Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

She wrote she wasn’t dating other people. Neither was Macon, but of course he didn’t say so. He came home in the summer and worked at his grandfather’s factory; Sarah worked on a tan at the neighborhood pool. Halfway through that summer, she said she wondered why he’d never asked to sleep with her. Macon thought about that and then said, levelly, that in fact he’d like to ask her now. They went to her parents’ house; her parents were vacationing in Rehoboth. They climbed the stairs to her little bedroom, all white ruffles and hot sunlight baking the smell of fresh paint. “Did you bring a whatchamacallit?” Sarah asked, and Macon, unwilling to admit that he hardly knew what one looked like, barked, “ No, I didn’t bring a whatchamacallit, who do you think I am?”—a senseless question, if you stopped to examine it, but Sarah took it to mean that he was shocked by her, that he thought her too forward, and she said, “Well, excuse me for living!” and ran down the stairs and out of the house. It took him half an hour to find her, and longer than that to make her stop crying. Really, he said, he’d only been thinking of her welfare: In his experience, whatchamacallits weren’t all that safe. He tried to sound knowledgeable and immune to passions of the moment. He suggested she visit a doctor he knew — it happened to be the doctor who treated his grandmother’s Female Complaint. Sarah dried her tears and borrowed Macon’s pen to write the doctor’s name on the back of a chewing gum wrapper. But wouldn’t the doctor refuse her? she asked. Wouldn’t he say she ought to be at least engaged? Well, all right, Macon said, they would get engaged. Sarah said that would be lovely.

Their engagement lasted three years, all through college. Grandfather Leary felt the wedding should be delayed even further, till Macon was firmly settled in his place of employment; but since his place of employment would be Leary Metals, which manufactured cork-lined caps for soft drink bottles, Macon couldn’t see himself concentrating on that even briefly. Besides, the rush to and from Sarah’s bedroom on her mother’s Red Cross days had begun to tell on them both.

So they married the spring they graduated from college, and Macon went to work at the factory while Sarah taught English at a private school. It was seven years before Ethan was born. By that time, Sarah was no longer calling Macon “mysterious.” When he was quiet now it seemed to annoy her. Macon sensed this, but there was nothing he could do about it. In some odd way, he was locked inside the standoffish self he’d assumed when he and she first met. He was frozen there. It was like that old warning of his grandmother’s: Don’t cross your eyes, they might get stuck that way. No matter how he tried to change his manner, Sarah continued to deal with him as if he were someone unnaturally cool-headed, someone more even in temperament than she but perhaps not quite as feeling.

He had once come upon a questionnaire that she’d filled out in a ladies’ magazine — one of those “How Happy Is Your Marriage?” things — and where it said, I believe I love my spouse more than he/she loves me, Sarah had checked True . The unsettling part was that after Macon gave his automatic little snort of denial, he had wondered if it might be true after all. Somehow, his role had sunk all the way through to the heart. Even internally, by now, he was a fairly chilly man, and if you didn’t count his son (who was easy, easy; a child is no test at all), there was not one person in his life whom he really agonized over.

When he thought about this now, it was a relief to remind himself that he did miss Sarah, after all. But then his relief seemed unfeeling too, and he groaned and shook his head and tugged his hair in great handfuls.

Some woman phoned and said, “Macon?” He could tell at once it wasn’t Sarah. Sarah’s voice was light and breathy; this one was rough, tough, wiry. “It’s Muriel,” she said.

“Muriel,” he said.

“Muriel Pritchett.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, but he still had no clue who she was.

“From the vet’s?” she asked. “Who got on so good with your dog?”

“Oh, the vet’s!”

He saw her, if dimly. He saw her saying her own name, the long u sound and the p drawing up her dark red mouth.

“I was just wondering how Edward was.”

Macon glanced over at Edward. The two of them were in the study, where Macon had managed to type half a page. Edward lay flat on his stomach with his legs straight out behind him — short, pudgy legs like the drumsticks of a dressed Long Island duckling. “He looks all right to me,” Macon said.

“I mean, is he biting?”

“Well, not lately, but he’s developed this new symptom. He gets angry if I leave the house. He starts barking and showing his teeth.”

“I still think he ought to be trained.”

“Oh, you know, he’s four and a half and I suppose—”

“That’s not too old! I could do it in no time. Tell you what, maybe I could just come around and discuss it. You and me could have a drink or something and talk about what his problems are.”

“Well, I really don’t think—”

“Or you could come to my place. I’d fix you supper.”

Macon wondered how it would help Edward to be dragged to supper at some stranger’s house.

“Macon? What do you say?” she asked.

“Oh, why, um… I think for now I’ll just try to manage on my own.”

“Well, I can understand that,” she said. “Believe me. I’ve been through that stage. So what I’ll do is, I’ll wait for you to get in touch. You do still have my card, don’t you?”

Macon said he did, although he had no idea where it had got to.

“I don’t want to be pushy!” she said.

“No, well…” Macon said. Then he hung up and went back to his guidebook.

He was still on the introduction, and it was already the end of August. How would he meet his deadline? The back of the desk chair hit his spine in just the wrong place. The s key kept sticking. The typewriter tapped out audible words. “Inimitable,” it said. His typing sounded just like Sarah saying “inimitable.” “You in your inimitable way…” she told him. He gave a quick shake of his head. Generally food in England is not as jarring as in other foreign countries. Nice cooked vegetables, things in white sauce, pudding for dessert… I don’t know why some travelers complain about English food.

In September, he decided to alter his system of dressing. If he wore sweat suits at home — the zipper-free kind, nothing to scratch or bind him — he could go from one shower to the next without changing clothes. The sweat suit would serve as both pajamas and day wear.

He bought a couple of them, medium gray. The first night he wore one to bed he enjoyed the feel of it, and he liked not having to dress the next morning. In fact, it occurred to him that he might as well wear the same outfit two days in a row; skip his shower on alternate evenings. Talk about saving energy! In the morning all he had to do was shave. He wondered if he ought to grow a beard.

Around noon of the second day, though, he started feeling a little low. He was sitting at his typewriter and something made him notice his posture — stooped and sloppy. He blamed the sweat suit. He rose and went to the full-length mirror in the hall. His reflection reminded him of a patient in a mental hospital. Part of the trouble, perhaps, was his shoes — regular black tie shoes intended for dressier clothes. Should he buy sneakers? But he would hate to be mistaken for a jogger. He noticed that without a belt around his waist, he tended to let his stomach stick out. He stood up straighter. That evening when it was time to wash the first sweat suit, he used extra-hot water to shrink out some of the bagginess.