Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

I’d heard about that planet quilt often, but I’d never seen it. What I had pictured was a kind of fabric map — a plaid Canada, a gingham U.S. Instead the circle was made up of mismatched squares of cloth no bigger than postage stamps, joined by the uneven black stitches of a woman whose eyesight was failing. Planet Earth, in Mrs. Alford’s version, was makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment.

“Pretty,” I said. Because it was sort of pretty, in an offbeat, unexpected way.

Valerie folded it up again and smoothed it gently before she laid it in the chest.

“We’re having a very small service,” she said. “I’m not sure exactly when. Then afterwards, I suppose we’ll need your help getting the house in shape to sell it.”

“I’ll be glad to help,” I told her. “Just call Rent-a-Back anytime you’re ready for me.”

When I left, Valerie hugged me again, and the brother shook hands again at the door. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

I said, “Well, I’ll miss her.”

It was nothing but the truth.

Of course, I had no way to get home, since Martine had driven off to mail Ditty Nolan’s Christmas parcels. So I sat on the curb out front and waited for her, hugging my knees and digging my chin into my folded arms. The curb was still damp from the melted snow, and I could feel a thin line of cold seeping through the seat of my jeans.

“Oh, my! All done?” Mrs. Alford used to say when I’d finished with a job. “Doesn’t that look lovely!” Her chirpy, cheery, determined voice. “Weren’t you quick about it!”

And then other clients’ voices — some cheery and some not, some sad, some downright cranky.

“Pasta? What’s this pasta business? In my day we called it spaghetti.”

“You’ll find out soon enough, young man, it is not especially unselfish to wish on your birthday candles that your children will be happy.”

“Back in Baltimore’s golden age, when the streetcars were still running and downtown was still the place to go and we had four top-notch department stores all on the same one block: Hutzler’s, Hochschild’s, Stewart’s, and Hecht’s …”

“… and at noon or so the phone rings, and my niece says, ‘I’m waiting for Dad but he hasn’t come and he said he’d be here at ten.’ I say, ‘Oh, now, you know how he is.’ About one o’clock, she calls again; two, she calls again. ‘Where can he be?’ she asks me. I say, ‘He’ll show up; don’t you worry.’ Though I’m fairly worried myself, to tell the truth. Along about three-thirty, I think, Oh! I think, Oh, my stars above! Because all at once it comes to me — I can’t say what brought it to mind — it comes to me that her dad had phoned me at eight o’clock that morning. ‘Sis,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve been trying to reach Sue but her line is busy and I want to hit the road so you call her later on, will you, please? And tell her I’ve decided not to stop at her place,’ he said.”

Martine tapped the truck horn. I almost jumped out of my skin.

“Don’t do that, okay?” I said, as I opened the passenger door. “A simple ‘Hey, you’ will suffice.”

“What’s up?” she asked me. She had already cut the engine. “I thought we were trimming a tree.”

“Mrs. Alford died,” I said.

“No!”

I hadn’t meant to be so blunt about it. I settled in my seat and shut my door. “She had a heart attack,” I said.

“Well, damn,” Martine said. Then she started the engine again. But she drove very slowly, as if in respect. “She was one of my favorite clients,” she said when we reached Falls Road.

Mine too, I realized. I wouldn’t have felt that way once upon a time. It used to be that Maud May was my favorite. Maud May was so let-it-all-hang-out. But I don’t know; you start to appreciate the other type of person, by and by — those ultracivilized types who keep their good humor and gracious manners even though their joints are aching nonstop and they can’t climb out of their baths without help and they’re not always sure what day it is. I’d be terrible at that myself.

• • •

“What are you giving Sophia for Christmas?” my mother asked on the phone.

“Oh …,”I said, hedging.

“Because I don’t want to interfere, but if you’d ever care for a piece of your grandmother Gaitlin’s jewelry — such as, say, for example, maybe perhaps a ring, perhaps, or something of that sort — you have only to ask.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but we’ve agreed not to bother with presents this year.”

“Why, for goodness’ sake?”

Why was a question of money, but I didn’t want to say so for fear Mom would segue into the eighty-seven hundred. Instead I told her, “Just lacking in Christmas spirit, I guess.”

Mom sighed. “But you do plan to bring her to dinner,” she said.

“She’s going up to Philly that weekend.”

“To Philly? Does that mean you’re going too?”

“No, I thought I’d stick around and pester you and Dad,” I said.

“Oh.”

“I can see you’re overjoyed at the prospect.”

“Well, naturally we’re delighted to have you! But I was thinking her people might like to get to know you a little better.”

“Evidently not,” I told her.

Sophia had, in fact, invited me, but I had made up this story about how I didn’t want to disappoint my parents. “For someone so down on his family,” she’d said, “you certainly seem to see an awful lot of them.” I told her I felt obligated, because Jeff and Wicky would be visiting Wicky’s folks for Christmas and Mom was all upset about it.

Which she was, no lie, but my presence at dinner was hardly going to change that. “Christmas will be so pathetic this year!” she was saying now. “Just you and Gram and Pop-Pop. I wonder if I should invite Dad’s cousin Bertha.”

“You detest Cousin Bertha,” I reminded her.

She said, “It’s such a pity Opal’s not coming.”

“We’ll have our turn next Christmas.”

“The two of you have been getting along so well together…. She should start spending her summers here, don’t you think? Or winters, even. We could enroll her in one of the private schools. Then for college, of course, she would go to Goucher. She could room with us, if she likes, although I suppose she’d prefer the dormitory. But dorms are so noisy! Studying in a dorm is such a struggle!”

“Mom. She’s barely ten years old,” I said.

She sighed again. Then she asked, “Should I invite Len Parrish?”

“I wouldn’t bother.”

“I could tell him to park the Corvette around the corner, where your Pop-Pop won’t have to look at it.”

“It’s not the Corvette,” I said.

“What, then?”

Someday I should get credit for all the things I don’t say. Like, “Your hero is a sleazeball, Mom.” What I told her was, “He’s got other plans, I’m sure. He’s a very popular guy.”

“Well,” she said. “All right.”

This was so untypical of her — I mean, the resigned and listless tone she used — that I caught myself feeling sorry for her. I remembered what she had said at Thanksgiving: how I was more her son than Dad’s, more related to her. It seemed that now I was taking that in for the very first time. Poor Mom! It hadn’t been much fun loving someone as thorny as me, I bet.

So when she told me she’d better hang up because she had a hair appointment, I said, “Mom. You know what I think? I really think your hair would look great if you stopped dyeing it.”

It was meant to be a kindness, but it backfired. “You may not like it, but all my friends say it looks lovely!” she snapped. And then she told me goodbye and slammed the receiver down.