though it couldn’t have been much later than four o’clock. The patio had these tall pole lamps that were activated by motion. If anybody came near, they would all at once light up. Then after thirty seconds they shut off again. Usually, I enjoyed teasing them. I would take a step, freeze, take another step…. Once, when the Hardestys were gone and I was grilling steaks with this girl I’d met, I told her there was no way to make the lamps stay lit nonstop (which was a flat-out lie) and we would have to keep moving if we wanted to see what we were eating. So there we were, shifting hugely in our chairs, lifting our forks with these exaggerated gestures that the lamps would be sure to notice. Then after supper we got to making out and the lamps, of course, went dark, and we forgot about them till she stood up to pull her T-shirt off, and whang! they all flared on again. I laughed until my stomach hurt.

That afternoon, though, I wasn’t feeling so playful. I just sat hunched over my sandwich in a shreddy mesh lawn chair, and pretty soon the lamps clicked off.

I’d finished eating by the time Martine pulled in. She was driving her boyfriend’s battered red pickup, high off the ground and narrow through the eyes. I set my Coke can in a planter and came around to climb in on the passenger side. “Hey, Martine,” I said. “No date for New Year’s Eve?”

“He’s in bed with the throwing-up flu,” she said, backing into the street. “What’s your excuse, Mr. Peanut Butter Breath?”

“I’ve turned against women,” I told her.

“Ha!”

She shifted gears and took off.

Martine drove sitting on a cushion; that’s how small she was. Heaven knows what had possessed her to sign on at Rent-a-Back. She must have weighed ninety pounds at the most — tiny little cat-faced girl with sallow skin and boxy black hair squared off above her earlobes. But tough, I have to admit. A Sparrows Point kid, from steelworking stock. Scraped sharp knuckles on the steering wheel; gigantic black nylon jacket that smelled of motor oil. “How was your trip to Philly?” she asked, and her voice had a raspy scratch to it that made me want to clear my throat.

I said, “It stunk.”

“Stunk!”

“First thing wrong,” I said, “was I had to take the train. Car is acting up again.”

“What is it this time?”

“Steering.”

“Well, it serves you right for owning an endangered species,” she said.

“Tell that to my grandpa,” I said. “He’s the one who owned it in the first place. You think I’d go out on purpose and buy a Corvette Sting Ray? So I had to plunk down money for a train ticket. Then when I get to Philly, what does Natalie do? Sends me straight back home again. Says she’s decided to stop my visits altogether.”

“Why, she can’t decide that!” Martine said.

“She claims I do Opal more harm than good.”

“You just get ahold of your lawyer!”

“Right.”

I actually didn’t have a lawyer, but it seemed like too much work to explain that. Instead I slouched in my seat and watched the scenery slog by: bald brick houses, pale squares of grass, bushes strung with Christmas lights that were just now winking on.

“Anyway,” I said, “her husband is a lawyer. No doubt they have some kind of fraternity or something, some secret circle she can mobilize against me. Oh, Lord. I don’t know why I ever hooked up with such a woman.”

“Well? Why did you?” Martine asked.

“I believe it was her hairline,” I said.

Martine laughed.

“Seriously,” I said. “She had this sterling-silver barrette pulling her hair straight back on top so you could see her forehead. Her clean, shiny forehead. It kind of hypnotized me, you might say.”