Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

“Lady?”

“The lady I just saw walking through the dining room.”

“That’s Rose.”

“Is she your ex-wife? Or what.”

“She’s my sister.”

“Oh, your sister!”

“This house belongs to her,” Macon said.

“I don’t live with anybody either,” Muriel told him.

Macon blinked. Hadn’t he just said he lived with his sister?

“Sometimes late at night when I get desperate for someone to talk to I call the time signal,” Muriel said. “ ‘At the tone the time will be eleven… forty-eight. And fifty seconds.’ ” Her voice took on a fruity fullness. “ ‘At the tone the time will be eleven… forty-nine. Exactly.’ You can release him now.”

“Pardon?”

“Release your dog.”

Macon snapped his fingers and Edward jumped up, yapping.

“How about you?” Muriel asked. “What do you do for a living?”

Macon said, “I write tour guides.”

“Tour guides! Lucky.”

“What’s lucky about it?”

“Why, you must get to travel all kinds of places!”

“Oh, well, travel,” Macon said.

“I’d love to travel.”

“It’s just red tape, mostly,” Macon said.

“I’ve never even been on an airplane, you realize that?”

“It’s red tape in motion. Ticket lines, custom lines. Should Edward be barking that way?”

Muriel gave Edward a slit-eyed look and he quieted.

“If I could go anywhere I’d go to Paris,” she said.

“Paris is terrible. Everybody’s impolite.”

“I’d walk along the Seine, like they say in the song. ‘You will find your love in Paris,’ ” she sang scratchily, “ ‘if you walk along the—’ I just think it sounds so romantic.”

“Well, it’s not,” Macon said.

“I bet you don’t know where to look, is all. Take me with you next time! I could show you the good parts.”

Macon cleared his throat. “Actually, I have a very limited expense account,” he told her. “I never even took my wife, or, um, my… wife.”

“I was only teasing,” she told him.

“Oh.”

“You think I meant it?”

“Oh, no.”

She grew suddenly brisk. “That will be fourteen forty, including the leash and the choke chain.” Then while Macon was fumbling through his wallet she said, “You have to practice what he’s learned, and no one else can practice for you. I’ll come back tomorrow for the second lesson. Will eight in the morning be too early? I’ve got to be at the Meow-Bow at nine.”

“Eight will be fine,” Macon told her. He counted out fourteen dollars and all the change he had loose in his pocket — thirty-six cents.

“You can pay me the other four cents tomorrow,” she said.

Then she made Edward sit and she handed the leash to Macon. “Release him when I’m gone,” she said.

Macon held out his palm and stared hard into Edward’s eyes, begging him to stay. Edward stayed, but he moaned when he saw Muriel leave. When Macon snapped his fingers, Edward jumped up and attacked the front door.

All that afternoon and evening, Macon and Edward practiced. Edward learned to plop his rump down at the slightest motion of a finger. He stayed there, complaining and rolling his eyes, while Macon clucked approvingly. By suppertime, a cluck was part of the family language. Charles clucked over Rose’s pork chops. Porter clucked when Macon dealt him a good hand of cards.

“Imagine a flamenco dancer with galloping consumption,” Rose told Charles and Porter. “That’s Edward’s trainer. She talks non-stop, I don’t know when she comes up for air. When she talked about her lesson plan she kept saying ‘simplistic’ for ‘simple.’ ”

“I thought you were going to stay out of sight,” Macon told Rose.

“Well? Did you ever see me?”

“Muriel did.”

“I guess so! The way she was always peering around your back and snooping.”

There were constant slamming sounds from the living room, because Edward’s new leash kept catching on the rocking chair and dragging it behind him. During the course of the evening he chewed a pencil to splinters, stole a pork-chop bone from the garbage bin, and threw up on the sun porch rug; but now that he could sit on command, everyone felt more hopeful.

“When I was in high school I made nothing but A’s,” Muriel said. “You’re surprised at that, aren’t you. You think I’m kind of like, not an intellect. I know what you’re thinking! You’re surprised.”

“No, I’m not,” Macon said, although he was, actually.

“I made A’s because I caught on to the trick,” Muriel told him. “You think it’s not a trick? There’s a trick to everything; that’s how you get through life.”

They were in front of the house — both of them in raincoats, for it was a damp, drippy morning. Muriel wore truncated black suede boots with witchy toes and needle heels. Her legs rose out of them like toothpicks. The leash trailed from her fingers. Supposedly, she was teaching Edward to walk right. Instead she went on talking about her schooldays.

“Some of my teachers told me I should go to college,” she said. “This one in particular, well she wasn’t a teacher but a librarian. I worked in the library for her, shelving books and things; she said, ‘Muriel, why don’t you go on to Towson State?’ But I don’t know… and now I tell my sister, ‘You be thinking of college, hear? Don’t drop out like I dropped out.’ I’ve got this little sister? Claire? Her hair never turned. She’s blond as an angel. Here’s what’s funny, though: she couldn’t care less. Braids her hair back any old how to keep it out of her eyes. Wears raggy jeans and forgets to shave her legs. Doesn’t it always work that way? My folks believe she’s wonderful. She’s the good one and I’m the bad one. It’s not her fault, though; I don’t blame Claire. People just get fixed in these certain frames of other people’s opinions, don’t you find that’s true? Claire was always Mary in the Nativity Scene at Christmas. Boys in her grade school were always proposing, but there I was in high school and no one proposed to me , I can tell you. Aren’t high school boys just so frustrating? I mean they’d invite me out and all, like to drive-in movies and things, and they’d act so tense and secret, sneaking one arm around my shoulder inch by inch like they thought I wouldn’t notice and then dropping a hand down, you know how they do, lower and lower while all the time staring straight ahead at the movie like it was the most fascinating spectacle they’d ever seen in their lives. You just had to feel sorry for them. But then Monday morning there they were like nothing had taken place, real boisterous and horsing around with their friends and nudging each other when I walked past but not so much as saying hello to me. You think that didn’t hurt my feelings? Not one boy in all that time treated me like a steady girlfriend. They’d ask me out on Saturday night and expect me to be so nice to them, but you think they ever ate lunch with me next Monday in the school cafeteria, or walked me from class to class?”

She glanced down at Edward. Abruptly, she slapped her hip; her black vinyl raincoat made a buckling sound. “That’s the ‘heel’ command,” she told Macon. She started walking. Edward followed uncertainly. Macon stayed behind. It had been hard enough getting down the front porch steps.

“He’s supposed to match his pace to anything,” she called back. “Slow, fast, anything I do.” She speeded up. When Edward crossed in front of her, she walked right into him. When he dawdled, she yanked his leash. She tip-tapped briskly eastward, her coat a stiff, swaying triangle beneath the smaller triangle of her hair blowing back. Macon waited, ankle-deep in wet leaves.