Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

“Don’t you dare laugh,” Macon told him.

Julian just went on gaping.

“Don’t even consider it.”

Julian swallowed. He said, “Do you think I ought to go after her?”

“No,” Macon said.

“But she seems so—”

“She’s fine! She’s perfectly fine.”

“Oh.”

“Now, who wants a baked potato?”

There was a kind of murmur around the table; everyone looked unhappy. “That poor, dear girl,” Mrs. Barrett said. “I feel just awful.”

“Me too,” Susan said.

“Julian?” Macon asked, clanging a spoon. “Potato?”

“I’ll take the turkey,” Julian said firmly.

At that moment, Macon almost liked the man.

“It was having the baby that broke our marriage up,” Muriel said. “When you think about it, that’s funny. First we got married on account of the baby and then we got divorced on account of the baby, and in between, the baby was what we argued about. Norman couldn’t understand why I was all the time at the hospital visiting Alexander. ‘It doesn’t know you’re there, so why go?’ he said. I’d go early in the morning and just hang around, the nurses were as nice as could be about it, and I’d stay till night. Norman said, ‘Muriel, won’t we ever get our ordinary life back?’ Well, you can see his point, I guess. It’s like I only had room in my mind for Alexander. And he was in the hospital for months, for really months; there was everything in this world wrong with him. You should have seen our medical bills. We only had partial insurance and there were these bills running up, thousands and thousands of dollars. Finally I took a job at the hospital. I asked if I could work in the nursery but they said no, so I got a kind of, more like a maid’s job, cleaning patients’ rooms and so forth. Emptying trash cans, wet-mopping floors…”

She and Macon were walking along Dempsey Road with Edward, hoping to run into a biker. Muriel held the leash. If a biker came, she said, and Edward lunged or gave so much as the smallest yip, she was going to yank him so hard he wouldn’t know what hit him. She warned Macon of that before they started out. She said he’d better not object because this was for Edward’s own good. Macon hoped he’d be able to remember that when the time came.

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and there’d been a light snow earlier, but the air didn’t have a real bite to it yet and the sidewalks were merely damp. The sky seemed to begin about two feet above their heads.

“This one patient, Mrs. Brimm, she took a liking to me,” Muriel said. “She said I was the only person who ever bothered talking to her. I’d come in and tell her about Alexander. I’d tell her what the doctors said, how they didn’t give him much of a chance and some had even wondered if we wanted a chance, what with all that might be wrong with him. I’d tell her about me and Norman and the way he was acting, and she said it sounded exactly like a story in a magazine. When they let her go home she wanted me to come with her, take a job looking out for her, but I couldn’t on account of Alexander.”

A biker appeared at the end of the street, a girl with a Baskin-Robbins uniform bunching below her jacket. Edward perked his ears up. “Now, act like we expect no trouble,” Muriel told Macon. “Just go along, go along, don’t even look in Edward’s direction.”

The girl skimmed toward them — a little slip of a person with a tiny, serious face. When she passed, she gave off a definite smell of chocolate ice cream. Edward sniffed the breeze but marched on.

“Oh, Edward, that was wonderful!” Macon told him.

Muriel just clucked. She seemed to take his good behavior for granted.

“So anyhow,” she said. “They finally did let Alexander come home. But he was still no bigger than a minute. All wrinkles like a little old man. Cried like a kitten would cry. Struggled for every breath. And Norman was no help. I think he was jealous. He got this kind of stubborn look whenever I had to do something, go warm a bottle or something. He’d say, ‘Where you off to? Don’t you want to watch the end of this program?’ I’d be hanging over the crib watching Alexander fight for air, and Norman would call, ‘Muriel? Commercial’s just about over!’ Then next thing I knew, there was his mother standing on my doorstep saying it wasn’t his baby anyhow.”

“What? Well, of all things!” Macon said.

“Can you believe it? Standing on my doorstep looking so pleased with herself. ‘Not his baby!’ I said. ‘Whose then?’ ‘Well, that I couldn’t say,’ she said, ‘and I doubt if you could either. But I can tell you this much: If you don’t give my son a divorce and release all financial claims on him, I will personally produce Dana Scully and his friends in a court of law and they will swear you’re a known tramp and that baby could be any one of theirs. Clearly it’s not Norman’s; Norman was a darling baby.’ Well. I waited till Norman got home from work and I said, ‘Do you know what your mother told me?’ Then I saw by his face that he did. I saw she must have been talking behind my back for who knows how long, putting these suspicions in his head. I said, ‘Norman?’ He just stuttered around. I said ‘Norman, she’s lying, it’s not true, I wasn’t going with those boys when I met you! That’s all in the past!’ He said, ‘I don’t know what to think.’ I said, ‘Please!’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ He went out to the kitchen and started fixing this screen I’d been nagging him about, window screen halfway out of its frame even though supper was already on the table. I’d made him this special supper. I followed after him. I said, ‘Norman. Dana and them are from way, way back. That baby couldn’t be theirs.’ He pushed up on one side of the screen and it wouldn’t go, and he pushed up on the other side and it cut his hand, and all at once he started crying and wrenched the whole thing out of the window and threw it as far as he could. And next day his mother came to help him pack his clothes and he left me.”

“Good Lord,” Macon said. He felt shocked, as if he’d known Norman personally.

“So I thought about what to do. I knew I couldn’t go back to my folks. Finally I phoned Mrs. Brimm and asked if she still wanted me to come take care of her, and she said yes, she did; the woman she had wasn’t any use at all. So I said I would do it for room and board if I could bring the baby and she said yes, that would be fine. She had this little row house downtown and there was an extra bedroom where me and Alexander could sleep. And that’s how I managed to keep us going.”

They were several blocks from home now, but she didn’t suggest turning back. She held the leash loosely and Edward strutted next to her, matching her pace. “I was lucky, wasn’t I,” she said. “If it wasn’t for Mrs. Brimm I don’t know what I’d have done. And it’s not like it was all that much work. Just keeping the house straight, fixing her a bite to eat, helping her around. She was crippled up with arthritis but just as spunky! It’s not like I really had to nurse her.”

She slowed and then came to a stop. Edward, with a martyred sigh, sat down at her left heel. “When you think about it, it’s funny,” she said. “All that time Alexander was in the hospital seemed so awful, seemed it would go on forever, but now when I look back, I almost miss it. I mean there was something cozy about it, now that I recall. I think about those nurses gossiping at the nurses’ station and those rows of little babies sleeping. It was winter and sometimes I’d stand at a window and look out and I’d feel happy to be warm and safe. I’d look down at the emergency room entrance and watch the ambulances coming in. You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. ‘What a helpful race of beings,’ a Martian would say. Don’t you think so?”