Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

Sometimes Alicia’s enthusiasm turned to her children — an unsettling experience. She took them all to the circus and bought them cotton candy that none of them enjoyed. (They liked to keep themselves tidy.) She yanked them out of school and enrolled them briefly in an experimental learning community where no one wore clothes. The four of them, chilled and miserable, sat hunched in a row in the common room with their hands pressed flat between their bare knees. She dressed as a witch and went trick-or-treating with them, the most mortifying Halloween of their lives, for she got carried away as usual and cackled, croaked, scuttled up to strangers and shook her ragged broom in their faces. She started making mother-daughter outfits for herself and Rose, in strawberry pink with puffed sleeves, but stopped when the sewing machine pierced her finger and made her cry. (She was always getting hurt. It may have been because she rushed so.) Then she turned to something else, and something else, and something else. She believed in change as if it were a religion. Feeling sad? Find a new man! Creditors after you, rent due, children running fevers? Move to a new apartment! During one year, they moved so often that every day after school, Macon had to stand deliberating a while before setting out for home.

In 1950, she decided to marry an engineer who traveled around the world building bridges. “Portugal. Panama. Brazil,” she told the children. “We’ll finally get to see our planet.” They gazed at her stonily. If they had met this man before, they had no recollection of it. Alicia said, “Aren’t you excited?” Later — it may have been after he took them all out to dinner — she said she was sending them to live with their grandparents instead. “Baltimore’s more suitable for children, really,” she said. Did they protest? Macon couldn’t remember. He recalled his childhood as a glassed-in place with grown-ups rushing past, talking at him, making changes, while he himself stayed mute. At any rate, one hot night in June Alicia put them on a plane to Baltimore. They were met by their grandparents, two thin, severe, distinguished people in dark clothes. The children approved of them at once.

After that, they saw Alicia only rarely. She would come breezing into town with an armload of flimsy gifts from tropical countries. Her print dresses struck the children as flashy; her makeup was too vivid, like a foreigner’s. She seemed to find her children comical — their navy-and-white school uniforms, their perfect posture. “My God! How stodgy you’ve grown!” she would cry, evidently forgetting she’d thought them stodgy all along. She said they took after their father. They sensed this wasn’t meant as a compliment. (When they asked what their father had been like, she looked down at her own chin and said, “Oh, Alicia, grow up.”) Later, when her sons married, she seemed to see even more resemblance, for at one time or another she’d apologized to all three daughters-in-law for what they must have to put up with. Like some naughty, gleeful fairy, Macon imagined, she darted in and out of their lives leaving a trail of irresponsible remarks, apparently never considering they might be passed on. “I don’t see how you stay married to the man,” she’d said to Sarah. She herself was now on her fourth husband, a rock-garden architect with a white goatee.

It was true the children in the portrait seemed unrelated to her. They lacked her blue-and-gold coloring; their hair had an ashy cast and their eyes were a steely gray. They all had that distinct center groove from nose to upper lip. And never in a million years would Alicia have worn an expression so guarded and suspicious.

Uncomfortably arranged-looking, they gazed out at the viewer. The two older boys, plump Charles and trim Porter, perched on either arm of the chair in white shirts with wide, flat, open collars. Rose and Macon sat on the seat in matching playsuits. Rose appeared to be in Macon’s lap, although actually she’d been settled between his knees, and Macon had the indrawn tenseness of someone placed in a physically close situation he wasn’t accustomed to. His hair, like the others’, slanted silkily across his forehead. His mouth was thin, almost colorless, and firmed a bit, as if he’d decided to take a stand on something. The set of that mouth echoed now in Macon’s mind. He glanced at it, glanced away, glanced back. It was Ethan’s mouth. Macon had spent twelve years imagining Ethan as a sort of exchange student, a visitor from the outside world, and here it turned out he’d been a Leary all along. What a peculiar thing to recognize at this late date.

He sat up sharply and reached for his trousers, which Rose had cut short across the left thigh and hemmed with tiny, even stitches.

No one else in the world had the slightest idea where he was. Not Julian, not Sarah, not anyone. Macon liked knowing that. He said as much to Rose. “It’s nice to be so unconnected,” he told her. “I wish things could stay that way a while.”

“Why can’t they?”

“Oh, well, you know, someone will call here, Sarah or someone—”

“Maybe we could just not answer the phone.”

“What, let it go on ringing?”

“Why not?”

“Not answer it any time?”

“Most who call me are neighbors,” Rose said. “They’ll pop over in person if they don’t get an answer. And you know the boys: Neither one of them likes dealing with telephones.”

“That’s true,” Macon said.

Julian would come knocking on his door, planning to harangue him for letting his deadline slip past. He’d have to give up. Then Sarah would come for a soup ladle or something, and when he didn’t answer she would ask the neighbors and they’d say he hadn’t shown his face in some time. She would try to get in touch with his family and the telephone would ring and ring, and then she would start to worry. What’s happened? she would wonder. How could I have left him on his own?

Lately, Macon had noticed he’d begun to view Sarah as a form of enemy. He’d stopped missing her and started plotting her remorsefulness. It surprised him to see how quickly he’d made the transition. Was this what two decades of marriage amounted to? He liked to imagine her self-reproaches. He composed and recomposed her apologies. He hadn’t had such thoughts since he was a child, dreaming of how his mother would weep at his funeral.

In the daytime, working at the dining room table, he would hear the telephone and he’d pause, fingers at rest on the typewriter keys. One ring, two rings. Three rings. Rose would walk in with a jar of silver polish. She didn’t even seem to hear. “What if that’s some kind of emergency?” he would ask. Rose would say, “Hmm? Who would call us for an emergency?” and then she would take the silver from the buffet and spread it at the other end of the table.

There had always been some family member requiring Rose’s care. Their grandmother had been bedridden for years before she died, and then their grandfather got so senile, and first Charles and later Porter had failed in their marriages and come back home. So she had enough right here to fill her time. Or she made it enough; for surely it couldn’t be necessary to polish every piece of silver every week. Shut in the house with her all day, Macon noticed how painstakingly she planned the menus; how often she reorganized the utensil drawer; how she ironed even her brothers’ socks, first separating them from the clever plastic grips she used to keep them mated in the washing machine. For Macon’s lunch, she cooked a real meal and served it on regular place mats. She set out cut-glass dishes of pickles and olives that had to be returned to their bottles later on. She dolloped homemade mayonnaise into a tiny bowl.